scholarly journals Δημοκρατεῖσθαι or μοναρχεῖσθαι, That is the Question: Cassius Dio and the Senatorial Principate

Author(s):  
Antonio Pistellato

Cassius Dio’s account of Caligula’s principate pivots on the divide between Caligula’s ‘democratic’ debut and his later decline into despotism. As Dio reports, the murder of the emperor in 41 CE polarised the Senate on the question of whether to abolish the Principate or to confirm it. It is likely that Dio’s interest in such a crucial passage depends on his own experience of the end of Commodus and the accession of Pertinax in 192-193 CE. The underpinning of his political thought is Stoic: when the relationship between the princeps and the Senate collapses, the solution is not so much ‘republicanism’ as a ‘republican spirit’, to be intended as a fruitful cooperation between the two.

2009 ◽  
pp. 123-134
Author(s):  
Stefania Bernini

- Family, Sexuality, Reproduction: an Unsolved Puzzle discusses the relationship between family history, gender studies and the studies of sexualities. Its starting point is the consideration that, perhaps surprisingly, disciplines and research interests apparently close have struggled to find a common language and a fruitful cooperation. Moving from a perspective of family history, this article explores causes and consequences of this apparent difficulty in finding a common ground between scholars of family, gender and sexuality and the possibility of overcoming it.Keywords: Family, Sexuality, Reproduction, Gender studies, Historiography, History.Parole chiave: Famiglia, Sessualitŕ, Riproduzione, Studi di genere, Storiografia, Storia.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147488512110496
Author(s):  
Aurelian Craiutu ◽  
Stefan Kolev

A review essay of key works and trends in the political thought of Central and Eastern Europe, before and after 1989. The topics examined include the nature of the 1989 velvet revolutions in the region, debates on civil society, democratization, the relationship between politics, economics, and culture, nationalism, legal reform, feminism, and “illiberal democracy.” The review essay concludes with an assessment of the most recent trends in the region.


2018 ◽  
Vol 91 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Nelson

Most scholarship on the ideology of the American Revolution asks the question: “What did American patriots think about politics”? But The Ideological Origins asks instead: “ How did patriots think about politics”? At issue here is the distinction between political theory and political consciousness. Once we get this distinction properly into view, we can rethink the relationship between two great, and apparently rivalrous, historiographies on early American political thought.


Author(s):  
Duncan Kelly

This chapter binds the book together, recapitulating its general argument, and offering pointers as to how the study relates to some contemporary questions of political theory. It suggests that a classification that distinguishes between Weber the ‘liberal’, Schmitt the ‘conservative’ and Neumann the ‘social democrat’, cannot provide an adequate understanding of this episode in the history of political thought. Nor indeed can it do so for other periods. In this book, one part of the development of their ideas has focused on the relationship between state and politics. By learning from their examples, people continue their own search for an acceptable balance between the freedom of the individual and the claims of the political community.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Davis

The Labour Party’s socialism changed dramatically in the 1980s. Neil Kinnock’s restructuring of Labour occurred at the same time as the international socialist movement moved away from the statist model of economics and turned, in varying degrees, to more market-orientated ideas. This chapter assesses the ways in which Labour’s political thought adapted both to New Right realities and to the fact that much of world was adopting free market economic ideas. The particular focus here is the development of Kinnock’s ideas in light of the changes in Soviet socialism after Mikhail Gorbachev introduced his reform programme. The Soviet Union had long influenced Labour’s ideology in both positive and negative ways, and this chapter shows how it continued to do so in 1980s. It examines the relationship between Kinnock’s Labour and Gorbachev’s USSR, and it shows how the changes introduced by both leaders began to lead to a convergence of ideas between Eastern and Western European versions of socialism.


Author(s):  
Paul Seaward

The lives, and political thought, of Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, and Thomas Hobbes, were closely interwoven. In many ways opposed, their views on the relationship between Church and State have often been seen as less far apart, with Clarendon sharing Hobbes’s Erastianism and concerns about clerical assertiveness in the 1660s. But Clarendon’s writings on Church-State relations during the 1670s provide little evidence of concern about clerical involvement in politics, and demonstrate his vigorous adherence to a fairly conventional view among early seventeenth-century churchmen about the proper boundaries to royal interference in the Church; his worries about attempts to push further the implications of the royal supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs are evident in his writings against Hobbes, as are his even greater anxieties, exacerbated by the conversion of his daughter, the Duchess of York, about the dangers of Roman Catholic encroachment.


1976 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Hagemann-White

AbstractThe author reports her experience of and observations on the teaching of sociology at the Free University of Berlin. She examines the teaching behavior of the instructors, the relationship between colleagues, and those between teachers and students. Certain tendencies in the practice of teaching are viewed as expressing a form of coping by projection with the failures experienced in trying to reform studies, failures that are in fact caused by the unfavorable real conditions at the university. A tendency to make university teaching more like schooling is observed; reasons for this are found in the effects of pressure towards professional competition, which prevents both fruitful cooperation between instructors and genuine communication with students. The additional difficulties experienced by women in teaching are described. In the final section conclusions are drawn in the form of practical suggestions which take account of the actual possibilities of a university with very large numbers of students.


Author(s):  
Elena Stetsko

The сhapter studies the relationship between the development of integration processes and the development of civil society in the post-Soviet space and, in particular, in the countries of the Eurasian Economic Union. It consists of five parts. The introduction presents the main trends and vectors of integration processes in the post-Soviet space. The first part considers the concept of “civil society” and its features in Western and Russian political thought. The second part highlights the features of building a civil society in the independent states of the EAEU. General points and differences in the emerging civil societies of the EAEU countries are revealed. Further, in the fourth part, the “Eurasian idea” is considered in terms of its compatibility with the peculiarities of the development of civil society in the post-Soviet space. The final part proposes a discussion topic on the possibility of political integration within the EAEU.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 352-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saladin Ambar

AbstractThis article seeks to illuminate the relationship between two of the most important figures in American political thought: the pragmatist philosopher William James, and the pioneering civil rights leader and intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois. As Harvard's first African American PhD, Du Bois was a critical figure in theorizing about race and identity. His innovative take on double consciousness has often been attributed to his contact with James who was one of Du Bois's most critical graduate professors at Harvard. But beyond the view of the two thinkers as intellectual collaborators, is the fraught history of liberal racial fraternal pairing and its role in shaping national identity. This article examines Du Bois and James's relationship in the context of that history, one marked by troubled associations between friendship and race.


2002 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 529-544 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen Whitebrook

The place of compassion in political thought and practice is debatable. This debate can be clarified by stipulating ‘compassion’ as referring to the practice of acting on the feeling of ‘pity’; in addition, compassion might best be understood politically speaking as properly exercised towards vulnerability rather than suffering. Working with these understandings, I contrast Martha Nussbaum's account of the criteria for the exercise of compassion in modern democracies with the treatment of compassion in Toni Morrison's novels in order to suggest how compassion can be viewed politically. In respect of distributive justice and public policy, in both cases compassion might modify the strict application of principles in the light of knowledge of particulars, suggesting an enlarged role for discretion in the implementation of social justice. More generally, compassion's focus on particulars and the interpersonal draws attention to the importance of imagination and judgement. The latter returns a consideration of compassion to the question of the relationship of compassion to justice. In the political context, although strict criteria for compassion are inappropriate, principles of justice might work as modifying compassion (rather than vice-versa, as might be expected).


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document