scholarly journals Il «sistema dell’egoismo universale» e la condizione presente dell’Italia

Author(s):  
Gaspare Polizzi

I intend to deal with the political thought of Giacomo Leopardi, especially in the Zibaldone, according to his conceptions on the contrast between reason and nature and on the contrast between ancient and modern, focusing attention on his analysis of the morale of the Italians, in order to identify their original line of interpretation in the analysis of the relationship between individuals and nations in the modern age, and in Italy in particular. The analysis of his political reflection cannot be separated from that of his moral and anthropological vision on the human condition. I dwell on three moments of his moral, social and anthropological vision of the nation, with a focus on the theme of individualism and the system of universal selfishness typical of Modernity.

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-155
Author(s):  
Elva Orozco Mendoza ◽  

This article offers an interpretation of anti-feminicide maternal activism as political in northern Mexico by analyzing it alongside Hannah Arendt’s concepts of freedom, natality, and the child in The Human Condition. While feminist theorists often debate whether maternalism strengthens or undermines women’s political participation, the author offers an unconventional interpretation of Arendt’s categories to illustrate that the meaning and practice of maternalism radically changes through the public performance of motherhood. While Arendt does not seem the best candidate to navigate this debate, her concepts of freedom and the child provide a productive perspective to rethink the relationship between maternalism and citizenship. In making this claim, this article challenges feminist political theories that depict motherhood as the chief source of women’s subordination. In the case of northern Mexico, anti-feminicide maternal activism illustrates how the political is also a personal endeavor, thereby complementing the famous feminist motto.


2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-102
Author(s):  
Gábor Kovács

Modernity, in philosophical and sociological literature, has “traditionally” been presented as the age when artifacts supplant nature and destroy the originally given natural environment. The process of modernization, from this point of view, is the process of de-naturalization. This widely shared conviction has basically been questioned by Hannah Arendt. During the centuries of modern age, in the detriment of the commonly created and uphold human world, process of re-naturalization has been taking place, Arendt argues. This means, from other aspect, that modernity is the age of world-alienation. It is one of the results of modern science that human beings lose their confidence in the reliability of their senses. The Arendtian critique of modernity, which has deeply been influenced by Martin Heidegger's philosophy, takes a difference between the notions of Earth and world. In Arendt's theory technology enhances the processes of re-naturalization. The problem of the relation of natural and artificial, in The Human Condition (1958), has been inserted in two narratives; one of them is the narrative of cultural criticism and another is that of political philosophy. These narratives have been embedded in different contexts borrowing ambivalences and inconsistencies to Arendt's argumentation. Santrauka Filosofinėje ir sociologinėje literatūroje modernybė „tradiciškai“ buvo pristatoma kaip epocha, kai artefaktai išstumia gamtą ir griauna pirminę natūralią aplinką. Šiuo požiūriu modernizacijos procesas – tai denatūralizacijos procesas. Šį plačiai paplitusį įsitikinimą iš esmės ginčijo Hanna Arendt. Pasak jos, moderniosios epochos šimtmečiais bendrai kurto ir puoselėto žmogaus pasaulio nenaudai vyko renatūralizacijos procesas. Kita vertus, tai reiškia, kad modernybė – tai pasaulio atskirties epocha. Viena iš moderniojo mokslo pasekmių yra ta, kad žmonės praranda pasitikėjimą juslėmis. Arendt modernybės kritika, giliai paveikta Martino Heideggerio filosofijos, atskiria Žemės ir pasaulio sąvokas. Arendt teorijoje technologija sustiprina renatūralizacijos procesus. Natūros ir artefakto santykio problema Žmogaus būklėje (1958) buvo įterpta į du naratyvus; vienas jų – tai kultūrinės kritikos naratyvas, o kitas – politinės filosofijos naratyvas. Šie naratyvai įsitvirtino skirtinguose kontekstuose, Arendt argumentacijai suteikdami dviprasmiškumų ir neatitikimų.


2009 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Villa

AbstractThis essay provides an overview of the life and theoretical concerns of Hannah Arendt. It traces the way her experience as a German Jew in the 1930s informed her analysis of totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism and her idea of the “banality of evil” in Eichmann in Jerusalem. The essay takes issue with those of Arendt's critics who detect a lack of “love of the Jewish people” in her writing. It also traces the way Arendt's encounter with totalitarian evil led to a deeper questioning of the anti-democratic impulses in the Western tradition of political thought—a questioning that finds its fullest articulation in The Human Condition and On Revolution. Throughout, my concern is to highlight Arendt's contribution to thinking “the political” in a way friendly to the basic phenomenon of human plurality. I also highlight her recovery and extension of the main themes of the civic republican tradition.


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.


Author(s):  
Roland Végső

The chapter examines Hannah Arendt’s critique of martin Heidegger and concentrates on the way Arendt tries to subvert the Heideggerian paradigm of worldlessness. While for Heidegger, the ontological paradigm of worldlessness was the lifeless stone, in Arendt’s book biological life itself emerges as the worldless condition of the political world of publicity. The theoretical challenge bequeathed to us by Arendt is to draw the consequences of the simple fact that life is worldless. The worldlessness of life, therefore, becomes a genuine condition of impossibility for politics: it makes politics possible, but at the same time it threatens the very existence of politics. The chapter traces the development of this argument in three of Arendt’s major works: The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and The Life of the Mind.


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):  
Joshua Hordern

This chapter situates the enquiry by considering the transitions which healthcare practice is undergoing because of turns in healthcare thinking towards philosophy, person-centredness, and social theory. Such changes accentuate a problem inherent in other trends in modern healthcare which have tended to reduce the scope for exploring the human condition and morally worthy ways of living life within it. The historic response of Christian ethicists to such transitions and trends is reviewed as a kind of cautionary tale which, by distinguishing different theological approaches, discloses the contested nature of an enquiry such as this. Options for the proper mode of the enquiry are thereby considered, with an argument made for a version of ‘faithful secularity’ being predominant, drawing on Nigel Biggar and Luke Bretherton, while incorporating other insights. The structure of the book is then outlined, the political context is introduced, some distinctions are highlighted, and a guide to reading is offered.


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).


Author(s):  
Craig Berry ◽  
Michael Kenny

The question of how intellectuals ought to relate to the ideological traditions of the political cultures of modern societies has been a recurrent theme of European social and political thought over the last two centuries. This chapter explores earlier traditions of European thinking, associated with the work of Karl Mannheim, Julien Benda, and Antonio Gramsci, which established the major lines of debate about the relationship of intellectuals to a sense of nationhood and the political traditions of the polities they inhabited. These ideas form the backdrop to the analysis of the drift towards post-national thinking among important groups of intellectual practitioners in the UK towards the end of the twentieth century. Cosmopolitan thinking, the article suggests, has tended to obscure the ideological character of the main lines of political thinking associated with globalization, and ensured that progressive intellectuals tended to abandon the ‘national-popular’ to their counterparts on the political right, with fateful consequences.


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