Classical Political Philosophy Research Articles

古典政治哲学视域下现代性危机的两种路径

古典政治哲学视域下现代性危机的两种路径

“How Did this Man Get Elected?” Perspectives on American Politics, Populism and Donald Trump

This article examines and compares three very different interpretations of populism and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election: Ian Bremmer’s Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism; Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West; and Salena Zito and Brad Todd’s The Great Revolt. Bremmer contends populism resulted in the U.S. and other nations when ruling elites failed to respond effectively to globalization’s rapidly rising inequalities. Goldberg sees deep-rooted divides in classical political philosophy (Rousseau v. Hobbes) as sources for contemporary identity politics on the sex-and-gender obsessed left and on the nativist/nationalist right. Based on direct interviews and supplementary survey data, Zito and Todd construct varying typologies of voter groups who supported Trump. None of the authors recognize that populism’s future may be seen in California where the effects of globalization, immigration and inequality are most pronounced.

Response to Ethnic and Racial Studies interlocutors

ABSTRACTThis symposium on my book, The Specter of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (Princeton, 2018) provides an opportunity to engage specialists in classical and modern political theory and philosophy, comparative racial and ethnic politics, and political sociology who have provided commentary on different aspects of the two overarching arguments intertwined in The Specter of Race; how students of democracy have largely ignored how racial and ethno-national hierarchy has been historically tethered to its practice , and how students of comparative politics have, for the most part, ignored how these hierarchies have informed the very development of modern democracies.

Plutarch’s Politics: Between City and Empire, Hugh Liebert Review by Carl Eric Scott

Leo Strauss inspired a renaissance in the study of classical political philosophy, and one of its side effects has been an increased number of close textual analyses of ancient works traditionally ...

La "polis" de Dios. El doble poder medieval y una sobrenaturalización de lo político

Francisco Bertelloni en “La teoría política medieval entre la tradición clásica y la modernidad” (2010) procura poner en evidencia cómo la transición de la filosofía política clásica a la filosofía social moderna encuentra un momento decisivo en la teoría política medieval, particularmente verificable en La monarquía de Tomás de Aquino, en la medida en que allí tiene lugar una reducción del concepto de polis a oikos. En esta presentación, pretendemos primeramente proponer nuestra reinterpretación de la génesis histórica del doble poder medieval; en segundo lugar, reconstruir la argumentación del autor en torno a la mencionada reducción; por último, sugerir una hipótesis de lectura de La monarquía, complementaria a la tesis del autor, en referencia a un posible desplazamiento a un plano sobrenatural del contenido político inherente a la concepción clásica.

Authenticity and community process

ABSTRACTHow does community process constitute an opening to an authentic existence? Martin Heidegger suggests that authentic Being-in-the-world is rooted in self-reflection and isolation from others—far from the public realm. Conversely, Mary Parker Follett argues that collaborative processes embed action with meaning that have far-reaching implications for individual development as well as for democracy. Drawing on classical political philosophy’s public space and citizenship, this research maintains that community process enhances authentic, self-aware participatory practices—fundamental for one’s full development and practical democracy. Public and nonprofit administrators working in community-based or oriented organizations ought to cultivate opportunities for such development.

Two Concepts of Liberalism: Some Comparative Discussion of Strauss and Hayek

This paper will attempt to compare and contrast certain views of two contemporaries, Leo Strauss (1899-1973) and F.A. Hayek (1899-1992). Hayek is very well known as an apologist for classical economics and the free market, while Leo Strauss’s growing fame is connected to his engineering an intellectual revolution involving a revival of classical political philosophy.

Maquiavelo, lector de la Ciropedia

El presente texto se propone un estudio sistemático de la lectura que Maquiavelo realiza de la Ciropedia. Siendo la de Maquiavelo una obra de ruptura, resulta especialmente relevante comprender su relación con el modelo de filosofía política clásica respecto del cual esta ruptura se efectúa. Este modelo, argumentaremos, es provisto en la obra maquiaveliana por la Ciropedia. Para ello, en contraste con la opinión establecida sobre el tema, sostendremos que el punto central de disputa entre ambos autores no debe ubicarse en la comprensión de la relación entre virtud y política, sino en la comunicación (moderada una, “temeraria y presuntuosa”, la otra) de una enseñanza acerca de la relación entre virtud y política cuya afinidad no ha sido suficientemente reconocida.

Классическая культура и политическая философия научно-технического романтизма в призме системного подхода Т. Парсонса

Классическая культура и политическая философия научно-технического романтизма в призме системного подхода Т. Парсонса

Machiavelli’o Valdovas: dorybių galvosūkis

[only abstract in English; full article and abstract in Lithuanian] The article deals with the attitude of Nicollo Machiavelli towards virtues and its political meaning explained in his famous work The Prince. Philosopher discusses the meaning of virtues in different stages of his reasoning. He makes partial conclusions at each stage and leads to the final conclusion, which states that virtues are harmful for the prince, while the deceptive appearance of virtues is most useful. The context of classical political philosophy allows to demonstrate that Machiavelli’s proposal to use deception of virtues equates to a perfect injustice. It can be concluded that Machiavelli breaks radically with the Platonic tradition of political philosophy and starts creating a new tradition on the grounds of ideas of ancient sophists about human nature and politics.

Some Remarks on the First Book of Aristotle’s Politics

This article is devoted to a sequential analysis of the first book of Aristotle’s Politics. It suggests an interpretation of the classical problem of natural hierarchy of men as it described in the first book of the treatise. In this book, Aristotle examines seven commonly held definitions of a slave – four “natural” and three “conventional” ones – and then offers his own eighth definition, placed right in the middle between nature and convention. The article exclusively deals with the first book of Politics and avoids invoking other books of the treatise as well as other works of Aristotle because in classical political philosophy every statement is highly contextualized and could not be simply quoted in order to prove or disprove any point of view without preceding deep examination.

Bergson’s theory of war

Bergson scholars such as Leonard Lawlor, Alexander Lefebvre, Philip Soulez, and Frederic Worms have recently argued that Bergson “places the phenomenon of war at the center of his analysis” in Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). We want to contribute to this line of interpretation. We claim that Bergson’s account of the causes of, and solution to, the problem of war can be effectively understood in light of a central tenet of classical political philosophy, namely, the City of God, both the concept and Augustine’s great text, de Civitate dei contra paganos. We highlight the shared view of the root of war in Augustine and Bergson, namely the lust for domination, libido dominandi. Our contribution provides a useful heuristic for understanding Bergson’s account of war, not a claim of Augustine’s influence on Bergson.

What Can We Learn from Political History? Leo Strauss and Raymond Aron, Readers of Thucydides

AbstractThrough a comparison of Leo Strauss's and Raymond Aron's interpretations of Thucydides's history, this paper sheds light on the relationship between political history and political philosophy. In continuing the dialogue between the two thinkers, I demonstrate that in spite of their opposed views on modern historical consciousness, they converge in a defense of the object and method of classical political history. However, there is a deeper disagreement regarding the relationship between philosophy and politics. While Strauss makes the case for the compatibility of classical political history and classical political philosophy on the grounds that Thucydides is a “philosophic historian,” Aron argues that it is precisely because Thucydides is not a philosopher that he succeeds in understanding an essential feature of political things, namely, contingency in history.

Classical Political Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity – An alternative to the competition State

The conservative Jewish, German and American philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973) proposes an interpretation of the causes of the crisis of modernity and argues that the only way in which we can reestablish social stability is to go back to classical political philosophy by Plato and Aristotle. In the following, I will introduce thought of Leo Strauss in order to show how we here can find a well-qualified concept of political conservativism. It is however clear, that this intellectual aristocratism is different from dominant conservative at the political right that also can be accused of having reduced politics to economics and utility maximization where focus is on promotion of personal privileges and interests rather than a concern for the common good in a strong political community.

The New Spirituality, or The Democratization of Divinity and Vice Versa (Has the New Age Come of Age?)

ABSTRACTAmerica and indeed the West have been witnessing the emergence of a new spirituality. Where once one looked for God beyond oneself, many now claim to have found God within. Perhaps contrary to initial appearances, the New Spirituality embraces many important tenets of older philosophic and spiritual traditions. But for this very reason (among others), the New Spirituality also stands in need of critique informed by those same traditions. This article explores the character and origins of the New Spirituality and attempts a critique from the perspective of Socratic or classical political philosophy. The effort at critique yields a certain appreciation, including the suggestion that the New Spirituality might help us gain access to certain elements of the classical tradition. But the critique also addresses a troublesome utopian temper that raises serious questions about the wisdom and goodness of this growing movement.

Etyczny wymiar wspólnoty państwowej w duchu klasycznej myśli politycznej

In this article the author presents the ethical aspects of the state understood as a community. The author refers primarily to the classic concepts of political philosophy, which have their source in thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle. It turns o that these concepts of reflection on the state is always associated with a reflection on issues such as the common good, justice, perfection and virtue. Classical political philosophy in a special way interprets also the concept of the regime, that is understood much broader than the modern notion of the political system. Classical thinkers show that politics and ethics are spheres constantly interrelated.

Recovering Classical Philosophy in the Modern Context: The Work of Francis Slade

Francis Slade's spoken words and his writings are concrete and realistic: in their arresting formulations, their close reading and juxtaposition of texts, their use of literature and art, their insights into classical political philosophy, and their understanding of Christian faith. This article illustrates these features by examining three contrasts he develops in his work. First, the distinction between ends and purposes helps recover the classical significance of telos, which was done away with in modernity and has been lost to contemporary thought and culture. Second, Slade contrasts the premodern city, where political life naturally emerges in several kinds of communities in accord with the ends of human nature, with the modern state, which has been constructed by thought from “deracinated individuals” organized into a “depoliticized society” and governed by “decontextualized rule.” Third, Slade shows how Augustine's reevaluation of human experience and Greek thought in the light of Christian revelation differs from Machiavelli's rejection of classical and Christian thought in favor of effective rationalism.

The Problem of Social Order (a Hobbesian Problem): Towards the Heuristics and Pragmatics of the Constitutive Question of Contemporary Social Theory

The paper takes the problem of social order or the conditions of the possibility of modern society that consists of a multitude of rational actors who pursue their private interests while frequently having opposing goals into consideration. The paper demonstrates that the problem in question, also known as a Hobbesian problem, has been transmitted to the center of the discourse of social science long ago since being formulated for the first time in 1651 by Thomas Hobbes in his famous Leviathan. The solution of the problem of social order as proposed by Hobbes, consisting in the recognition of the necessity to constitute a dominant political authority, i.e., the state which is capable of maintaining stable social relations, caused an intensive theoretical debate that continues to this day. Social theorists have proposed a large variety of answers to the question posed by Hobbes, but none can be considered as final or comprehensive. The paper makes an attempt to reconstruct various theoretical and methodological approaches to the problem of social order, from the solution proposed by Hobbes (including its reformulation by Talcott Parsons) to the analytical concepts of social order elaborated by contemporary thinkers belonging to different theoretical orientations. The article makes the conclusion that translating the old problem of classical political philosophy of modernity into the language of actual contemporary social theory allows the problematization of the heuristic foundations of political discourse of modernity by operationalizing its key concept.

Theoretical reflection on the impact of globalization processes on civil rights

The concept of citizenship is one of the old key concepts in political philosophy that has been reproduced in various forms since the formation of classical political philosophy up to modern times within the theory set forth in this type of theoretical philosophy. So, pre-modern theory, modern theory and postmodern theory can be noted. The concept of citizenship is an idea which governs the right of modern human and was emerged in the Western Europe and is a product of modern politics. Accepting Legal and political rights and duties is raised by citizenship status, its main foundation and the basic idea of the concept. In the contemporary world, citizenship has been interested more than other societies. The question that comes to mind here is that how is the situation of civil rights in the era of theoretical terms in globalization? In response to the question hypothesis is that with globalization, citizenship in its modern form that was enclosed in the geography of the national government has lost its sense and civil rights embodied in the discourses that are outside the reach of state law. This study aimed to investigate the impact of globalization on the civil right and conceptual evolution theoretically, as contemporary theorists have theorized it. Research findings indicate the "global citizenship" as a concept is emerging in the era of globalization as the result of rethinking of citizenship in the modern age. The methodology of study is analysis - descriptive, this means that the concept of civil right is described and then the theoretical changes in the era of globalization will be analyzed.

The Spread of Leo Strauss’s Thought and the Flowering of Classical Political Philosophy in Post-Socialist China

The Spread of Leo Strauss’s Thought and the Flowering of Classical Political Philosophy in Post-Socialist China