scholarly journals Prophet of the Electric Age: Cultural Performativity as Nonviolent Revolution in the Lifework of Percy Bysshe Shelley

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neşe Devenot
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Opposite Effect ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Radical Class ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Press Coverage ◽  
Lord Chancellor ◽  
Radical Movement

This article examines Percy Bysshe Shelley’s interest in contemporary possibilities of text dissemination in order to reconcile the normally opposing tendencies of gradualism (“slow reform”) and “violent” revolution in his life and writings. I offer a close reading of two parallel cultural events, both of which produced a national commotion that widely disseminated radical views—the “Peterloo” massacre at Manchester and Lord Eldon’s copyright rulings as Lord Chancellor. In both instances, the government’s attempts to control expression had the opposite effect due to the consequences of press coverage and political activism. In combination with nonviolent textual piracy, I argue that the circulation of the belief in poetry’s power concomitantly with the formation of a radical canon encouraged the latter’s circulation as propaganda, de facto establishing a common cultural heritage for the growing radical movement. Since Shelley’s writings became a fundamental component of the cultural glue that encouraged cohesion of the expanding radical class as soon as one decade after his premature death, I suggest that a reading of Shelley’s political strategies that moves beyond “ineffectualism” can highlight the continuing relevance of Shelley’s aesthetics and political thought.

Politics Versus Aesthetics: Arendt's Critiques of Nietzsche and Heidegger

1995 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Biskoivski
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Political Condition

Several recent commentaries on Hannah Arendt's political thought have suggested strong connections and affinities between Arendt and Nietzsche or between Arendt and various later Nietzschean, aestheticist, or postmodernist thinkers. But a close reading of Arendt's critiques of Nietzsche and Heidegger suggests that an overemphasis on the more Nietzschean or aesthetic aspects of Arendt's work risks obscuring some vital distinctions Arendt makes or preserves concerning politics and aesthetics. More significantly, the Nietzschean or aestheticist interpretation of Arendt tends to conceal or distort Arendt's actual, highly original, and more promising response to various facets of the modern political condition.

scholarly journals Disturbing Binaries in Political Thought: Silence as Political Activism

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 509-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophia Hatzisavvidou
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Activism

scholarly journals ‘To Believe In This World, As It Is’: Immanence and the Quest for Political Activism

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (supplement) ◽  
pp. 28-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathrin Thiele
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constructive Approach ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The World

In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari make the claim that ‘[i]t may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today. This is the empiricist conversion.’ What are we to make of such a calling? The paper explicates why and in what sense this statement is of exemplary significance both for an appropriate understanding of Deleuze's political thought and for a most timely conceptualisation of politics in a world so clearly defined by immanence, and nothing but immanence. I argue that Deleuze's rigorously constructive approach to the world is not beyond politics, as some recent readings have declared (e.g. those of Badiou and Hallward). Rather, we have to appreciate that in Deleuze and Guattari's demand for a ‘belief in this world’ the political intersects with the dimension of the ethical in such a way that our understanding of both is transformed. Only after this ‘empiricist conversion’ can we truly think of a Deleuzian politics that does justice to a plane of immanence ‘immanent only to itself’.

The Intellectual Origins of Turkish Radical Republicanism

2020 ◽  
pp. 197-214
Author(s):  
Banu Turnaoğlu
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Secret Society ◽  
The Core ◽  
International Solidarity ◽  
Intellectual Origins ◽  
Head Of Government ◽  
Radical Republicanism

This chapter traces the radical heritage of Turkish republicanism to the political thought of the radical branch of the Young Ottoman secret society. It examines the core republican principles of several leading Young Ottoman radicals: Sağır Ahmed Beyzâde Mehmed, İskender Beyzâde Reşad, and Subhî Paşazâde Nuri. The core notions of their ideology entail freedom from oppression, a deep commitment to popular sovereignty and constitutionalism, an emphasis on political activism and revolution, a stress on international solidarity and peace, and a recognition of the need for social equality. Their republicanism was antithetical to monarchy, and a central aim was the abolition of the sultanate by force, but unlike European republican models they wanted the head of government to be a non-hereditary elected caliph. Although less known than some of their intellectual counterparts, the role they played in the development of Turkish republicanism proved no less pervasive and profound.

Introduction

Plato's Caves ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-55
Author(s):  
Rebecca LeMoine
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Scholarly Literature

This chapter discusses existing interpretations of the treatment of foreigners in Plato’s dialogues. The view that Platonic political thought is xenophobic remains prominent in both popular accounts and the scholarly literature, but there is reason to question the traditional narrative. First, recent historical work shows that Athenian attitudes toward foreigners were more mixed than was previously believed. Plato, then, may well have held a positive conception of foreigners. Second, the analysis shows why quoting lines out of the dramatic contexts of the dialogues is problematic. If one of Plato’s characters speaks disparagingly of foreigners, that does not make Plato xenophobic. The chapter proposes instead a close reading of Plato’s dialogues using the techniques of literary analysis. It presents original data on the use of terminology related to foreigners throughout the Platonic corpus, and explains the process of selecting which dialogues to analyze.

Nature, Nation-Building, and the Seasons of Justice in Rousseau's Political Thought

2006 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
Human Conduct ◽  
Natural Development ◽  
The Social ◽  
Special Relations

Examining the special relations between On the Social Contract and the Constitutional Project for Corsica, this essay argues that Rousseau conceives of constitutionalism on the basis of his understanding of the “natural development” of any state. What is “natural” is a certain order in which developmental periods best emerge, such that any state's disordered development will always result in its premature “death.” The essay explains four aspects of Rousseau's conception of properly ordered political development: the nature of a state's beginning; the relation between the two “great springs” of human conduct; the influence of external nature on human nature and justice; and the inevitable “end” of even the best state.

Does the Political Power of Nonfinancial Stakeholders Affect Firm Values? Evidence from Labor Unions

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 1101-1133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jared Stanfield ◽  
Robert Tumarkin
Keyword(s):  
Collective Bargaining ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
Opposite Effect ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Political Connections ◽  
The Political ◽  
Labor Contracts ◽  
Equity Values ◽  
Australian State

Whereas corporate political connections are known to enhance equity values, we demonstrate that union political activity can have the opposite effect. We examine the consequences of a recent Australian state law that restricts union political activity but does not change collective bargaining rights. In the wake of this law, the equity values of affected unionized firms significantly increase, and consistent with this market reaction, these firms are able to bargain for more favorable labor contracts than their unionized peers in other states. The evidence strongly suggests that unions use political activism to extract rents from shareholders and benefit their members.

Words as well as Deeds: The Popular Press and Suffragette Hunger Strikes in Edwardian Britain

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Vessey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Press Coverage ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Political Union ◽  
Daily Mail ◽  
Consistent Feature ◽  
Patriarchal Narratives

Abstract This article considers how national newspapers reported, portrayed, and narrated the militant suffragism of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Using three popular newspapers, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, and the Daily Mirror and the specific case study of hunger strikes and the government’s response of forcible feeding, it evaluates the various tropes that characterized press coverage of the suffragettes. It investigates how militancy, an approach that prioritized spectacle, was covered in an emerging medium that sought to recast politics in a new and spectacular fashion, thereby extending understanding of how the style and content of popular newspapers evolved in the first decade of the twentieth century. In doing so, it expands existing research into the dynamics of the nascent popular press and its function as an ‘arena’ for fostering extra-parliamentary political debate. The WSPU attempted to take advantage of this opportunity to promote its own arguments on forcible feeding and female suffrage, using correspondence columns and prisoner testimony to elicit empathy, albeit with only sporadic success in receiving a sympathetic hearing from a hostile press, with enmity a consistent feature of editorial argument. Nevertheless, the article concludes that responses to hunger strikes and forcible feeding in the popular press were multifaceted, and whilst the WSPU was unable to reframe patriarchal narratives of political activism, it persisted with words as well as deeds in seeking to co-opt newspapers into its campaign and garner publicity for its cause.

Between “the lights and shadows”: Reading the new edition of Olive Schreiner’sFrom Man to Man or Perhaps Only —

2021 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-12
Author(s):  
Sanja Nivesjö ◽  
Heidi Barends
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Writing Process ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gender And Race

The introduction to this written symposium considers Olive Schreiner’s novel From Man to Man or Perhaps Only — (1926) in light of the release of a new edition by Dorothy Driver and UCT Press (2015). The symposium’s first article, by Liz Stanley, reflects on Schreiner’s writing process by studying two early manuscript fragments of the novel from 1886–1887. Joyce Berkman and Dorothy Driver then both perform a close reading of the novel. Berkman achieves an extended reading of the issue of possession, in relation to gender and race. Driver investigates Schreiner’s “poetics of plants” in relation to indigeneity and Schreiner’s social and political thought on race. Finally, an interview article provides multiple current academic voices on the relevance of reading From Man to Man today. Taken together, the symposium illustrates the complexity of Schreiner’s thinking in From Man to Man, the opportunities provided by the new edition for scholarship, and the value of reading this novel at the present moment.

scholarly journals La politique selon La Mort d’Agrippine de Cyrano de Bergerac : conspiration, athéisme et libertinage érudit sur scène

2020 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 107-119
Author(s):  
Christian Grünnagel
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
The Political ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Trompe L'oeil ◽  
Cyrano De Bergerac ◽  
French Author ◽  
Political Interpretation

The present article examines the vision of politics, especially linked to religion, in the only known tragedy by French author Cyrano de Bergerac. Provoking a major scandal during its premiere due to several dialogues considered as atheist by contemporary authorities, this complex piece of dramatic art provides some insights into the political thought of a 17th-century philosophical (un-derground) tendency known as libertinage érudit. As I try to show, one of the major problems we face in the tragedy’s (political) interpretation is its overall composition, which Cyrano based on baroque principles like (dis)simulation, illusion, and manipulation, turning the whole piece into a dramatic trompe-l’œil. Focusing on the close reading of some crucial dialogues that involve three of the tragedy’s protagonists (Agrippina, Emperor Tiberius, and Sejanus), this article postulates two axes as central to politics according to Cyrano: (1) religion is useful for political enterprises and the foundation of the state, but has no basis in itself since the gods do not exist — they are mere creations of the human mind. (2) At least in Cyrano’s Rome, there simply are no good politicians (‘good’ understood in a moral sense), only brilliant liars and deceivers, Machiavellian rulers, cruel emperors, and equally cruel conspirators. Politics is perceived as a dirty business where there is no space for morals — scandalous conclusions explaining the immediate suppression of any further representations of La Mort d’Agrippine after its tumultuous premiere.

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