Political Thinking and Consciousness: The Private Life of the Political Mind. By Robert E. Lane. (Chicago: Markham Publishing Co., 1969. Pp. 348. $6.95.)

Citizens are political simpletons—that is only a modest exaggeration of a common characterization of voters. Certainly, there is no shortage of evidence of citizens' limited political knowledge, even about matters of the highest importance, along with inconsistencies in their thinking, some glaring by any standard. But this picture of citizens all too often approaches caricature. This book brings together leading political scientists who offer new insights into the political thinking of the public, the causes of party polarization, the motivations for political participation, and the paradoxical relationship between turnout and democratic representation. These studies propel a foundational argument about democracy. Voters can only do as well as the alternatives on offer. These alternatives are constrained by third players, in particular activists, interest groups, and financial contributors. The result: voters often appear to be shortsighted, extreme, and inconsistent because the alternatives they must choose between are shortsighted, extreme, and inconsistent.

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Heraclitus’ Political Thought

Apeiron ◽

10.1515/apeiron-2017-0009 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 51 (4) ◽

pp. 405-426 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Jan Maximilian Robitzsch

Keyword(s):

Political Thought ◽

Political Order ◽

Traditional View ◽

The Political ◽

Human Beings ◽

Basic Principles ◽

Political Thinking ◽

Difficult Question ◽

Close Analysis ◽

Political Realm

Abstract This paper deals with Heraclitus’ political thought. First, in discussing the conception of cosmic justice, it argues that it is a mistake to separate Heraclitus’ political thought from his cosmological thought. Second, the paper works out two basic principles of Heraclitean political thinking by offering a close analysis of fragment B 114 as well as related texts. According to Heraclitus, (1) there is a standard common and relevant to all human beings in the political realm, namely, the logos, and (2) ruling well is a matter of grasping the logos and using it as a guide in all things political. Finally, the paper tackles the notoriously difficult question of whether there are certain forms of political order towards which Heraclitean thought is more or less inclined. According to what may be called the traditional view, Heraclitus is seen as a supporter of an aristocratic political order, while according to what may be called the revisionist view, Heraclitus is classified as a supporter of a democratic political order. The paper concludes that while Heraclitean philosophy is compatible with a plethora of different forms of political order, including democratic ones, the two basic principles of Heraclitean politics that were distinguished above are more conducive to aristocratic forms of political order.

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Advice to a Nation

10.53105/jig.1-3 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 1 ◽

Author(s):

Dina Aliuddin

Keyword(s):

The Political ◽

Ethical Values ◽

Political Thinking ◽

Recent Addition ◽

Political Vocabulary

This paper analyses the political thinking of Almarhum Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien III through his Syair Nasihat or The Ode of Advice. Almarhum Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin III wrote Syair Nasihat in 1957 and it expresses His Majesty’s insights on how culture and ethical values are essential social elements for preserving and promoting what is recognisable today as the Maqāsid of the Sharī’ah. This paper argues that although the concept of ‘Islamic Governance’ is a recent addition to the Muslim political vocabulary, the practice of governing in an Islamic way is not. Almarhum Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien III conveyed his ideas on Islamic Governance via the verses of his Ode of Advice where he expounded aspects of the Maqāsid, and as the mission of a true Islamic leader.

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The Effect of Social Text and Context on the Political Thinking of the Contemporary Shiite Scholars

Research Journal of Applied Sciences Engineering and Technology ◽

10.19026/rjaset.5.5100 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

pp. 171-175

Author(s):

Reza Mahmoodoghli ◽

Hosein Harsij ◽

Seyed Javad Emamjomehzadeh ◽

Hosein Masoudnia

Keyword(s):

The Political ◽

Political Thinking

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Political Emancipation

Sex and Secularism ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691197227.003.0004 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 89-121

Author(s):

Joan Wallach Scott

Keyword(s):

Political Theory ◽

The Political ◽

Political Thinking ◽

Liberal Democratic ◽

Formal Equality ◽

Political Emancipation ◽

The Law ◽

Women's Emancipation ◽

Definition Of ◽

Liberal Political Theory

This chapter considers the contradictions of women's emancipation in light of the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions. It shows how the resistance to women's citizenship had less to do with the necessarily slow but inevitable progress of liberal democratic ideas than it did with a contradiction at the very heart of the political thinking that articulated them—a political thinking integral to the discourse of secularism. Liberal political theory postulated the sameness of all individuals as the key to their formal equality—abstracted from their circumstances there was no discernable difference among them, they stood as equals before the law. At the same time there were differences that were thought to refuse abstraction. These were people in a state of dependency, such as propertyless peasants, wage laborers, women, children, slaves. Therefore, they could not be counted as autonomous individuals—autonomy, after all, was at the heart of the very definition of individuality.

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Approaching the Hellenistic Polis through Modern Political Theory: The Public Sphere, Pluralism and Prosperity

Ancient Greek History and Contemporary Social Science ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474421775.003.0004 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 68-98

Author(s):

Benjamin Gray

Keyword(s):

Public Sphere ◽

Political Thought ◽

Social Inclusion ◽

The Political ◽

Political Thinking ◽

The Public ◽

Civic Values ◽

Hellenistic World ◽

The Public Sphere ◽

Hellenistic Philosophy

This chapter discusses methods and problems in reconstructing an inclusive, dynamic picture of the political thought and debates of the Hellenistic cities (c. 323– 31 BC), drawing on theories and models from modern political and social theory. It shows the benefits of integrating together the widest range of possible evidence, from Hellenistic philosophy to the most everyday inscriptions, in order to reconstruct for the Hellenistic world the kind of complex, wide-ranging picture of political thought advocated by P. Rosanvallon and others in the study of modern political thinking. When studied in this way, the political thinking and rhetoric of Hellenistic philosophers, intellectuals and citizens reveal attempts to reconcile the Greek polis with ideals of cosmopolitanism and social inclusion, without diluting political vitality. As evidence for this political vitality, the paper demonstrates is the fruitful interlocking and mutual counterbalancing within the Hellenistic public sphere of the three types of political discourse studied in turn in Ober’s trilogy on Classical Athens: political lobbying and negotiation, including rival attempts to shape civic values; philosophical and critical reflection about the foundations of politics; and rationalistic consideration of efficiency, especially the devising and advertisement of incentives.

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Introduction: Ethical and Political Thinking after Literature

Anarchaeologies ◽

10.5422/fordham/9780823286829.003.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 1-18

Author(s):

Erin Graff Zivin

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Literary Criticism ◽

The Political ◽

Political Thinking ◽

Ricardo Piglia

In the Introduction, the author proposes a mode of reading that would expose the misunderstanding that is constitutive of both the literary and the political. A reading of the figure of the “blind” reader in two primal, early modern scenes of reading taken up by Ricardo Piglia in his 2005 El último lector [The Last Reader] is then taken up, suggesting that the blind reader might be that reader who—desperately close to the text—is attuned to its marks of invisibility, to those elements of unreadability that serve as an aporetic demand for more (blind) reading. The motif of opacity, or invisibility, recurs throughout Anarchaeologies vis-à-vis a cluster of concepts—misunderstanding, error, equivocation—to which the author turns in order to imagine new interpretative possibilities not only within literary criticism, but within ethical and political thinking as well.

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Political Thinking on Kingship in Democratic Athens

Polis The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought ◽

10.1163/20512996-12340232 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 36 (3) ◽

pp. 442-465

Author(s):

Lynette Mitchell

Keyword(s):

Fourth Century ◽

The Political ◽

Political Language ◽

Political Thinking ◽

New Ideas ◽

Greek World ◽

Striking Fact ◽

Scholarly Attention

Abstract Democratic Athens seems to have been the first place in the Greek world where there developed systematically a positive theorising of kingship. Initially this might seem surprising, since the Athenians had a strong tradition of rejecting one-man-rule. The study of kingship among the political thinkers of the fifth and fourth century has not received much scholarly attention until recent years, and particularly not the striking fact that it was democratic Athens, or at least writers directing themselves to an Athenian democratic audience, that produced a positive theorising of kingship. The aim of this essay, then, is not only to show how the political language around kingship became a way of forming definitions of what democracy was and was not, but also (more significantly), among some fourth-century intellectuals, of shaping new ideas about what it could be.

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