From Sovereignty to the State The Tragicomic Clemency of Massinger’s The Bondman

2019 ◽  
pp. 143-174
Author(s):  
Bernadette Meyler
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Rule Based ◽  
Charles I ◽  
King Charles I

Philip Massinger’s 1623 play The Bondman appealed to a number of very different audiences, from King Charles I, to republicans resisting Charles II’s return to England, to spectators after the Restoration. This chapter argues that the play proved so versatile because it placed priority on the preservation of the state over any particular form of sovereignty. This political orientation derives in part from The Bondman’s debt to Senecan stoicism. Stoicism shapes the play’s approach to mercy as well. Rather than relying on a sovereign pardon, the play emphasizes a kind of rule based on equity as well as a variety of clemency derived from Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s De Clementia. Clemency as presented by the play entails preservation of the body politic through enlargement of the sovereign’s compass of concern.

The Road to Brexit

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Andrew Ryder
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Road

The chapter follows the course of events and debate during the referendum and initial negotiations and legislative attempts in Westminster to enable Brexit. The chapter gives an overview of the speech acts and associated stratagems to facilitate or to frustrate Brexit. It includes a number of vignettes presenting some key or insightful moments in the referendum campaign. A key focus of the chapter is analysis of the Leave and Remain campaigns (Vote Leave, Leave.EU and Stronger In) and what became known respectively as ‘projects hate and fear’. The chapter concludes with an inquest into the state of British democracy and how fundamental weaknesses in the body politic enabled Brexit, among which is the emergence of ’post-truth’ politics and the influence of the tabloid media.

Corporate Life in the University of Paris, 1249–1418, and the Ending of Schism

1989 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-523
Author(s):  
Osmund Lewry Op
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
University Of Paris ◽  
The University ◽  
The Church

As many had done long before, John Henry Newman, in his sermon of 1842 on ‘The Christian Church an imperial power’, drew his model of the corporate life of the Church from the state: ‘We know what is meant by a kingdom. It means a body politic, bound together by common law, ruled by one head, holding intercourse part with part, acting together’. This description, little changed, could have applied as well to the university community of Newman's Oxford, and it is not implausible that an experience of fellowship there, strained and divided as it sometimes was, could have provided an unconscious model for his understanding of the ecclesial community. Even if it did not become explicit in Newman's thought, the analogy of head and members was present to the thinking of university men at Paris with regard to their own corporate life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, particularly when relations were strained and division of the body threatened. Whatever the origins of conciliarist theory, then, in the reflections of canonists and theologians, there was an experience of ecclesial community in the corporate life of medieval Paris that could have given living content to speculation about the Church in the most influential intellectual centre of Christendom. The shaping of that experience deserves some attention as a matrix for conciliarist thought.

The Glorious Excess of Peace in Marsilius of Padua's Defensor Pacis

Theoria ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (159) ◽  
pp. 23-51
Author(s):  
Richard A. Lee Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Legitimate Authority ◽  
Marsilius Of Padua ◽  
The Right

In Defensor Pacis Marsilius of Padua grounds the legitimacy of the kingdom, or the state (civitas), on the peace that rule provides the citizens. Looking at Aristotle’s claim that the civitas strives to be like an animal in which all parts in the right proportion for the sake of health, Marsilius argues that ‘the parts of the kingdom or state will be well disposed for the sake of peace [tranquilitas].’ Marsilius goes on to define peace as the agreeable ‘belonging together’ of all members of the kingdom or the state. In this way, Marsilius moves away from a theological ground of the legitimacy of the state towards one that is entirely secular. However, the ground is an unstable one in that it acknowledges the fact that the ‘members’ of the body politic are characterised by difference. As such, the ground of legitimate authority will be characterised as much by force as by peace or by the relation of force to peace.

Sulla’s Phthiriasis and the Republican Body Politic

Mnemosyne ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (6) ◽  
pp. 949-971
Author(s):  
Brian Walters
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body

AbstractIt has long been suspected that Roman moralizing and the slander of political enemies lay behind the story of Sulla’s horrific death by vermin. This study traces the evocative logic of Sulla’s affliction to a constellation of Roman attitudes about corruption, self-mastery, and the body politic. It also argues that Sulla’s own rhetoric about the health of the state played a formative role in shaping narratives about his gruesome end.

The lives of subjects

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annabel S. Brett
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the relationship of the state to its subjects as necessarily physically embodied beings. The primary way in which the commonwealth commands its subjects is through the medium of its law. The law is for the common good and obliges the community as a whole, and thus the ontological status of the law—as distinct from any particular command of a superior to an individual—is intimately tied to that of the body politic. The question, then, concerning the relationship of the state to the natural body of the individual can be framed in terms of the extent of the obligation of the civil law.

Body Fascism in Britain: Building the Blackshirt in the Inter-War Period

2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIE GOTTLIEB
Keyword(s):  
Physical Fitness ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
National Context ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Public Display ◽  
Graphic Art ◽  
Political Religion

AbstractIn recent years scholars have devoted a great deal of attention and theorisation to the body in history, looking both at bodies as metaphors and as sites of intervention. These studies have tended to focus on the analysis of bodies in a national context, acting for and acted upon by the state, and similarly the ever-expanding study of masculinity continues to try to define hegemonic masculinities. But what if we direct our gaze to marginal bodies, in this case Blackshirt bodies who act against the state, and a political movement that commits assault on the body politic? This article examines the centrality of the body and distinctive gender codes in the self-representation, the performance and practice, and the culture of Britain's failed fascist movement during the 1930s. The term ‘body fascism’ has taken on different and much diluted meaning in the present day, but in the British Union of Fascists’ construction of the Blackshirted body, in the movement's emphasis on the embodiment of their political religion through sport, physical fitness and public display of offensive and defensive violence, and in their distinctive and racialised bodily aesthetic illustrated in their visual and graphic art production we come to understand Britain's fascist movement as a product of modernity and as one potent expression of the convergence between populist politics and body fixation.

scholarly journals Cells in the Body Politic: Social identity and hospital construction in Peronist Argentina

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-131
Author(s):  
J Hagood
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
National Identities ◽  
The People ◽  
Hospital Construction ◽  
Political Speeches ◽  
Modern Hospital

This article examines the critical role played by social identity in the construction of hospitals in the Argentine health care sector during the 1940s and 1950s by uncovering the way in which the “jungle” of hospitals withstood attempts by the state to apply some sense of order, purpose, and centralized organization. The first section examines how physicians envisioned the “modern” hospital they hoped to construct. The second section reveals the important antecedents of nationalized hospitalization schemes found in the collaboration between physicians’ unions and the state. In the third section, an analysis of political speeches illuminates how Juan and Evita Perón packaged new hospitals as gifts to the people from their leader. The fourth section outlines specific plans to increase the number of hospital beds. The final section surveys examples of hospital construction to demonstrate how sub-national identities were instrumental to fragmenting both Argentine society and its hospital infrastructure.

Butchering the Body Politic

2020 ◽  
pp. 53-76
Author(s):  
Brian Walters
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self

Chapter 3 explores images of wounding, dismemberment, and violence against the state in republican oratory. Cicero’s speeches of the 50s are sometimes argued to be unusually gruesome in their claims about violence to the body politic. Cataloguing references to the republic’s mutilation and trauma in surviving oratory, this chapter puts the images of these speeches in context and reveals that such violent imagery is in fact prevalent in all periods. Violent imagery is shown to have been persuasive for tapping into anxieties about disability, social status, and liberty. Cicero’s references to the body politic’s wounds in the speeches of the 50s are remarkable only insofar as they refer to the orator’s exile, a fact which highlights the self-serving character of such imagery in general.

The Microbial State

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie R. Fishel
Keyword(s):  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
World Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Radioactive Isotopes ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
Radical Shift

For three centuries the rational and disembodied state has been animated by one of the most powerful metaphors in politics: the body-politic, a claustrophobic and bounded image of the collective, the state, the nation, of the sovereign alienated among sovereigns. Drawing sources from continental philosophy, science and technology studies and world politics, this pathbreaking book challenges the body-politic on the grounds of its materiality. Just as the human body is not whole and separate from other bodies, but populated by microbes, bacteria, water and radioactive isotopes, Stefanie Fishel argues that the body-politic of the state exists in dense entanglement with other communities and forms of life. Yet rather than follow the nihilistic critiques of biopolitics and sovereignty into their political and metaphysical dead ends, Fishel challenges us to think and live hopefully beyond the body-politic: to think of bodies and states as lively vessels, living harmoniously coevolved with multiplicity and the biosphere. From global trade to people movements and climate change, this radical shift in metaphors promises to open up new forms of global political practice and community and challenge a politics based on fear and survival. Fishel concludes that we should not aim for mere living: we need to set our sights on building a world for thriving. This book will be of interest to a range of scholars in the humanities and the social and natural sciences. Fishel provides connections between the political and practical in clear terms using multiple approaches and disciplines.

The politics of the provincial administration

2020 ◽  
pp. 220-234
Author(s):  
Walter O. Oyugi ◽  
Jimmy O. Ochieng
Keyword(s):  
Local Level ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Center ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Provincial Administration ◽  
To Come

This chapter traces the evolution and strengthening of the provincial administration as the executive’s instrument of maintaining control from the political center to the local level, which the state has used intensively to intervene in the body politic. The administration has been the eyes and ears of the state—and the president—from 1963 up until the new Constitution was promulgated in 2010. The new Constitution’s attempt to restructure the provincial administration and limit its reach and capability did not come to fruition, as the state succeeded in retaining and consolidating its powers. Therefore, the provincial administration will continue to be the backbone of the state for a long time to come.

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