scholarly journals Genealogy, Virtuality, War (1651/1976)

2011 ◽  
pp. 156 ◽  
Author(s):  
R.d. Crano
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Final Analysis ◽  
Research Strategy ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
Modern Nation State

This article recounts Foucault’s critical reevaluation of Thomas Hobbes in his 1975-76 lecture course, published as Society Must Be Defended (2003). In probing Hobbes’ pivotal role in the foundation of the modern nation-state, Foucault delineates the ”philosophico-juridical” discourse of Leviathan from the ”historico-political” discourses of the English insurrectionists whose uncompromising demands were ultimately paved over by the more conventional seventeenth century debate between royalists and parliamentarians. In his most sustained engagement with political philosophy proper, Foucault effectively severs the two co-constitutive terms, enumerating the damning consequences of thinking politics apart from history and philosophy apart from the laws and codes that had been “born in the mud and blood of battles.” Displacing himself in the archive, Foucault doubles the Levellers and Diggers’ efforts to restage the violent conquests that undergird our seemingly calm governmental regimes. This doubling, I argue, evinces the profound influence of Deleuze’s innovative ontology of time on Foucault’s genealogical method. Foucault’s research strategy takes a fundamental turn towards specific techniques of cultural memory in the wake of his colleague’s radical reconceptualization of virtuality, difference, and repetition. To this end, I take up Foucault’s review essay ”Theatrum Philosophicum” and his comments on method in ”Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in order to draw an analogy between what he does in 1976 and what the Levellers and Diggers were doing in 1651. In the final analysis, genealogy means war, and, in this war, it is the very being of the virtual itself that is at stake.

A Brief Semantic History of Securitas

Security ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Sense Of Security ◽  
Positive Sense ◽  
History Of ◽  
Semantic History ◽  
Cultural Connotations ◽  
Historical Usage

What does the term “security” express? What are or have been its semantic functions: its shifting cultural connotations and its divergent discursive values? This chapter examines the figures and metaphors that have been deployed to think about security across the ages. It outlines the main stations along the word's complex itinerary through historical usage. It begins with a cursory overview that marks the major turning points of this history, beginning with ancient Rome and concluding with seventeenth-century Europe. Among the topics covered is the positive sense of security that established its position as a central topic in political philosophy in the work of Thomas Hobbes. Throughout, the affirmation of security as a good is fundamentally connected with the power of sovereignty to alleviate the cares and concerns of its subjects. The state emerges as an institution that protects its citizens from all varieties of existential threats, from external aggression as well as from internal discord.

Transculturality and the Included Third

2014 ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Patrick Imbert
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Relational Identity ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Rene Girard ◽  
Positive Capacity ◽  
Modern Nation State

Transculturality is principally defined by its relation to multiculturalism and interculturality as the constant invention of relational identity suggesting that the self is in the other and the other is in the self. In the context of “glocalisation,” we no longer seek to resolve the contradictions in one synthesis that results in monoculturalism, founded on the characteristic dualism of modern Nation-State. The possibilities are instead capitalized in the dynamics of what we call the “included third.” We try thus to understand the semiotic codes of diversity by, at the same time, avoiding relativism by recognizing what is undeniable and yet denied by the mediation of the monocultural dictatorships, fundamentalisms, or terrorisms masking murders and genocide either behind the promise of eternity or threat of disappearance. What is undeniable is the fact that people who were once alive are now dead. Inclusion and its strategies require testimony of a cultural memory very different from the disinformation of the official histories, tools in the hands of “lynchers,” those who lynch somebody, as René Girard calls them. Different literary and mediated texts are analyzed from this point of view based on their valorization of the metaphor of the chameleon, that is a very positive capacity to blend in different cultural contexts, in this chapter.

scholarly journals Community Agency and Islamic Education in Contemporary Zanzibar

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 93-103
Author(s):  
Caitlyn Bolton
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Islamic Education ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Community Agency ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Modern Nation State

Western liberal political philosophy, which undergirds the conception of the modern nation-state as theorized by European philosophers of liberalism from centuries past, is primarily concerned with the dynamics of rights and responsibilities between the individual and state institutions. In defining these dynamics, some philosophers held an assumption of human nature as inherently inclined toward selfish ends...

The Riddle of the Sands

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Brayton
Keyword(s):  
Coastal Zone ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Intertidal Zone ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Aesthetic Appeal ◽  
Secret Service ◽  
German Coast ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Modern Nation State

The aesthetic appeal of coasts is due in part to the indeterminacy of the intertidal zone. The imagination finds room to play where land and sea meet. This chapter explores the coastal zone that lies at the heart of a novel considered by many to be the first modern spy thriller, Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service. Childers develops the notion of coastal indeterminacy as a figure for the boundaries, ambitions, and limitations of the modern nation-state. The journey of Childers’s characters through a north Atlantic archipelago that extends from the German coast draws a line of association between Europe and Britain, whose form depends on coastlines, estuaries, and shallows. In following this course, Childers creates a narrative fiction that shifts between charts, borders, and languages.

‘Inevitable and Unacceptable?’ Methodological Rawlsianism in Anglo-American Political Philosophy

1998 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wayne Norman
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Parallel Tasks ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
English Speaking World

This article attempts two parallel tasks. First, it gives a sympathetic explication of the implicit working methodology (‘Methodological Rawlsianism’) of mainstream contemporary political theory in the English-speaking world. And second, principally in footnotes, it surveys the recent literature on justification to see what light these debates cast on the tenets of this methodology. It is worth examining methodological presuppositions because these can have a profound influence on substantive theories: many of the differences between philosophical traditions can be traced to their methodologies. My aim is to expose the central features of methodological Rawlsianism in order to challenge critics of this tradition to explain exactly where and why they depart from the method. While I do not defend it at length, I do suggest that methodological Rawlsianism is inevitable insofar as it is basically a form of common sense. This fact should probably lower expectations about the amount of progress consistent methodological Rawlsians are likely to make in grounding comprehensive normative political theories.

Hobbes's Concept of Representation—I

1964 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 328-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Pitkin
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Standard Edition

It is not customary to regard Thomas Hobbes as a theorist particularly concerned with representation. Hardly any of the traditional commentaries on his thought even acknowledge that he mentions the term; and the index to Molesworth's standard edition of Hobbes's English works contains no reference to it. But the fact is that representation plays a central role in the Leviathan; and Hobbes's analysis of the concept is among the most serious, systematic and challenging in the history of political philosophy. It is an analysis both temptingly plausible and, as I hope to show, peculiarly wrong. And the ways in which it is wrong are intimately related to what is most characteristic and peculiar in the Hobbesian political argument.

Seventeenth-Century Calvinism and Early Enlightenment Thought

2021 ◽  
pp. 375-392
Author(s):  
Aza Goudriaan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Sensus Divinitatis ◽  
Pierre Bayle ◽  
Philosophical Debates ◽  
Van Til

Analysing a number of interactions between Calvinists and Early Enlightenment philosophers—and the receptions of John Calvin in these—this chapter shows a complex and persistent presence of Calvin and Calvinists in philosophical debates during the early Enlightenment period. Among Calvinists, Descartes found both opponents and followers. Reformed Cartesians have occasionally appealed to Calvin (e.g. on accommodation and the sensus divinitatis), praised the Reformer (Heidanus, Burman), or neglected him (van Til). The philosopher Arnold Geulincx has been protected (Heidanus.) and published (van Til) by Calvinists, before they began to associate him with Spinoza (Tuinman, Andala, Driessen). Thomas Hobbes quoted Calvin incidentally, but Calvinists usually opposed his philosophy. Thus, the jurist Ulrik Huber used Calvin’s teachings on the testimonium Spiritus sancti against Hobbes—an appeal to Calvin that Huber repeated against another philosopher’s claim that reason alone was able to demonstrate the divinity of scripture. In order to refute Spinozists, Reformed minister Carolus Tuinman translated Calvin’s treatise against the libertines (1545). Responding to Huguenot Pierre Bayle, the Lutheran philosopher G. W. Leibniz wrote favourably about Calvin’s teachings on predestination and providence, as he had done also about Calvin’s views on the Eucharist.

scholarly journals Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines and the Emergence of Racial and Colonial Discourses in the Genre of Utopia in Britain

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 33-44
Author(s):  
Zahra Jannessari Ladani
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Turbulent Atmosphere ◽  
Utopian Fiction ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Controversial Nature

This essay will explicate and study Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines as one of the most popular utopian/dystopian accounts written in the pamphleteering tradition current in the seventeenth century. The researcher will see how Neville's socio-political philosophy was molded in the highly turbulent atmosphere of the seventeenth century. Then, The Isle of Pines will closely be analyzed to assess its formation under the influence of the controversial nature of the politics of the time. We will also elaborate on Neville's introduction of the pamphleteering tradition to utopian fiction. In addition, Neville's employment and foregrounding of racial and colonial intentions will be discussed to see how these modern discourses gave shape and directed the genre of British utopia as an apology for the republic and commonwealth as the requirement of an age with a disturbed political face.

scholarly journals Libertinism in English Restoration drama: a cognitive-pragmatic perspective

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
General Public ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Focus Of Attention ◽  
Restoration Drama ◽  
English Restoration ◽  
New Type ◽  
English Identity ◽  
Charles Ii

This paper aims to explore LIBERTINISM as a discourse-generative concept of the English Restoration and its manifestations in the 17th century drama. In the focus of attention are: the dramatic discourse of the seventeenth century and social and historical conditions that predetermined the origin and development of libertinism in the Restoration drama. In this article, I argue that during the Restoration LIBERTINISM thrived along with such concepts as EMPIRE, HONOUR, LOVE, MODE, SCIENCE, TRADE, and WIT. It is stated that after years of bans and prohibitions libertinism began to develop as a reaction against an overly religious dominant worldview that was imposed on the English people during the Interregnum. It is confirmed that libertinism was widely disseminated in the play-houses which were reopened by Charles II after almost a twenty-year break. In this article, I argue that libertinism takes its ideas from the teachings of René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes; it viewed as extreme hedonism and rejection of all moral and religious dogmas. Charles II himself set an example which was emulated by his courtiers and therefore libertine modes of behaviour were demonstrated to the general public as role models by the aristocracy which regained power with the Restoration. I also claim that as during the English Restoration many play wrights either were libertines or wrote about libertine behaviour and adventures in their plays, the dramatic discourse of the seventeenth century gave rise to a new type of English identity–the English Restoration libertine-aristocrat. Accordingly, the dramatic discourse and dramatic performances of the seventeenth century were the means of establishment, reiteration, and dissemination of the libertine ethos.

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