scholarly journals Potatoes and the Pursuit of Happiness

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-32
Author(s):  
Rebecca Earle
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Healthy Eating ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Individual Choice ◽  
Pursuit Of Happiness ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
The Individual

Eating acquired a new political importance during the Enlightenment, as writers began to link individual diets to the strength and wealth of nations. This article examines the eighteenth-century career of a foodstuff that became emblematic of these developments: the potato. Politicians, statesmen, and philosophers across Europe enthusiastically promoted the potato as a means of strengthening the body politic. They framed this promotion within a language of choice and the individual pursuit of happiness. In so doing they laid the foundations for today's debates about how to balance personal dietary autonomy with the demands of public health. The roots of the current neoliberal insistence that healthy eating is fundamentally a matter of individual choice thus lie in the Enlightenment.

scholarly journals Risk as Moral Danger: The Social and Political Functions of Risk Discourse in Public Health

1993 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Lupton
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
Divine Retribution ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Risk Discourse

Risk is a concept with multiple meanings and is ideologically loaded. The author reviews the literature on risk perception and risk as a sociocultural construct, with particular reference to the domain of public health. Pertinent examples of the political and moral function of risk discourse in public health are given. The author concludes that risk discourse is often used to blame the victim, to displace the real reasons for ill-health upon the individual, and to express outrage at behavior deemed socially unacceptable, thereby exerting control over the body politic as well as the body corporeal. Risk discourse is redolent with the ideologies of mortality, danger, and divine retribution. Risk, as it is used in modern society, therefore cannot be considered a neutral term.

Turning Vanity Fair into The Cœlestial City: England’s Legal Narratives of the Body Politic from Bunyan to Thackeray

Pólemos ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-145
Author(s):  
Matteo Nicolini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
Legal Narratives ◽  
English Constitutional History

Abstract The article addresses the different narratives that characterize English constitutional history. It first examines the mainstream narrative, i. e., the retrospective reading of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constitutional events dispensed by jurists and politicians in an attempt to pack the Establishment Constitution. It then focuses on the alternative legal narratives about the Constitution elaborated during the Civil War and the Restoration. Among them, it ascertains John Bunyan’s impact on the Establishment Constitution. Bunyan was a member of the New Model Army, a radical, and a Puritan who ended up in prison. Despite this background, he exerted a strong influence on Victorian society and on Thackeray’s representation of the body politic. As a consequence, Bunyan entered the political discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century when politicians started to reform English representative institutions, and therefore became part of the Establishment Constitution.

scholarly journals The Law of Nature in Locke's Second Treatise: Is Locke a Hobbesian?

1987 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Coby
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Civil Justice ◽  
Natural Justice ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Law

The question addressed by this essay is whether Thomas Hobbes is the true intellectual forebear of John Locke. A brief comparison of the teachings of these two authors with respect to natural justice and civil justice would seem to suggest that Locke is a determined adversary of Hobbes whose views on justice are reducible to the maxim that “might makes right.” But a reexamination of Locke's Second Treatise shows that Locke adopts this principle with hardly less thoroughness than Hobbes. Even so, an important difference remains, for Locke takes steps to disguise the grim reality of power, whereas Hobbes makes the enlightenment of people the sine qua non of his political science. Locke's departure from Hobbes is seen as an attempt to instill in the body politic a degree of justice that would not otherwise exist.

scholarly journals Virtue, Production, and the Politics of Commerce: Genovesi’s “Civil Economy” Revisited

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 703-729
Author(s):  
Adrian Pabst ◽  
Roberto Scazzieri
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
External Trade ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
Civil Economy ◽  
Specific Stage ◽  
Wealth Of Nations

Antonio Genovesi’s economic-political treatise on civil economy was a major contribution to debates in the mid-and late eighteenth century on the nature of political economy. At that time, Genovesi’s book was extensively translated and discussed across continental Europe and Latin America, where it was read as a foundational text of political economy similar to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The aim of this article is to contribute to the analysis of the mutual implication between the economic and the political order of society by revisiting Genovesi’s theory of civil economy, which he defined as “the political science of the economy and commerce.” First, the article retraces Genovesi’s conception of civil economy as a branch of political science and the role of “virtue” in ordering the polity according to “the nature of the world.” Second, it explores Genovesi’s theory of production as an inquiry into the proportionality conditions that productive activities should meet for a well-functioning polity to persist over time. Third, our argument emphasizes the importance of Genovesi’s analysis of production structures for his theory of internal and foreign trade. In this connection, the paper investigates Genovesi’s idea that the maintenance of a country’s “trading fund” should be the fundamental objective for its internal and external trade policies. These policies, according to Genovesi, should be consistent with the context of the body politic under consideration and the economy’s proportionality requirements for any specific stage of development.

‘The Government is the One Who Caused Cholera’: State Transformation and the Politics of Public Health During Zimbabwe’s Crisis

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simukai Chigudu
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
State Transformation ◽  
Cholera Outbreak ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
The One ◽  
Political Economic

Zimbabwe’s cholera epidemic of 2008/09 is almost unrivalled, in scale and lethality, in the modern history of the disease. The disease infected nearly 100,000 people, claiming over 4000 lives over a ten-month period. This chapter examines the political and economic origins of the outbreak and analyses some of the meanings, memories, and narratives that the outbreak has left in civic life. It makes three key arguments. First, it contends that the origins, scale, and impact of the cholera outbreak were overdetermined by a multilevel failure of Zimbabwe’s public health system, itself a consequence of the country’s post-2000 political conflicts and economic crisis. Second, by recounting stories of the relentless suffering and dispossession that accompanied the cholera outbreak the chapter reveals how the disease mapped onto and exacerbated the contours of abandonment, abjection, and exclusion within Zimbabwean society. Third, the chapter ultimately argues that cholera emerged from prolonged and multiscalar political-economic processes for which no short-term or easy solutions are available. While the outbreak aroused public anger and outrage at the government for its causal role in the epidemic and the inadequacy of its relief efforts, this anger did not translate into any effective political mobilization or permanent change. Thus, the politics of cholera, in its making and aftermath, show the grim and profound consequences of state transformation for public health and for notions of belonging in the body politic.

Inclusions: Concerning a Theory and Aesthetics of Police

2002 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Vogl
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
The Body ◽  
Friedrich Schiller ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Form

AbstractSince the eighteenth century what is known as the ›body politic‹ has duplicated itself in a very specific way. Alongside the models of the social contract we can observe, under the label ›police‹, the emergence of political knowledge dealing with the regulation of social, economic, medical and moral spheres. This tension between sovereign representation and the empirical ›body politic‹ became critical after the French Revolution. The works of Friedrich Schiller may serve as an example of the intense exchange between aesthetic and police-theoretical problems: a quest to mediate between the laws of reason and the scope of empirical forces; and to grasp the economics of a political power which converts the inclusion of the excluded into a new form of degenerate life.

The lives of subjects

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annabel S. Brett
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the relationship of the state to its subjects as necessarily physically embodied beings. The primary way in which the commonwealth commands its subjects is through the medium of its law. The law is for the common good and obliges the community as a whole, and thus the ontological status of the law—as distinct from any particular command of a superior to an individual—is intimately tied to that of the body politic. The question, then, concerning the relationship of the state to the natural body of the individual can be framed in terms of the extent of the obligation of the civil law.

Individual Context

2014 ◽  
pp. 158-176
Keyword(s):  
Individual Choice ◽  
Pursuit Of Happiness ◽  
Underlying Assumption ◽  
Disruptive Technologies ◽  
The Core ◽  
Women In It ◽  
Main Driver ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right ◽  
Innate Interest

The core principle derived from evaluation of the data is that the number of women in IT (or any career) is not a matter of the balance of societal forces, which we can push one way or another with the right lever. It comes down to the individual and her pursuit of happiness through her own values. This puts the individual at the core of the STEMcell Model. The influencing factors of philosophy, values, rights, assumptions, strength, self belief, interests, differences, ability, curiosity, creativity, and reality are explored in this chapter in that context. The centrality of individual choice does not mean there is nothing we can do about remaining barriers, but it does mean that empowering the individual (especially through the disruptive technologies of #SocialIT) and accepting their choices is the solution. The answer to collectivist prejudices about “women” is not collectivist actions that accept the same underlying assumption, but is instead recognising that the only differences that matter are individual ones. Contrary to beliefs that the low proportion of women in IT should be viewed through a gender or culture lens, the results and analyses in this book indicate that not only is innate interest the main driver of an IT career, but most women with that interest are perfectly capable of discovering it themselves. And that is why no single “solution” has been found, and why a wide variety of interventions have had no significant impact—because there is no generic solution to finding out “what women want”—individually.

Surplus Repressive Punishment and Spirit’s Regressive (de-)Actualisation

2018 ◽  
pp. 212-240
Author(s):  
Wes Furlotte
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Real Problem ◽  
The Real ◽  
Social Objective ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

This chapter begins with a provoking claim: the real problem here is not the natural dimension involved in criminality. Instead, it argues that the real threat to freedom’s social actualization is the way in which the state’s disciplinary apparatus reacts to violations of right. It shows that if criminality needs to be framed in terms of nature then so does punishment. If punishment functions to (re-)habituate transgressive persons, then one of its inherent risks is that it might operate as a brute externality, a natural force. In functioning as an external natural force, punishment actively mutilates the freedom constitutive of juridical personhood. Not only does this mutilation undermine the individual it also actively undermines spirit’s social (objective) expression as freedom because such a practice serves to (a) fragment and alienate the person and (b) the totality constituting the body politic. This threat is what the chapter calls “surplus repressive punishment.” This problem as a whole is what the chapter denotes with “spirit’s regressive (de-)actualization.” Consequently, the problem nature poses in Hegel’s system is even more complex when considered in terms of how the polis’ institutions frame, understand, and react to that very same problem.

Litigation as an Alternative to Legislation in Achieving Public Health Reform

2002 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-45
Author(s):  
Francis E. McGovern
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Health Reform ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
State Authority ◽  
Public Health Reform

There is virtually universal acceptance for the proposition that political questions in the United States have a propensity to morph into judicial questions. The use of litigation as a method of governing the body politic has repeatedly manifested itself since the formation of our nation. Congress vs. the legislature; federal vs. state authority; voting rights; civil rights; universal rights — the list is pervasive.

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