scholarly journals Frihed og lykke i Rousseaus retfærdiggørelse af staten

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Rafeeq Hasan
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Individual Autonomy

<p>Political philosophers tend to think that Rousseau is significant because his contractarianism anticipates Kant. However, reading Rousseau in this way requires us to ignore his frequent and emphatic appeals to the role of happiness as collective flourishing (<em>eudaimonia</em>) in establishing the rational authority of justice. I offer a reading of Rousseau’s political theory which accounts for this eudaimonistic aspect of his thought. I argue that for Rousseau, as for Kant, obligations are structured by the autonomous willing of agents who bind themselves by the norms of reason alone. But unlike Kant, Rousseau thinks that such formal considerations of rational autonomy provide necessary but not sufficient reasons for fulfilling our duties to one another. This is because the ultimate reason for valuing individual autonomy is that it enables the flourishing of individuals insofar as they are members of a just political community.</p>

Leave the Dead Some Room to Dance: Postcolonial Founding and the Problem of Inheritance in Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 330-356
Author(s):  
David Thomas Suell
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Critical Part ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Dead

In this essay, I examine Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests in order to think through political founding. Viewing founding from the postcolonial context, I explore how members of a political community negotiate among the multiple pasts that continue to affect them, and what kind of institutions and actors are best equipped to pursue this critical part of the founding project. Situating Soyinka’s account against competing narratives of the postcolonial condition, I demonstrate how he uses Yoruba philosophy and cosmology to reframe the challenges and potentials of founding, and I illustrate how political actors should respond to these by adopting the role of “citizen-artists” who can learn from past struggles and overcome their overwhelming legacies. Read as a dramatic intervention into Nigerian democratic politics and as a work of political theory, A Dance offers a lens through which to interrogate founding within and beyond the postcolony.

Kropotkin

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Kinna
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Special Character ◽  
Revolutionary Politics

This book is designed to remove Peter Kropotkin from the framework of classical anarchism. By focusing attention on his theory of mutual aid, it argues that the classical framing distorts Kropotkin's political theory by associating it with a narrowly positivistic conception of science, a naively optimistic idea of human nature and a millenarian idea of revolution. Kropotkin's abiding concern with Russian revolutionary politics is the lens for this analysis. The argument is that his engagement with nihilism shaped his conception of science and that his expeditions in Siberia underpinned an approach to social analysis that was rooted in geography. Looking at Kropotkin's relationship with Elisée Reclus and Erico Malatesta and examining his critical appreciation of P-J. Proudhon, Michael Bakunin and Max Stirner, the study shows how he understood anarchist traditions and reveals the special character of his anarchist communism. His idea of the state as a colonising process and his contention that exploitation and oppression operate in global contexts is a key feature of this. Kropotkin's views about the role of theory in revolutionary practice show how he developed this critique of the state and capitalism to advance an idea of political change that combined the building of non-state alternatives through direct action and wilful disobedience. Against critics who argue that Kropotkin betrayed these principles in 1914, the book suggests that this controversial decision was consistent with his anarchism and that it reflected his judgment about the prospects of anarchistic revolution in Russia.

Five Lessons from European Democracy

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Matijasevich
Keyword(s):  
Political Community ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Democratic Development ◽  
Track Record ◽  
European Democracy ◽  
Democratic Experience ◽  
Theory Of Democracy ◽  
The Eu

Outside of some states still struggling with post-communist transitions, Europe itself may be the first European democracy to collapse in decades. Though never a bastion of participatory democracy and even subject to continuous criticism due to its democratic deficit, the European Union (EU) has provided hope to those who envision a post-national democratic political community. As such, whether the EU survives its present crisis or not, cosmopolitan democrats will look to the EU as a vindication of their ideals. Though perhaps surprising given their track record, this paper will argue that political scientists, especially those concerned with democratization, can also be optimistic about what the EU has brought to the table in terms of how we conceive processes of democratic development. Throughout the paper it will be demonstrated that the creation and maintenance of the European democracy has challenged much of the literature's fundamental assumptions of what makes democracy work. Five key lessons from the European democratic experience will be presented in an attempt to disrupt some of these assumptions including lessons regarding the diversity of the demos, the contingency of democratic upkeep, the challenges of the state, the role of elites in political transformation, and the necessity of exclusion within inclusive spaces. Though a general theory of democracy will not be presented, suggestions will be made as to how we can incorporate some of these lessons into the dominant approaches to democracy found in the literature.   Full text available at: https://doi.org/10.22215/rera.v7i1.214

Neurointerventions, Morality, and Children

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Clayton ◽  
Andres Moles
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Moral Enhancement ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Conduct ◽  
Moral Behaviour ◽  
Moral Constraint ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Moral Limits

Is the political community morally permitted to use neurointerventions to improve the moral conduct of children? Putting aside difficult questions concerning the institutionalization of moral enhancement, the authors address this question, first, by arguing that is not, in itself, always morally impermissible for the community to impose neurointerventions on adults. Although certain ideals, such as the ideal of individual autonomy, limit the permissible employment of neurointerventions, they do not generate a moral constraint that always forbids their use. Thereafter, they argue that because young children lack certain moral capacities that adults possess, the moral limits that pertain to the use of neurointerventions to improve their moral behaviour are, in principle, less restrictive than they are for adults.

Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Brill
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Character

Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life studies Aristotle’s understanding of the political character of human intimacy via an examination of the zoological frame informing his political theory. It argues that the concept of shared life, i.e. the forms of intimacy that arise from the possession of logos and the capacity for choice, is central to human political partnership, and serves to locate that life within the broader context of living beings as such, where it emerges as an intensification of animal sociality. As such it challenges a long-standing approach to the role of the animal in Aristotle’s thought, and to the recent reception of Aristotle’s thinking about the political valence of life and living beings.

Politics and Kingship in the Historical Books, with Attention to the Role of Political Theory in Interpretation

2020 ◽  
pp. 186-200
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Parsons Miller
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Distributive Justice ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
Abstract Ideas ◽  
Theological Message

This chapter explores the thesis that the historical narratives of the Hebrew Bible address abstract ideas about politics, government, and law. Taking issue with critics who view the Bible’s spiritual and theological message as incommensurable with political philosophy, the chapter argues that the stories of politics and kingship in the Hebrew Bible’s historical books set forth set forth an impressive political theory that rivals, in some respects, the work of Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek thinkers. The key is to bring out the general ideas behind the specific narrative elements. The chapter illustrates this thesis by examining the Hebrew Bible’s treatment of a number of classic problems of political theory: anarchy, obligation and sovereignty, distributive justice, and the comparative analysis of political organizations.

The Role of the Representative: Some Empirical Observations on the Theory of Edmund Burke

1959 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 742-756 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heinz Eulau ◽  
John C. Wahlke ◽  
William Buchanan ◽  
Leroy C. Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
General Consensus ◽  
History Of

The problem of representation is central to all discussions of the functions of legislatures or the behavior of legislators. For it is commonly taken for granted that, in democratic political systems, legislatures are both legitimate and authoritative decision-making institutions, and that it is their representative character which makes them authoritative and legitimate. Through the process of representation, presumably, legislatures are empowered to act for the whole body politic and are legitimized. And because, by virtue of representation, they participate in legislation, the represented accept legislative decisions as authoritative. But agreement about the meaning of the term “representation” hardly goes beyond a general consensus regarding the context within which it is appropriately used. The history of political theory is studded with definitions of representation, usually embedded in ideological assumptions and postulates which cannot serve the uses of empirical research without conceptual clarification.

scholarly journals Criminal Law and Republican Liberty: Philip Pettit’s Account

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Horder
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Significant Challenge ◽  
Philip Pettit ◽  
Republican Liberty ◽  
Republican Theory

AbstractPhilip Pettit has made central to modern republican theory a distinctive account of freedom—republican freedom. On this account, I am not free solely because I can make choices without interference. I am truly free, only if that non-interference does not itself depend on another’s forbearance (what Pettit calls ‘formal’ freedom). Pettit believes that the principal justification for the traditional focus of the criminal law is that it constitutes a bulwark against domination. I will, in part, be considering the merits of this claim. Is the importance of the orthodox realm of the criminal law solely or mainly explained by the wish to protect people from domination? In short, the answer is that it is not. Across the board, the criminal law rightly protects us equally from threats to what Pettit calls ‘effective,’ as opposed to formal, republican freedom. I will develop my critique of Pettit’s account of criminal law, in part to raise questions about the role of ‘domination’ in political theory, and about whether it poses a significant challenge to liberal accounts of criminal law.

Two Models of Pluralism and Tolerance

1992 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Kymlicka
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Group Rights ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Social Pluralism

AbstractIn his most recent work, John Rawls argues that political theory must recognize and accomodate the ‘fact of pluralism’, including the fact of religious diversity. He believes that the liberal commitment to individual rights provides the only feasible model for accomodating religious pluralism. In the paper, I discuss a second form of tolerance, based on group rights rather than individual rights. Drawing on historical examples, I argue that this is is also a feasible model for accomodating religious pluralism. While both models ensure tolerance between groups, only the former tolerates individual dissent within groups. To defend the individual rights model, therefore, liberals must appeal not only to the fact of social pluralism, but also to the value of individual autonomy. This may require abandoning Rawls’s belief that liberalism can and should be defended on purely ‘political’, rather than ‘comprehensive’ grounds.

Umstrittene Expertise

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Global Dimension ◽  
The Political ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Controversial Nature

The current political debates about climate change or the coronavirus pandemic reveal the fundamental controversial nature of expertise in politics and society. The contributions in this volume analyse various facets, actors and dynamics of the current conflicts about knowledge and expertise. In addition to examining the contradictions of expertise in politics, the book discusses the political consequences of its controversial nature, the forms and extent of policy advice, expert conflicts in civil society and culture, and the global dimension of expertise. This special issue also contains a forum including reflections on the role of expertise during the coronavirus pandemic. The volume includes perspectives from sociology, political theory, political science and law.

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