scholarly journals State Failure and Successful Leadership in Medieval India

2021 ◽  
pp. 025764302110019
Author(s):  
Vasileios Syros
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
State Failure ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Successful Leadership ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medieval India

State failure has been an enduring topic in the history of political thought. This article will revisit modern debates on the characteristics of state failure and the factors conducive to successful leadership by focusing on political ideas that evolved in fourteenth-century India. I will discuss two works with the same title, i.e., Tārīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī ( The History of Fīrūz Shāh) of the distinguished historians of the Delhi Sultanate period Ziyā’ al-Dīn Baranī (ca. 1285–1357) and Shams Sirāj ‘Afīf (d. 1399) about Sultans Muḥammad b. Tughluq and (his successor) Fīrūz Shāh as instantiations of state failure and good governance, respectively. The deployment of the concept of state failure has often been construed as an effort to impose a political straitjacket; the examination of authors like Baranī and ‘Afīf demonstrates the value of reflecting on lessons from history and exploring how societies in the past evolved their own patterns of thinking about effective or failed leadership.

Fortescue and the Political Theory of dominium

1985 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 777-797 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. H. Burns
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Fundamental Concept ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Society ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
History Of

After more than five hundred years the political ideas of Sir John Fortescue (c. 1394–c. 1476) retain the potency which has ensured that they have seldom suffered total neglect, even if much of the interest they have aroused has been ideological in character. It was perhaps only in the 1930s that Fortescue first received appropriate attention in the context of the history of political thought; and the varied consideration devoted to him by scholars over the past quarter of a century suggests that the process of appraisal is by no means complete. Despite much discussion of Fortescue's basic political categories, it will be argued here, important dimensions of his thought have been fore-shortened – notably in regard to origins, basis, and character of political society as such. Again, some of the perspectives in which the fundamental concept of dominium has been presented may be misleading if they are applied to Fortescue's use of that concept without full recognition of his specific political purposes.

: Contextual and Non-Contextual Histories of Political Thought

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
Post War

This chapter focuses on how the history of political ideas has been approached in the context of British political science. This has the consequence that the discussion ranges over commentators who are explicitly not historians. It claims that the current British approaches to the study of past political thought have domestic origins in the development of the study of politics in British Universities, especially Oxford, Cambridge, and LSE. The first section accounts for different approaches to the study of political ideas in British political science by examining conceptions of the history of political thought. It shows how institutional history is connected to the development of a genre, and how this history has not been dependent on the direct import of Continental or American intellectual fashions or personalities. The second section delineates the three main British approaches to the study of the history of political ideas in the post-war period.

Theory in Practice: Quentin Skinner's Hobbes, Reconsidered

2000 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 531-562 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Goodhart
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Proper Method ◽  
History Of ◽  
Specification And Implementation

Quentin Skinner's method for studying the history of political thought has been widely and heatedly debated for decades. This article takes a new tack, offering a critique of Skinner's approach on the grounds he has himself established: consideration of his historical work as exemplifying the theory in practice. Three central assumptions of Skinner's method are briefly reviewed; each is then evaluated in the context of his writings on Hobbes. The analysis reveals problems and ambiguities in the specification and implementation of the method and in its underlying philosophy. The essay concludes by examining the broader practical and philosophical implications of adopting this approach to the study of political ideas: the method operationalizes a set of philosophical commitments that transforms ideological choices into questions of proper method.

Introduction: when ideas travel: political theory, colonialism, and the history of ideas

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Burke A. Hendrix ◽  
Deborah Baumgold
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
History Of

Ideas travel. The history of political thought as it has generally been studied is deeply interested in these forms of travel and in the transformations that occur along the way. Ideas of a social contract first crystallize in the England of Hobbes and Locke, and then travel in branching ways to Jefferson’s North America, Robespierre’s France, Kant’s Prussia, and elsewhere. In their travels, these ideas hybridize with others, are repurposed in new social contexts, and often take on political meanings deeply divergent from what their originators intended. Students of the history of political thought are acutely aware of these complexities in the development of European political ideas during the early modern and modern eras, given the centrality of such ideas for shaping the political worlds in which we now live....

The Politics of Slavery

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Brace
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Definition Of

This book asks what it means to describe someone as a slave and explores the political dimensions of that question. It argues against the search for a transhistorical and timeless definition of slavery, and offers a critical interrogation of the dominant liberal discourse on slavery from the Enlightenment to the present. It pays particular attention to the meanings of the slavery / freedom binary and to the connections between the past and the present in understanding ‘old’ and ‘new’ slavery. The book is about what it means to think about slavery as a historical process and as a political relation, both in the history of political thought and in present debates about trafficking and incarceration. It argues that we need to bring the concept of slavery back into our understandings of freedom, labour and belonging, and unravel the assumptions behind the meanings we ascribe to personhood, sub-personhood and humanity. From Aristotle and the idea of natural slavery, through Locke’s conception of civil society, Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and J.S. Mill’s analogy of slavery and marriage to the discourse of modern abolition and the idea of trafficking as slavery, the book interrogates what it means to think about the idea of freedom as the opposite of slavery, and draws attention to the significance of the tensions, ambiguities and silences that surround that conception.

Włoscy utopiści epoki nowożytnej (Machiavelli, Botero, Campanella) w polskich badaniach naukowych XX i przełomu XX i XXI wieku

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (247) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Bielański
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Negative Influence ◽  
Niccolo Machiavelli ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Niccolò Machiavelli ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Utopian Thought ◽  
Modern Era

The author of the article analyzes the place and importance of the works of Italian utopiansfrom the modern era (such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Tommaso Campanella and Giovanni Botero)in Polish research from the range of the history of political thought from the 20th and the turnof 20th and 21st centuries. The first works dedicated to the aforementioned political thinkersfrom the 16th and 17th centuries by Bolesław Limanowski and Aleksander Świętochowski andthe publications from the interwar period were the starting point of the research. They werepresented much broader – also because of the appearance of the translations of the utopiansfrom the modern era in the 1940s and 1950s. Much interest – before 1956 – was attracted tothe concepts by Campanella, included in his famous work, City of the Sun. In the later times theimportant place in the Polish research on the history of Italian political thought was taken bythe content and expression of Niccolò Machiavelli, especially those fragments of The Prince,which show signs of utopian thought. Much interest was also brought to the works of GiovanniBotero, the author who was the first to use the term “reason of state” and who also proposedthe utopia of “universal monarchy”. The final part is dedicated to the reflections on theItalian utopians of the modern era (but also influencing the modern utopias and dystopias –for example Orwell) by such Polish researchers as e.g. Jerzy Szacki, Janusz Tazbir, LeszekKołakowski, Bohdan Szlachta, Marcin Król, Monika Brzóstowicz-Klajn or Andrzej Dróżdż. Inthe context of the reflections on the possible negative influence of the work of utopians, it isworth to remind the significant observation by J. Baszkiewicz, who thought that “politicalreflection is not always conducted innocently. Political ideas can bring socially beneficialeffects, but they also can become a cause for destructive actions and severe havoc”.Key words: Italian utopians of the Renaissance, history of political thought, state of scientificresearch

Figural Judaism and Political Thought in the Marquis d'Argens's Lettres juives

2019 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-380
Author(s):  
Catherine R. Power
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
Secular Politics

AbstractDespite its immense popularity at the time of publication in the 1730s, the marquis d'Argens's (Jean-Baptiste de Boyer) Lettres juives is largely overlooked by contemporary political theorists and the history of political thought. The Lettres’ contribution is noteworthy in its multilayered literary presentation incorporating many of the polemics and paradoxes of Enlightenment ideas. It is also significant as an early example of one way that post-Christian thought made use of imagined Jews and Judaism to articulate, debate, and popularize philosophical and political ideas. In this paper, I submit that d'Argens appropriated Christian figural Judaism in the service of secular philosophical inquiry. D'Argens's imagined “Jew in speech” proved to be a fertile ground upon which to conceptualize and debate post-Christian ideas about human nature and secular politics that subsequent diverse thinkers would make use of in the centuries that followed.

Indian and Western Political Thought: Coalescence or Clash?

1955 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 747-761
Author(s):  
Norman D. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
The United States ◽  
Western World ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Comparative Government ◽  
The Government ◽  
Modes Of Thought ◽  
Or History

American political scientists are still teaching courses labeled “Comparative Government” with little or no attention to the government and politics of the largest states of the world today, and they are still teaching something called “Political Theory” or “History of Political Thought” with no more than casual reference to the ideas underlying non-Western civilizations. The neglect of Indian polity is particularly striking and particularly serious, for apart from Western political thought it comprises probably the most extensive and most important body of political philosophy. Moreover, it is an integral part of the Hindu civilization of the past and the present. That civilization, as Radha-krishnan and Toynbee, among others, have pointed out, is alien to Western civilization, although there are many similarities; and the present encounter between the two civilizations comes at a time when both are in a period of crisis and transition. Such considerations are basic to an understanding of the stresses and strains in the relations of India with the Western world. Behind the tensions that arise between the United States and India, for example, lie differences in views of life and modes of thought and conduct, complicated by uncertainty, inner struggle, sensitivity, misunderstanding, and inexperience in playing new and difficult roles.

“ ’What’s Gone and What’s Past Help...’: Oakeshott and Strauss on Historical Explanation”

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-101
Author(s):  
Kenneth B. McIntyre
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Historical Explanation ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Michael Oakeshott ◽  
Contemporary Practice

AbstractBecause of the public identification of both Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss as conservative political philosophers, there have been numerous comparisons of their political thought. Whatever similarities or differences that do exist between them, it is certainly true that they shared a keen interest in the history of political thought. However, they understood the character of history in widely divergent ways. In the following paper, I examine the way in which each writer understood the logic of historical explanation, and there are two primary reasons for wanting to do so. First, there have been few examinations of either writer’s arguments concerning historical understanding, despite the stature of both as historians of political theory. Second, the differences between Oakeshott and Strauss on history are central to two fundamentally opposed ways of understanding the past, each of which has manifested itself in the contemporary practice of the history of political thought. I will argue that Strauss’s approach to the past is primarily a practical one and yields a concern with a legendary or mythical past constructed primarily to address contemporary political problems, and that his specific methodological propositions are either irrelevant to a specifically historical understanding of the past or inadequately argued and unconvincing. Conversely, I will suggest that Oakeshott offers a coherent and compelling account of the logic of historical understanding, which involves both a defense of the autonomy of historical explanation and an elaboration of the character of historical contextualism.

scholarly journals In Defence of Political Parties: A Symposium on Jonathan White and Lea Ypi’s The Meaning of Partisanship

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 289-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Bonotti ◽  
Jonathan White ◽  
Lea Leman Ypi ◽  
Gideon Calder ◽  
Mark Donovan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Future Research ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
The Past ◽  
Single Text ◽  
History Of

Over the past 10 years, the literature on the normative dimensions of partisanship and party politics has rapidly grown. Yet, however rich and diverse, this literature lacked so far a single text able to comprehensively map the contours of the existing debates and, at the same time, open up a range of future research avenues. Jonathan White and Lea Ypi’s The Meaning of Partisanship does an excellent job at fulfilling both tasks. First, it offers a wide-ranging and sustained engagement with key debates in the history of political thought, contemporary democratic theory and analytical political philosophy. Second, it opens up new areas of research ranging from partisanship across time to revolutionary and transnational partisanship. In this symposium, White and Ypi re-examine some of the book’s main themes by responding to the commentaries offered by six political theorists.

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