scholarly journals Saving Nation, Faith and Family. Yoram Hazony’s National Conservativism and Its Theo-Political Mission

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 1091
Author(s):  
Michaela Quast-Neulinger
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Specific Kind ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Religiously Based ◽  
The Way

Particularly pushed by the Edmund Burke Foundation and its president Yoram Hazony, the political movement of National Conservativism is largely based on specific concepts of nation, faith and family. Driven by the mission to overcome the violence of liberalism, identified with imperialism, national conservatives shape potent international and interreligious alliances for a religiously based system of independent national states. The article gives an outline of the main programmatic pillars of National Conservativism at the example of Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism, one of the current ideological key works of the movement. It will show how its political framework is based on a binary frame of liberalism (identified with imperialism) versus nationalism, the latter supported as the way forward towards protecting freedom, faith and family. The analytic part will focus on the use of religious motifs and the construction of a specific kind of Judaeo-Christianism as a means of exclusivist theo-political nationalism. It will be shown that Hazony’s nationalism is no way to overcome violence, but a political theory close to theo-political authoritarianism, based on abridged readings of Scripture, history and philosophy. It severely endangers the foundations of democracies, especially with regard to minority and women’s rights, and delegitimizes liberal democracy and religious traditions positively contributing to it.

The Scholastic and Conciliar Roots of Samuel Rutherford’s Political Philosophy

2020 ◽  
pp. 208-226
Author(s):  
Simon J. G. Burton
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Way

Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex remains a source of perennial fascination for historians of political thought. Written in 1644 in the heat of the Civil Wars it constitutes an intellectual and theological justification of the entire Covenanting movement and a landmark in the development of Protestant political theory. Rutherford’s argument in the Lex Rex was deeply indebted to scholastic and Conciliarist sources, and this chapter examines the way he deployed these, especially the political philosophy of John Mair and Jacques Almain, in order to construct a covenantal model of kingship undergirded by an interwoven framework of individual and communal rights. In doing so it shows the ongoing influence of the Conciliarist tradition on Scottish political discourse and also highlights unexpected connections between Rutherford’s Covenanting and his Augustinian and Scotistic theology of grace and freedom.

Liberty in a Culturally Plural Society

1983 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 91-107
Author(s):  
L. S. Lustgarten
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Legal Doctrine ◽  
Legal Scholar ◽  
Plural Society ◽  
Legal Thinking ◽  
The Way

I want to begin this paper by recalling a once-lively school of English political and legal thinking which has fallen undeservedly into neglect. I refer to the pluralists, notably the lawyer F. W. Maitland, the religious scholar J. N. Figgis, and, early in their careers, the political theorists Harold Laski and G. D. H. Cole. All were influenced by the writings of the German legal scholar Otto von Gierke, which Maitland as editor and translator had first introduced into England. The pluralists' concerns were at once political and legal; virtually alone among English writers in this century until the 1970s, their work avoided the barrenness that comes of treating political theory and jurisprudence as unrelated enterprises. I shall describe the problems that preoccupied them and some of their resultant theories, and also the way in which specifically legal doctrine was both a target of their criticism and an important element in their thinking.

scholarly journals Who’s the realest?

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-290
Author(s):  
Derek Edyvane
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Realism ◽  
Original Essays ◽  
The Way

The revival of interest in realism in political theory is comprehensively explored in Politics Recovered, a major new volume of 14 original essays edited by Matt Sleat. Wide-ranging and engaging throughout, the book takes in both supporters and critics of the realist turn and addresses neglected questions of the political application of realism and of the connection between contemporary political realism and the classical IR tradition of realist thought. But I argue that the book also prompts some troubling questions about the ultimate coherence of the realist orientation and about the way in which realists interpret the limits of political theory and of political theorists.

MacIntyre, Thomism and the Contemporary Common Good

2008 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Osborne
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Common Good ◽  
The Political ◽  
Jacques Maritain ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Common Goals ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

AbstractAlasdair MacIntyre’s criticism of contemporary politics rests in large part on the way in which the political communities of advanced modernity do not recognize common goals and practices. I shall argue that although MacIntyre explicitly recognizes the influence of Jacques Maritain on his own thought, MacIntyre’s own views are incompatible not only with Maritain’s attempt to develop a Thomistic theory which is compatible with liberal democracy, but also relies on a view of the individual as a part which is related to the whole in a way that is incompatible with Maritain’s understanding of the spiritual individual or person.

A Feminist Still

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. iv-29
Author(s):  
Lakshmi Padmanabhan
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
The Political ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
New Delhi ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Community Organizer ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
Feminist Historiography ◽  
The Way

What can photographic form teach us about feminist historiography? Through close readings of photographs by visual artist and documentary photographer Sheba Chhachhi, who documented the struggle for women’s rights in India from the 1980s onward, this article outlines the political stakes of documentary photography’s formal conventions. First, it analyzes candid snapshots of recent protests for women’s rights in India, focusing on an iconic photograph by Chhachhi of Satyarani Chadha, a community organizer and women’s rights activist, at a rally in New Delhi in 1980. It attends to the way in which such photographs turn personal scenes of mourning into collective memorials to militancy, even as they embalm their subjects in a state of temporal paralysis and strip them of their individual history. It contrasts these snapshots to Chhachhi’s collaborative portrait of Chadha from 1990, a “feminist still” that deploys formal conventions of stillness to stage temporal encounters between potential histories and unrealized futures. Throughout, the article returns to the untimeliness of Chhachhi’s photography, both in the multiple temporalities opened up within the image and in its avant-garde critique of feminist politics through experiments with photographic form.

Carl Schmitt’s Political Theory of Dictatorship

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.

Eric Voegelin's Contribution to Contemporary Political Theory

1964 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-402
Author(s):  
Dante Germino
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
General Position ◽  
The Political ◽  
Major Objective ◽  
Eric Voegelin ◽  
Political Philosopher ◽  
The Way

Some fifty years ago, Douglas Ainslie wrote of Benedetto Croce: “I can lay no claim to having discovered an America, but I do claim to have discovered a Columbus.” Eric Voegelin, today at the height of his career as a political philosopher, scarcely needs to be discovered; he is regarded as a Columbus in the realms of the spirit by many concerned with the the oretical analysis of politics. But in the political science profession he has been more often ignored or systematically misunderstood than read for what he has to teach. Among those according an indifferent or hostile reception to Voegelin are many who, bewailing the recent “decline” of political theory, might have been expected to welcome the appearance of a thinker meticulously pointing the way to the recovery of political theory as a tradition of inquiry. The basic reasons for this curious reception will be alluded to in the course of this essay. The major objective, however, is to isolate the key elements in Voegelin's political theory and to give some indication of his general position in contemporary political science. Hopefully, the result will be to further the understanding of his work and the appreciation of his achievement.

scholarly journals Democracy: Between the essentially contested concept and the agonistic practice: Connolly, Mouffe, Tully

2010 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-87
Author(s):  
Michal Sladecek
Keyword(s):  
Social Integration ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Radical Pluralism ◽  
William Connolly ◽  
The Status ◽  
Specific Interpretation ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Essentially Contested Concept

The text considers points of view of theoreticians of the radical pluralism (democracy): Connolly (William Connolly), Mouffe (Chantal Mouffe) and Tully (James Tully) with regard to the status and the nature of concepts in the political discourse, as well as the consequences of these conceptual presumptions to understanding democracy. The three authors emphasize the essential contestability of political concepts, the paradox of liberal democracy and the need to revise standard rational consensus theories of democracy. Also, the three authors take over the specific interpretation of Vittgenstein to the direction of political theory the centre of which consists of everyday contingent practices of politics as well as dissent about their assessment. The text analyzes the extent to which this reading is compatible to Wittgenstein's position. The author defends the opinion that the essential contestability does not imply agonism and denial of the significance of rules and tries to indicate to the points of illegitimate transition from antiessentialism to unconsensus rules. Also, the text underlines the flaws of dissent conception of democracy and social integration.

Liberty in a Culturally Plural Society

1983 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 91-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. S. Lustgarten
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Legal Doctrine ◽  
Legal Scholar ◽  
Plural Society ◽  
Legal Thinking ◽  
The Way

I want to begin this paper by recalling a once-lively school of English political and legal thinking which has fallen undeservedly into neglect. I refer to the pluralists, notably the lawyer F. W. Maitland, the religious scholar J. N. Figgis, and, early in their careers, the political theorists Harold Laski and G. D. H. Cole. All were influenced by the writings of the German legal scholar Otto von Gierke, which Maitland as editor and translator had first introduced into England. The pluralists' concerns were at once political and legal; virtually alone among English writers in this century until the 1970s, their work avoided the barrenness that comes of treating political theory and jurisprudence as unrelated enterprises. I shall describe the problems that preoccupied them and some of their resultant theories, and also the way in which specifically legal doctrine was both a target of their criticism and an important element in their thinking.

THE INFLUENCE OF POPULISM ON DEMOCRACY IN THE CONTEXT OF CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL THEORY

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 46-52
Author(s):  
Mirilias Azad ogly Agaev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Representative Democracy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Institutions ◽  
Silent Majority ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The Impact

The article is devoted to the impact of populism on democracy. To investigate the impact of populism on democracy, the author explores key approaches to the populism notion: political, socio-cultural and ideological. The article notes that populism studies lack a single definition and emphasizes there are negative, positive and neutral evaluations of the nature of this phenomenon. These conclusions are used for further assumptions about the impact on liberal democratic institutions. After analyzing the works on the populism of such scholars as B. Arditi, H.-G. Betz, M. Canovan, E. Laclau, K. Mudde, S. Mouffe, K. Rovira Kaltwasser, N. Urbinati, and others, the article draws conclusions about the multidimensionality of influence on liberal democracy and, in particular, about the fallacy of solely negative assessments of this impact. The author underlines the presence of both positive aspects (providing the interests of the “silent majority”, mobilizing excluded groups and integrating them into the political sphere), and negative aspects (rejection of representative democracy and parliamentarism) of populism.

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