Ethics against Politics

2020 ◽  
pp. 53-59
Author(s):  
Erin Graff Zivin
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Literature Culture ◽  
Ethics And Politics

The second part of the book is a critical engagement with the so-called ethical “turn” in critical studies of literature, culture and philosophy. “The Ethical Turn” takes the reader through the tense articulation of ethics and politics in current criticism and political philosophy in Latin America. The first section, titled “Ethics against Politics,” shows how the notion of an ethical “turn” tends to place ethics and politics in a relation of antagonism or substitution (ethics or politics, but not both), which limits the possibilities of both ethical and political thinking. What if the two terms were to be thought instead as operating against each other? Here “against” would indicate both antagonism (ethics versus politics) and correlation, even support: ethics against the backdrop of politics and vice-versa, an arrangement in which ethics and politics would be mutually interdependent.

Stuart Hall, a peerless mediator

Soundings ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 79 (79) ◽  
pp. 51-77
Author(s):  
Gregor McLennan ◽  
Bruce Robbins ◽  
Angela McRobbie ◽  
Brett St Louis ◽  
Catherine Hall
Keyword(s):  
Practical Observation ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Politics Of Difference ◽  
The People ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
Stuart Hall ◽  
Organic Intellectual ◽  
The Many ◽  
Great Danger

The authors discuss Stuart Hall's lifelong critical engagement with Marxism - though his was a complex, subtle, agonistic, Marxism, where nothing is taken for granted. This engagement continued even as postcoloniality, ethnicity, race and identity steadily came to the centre of Hall's attention, constituting ways of thinking that in some ways represented a departure. Hall can be seen as a mediator, both within Marxism - for example structuralism versus culturalism - and between Marxism and other discourses, finding areas in common as well as difference, respecting aspects of a position without endorsing whole positions; and in so doing transforming the problem under consideration. He is also discussed as an organic intellectual, who - though with no assumption of a shared class or shared party - sought to create a collective self-consciousness, a coalition, that could offer an effective challenge to the state. The concept of conjuncture is an important part of these ideas. These aspects of Hall's work are discussed further in relation to racialisation and racism, where Hall is seen as committed to both analytic and practical observation, and to humanism as well as Marxism: the people at the centre of the analysis are agents not categories. Hall was not aiming to bring things to a rounded, validity-seeking coherence, but to always leave some strands open: his thinking is constitutively open. At the same time his underlying, very simple, message is that, in some way or another, the many issues we face are all connected, and we should never give up the integrative pluralism of political thinking. The great danger is fragmented pluralism, where the politics of difference, wherever the differences are, leads to political de-alignment rather than coalitional unity.

RACISM, MORALISM, AND SOCIAL CRITICISM1

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tommie Shelby
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Philosophical Study ◽  
Psychological Phenomena ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Normative Evaluation ◽  
Social Arrangements ◽  
Empirical Analyses

AbstractThrough a critical engagement with Lawrence Blum’s theory of racism, I defend a “social criticism” model for the philosophical study of racism. This model relies on empirical analyses of social and psychological phenomena but goes beyond this to include the assessment of the warrant of widely held beliefs and the normative evaluation of attitudes, actions, institutions, and social arrangements. I argue that we should give political philosophy theoretical primacy over moral philosophy in normative analyses of racism. I also show how conceptualizing racism as an ideology gives us a unified account of racism and helps us to see what is truly troubling about racism, both in the past and today.

Contemporary Left-wing Populism in Latin America: Leadership, Horizontalism, and Postdemocracy in Chávez's Venezuela

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 51-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yannis Stavrakakis ◽  
Alexandros Kioupkiolis ◽  
Giorgos Katsambekis ◽  
Nikos Nikisianis ◽  
Thomas Siomos
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Discursive Analysis ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Liberal Rights ◽  
A Site

AbstractCritical engagement with the case ofChavismoin Venezuela can offer valuable insights for a fuller understanding of contemporary populism in Latin America. While for some scholars Chávez's populism has fostered popular empowerment, others dwell on the newly confirmed tensions between populism, liberal rights, and democratic proceduralism. This article embraces both positions but moves beyond their one-sidedness to castChavistapopulism as an inherently contradictory phenomenon that has constituted an ambivalent and transitory process in response to the gradual closure of liberal (post)democracy.Chavista“caesaro-plebeian” populism is construed as a site of tension and contention, which entails both promises and dangers for democracy. To make these points, the article draws on the discursive analysis of populism and on a new, productive shift in the study of populism in Venezuela, which pursues ethnographic field research on social movements instead of focusing exclusively on the figure of the leader.

Jefferson’s Platonic Republicanism

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 369-386
Author(s):  
M. Andrew Holowchak
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
The Political ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Strong Disagreement ◽  
Political Principles

That Jefferson execrated Plato in an 1814 letter to friend John Adams. In it, he expresses an unsympathetic, hostile view of Plato’s Republic, and the reasons are several. Nonetheless, Plato’s views on what makes government fundamentally sound are, at base, remarkably similar to Jefferson’s both in substance and sentiment, so much so that it is inconceivable to think that Plato’s Republic had little effect on Jefferson’s political thinking. That makes his execration of Plato difficult to understand. This paper is an attempt to show that Jefferson, despite the tenor of his letter to Adams, had much more than a dilettante’s grasp of the political content of Plato’s major work. Jefferson was very likely quite familiar with the work, since his own political philosophy assimilates key substratal Platonic political principles of good, stable governing. His disavowal of the work and execration of Plato, then, is due to a constellation of other factors: Adams’s feelings toward Plato, Jefferson’s views on the corruptions of Jesus’s teachings, his deep-dyed detestation of metempiricism, his view that Plato was an unoriginal thinker, and strong disagreement with Plato’s means to instantiate substratal political principles.

Early Christian Political Philosophy

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Coherent System ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Greek Philosophy ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Social Pressures

Early Christian political philosophy is not a unified, theoretical, and coherent system, but is embedded in a range of Christian works of apology, theology, and exegesis. Literate (and therefore elite) Christians from the apologists to Augustine were subject to a range of political and social pressures, and their political thinking was often contingent and incidental. What is the ultimate goal of political life for Christians? What is the good life for Christians? Between Constantine's reign and that of Theodosius at the close of the fourth century, emperors veered from the pious to the “heretical,” with a single pagan interruption. It was a common rhetorical conceit for Christians to redefine philosophy as Christianity, and one that became more urgent during Julian's reign. He attempted to wrest Greek philosophy and culture from the Christians for his revived paganism, dubbed “Hellenism,” and even barred Christians from teaching in his school edict of 362. This article focuses on early Christian political philosophy as well as ecclesiology, eschatology, and asceticism.

Classical Ethics and Postmodern Critique: Political Philosophy in Václav Havel and Jan Patočka

1999 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward F. Findlay
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The West ◽  
Vaclav Havel ◽  
Phenomenological Interpretation ◽  
Ethics And Politics

This article examines the ties between the work of Václav Havel and his dissident mentor Jan Patočka. Havel's political theory consists largely of an evocative, literary reformulation of a number of themes developed by Patočka, the student of Husserl and Heidegger generally recognized as the most significant Czech philosopher of the century. Insofar as Patočka's work continues to be ignored in the West, the intuitively appealing essays of Havel will themselves fail to be fully understood. This study offers an analysis of Havel's debt to Patočka, as well as an explication of the latter's political thought. With Patočka's phenomenological interpretation of ancient and contemporary thought, of Socrates and Heidegger, a bridge is built between the classical and the postmodern that seeks to ground ethics and politics without recourse to the foundationalism of metaphysical accounts of reality.

Labour geography 1

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 622-630 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kendra Strauss
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Technological Change ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Progress Report ◽  
The Political ◽  
Employment Relation ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Open Question ◽  
The Relationship

This progress report examines the relationship between continued growth in the sub-field of labour geography, especially in research on migration, and the concept of precarity. An increasingly dominant frame in critical studies of labour and the employment relation, and resonant in the political sphere within (and now beyond) Europe, precarity has seen slower uptake by geographers. However, research on migrant labour and emerging work on technological change, flexibilization, restructuring and insecurity is employing precarity as a multi-dimensional conceptual framework. In this sense, I argue that the distinction between notions of precarity grounded in political economy and those grounded in political philosophy is increasingly – and productively – blurred. As I illustrate, this blurring is apparent in labour geography’s ongoing and deepening engagement with precarity, yet our distinctive contribution to a spatialized theorization of precarity remains, I argue, an open question.

The Struggle for the Human Right to a Good Life for Everyone: Oscar Correas’s Legacy for the Crítica Jurídica Movement in Latin America

2021 ◽  
pp. 096466392199969
Author(s):  
Mauro Cristeche ◽  
Cesar Villena
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
The Law

Oscar Correas has been one of the promoters and main references of the Crítica Jurídica movement in Latin America due to his theoretical contributions and his permanent activism to develop the movement. In this paper, we firstly review his vast academic and intellectual career, and then we go through and analyse some of Correas’s main contributions to the study of the law and the Marxist thought. Special focus will be given to: (a) his approach to Marx’s works and its extension to the analysis of modern law; (b) his understanding of Hans Kelsen’s theory; and (c) Correas’s critical contributions to the debate on human rights. We aim to highlight the originality and wit of Oscar Correas’s work, and its importance for the development of the legal critical studies and debates on legal and human rights challenges from a critical perspective.

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