Who Gets Power and Why

1949 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ithiel de Sola Pool

A Feature of Western ideology, particularly its American variant, is consciousness of tension between ideals and reality. One source of this tension is a propensity to seek social goals by way of adventitious motives. Education seeks marks not knowledge; business seeks profits not products; politics seeks power not the good life. To protest this lack of what Max Weber called substantive rationality, and to demand that first things be put first is labelled “idealism,” while acceptance of the immediate incentive and disregard for the final end is labelled “realism.”Thus in political science the name “realistic” has been largely applied to that tradition which concentrates on power relations and assumes that its subjects behave as “political men,” that is, that they strive to maximize power. The “realist” assumes that all men in politics share the same drive. So deeply ingrained is this identification of politics and power that it appears even in the unconscious where the state is a father symbol. It appears also in everyday idioms where to be in the government is “to be in power” and to go into politics means not to pave streets but to enter a game of hierarchical advancement. It appears also in scholarly thought. Unlike Aristotle, who defined the polis as that association formed for the highest good and which comprehends the rest, most modern scholars find in a monopoly of coercion the distinctive attribute of the state.

Author(s):  
Maria Cristina Dadalto ◽  
Luis Fernando Beneduzi

This paper aims to analyse the multiethnic constitution of Espírito Santo starting from the report book Encontro das Raças, published in 1997 by the journalist Rogério Medeiros. The book presents interviews with narratives of European immigrants and descendants – Pomeranians, Dutch, Italians, Polish, German, Tyrolean, and Swiss. During its historical, socio-cultural and demographic constitution, Espírito Santo also counted with the participation of Syrian and Lebanese immigrants – in the 19th and early 20th centuries – and Asians, as well as national migrants. Medeiros also discusses and presents narratives of the descendants of Africans, Indians and Portuguese who constitute the first matrix of miscegenation of the capixaba people. The purpose of the present study is to reflect on this relationship that Medeiros calls the “Meeting of the Races” from a perspective of the sense of belonging and power relations established between these various ethnic groups settled in the state from 1847, when the government of the province sought alternatives to transform Espírito Santo economically and initiated, through political actions, the process of installing European immigrants in its lands.


Author(s):  
C.C.W. Taylor

The literal sense of the Greek word eudaimonia is ‘having a good guardian spirit’: that is, the state of having an objectively desirable life, universally agreed by ancient philosophical theory and popular thought to be the supreme human good. This objective character distinguishes it from the modern concept of happiness: a subjectively satisfactory life. Much ancient theory concerns the question of what constitutes the good life: for example, whether virtue is sufficient for it, as Socrates and the Stoics held, or whether external goods are also necessary, as Aristotle maintained. Immoralists such as Thrasymachus (in Plato’s Republic) sought to discredit morality by arguing that it prevents the achievement of eudaimonia, while its defenders (including Plato) argued that it is necessary and/or sufficient for eudaimonia. The primacy of eudaimonia does not, however, imply either egoism (since altruism may itself be a constituent of the good life), or consequentialism (since the good life need not be specifiable independently of the moral life). The gulf between ‘eudaimonistic’ and ‘Kantian’ theories is therefore narrower than is generally thought.


Author(s):  
Axel Honneth

The concept of recognition has played an important role in philosophy since ancient times, when the good life was thought to depend partly on being held in regard by others. Only Hegel, however, made recognition fundamental to his practical philosophy. He claimed that human self-consciousness depends on recognition, and that there are different levels of recognition: legal or moral recognition, and the forms of recognition constituted by love and the state. A similar tripartite distinction can be used to ground a plausible modern account of ethics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Anthony P. McIntyre

This article examines how a specific form of lifestyle programming indexes both national concerns and transnational financial trends as well as diffuse social fissures in Irish life. Emerging in the late 1990s amid a construction boom, Irish property television adapted and thrived through the subsequent post-2008 crash, the concomitant implementation of austerity policies and an ensuing housing crisis. This boom-to-bust cycle was precipitated by the financialization of property within Ireland, a process whereby housing and commercial property became embedded in transnational financial market cycles. Through an analysis of three key examples of the genre, this article argues that for the most part, Irish property television seeks to hold at bay anxieties generated by a growing wealth and income disparity in the state. While this programming displays an ideological commitment to the “investor subjects” of home-ownership, increasingly the concerns of those excluded from this version of the good life are evident.


2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriella Slomp

Recent decades have witnessed a revival of interest in ancient friendship both as a normative and as an explanatory concept. The literature concurs in holding Hobbes responsible for the marginalisation of friendship in political science and suggests that Hobbes devalued friendship because of his understanding of man. This article argues that although Hobbes’ appraisal of friendship hinges on his assumption that man is self-interested, his critique of normative friendship does not rest on that notion. Hobbes’ challenge to us is this: without foundation in the ‘truth’ (i.e. the ‘Good Life’) that underpinned ancient friendship, modern friendship, whether self-interested or selfless, cannot be assumed to be a civic virtue, nor an index of the health of a political association, nor a facilitator of domestic or global peace. Hobbes’ critique is especially relevant for writers who maintain that a resurgence of friendship can nurture concord and foster reconciliation within contemporary liberal democracies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-174
Author(s):  
Alexa Zellentin

Under the circumstances of pluralism people often claim that the state ought to be neutral towards its citizens’ conceptions of the good life. However, what it means for the state to be neutral is often unclear. This is partly because there are different conceptions of neutrality and partly because what neutrality entails depends largely on the context in which neutrality is demanded. This paper discusses three different conceptions of neutrality – neutrality of impact, neutrality as equality of opportunity and justificatory neutrality – and analyses the strengths and weaknesses of the different conceptions in different contexts. It suggests that there are two common elements of neutrality in all its exemplifications: a) an element of “hands-off” and b) an element of equal treatment. It therefore argues that while justificatory neutrality is necessary for the state to be neutral it is not sufficient and claims that while conceptions of the good must not enter the justification of state regulations, they must be taken into consideration when deliberating the implementation of these regulations.


Thesis Eleven ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 138 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Martens

This paper examines Andrew Feenberg’s radical democratic politics of technology in relation to the context of Ecuador’s free and open software movement. It considers the articulation of this movement via the government sponsored activist project FLOK Society (Free/Libre Open Knowledge Society). Based on an ethnographic study (2015–16), which included interviews with FLOK Society coordinators, the paper discusses how such government-activist collaborations, may be useful in expanding Feenberg’s notion of technical politics and the nature of representation in the technical sphere. More specifically, the paper looks at the political shaping of technology, in relation to concepts about ‘the Good Life’, or ‘Buen Vivir’ in the case of Ecuador, and its drive toward a knowledge economy, based on the concepts of ‘Buen Conocer’ and ‘Bioconocimiento’ (Good Knowing and Bioknowledge). The paper argues that certain premises held by Feenberg concerning technical politics, democracy and populism in particular may need to be reconsidered in light of developments in Ecuador.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Romilson Silva Sousa

A grande mortalidade de negros e pobres em nossa contemporaneidade, abre uma reflexão sobre a vida, a ética e a justiça e suas relações com a necropolítica nos forçando a repensar o Estado e sua racionalidade ético-civilizatória (SOUSA, 2020b). Compreender o Estado, a Ciência Política e seus arquétipos é necessário para entendermos as origens das relações de poder e as relações étnico-raciais que marcaram e marcam a formação e a reprodução da iniquidade na história da raça humana. Denunciada pela literatura marginal dos pesquisadores e intelectuais negros (SOUZA, 2000) a literatura oficial carece de suplementação de outras perspectivas. Considerando que apesar de tradições historiográficas diferentes, tanto para Nietzsche como para Foucault e Paul Ricoeur, a verdade é histórica, pensar a interdisciplinaridade entre história, filosofia e literatura, implica em construir um tipo de genealogia das relações de poder sob a ótica de uma ética que é civilizatória e epistêmica. Considerando que as narrativas míticas podem recompor um saber eticamente comprometido com novas epistemologias e novas perspectivas interpretativas. Deste modo a importância da literatura mítica (SOUSA, 2020, 2020b) para a recomposição epistemológica de discursos na literatura bíblica. Uma pergunta foi o ponto de partida: quais as contribuições da literatura mítica para a compreensão da Ciência Política? Nosso objetivo então foi identificar aspectos da literatura mítica capaz de contribuir para uma outra interpretação para a ciência política. Tivemos por objetivos específicos: compreender a razão e a racionalidade de estado; analisar a racionalidade ético-civilizatória no Estado; identificar o papel dos arquétipos na literatura mítica e suas contribuições para a formação do Estado.  Partindo dos processos de formação histórico-cultural e da dialética presente nas relações étnico-raciais nas racionalidades ético-civilizatórios, a literatura mítica (SOUSA, 2020) utilizamos como referências principais no estudo da cultura e civilização egípcia:  Camara (2011), Diop (1974, 1991, 2014). Serviram também como fonte de pesquisa bibliográfica a literatura bíblica e a egípcia. Utilizamos uma metodologia baseada na bricolagem (KINCHELOE & BERRY, 2007). Sugerimos em nosso trabalho sugere a necessidade de considerarmos a literatura mítica na análise das relações entre poder e o Estado, a partir dessa literatura como um lócus epistêmico para a outra compreensão da materialidade teoria do Estado. AbstractThe high mortality of blacks and the poor in our contemporaneity opens a reflection on life, ethics and justice and its relations with the necropolitics, forcing us to rethink the State and its ethical-civilizing rationality (SOUSA, 2020b). Understanding the State, Political Science and its archetypes is necessary to understand the origins of power relations and the ethnic-racial relations that have marked and mark the formation and reproduction of inequity in the history of the human race. Denounced by the marginal literature of black researchers and intellectuals (SOUZA, 2000), the official literature needs supplementation from other perspectives. Considering that despite different historiographical traditions, both for Nietzsche and for Foucault and Paul Ricoeur, the truth is historical, thinking about the interdisciplinarity between history, philosophy and literature, implies building a kind of genealogy of power relations from the perspective of an ethics which is civilizing and epistemic. Considering that mythic narratives can recompose knowledge ethically committed to new epistemologies and new interpretative perspectives. Thus, the importance of mythical literature (SOUSA, 2020, 2020b) for the epistemological recomposition of discourses in biblical literature. One question was the starting point: what are the contributions of mythical literature to the understanding of Political Science? Our aim, then, was to identify aspects of mythical literature capable of contributing to another interpretation for political science. We had for specific objectives: to understand the reason and rationality of state; to analyze the ethical-civilizing rationality in the State; to identify the role of archetypes in mythical literature and their contributions to the formation of the State. Starting from the processes of cultural historical formation and the dialectic present in the ethnic-racial relations in the ethical-civilizing rationalities, the mythical literature (SOUSA, 2020) we used as main references in the study of Egyptian culture and civilization: Camara (2011), Diop (1974, 1991, 2014). Biblical and Egyptian literature also served as a source of bibliographic research. We use a methodology based on DIY (KINCHELOE & BERRY, 2007). We suggest in our work suggests the need to consider mythical literature in the analysis of the relations between power and the State, from that literature as an epistemic locus for the other understanding of the State theory materiality.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Sunday Olaoluwa Dada

This essay explores the philosophical affinity between Aristotle’s concept of virtue as character habituation and the Yorùbá ethical and ontological understanding of ọmọlúwàbí as the foundation for re-examining the philosophical foundation of democratic governance in Nigeria. Based on the Aristotelian insistence that the good life is the end of politics, the essay argues for a rethinking of the concept of public morality as character-based political dynamics that enables politicians to think more about the social contract between the government and the governed, rather than an amoral understanding of politics that eschew morality and undermines the well-being of the citizens. The absence of public morality, the essay argues, has resulted in a neopatrimonial framework within which the political elite willfully circumvent constitutional rules and regulation in order to vitiate the public interest. The essay concludes by arguing for a rigorous public enlightenment as well as a reform of the educational curriculum through an injection of virtue ethics.


Author(s):  
Amr Sabet

As late as 1966, Martin Wight could still pose the question: “why is there no international relations theory?” By this he meant the absence of a tradition of speculation about relations between states, family of nations, or the international community, comparable to that of political theory as speculation about the state. To the extent that it did exist, it was marked by “intellectual and moral poverty” caused both by the prejudice imposed by the sovereign state and the belief in progress (Wight 1995: 15-16 &19). Unlike political theory, which has been progressivist in its concern with pursuing interests of state as “theory of the good life”, international politics as the “theory of survival” constituted the “realm of recurrence and repetition” (Wight 1995: 25 & 32). Essentially, therefore, it had nothing new to offer.


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