Contesting Patrilineal Descent in Political Theory: James Mill and Nineteenth-Century Feminism

Hypatia ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-174
Author(s):  
Jim Jose
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Patrilineal Descent

Contesting Patrilineal Descent in Political Theory: James Mill and Nineteenth-Century Feminism

Hypatia ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Jose
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Sole Source ◽  
Feminist Perspective ◽  
Feminist Thought ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Patrilineal Descent

Liberal philosopher James Mill has been understood as being unambiguously antifeminist. However, Terence Ball, supposedly informed by a feminist perspective, has argued for a new interpretation. Ball has reconceptualized Mill as a feminist and the sole source of the feminism of his son (J. S. Mill), suggesting a revision of the received wisdom about their relationship to the development of nineteenth century feminist thought. This paper takes issue with Ball's “new interpretation” and its presumed feminist basis.

Creation, Fall and Political Order — Prussian Conservatism and the Old Testament

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-181
Author(s):  
Laura C. Achtelstetter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Role Model ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Wars

Abstract This article examines differences within the theological basis of early nineteenth-century Prussian conservatism. By exploring the usage of the Old Testament in the writings of conservative thought leaders Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, and Friedrich Julius Stahl, this article contributes to scholarship of both traditions of biblical interpretation and that of the relation of theology and political theory. The focus of this article centers on three concepts of the Old Testament and their implementation in conservative political doctrine. I will discuss Hengstenberg’s concept of biblical historicity and unity of Scripture, Gerlach’s use of the Old Testament as the source of a role model for just religious wars and a theocratic concept of law, as well as Stahl’s bible-based political philosophy of history and the resulting model of political order. Thus, the basis for different, resulting concepts of church, state, and nation that were merged into an overall religion-based political conservative doctrine in pre-1848 Prussia are analyzed.

From New Anarchism to Post-anarchism

Kropotkin ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Kinna
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Political Theorist ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines contemporary anarchist critiques of Kropotkin, especially post-anarchist analysis. It argues that science has become a byword to describe Kropotkin's political theory, providing an exemplar for classical anarchism. This theory is described as teleological, based on a particular concept of human nature and linked to a form of revolutionary utopianism that promises the realisation of anarchy. Post-anarchists dissolve the distance between Kropotkin and Bakunin that advocates of his evolutionary theory invented in the 1960s in order to rescue anarchism from its reputation for violence. This repackaging of historical traditions underpins judgments about the irrelevance of anarchism to contemporary politics and political theory. In response, critics of post-anarchism have sought to defend nineteenth-century revolutionary traditions. The result of this argument is that Kropotkin emerges as a political theorist of class struggle. This defence raises significant questions about the coherence of Kropotkin's position on the war in 1914.

Commentary: Necromance

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 829-839
Author(s):  
Irvin J Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Romantic Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Cooperative Economy ◽  
The Revolution

Abstract This article reconsiders the recent turn in political theory to love as a countercapital affect, helping us endure when hope has lost its salience. The article offers the concept of “necromance” to attend to the ways the popular configuration of love as life-giving often overlooks how in the history of slavery and liberal empire love operates as life-taking. Distinct from necromancy, necromance is not a process of reviving the dead but of bringing subjects in ever closer proximity to the dead. Grounded in a reading of W. E. B. Du Bois’s romantic novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), particularly its vision of a cooperative economy and its response to the evolving meaning of love in American culture at the end of the nineteenth century, necromance is both a structure of feeling and a form of writing. As a resource for activism indebted to the creative powers of melancholic attachments, necromance contests the common conception that in order for grievances to become social movements or collective insurgencies they must be framed to create feelings of outrage, not of grief. By working inside existing conditions of irrevocable loss, necromantic love registers the feeling that the revolution is already here.

The Concept of Rights in Modern Japan

2019 ◽  
pp. 393-414
Author(s):  
Ōkubo Takeharu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Western World ◽  
The West ◽  
Comparative Political Theory ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
Normative Issues ◽  
Imminent Threat

This chapter aims to investigate the acceptance of “rights” in nineteenth-century Japan by examining divergent interpretations of political concepts between the West, especially Europe, and East Asia. After the arrival of US warships in 1853, facing the imminent threat of Western power, Japanese scholars and statesmen raised fundamental normative issues concerning the legal and moral concepts shaping the Western world—essentially posing the question, “What is Western civilization?” They grappled both theoretically and practically with Western political thought, employing the vocabulary and concepts provided by their own East Asian legal, moral, and political traditions, such as Confucianism, in a variety of ways. Given the differences between Western and Asian legal traditions, especially, the idea of “rights” was one of the hardest to accept. This chapter examines how some key Japanese intellectuals and politicians, including Nishi Amane, Nakae Chomin, and Fukuzawa Yukichi, confronted the complex plurality of rights in jurisprudence and discourse of European thinkers such as Simon Vissering, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill and how they used it to reconsider specifically the legal culture of East Asia. In the course of this intellectual struggle with an alien culture, these Japanese thinkers sought to liberate European political theory from a closed historical identity and imbue it with new meaning in a new context. This is a history of comparative political theory concerned with the cross-cultural phenomenon of the nineteenth-century encounter of non-Western intellectuals with the ideal and the reality of “the West.”

Feminist Political Theory without Apology: Anna Doyle Wheeler, William Thompson, and the Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women

Hypatia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 827-851
Author(s):  
Jim Jose
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Original Formulation ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Twenty First Century

Anna Doyle Wheeler was a nineteenth‐century, Irish‐born socialist and feminist. She and another Irish‐born socialist and feminist, William Thompson, produced a book‐length critique in 1825, Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women: Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery: In Reply to a Paragraph of Mr. Mill's Celebrated “Article on Government,” to refute the claims of liberal philosopher James Mill in 1820 that women did not need to be enfranchised. In so doing the Appeal undermined the philosophical credibility of Mill's liberal utilitarianism. The Appeal exposed the hypocrisy of the language of contract (whether social, sexual, or marriage) by showing that men's freedom and claims to rights presupposed the unfreedom and sexual subjugation of women. The article argues that the Appeal was an original formulation of feminist political theory that still retains its relevance in the twenty‐first century.

Tocqueville and the French

1994 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-165
Author(s):  
Cheryl B. Welch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Paris Commune ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Class Struggles ◽  
Marxist Tradition

For contemporary political theorists, the events of nineteenth-century France – the "bourgeois" revolution of 1830, the revolutionary eruption of 1848 with its dénouement in Bonapartism, and the "heroic" moment of the Paris Commune – have entered the domain of reflection on modern politics through Marx. Not only for Marxists, but for those who learned political theory in a Marxist tradition or whose primary acquaintance with nineteenth-century France came from Marx's trenchant dissection of its class struggles, this was a story fraught with universal significance. Indeed, French historical events have long functioned as dramatic signs or markers of the modern relationship between state and civil society, and between democracy and revolution.

The necessity of abolition

Soundings ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 78 (78) ◽  
pp. 109-123
Author(s):  
Matt Sandler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Ecological Disaster ◽  
The Moment

The international outpouring of abolitionist sentiment in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in the spring of 2020 came as a surprise even to experienced activists and researchers. The context of the pandemic had thrown into stark relief the consequences of fraying commitments to social welfare and excess commitments to security, policing, and incarceration. This essay argues that the moment laid bare the necessity of abolition, not only of police and prisons but also of the industries which exacerbate ecological disaster. To support this argument on the basis of political theory and intellectual history, it returns first to W.E.B. Du Bois's account of "abolition-democracy" as prompted by a recognition of necessity. The essay then goes on to define "necessity via the philosophical dialectic of freedom and necessity, before finding that conception of abolition as necessity expressed in nineteenth century Black abolitionist thought. It concludes by returning to the present, in which the pathological freedoms of neoliberalism seem to call up the necessity of abolition in response.

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