Crowds

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-166
Author(s):  
Yaacob Dweck
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Philosophical Problem ◽  
Important Resource ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Sephardic Diaspora

This chapter assesses the doubt of an individual versus the certainty of the crowd. It posits that Jacob Sasportas's aversion to Sabbetai Zevi as the Messiah was as much a response to the force of perceived social chaos as it was an attack on the truth-value of Sabbetai Zevi's claims. Sabbatianism posed an acute philosophical problem to Sasportas. The certainty with which the Sabbatian believers propagated their newfound faith, the confidence and imperiousness with which they attempted to silence dissent, and their contempt for doubt as a condition for belief, all of these threatened the welfare of the body politic. Belief, or the acquisition of the correct opinions, could be cultivated and acquired only if the welfare of the body politic and the welfare of the soul had been adequately regulated. These intellectual and social demands forced Sasportas to draw upon the single most important resource he had in order to confer intellectual legitimacy upon his argument for the conditionality of messianic belief: Maimonides. As opposed to the collective need for instant certainty, he upheld the individual quest for discernment. Throughout The Fading Flower of the Zevi and throughout his long career in the Sephardic Diaspora, Sasportas consciously cultivated the posture of an articulate outsider. He saw himself as a figure of authority, the product of his lineage and his learning, who was quite capable of seeing the problems in Jewish society.

The lives of subjects

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annabel S. Brett
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the relationship of the state to its subjects as necessarily physically embodied beings. The primary way in which the commonwealth commands its subjects is through the medium of its law. The law is for the common good and obliges the community as a whole, and thus the ontological status of the law—as distinct from any particular command of a superior to an individual—is intimately tied to that of the body politic. The question, then, concerning the relationship of the state to the natural body of the individual can be framed in terms of the extent of the obligation of the civil law.

Surplus Repressive Punishment and Spirit’s Regressive (de-)Actualisation

2018 ◽  
pp. 212-240
Author(s):  
Wes Furlotte
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Real Problem ◽  
The Real ◽  
Social Objective ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

This chapter begins with a provoking claim: the real problem here is not the natural dimension involved in criminality. Instead, it argues that the real threat to freedom’s social actualization is the way in which the state’s disciplinary apparatus reacts to violations of right. It shows that if criminality needs to be framed in terms of nature then so does punishment. If punishment functions to (re-)habituate transgressive persons, then one of its inherent risks is that it might operate as a brute externality, a natural force. In functioning as an external natural force, punishment actively mutilates the freedom constitutive of juridical personhood. Not only does this mutilation undermine the individual it also actively undermines spirit’s social (objective) expression as freedom because such a practice serves to (a) fragment and alienate the person and (b) the totality constituting the body politic. This threat is what the chapter calls “surplus repressive punishment.” This problem as a whole is what the chapter denotes with “spirit’s regressive (de-)actualization.” Consequently, the problem nature poses in Hegel’s system is even more complex when considered in terms of how the polis’ institutions frame, understand, and react to that very same problem.

scholarly journals Risk as Moral Danger: The Social and Political Functions of Risk Discourse in Public Health

1993 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Lupton
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
Divine Retribution ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Risk Discourse

Risk is a concept with multiple meanings and is ideologically loaded. The author reviews the literature on risk perception and risk as a sociocultural construct, with particular reference to the domain of public health. Pertinent examples of the political and moral function of risk discourse in public health are given. The author concludes that risk discourse is often used to blame the victim, to displace the real reasons for ill-health upon the individual, and to express outrage at behavior deemed socially unacceptable, thereby exerting control over the body politic as well as the body corporeal. Risk discourse is redolent with the ideologies of mortality, danger, and divine retribution. Risk, as it is used in modern society, therefore cannot be considered a neutral term.

Racism and Its Presuppositions: Towards a Pragmatic Ethics of Social Change

Human Affairs ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Lanre-Abass
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Intelligence ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Barium Meal ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Moral Ideals ◽  
Litmus Test ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Pragmatic Ethics

Racism and Its Presuppositions: Towards a Pragmatic Ethics of Social ChangeRacism has been described as a litmus test or a barium meal which reveals other disorders and injustices within the body politic. It presupposes the legitimacy of racial classifications and the metaphysical reality of races and therefore provides a vital area of scrutiny for philosophical traditions. This paper examines racism and its anti-social effects both on the individual and the society at large. It argues that racism is generally driven by fear and hatred hence all forms of racism are dangerous, socially harmful and morally wrong in practice. The paper recommends ways of overcoming the evil of racism by emphasizing social intelligence and self-realization as moral ideals drawing on John Dewey's pragmatism in ethics. It concludes by stressing Dewey's moral pragmatism as a potent instrument of social change.

scholarly journals Habit, the Criminal Body and the Body Politic in England, c. 1700–1800

2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 83-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Martin Dodsworth
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Individual Responsibility ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Social Circumstance

This article explores the role that ‘habit’ played in discourses on crime in the 18th century, a subject which forms an important part of the history of ‘the social’. It seeks to bridge the division between ‘liberal’ positions which see crime as a product of social circumstance, and the conservative position which stresses the role of will and individual responsibility, by drawing attention to the role habit played in uniting these conceptions in the 18th century. It argues that the Lockean idea that the mind was a tabula rasa, and that the character was thereby formed through impression and habit, was used as a device to explain the ways in which certain individuals rather than others happened to fall into a life of crime, a temptation to which all were susceptible. This allowed commentators to define individuals as responsible for their actions, while accepting the significance of environmental factors in their transgressions. Further, the notion that the character was formed through habit enabled reformers to promote the idea that crime could be combated through mechanisms of prevention and reformation, which both targeted the individual criminal and sought more generally to reduce the likelihood of crime.

D(en)ying narratives: death, identity and the body politic

Legal Studies ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Hanafin
Keyword(s):  
Political Identity ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
The Body ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
New Nation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Imagined Nation ◽  
The Sacrifice ◽  
Individual Body

One of the enduring features in Irish legal discourse in the postcolonial period is the manner in which the individual body has become a receptacle of contested meaning. In Ireland, with its birth out of a violent trauma based on a philosophy of blood sacrifice, the heroic patriot who dies in the service of his imagined nation is invested with particular symbolic capital and casts a traumatic shadow over discourses on death in Irish society. The nation is always already in the shadow of death, of the deathly apparition of the new nation, made hauntingly manifest in the photos of the dead body of the nationalist hunger striker Terence MacSwiney, as his corpse lay in state in 1920. This body being dead also signals the hope that, in the sacrifice of the individual for the national cause, liberation will one day come. This theme of the primacy of community over individual prefigured the manner in which in postcolonial Irish society the individual body of the citizen was relegated to a secondary position. The attempt to deny or repress death may be analogised with the similar attempt on the part of political elites to create a notion of political identity which is rigid and attempts to keep all those others associated with death and degeneration outside the body politic.

Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hunter H. Gardner
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Epidemic Disease ◽  
American Novels ◽  
Silius Italicus ◽  
Familial Bonds ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Individual

Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid developed important conventions of the Western plague narrative as a response to the breakdown of the Roman res publica in the mid-first century CE and the reconstitution of stabilized government under the Augustan Principate (31 BCE–14 CE). Relying on the metaphoric relationship between the human body and the body politic, these authors use largely fictive representations of epidemic disease to address the collapse of the social order and suggest remedies for its recovery. Plague as such functions frequently in Roman texts to enact a drama in which the concerns of the individual must be weighed against those of the collective. In order to understand the figurative potential of plague, this book evaluates the reality of epidemic disease in Rome, in light of twentieth-century theories of plague discourse, those of Artaud, Foucault, Sontag, and Girard, in particular. Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature identifies consistent features of the outbreaks described by Roman epic poets, charting the emergence of Golden-Age imagery, emphasis on bodily dissolution, and poignant accounts of broken familial bonds. Such features are expressed through Roman idioms that provocatively recall the discourse of civil strife that characterized the last century of the Roman Republic. The final chapters examine key moments in the resurgence of Roman plague topoi, beginning with early imperial poets (Lucan, Seneca, and Silius Italicus), and concluding with discussion of late antique Christian poetry, paintings of the late Italian Renaissance, and Anglo-American novels and films.

scholarly journals Potatoes and the Pursuit of Happiness

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-32
Author(s):  
Rebecca Earle
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Healthy Eating ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Individual Choice ◽  
Pursuit Of Happiness ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
The Individual

Eating acquired a new political importance during the Enlightenment, as writers began to link individual diets to the strength and wealth of nations. This article examines the eighteenth-century career of a foodstuff that became emblematic of these developments: the potato. Politicians, statesmen, and philosophers across Europe enthusiastically promoted the potato as a means of strengthening the body politic. They framed this promotion within a language of choice and the individual pursuit of happiness. In so doing they laid the foundations for today's debates about how to balance personal dietary autonomy with the demands of public health. The roots of the current neoliberal insistence that healthy eating is fundamentally a matter of individual choice thus lie in the Enlightenment.

scholarly journals The French Revolution: The Origins of a Modern Liberal Political Culture?

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-193
Author(s):  
James A. Leith
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
General Will ◽  
Constituent Assembly ◽  
The People ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract Recently it has been argued that the chief legacy of the French Revolution was that it provided a prototype of a modern liberal political culture. This paper argues that, while some of the features of such a political culture did appear during the revolutionary decade, the revolutionaries never discarded an ancient conception of sovereignty which insisted that political will had to be unitary and indivisible. This led to rejection of political parties, legitimate opposition, and pluralism. The debates in the Constituent Assembly already reveal these illiberal tendencies. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, with its apparent emphasis on individual rights, might seem to have counterbalanced these tendencies, but two clauses inserted at the insistence of Abbé Sieyès vested sovereignty in the nation and asserted that law must be the expression of the general will. These clauses transformed the rights of the individual into the rights of the Leviathan. The insistence on a unified will was revealed in the allegorical figures, symbols, and architectural projects of the period. The figure of the demigod Hercules, which came to represent the People, conveyed a monolithic conception of the citizenry in complete contradiction to the conception of them in a pluralistic liberal democracy. Also the fasces, the tightly bound bundle of rods with no power to move independently, suggested a conception of the body politic at odds with that of a variegated liberal society. If such unity did not exist, it was to be created by the rituals performed in Temples décadaires every tenth day, the republican Sunday. Those who would not join this vast congregation would be excised or coerced. Moreover, throughout the decade there were various theories of revolutionary government at odds with liberal ideals: the unlimited power of a constituent body, the concentration of power in a tribune or dictator, or the dictatorship of a committee. Such notions, too, were important for the future.

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