Early Modern Political Philosophy Research Articles

An Isle Near Terra Australis Incognita: Henry Neville’s Mental Experiment and Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes

The paper analyzes the ideas of H. Neville’s philosophical novel “The Isle of Pines”. The scope of the research is to make sense of its place within the context of Early Modern political philosophy, and especially its linkage with the Hobbesian theories of human nature, sovereignty and inevitable conflict engaging pre-political communities into bellum omnium contra omnes. Rethinking Hobbesian views on the natural state Neville replaces his mechanical interpretation of human’s passions and behavioral patterns with a historical perspective. Taking into his account contemporary ethnographical knowledge Neville set a mental experiment and found out that a Hobbesian trap before the emergence of a state was not inevitable as well as the lack of social norms. We argue that Neville’s novel was an attempt to escape Hobbesian pessimism and to describe the emergence of social and political structures as a historical and evolutionary proces

The Genesis of the Idea and Value of Political Peace in Early Modern Political Philosophy

The main intention of this paper is to reconstruct the conceptual and historical‎ genesis of the idea and value of political peace from the point of view of ‎political philosophy at the intersection between late scholasticism and early modernity. The paper consists of three related parts. The first part highlights‎ methodological and contextual reasons why the idea of political peace has ‎been overshadowed throughout history by dominant discourses on war. The ‎second part deals with conceptual clarifications. The nature of war is distinguished ‎from other types of conflict and three interpretative approaches to‎ war are analyzed: political realism, fundamentalist-moralistic view of the holy‎ war, and the many theories of natural law that give rise to conceptions of just‎ war, but also the first abolitionist perspective or idea of ending all wars. Early‎ theoretical articulations of the notion of peace indicated modern-day emancipation‎ of politics from the tutelage of metaphysics and classical ethics, thus‎ separating the value of political peace from its original oneness with cosmic ‎and psychological peace. The third part of the paper highlights key moments ‎in the historical genesis of the value of political peace in the works of Aurelius ‎Augustine, Marsilius of Padua, and William of Ockham.‎

Virginia: un soggetto politico per la tragedia tra Sei e Settecento

The paper takes into account several tragedies based on the Roman subject – drawn by Titus Livius – of Appio and Virginia, composed in English, French and Italian between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in order to show how the subject's progressive refinement allows the dramatists to cope with essential matters of the Early modern political philosophy, from the relationship between the sovereign and the law to the gap between public and private happiness. The analysis aims to prove that, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the subject of Virginia becomes an unavoidable passage for dramatist interested in representing political tragedies.

Challenging the State: Teaching Alternative Historiographies in Early Modern Politics

This article argues that we can improve the way we teach early modern political philosophy if we introduce students to alternative views about the development of the state. First, it summarizes the work of contemporary philosophers and historians who are critical of the modern state. Second, it points out ways in which early social contract theorists take the state for granted. Third, it argues that alternative views about the development of the state can help students take a more critical perspective on standard works of early modern political philosophy. Fourth, it argues that these alternative views will help students better understand dissenting voices in early modern political philosophy.

Racism and Modernity: Festschrift for Wulf D. Hundt

Racism and Modernity: Festschrift for Wulf D. Hundt

Religion, Privacy and the Rise of the Modern State

Abstract This article discusses the role of the category Religion in the modern state formation. The liberal private/public religion/state rhetoric plays a central part in the “rise” of the modern state. The binary oppositions of this rhetoric are crucial to the creation of a very unique type of society, which serves as the basis for the formation of the modern state. With reference to Russell McCutcheon, this essay examines this process, drawing on examples from early modern political philosophy (e.g., Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau), before explicitly tackling the question of the role of religion by addressing two German (Fischer and Böckenförde) authors in particular.

Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics by Anthony J. Cascardi

226 Cervantes Reviews its laurels of canonicity, continues to push the boundaries of critical inquiry, delve deeper into the archives, and interrogate the underlying premises of its own scholarship. In a volume that could have been several times larger— by including other scholars whose contributions to Cervantes studies have been equally worthy—the diversity of disciplinary training, theoretical background , and professional experience of its thirty-nine authors subtly attests to this reality. In fact, Dopico Black and Layna Ranz’s achievement as a whole affirms that this kind of multiplicity—resistant to facile categorizations as it is—remains Cervantism’s strongest quality. Their explicit call to “seguir tendiendo puentes,” “trazar avenidas críticas de ida y vuelta,” and “contribuir a una mayor interacción de intereses cervantinos” on both sides of the Atlantic is one which, in the face of the aforementioned challenges currently confronting academe, we can no longer afford to ignore (14). If this volume is as much a reflection on the past as it is a roadmap for the future, and if the moment is indeed ripe for Cervantes studies to build more transatlantic bridges of mutual cooperation, then USA Cervantes lays a critical cornerstone. Paul Michael Johnson University of California, Irvine pmjohnso@uci.edu Anthony J. Cascardi. Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. 351 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4426-4371-0 Anthony J. Cascardi proposes to elucidate the ways in which Cervantes’s literature , especially Don Quixote, can be appreciated as much for its insightful political philosophy as for its literary genius in Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics. Cascardi recognizes that Cervantes is not a political theorist , yet Cervantes, like his humanist predecessors, understood that literature and political discourse were not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, Cascardi does not claim that the political tone of Cervantes’s literature is secondary to its literary value; but, instead, he believes that Cervantes was “centrally engaged ” in answering the question: “What is the place of literature within the (ideal) state?” (3). Cascardi addresses the different ways in which Cervantes approaches this question in a book that reveals as much about early modern political philosophy and thought as it does about Cervantes’s discourse of politics. Volume 33.1 (2013) 227 Reviews In Chapter 1, “Introduction,” Cascardi states that his aim in Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics is twofold: “First, I want to offer a vision of what the discourse of politics might have amounted to had it not been dominated by the methods and concerns associated with the thinkers just mentioned [Hobbes, Lock, Montesquieu, and Rousseau]. How might politics have been otherwise, and yet still fully modern? Second, I want to explore the specific ways in which Don Quixote, by all accounts Cervantes’ most important work, is itself involved in thinking about what the polis and political discourse might be” (3). Cascardi asserts that fiction “provides a platform for a pursuit of the truth, and with it of political ideals, within and through the realm of the manifestly false” (6). Cervantes recognized that fiction was the means by which he could question the disjuncture that exists between political theory and practice. This introduction includes an informative and thought-provoking exposition of early modern political philosophy that prepares the reader to consider the manner in which Cervantes manifests his own political philosophy. Cascardi concludes his first chapter by focusing on Don Quixote. He not only believes that Cervantes’s masterpiece “illuminates the ideological gaps between a utopian vision of politics and the political circumstances of the world at hand” (18), but that it also proposes ways to fill in these gaps. In Chapter 2, “What the Canon Said,” Cascardi centers his discussion on the Canon’s judgment that books of chivalry are “perjudiciales en la república.” Cascardi, though, informs the reader of the oblique nature of the Canon’s words, and, even more noteworthy, he draws a connection between the Canon’s opinion and Cervantes’s view of the relationship between literature and politics: “The evasiveness with which Cervantes approaches these question might itself be a key to the fact that he regards the relationship between literature and politics as...

Die Tora des Mose: Die Geschichte der literarischen Vermittlung von Recht, Religion und Politik durch die Mosegestalt

Die Tora des Mose: Die Geschichte der literarischen Vermittlung von Recht, Religion und Politik durch Mosegestalt, by Eckart Otto. Berichte aus den Sitzungen der Joachim Jungius-Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften E.V., Hamburg 19/2. Hamburg: Joachim Jungius-Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001. Pp. 74. euro12.90 (paper). ISBN 352586311X. Eckart Otto, respected for his stimulating books and essays on the and its connections to the ancient Near Eastern intellectual and political world, offers in this too brief tract a persuasive argument that the image of Moses served the various tradents of the Pentateuch, in part, as a device for political opposition to Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian rule. Standing in the central European (primarily German) tradition of redactional analysis of the Pentateuch, Otto moves from questions of the purely literary development of the text to larger historical ones. Framing the discussion are a brief introduction to the idea of the book (pp. 5-6, which includes a disavowal of the search for the historical Moses) and an abbreviated conclusion that connects the political speculation of the Pentateuch's tradents to early modern political philosophy and the birth of the idea of human rights (pp. 58-60). An excellent bibliography, chiefly of German works, closes the volume. The core of the book consists of four lengthier chapters exploring literaturhistorische Voraussetzungen einer Geschichte des literarischen im Pentateuch (pp. 6-11), Mose als Antitypus zum neuassyrischen Groskonig im spatvorexilischen (pp. 11-33), Mose als Kristallisationsgestalt judaischer Identitat in spatbabylonischer Zeit (pp. 33-48), and die Vermittlung von Recht, Religion und Politik durch Mosegestalt in persischer Zeit (pp. 49-58). Working with texts identified as belonging to each period by previous scholarship (going back at least to Martin Noth), Otto locates each stratum of the Moses tradition within the ideological contests of the geopolitics of its day. This approach, which is promising and deserves to be worked out in much greater detail than Otto can do in such a circumscribed format (but see his Das Deuteronomium: Politische Theologie und Rechtsreform in Juda und Assyrien [BZAW 284; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999]), offers an important corrective to English-language scholarship that overemphasizes the Achaemenid-era influence on the Pentateuch's final form to the detriment of readily isolable earlier connections to extra-Israelite events. Moreover, Otto's effort to ground the argument in Near Eastern texts and other data, rather than in speculation about the life of postexilic Yehud, should exert a salutary influence on future research. Now to the details of the case. Otto is most convincing when he treats the Assyrianperiod evidence. He persuasively argues both that the well-known parallel of the birth story of Moses to that of Sargon of Akkad is the result of an Israelite cooptation of the older story, that is, a political statement, and that Assyrian propaganda (notably Esarhaddon's Vassal Treaty) influenced the Moses tradition more broadly. While one might wish for an exploration of possible elements of the tradition antedating contact with Assyria (after all, the Zadokite priests chose Moses as the vehicle for their theological work, a fact that presupposes his earlier importance in the culture), the case that the seventh century B. …

Piety and Humanity: Essays on Religion and Early Modern Political Philosophy. Edited by Douglas Kries. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. 286p. $68.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Piety and Humanity: Essays on Religion and Early Modern Political Philosophy. Edited by Douglas Kries. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. 286p. $68.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Hamilton's Report on Manufactures and Political Philosophy*

The argument of Hamilton's Report on Manufactures was that the general welfare required the encouragement of manufactures in the United States. But Hamilton's Report goes further than that. Its defense of manufacturing is a defense of the acquisitive principle. More than any other American political thinker, Hamilton felt compelled to emphasize the applicability of the spirit of acquisitiveness to the American experience. The acquisitive faculties that found protection under the combined influence of commerce and the Constitution would be further enhanced by manufacturing, the new economic force in American politics. Hamilton's Report, moreover, is based on the principles of modern political philosophy. It is of greatest importance to bear in mind that a revolution in political philosophy, a fundamental change in perspective, had occurred in the seventeenth century. The classic modern political philosophy of the seventeenth century, in its pristine form, was a philosophy of acquisitiveness, that peculiarly grasping passion devoted to the accumulation of ever more wealth. The peculiar acquisitive spirit characteristic of early modern political philosophy reveals itself most strikingly in the teachings of John Locke. Locke justifies the emancipation of acquisitiveness by showing that it is conducive to the common good or the prosperity of society. An acquisitive society, with all its inevitable inequalities, will create economic incentives and thereby enhance the wealth of the society.