Concepts Of Political Philosophy Research Articles

Sovereignty, ecology, and regional imperatives: formulating normative foundations for regional ecological justice

ABSTRACT I will outline four justifications of regional ecological obligations calling for different political authorities to collaborate for ecological reasons: through voluntary agreement between political entities united by an ecological region; by a shared regional history or cultural relations to an ecological region; with reference to ‘place-based’ duties with an ecological basis; or by obligations to an extended set of individual right-holders. None are conclusive reasons but show that there are normative grounds for regional collaboration of separate political authorities. The article contributes to discussion on, despite its practical relevance, a much neglected concept in political philosophy.

The Crowd, the People, and the Philosopher in Spinoza's Political Philosophy

Abstract The article analyzes the relationship in Spinoza's thought between the figures of the philosopher, the people, and the crowd. This distinction is anchored in his theory of knowledge, of the passions, and of natural right and plays a fundamental role in his conception of political philosophy. Spinoza establishes a direct connection between these three figures and the forms of political regimes: while in democracy human beings who are completely rational (the philosophers) can fully deploy their theoretical passions and the people can develop their desire for freedom, in theocracy and tyranny the crowd's superstition dominates. These aspects of Spinoza's thought allow us to interpret the relationships between the contemplative and the active life, and to rethink the relationship between the philosopher and the city, in the early modern age as well as in our contemporary one.

Biopolitics in critical tourism theory: a radical critique of critique

The article reviews the uses of the concept of biopolitics in critical tourism studies. After a brief genealogical account of the concept in political philosophy, it follows its transposition and its thematic applications in tourism theory and practice. It is argued that biopolitics is only one of the three key domains of ‘human interests’, which must be subjected to a radical critique in tourism studies and practice. Such critique should be entwined with questions of (a) institutional and discursive power in the making of tourism worlds and destinations (‘worldmaking’ – Hollinshead, 2009a), but also, crucially (b) the analogous counter-discourses instituted by critical tourism studies scholars, who seek to legitimise their own epistemic community and thus produce a majoritarian voice endorsing an apparent (but not interest or motivation free) support of morally just causes for a better human and planetary futures.

Revolutionizing the Right to Revolt: Søren Kierkegaard and the Responsibility to Revolt

Abstract The right to revolt is a central concept in political philosophy, denoting when it is justified to replace a corrupt government with a new one. As such, it is a normative concept that would-be revolutionaries should consult in order to determine the justness of a possible revolution. However, this article argues that within Kierkegaard’s thought lies a wholly new conception of revolution that does not look to describe when it might be just to revolt but that instead sees revolution as an act we are sometimes obligated to enact. Consequently, revolt transforms from a right to a responsibility, with important ethical and political consequences.

Noções de engajamento cívico e liderança em adolescentes Civismo, Liderança e Adolescência ,

Abstract This research aims to discuss civic engagement among teenagers based on their own conceptions about politics and leadership. The theoretical perspective is at the intersection of Education and Moral Psychology, bringing studies on the education of values, as well as concepts of political philosophy. We evaluate the responses of 219 teenage students from Baixada Santista-SP, of both genders, aged 10 to 13 years, from two questionnaires produced for the investigation. One questionnaire on the perceptions of the political scenario, and the other on anti-hero characters from cinema and TV, the answers to the questionnaires were inter-related. The results show that civic engagement emphasizes the important role that teenagers can and should play as participants and agents of change in the construction of qualities that promote the common good and citizenship.

Class Project of Multitude

The concept “multitude”, popular in political philosophy, largely owes its entrance into the modern political vocabulary to the efforts of Antonio Negri, the Italian philosopher. His research from the 1980s and 1990s gave rise to a synthetic philosophical theory that views multitude as a key element in the political struggle of the left, thereby giving a theoretical impetus to a rebirth of the seemingly forgotten concepts of political philosophy. The article attempts to analyze the formation of the political logic of multitude and demonstrates how this phenomenon became part of the Marxist criticism of the modern society. The first part of the article traces how the idea of multitude as a positive element of politics grows out of the materialist interpretation of Baruch Spinoza. According to the author, Negri by interpreting Spinoza as a “savage ano maly” laid a theoretical foundation for the entire modern discourse of multitude. The conceptualization of the differences between the notions of potentia and potestas made it possible to distinguish between multitude and the people. The people can be seen as an element of potestas — political power that mediates relations between people by introducing the principle of transcendence in the form of representation and the figure of a sovereign. In contrast to the people, multitude with its collective power-potentia embodies a collective plan of immanence that resists representation i.e., a subject of constituent power that does not need representation. The second part of the article is devoted to the analysis of the class approach to multitude, which appears in the works of Negri co-authored with Michael Hardt, where the ontology of multitude is transformed into a political project based on the understanding of class as a political subject that opposes the global capitalist world order.

Corrupção e escândalo político: o enquadramento dos escândalos face oculta e mensalão na imprensa portuguesa e brasileira

O artigo que o leitor tem entre mãos é uma tentativa de analisar a coberturajornalística de dois escândalos de corrupção, o Face Oculta e o Mensalão, numaperspetiva comparativa. Versando, num primeiro momento, sobre os fenómenos dacorrupção e do escândalo político, procuraremos analisar os conceitos à luz da Filosofia Política, discorrendo sobre a sua relação sem, contudo, deixar de fazer a sua distinção analítica. Na parte empírica, adotaremos a teoria do enquadramento no sentido de compreender de que forma o semanário SOL (Portugal) e a Revista Veja (Brasil), operaram uma reconfiguração dos escândalos no momento da sua eclosão.

Fears of Disaster and (Post-)Human Raciologies in European Popular Culture (2001-2013)

This article aims at mapping the impact of ‘fears of disasters and crisis’ on European self-representations in terms of racial stereotypes, ‘white fantasies’, gender hierarchies, and heteronormativities. Its methodology is a critical discourse analysis of texts – specifically television series such as the BBC’s Dead Set (2009) and the first season of BBC US and UK, In the Flesh, (2013) and movies such as 28 Days Later (2002), L’Horde (2009), and World War Z (2013) – read through the lens of postcolonial theories, critical race and whiteness studies, the concepts of political philosophy and the theoretical insights of post-human feminism. This composite theoretical framework permits a grasp of gendered, racialised and classed fantasies behind the narratives of catastrophe and the visions of the post-apocalyptic world(s) the catastrophe is supposed to bring to life; it also allows an analysis of the meaning and articulations of catastrophe and post-world spatial constructions, and the latter’s relation to actual and imagined social hierarchies (gender, colour and class of the survivors). These are examined in order to understand whose eyes we are expected to imagine and experience the crisis/catastrophe through; the geographies of catastrophe and of post-world(s) (where in the world, and why); the relation between the undead and the living; life amongst the living before the undead threat; and the way protagonists look at the laws, rule, governmentalities, and use of violence in the past, present and future societies. These are a few of the themes that this article discusses in an attempt to uncover what fantasies of the present are hidden behind present memories of the future.

George Washington: Founding Philosopher?

George Washington:Founding Philosopher? Alan Gibson (bio) Jeffry H. Morrison . The Political Philosophy of George Washington. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 2009. xxi + 226. Appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $40.00. In a brief biographical sketch that he wrote of George Washington, Mark Twain asserted that Washington had shown no early signs of greatness or sagacity. "Young George," Twain quipped, "was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie." Twain continued: "It is related of him that he once chopped down his father's favorite cherry-tree, and then didn't know enough to keep dark about it."1 Although Twain sarcastically summoned this Parson Weems image of Washington for entertainment, variations of the view that Washington was simple, limpid, and obtuse have had serious defenders since the earliest days of the republic. Thomas Jefferson credited Washington with a "great and powerful" mind and concluded that, "as far as he saw," no one's judgment was sounder. Nevertheless, Washington's mind was "slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination," according to Jefferson. "When called on for a sudden opinion, he was unready, short, and embarrassed."2 John Adams was less generous. Washington, Adams concluded, was "not a scholar" and was "too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his Station and reputation."3 More recently, John C. Fitzpatrick, editor of the Library of Congress edition of the Washington Papers, maintained that it "is easy to understand George Washington. It is easy to understand any thoroughly sincere, honest, simple soul" (p. xiv). Such assessments—strengthened by Washington's admissions that he was "conscious of a defective education," had little time for reading, and was a man of action whose designs should be judged from his deeds—have raised a persistent barrier to serious consideration of Washington's political thought.4 To be sure, scholars have acknowledged the importance of Washington's role as president of the Constitutional Convention. They have also recognized that the letter he signed that accompanied the proposed Constitution as it was submitted to Congress and then the states gave the Constitution legitimacy and helped secure its ratification. Garry Wills and Paul K. Longmore have [End Page 629] shown how Washington shrewdly shaped his own image.5 It is also increasingly fashionable to suggest that Washington was more complex than previously thought, to seek out his Machiavellian side, and to speak of Washington's political genius. Nevertheless, few scholars have suggested that anything on the order of a "political philosophy" can be reconstructed from Washington's correspondence and state papers.6 In the Political Philosophy of George Washington, Jeffry Morrison, an associate professor of government at Regent's University and the author of John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic, argues that standard characterizations of Washington as unlearned, dense, and thus intellectually dependent on others are as "mythical as Parson Weem's tale of the cherry tree" and should not stand in the way of exploring Washington's "coherent theory of American constitutionalism" and his "fully formed political philosophy" (pp. xiv, 18). The core of Washington's political philosophy, Morrison maintains, "revolved around the central principles of union, liberty, and self-government under the Constitution, administered with virtue as an example to the world, all under the superintendence of a benevolent Providence" (p. 16). This conception of political philosophy was built by combining classical republicanism, British liberalism, and Protestant Christianity—the three ideologies that, according to Morrison, were "dominant at the Founding" (p. xiv). Indeed, Washington's "syncretism," combined with his unsurpassed popularity among his contemporaries, helps to explain how he came to embody American ideals and to be viewed as the "Father of His Country" (p. 2). Speaking the three political languages that were literally "in the air" in the early republic, Washington became "uniquely the incarnation of early American political thought" (p. xv). More specifically, Washington, according to Morrison, had by 1789 "become the most classically republican American of his generation" (p. 63). The Greeks taught Washington and other Founders that tyranny often sprang from anarchy, which, in turn, resulted from excessive democracy, and that balanced and mixed government was the necessary antidote for this problem. They also inspired Washington...

Reading Strauss from the Start

It has often been noted that Leo Strauss developed his understanding of political philosophy through a critical engagement with Heidegger. Yet most analyses focus on Strauss’s American works while neglecting his earlier response during the crisis years of the Weimar Republic. The article seeks to overcome this limitation by ‘deconstructing’ Strauss’s American definitions of political philosophy in light of both his Weimar understanding of politische Wissenschaft and his 1922 discovery of Heidegger’s Aristotle. I argue that Strauss’s conception of political philosophy originated in Heidegger’s subversion of the traditional distinction between theory and praxis. I thus propose a way to read Strauss from the start following his own changing views of that distinction.

Illiberal justice: John Rawls vs. the American political tradition

Often considered the greatest American political philosopher of the twentieth century, and the most important liberal theorist since John Stuart Mill, John Rawls enjoys a practically sacrosanct status among scholars of political theory, law, and ethics. In Illiberal Justice, David Schaefer offers the most thorough challenge to Rawls' doctrine yet published, demonstrating how his teachings deviate from the core tradition of constitutional liberalism as exemplified by leading American statesmen from the founders through Lincoln and beyond. Illiberal Justice is the first comprehensive overview of all of Rawls' writings, emphasizing the continuity in his thought and intention to a greater extent than other scholars have done. Schaefer offers a fundamental critique of both Rawls' conception of political philosophy and the policy judgments he derives from his of justice. Schaefer argues that Rawls' failure to ground his teaching about justice in a serious analysis of human nature or an empirical grasp of political life is symptomatic of a larger crisis within contemporary liberal political and jurisprudential theorizing. Although Rawls is commonly viewed as a welfare-state liberal, Schaefer stresses that his writings actually embody a radical transformation of liberalism in the direction of libertarianism that deviates sharply from the American liberal tradition. Citing empirical evidence of the persistence of political and economic opportunity in America, Schaefer challenges Rawls' allegations that our polity suffers from grave injustices. He points out the strikingly apocalyptic tone of Rawls' last writings, in which Rawls even questions whether human existence is worthwhile if his principles are not actualized. Illiberal Justice is not only a critique of Rawls' political program and philosophic methodology, it is also a defense of the American constitutional order against Rawls' dogmatic theorizing, which Schaefer argues has exercised an increasing, and detrimental, effect on our jurisprudence. By combining a thorough critical exegesis of Rawls' texts with a broad engagement with the tradition of political philosophy and American political thought, Schaefer makes an important contribution to both our understanding of Rawls and the enterprise of political philosophy.

Taking the Distinction between Persons Seriously

AbstractRawls criticizes utilitarianism for not taking the distinction between persons seriously, and suggests that his own theory: justice as fairness, does. I argue that justice as fairness aims to take the distinction seriously at four levels, ranging from the content of its principles to its conception of political philosophy, and that doing so at each stage is of fundamental importance in working out the basis of a conception of justice for a democratic society. Understanding Rawls’s theory in this way points to a clearer understanding of how to go on doing political philosophy after Rawls.

Pragmatism's Boundaries

The core, and arguably constitutive, problem confronted by an international political theory is that of the status of borders. This paper argues that pragmatism possesses useful resources for thinking about this issue, if understood in the right way. I begin by positing pragmatism as defined by four core commitments: holism, fallibilism, anti-scepticism, and the primacy of practice. The paper then examines four ways of endowing these basic commitments with more determinate political content: anti-revisionism, social holism, Richard Rorty's `ethnocentric' conception of political philosophy, and Deweyan democratic inquiry. The article rounds off by outlining a well hedged defence of this last perspective, as both normatively attractive and capable of addressing some of the problems posed by boundaries.

VALUE-JUDGEMENT AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION IN AN AFRICAN NATION: RETHINKING NATIONAL SECURITY AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

This essay examines the important problem of the proper conception of political philosophy that can ensure the security, survival and well-being of both the individual and the society. It clarifies the role of values in socio-political discourse and we use the problem of national security as a basis for the analysis of the right disposition of intellectuals to the matters affecting human life. Most especially, we seek a conception of political philosophy which can ensure the well-being and survival of the society. (Humanities Review: 2001 1(1): 47-60)

India

NATIONAL LEADERS often have a way of summing up concepts of political philosophy which are revealing in a way they do not intend. One of analogies that Jawaharlal Nehru was fond of retailing to unsophisticated audiences on his speech-making tours of India was his assertion that giant government-owned industrial projects his regime had set out to build were the temples of future. How right he was to compare them to India's massive religious structures of past! In truth, they have not contributed much more than ancient edifices to economic well-being of his people. Today, 30 years after independence, average Indian finds himself no richer-and perhaps actually poorer-than his father. And in no small part, abysmal poverty that continues to dog Indian is result of utterly ill-conceived economic policies of Nehru period. What Nehru set out to do was to construct a modernized heavy industry sector which would-in words of one of its sponsors, Professor P. C. Mahalanobhis-eventually come back and sweep up masses and deliver them from their eons of poverty. It was, Nehru's advisors told him (and they included a small clutch of Stalinist economists lent by Soviet Union and Communist states of Eastern Europe), simply a matter of tying Indian resources and raw materials to a system of Soviet-style planning. Today, almost all informed quarters in India understand that this approach, which that marvelous old statesman from Madras, C. Rajagopalachari, called permit-license raj, has reached a dead end. Now question is quietly posed on all sides, Where to go from here?