scholarly journals Thinking about relations: Strathern, Sahlins, and Locke on anthropological knowledge

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 327-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
John Locke ◽  
The State ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
Trading Zone ◽  
Natural Laws ◽  
The Past ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The Social

John Locke is known within anthropology primarily for his empiricism, his views of natural laws, and his discussion of the state of nature and the social contract. Marilyn Strathern and Marshall Sahlins, however, have offered distinctive, novel, and broad reflections on the nature of anthropological knowledge that appeal explicitly to a lesser-known aspect of Locke’s work: his metaphysical views of relations. This paper examines their distinctive conclusions – Sahlins’ about cultural relativism, Strathern’s about relatives and kinship – both of which concern the objectivity of anthropological knowledge. Although Locke’s own views of relations have been neglected by historians of philosophy in the past, recent and ongoing philosophical discussions of Locke on relations create a productive trading zone between philosophy and anthropology on the objectivity of anthropological knowledge that goes beyond engagement with the particular claims made by Sahlins and Strathern.

scholarly journals The The Social Contract Theories of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke: Comparative Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-45
Author(s):  
John Michael V Sasan
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The State ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Social ◽  
Similarities And Differences

This study engages in the concept of social contract of Hobbes and Locke, and the similarities and differences of their ideas. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke both begin their political ideas with a discussion on the state of nature and the danger of living outside the community. For Thomas Hobbes, the state of nature is chaotic; it is in the state of mutual competition. He claims that the state of nature is a state of war, every man against everybody. Due to a constant competition for power and reputation, the man’s equality leads the state of nature into chaos. Man who is bestowed with equal capacities for thinking and reasoning is moved by whatever he wants for survival and preservation no matter what it takes. This state of nature, according to Thomas Hobbes, is a state of egoistic self-preservation and necessity for survival. Meanwhile, John Locke is rather optimistic in his view in the state of nature, compared to the pessimistic view of Thomas Hobbes. He sees humans as decent species which are capable of knowing what is right and wrong. Although man in the state of nature lives with full freedom, yet he is still at risk of harm and invasion. The property is very unsafe and unsecure, however, free yet full of fears. On this matter, man realizes and decides to create a contract and agree to the terms for peaceful and secure life for the safe and security of their liberty and possession. Furthermore, for Thomas Hobbes, social contract is a mutual transferring of rights to the sovereign. For him, social contract is responsible for the morality and the conception of right and wrong, just and unjust. Hence, social contract is very significant to every individual because it is the source of law and regulations and basis of morality. For Locke, the chief reason why man in creating an agreement or contract is the property. The main argument is Locke’s social contract.

Coleridge’s Exile from the Social Contract, 1795–1829

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoe Beenstock
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
The State ◽  
The Self ◽  
Breaking Point ◽  
General Will ◽  
Social Crisis ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Better Than

Coleridge wrote frequently about Rousseau throughout his varied career. His early lectures and letters draw on Rousseau’s critique of luxury and frequently allude to the general will, depicting Rousseau as a Christ-like figure. Coleridge’s subsequent disappointment with Pantisocracy led him to reject Rousseau and the social contract. Comparing Rousseau to Luther in The Friend, Coleridge argues that Rousseau’s unhappiness arises from a conflict between an age of individualism and an ongoing need for community. According to Coleridge, poetry tolerates this conflict better than philosophy. In ‘Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement’ Coleridge suggests that social retreat offers illusory solace from war and social crisis. He critiques the state of nature, sympathy, and even religion for failing to balance the self with its environment. Thematically and formally The Rime of the Ancient Mariner explores this crisis in cohering systems. Through the mariner’s relationship to the albatross, the wedding that frames the poem, and episodes of the supernatural that disrupt the ballad form, Coleridge defines a breaking point between the individual and general wills.

Writing the Social Contradiction: Rousseau’s Literary Politics

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoe Beenstock
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Conformity ◽  
General Will ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Literary Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

This chapter explores Rousseau’s account of the tension between community and individual by examining the Second Discourse and the Social Contract on the one hand, and Julie on the other. In his political theory Rousseau defines the state of nature as a mere fantasy which belongs to an optative imagined past. In leaving the state of nature, people trade basic needs for decadent desires. Rousseau introduces the general will as a practical device for managing the asociability of the private will, which is driven mainly by appetite. To safeguard the general will from its wayward members, individuals must form a social contract which transforms them into sociable beings. In Julie Rousseau explores the sacrifices that individuals make in joining the general will, as Julie is torn between personal desire on the one hand and social conformity on the other. Rousseau’s literature suggests that the two are incompatible and thus ‘judges’ his philosophy, exploring the deathly outcome of contract. Rousseau’s use of literature to critique the social contract constitutes his major legacy to British Romantic writers.

Counterfeit COIN and the State of Nature Effect

2020 ◽  
pp. 465-487
Author(s):  
Marshall Sahlins
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
The State ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Social Differences ◽  
Civil Strife ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
American Intervention ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The Social

This chapter documents the processes by which the American intervention in Iraq transformed a plural nation into a bellum omnium contra omnes (war of all against all). In the civil strife of ancient Greek cities that was the model for Hobbes' state of nature, the intervention of the larger forces of Athens and Sparta, proclaiming unconditional causes to die for, transformed local social differences into lethal factional enmities. Death then raged from many quarters. The same effect of anarchic violence has followed from imperial conquer-and-divide policies in modern colonial and post-colonial societies. Historically, the state of nature appears as the effect of the subversion of the social contract rather than its precondition.

Rousseau’s Return to Hobbes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Sagar
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Opposite Direction ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The State ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The Social

This chapter examines the issue of sociability and the theory of the state with regard to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. More specifically, it considers Rousseau's intervention in the debate over human sociability, mainly in The Discourse on Inequality, and how it ultimately led in the opposite direction to that pointed out by David Hume: back to Thomas Hobbes. The chapter begins with a discussion of Rousseau's idea of the state of nature as well as the views of Rousseau and Hume on pity, justice, property, and deception. It then analyzes Rousseau's The Social Contract, an exercise in full-blooded Hobbesian sovereignty theory, and his attempt to start from a different place in the theory of sociability, and then offer a purposefully counter-Hobbesian theory of sovereignty. The chapter argues that Rousseau ultimately could not get past Hobbes, and ended up returning to the latter's positions.

The Social Contract in Leviathan and the Prisoner's Dilemma Supergame

1981 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain McLean
Keyword(s):  
Game Theory ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Prisoner's Dilemma ◽  
Prisoner’S Dilemma ◽  
The State ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Prisoner’S Dilemma Game ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Game Theory

The familiar problem of whether Hobbesian men in the state of nature would ever abide by an agreement to obey a Sovereign is a version of the puzzle now known as ‘Prisoner's Dilemma’. The present paper has the following aims: (1) To establish that the game-theory approach is a legitimate way to study Hobbes. (2) To see whether a proposed ‘solution’ to the paradox of Prisoner's Dilemma applies to this example. The paradox is that individually rational self-interested calculations sum to an outcome that is suboptimal not only for society but also for every single member of it. The solution is the Supergame which consists of indefinitely repeated plays of the simple Prisoner's Dilemma game. (3) To compare the results of the above with the similar conclusions reached by a different route by recent arguments in sociobiology.

BLESSETH HIM THAT GIVES AND NOT HIM THAT TAKES: BUṬRUS AL-BUSTĀNĪ AND THE MERCY OF DEBT

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (02) ◽  
pp. 443-469
Author(s):  
NADIA BOU ALI
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Natural Laws ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sociohistorical Context

This article discusses Nahda intellectual Buṭrus al-Bustānī’s public and pedagogic writings. It focuses on the nationalist pamphlets, the Nafīr Sūrriya, written in the wake of the first sectarian–civil war, and his translation of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, both published in Beirut in 1860. I analyze Bustānī’s politico-theological and economic thought by looking at the nexus of debt, guilt, love, and mercy that he draws out in the Nafīr. The article argues that Bustānī’s nation is inaugurated into a “guilt-history” and eternally faced with the task of confronting the mercy of debt and the un-requitable debt of mercy. Nationality in this specific sociohistorical context became a form of artifice that in a postlapsarian age requires religion, labor, and exchange to survive as a social contract. The “civil war” exemplified a return to a state of nature that could only be amended by a return to the laws of nature and the seeking of refuge under the name of one God and one religion, diyāna. The social contract, articulated in these terms, could only be sealed through the recognition of natural laws as the foundation provided by God himself, while politics remained concealed under the folds of political theology.

scholarly journals Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan: The Unbearable State of Nature

2021 ◽  
pp. 62-75
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Krzyżanowska
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
The State ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Legitimate Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Law And Justice

Leviathan by Andrey Zvyagintsev is a  movie that depicts the world in a  state of nature, with no prospects for creating a Hobbesian social contract. Set in the Russian peripheries, the film depicts a respected and caring family man who is gradually deprived of everything because of lack of political order with enforceable law and justice. The movie is a depiction of a contemporary “failed state”, equalized with the state of nature, where there is no legitimate power and violence remains the only tool to achieve goals both in private and public spheres. Religion consists of empty rituals that serve corrupt officials to maintain power. This world cannot last without innocent victims, scapegoats of the society, one of whom is the protagonist of the movie. This paper offers a legal and philosophical inquiry into the film, as it draws especially on the theory of the social contract proposed by Hobbes. It depicts a Russian town as a symbol of the state of nature as envisioned by Hobbes and describes the reasons why the social contract has not been made. According to Hobbes’s theory, in the state of nature concepts like justice and injustice do not convey any meaning; therefore, this paper investigates other: theological and anthropological concepts, to explore the meaning of Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan.

scholarly journals The Emergence of Civil Society in Hobbesian Philosophy

Jurnal Office ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 123
Author(s):  
Edor John Edor
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern State ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The Social

The origin of the modern state has left many scholars intellectually engaged. Sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, jurists, anthropologists, and philosophers have variously grappled with the issue of the origin of the state. Thomas Hobbes is one of the great thinkers who has contributed to the discussion on the origin of the state. Thomas Hobbes is of the view that naturally, that is, man in the state of nature, is a-social, atavistically thinking about himself alone. Because of this atomistic and solitary disposition of man in the state of nature, the society was accentuated by an unprecedented degree of rancor, acrimony and obfuscation. Given this picture of man and the pre-civil-society depicted by Hobbes, one would feel that justifying the emergence of the civil society would become difficult. This paper examines how Hobbes migrated man from the state of nature to the civil society in spite of the gory picture of him he had painted. Thomas Hobbes’ theory of the origin of the state is categorized in the class of the social contract theories. 

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