scholarly journals The Early Literary Evolution of the Notorious Pirate Henry Avery

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 6
Author(s):  
Richard Frohock

Henry Avery (alternately spelled Every) was one of the most notorious pirates of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and scholars have written much about Avery in an effort to establish the historical details of his mutiny and acts of piracy. Other scholars have focused on the substantial literary production that his life occasioned; the early literary history of Avery’s exploits evolves quickly away from the known facts of his life, offering instead a literary trajectory of accumulated tropes about Avery’s motivations, actions, and transformations. This literary invention of Avery is a compelling subject in itself, particularly as writers used his story to explore pressing philosophical and political concerns of the period. In this essay, I consider how early fictions about Avery look well beyond the history of a particular pirate to ruminate on topical ideas about the state of nature, the origins of civil society, and human tendencies toward self-interest and corruption that seem—inevitably—to accompany power and threaten civil order, however newly formed or ostensibly principled.

2019 ◽  
pp. 330-338
Author(s):  
Mark Somos

The conclusion reviews the book’s claims, methods and sources, and summarizes the book’s conclusions concerning the stages and mechanisms in the evolution of the distinct American state of nature discourse. Placing the American state of nature discourse in its broader intellectual and chronological context, and comparing the state of nature to property and liberty as a fundamental and orientational concept for the colonists, the chapter asserts that without due attention to the state of nature discourse, no history of the American Revolution and early constitutional design can be written.


2008 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boris DeWiel

The idea of civil society has undergone a renaissance in recent years, but missing from this literature is an explanation for its historical transformation in meaning. Originally civil society was synonymous with political society, but the common modem meaning emphasizes autonomy from the state. This paper traces this historical transformation within the context of the history of ideas, and suggests that the critical event was an eighteenth-century reaction against the rationalistic universalism associated with the French Enlightenment. The continued significance of the question of universalism is suggested by the fact that universalistic Marxist Leninist theories provided the ideological underpinnings for the destruction of civil society in Eastern European nations. The paper concludes that three elements are essential to the modern understanding of civil society: its autonomy from the state, its interdependence with the state, and the pluralism of values, ideals and ways of life embodied in its institutions.


Philosophy ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thom Brooks

G. W. F. Hegel is widely considered to be one of the most important philosophers in the history of philosophy. This entry focuses on his contributions to political philosophy, with particular attention paid to his seminal work: the Philosophy of Right. A particular focus will be placed on Hegel’s theories of freedom, contract and property, punishment, morality, family, civil society, law, and the state.


Author(s):  
Joshua Neoh

Abstract This paper argues that the wrong of slavery lies in the denial of the good of law to the slave. Defending this proposition will require the positing of three related claims: (i) that law is good, (ii) that the good of law is denied to the slave, and (iii) that the denial is wrong. This paper will defend the main proposition by defending its three constituent claims. On claim (i), the paper will relate the form of law to the formation of freedom. On claim (ii), the paper will relate law’s objectivity to legal subjectivity. On claim (iii), the paper will relate the state of nature to the state of civil society.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyudmila Grudtsyna ◽  
Alyeksandr CHyernyavskiy ◽  
Dmitriy Pashentsev

The monograph is devoted to the study of the role of government in shaping, support and development of Russia´s civil society institutions. by the authors E practical examples and using the theoretical and legal structures proved the leading role of the state in the formation of Russian civil society, which is based in Russia "from below", according to the classical western models, and "from above", taking into account the centuries-old traditions and the history of the Russian people and the Russian statehood. The state acts as the management system in relation to civil society as a managed system. However, civil society functions as a self-regulating social system, the determining state. The fact that civil society - self-regulating system, and at the same time controlled, there is no contradiction. The book will be of interest to lawyers, political scientists, sociologists, public servants, students, graduate students and faculty of liberal arts colleges and faculties, as well as all interested in the development of civil society in Russia and the role of the state in this process.


Author(s):  
Dale Jamieson

This chapter examines the role of the environment in the history of political theory. The philosophy of nature is an ancient subject. From the pre-Socratics to the present, philosophers have sketched diverse pictures of nature and held various views about nature's relationships to human flourishing. For Aristotle, nature and goodness were closely allied. For Thomas Hobbes, the state of nature was something to be overcome, but the laws of nature directed us how to do it. Jean-Jacques Rousseau idealized the state of nature and thought that it was required for human flourishing. The chapter first considers the doom and gloom that pervaded academic writing about the environment in the late 1960s and early 1970s before discussing themes such as democracy and environmental crisis, global environmental change, climate change, environmentalism, liberalism, and justice. A case study on managing climate change is presented, along with a Key Thinkers box featuring Anil Agarwal.


1997 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 581-605 ◽  
Author(s):  
Senzil Nawid

The political and dynastic history of Afghanistan during the 19th and the early 20th centuries is well known. So is British imperial policy toward Afghanistan. However, very little attention has been paid to the role of the clergy, the guardians of the Islamic order and the representatives of the civil society in Afghanistan. They played a major role in domestic politics and in Afghanistan's challenges with foreign powers. This paper attempts to fill the gap in information about the ulama by detailing their role in defending Afghanistan's territorial integrity and by examining the conflict over jihad between the ulama and Afghanistan's rulers, a conflict that adversely affected the legitimacy of successive regimes.


Dialogue ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 674-689
Author(s):  
Thomas Scally

Chapter fifteen of Leviathan is concerned with what Hobbes calls “the laws of nature”; however, it is evident from the start that justice is the central problem of the chapter. Hobbes demonstrates a rather subtle sensitivity to a possible misunderstanding of his views on the state of nature and the function of natural reason by inventing the character of the fool who purports to use Hobbes' own principle of self-interest to deny the existence of justice. The fool may finally be a “straw man” who proposes precisely that argument which Hobbes can quickly refute, but even if this is so, the straw man has Hobbes' face, or one like it, because the line between the views of the fool and those of Hobbes himself is very fine indeed. This section of Leviathan is more significant than it would seem at first glance because it provides an avenue by means of which one can distinguish the political philosophy of Hobbes from that of classical “individualists” such as Callicles and Thrasymachus. It is all too easy to read Hobbes as an elaborate restatement of the sophistic position of Socrates' famous opponents; the example of the fool belies this facile identity and to a certain extent constitutes a refutation of the classical power theorists.


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