A Dissenting View on the Group Approach to Soviet Politics

1976 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 542-567 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Odom
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Organization Theory ◽  
Soviet System ◽  
Group Approach ◽  
Comparative Political Theory ◽  
Middle Range ◽  
Comparative Concept ◽  
Group Concept ◽  
Significant Support

In the struggle to find a successor to the totalitarian model for study of Soviet politics, the interest-group approach has won significant support. Yet this concept fails to meet all three of Huntington's criteria for a “useful” model. First, the group concept emphasizes the peripheral at the expense of what is of critical importance. Second, as a comparative concept it introduces errors in logic as well as a myriad of ambiguities in definition and taxonomy. Third, it is more likely to obscure than to clarify the dynamic character of the Soviet system. The group approach does not promise, as some assert, to bring the study of Soviet politics into the mainstream of comparative political theory.In contrast, the totalitarian model still goes far toward meeting Huntington's criteria. When supplemented by the notion of political culture and by middle-range concepts of organization theory and bureaucracy, the totalitarian model retains great heuristic value as an ideal construct from which Soviet realities diverge in various ways.

Bulls and Deer, Women and Warriors

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulia Sissa
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Democratic Culture ◽  
Popular Rule

In ancient Greece, manly men were thought to have invented popular rule and were considered capable, and worthy, of ruling themselves. The full appreciation of the gendered nature of democratic culture challenges our canonical vision of ancient politics. First, we have to place gender not at the margin, but at the heart of Athenian political culture. Second, we have to expand our primary ‘must-read’ sources, by including discourses that deal with the embodiment of a political identity: above all, the biological works of Aristotle. This chapter argues for a correlation between physiology and political theory within the Aristotelian corpus, as well as for the relevance of Aristotle’s insight for our understanding of ancient democracy.

The “Legitimacy of Chinese Philosophy” Debate and the Global Extension of Disciplinary Knowledge

2019 ◽  
pp. 699-717
Author(s):  
Leigh K. Jenco
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Chinese Philosophy ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Disciplinary Knowledge ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Comparative Political Theory ◽  
Chinese Thought ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

This chapter argues that the ongoing debate about the “legitimacy of Chinese philosophy” (Zhongguo zhexue hefaxing) raises issues relevant to the globalization of knowledge. On its surface, the debate concerns whether Chinese thought can be meaningfully understood as “philosophy”; more generally, it asks how, in the very process of enabling their translation into presumably more “modern” languages of intellectual expression, the terms of a specific academic discipline shape and constrain the development of particular forms of knowledge. The debate reveals the power inequalities that underlie attempts to include culturally marginalized bodies of thought within established disciplines and suggests the range of alternatives that are silenced or forgotten when this “inclusion” takes place. Even contemporary invocations of “Chinese philosophy” are often unable to comprehend the stakes of the debate for many of its Chinese participants, who link the debate to enduring questions about the capacity of indigenous Chinese academic terms to compete successfully with Euro-American ones. These debates may illuminate questions currently motivating comparative political theory.

scholarly journals Political Theory of Populism

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadia Urbinati
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Representative Government ◽  
Constitutional Democracy ◽  
The People ◽  
Democratic Societies ◽  
Democratic Principles

Populism is the name of a global phenomenon whose definitional precariousness is proverbial. It resists generalizations and makes scholars of politics comparativist by necessity, as its language and content are imbued with the political culture of the society in which it arises. A rich body of socio-historical analyses allows us to situate populism within the global phenomenon called democracy, as its ideological core is nourished by the two main entities—the nation and the people—that have fleshed out popular sovereignty in the age of democratization. Populism consists in a transmutation of the democratic principles of the majority and the people in a way that is meant to celebrate one subset of the people as opposed to another, through a leader embodying it and an audience legitimizing it. This may make populism collide with constitutional democracy, even if its main tenets are embedded in the democratic universe of meanings and language. In this article, I illustrate the context-based character of populism and how its cyclical appearances reflect the forms of representative government. I review the main contemporary interpretations of the concept and argue that some basic agreement now exists on populism's rhetorical character and its strategy for achieving power in democratic societies. Finally, I sketch the main characteristics of populism in power and explain how it tends to transform the fundamentals of democracy: the people and the majority, elections, and representation.

A Democratic Case for Comparative Political Theory

2013 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa S. Williams ◽  
Mark E. Warren
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Comparative Political Theory

scholarly journals The Incomprehension of Terror as a Harbinger of “Post-Truth”?

Stan Rzeczy ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 55-77
Author(s):  
Anna Shor-Chudnovskaya
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Open Book ◽  
Soviet System ◽  
Soviet History ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Political Epistemology ◽  
Soviet Russia

This article is devoted to the attitude to truth as a part of political epistemology and of political culture in post-Soviet Russia. It considers the extent to which the Great Terror contributed to the development of a specific political epistemology, which is also largely characteristic of later periods of Soviet history and perhaps even of today. Of particular interest is the population’s perception of the terror as inaccessible or poorly accessible to logical understanding. As main sources, the article relies on two literary texts: Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna and Veniamin Kaverin’s The Open Book. Despite all the apparent differences between the Soviet system and today’s Russia, one important similarity is striking: over the last two decades (after 1999) there has been a visible increase in the belief that it is impossible for a political subject to separate truth from lying and that the sphere of public administration and political interests is, by definition, a place where deception prevails. This article discusses the potential historical roots of this certainty.

The Theory behind the Findings

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy J. Binder ◽  
Kate Wood
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Cultural Sociology ◽  
Public University ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
University System ◽  
Social And Cultural Capital ◽  
Elite University

This chapter examines in more abstract terms how universities, in combination with the broader political culture, cultivate distinctive styles of conservatism among students. It reviews research in the fields of higher education studies, cultural sociology, political theory, and organization studies to capture some of the more general processes observed at Eastern Elite University and Western Flagship University. In particular, it considers how social and cultural capital gives rise to the particular dominant conservative styles of civilized discourse at Eastern Elite, provocation in the Western Public university system, and the submerged styles seen at these different campuses. The chapter concludes by arguing that the model developed for studying student conservatism on both campuses is general enough to be useful to scholars studying other aspects of students' lives other than politics.

Political Theory and the Bourgeois Public Sphere

Beyond Reason ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 175-206
Author(s):  
Sanjay Seth
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Rational Argument ◽  
Comparative Political Theory ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political View ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Common World

Arguing that political theory is an irremediably Western and liberal enterprise, this chapter shows that it is a discipline that does not seek to accurately represent and explain an object, but is rather knowledge “for,” performance rather than representation. The discipline is directed toward the public sphere, imagined as a realm of individuals possessed of their own “values” who, however, inhabit a common world and engage in rational, critical debate about that which they hold in common. It thus “performs” the liberal conviction that differing moral and political viewpoints being ineliminable, they must contend with each other in rational argument in a public sphere not itself marked by a commitment to any moral or political view. Recognizing the parochialism and Eurocentrism of these presumptions, some scholars have recently attempted to “deprovincialize” political theory by extending its geographical and cultural remit through “comparative political theory.” The chapter evaluates the success and shortcomings of these endeavors.

scholarly journals Institutions, Ideologies, and Comparative Political Theory

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 423-438
Author(s):  
Joshua Simon
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Comparative Political Theory ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
Methodological Reflection ◽  
Insight Into

The growing prominence of comparative political theory has inspired extensive and fruitful methodological reflection, raising important questions about the procedures that political theorists should apply when they select texts for study, interpret their passages, and assess their arguments. But, notably, comparative political theorists have mainly rejected the comparative methods used in the subfield of comparative politics, because they argue that applying the comparative method would compromise both the interpretive and the critical projects that comparative political theory should pursue. In this article, I describe a comparative approach for the study of political ideas that offers unique insight into how the intellectual and institutional contexts that political thinkers occupy influence their ideas. By systematically describing how political thinking varies across time and over space in relation to the contexts within which political thinkers live and work, the comparative method can serve as the foundation for both deconstructive critiques, which reveal the partial interests that political ideas presented as universally advantageous actually serve, and reconstructive critiques, which identify particular thinkers or traditions of political thought that, because of the contexts in which they developed, offer compelling critical perspectives on existing political institutions.

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