Righteous Resistance: Clausewitz's Political Theory of Defence

“There Is Another Kingdom”:On The Politics of Virtue Tracey Rowland John Milbank’s and Adrian Pabst’s The Politics of Virtue could be described as the theo-political analogue to Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier, Blake’s Jerusalem, and Sir Cecil Spring Rice’s I Vow to Thee my Country all rolled into one. It pulls no punches and is unashamedly in favor of aristocratic and monarchical forms of government, as well as the establishment of the Church of England. God, Queen, and Country Anglicans who read it are likely to recall the words of Simeon’s prayer upon the presentation of the Christ-child: Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine, secundum verbum tuum in pace: Quia viderunt oculi mei salutare tuum; Quod parasti ante faciem omnium populorum: Lumen ad revelationem gentium, et gloriam plebis tuae Israel. Another way to describe it would be a twenty-first-century Tory manifesto or “Blue Labor” handbook. (The difference between the British political classifications “Red Tory” and “Blue Labor” seems to be more a matter of class identity than substantive policy preference). Whether one is an aristocrat with a strong sense of noblesse oblige—that is, a Red or Turquoise Tory (turquoise is red combined with green ecological interests)—or a person from a lowlier social position who appreciates the value of an aristocratic element within the social order—a Blue Labor type—the same substantive political positions can be arrived at assuming a common Christian intellectual foundation. The Politics of Virtue is therefore in the genre of works that offer a critique of liberal political theory from a Christian perspective. It [End Page 1337] shares something of the flavor of Alasdair MacIntyre’s many publications on the subject, especially the need to reclaim virtue and unmask the confidence tricks and coercive character of liberal ideology. However, where MacIntyre and others have been criticized for offering no alternative to the present liberal political order other than building more monasteries, home schooling children, out-breeding liberals, and praying for another St. Benedict or Joseph Ratzinger (all reasonable strategies in my judgment), Milbank and Pabst have dared to offer some concrete proposals about the structure of political institutions, as well as offering a robust defense of a Christian commonwealth where both politics and economics are rooted in virtuous practices. While a wave of communitarian and specifically Catholic criticisms of liberalism began to be published in the 1980s, often in response to John Rawls’s liberal classic A Theory of Justice (1971), at a time when it seemed as though the end-of-history theorists and a chorus of neoconservative Catholics might be right about the triumph of liberalism, and hence the enthusiasm (especially among American Catholics) to quickly baptise it, Milbank’s and Pabst’s book comes after the outbreak of Islamic terrorism in 2001 and the financial crisis of 2008. They note that both of these events “exposed the limitations of the two liberalisms that have dominated Western politics for the last half-century: the social-cultural liberalism of the left since the 1960s and the economic-political liberalism of the right since the 1980s.”1 The social-cultural liberalism of the left and the economic-political liberalism of the right share the same starting position of a merely negative conception of liberty. A negative conception of liberty is about “freedom from” something, rather than “freedom for” something. This negative liberty rests on two pillars: “a procedural, formalistic conception of justice and an instrumental notion of reason.”2 The combined result is that “individuals are proclaimed ‘autonomous’ when all the while they are subjected to the instrumental logic of bureaucratic control and commercial exchange.”3 Worse yet, “the scale of self-worth that the individual is encouraged to adopt is the [End Page 1338] very same scale by which she is subjected to mass manipulation.”4 The “double paradox at the heart of liberalism” is therefore the “relentless privatisation of the public sphere and yet the ever-greater invasion of the private sphere, coupled with an oppressive moralism masquerading as liberal impartiality and procedural fairness.”5 Milbank and Pabst strongly affirm the judgment of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek...

Forgotten Virtues

This dissertation claims that Fenelon's political theory is ontologically instead of epistemologically based. His political theory is a moral theory of civic virtue. The ontological focus places the emphasis of his theory on the question of why and how individuals relate and contribute to civic society. This means that inner atonement of independency and dependency is a key to civic society and determination of free will, a connection Rousseau made at a later date. Fenelon does not approach this question from the standpoint of duty or obligation. He claims that the goodness of human nature has the potential of unselfish civic virtue. This goodness is perfected when the motives of action do not end in the self. It is the role of civic education, particularly through the example of words and deeds of those who hold political authority, to inculcate unselfishness. The viability and flourishing of civic society depend upon character development toward unselfishness. Because unselfish members do what they should because they want to do it, there is harmony between the individual and his tendency toward association. There is personal ownership of consciousness and action toward the well being of others. Fenelon's political theory is based on the principle of disinterestedness, a theological term with a rich history in Christian contemplative mysticism. Disinterestedness refers to detachment from selfish interest in sense based, emotional, or temporal acquisitiveness in favor seeking the welfare of others. Indifference to a person's actions stems from his motives. For Fenelon, love is the will's determining motive toward action. Motives vary on a spectrum from interest that is mercenary, or selfish, to that which is purely unselfish. All humans are capable of perfectibility toward unselfishness during temporal life, and social improvement is possible. Fenelon's concept of love provides an alternative to the seventeenth century Jansenist focus on human corruptibility, although Fenelon concedes the influences of social corruption. His concept of disinterestedness brought to a head the question of whether happiness has anything to do with interest. Because he maintains that personal happiness, satisfaction of desire, and utility are not factors in the concept of interest, he detaches happiness from the motive of ethical action. Fenelon's theory of property is a primary example of disinterestedness in his political theory. Fenelon's voluntaristic theory of free will is also crucial to his moral and political thought. Unfettered will determines itself with the impressions of reason, senses, emotions, and experience with that which incorporates all being, Infinite Goodness. Fenelon maintains the Cartesian distinction between the mind and the body. He also maintains Descartes's distinction between la pensa and la volonta. However, Fenelon expands Descartes's concept of will by incorporating influences of Christian contemplative mysticism. Here, Fenelon shifts from epistemology to ontology. The primary source of experience in the will is ontological and is not limited by what reason can ascertain about infinity. Morality stems from the fact that experience is relational. Good will is what is most perfect in man, and the will can experience its goodness only when it is creative and free of encumbrance, including limits of reason. The basis of the morally good will is ontological. The idea of union as Infinite Goodness is the basis of Fenelon's system of ethics One of the goals of this dissertation is to explain the role of language and rhetoric in Fenelon's theology and politics of virtue. Because moral value and inspiration are integral parts of phenomenological being, persuasiveness has a role in inculcating the spirit of association. Through rhetoric, persuasiveness has a vital role in communication within the polis. Rhetorical language is the means of communication among political beings. When moral value is identified as caring for others, rhetoric is the language of civic virtue and education. Civic education of disinterested virtue beckons individuals to bond unselfishly This dissertation uniquely provides an ontological explanation that connects the dots between Fenelon's metaphysics, theology, moral theory, and political theory. It also provides a strong foundation for further research.

This chapter introduces the politics of virtue and virtù. It identifies virtue theories of politics as theories that displace conflict, identify politics with administration, and treat juridical settlement as the task of politics and political theory. According to virtue theorists of politics, the world and self are not resistant to but enabled by their favored conceptions of order and subjectivity. Meanwhile, virtù theories of politics refer to theories that see politics as a disruptive practice that resists the consolidations and closures of administrative and juridical settlement for the sake of the perpetuity of political contest. The chapter looks into the perspectives of Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, Michael Sandel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Hannah Arendt.

This paper was given as an Inaugural Lecture for Chichele Professorship of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University on May 3, 2012. Political theorists study (1) political virtue, (2) political processes and institutions, and (3) political ideals (like justice, liberty, and equality). Since time of Hume, Madison, and Kant, it has been thought that (2) is more important than (1), because maybe we can set up institutions that work for general good whatever state of virtue of people who administer them. But in revival of political philosophy heralded by John Rawls's book in 1971, there has been great emphasis on (3) and not nearly enough emphasis on (2). This is particularly true in UK. Previous holders of Chichele chair (G.A. Cohen and Isaiah Berlin) focused almost exclusively on (3) -- with Berlin going so far as to announce that political philosophy was really just study of the ends of life. The lecture argues that this way of conceiving subject-matter of Chichele chair is at best one-sided.The lecture argues for a reorientation of political theory teaching and scholarship back towards institutions -- particularly normative evaluation of various aspects of political process and detailed theoretical exploration of institutional principles like democracy, representation, bicameralism, rule of law, separation of powers, federalism and so on. It argues that these issues should not be left to empirical or comparative politcial science, because they raise important and complex questions of evaluation -- including dignitary evaluation -- that may be sold short by pragmatic and consequentialist emphasis of empirical and comparative work. But political theory should respect empirical study of institutions more than it does, and it should dovetail normative and evaluative work that political theory involves with understanding of institutions, processes, and practices that political science generates.

The Prospect of Pragmatic Confucian Democracy: Reply to Dryzek, Macedo, Ackerly, and Li

Two paradoxes constitute the discourse of human rights. One concerns the relationship between “the human” and “the political”; the other invokes the opposition between the universalist moral character of human rights and the practical, particular context in which they become manifest. This chapter argues how and why these paradoxes will not go away – a good thing, too – over and against classical and contemporary writers who have argued for the priority of one or the other. After elucidating the powerful and enduring character of these paradoxes in history and political theory, I argue that human rights discourse only makes sense in terms of the arguably more primary discourses of democracy, political virtue, and justice if it is to avoid being a deceptive, rhetorical cover for dubious political practices.

Acknowledgements Introduction Concepts of Virtue before 1745 Sociable Virtue and the Rose of Secular Morality, 1745-1754 Virtue and Radical Political Theory: Rousseau and Mably Making the Man of Virtue, 1755-1770 The Virtuous King: A Rhetoric Transformed The Maupeou Crisis and the Rose of Patriotic Virtue, 1770-1775 The Triumph of Virtue, 1774-1788 Conclusion: Virtue and the Creation of Revolutionary Politics Index

The first goal of the chapter is to establish that Montesquieu was as much a moral philosopher as a political theorist, as is revealed in numerous discourses, dissertations and dialogues only recently translated into English. His purpose in writing The Spirit of the Laws, he remarked in his “Preface,” was to provide reasons for loving one’s “duties” while encouraging readers to “practice the general virtue that includes love of all.” In a discarded fragment of his “Preface” he even termed his work “a treatise on morality.” A second goal of the chapter is to establish that Montesquieu was critical of the political virtue he attributed to the republics of antiquity and to explain that the grounds for his rejection of Lycurgus’ Sparta have not previously been sufficiently explained. And, finally, the chapter analyses why Montesquieu strongly preferred the principle of honor motivating monarchical subjects, as compared to the political virtue of the ancients, which he likened to the hardships monks endure. Most revealing is his remark in a text Robespierre unfortunately failed to heed that “even virtue is in need of limits.”

A professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and one of the leading lights of the Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Ferguson was a distinct voice in the eighteenth‐century debate on the effects of civilization on the social and political virtues. His call to restore the classical spirit of patriotism, while cautiously embracing progress, paved a middle course between the modern outlook of David Hume and Adam Smith, and the romantic primitivism of Jean‐Jacques Rousseau. Long admired by sociologists, Ferguson's writings have recently been rediscovered by intellectual historians and political theorists, who have been fascinated by the timeliness of his critical observations on the emerging liberal order.

What would a phenomenology of justice look like and what role would mercy play in that account? The unruly experiences and lives of the individuals and communities wrapped up in the dramas of justice are paradoxically distant from legal and philosophical reasoning, laundered by rules of evidence for the instrumental exigencies of the former, and frequently effaced by the disciplinary conventions of the latter. One casualty of these habits of reflection is our understanding of the role of mercy in the experience of justice. Wanting to recapture space to imagine the role of mercy in justice, this paper makes an exploratory turn to a world consumed with representing the messy experience of justice and still thick with the language of mercy – to the poetic and narrative world created in the Book of Jonah. Drawing inspiration from a close reading of this mythic tale, I argue that mercy is an essential feature of the phenomenological architecture of justice, requiring us, as it does, to connect abstract judgment with the complexities and exigencies of our concrete conditions. Though distant from contemporary legal and political theory, I argue that mercy in fact remains an uncanny aspect of our experience of justice and so demands a political and legal scholarship that spends as much time reflecting on the sources and nature of mercy as a political virtue, as it does on the demands of reason and the dictates of law alone.

Thomas Hobbes had a deep and, to some extent, controversial relationship with both the classics and the classical world. At the beginning of his career as a political thinker, for example, he translated from Greek into English the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. Despite this initial involvement, the philosopher subsequently stopped translating, although, several decades later, in the final period of his life, he decided to return to this activity, translating the Iliad and the Odyssey, apparently for his own amusement, nothing more. However, recent literature has suggested that these works, as in the case of his translation of Thucydides’s work, hid another motive: he wanted to continue spreading his political thought in a period when he no longer able to do it in the usual way because of old age, illness, and, above all, censorship. By offering a comparison of the original Greek texts and Hobbes’s translations, this essay aims to show how he handled the political elements of the Iliad and the Odyssey that did not fit his political theory and ran the risk of undermining his attempt to teach moral and political virtue. It focuses in particular on the political question of overlapping sovereignties, with a view to explaining some systematic uses of translation choices that clearly deviate from the Greek.

Reviewed by: Platonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity Peter Lautner Dominic J. O'Meara . Platonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xi, 249. $55.00. ISBN 0-19-925758-2. It is quite difficult to give a detailed account of the political theories of the Neoplatonists. In his book, O'Meara attempts to trace down these theories, and he makes it clear that they must have played a subservient role within the whole body of philosophy. Their role was to contribute to the divinization of man. He emphasizes that Neoplatonic schools attracted many aristocrats and high government officials, taking it as evidence for the influence of Neoplatonism in political spheres. In Iamblichus' curriculum, students had the opportunity to discuss practical sciences when reading the Alcibiades Major and the Gorgias. The interest in such theories is evidenced by the fact that we know of sixteen commentaries on the Republic, Alcibiades Major, Gorgias, and Laws, as well as oral lectures on these dialogues. The proper politician is the sage who descends to the cave with the aim of helping the captives to get rid of their bonds. To reach that goal, however, what kind of activity is he supposed to display? The distinction between legislative and judicial parts of Platonic political science is informative. The eschatological myths in Plato's dialogues were taken to illustrate the latter. Inclusion of this sort of penology in the themes of political philosophy signals how great the divergence was between Neoplatonic political theories and their counterparts in Plato and Aristotle. An important lesson is that Proclus constructed a model for the three levels of political reform and tied it to the three levels of demiurgy. This hierarchy of divine models was used to illustrate the ideal "city of gods" of the Republic, the second best city of the Laws, and the third best city. Proper emphasis has been given to the effort by Boethius to express political structures in terms of mathematical ratios. Three constitutional structures are related to the three kinds of mathematical proportion: oligarchy to arithmetical proportion, aristocracy to harmonic proportion, and democracy to geometric proportion. Boethius' sources must have been as much Platonic as Pythagorean. The last part of the book focuses on the influence of Neoplatonic political thinking on Christian and Muslim authors. Eusebius and, to a lesser extent, the anonymous author of the dialogue On Political Science took over many elements, while the Augustine of the City of God rejected it altogether. Al-Farabi was also familiar with many Neoplatonic theses on politics, as his Perfect State shows. O'Meara refers to a dispute on the purpose of the Alcibiades Major (64): whether it concerns self-knowledge, thus giving a starting point for all sorts of philosophy, as Proclus thought, or whether it deals with political virtues, as Damascius assumed. If this is the case, then Proclus' work may not be taken to signal the importance of political philosophy in the Athenian school. What we know of that commentary may discourage one to call it political in any sense. We also read that in Iamblichus' view human souls are bound to matter more intimately than Plotinus supposed it, which entails that political and religious life must be of much greater instrumental value in Iamblichus than in Plotinus (125). One might ask, however, why we hear so much about theurgy in Iamblichus, and almost nothing about political action. One might get the impression that theurgical practices supersede or even replace political activity as a means to ascend to the higher world. Political activity may not have been so compelling under these circumstances. It remains a theoretical possibility only. [End Page 196] All in all, O'Meara demonstrates that politics was a bigger issue for the Neoplatonics than hitherto assumed. But in comparison to the elaborate theories in Plato's Republic and Laws and in Aristotle's Politics, respectively, the evidence that we have for the Neoplatonic approaches is meagre. To be sure, from this it would be unwise to draw the conclusion that the doctrines themselves were also inferior. But they may not have occupied such an important role in philosophy as the one that...

In recent years, constitutional law theory has moved from the formal analysis of constitutional practice to evaluating the substantive realization of basic constitutional principles. Along the way, scholars have developed the concept of constitutionalism, based on Western liberal values and purported to be universally and exclusively correct. As a result, the concept of constitution in substantive meaning has narrowed: “true” constitutionalism demands the fulfillment of all constitutional principles and a constitutional system is branded as “imitative” if it falls short. Meanwhile, most principles such as separation of powers, rule of law, and constitutional review are to some extent instrumental, as they have to serve the main value of constitutionalism — limitation of state power to prevent abuse and arbitrariness. While some experts believe that constitutionalism is the only way to achieve this goal, in fact there are alternative ways beyond the liberal model. The article presents ideas and concepts rooted in non-Western polities and manifested today predominantly in political concepts of Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, as well as in certain political institutions that still persist in African polities, dating back to pre-colonial times. By comparing these with Western liberal constitutionalism, the author concludes that these concepts could serve as viable alternatives to liberal constitutionalism, thus allowing for an expansion of the scope of the very notion of the constitution. This is an extremely topical issue in the current movement for protection of national cultures in the context of re-globalization. Non-Western traditions propose a departure from the opposition between the individual and the state, advocating instead for the pursuit of harmony and the common good. Rather than relying on a rationally constructed system of political institutions designed to restrain the powers of state officials, these traditions emphasize adherence to political traditions, religious dogma and political virtue, with the wellness of humans intertwined with their integration into different social communities. These approaches require a reexamination of many provisions within political and social theory and underscore the importance of taking the equality of political traditions and cultures seriously.

As demonstrated by Marx’s fierce defence of his integrity when anonymously accused of lying in 1872, he was a principled believer in both personal honesty and the value of truth in politics. Whether understood as enabling an accurate, ‘scientific’ depiction of the contradictions of the present society or a normative image of a truly just society to come, truth-telling was privileged by Marx over hypocrisy as a political virtue. Contemporary Marxists like Alain Badiou continue this tradition, arguing that revolutionary politics should be understood as a ‘truth procedure’. Drawing on the alternative position of political theorists such as Hannah Arendt, who distrusted tin; monologic and absolutist implications of a strong notion of truth in politics, this paper defends the role that hypocrisy and mendacity, understood in terms of lots of little lies rather than one big one, can play in a pluralist politics, in which, pace Marx, rhetoric, opinion and the clash of values resist being subsumed under a singular notion of the truth.