Hobbes and the Culture of Despotism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheldon S. Wolin
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Physical Nature ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Structure ◽  
The One

This chapter argues that Hobbes's was the first modern philosopher in whom a despotic mentality was at work. He perpetuated Bacon's political reading of science, and he fully appreciated the political structure implicit in Bacon's conception of scientific knowledge. Bacon's credo “knowledge is power” was transcribed to read “knowledge is for the sake of power” (scientia propter potentiam). Hobbes's despotic mentality is revealed in the several departments of his theory, not just in his political writings: in his thinking about human nature, physical nature, knowledge, scientific inquiry, and thinking itself. He fashioned images of man and mind as subjects fit for despotic rule: the one for the rule or rules of a sovereign lawgiver, the other for the rules of method decreed by a sovereign science.

Segmentary State Formation and the Ritual Control of Water Under the Incas

1993 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 480-514 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Gose
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Structure ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Plant Life ◽  
Kinship Relations ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The One ◽  
Divine Kingship

There is a strange and unacknowledged paradox in the historiography of the Incas. On the one hand, few would deny that theirs was a typically theocratic archaic state, a divine kingship in which the Inca was thought to.be the son of the Sun. On the other hand, the standard descriptions of Inca political structure barely mention religion and seem to assume a formal separation between state and cult.1I believe that these secularizing accounts are misguided and will show in this essay that the political structure of the pre-Columbian Andes took form primarily around a system of sacred ancestral relics and origin points known generically ashuacas. Each huaca defined a level of political organization that might nest into units of a higher order or subdivide into smaller groupings. Collectively they formed a segmentary hierarchy that transcended the boundaries of local ethnic polities and provided the basis for empires like that of the Incas. However, these huacas were also the focus of local kinship relations and agrarian fertility rituals. The political structure that they articulated therefore had a built-in concern for the metaphysical reproduction of human, animal, and plant life. Political power in the pre-Columbian Andes was particularly bound up with attempts to control the flow of water across the frontier of life and death, resulting in no clear distinction between ritual and administration.

scholarly journals Political structure and the administration of political system in Iraq (post-ISIS)

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (65) ◽  
pp. 345-361
Author(s):  
Muntasser Majeed Hameed
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Fundamental Problem ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Entry Point ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Structure ◽  
Democratic Systems ◽  
The One

The objective of the investigation was to analyze the structure and administration of the political system in Iraq (post-ISIS). After 2003, the Iraqi political system suffered the fundamental problem of its failure to achieve the political and social inclusion that characterizes democratic systems, to guarantee the establishment of a "state for all", while respecting differences. Political representation has moved from the system of sectarian ethnic components, under the title of consensual democracy, to the representation of leaders and the realization of their interests and the interests of their parties at the expense of the groups that claim to represent them, which complicates the problem. In this sense, the new political system could not represent social pluralism, on the one hand, and could not satisfy the demands of the same components on the other. Methodologically, it is a political investigation in the framework of the analysis of the political system. It was concluded that the search for new balances is a pending issue. While these emerging balances and arrangements are still fragile and immature to the extent required, they represent a clear entry point to reshape the regime's political structure in one form or another.

Getting Over Athens

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Wiater
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Model ◽  
Dionysius Of Halicarnassus ◽  
The One

This chapter examines the ambivalent image of Classical Athens in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities. This image reflects a deep-seated ambiguity of Dionysius’ Classicist ideology: on the one hand, there is no question for Dionysius that Athenocentric Hellenicity failed, and that the Roman empire has superseded Athens’ role once and for all as the political and cultural centre of the oikoumene. On the other, Dionysius accepted Rome’s supremacy as legitimate partly because he believed (and wanted his readers to believe) her to be the legitimate heir of Classical Athens and Classical Athenian civic ideology. As a result, Dionysius develops a new model of Hellenicity for Roman Greeks loyal to the new political and cultural centre of Rome. This new model of Greek identity incorporates and builds on Classical Athenian ideals, institutions, and culture, but also supersedes them.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

Plausibility and Aesthetic Interpretation

1977 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis Dutton
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
The Other ◽  
Inquiry Science ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Logical Structures ◽  
The One

If a catalogue were made of terms commonly used to affirm the adequacy of critical interpretations of works of art, one word certain to be included would be “plausible.” Yet this term is one which has received precious little attention in the literature of aesthetics. This is odd, inasmuch as I find the notion of plausibility central to an understanding of the nature of criticism. “Plausible” is a perplexing term because it can have radically different meanings depending on the circumstances of its employment. ln the following discussion, I will make some observations about the logic of this concept in connection with its uses in two rather different contexts: the context of scientific inquiry on the one hand, and that of aesthetic interpretation on the other. In distinguishing separate senses of “plausible,” I shall provide reason to resist the temptation to imagine that because logical aspects of two different types of inquiry—science and criticism—happen to be designated by the same term, they may to that extent be considered to have similar logical structures.

Relation of Field Dependence to the “Philosophies of Human Nature”

1969 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-198
Author(s):  
Robert B. Duke
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Field Dependence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Field Independence ◽  
Personality Variables ◽  
Positive View ◽  
Embedded Figures Test ◽  
Embedded Figures ◽  
Positive Correlations ◽  
The One

To study the function of personality variables in the perception of other people, 52 undergraduate males were administered the Philosophies of Human Nature Scale and the Embedded-figures Test. Relatively low but significant positive correlations were found between field independence and trustworthiness, altruism, and the positive view of human nature. There was no significant correlation between field independence and strength of will, independence, complexity, and variability. Apparently, the personality of the one perceiving is relevant to what is perceived in the other person.

Studying Political Leadership: The Case of François Mitterrand

1994 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-468 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Cole
Keyword(s):  
General Framework ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Environmental Constraints ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The One

The study of political leadership, in France and elsewhere, must be appreciated in terms of the interaction between leadership resources (personal and positional) on the one hand, and environmental constraints and opportunities on the other. This article proposes a general framework for appraising comparative liberal democratic political leaderships. It illustrates the possibilities of the framework by evaluating the political leadership of the French President François Mitterrand.

Scatter 2

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Bennington
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
The Other ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Early Church ◽  
The Political ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Jean Bodin ◽  
Marsilius Of Padua ◽  
The One ◽  
Nuremberg Trials

Scatter 2 identifies politics as an object of perennial difficulty for philosophy—as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery as is philosophy’s traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty makes it an attractive area of attention for any deconstructive approach to the tradition from which we inevitably inherit our language and our concepts. Scatter 2 pursues that deconstruction, often starting, and sometimes departing, from the work of Jacques Derrida, by attending to the concepts of sovereignty on the one hand, and democracy on the other. Part I follows the fate of a line from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, where Odysseus asserts that “the rule of many is no good thing, let there be one ruler, one king,” as it is quoted and misquoted, and progressively Christianized, by authors including Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de la Boétie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, before being discussed by Derrida himself. Part II begins again, as it were, with Plato and Aristotle, and tracks the concept of democracy as it regularly impacts and tends to undermine that sovereignist tradition, and, more especially in detailed readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, develops a notion of “proto-democracy” as a possible name for the scatter that underlies and drives the political as such, and that will always prevent politics from achieving its aim of bringing itself to an end.

Indian and Russian Tolstoy: one among strangers and a stranger among one’s

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-35
Author(s):  
Svetlana M. Klimova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Indian Thought ◽  
Russian State ◽  
Lev Tolstoy ◽  
The One ◽  
The Voice ◽  
The Church ◽  
Peculiar Phenomenon

The article examines the phenomenon of the late Lev Tolstoy in the context of his religious position. The author analyzes the reactions to his teaching in Russian state and official Orthodox circles, on the one hand, and Indian thought, on the other. Two sociocultural images of L.N. Tolstoy: us and them that arose in the context of understanding the position of the Russian Church and the authorities and Indian public and religious figures (including Mahatma Gandhi, who was under his influence). A peculiar phenomenon of intellectually usL.N. Tolstoy among culturally them (Indian) correspondents and intellectually them Tolstoy among culturally us (representatives of the official government and the Church of Russia) transpires. The originality of this situation is that these im­ages of Lev Tolstoy arise practically at the same period. The author compares these images, based on the method of defamiliarisation (V. Shklovsky), which allows to visually demonstrate the religious component of Tolstoy’s criticism of the political sphere of life and, at the same time, to understand the psychological reasons for its rejection in Russian official circles. With the methodological help of defamiliarisation the author tries to show that the opinion of Tolstoy (as the writer) becomes at the same time the voice of conscience for many of his con­temporaries. The method of defamiliarisation allowed the author to show how Leo Tolstoy’s inner law of nonviolence influenced the concept of non­violent resistance in the teachings of Gandhi.

Towards the Socratic Mission: Imitatio Socratis

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-222
Author(s):  
Mathias G. Parding
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Climate ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Political Associations ◽  
The One ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
The Church

Abstract It is known that Kierkegaard’s relation to politics was problematic and marked by a somewhat reactionary stance. The nature of this problematic relation, however, will be shown to lie in the tension between his double skepticism of the order of establishment [det Bestående] on the one hand, and the political associations of his age on the other. In this tension he is immersed, trembling between Scylla and Charybdis. On the one hand Kierkegaard is hesitant to support the progressive political movements of the time due to his skepticism about the principle of association in the socio-psychological climate of leveling and envy. On the other hand, his dubious support of the order of the establishment, in particular the Church and Bishop Mynster, becomes increasingly problematic. The importance of 1848 is crucial in this regard since this year marks the decisive turn in Kierkegaard’s authorship. Using the letters to Kolderup-Rosenvinge in the wake of the cataclysmic events of 1848 as my point of departure, I wish to elucidate the pathway towards what Kierkegaard himself understands as his Socratic mission.

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