Two Currents in Contemporary English Political Theory

1955 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 487-495
Author(s):  
Thomas P. Peardon
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Self ◽  
General Tendency ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Present Generation ◽  
The World ◽  
Eric Voegelin

There is widespread discontent today with the state of English political theory. This does not seem to have been so a generation ago. In 1915, Ernest Barker certainly revealed uneasiness about some intellectual tendencies of the time, but his overriding belief was that the new psychology and the new awareness of the personality of groups within society would enrich thinking in the long run. Ten years later, Lewis Rockow was distinctly optimistic at the end of his Contemporary English Political Thought. Having surveyed the first quarter of this century, he was impressed by “the richness of the contemporary mind” and the boldness of its political speculation. How different is the self-judgment of our own day. “In the present generation,” declared Professor Catlin in 1952, “England is in a poorer way as a fount of political ideas than she has been for centuries.” There were only a few men—Laski, Barker, Oakeshott, E. H. Carr—whom he would put in a high category, while apart from them he went on to say, “a drear darkness has fallen on British political theory which was so bright.” A little later, and speaking of the world in general rather than of England alone, Professor Cobban lamented “a general tendency to cease thinking about society in terms of political theory.” He could find no original thought since the eighteenth century and concluded that the idea of democracy had become a mere shibboleth—and not even a serviceable one, since all camps used it. He felt that the study of politics had taken a wrong turn, being corrupted by a neglect of the moral element, by an indifference to the practical problems besetting men, and by a deep pessimism about the possibility of resolving the dilemma between “moral man and immoral society.” Eric Voegelin seems at first to strike a more cheerful note when he speaks of “the revival, not to say the outburst, of political philosophy at Oxford in recent years,” but his article is critical of some of its tendencies and even goes so far at one point as to refer to its “distressing state.”

American Political Thought and the Study of Politics

1957 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. McCloskey
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Matthew Arnold ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Institutional Facts ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
Theory Lead

The title of this essay poses not one vexing issue but two, and each of them sharply challenges the student of American political thought. The first might be called the common problem of political theory—the question of its relevance to the institutional facts of life. How, it is asked, can the analysis of political ideas help to illuminate our understanding of political action? Can theory lead us to a surer knowledge of why governments and electorates behave as they do? Can it help us to diagnose and prescribe? Or is the study of theory, on the contrary, justified simply on the ground that the words of Plato and Hobbes and Locke are part of what Matthew Arnold called culture: “the best that has been thought or known in the world”? This is, I take it, a problem universal among students of political thought, whether they choose America, Europe, or China as their realm; and it lends itself to no easy answers.

Contemporary British Political Thought

1952 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 641-659 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Catlin
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
John Locke ◽  
The United States ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Present Generation ◽  
The World ◽  
European Civilization

The ideas of the bloodless and “glorious Revolution” of 1688, and especially those of John Locke, inspired the Founding Fathers of the United States and, both directly and indirectly, influenced the French Revolution. In the nineteenth century a successful Britain also made her great contribution to European civilization, and this not least in terms of her political ideas and of her parliamentary institutions. Politically it would be quite accurate to say that she led the world.In this present generation, however, England is in a poorer way as a fount of political ideas than she has been for centuries. The great succession of Occam and Fortescue, More and Hooker, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Bentham, the Mills, Green, even Spencer, perhaps Bradley, seems to be broken. Many British writers are too content to subedit Hegel or Marx and to explain what they really meant. The most eminent now living, Lord Russell, is primarily a mathematical philosopher.

The Theory of Papal Monarchy in the Thirteenth Century: The Contribution of the Canonists

Traditio ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 179-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Watt
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Church ◽  
Christian Society

The work of the medieval canonists has always formed a significant chapter in the histories of medieval political thought. The law of the Church and its attendant juristic science forms the proper source material for the examination of the system of ideas which lay behind the functioning of papal government. Ecclesiastical jurisprudence was the practical branch of sapientia Christiana. It was concerned with a constitution and the exercise of power within its terms; with an organization and the methods by which it was to be run. It had of necessity to be articulate about the nature of the papacy, the constitutional and organizational linchpin. In consequence the canonists were the acknowledged theorists of papal primacy. To them rather than to the theologians belonged that segment of ecclesiology which treated of the nature of the Church as a visible corporate society under a single ruler. In that period of nearly a century which lay between the accession of Alexander III and the death of Innocent IV, canonists were required to register the increasingly numerous and more diverse applications of papal rulership to the problems of Christian society. The concept of papal monarchy came to be reexamined in academic literature because of the accelerating tempo of papal action. Under the stimulus of an active papacy, the canonists were led to examine many of the assumptions on which the popes based their actions and claims. The world of affairs conditioned the evolution of a political-theory, which in turn helped to shape the course of events.

Calvinists, Arminians, Socinians: Popular Sovereignty and Natural Rights in Early Modern Political Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
James Moore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Hugo Grotius

This chapter focuses upon natural rights in the writings of Hugo Grotius, the Levellers and John Locke and the manner in which their understanding of rights was informed by distinctive Protestant theologies: by Arminianism or the theology of the Remonstrant Church and by Socinianism. The chapter argues that their theological principles and the natural rights theories that followed from those principles were in conflict with the theology of Calvin and the theologians of the Reformed church. The political theory that marks the distinctive contribution of Calvin and the Reformed to political theory was the idea of popular sovereignty, an idea revived in the eighteenth century, in the political writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

7. St Augustine

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Bethke Elshtain
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Just War ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Just War Theory ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Orientations ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines Augustine of Hippo's political thought. After providing a brief biography of St Augustine, it considers the fate of his texts within the world of academic political theory and the general suspicion of ‘religious’ thinkers within that world. It then analyses Augustine's understanding of the human person as a bundle of complex desires and emotions as well as the implications of his claim that human sociality is a given and goes all the way down. It also explores Augustine's arguments regarding the interplay of caritas and cupiditas in the moral orientations of persons and of cultures. Finally, it describes Augustine's reflections on the themes of war and peace, locating him as the father of the tradition of ‘just war’ theory.

Characteristics of Latin American Political Thought

1966 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Martz
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Intellectual Elite ◽  
The World ◽  
Public Responsibility

In few areas of the world are the role and contribution of the intellectual elite more significant than in Latin America. Its membership has historically been in the forefront of major political and social movements, and there has been somewhat less of the distaste for politics and public responsibility than is often found elsewhere. Leading intellectuals are widely respected and nationally prominent, enjoying a degree of prestige that is scarcely exceeded in any other region. The pensador—sometimes likened to the eighteenth-century philosophe— has been intimately involved in major political movements from colonial times to the present.

Corruption and Partisanship: Rousseau, Ferguson and Two Competing Models of Republican Revival

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Sparling
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Civic Virtue ◽  
Civic Life ◽  
Important Distinction ◽  
Individual Judgment ◽  
Competing Models ◽  
The Common

AbstractPartisanship inspires a degree of ambivalence. There is a widespread tendency—which has a long history in republican political thought—to decry division and partisanship as corrupting, undermining individual judgment, and promoting clientelism, dependencies and loyalties antithetical to the common good. Yet there is an equally widespread intuition that excessive unity is corrupting, undermining the vigour of civic life. Contemporary political theory remains divided on the normative implications of division and unity—witness the battles between agonistic and consensus-oriented schools of democratic theory. In this article I examine the thought of two eighteenth-century writers who, while often treated as contributing to a common intellectual project of reinvigorating classical civic virtue, took opposite positions on the desirability of division. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Ferguson offered competing accounts of what corrupts civic virtue, one decrying party divisions and the other lauding them. The article examines the underlying philosophical presuppositions of Rousseau and Ferguson's competing claims and suggests, ultimately, that both positions suffer from neglecting to attend to an important distinction between salutary and harmful divisions.

Ideology Hunting: The Case of James Harrington

1959 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 662-692 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith N. Shklar
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
History Of

It is well known that each age writes history anew to serve its own purposes and that the history of political ideas is no exception to this rule. The precise nature of these changes in perspective, however, bears investigation. For not only can their study help us to understand the past; it may also lead us to a better understanding of our own intellectual situation. In this quest the political theories of the 17th century and particularly of the English Civil War are especially rewarding. It was in those memorable years that all the major issues of modern political theory were first stated, and with the most perfect clarity. As we have come to reject the optimism of the eighteenth century, and the crude positivism of the nineteenth, we tend more and more to return to our origins in search of a new start. This involves a good deal of reinterpretation, as the intensity with which the writings of Hobbes and Locke, for instance, are being reexamined in England and America testify. These philosophical giants have, however, by the force of their ideas been able to limit the scope of interpretive license. A provocative minor writer, such as Harrington, may for this reason be more revealing. The present study is therefore not only an effort to explain more soundly Harrington's own ideas, but also to treat him as an illustration of the mutations that the art of interpreting political ideas has undergone, and, perhaps to make some suggestions about the problems of writing intellectual history in general.

scholarly journals A Founder on Founding: Jefferson's Advice to Koraes

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 157
Author(s):  
Ioannis D. Evrigenis
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Years Of Experience ◽  
American Founding ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Life ◽  
Over Time

<p>In 1823, shortly after the outbreak of the Greek Revolution, and in the context of a general attempt to gather support for the Greek cause, Adamantios Koraes wrote to Thomas Jefferson, whom he had met once in Paris, to request his advice on the founding of a Greek state. Although brief, the exchange between the two men provides a rare, if not unique, record of a founder's advice to an aspiring emulator. Koraes' role in Greek political and intellectual life, coupled with Jefferson's fame, have made the correspondence between the two men a source of some interest among Greek scholars, but Jefferson's advice has never been studied in the context of his broader political theory. This paper traces the history of the acquaintance of the two men and of their subsequent correspondence, and places Jefferson's recommendations in the context of his political thought. Written as it was with the benefit of a long life in politics and more than forty-five years of experience from the American founding, Jefferson's advice to Koraes provides a singular opportunity to assess his political ideas over time.</p>

Res Publica

2021 ◽  
pp. 138-176
Author(s):  
Carey Seal
Keyword(s):  
Roman Republic ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Res Publica

Discussion of Seneca’s political thought has tended to concentrate on his relationship to and views about the emperors under whom he lived, in particular Nero. This chapter aims instead to explore how Seneca’s commitment to philosophy as a way of life shapes his political ideas, and vice versa. Seneca uses arguments about the unique value of philosophy to reconfigure and reinvigorate received accounts of the nature of the Roman commonwealth. He also draws on the inheritance of Roman political thought to offer new solutions to some long-standing lacunae in Stoic cosmopolitanism. This chapter’s account of Seneca’s politics emphasizes the diachronic continuities between the Roman republic and the principate in his thought and the richness of his engagement with previous Greek and Roman political theory.

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