Philosophy and Anthropology: With Lefort and Descombes

2019 ◽  
pp. 148-168
Author(s):  
Marcel Hénaff
Keyword(s):  
General Question ◽  
The Political ◽  
Individual Subject ◽  
Specific Level ◽  
Claude Lefort ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Traditional Societies ◽  
Gift Exchanges ◽  
Political Realm

This chapter discusses the need to problematize more precisely the possible relationships between philosophy and social anthropology from the perspective of gift exchanges. In France, few philosophers have attempted this effort. Two of them seem especially interesting for this discussion because of their original relationship to Mauss's The Gift: Claude Lefort and Vincent Descombes. Their perspectives are very different. Lefort supports his reflection on the political realm and history based on the social sciences, whereas Descombes questions the validity of the concepts of those sciences, beginning with the concepts of society and social relationship. The question of the social bond is at the core of Lefort's and Descombes's inquiries. It is not enough to ask what unites a group, preserves its unity, and makes it view itself as forming a unique whole. Lefort examines whether seeking this bond entirely absorbs the energy of the members of the group and determines their choices and actions, while Descombes attempts to answer a more general question: How can an individual subject relate to another and view this relationship as being as evident and fundamental as their own existence? It is based on these kinds of questions that the exchange practices of traditional societies are chosen as providing the very model of the strong bond and the specific level that those authors seek to define.

Thumos in Aristotle’s Politics VII.7

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-76
Author(s):  
Marguerite Deslauriers
Keyword(s):  
Physical Phenomenon ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Roles ◽  
Political Value ◽  
Political Realm

Abstract Aristotle claims that the citizens of the best city should be both intelligent and spirited at Politics VII.7 1327b19-38. While he treats intelligence as an unqualified good, thumos (‘spirit’) is valuable but problematic. This paper has two aims: (i) to consider the political value of spirit in Aristotle’s Politics and in particular to identify the ways in which it is both essential to political excellence and yet insufficient for securing it, and (ii) to use this analysis of the role of spirit in the political realm to explain Aristotle’s exclusion of women from political authority, even in the context of the household. I analyze spirit as a physical phenomenon and as a type of desire, before considering its moral and affective aspects. I then return to the role of spirit in political life and examine its importance for the activity of ruling. In the last section I consider the implications of this analysis of spirit for the social and political roles Aristotle assigns to men and women.

Claude Lefort as interpreter of Machiavellian social conflict

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 684-694
Author(s):  
Luana M Alagna
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Conflict ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Political Freedom ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Society ◽  
Claude Lefort ◽  
The Social

Claude Lefort, French philosopher and activist, exponent of the anti-totalitarian moment in France, has developed an original theoretical proposal on democracy and totalitarianism. When he distanced himself from the creed of the proletarian revolution as an instrument of understanding of human action, he focused on the understanding of the political as a space in which the social emerges, in which it takes shape. The idea that society acquired a unity through the revolutionary project was overturned by the knowledge that the social cannot be contained; it cannot be the object of appropriation and unification through action or knowledge without threatening freedom and the existence of society itself. Democratic political society can only be heterogeneous, in which the conflict cannot be resolved precisely because the various interests in society are irreducible and asymmetrical. Machiavelli, in the Lefortian thinking, had identified the sense of the political at the beginning of his institution, in which the division and disagreement between classes are the foundation of social relations. This view is opposed to the classical conception of dissent as a moment of collision between passions and reason, where the disorder compromises the political structure. Social conflict indeed is an irreducible resource for the existence of human relations, public space and political society. In the clash between two realisms, Lefort shelved the Marxist one to deepen the turmoil of the ‘divine Machiavelli’, replacing in his theoretical vision the Machiavellian idea of the political as a social dimension to the Marxist dominance of the production forces; the political is the way in which society represents its legitimacy and presupposes conflict as inescapable, a way to guarantee political freedom. Plurality and irrepressible diversity will be instruments for guaranteeing democracy.

scholarly journals Revisiting nuclear policies under Modi regime: Leadership analysis and repercussions for Pakistan

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 248
Author(s):  
Muhammad Umer Hayat ◽  
Aleena Zaid
Keyword(s):  
Major Part ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Descriptive Study ◽  
The Political ◽  
Leadership Analysis ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
The Social ◽  
Bharatiya Janata Party ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Political Realm

Modi’s leadership and governance pattern is a matter of consideration as concerned directly with styles of functioning of his adopted policies, which reflects his undertakings both in the social and political realm. This paper seeks to offer an alternative perspective in the domain of the rising threat of Hinduism, while the consolidation of the political power in India has been raising serious implications for Pakistan, in particular. It highlights the impact of all such harsh realist nuclear policies that may cause more complexities and further deteriorate the region's stability. This study deployed descriptive, analytical, and explanatory research techniques but to great extent, a major part consists of the descriptive study, which will be used when it comes to genesis and existing various scenarios. Findings also substantiate India’s intentions and the propaganda waged and all steps keenly targeting Pakistan. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) seems to be adopting new realist approaches deeply rooted with that of Kautilya’s. Therefore, the paper concludes that the rise of Hindu nationalists gets the support of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-based concept demanding soft measures to lessen the worrisome environment causing by the Modi regime.

scholarly journals “Through no fault of their own”: Josephine Dauphinee and the “Subnormal” Pupils of the Vancouver School System, 1911-1941

2006 ◽  
pp. 51-73
Author(s):  
Gerald Thomson
Keyword(s):  
School System ◽  
Special Class ◽  
Mental Hygiene ◽  
The Political ◽  
Teaching Career ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Motivation ◽  
Teaching Life ◽  
Social Logic ◽  
Political Realm

This article concerns the career of an early British Columbia teacher, Miss Josephine Dauphinee. She was the first teacher in the province to teach children labelled as feeble-minded in segregated special classes within the Vancouver school system. Dauphinee’s teaching career would be remarkable for that fact alone but the social and political motivation behind her special-class work was her life-long belief in eugenics. She saw herself as a progressive activist; by promoting the segregation of feeble-minded schoolchildren, she sought to advance the social logic of eugenics into the political realm. With the aid of local women’s groups, Dauphinee lobbied successfully for a sexual sterilization law and up until the last days of her teaching life followed an outmoded form of mental hygiene based on eugenic hereditarianism

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 485-488
Keyword(s):  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
The Political ◽  
Charles Kingsley ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Social Reforms ◽  
Women Journalists ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Press ◽  
Political Realm

IN 1869, CHARLES KINGSLEY wrote a review of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women for Macmillan’s Magazine, praising its message about women’s fitness for participation in the political realm. He notes, ‘What women have done for the social reforms of the last forty years is known, or ought to be known, to all…. Who will say that Mrs Fry, or Miss Nightingale, or Miss Burdett Coutts, is not as fit to demand pledges of a candidate and the hustings on important social questions as any male elector?’ (Oct 1869: 558). In this way, he provided support for Mill’s argument in favour of women’s enfranchisement while at the same drawing attention to their ongoing influence in discussions of social and political questions – as recounted in and facilitated by the periodical press. Indeed, by 1869 women had been contributing to political discourse for many years, due largely to the convention of anonymity in most periodicals and newspapers. Hidden behind the ‘editorial we,’ women journalists did not have to write from gendered subject positions. The rapid expansion of the press during the same period, facilitated by advances in printing technology and reductions in the taxes on print, provided women with increased opportunities to enter the profession and contribute to political debates....

CULTURAL CAPITAL AND THE SCENE OF RIOTING: MALE WORKING-CLASS AUTHORSHIP IN ALTON LOCKE

2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Menke
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Social ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
Intellectual Labor ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Realm ◽  
Title Character ◽  
Do So

IN ITS VERY TITLE, Charles Kingsley’s 1850 novel Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography hints at a set of questions that the novel itself never manages to answer in a very clear or convincing way: what is the relationship between manual and intellectual labor, between industrial and poetic production, between making a coat and writing a poem? How might the early Victorian imagination conceive of a working tailor who is also a working poet — especially in light of the various actual working-class poets who appeared on the literary scene in the first half of the nineteenth-century, complete with occupational epithets, such as Thomas Cooper, the “shoe-maker poet” (a figure who in many ways provided a model for Kingsley’s fictional protagonist)? And what if, like a fair number of urban artisans, including Cooper himself, the tailor-poet is also a Chartist — as Alton Locke indeed turns out to be? What is the relationship between the Chartist call for reform and for representation of disenfranchised men in the political realm, and the attempts of a fictional working-class man (since the novel’s treatment of gender, as I will argue, is crucial to its treatment of politics and culture) to enter the early Victorian field of literary production? Or why, in the first place, should a novel that treats the “social problem” of class in the hungry forties and the appalling working conditions of the clothes trade do so by way of the literary aspirations of its title character, that is, through a fictional construction of working-class authorship?

scholarly journals Iris Murdoch, Kesempurnaan, dan Moralitas

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 182
Author(s):  
Muhammad Fuad
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Iris Murdoch ◽  
Inner Experience ◽  
Moral Choice ◽  
Moral Concept ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Context ◽  
Political Realm ◽  
The Ideal

<p>The paper brings Iris Murdoch�s article, �The Idea of Perfection,� of which three frames of ideas, Plato�ethics, inner experience, and moral concept were discussed. The goal of �the idea of perfection� is�reaching Perfection by cultivating the inner experience� which the social behaviorists challenged the<br />notion of �inner experience� as the core role. It is not tangible, therefore it is meaningless. Besides�inner experience, Murdoch�s premise lies in morality, which is �a magnetic but inexhaustible reality.��Although no one can reach Perfection, it remains a measure of which human would direct their�lives and how far it will be for one can get close to it. Murdoch proposes �love� for it is capable for��progressive attempt to see a particular object clearly.� The ways of love are understood in the moral�context, therefore, the choice of which is arbitrary in a sense that they remain as effort to be just and�impartial. Moreover, in the political realm, the effort is challenged at its hardest, but again, the inner�experience, moral choice, and compassion are a possibility. The idea of perfection is practiced in order�that the concept becomes a standard of operation in one�s life. Thus, the cultivation of the ideal of�perfection is a continuing inner exercise.</p>

scholarly journals The gift of repentance: a Maussian perspective on twenty years of pentimento in Italy

2001 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID MOSS
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift

The influence of Marcel Mauss' study The Gift has largely been confined to the study of the circulation of goods and the social relations in which their transfer is embedded. One of Mauss' principal aims, however, was to show the political importance of gift-giving in averting the recourse to violence. In this paper, his approach to the offering, receiving and reciprocating of gifts is used to analyse the phenomenon of pentimento – the exchange of confessions for reduced sentences by terrorists and mafiosi which has become a central feature of the effort to combat organised violence in Italy since 1980.

The Social Physics of Festuge: Odin Teatret at Home

2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Watson
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Regional Organizations ◽  
Rutgers University ◽  
Social Physics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Traditional Societies ◽  
The City ◽  
Considerable Body ◽  
Odin Teatret

The Holstebro Festuge (festival week), which marked its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2014, is a huge undertaking organized by Odin Teatret every three years that involves the participation of many local people and a significant number of town and regional organizations as well as numerous international artists in a cultural extravaganza of performances, screenings, art exhibits, and barters that takes place over nine days in the city and surrounding region. In this article, Ian Watson examines the implications of the Festuge for Odin’s connection to and relationship with the city it has called home for a little under fifty years. As Watson points out, the tacitly accepted narrative, embedded in much of Eugenio Barba’s considerable body of writings, Odin’s performances and workshops as well as much of the material written about Barba and/or his company by scholars, is that the pursuit of an aesthetic is Barba’s primary if not sole preoccupation. Watson challenges this limited reading as he draws upon the sociologist Marcel Mauss’s study of ‘gifting’ in particular traditional societies, and the political scientist Robert Putnam’s parsing of social capital in Bowling Alone to examine the Festuge. Ian Watson is Professor of Theatre and Chair of the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers University-Newark. Among other publications, he is author of Towards a Third Theatre and Negotiating Culture: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate.

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