Abstract
72.3152 ABROMEIT, John —
This article demonstrates the continuity of The Authoritarian Personality with the model of “early Critical Theory” that was developed at the Institute for Social Research in the 1930s. Second, it shows why The Authoritarian Personality — and early Critical Theory more generally — are still essential to understanding the frightening resurgence of authoritarianism in the US in recent times. The article [reviews] the Institute’s analyses in the 1930s of authoritarianism. It examines how the empirical research carried out by the Institute in the US in the 1940s informed Theodor Adorno’s understanding of American society and the ways in which the US embodies larger tendencies at work in modern capitalism as a whole. The third part focuses on the key concept of pseudo-conservatism. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.3175]
72.3153 ADALET, Begüm —
Political theorists are increasingly drawn to the recovery of anticolonial thinkers as global figures. Frantz Fanon is largely excluded from these discussions because of his presumed commitment to the nation-state and its territorialist assumptions. This essay claims, by contrast, that Fanon’s writings reveal an alternative way of thinking about worldmaking, less as a question of political and economic institution-building spearheaded by leaders than as a multiscalar project that permeates the production of the built environment and the creation of selves. I show how Fanon challenges the dichotomy between the global and the national by seeking to transform not just the national scale in relation to the international, but also the corporeal, urban, rural, and regional scales of an imperially configured world. [R, abr.]
72.3154 AGUIRRESAROBE, Asier H. —
Can an empire be transformed into a nation-state? This paper examines the works of John Robert Seeley and Liang Qichao as projects aimed at adapting the histories of the British and Qing empires to a national theory of political legitimation. By analyzing three aspects — national unity, national continuity and historical subjecthood — in their historical narratives, it shows : (1) that history plays a central role in the production of imagined communities; (2) that the principles of the national discourse limited the possibilities of these rewritings of history; and (3) that previous identifiers were adapted to the new theory of national legitimation. [R]
72.3155 ANDERSSON, Jenny —
This article examines the sociologist Daniel Bell’s interest in future research. Future research, to Bell, had as its particular purpose to ensure forms of coordination and steering acceptable to a liberal society. By examining Bell’s interest in future research and the activities of the Commission on the Year 2000, the essay proposes that future research played a role in Cold War intellectual history as a particular form of planning for the liberal polity. This idea of planning a liberal society changed decisively, however, between 1965 and 1975. [R]
72.3156 ARELLANO, Alec —
Citizens of liberal democracies today increasingly exhibit a distrust of perceived elites, especially experts and those of advanced educational attainment more generally. John Stuart Mill’s work offers potential responses to this phenomenon. Mill regards deference to superior wisdom as an essential part of a well-developed character while esteeming independent thought. Although his emphasis on the importance of character formation is well known, his concern for inculcating a salutary form of deference has been underexplored. I show how Mill’s approaches to this task include redesigning the political process to amplify the voice of the highly educated, promoting more widespread opportunities for learning, and consistently emphasizing the partiality of human understanding. I also compare Mill’s treatment of the place of deference in democratic politics with that of Alexis de Tocqueville’s, and consider how Tocqueville might critique Mill’s strategies for cultivating deference. [R, abr.]
72.3157 ARNEIL, Barbara —
Using two recently published folios by Jeremy Bentham, I draw out a fundamental but little-analyzed connection between pauperism and both domestic and settler colonialism in opposition to imperialism in his thought. The core theoretical contribution is to draw a distinction between a colonial, internal, and productive form of power that claims to improve people and land from within, which Bentham defends, and an imperial, external, and repressive form of power that dominates or rules over people from above and afar, that he rejects. Inherent in colonialism and the power unleashed by it are specific and profoundly negative implications in practice for the poor and disabled of Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries subject to domestic colonialism and indigenous peoples subject to settler colonialism from first contact until today. [R, abr.]
72.3158 ASHWORTH, Lucian M. —
Central and Eastern Europe played an important role in British interwar international thought. This article contrasts the visions of the region found in three key texts written by British scholars in the interwar period. Two of these, Halford Mackinder’s 1919 Democratic Ideals and Reality and E. H. Carr’s 1939 Twenty Years’ Crisis, share a common approach based on an abstract understanding of the nature of international order, even while they disagree on their prescriptions for Central and Eastern Europe. Starting from abstract principles, they then apply their findings to Central and Eastern Europe. By contrast, in her 1938 Czechs and Germans Elizabeth Wiskemann works in the other direction. Through a detailed analysis of the politics of the Bohemian historic provinces she comes to conclusions that can be applied to ideas of world order. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.3997]
72.3159 BOGIARIS, Guillaume —
This paper argues that in their criticism of Socrates’s prospective evasion, the Laws of the Crito make two arguments relevant to the discussion of the ethics of migration, labeled here the “Argument from Parentage” and the “Argument from Corruption.” When considered from the perspective of liberal democracies, those arguments help us realize that political communities should be considered as a subject of justice in migration alongside individuals, and that migration might entail some citizen-tocommunity obligations. This means that some correctives may be justified to offset the moral costs of some acts of migration. This paper concludes by exploring how the extension of local voting rights in absentia could be one such corrective. [R]
72.3160 BONNEMAISON, Anthony —
In the Republic, philosophy is associated with lawfulness, while tyranny and other corrupted regimes and individuals are associated with various degrees of lawlessness. So why does Socrates explain that the curriculum addressed to the philosophers of the ideal city brings about a risk of lawlessness among the potential philosopher-rulers? This is due to a specific step of this curriculum, the practice of refutation, which causes an intellectual as well as moral distress that can lead to skepticism and in fine to lawlessness. Although this risk needs to be reduced to a minimum, it has to be taken because the philosophical natures should be able to survive all challenges in order to become genuine dialecticians. [R, abr.]
72.3161 BRENDESE, P. J. —
This essay engages Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus as a salient intervention into modern political theory. I analyze the work as a cipher for the tensions inhabiting Euro-modernity’s stitched together fictions of racial determinism and racial dynamism legible in slavery, assimilationist projects and White fears reverberating throughout. Adapting the mythical ancient Prometheus as one who steals fire from the gods to create humans and civilization, Frankenstein dramatizes the risks and monstrous results of White imperial masculinity as a Euro-colonial Promethean project of subject formation and race-making. Viewed through the prism of the Modern Prometheus, modernity in general and liberal humanism in particular are recast as monster-making projects. The European “discovery” of Indigenous peoples amplified Promethean aspirations to create subjects through civilizational processes of religious conversion, the infusion of Enlightenment rationality, and assimilation into whiteness. [R, abr.]
72.3162 BRISSET, Nicolas ; FEVRE, Raphaël —
Cet article vise à interroger la manière dont le régime de Vichy fut l’occasion, pour certains économistes, de réviser leur vision de l’État en général, de son rôle économique en particulier. Cette révision passa notamment par une réflexion relative à leur propre positionnement vis-àvis de l’exécutif, en tâchant d’asseoir la mission d’expertise de l’économiste. Pour ce faire, nous nous concentrerons principalement sur un petit groupe d’économistes réunis autour de François Perroux (1903-1987), qui fut non seulement une figure intellectuelle notable du régime, mais également un entrepreneur scientifique de premier plan à la Fondation française pour l’étude des problèmes humains. [R, abr.]
72.3163 BURDMAN, Javier —
In order to find a response to the paradox according to which universal history is inherently exclusionary and yet necessary to uphold universal values, I examine the contrast between Adorno’s and Lyotard’s perspectives on the problem of writing history ‘after Auschwitz’. For both philosophers, Auschwitz interrupts our fundamental normative and cognitive values, because any attempt to identify the meaning of the camps by means of these values misunderstands the suffering that took place in them. Yet this interruption produces a feeling that calls for the institution of new universal normative values. For Adorno, this value is a purely negative command to act in such a way that Auschwitz does not repeat itself. For Lyotard, by contrast, it is the demand to invent new idioms that make it possible to find meaning in Auschwitz. [R, abr.]
72.3164 CHIN, Clayton —
This article provides a critical appraisal of the ontological method of political theorizing through an examination of the methodological development of the work of William E. Connolly. Connolly has often been taken as a paradigmatic figure of the ‘ontological turn’. This is not only because of the significance of his work in the field but because he is one of its major methodological articulators. However, there has been no systematic evaluation of that method and its development. This paper rectifies that lacuna by critically illustrating Connolly’s turn from a postpositivistic interpretivism to his much noted ‘onto-political method’. It argues that the latter, while usually thought to be modelled on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, is structured by Heidegger’s understanding of ontological difference. [R, abr.]
72.3165 DANSO, Kwaku ; ANING, Kwesi —
Deconstructing IR episteme acknowledges its generation of power imbalances in security knowledge that relegate African experiences to the margins of global politics. This article reflects on the ways in which IR and security studies have been responsible, in part, for the production of a racialized mode of security knowledge generation that obfuscates the security policies and experiences of people in African locales. It draws on insights from post-colonial discourses and the episteme of alternativity to explore how the study of events and processes in Africa in a theoretically conscious manner could advance IR scholarship as a whole. It contends that incorporating African experiences as they manifest through hybrid security orders can broaden the empirical base for IR theorizing about security since they offer another perspective outside the conventional western assumptions and experiences. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.3984]
72.3166 DeMARS, William E. —
After the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945, both nations experienced a profound need for a new and encompassing story of what it meant to be Japanese, and to be American, in the permanent nuclear age. This article is a thought experiment to juxtapose the writings and personas of two people who helped their respective societies answer those needs and questions during the early Cold War: Takashi Nagai — medical radiologist, and survivor of the American atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and Albert Wohlstetter — leading American civilian nuclear strategist for the RAND Corporation in the 1950s. Using a combination of mythopeic analysis, biography and illuminative juxtaposition, the study discovers surprising similarities and analogies between the two cases. [R, abr.]
72.3167 EDELSTEIN, Dan —
This essay reconsiders Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s debt to Jean Bodin, on the basis of Daniel Lee’s recent revision of Bodin as a theorist of popular sovereignty. It argues that Rousseau took a key feature of his own theory of democratic sovereignty from Bodin — namely, the dual identity of political members as both citizens and subjects of the state. It further makes the case that this dual identity originates in medieval corporatist law, which Bodin was summarizing. Finally, it demonstrates the lasting impact of corporatist law in eighteenth-century France, highlighting Rousseau’s direct borrowings from the corporatist language and logic of contemporary commercial societies. In this regard, the article revisits and updates Otto von Gierke’s classic argument about the origins of the state in corporatist thought. [R]
72.3168 El-JAICHI, Saer —
The burgeoning interest and research in the ideology of the Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), since the attacks of 11 September [2001], have been driven by one of the two goals: to demonstrate the crucial role of Qutb’s verdict upon all modern societies as ungodly (jahili) in shaping the worldview of militant Islamists, or, more specifically, to explore the extent of Qutb’s influence in shaping the takfiri rhetoric of late 20th-c. jihadists. Yet one aspect of Qutb’s verdict against modern societies that might explain the continuing appeal of his ideology to jihadists has received less attention in the literature: how the arguments Qutb employs in formulating this condemnation of modern societies as ungodly leads to a deterritorialization of jihad that explains his refusal to accept the traditional division of the world into “land of Islam” and “land of disbelief”. [R, abr.]
72.3169 FINCHELSTEIN, Federico —
Historians are often allergic to ideas of collective pathology. I do not disagree at all with these objections and concerns. And yet, this paper stresses the centrality of The Authoritarian Personality because in addition to its problematic pathologizing tendencies, it also poses important challenges to the history of fascism, especially in terms of the latter’s periodization and its intellectual history. In other words, it is time to think with and about The Authoritarian Personality in the context of studies on fascism. [R] [See Abstr. 72.3175]
72.3170 FIORINA, Morris —
The author reviews Lee Drutman’s book, Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy. While he agrees with much of Drutman’s diagnosis of what has gone wrong with American politics, Fiorina is skeptical that the reforms proposed in Drutman’s Save American Democracy Act could be adopted, and would have as positive an impact as Drutman believes in the unlikely event that they are adopted. [R]
72.3171 FUCHS, Christian —
Humanity has experienced an explosion of anti-humanism in the form of authoritarian capitalism, postmodern filter bubbles, and global problems. Marxist/Socialist Humanism is the proper answer to the deep crisis of humanity. In this context, this article asks ‘How can Cornel West’s works inform a contemporary Marxist humanist theory of society?’ Taking West’s works as a starting point, what are the key elements of a Marxist humanist theory of society? Cornel West is one of the leading critical intellectuals today. His work has fused anti-racist theory, Black Liberation Theology, Marxist theory, pragmatism, and existentialism. This article especially focuses on West’s understanding of humanism and culture. It shows how his works and praxis can inform the reinvigoration of Marxist Humanism in the age of authoritarian capitalism as a socialist response. [R, abr.]
72.3172 GANDESHA, Samir —
In opposition to the view, on the one hand, that suggestions that we are witnessing the rise of fascism are needlessly alarmist, and, on the other, that fascism is ubiquitous and coextensive with capitalism, Theodor W. Adorno understands fascism as neither decisively defeated in the Second World War, nor an all-pervasive reality. Rather, late capitalist societies evince fascist potential that, given the right concatenation of conditions, could re-emerge. As Adorno once argued, the real threat of fascism comes from within not from outside of capitalist or liberal democracy. In articulating such an assessment, Adorno offers an analysis that escapes the pitfalls of writers such as Corey Robin, who underestimates the threat, on the one hand, and those such as Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, for whom such a threat is all-pervasive, on the other. [R] [See Abstr. 72.3175]
72.3173 GIAMARIO, Patrick T. —
What good does determining laughter’s role in the polis do when the polis itself is to a large extent shaped by laughter? The essay argues that Kant’s aesthetic investigations of laughter in the Critique of Judgment and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View offer a much needed alternative to the normative discourse. Kant theorizes laughter as an intensely dialectical experience — at once an aesthetic judgment and an affect. Laughter in Kant enacts dissensus: it disrupts and transforms sensus communis, or the ways subjects see and hear the world in common that organize and structure a political community. The essay illustrates the advantages of a Kantian conception of the politics of laughter over the normative discourse by examining Dave Chappelle’s controversial 2019 stand-up comedy special Sticks & Stones. [R, abr.]
72.3174 GJERDE, Lars Erik Løvaas —
This text focuses on the mentalities and technologies of power employed by the Norwegian government as it attempts to control the Covid-19 pandemic. Utilizing governmentality studies and a Foucauldian discourse analysis, I find life itself to be given primacy within a biopolitical problem space where the government seeks to contain the spread of Covid-19. The government primarily rationalizes its exercises of power in a liberal manner while employing a complex set of liberal and coercive technologies, which it channels towards both the human population, which serves as an object of administration, and Covid-19, which serves as an object of domination. [R]
72.3175 GORDON, Peter E. —
I offer some thoughts on the problem of self-reflexivity in critical theory, with special attention to the way in which this problem is thematized in The Authoritarian Personality (1950). The problem of self-reflexivity is a defining feature of any social theory that means to account for the conditions of its own possibility within the society it describes. I argue that The Authoritarian Personality is less a study of distinctive and socially isolable personality “types” and more concerned with the rise of “conventionalism” as a generalized problem that afflicts all of modern society. By examining Adorno’s comments on the themes of realism and utopia and the distribution of these attributes between high-scorers and low-scorers, respectively, I offer one possible answer to this dilemma. [R, abr.] [First article of a thematic issue on “The Authoritarian Personality”, introduced by Robyn MARASCO, Christina GERHARDT, and Kirk WETTERS. See also Abstr. 72.3148, 3152, 3169, 3172, 3181, 3211]
72.3176 HARRIS, Ian —
This article alters the terms in which the early response to Reflections on the Revolution in France, the most important criticism of the revolution of 1789, can be understood. For over a century, commentators have thought in terms of pamphlets, and Burke has seemed isolated or eccentric. But Burke considered that his account of the English nation, a vital feature of his argument, had been ‘authenticated by the verdict of his country’ and ‘recognized by the body of the people’. The grounds for this unexpected view are identified here by turning from literary to institutional ways of responding, and by connecting institutions with a doctrine of representation, one which was basic to the Glorious Revolution and to the post-1688 constitution but which has not been treated in relation to them. Representation did not always entail election, and representatives included the monarch and the peers. England itself was understood in terms of corporate bodies and their relations. These bodies included nation, state and universities. [R, abr.]
72.3177 HATINA, Meir —
The Sudanese thinker Mahmud Muhammad Taha (d. 1985) was a bold advocate of Arab enlightenment, which he based on a synthesis of Sufism, democracy and socialism that in his view represented the ideal amalgamation of ethics, freedom, and equality. The model of Islam he sought to renew was the Islam of Mecca (612-622). In his view, the Meccan period advocated universal values such as justice, freedom and peace, and ought hence be revived. The Medinan period (622-632), which turned Islam into a religion of coercion and exploitation, needed to be abolished. Taha’s sharp division of the Qurʾan into two parts, one exalted and the other inferior, signified a total break with past legacies. His dismantling of the sacred in the name of humanity was intertwined with his deconstruction of Arab collective memory regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. [R, abr.]
72.3178 HOLLAND, Thomas James —
This article situates John Stuart Mill’s inheritance reform ideas during the first half of the nineteenth century within their ideological context. Recent interpretations of his egalitarian inheritance proposals have treated them as either: (1) the legacy of his early Benthamite indoctrination; or (2) indications of his interest in socialism. Through challenging these readings, an entirely new set of contexts in which to read Mill’s economic and political writings is reconstructed: first, the succession law debates in France, which spread to Britain during the 1820s; and second, the debate within British political economy over the constitutional role of a hereditary aristocracy. [R]
72.3179 HORKY, Phillip Sidney —
At the beginning of Republic 2 (358e-359b), Plato has Glaucon ascribe a social contract theory to Thrasymachus and ‘countless others’. This paper takes Glaucon’s description to refer both within the text to Thrasymachus’ views, and outside the text to a series of works, most of which have been lost, On Justice or On Law. It examines what is likely to be the earliest surviving work that presents a philosophical defence of law and justice against those who would prefer their opposites, On Excellence by an anonymous author usually referred to as ‘Anonymus Iamblichi’; the views on these topics among the Socratics, including Crito, Simon the Cobbler, Aristippus of Cyrene, and Antisthenes; and Socrates’ debate with Hippias ‘On Justice’ in Xenophon’s Memorabilia (4.4.5-25). Its main contention is that the ‘countless others’ referred to by Glaucon points chiefly, but not solely, to the members of the circle of Socrates, who themselves espoused a range of views on justice and law, and their relations. [R]
72.3180 IMMERMAN, Richard H. —
The author review essay of John Mueller’s The Stupidity of War assesses the arguments as insightful, compelling, and in the current international environment, essential reading. Yet he concludes that a final judgment on Mueller’s claims about America’s farcical US behavior throughout the Cold War and after requires answers to questions Mueller leaves unaddressed. [R]
72.3181 JAY, Martin —
Attempts to apply the methods and findings of The Authoritarian Personality [Th. . Adorno, 1950] to Chinese culture and politics reveal the limits of its cross-cultural reach. Additional qualms result from a consideration of the history of displacing the rhetoric of pathologization from medicine to psychology to society and finally to politics. Critical Theory’s warning against the subsumption of non-identical individuals under homogenizing categories is only partly answered by the claim that such a homogenization has already taken place in modern society. By labeling those whose politics we may disdain as suffering from personality disorders, we risk undermining any hope for the persuasive use of reason in a deliberative democracy. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.3175]
72.3182 JERBIĆ, Vedran —
The aim of this paper is to critically assess Quentin Skinner’s linguistic contextualism by using the perspective of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony. It strives to show that the theory of hegemony can offer a sort of middle way in the currently dominant discussion between so-called textualists and contextualists. By insisting on the strategic aspect of context in the interpretation of political discourses, Laclau and Mouffe are introducing a model of contextualization that does not follow traditional dichotomies between history and philosophy or particularity of context and universality of ideas. The strategic role of context would simultaneously represent a symptom of the deeper stratification of political language and meaning, and would function as a tool of the transformation of that very context. [R]
72.3183 KASIMIS, Demetra —
Does the Republic depict a conspiracy? The ostensible impetus for discussing profound political change behind closed doors is a desire to discuss the meaning of justice, not to replace a political order with a new one. But the dialogue takes place during the Peloponnesian War, when fears of plots sporadically consumed an eroding Athenian democracy. Arguments about political instability and instances of plotting reverberate throughout dialogue that takes shape in this suspicious climate. Whether Socrates makes us privy to a conversation about a political world that does not exist or presents us with a strategy for talking about revolution undetected remains unresolved. I argue that Athenian fears of secret power and revolution express themselves in the style and arguments of the Republic and suggest that critics like Plato were concerned with theorizing the subtleties of democratic erosion. [R, abr.]
72.3184 KATSAMBEKIS, Giorgos —
This article takes as its starting point the consensus among scholars regarding the core characteristics of populism, namely the centrality of ‘the people’ and an antagonistic view of society that pits the former against an elite. It suggests that the assumption found in the ideational approach, that populism constructs a homogeneous and morally pure people is problematic and may lead to analytical and normative bias, as it equates populism with anti-pluralism and illiberalism. The article surveys the language games involved in the construction of ‘the people’ in democratic modernity. It then reconstructs the key principles of the ideational and the discursive approaches to populism, highlighting how the latter offers a more robust framework for understanding how populism creates a sense of unity among heterogeneous demands, without necessarily resulting in homogeneity, while problematizing moral framings. [R, abr.]
72.3185 KENNY, Kate ; Niall Ó DOCHARTAIGH, —
What are the dominant framings by which public inquiries understand and analyze power dynamics in the events they examine? We draw on unique data from the Saville Inquiry into the killing of 13 people by British soldiers at a civil rights demonstration in Northern Ireland in 1972.Juxtaposing an analysis of the actions of senior military figures with the final Inquiry report, we show how an approach of ‘sufficient rationalization’ dominated a public inquiry’s conclusions, marginalizing and discounting important aspects. Emphasizing the local exercise of power and affective attachments, our article contributes an alternative approach to analyzing public inquiries. [R]
72.3186 KÖKERER, Can Mert —
In this paper, which is positioned at the intersection of political sociology and the sociology of art, I discuss the implications of political art at the local level. I show how analyzing an existing example of locally engaged political art would contribute to the comprehension of the relationship between art and politics in contemporary societies. I employ a single case study, Freetown Christiania, in order to reveal the role of local artistic engagement in bringing about political outcomes, and in particular, relative autonomy at the local level. Though this study is solely focused on one community which has emerged within a specific context and time, it provides a unique lens to describe the relevance and potential of locally engaged political art for broader society. I utilize Freetown Christiania as an example of Benjaminian and Brechtian utopia in order to showcase how their micro-level artistic engagement has brought about relative autonomy at the local level. [R, abr.]
72.3187 KWAK Jun-Hyeok —
This paper suggests the conception of the ‘political’ in Aristotle’s Politics as an alternative to the Hobbesian conception of the ‘political’. More specifically, I will develop two arguments in this paper. First, investigating Aristotle’s conception of the ‘political’ in the Politics, I will maintain that the ‘political’ rule (πολιτικὴ ἀρχή) is not a political ideal to be realised in the best possible regime but the necessary condition for making political life possible. Second, exploring ‘persuasion’ as the most imperative way in which a particular claim about justice may be justified in democratic deliberation, I will argue that in Aristotle’s conception of the political, democratic deliberation is not constrained by an architectonic political vision or a shared solidarity but guided by persuasion based on the fear of domination under which antagonistic contentions between citizens can contribute to making a tolerably good decision without empowering anyone who knows better. [R]
72.3188 LEE Mi-Kyoung —
In this paper I consider Aristotle’s solutions to two questions about justice and the laws: why think that obeying the law is just? And why think that doing what is just will promote one’s happiness? I analyze Aristotle’s solutions to these two problems in terms of four claims concerning the laws that come from Plato and underwrite Aristotle’s optimism about the potential for politikê epistêmê to issue in laws which are objectively correct. [R]
72.3189 LIGIO, Giulio De —
This essay approaches the issue of our “divided city” by way of an examination of the thinkers of the Italian School — Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto and Roberto Michels. Better known as “the neo-Machiavellians,” they aimed at a rigorously scientific understanding of social composition and change. Central to their findings was the so-called “iron law of oligarchy.” No society, modern democracy included, can escape the reality of the rule of the few. This essay argues that their scientific methodologies and generalized laws necessarily precluded them from understanding the main alternatives of political life and what is essentially at stake in human history. Paradoxically, their perspective ends up being unable to judge the changing relations between elites and peoples. [R, abr.]
72.3190 LIZÁRRAGA, Fernando —
In the face of various objections to egalitarianism, this article examines Edward Bellamy’s insightful rebuttal to the principle of self-ownership. The main purpose is to make sense of Bellamy’s egalitarianism rather than mounting a full-fledged critique against one of the key concepts of libertarianism. I present the principle of self-ownership and Bellamy’s early objections, encompassing arguments based on fraternity as a social duty and the right to life as prior to the right to property. Second, I analyze Bellamy’s conception of talents as a common asset and his outright condemnation of self-ownership as a ‘fraudulent principle’, because it allows those with better natural and social endowments to take advantage in the economic domain. Third, I tease out the egalitarian dismissal of material incentives. [R, abr.]
72.3191 MAGALHÃES, Pedro T. —
This article analyzes the role played by the concept of nation in the interwar writings of Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) and Eric Voegelin (1901-1985). It contends that, although these conservative thinkers were drawn in different ways to the anti-progressive potential of nationalist ideas, the center of their political and theoretical horizons in that period is occupied by the problems of political unity and authority. Therefore, their nationalism is fundamentally determined by, and instrumental to, their adherence to a monistic and authoritarian conception of the state. This, in turn, leads them to embrace, though not without some reservations, the solutions put forward by the emergent far-right ‘strongmen’ to the interwar crisis of liberal democracy. Each author tested in his own way the porous borders between conservatism, nationalism, and fascism — a topic whose scholarly and political relevance is far from being exhausted. [R]
72.3192 MARCHAND, Stéphane —
The aim of this paper is to determine how a Pyrrhonian (as she/he is described by Sextus Empiricus) considers the Law and can respond to Aristocles’ objection that a Pyrrhonian is unable to obey laws. First (1), we analyze the function of the Law in the 10th Mode of Aenesidemus, in order to show laws as a dogmatic source of value. But (2) Sextus shows also that the Sceptic can live in a human society by following laws and customs, according to so-called ‘sceptical conformism’. In the light of Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes (Pyr.) 1.23–24 and Against the Mathematicians (Math.) 11.162–164, I discuss the validity of the label ‘conformism’ in order to understand the nature of the political effect of the suspension of judgement. (3) The real nature of the political position of Pyrrhonian Scepticism – that lack of commitment does not mean indifference to politics but rather a criticism of fanaticism and praise for political cautiousness – appears by comparison with the Scepticism of the New Academy. [R]
72.3193 McCORMICK, William —
The investigations of Carl Schmitt yielded an influential but partial recovery of the term “political theology.” In this article, I consider Schmitt’s tendentious reduction of political theology to a justifying or legitimizing function. I then turn to Aquinas to demonstrate that Christian political theology also offers robust criticism of political life. After laying out three such standards for criticism, I account for why Christian political theology exhibits this deep ambivalence toward political life. The traditions of political theology, I argue, can be understood as attempts to harmonize polar tensions with those traditions. Whereas thinkers like Schmitt and Foucault emphasize one set of polarities against another, Aquinas effects a genuine synthesis. This synthesis should be the task of political theology. I close with notes toward the renewal of political theology. [R]
72.3194 MITHEN, Nicholas —
Machiavelli is often characterized as a radical political thinker. This essay doesn’t challenge this view directly, but approaches Machiavelli’s originality through a new lens by considering the role of moderation in his political thought. Drawing upon The Prince, the Discourses and The History of Florence, it treats moderation as a binding principle with which to tie together Machiavelli’s views on prudence, the via di mezzo, and the model of well-regulated political order. Machiavellian moderation emerges as a dynamic means of managing forces of discord without insisting upon neutrality or passive compromise. [R]
72.3195 MURR, Dimitri EL —
One of the main philosophical outcomes of Plato’s Statesman is to define statesmanship as a prescriptive (epitactic) form of knowledge, exercising control over subordinate tekhnai Against a widespread scholarly view according to which the Statesman offers a radically critical view of laws, this paper argues that the art of legislation (nomothetikē) has pride of place among these subordinate arts which also include rhetoric, strategy, the art of the judge and education. [R]
72.3196 NEDIĆ, Tomislav —
The work offers an interpretive analysis and reception of Cicero’s claim about the imperative supremacy of welfare and salvation of the people (salus populi suprema lex esto), made in the third book of Cicero’s Laws. This statement is only a piece of the “puzzle” of Cicero’s reflections on government laws, largely focused on the reparation and survival of the Roman Republic, the historical context of which displays many adversities afflicting its integrity. First of all, it is necessary to offer an interpretive overview of Cicero’s claim about the supremacy of welfare and salvation of the people and the Republic in the historical context of the Roman political and legal circumstances, in order to gain a complete insight into the reception of the claim, especially in legal doctrine and practice. The actuality of Cicero’s claim in the form of constitutional provisions (Art. 16, 17 and 101 of the Constitution of the Republic of Croatia) on states of emergency and crisis has particular relevance against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also for some new controversies, as demonstrated by the case study of recent decisions taken by the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Croatia. [R]
72.3197 NICOLAY, René DE —
Plato’s pronouncements about political freedom in the Laws have sparked renewed interest in the literature. The present paper takes a new angle on that vexed question. It focusses on Plato’s account of the birth of unlawful freedom, or ‘theatrocracy’, at the end of book 3. By studying the transition from moderate to excessive freedom, it wishes to shed light on what sets the two apart. The paper provides a causal analysis of the key passage (700a3-701c2), suggesting four compatible and complementary explanations for the process it describes. The first is presented as the main one, but it is made more likely by the addition of the three others. [R]
72.3198 O’MEARA, Dominic J. —
This paper surveys the conceptions of law and of legislation to be found in the philosophy of Julian the Emperor. A hierarchy of levels of law is described, going from transcendent divine orders and paradigmatic laws down to the laws of nature, laws innate in human souls and regional laws. Julian’s ideal legislator is discussed, as inspired by transcendent, paradigmatic laws and as subordinate to law and its protector. An example of Julian’s legislation is discussed. Attention is paid to Julian’s use of Plato’s Republic, Statesman, and Laws. [R]
72.3199 PAIĆ, Žarko —
In the article, the author analyzes Carl Schmitt’s book The Nomos of the Earth by asking how, after the nation-state era and the collapse of European imperialism, which was also the starting point of Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, the conditions for the possibility of political action are established, since this action no longer has for its existential space the idea of rootedness in the nation as a state with mechanisms for the protection of sovereignty with the help of legislative, executive and judicial power enshrined in the constitution. Power is not just a state-social logic of managing a fixed space and a limited nationstate territory, as was customary from the 18th c. in Europe until the end of World War I. Schmitt in the second period of his philosophical and legal thought, formally and substantively after the end of World War II, saw the political and politics as the universal geopolitics of the “large space” (Grossraum). [R, abr.]
72.3200 RODRÍGUEZ-FONTANLA, Elena R. —
The aim of this article is to analyze pluralism that runs transversally through John Gray’s political thought, a British theorist whose work occupies a relevant position in the field of contemporary political theory. To this end, the more intellectual and non-ideological side of his thought is here examined; in other words, his works focused on political theorizing. Firstly, it is analyzed how Gray defines values pluralism on the basis of three interrelated ideas: plurality, incommensurability and impossibility of rational resolution of values conflicts. Secondly, it is examined the connection between value pluralism and Gray’s political proposal. On the one hand, the article focuses on his “negative” criticism of liberalism and communitarianism, as well as his more or less explicit defense of multiculturalism. On the other hand, the article examines Gray’s “positive” political theory, as it is reflected in his proposal of modus vivendi, which displays some sort of ambiguity as a consequence of his double understanding of value pluralism both as descriptive and normative. [R, abr.]
72.3201 SAUVÉ MEYER, Susan —
In Book 3 of Plato’s Laws, we read that a legislator must aim to endow the polis with a trio of properties: freedom, wisdom, and internal friendship (philia). This paper explores what such freedom consists in, with a focus on the so-called doctrine of the mixed constitution. It argues that such freedom is a constitutional matter; that it is not to be identified with ‘voluntary servitude to the laws’ cultivated by persuasive preludes to the laws; nor is it the rational self-control essential to virtuous character, or citizens’ ability to decide and act for themselves; nor is it a restriction on the size of individual political authority. Rather, it is a freedom based on equality: a polis is free to the extent that its constitution mitigates the inherent inequality between rulers (archontes) and ruled archomenoi), between those who wield political authority and those who are subject to that authority. [R]
72.3202 SCHILLINGER, Daniel —
Contemporary authorities invoke luck to explain the arbitrariness of economic success, to emphasize our shared vulnerability to disaster, and to urge more generous policy, legislation, and governance. According to Robert Frank, Martha Nussbaum, and Ronald Dworkin, for example, extreme bad luck can befall individuals no matter what they know or do. By redefining luck as a psychological phenomenon (rather than as a constitutive principle of the world), this article challenges the contemporary consensus. My approach to luck arises out of my engagement with the political thought of Thucydides. Whereas influential interpreters present Thucydides as a witness to the crushing power of bad luck, and whereas they criticize Thucydides’ Pericles for being insufficiently deferential to luck, I revisit and defend Pericles’ skeptical and psychological approach to luck, and I argue that Thucydides shares this approach, at least in the main. [R, abr.]
72.3203 SCHOFIELD, Malcolm —
The relation between the opening section of Plato’s Laws and Xenophon’s Constitution of the Lacedaemonians usually goes unnoticed. This paper draws attention to its importance for understanding Plato’s project in the dialogue. It has three sections. In the first, it will be shown that the view proposed by Plato’s Athenian visitor that Lycurgus made virtue in its entirety the goal of his statecraft was anticipated in Xenophon’s treatise. It has to be treated as an interpretation of the Spartan politeia, alternative to that advanced by Cleinias and Megillus, and accepted by (for example) Aristotle, which Plato could expect or at any rate hope to be taken seriously as such. In the second, the argument will focus on the contents of the legislative programme the Athenian says he had hoped to hear Cleinias ascribe to the Cretan and Spartan lawgivers. The case will be made that Plato can expect recognition by the reader (as by the Athenian’s interlocutors) that the programme is properly Spartan and Cretan by virtue of its echoes of the programme attributed to Lycurgus by Xenophon. [R, abr.]
72.3204 SIGALET, Geoffrey —
Rainer Knopff’s scholarship on Canadian constitutionalism has offered some of the most trenchant criticism of the exercise of judicial review under the Charter, yet his theory has largely been misunderstood. This article exposes two prominent critiques of Knopff’s constitutional writings as straw man arguments and provides a republican account of his constitutional theory. The first straw man argument is that Knopff supports a majoritarian or populist conception of direct democracy. This claim is belied by Knopff’s embrace of representative democracy and institutions structured to encourage reflexive deliberation. The second straw man argument is that Knopff is a moral rights skeptic. Knopff’s rights skepticism is a legal skepticism about the determinacy of many rights that is merely a function of his inclusive legal positivism. [R, abr.]
72.3205 SMITH, William —
Deliberative democracy is underpinned by ideological preferences that lend unity to an otherwise diverse theoretical paradigm. It is, in particular, shaped by concepts and values associated with liberalism and social democracy, which inform its political goal of embedding deliberative reforms in existing systems of representative democracy. At the same time, practices associated with deliberative democracy are emerging in very different contexts to those envisaged by deliberative democrats. An upshot of this is that deliberative democracy is increasingly undergoing a process of contestation, whereby alternative ideologies revise and rearticulate its core ideas. This article focuses on anarchist deliberation, analyzed here as a form of collective organization forged by successive generations of radical activists and underpinned by core values of anarchist ideology. [R, abr.]
72.3206 STEELE, Brent J. —
This article appraises Professor Rumelili’s important central focus on anxiety by broadening the scope of the challenges the age of anxiety poses. With reference to recent events, such as the covid-19 pandemic and authoritarian politics, it argues that practices and strategies once thought to alleviate anxiety are now resources for it. The article concludes by calling for scholars to consider the possibility of anxiety as a structural feature of global politics, and organising our theoretical interventions, analyses, and politics around that constitutive feature. Ontological security, therefore, proves more elusive than ever before. [R] [See Abstr. 72.3207]
72.3207 SUBOTIĆ, Jelena ; EDJUS, Filip —
This symposium is a follow-up to the 2019 CEEISA/ISA conference ‘International Relations in the Age of Anxiety’ held at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Belgrade, Serbia, in June 2019. The central piece in the symposium is the keynote address by Bahar Rumelili on the untapped potential of existentialism in IR followed by highly engaged responses by Felix Berenskötter, Karl Gustafsson, Brent Steele and Andreja Zevnik. In this introduction we first describe the context in which we organised the conference and our motivations to choose the topic of the age of anxiety. We also reflect on how the global pandemic, which erupted in January 2020, made our topic more relevant than ever before. We then briefly introduce each piece and discuss what we see as the key questions they raise. [R] [Introduction to the symposium on anxiety. See Abstr. 72.3206, 3215, 3988, 4033]
72.3208 TEMIN, David Myer —
I reconstruct the writings of the Oneida thinker and activist Laura Cornelius Kellogg (1880-1947). I contend that Kellogg offers a political theory of “decolonial-democracy,” which challenged settler-imperial domination by bringing together a project of Indigenous self-determination with reimagined democratic narratives, values, and institutions. The first and second sections place Kellogg in pan-Indigenous debates within the Society of American Indians and among non-Indigenous Progressive reformers, in order to show how she brings together a pan-Indigenous and social-democratic critique of American democracy. The third section interprets her landmark 1920 pamphlet Our Democracy and the American Indian as a counter-narrative of the American founding read through the disavowed influence of the Haudenosaunee confederacy, a return to which she casts as a basis for democratic and Indigenous renewal. [R, abr.]
72.3209 TENNYSON, Timothy T. —
I examine Cicero’s use of Romulus as a historical exemplum in support of his theory of the ideal statesman. I compare Cicero’s characterization of Romulus in De Republica to the Romulus accounts advanced in Livy’s History of Rome and Dionysius’ Roman Antiquities to better understand the character and composition of this historical exemplum. An examination of Livy’s and Dionysius’ more comprehensive Romulus accounts reveals Cicero’s omission of character traits and actions that contradict his stateman ideal. By crafting an image of Romulus that largely conflicts with his portrayal in the collective cultural memory, Cicero attempts to re-shape the ‘traditional’ archetype of Roman statesmanship. [R]
72.3210 VAN LEEUWEN, Bart —
This paper [argues] that urban justice is a field of political philosophy in its own right, and that the recognition-theoretical approach is capable of expressing what is at stake there. A revised version of Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition meets the three desiderata of a theory of urban justice: relationality, spatiality and diversity. Ultimately, what is at stake is to articulate a vision of the city as an embodiment of human space; a space that is structured in such a way that it meets the demands for recognition. The paper tests if the framework is capable of expressing the key moral challenges of two justice-related issues of contemporary cities, namely, segregation and gentrification. [R, abr.]
72.3211 WEIGEL, Moira —
This essay reframes the significance of The Authoritarian Personality study for the “fascism debates” and for the rapidly growing field of research on digitally mediated right-wing movements by rereading Theodor Adorno as a theorist of algorithms. Positing that the advent of “the society of algorithms” has transformed the nature of both authoritarianism and of personality, it returns to two empirical texts where Adorno analyzes two methods of classification and prediction: the “Types and Syndromes” chapter of The Authoritarian Personality, and Adorno’s content-analysis of the Los Angeles Times astrology column, Stars Down to Earth. On the basis of these texts, this essay formulates some initial hypotheses about certain widely observed changes in the character of the right and sketches a program for a critical data science inspired by Adorno’s “critical typology” that could undertake further investigation. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.3175]
72.3212 WOLF, Jacob C. J. —
This essay argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson is America’s prophet of expressive individualism — foreseeing, and calling into being, a new understanding of the individual. Far from being a defender of the intellectual status quo, Emerson was a moral revolutionary — and his Self-Reliance is not a restatement of the Protestant ethic before him, but a repudiation of it. Emerson sought to replace the older, more-constrained forms of individualism with a new, “expressive” form of individualism, premised on the innate goodness of the individual (rather than on an individual’s sinful nature). Whereas his forebears thought the human person was elevated through participation in institutions and through submission to social and moral rules, Emerson believed such attachments nothing more than chains upon human individuality. [R, abr.]
72.3213 YOUNG, Matthew H. —
Despite a recent renewed focus on the historical and theological justifications for toleration, few scholars have examined the positive uses of eschatological rhetoric in fuelling a commitment to religious liberty. The early modern thinker Roger Williams, however, advanced a distinctly eschatological conception of church-state relations to defend the practice of religious toleration in Rhode Island. Drawing on works by Thomas Helwys and John Murton, Williams articulates a millenarian ethos of toleration characterized by patience and hope. This important, though neglected, dimension of Williams’ political theology sheds light on the relationship between apocalypticism, eschatology and religious toleration. [R]
72.3214 ZEITLIN, Samuel Garrett —
The present article analyzes John Rawls’s advocacy of judicial review via a close reading of Rawls’s discussions of his “principles of paternalism” and his “four-stage sequence” in A Theory of Justice (1971). The article surveys Rawls’s political “principles of paternalism,” the limits, checks, and constraints he imposes on majority rule and civic participation, and finally the role Rawls assigns to courts, judges, and judicial review within his political conception of justice. Following upon this survey, this article contends that the particular relations of supremacy and domination (Herrschafts-Verhältnisse) at which Rawls’s political thought aims are judicial or juridical — the supremacy of judges over citizens, of courts over legislatures, and of the judiciary over participatory politics. [R]
72.3215 ZEVNIK, Andreja —
Anxiety is a politically charged and socially potent phenomenon. Scholars, politicians and activists often describe our present times as the ‘age of anxiety’. Anxiety permeates emotional or affective experiences, sets in motion temporal particularities, and creates distinct governing logics. Anxiety — in social sciences and international relations — is often linked with affect. By mobilising the distinction between anxiety as affect and anxiety as experience Rumelili points out that anxiety is different from fear. If fear arises from identifiable objects, then anxiety is a reaction to something which cannot be located. I engage with the transformative potential that the experience of anxiety might have for how we conceive of political action. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis I outline the role of anxiety as a structural force in the constitution of the subject before exploring its broader socio-political significance. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 72.3207]
72.3216
A symposium. Introduction by John von HEYKING. Articles by Tilo SCHABERT, “Truth against arrogance: insights and eclipse, investigation and insights again”, pp. 206-208; Thomas HEILKE, “‘Religion’ and the human thing”, pp. 209-215. Response, pp. 216-217, by Barry COOPER.
72.3217
A symposium. Introduction, pp. 218-223, by John von HEYKING. Articles by James GREENAWAY, “David Walsh’s The Sacramentality of the Person”, pp. 224-228; Veronica ROBERTS OGLE, “David Walsh, The Priority of the Person: Political, Philosophical and Historical Discoveries”, pp. 229-232; S. F. McGUIRE, “The paradox of the person as the paradox of modernity”, pp. 233-235; Jonathan WENSVEEN, “Recovering the person: a review of David Walsh’s The Priority of the Person: Political, Philosophical, and Historical Discoveries, pp. 236-239. Response by David WALSH, pp. 240-246.
72.3218
A Symposium. Introduction by Jillian SCHWEDLER, pp. 29-31. Articles by Adria LAWRENCE, “Acting As If: Dramatics, Deception, and the Production of State Power”, pp. 32-35; James C. SCOTT, “Lisa Wedeen: appreciations and queries”, pp. 36-39; Elisabeth Jean WOOD, “Implications of Wedeen’s Ambiguities of Domination for the analysis of political violence”, pp. 40-43; Christian DAVENPORT, “The Art of Keeping the People in Line: Lisa Wedeen’s Ambiguities of Domination after 20 Years”, pp. 44-47; Amaney A. JAMAL, “Ambiguities of Domination: 20 years later and we are still not getting it right”, pp. 48-51; Robyn MARASCO, “On the uses and abuses of weber for comparative political science”, pp. 52-55;and Lisa WEDEEN’s response, pp. 56-60.