Deleuze's Notion of Institution: In the Direction of a Different Distance

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 528-540
Author(s):  
Ubaldo Fadini
Keyword(s):  
David Hume ◽  
The Social ◽  
Elias Canetti

The article focuses on Deleuze's analysis of the institution, which the French philosopher carries out starting from a close confrontation with that modern anti-contractualism of which David Hume is a very significant exponent. On this basis, using also the analytical of power outlined by Elias Canetti, Deleuze attempts to provide a less obvious image of the institution. In fact, he proposes it as an indication of a need for distance, however elastic, temporary, revocable, that is, connected to those that turn out to be the transformations, the metamorphoses, of the social.

Body to Body: On the Political Anatomy of Crowds

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Borch
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Crowd Behavior ◽  
Negative Image ◽  
Body Contact ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Program ◽  
Elias Canetti ◽  
Democratic Transformation

This article challenges the negative image that, since the late 19th century, has been associated with crowds, and it does so by focusing on a number of bodily-anatomic aspects of crowd behavior. I first demonstrate that the work of one of the leading crowd psychologists, Gustave Le Bon, instigated a racist body politics. As a contrast to Le Bon's political program, I examine Walt Whitman's poetry and argue that the crowd may embody a democratic vision that emphasizes the social and political import of sexuality and body-to-body contact. Further, I dispute classical crowd theory's idea of an antagonistic relationship between crowds and individuality. Following Elias Canetti, I claim instead that the bodily compression of crowds in fact liberates individuals and creates a democratic transformation. The analysis results in a rehabilitation of crowds and briefly suggests how a reinterpretation of crowd behavior may inform current debates in social theory.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF INCLUSION: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE WORKHOUSE SYSTEM

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 453-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cosma Orsi
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
George Berkeley ◽  
Institutional Reforms ◽  
The Social ◽  
Policy Shift ◽  
The Rose

The aim of this article is to describe the rise and fall of the workhouse system in connection with the developments that took place in economic thought in the transition from mercantilism to the Classical tradition. By examining the economic debate about wages, efficiency, labor market, workers’ mobility, and unemployment, we discuss whether the social policy shift epitomized by institutional reforms like the Gilbert Act (1782), the Rose Act (1793), and the Speenhamland system (1795) was accompanied and eventually inspired by a change in the perception of major political economy issues. In doing so, we review the writings of Jacob Vanderlint (d. 1740), George Berkeley (1685–1753), Malachy Postlethwayt (1707?–1767), Josiah Tucker (1713–1799), David Hume (1711–1776), and Adam Smith (1723-1790), among others. Although a direct influence by these writers cannot be proven, the originality of the present work rests on the effort to put into perspective the arguments elaborated by economic thinkers and the proposals made by social reformers so as to identify possible connections between economic theorizing and social legislation.

Rousseau’s Return to Hobbes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Sagar
Keyword(s):  
Social Contract ◽  
Opposite Direction ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The State ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
The Social

This chapter examines the issue of sociability and the theory of the state with regard to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. More specifically, it considers Rousseau's intervention in the debate over human sociability, mainly in The Discourse on Inequality, and how it ultimately led in the opposite direction to that pointed out by David Hume: back to Thomas Hobbes. The chapter begins with a discussion of Rousseau's idea of the state of nature as well as the views of Rousseau and Hume on pity, justice, property, and deception. It then analyzes Rousseau's The Social Contract, an exercise in full-blooded Hobbesian sovereignty theory, and his attempt to start from a different place in the theory of sociability, and then offer a purposefully counter-Hobbesian theory of sovereignty. The chapter argues that Rousseau ultimately could not get past Hobbes, and ended up returning to the latter's positions.

The Testimony of Sense

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Milnes
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
Social Solidarity ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
The Social ◽  
Epistemological Debate

British intellectual culture witnessed a sharp reduction in the volume of epistemological debate between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This change coincided with a relocation of philosophical discourse from the treatise to the informal writing of the essayist. This study argues that these two phenomena are related. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea of intersubjectivity emerged as a counterdiscourse to scientific empiricism. Exemplified by Hume’s ‘easy’ philosophy, it sought to reground epistemological correspondence in social correspondence, in the circulation of trusting conversation. Contemporaneously, the rise of the essay, like the concern with trust, reveals the period’s preoccupation with the ways in which intellectual life was being shaped by economic change. The essay genre sought to effect a performative critique of instrumental reason which, while essentially nostalgic in its desire for unsystematic accomplishment, presented a pragmatic counterthrust to Enlightenment rationality. For David Hume and Samuel Johnson, the performance of virtue represents and enacts the social solidarity that either underpins norms or reflects moral truths. For later essayists, however, the fiction of familiarity was both more tenuous and more urgent. In the Romantic period, the essayist’s primary burden became one of establishing social and epistemological norms through the exercise of imaginative power. In the essays of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, the enactment of familiar conversation created an experience of singularity and enchantment that was linked to idealized and nostalgic forms of sociability. Thus, while the eighteenth-century essay consolidated ‘truth’, the Romantic essay produced it.

scholarly journals Classification and Symbols of Masses in the Conception of Elias Canetti

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-40
Author(s):  
Nikolay Angelov Tsenkov
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Functional Characteristics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Elias Canetti ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
The Masses

The article focuses on the types of masses and their symbols according to Elias Canetti, which he presents in his large-scale work Masses and Power. The main forms of the masses are classified, according to their functional characteristics. Various natural phenomena and clusters are natural combinations of symbolic significance, carried away from ancient times to the present day through myths, traditions, dreams, speech. Analogies are examined between the natural symbols of masses, which are absorbed and carried by man as attributes of the masses in the social reality.

Law against Justice and Solidarity

2019 ◽  
pp. 54-102
Author(s):  
Michel Rosenfeld
Keyword(s):  
David Hume ◽  
Social Bonds ◽  
The Social ◽  
Law And Justice ◽  
Normative Order ◽  
Artificial Virtue

Law and justice are in crucial ways against nature as well as against solidarity. As David Hume proclaimed, justice is an “artificial virtue” in contrast to the social bonds of family and community, which are affectively grounded in solidarity and manifestations of mutual sympathy. Law as a self-standing normative order propelled by its own inner logic remains too abstract to command heartfelt internalization or commitment. Moreover, law often stands against justice, as some laws are unjust and full justice ever elusive. Accordingly, difficult questions arise for jurisprudence. Derrida and Agamben confront these difficulties in the context of the nexus between the singular, the universal, and the plural. For Derrida, law cannot achieve justice, as there is tragically no way to reconcile the universal and the singular. For Agamben, in contrast, the gaps become masked by a ceremonial spectacle of religiously inspired harmony and acclamation by those subject to law and an unbridgeable gap between law and administration. This chapter situates and compares Derrida’s deconstruction of law with Agamben’s reconstruction, focusing on whether they complement one another and on whether they point to solutions that may open a way beyond despair or artifice.

Hume's Sceptical Enlightenment

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryu Susato
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Contract Theory ◽  
Social Contract Theory ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Positive Assessment

David Hume (1711–1776) remains one of the most equivocal thinkers in eighteenth-century Europe. Some emphasise his conservatism because of his criticism of rationalism in morals and of the social contract theory in politics, while others deem him one of the most important liberal thinkers. He can also be characterised as a forerunner of utilitarianism or even postmodernism. How can these images be integrated? To address this issue, Hume’s Sceptical Enlightenment demonstrates the uniqueness and complexity of Hume as an Enlightenment thinker through an investigation of the ‘historical’ Hume. Based on a sceptical adaptation of Epicureanism, he delineates the variable and vulnerable nature of the workings of our imagination and opinions, and emphasises the essential instability of civilisation. In addition, he retains a positive assessment of such modern values as liberty, politeness and refinement, and carries the banner for secularisation. His ‘spirit of scepticism’, which permeates even his non-epistemological writings, enables these seemingly paradoxical positions. This book is not only for Hume specialists, but is also a contribution to the flourishing fields of the Enlightenment study. This intellectual history connects Hume’s early eighteenth-century Continental and British predecessors not only to Hume, but also to British philosophers writing up until the nineteenth century.

The New Darwinian Naturalism in Political Theory

1995 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 389-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Arnhart
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
Nature Versus Nurture ◽  
The Social

There has been a resurgence of Darwinian naturalism in political theory, as manifested in the recent work of political scientists such as Roger Masters, Robert McShea, and James Q. Wilson. They belong to an intellectual tradition that includes not only Charles Darwin but also Aristotle and David Hume. Although most political scientists believe Darwinian social theory has been refuted, their objections rest on three false dichotomies: facts versus values, nature versus freedom, and nature versus nurture. Rejecting these dichotomies would allow the social sciences to be linked to the natural sciences through Darwinian biology.

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