Arendt’s Apology

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-446
Author(s):  
Michael Ure ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Political Art ◽  
Truth Telling ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Perspective ◽  
Political Roles ◽  
The World ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Truth Teller ◽  
Political Value

In 1967, Hannah Arendt published an essay with the deceptively simple title “Truth and Politics” (1967). Most scholarly discussions of her essay consider her distinction between a traditional political art of limited, deliberate, strategic lying and modern, organised, global lying and self-deception and then evaluate her qualified defence of the virtues of mendacity. This article suggests, however, that her essay has a much broader ambit: viz., to defend the political value of truth-telling. The main purpose of this article is to demonstrate that she formulates her essay as an apology of the truth-teller in politics and of her own truth-telling in her controversial report of the Eichmann trial. It first surveys the personal motives of Arendt’s political defence of frank speech. It shows that in developing this defence she significantly revises her scepticism about the value of truth-telling in politics. She does so by identifying three different types of truth-teller with distinctive political roles: philosophers who exemplify the truth in their own lives, citizens who see the world from other people’s perspectives, and poets and historians whose stories reconcile citizens to the past. Finally, it argues that the tragic political perspective Arendt sought to revive requires acknowledging value of the emotions in making political judgments.

A Long, Long Way

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Garrett
Keyword(s):  
People Of Color ◽  
Racial Reconciliation ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Truth Telling ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Race And Culture

Hollywood films are perhaps the most powerful storytellers in American history, and their depiction of race and culture has helped to shape the way people around the world respond to race and prejudice. Over the past one hundred years, films have moved from the radically prejudiced views of people of color to the depiction of people of color by writers and filmmakers from within those cultures. In the process, we begin to see how films have depicted negative versions of people outside the white mainstream, and how film might become a vehicle for racial reconciliation. Religious traditions offer powerful correctives to our cultural narratives, and this work incorporates both narrative truth-telling and religious truth-telling as we consider race and film and work toward reconciliation. By exploring the hundred-year period from The Birth of a Nation to Get Out, this work acknowledges the racist history of America and offers the possibility of hope for the future.

Democracy in a Time of Misery

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Curato
Keyword(s):  
Field Research ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Gallup Poll ◽  
The Past ◽  
Democratic Action ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Value

Misery rarely features in conversations about democracy. And yet, in the past decades, global audiences are increasingly confronted with spectacles of human pain. The world is more stressed, worried, and sad today than we have ever seen it, a Gallup poll finds. Does democracy stand a chance in a time of widespread suffering? Drawing on three years of field research among communities affected by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, this book offers ethnographic portraits of how collective suffering, trauma, and dispossession enlivens democratic action. It argues that emotional forms of communication create publics that assert voice and visibility at a time when attention is the scarcest resource, whilst also creating hierarchies of misery among suffering communities. Democracy in a Time of Misery investigates the ethical and political value of democracy in the most trying of times and reimagines how the virtues of deliberative practice can be valued in the context of widespread suffering.

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.

Standing in Line

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 219-223
Author(s):  
Sharif Islam
Keyword(s):  
Immigration Law ◽  
Worst Case ◽  
Professional Background ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Past ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
The World ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Shed Light

Over the past two decades, immigration receiving states have resorted to extraordinary legal, political, spatial tactics to curtail and prevent different types of migrants from legally entering the states. Some of these processes increased the number of undocumented and unauthorized immigrants in certain countries. These processes also lead to enormous personal sacrifices and hardships for families across the world. My personal experiences are probably not the worst case due to my educational and professional background, although there were few bumps in the road. Some of the following notes, I hope, will shed light on the personal experiences dealing with immigration law and processes.

scholarly journals “No one may starve in the British Empire”: Kwashiorkor, Protein and the Politics of Nutrition Between Britain and Africa

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Nott
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Underdevelopment ◽  
Natural Result ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
Political Value

Summary Throughout the twentieth century it was widely assumed that African diets were grossly deficient in protein, that childhood protein deficiency was a natural result of this generalised diet and that a relative lack of meat and milk went some way to explaining African economic underdevelopment. This article explores why these conclusions took hold; the European deification of animal protein in previous centuries; structural changes to African diets and food economies under colonial government; and the political value of such a consensus. Unlike elsewhere in the world, where deficiency was removed from the exceptionalism of tropical medicine, protein malnutrition was constructed as a particularly African concern. Focusing this discussion on the history of the severe childhood deficiency, kwashiorkor, this article explores how the politically informed othering of African nutrition came to direct, or misdirect, the medicine of malnutrition in twentieth-century Africa.

Return to Empire: The New U.S. Imperialism in Comparative Historical Perspective

2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 339-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Steinmetz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Regulation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Political Spectrum

The widespread embrace of imperial terminology across the political spectrum during the past three years has not led to an increased level of conceptual or theoretical clarity around the word “empire.” There is also disagreement about whether the United States is itself an empire, and if so, what sort of empire it is; the determinants of its geopolitical stance; and the effects of “empire as a way of life” on the “metropole.” Using the United States and Germany in the past 200 years as empirical cases, this article proposes a set of historically embedded categories for distinguishing among different types of imperial practice. The central distinction contrasts territorial and nonterritorial types of modern empire, that is, colonialism versus imperialism. Against world-system theory, territorial and nonterritorial approaches have not typi-cally appeared in pure form but have been mixed together both in time and in the repertoire of individual metropolitan states. After developing these categories the second part of the article explores empire's determinants and its effects, again focusing on the German and U.S. cases but with forays into Portuguese and British imperialism. Supporters of overseas empire often couch their arguments in economic or strategic terms, and social theorists have followed suit in accepting these expressed motives as the “taproot of imperialism” (J. A. Hobson). But other factors have played an equally important role in shaping imperial practices, even pushing in directions that are economically and geopolitically counterproductive for the imperial power. Postcolonial theorists have rightly empha-sized the cultural and psychic processes at work in empire but have tended to ignore empire's effects on practices of economy and its regulation. Current U.S. imperialism abroad may not be a danger to capitalism per se or to America's overall political power, but it is threatening and remaking the domestic post-Fordist mode of social regulation.

Memory and Politics in Democratic Spain

2020 ◽  
pp. 46-61
Author(s):  
Omar G. Encarnación
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Truth Telling ◽  
Franco Regime ◽  
Political Class ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Right

This chapter explains the persistence of Spain’s ‘politics of forgetting’, a phenomenon revealed by the wilful intent to disremember the political memory of the violence of the Spanish Civil War and the human rights abuses of General Franco’s authoritarian regime. Looking beyond the traumas of the Civil War, the limits on transitional justice and truth-telling on the Franco regime imposed by a transition to democracy anchored on intra-elite pacts, and the conciliatory and forward-looking political culture that consolidated in the new democracy, this analysis emphasizes a decidedly less obvious explanation: the political uses of forgetting. Special attention is paid to how the absence of a reckoning with the past, protected politicians from both the right and the left from embarrassing and inconvenient political histories; facilitated the reinvention of the major political parties as democratic institutions; and lessened societal fears about repeating past historical mistakes. The conclusion of the chapter explains how the success of the current democratic regime, shifting public opinion about the past occasioned by greater awareness about the dark policies and legacies of the Franco regime, and generational change among Spain’s political class have in recent years diminished the political uses of forgetting. This, in turn, has allowed for a more honest treatment of the past in Spain’s public policies.

scholarly journals Economic and Higher Education Partnership of Hungary and Kazakhstan

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kinga Magdolna Mandel ◽  
Anargul Belgibayeva
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
World Bank ◽  
Strategic Partnership ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Communications ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
The World ◽  
University Level ◽  
The University

The aim of our research was to describe, compare, and analyze the development of business and educational co-operation between Kazakhstan and Hungary over the past 19 years. The research was prompted by the university-level co-operation between the two countries that star ted in 2018, which was made possible by the strategic partnership that is the topic of the present article. We started from the hypothesis that both business and educational co-operation has developed linearly and significantly during the last 19 years. Our research methodology was based on gathering and analyzing secondary macroeconomic, trade, and educational co-operation data in the period between 2011 and 2020. The data were obtained from publications, national offices (statistical, commerce, and education), and international bodies (like TempusPublic Foundation, Eurostat, International Monetary Fund [IMF], and the World Bank). In this paper, we intend to link the main political, social, and macroeconomic endowments with business and educational developments of partnership in the two countries, trying to map out prospects for co-operation. One conclusion is that, although in the political communications of the two countries we were able to identify significant governmental efforts on both sides to support and enforce economic and educational co-operation, the data indicate a decrease in the size of business investments. At the same time, however, the educational co-operation between the two parties continues to develop further.

The Political Capital of War Wounds

2019 ◽  
pp. 137-151
Author(s):  
Ghassan Soleiman Abu-Sittah
Keyword(s):  
Social Stratification ◽  
Medical Center ◽  
Quality Care ◽  
The Political ◽  
American University ◽  
War Wounds ◽  
American University Of Beirut ◽  
Iraqi War ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Value

Iraq’s healthcare infrastructure has deteriorated after decades of war and sanctions. A small fraction of Iraqis injured as a result of war have accessed quality care at the American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUMC), some funded by the Iraqi government. This chapter, based on the author’s work as a surgeon treating Iraqi war wounded at the AUMC, describes how powerful elites determine the political value of a war wound, influencing what a person’s injury means to the country as a whole and hence, the kind of treatment the Iraqi government is willing to sponsor. As such, the chapter sheds light on a form of social stratification shaping access to care for war-injured populations in Iraq and around the world, as political elites seek legitimation for their projects.

HISTORY AND ITS ENDS IN CHARTIST EPIC

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela K. Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
End Of History ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The End Of History ◽  
Long Poems

In the mid-1800s, two significant and widelyread Chartist poems appeared, both written in prison by Chartist organizers, and both using the epic form to interrogate the present, body forth a utopian future, and rewrite a history conceived both as broadly human and specifically national. These long poems, Thomas Cooper'sPurgatory of Suicides(1845) and Ernest Jones'sThe New World, first published in 1851 and then republished after 1857 as theRevolt of Hindostan, have much to tell us about how radicals envisioned the history of Britain, its relationship with empire, and the fulfillment of the ends of history. Cooper's poem proceeds in ten books, written in Spenserian stanzas, in which he dreams of visiting a purgatory of suicides: mythical and historical personages who have committed suicide debate the reasons for their condition and the condition of the world. Jones's poem was written in couplets, supposedly on the torn pages of a prayer book, in his own blood. The poem surveys the rise and fall of multiple empires, and also surveys recent political history closer to home. The two poems look to the past and the future, to universal history and its end. They thus participate in utopian political discourse, with its emphasis on the end of history, as well as the epic tradition. Both utopian and epic discourse in this period were affiliated with specifically national narratives, and the internationalist and universal elements of the poems sometimes inhabit these genres uneasily. Additionally, both poets attend to the religious tradition of eschatological discourse that underlies the secular notion of the end of history, and work to reconcile it with the political vision they are promoting. These writers use unique combinations of spatial and temporal frames to achieve the reconciliation of their diverse goals with the genres and discourses that they claim and transform.

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