A Virtue for Courageous Minds

Common Notion ◽

History Of ◽

Benjamin Constant ◽

Intellectual Foundations

Political moderation is the touchstone of democracy, which could not function without compromise and bargaining, yet it is one of the most understudied concepts in political theory. How can we explain this striking paradox? Why do we often underestimate the virtue of moderation? Seeking to answer these questions, this book examines moderation in modern French political thought and sheds light on the French Revolution and its legacy. The book begins with classical thinkers who extolled the virtues of a moderate approach to politics, such as Aristotle and Cicero. It then shows how Montesquieu inaugurated the modern rebirth of this tradition by laying the intellectual foundations for moderate government. The book looks at important figures such as Jacques Necker, Germaine de Staël, and Benjamin Constant, not only in the context of revolutionary France but throughout Europe. It traces how moderation evolves from an individual moral virtue into a set of institutional arrangements calculated to protect individual liberty, and explores the deep affinity between political moderation and constitutional complexity. The book demonstrates how moderation navigates between political extremes, and it challenges the common notion that moderation is an essentially conservative virtue, stressing instead its eclectic nature. Drawing on a broad range of writings in political theory, the history of political thought, philosophy, and law, the book reveals how the virtue of political moderation can address the profound complexities of the world today.

How Should We Categorize Approaches to the History of Political Thought?

The Review of Politics ◽

10.1017/s0034670520000704 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 83 (1) ◽

pp. 91-114

Author(s):

Adrian Blau

Keyword(s):

Theoretical Analysis ◽

Political Theory ◽

Political Thought ◽

Two Dimensional ◽

One Dimensional ◽

History Of ◽

New Framework

AbstractThis paper proposes a new framework for categorizing approaches to the history of political thought. Previous categorizations exclude much research; political theory, if included, is often caricatured. And previous categorizations are one-dimensional, presenting different approaches as alternatives. My framework is two-dimensional, distinguishing six kinds of end (two empirical, four theoretical) and six kinds of means. Importantly, these choices are not alternatives: studies may have more than one end and typically use several means. Studies with different ends often use some of the same means. And all studies straddle the supposed empirical/theoretical “divide.” Quentin Skinner himself expertly combines empirical and theoretical analysis—yet the latter is often overlooked, not least because of Skinner's own methodological pronouncements. This highlights a curious disjuncture in methodological writings, between what they say we do, and what we should do. What we should do is much broader than existing categorizations imply.

Roger Boesche: The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville

The Tocqueville Review/La revue Tocqueville ◽

10.3138/ttr.9.1.419 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 419-422

Author(s):

James Schleifer

Keyword(s):

Los Angeles ◽

Political Theory ◽

Political Science ◽

Political Thought ◽

History Of Ideas ◽

Alexis De Tocqueville ◽

Roger Boesche, Chair of the Department of Political Science at Occidental College in Los Angeles, lias already written several thoughtful articles about Tocqueville, each marked by clarity of thought and expression: ’The Prison: Tocqueville’s Model for Despotism,” Western Political Quarterly 33 (December 1980):550-63; “The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville,” History of Political Thought 2 (Winter 1981): 495-524; “Why Could Tocqueville Predict So Well?” Political Theory 11 (February 1983): 79-104; “Tocqueville and Le Commerce’. A Newspaper Expressing His Unusual Liberalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44 (April-June 1983): 277-92; and “Hedonism and Nihilism: The Predictions of Tocqueville and Nietzsche,” The Tocqueville Review 8 (1986/87): 165-84.

Review: Jeremy Waldron’s Political Political Theory

European Journal of Political Theory ◽

10.1177/1474885116671137 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 18 (3) ◽

pp. 437-446

Author(s):

David Runciman

Keyword(s):

Political Theory ◽

Conceptual Understanding ◽

Political Thought ◽

Contemporary Politics ◽

This collection seeks to ground political theory in the study of institutions, particularly the constitutional relationship between different branches of government. It makes the case that ‘constitutionalism’ has become a thin doctrine of political restraint. Waldron wants to identify a fuller conceptual understanding of how the functions of government can be empowered and articulated. In doing so, he sets out a position that is distinct from both moralism and realism in contemporary political theory. I explore how well the later distinction holds up: how successfully does Waldron’s approach marry realist concerns with the rigour of analytical political theory? I also discuss the role it leaves for the history of political thought and whether it can deal with the populist strain in contemporary politics.

Carl Schmitt’s Political Theory of Dictatorship

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199916931.013.009 ◽

2013 ◽

Author(s):

Duncan Kelly

Keyword(s):

Political Theory ◽

French Revolution ◽

Liberal Democracy ◽

Political Thought ◽

General Analysis ◽

Historical Background ◽

The Political ◽

Critical History ◽

History Of ◽

The Relationship

This chapter reconstructs the intellectual-historical background to Carl Schmitt’s well-known analysis of the problem of dictatorship and the powers of the Reichspräsident under the Weimar Constitution. The analysis focuses both on Schmitt’s wartime propaganda work, concerning a distinction between the state of siege and dictatorship, as well as on his more general analysis of modern German liberalism. It demonstrates why Schmitt attempted to produce a critical history of the history of modern political thought with the concept of dictatorship at its heart and how he came to distinguish between commissarial and sovereign forms of dictatorship to attack liberalism and liberal democracy. The chapter also focuses on the conceptual reworking of the relationship between legitimacy and dictatorship that Schmitt produced by interweaving the political thought of the Abbé Sieyès and the French Revolution into his basic rejection of contemporary liberal and socialist forms of politics.

The Opinion of Mankind

10.23943/princeton/9780691178882.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Paul Sagar

Keyword(s):

Political Theory ◽

Political Thought ◽

David Hume ◽

State Theory ◽

The State ◽

Political Organization ◽

Scottish Enlightenment ◽

The Enlightenment ◽

What is the modern state? Conspicuously undertheorized in recent political theory, this question persistently animated the best minds of the Enlightenment. Recovering David Hume and Adam Smith's underappreciated contributions to the history of political thought, this book considers how, following Thomas Hobbes's epochal intervention in the mid-seventeenth century, subsequent thinkers grappled with explaining how the state came into being, what it fundamentally might be, and how it could claim rightful authority over those subject to its power. Hobbes has cast a long shadow over Western political thought, particularly regarding the theory of the state. This book shows how Hume and Smith, the two leading lights of the Scottish Enlightenment, forged an alternative way of thinking about the organization of modern politics. They did this in part by going back to the foundations: rejecting Hobbes's vision of human nature and his arguments about our capacity to form stable societies over time. In turn, this was harnessed to a deep reconceptualization of how to think philosophically about politics in a secular world. The result was an emphasis on the “opinion of mankind,” the necessary psychological basis of all political organization. Demonstrating how Hume and Smith broke away from Hobbesian state theory, the book suggests ways in which these thinkers might shape how we think about politics today, and in turn how we might construct better political theory.

Re-Telling the History of Political Thought

American Journal of Islam and Society ◽

10.35632/ajis.v19i1.1974 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 19 (1) ◽

pp. 29-49

Author(s):

Katherine H. Bullock

Keyword(s):

Political Theory ◽

Political Thought ◽

Philosophical Thinking ◽

Proper Role ◽

This paper explores the construction of the canon of political theory. I argue that the interpretation of the canon that defines ancient pagan Greeks as the founders of western political thought, includes medieval Christian thinkers, and yet defines out Muslim and Jewish philosophers is based upon western ethnocentric secular assumptions about the proper role of reason, experience and revelation in philosophical thinking.

The Political Economy of Burke&s Analysis of the French Revolution

The Historical Journal ◽

10.1017/s0018246x00011584 ◽

1982 ◽

Vol 25 (2) ◽

pp. 331-349 ◽

Cited By ~ 24

Author(s):

J. G. A. Pocock

Keyword(s):

Political Economy ◽

French Revolution ◽

Political Thought ◽

The Political ◽

Single Structure ◽

History Of ◽

The French Revolution

There are, perhaps, in the end only two ways in which a historian may undertake the study of a document in the history of political thought. One may consider it as a text, supposed to have been intended by its author and understood by its reader with the maximum coherence and unity possible; the historian's aim now becomes the reconstitution of the fullest possible interpretation available to intelligent readers at the relevant time. Alternatively, one may consider it as a tissue of statements, organized by its writer into a single document, but accessible and intelligible whether or not they have been harmonized into a single structure of meaning. The historian's aim is now the recovery of these statements, the establishment of the patterns of speech and thought forming the various contexts in which they become intelligible, and the pursuit of any changes in the normal employment of these patterns which may have occurred in consequence of the statements’ being made.