Ideal Polity Research Articles

Politics as Invention: On Theodor Herzl's Ideal Elites

This article explores Theodor Herzl's understanding of social elites and their role in society, especially with regard to creating (or resisting) social and political change. The article follows Herzl's different perceptions of elites and their relation to society, tracing the path that led him from an ideal of an aristocratic republic to his later democratic model. For Herzl, creating a utopia, that is, an ideal polity, effectively meant shaping a new understanding of the elite's position in society. Even though in his imagined future polity elites still govern—and even still, govern with an aristocratic ethos—their relationship with society is changed, shifting from an external authority to a socially and morally engaged position, which forms their public legitimacy and source of power.

Being realistic and demanding the impossible

Characterising realism by contrasting it with moralism leaves open several questions to do with realism’s practical import. If political judgment is not to be derived — exclusively or at all — from pre-political moral commitments, what scope is there for genuinely normative political thinking? And even if there is some scope for political normativity, does realism’s reliance on interpretations of political practices condemn it to some form of status quo bias? In this paper I address those questions. My main aim is to assuage some worries about realism’s alleged conservative tendencies. I argue that there is an important sense in which realists can support radical and even unachievable political change — one can be realistic and demand the impossible, as the soixante- huitard slogan goes. To see how that may be the case one needs to characterise realism by contrasting it with both non-ideal theory and utopianism. In a nutshell, realism differs from non- ideal theory because it need not be concerned with feasibility constraints, and it differs from utopianism because it eschews detailed blueprints of the perfect polity.

An ‘anti-utopian age?’: Isaiah Berlin’s England, Hannah Arendt’s America, and utopian thinking in dark times

This essay challenges the influential view that Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt played a central role in inaugurating an ‘anti-utopian age’. While the two thinkers certainly did their share to discredit the radical utopian inclination to portray a political blueprint in the abstract, I show that neither was straightforwardly anti-utopian. On the contrary, both thinkers’ writings display a different kind of utopian thinking, consisting in an imaginative and idealized reconstruction of existing polities. Schematically put, Berlin’s utopia was England reconstructed as a quintessential liberal society, whereas Arendt’s utopia was America reconstructed as a quintessential modern free republic. Those two polities differ from each other in important respects, but they share two essential features in common: they are claimed to be exempt from the rise of totalitarianism; and they allegedly give men and women the decent chance to live a fulfilling life. To illustrate Berlin’s and Arendt’s overlapping and yet differing visions, I consider their contrasting responses to the upheaval of 1968 – a possible utopian moment in the late 20th century. While their responses could scarcely be more different, they were informed by their shared desire to imagine an ideal polity in what both regarded as the darkest century in human history.

Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective

Michael Cook is among the most eminent and original scholars of Islam alive. The 2014 award of the Holberg Prize—often described as the Nobel Prize for the arts, humanities, law, and theology—testifies to his stature. His latest book, Ancient Religions, Modern Politics, will not disappoint his admirers. It is profoundly erudite, written with exceptional clarity, and laced with mordant wit. Cook's goal in the book is to compare, in his words, the role of religious tradition to modern political identity, the contribution of religious heritage to contemporary political values, and the possible recourse within religious tradition to fundamentalism. Cook's argument is that contemporary Islam plays an altogether different and more potent role in politics than does Catholicism or Hinduism. He describes a religious identity that has increasingly challenged ethnic and national identity among Muslims in ways that are not true either for Hindus or for Latin American Catholics. Along with identity, religion also plays a role in the elaboration of social values. Cook proposes that Islam has an image of an ideal polity but not of an ideal society. This is so partly because Islam entered a world with no polity but an already existing society. Consequently, the basic texts and tenets of Islam place a value on the equality of free male believers but not on the elimination of social or economic hierarchy. Islam thus rejects despotism and embraces the rule of law but not necessarily the redistribution of property.

The Rhetoric of Violence, the Public Sphere, and the Second Amendment

Abstract Jürgen Habermas supports his transhistorical conception of violence as a form of instrumental reason to be rejected from the ideal polity with a historical narrative that recounts the rejection of Machiavellian and Hobbesian instrumental violence by the Enlightenment philosophes. This article provides a revised narrative, which emphasizes the persistence of a rhetorical conception of violence from Machiavelli's princely violence to a line of Anglo-American republican thinkers who shifted the locus of sovereign rhetorical violence to the people's armed militia. The narrative culminates with Madison's exegesis of the Second Amendment and sketches how this Madisonian conception harmonizes with Habermasian norms and law.

The EU Polity and Foreign Policy Coherence

The present article examines the character of the European Union (EU) as a polity by looking at the mechanisms it employs to ensure the coherence of its foreign policies. It first contrasts three ideal polity types. The methods chosen to ensure coherence in foreign policy actions differ according to each of the three polity types. The article then explores how the EU ensures coherence through institutional reform, and subsequently looks in detail at two illustrative policy fields: aid sanctions and civilian crisis-management. The investigation concludes that the organisation of EU foreign policies combines elements from different polity types.

Twilight of Utopias

The biologist Julian Huxley and his younger brother, the novelist Aldous Huxley, each presented a distinct approach to utopian thought in the twentieth century. Julian Huxley sketched a vision of ideal polity that was nothing less than global, calling for the creation of a uni?ed world culture, a new religion predicated on the methods and discoveries of evolutionary biology, and, ultimately, the emergence of a global government. Aldous Huxley’s vision of utopia was deliberately local, based on his view that the machinations of large states, however well intentioned, were a threat to human liberty. Island, Aldous Huxley’s utopian novel of 1962, depicts a small cooperative society, employing low-impact technologies while draw¬ing its worldview from a combination of modern science and Mahayana Buddhism. The distinct visions of the Huxley brothers did share one common trait which remains resonant today. Each identi?ed ecological sustainability as the primary foundation for any plausible utopia.

The Place of Self‐Interest and the Role of Power in Deliberative Democracy*

DELIBERATIVE democracy has traditionally been defined in opposition to self-interest, to bargaining and negotiation, to voting, and to the use of power. Our assessment differs in two ways from the traditional one. First, we contend that self-interest, suitably constrained, ought to be part of the deliberation that eventuates in a democratic decision. Indeed, some forms of negotiation involving self-interest meet all of our criteria for ideal deliberation, in particular the criterion that in their ideal form deliberative methods eschew coercive power. We thus include such constrained self-interest and these forms of negotiation in our reformulation of the deliberative ideal, that is, the regulative standard to which real deliberations should aspire. Second, we argue for a complementary rather than antagonistic relation of deliberation to many democratic mechanisms that are not themselves deliberative. These nondeliberative mechanisms, such as aggregation through voting as well as fair bargaining and negotiation among cooperative antagonists, involve coercive power in their mechanisms of decision. Yet they can and must be justified deliberatively. Our ideal polity is diverse and plural. Its members both strive for

Dangerous Knowledge: On the Epistemic and Moral Significance of Arts in Education

Plato is usually credited as the source of the “ancient quarrel” between reason and rhetoric—and, for him, the arts fall mostly on the less favorable side of rhetoric.1 To be sure, Plato’s harsh verdict on the arts rests on an idealist metaphysics and epistemology (or realism about universals)—enshrining a general pessimism about the epistemic prospects of sense experience— which few, nowadays, would consider persuasive. For Plato, since what is presented to us by the senses is no more than an inaccurate copy of truth as revealed by the intellect, and since the artist merely reproduces such copies, the productions of artists are not once but twice removed from any genuine knowledge of reality. To be sure, Plato is not entirely consistent about this: for example, since music may embody an ideal (perhaps Pythagorean) order of mathematical balance, proportion, and harmony, exposure to some sorts of music may be conducive to right order in the soul. In general, however, the artist is less than welcome in Plato’s ideal polity. On the other hand, the more naturalist drift of Aristotle’s philosophy— not least his emphasis on the significance of experience for cultivation of the judgements of practical wisdom—is much more hospitable to the contribution of arts to positive human formation. Indeed, insofar as Aristotle considered proper emotional development (as distinct from mere emotional control) necessary to the growth of the practical wisdom of virtue, and also regarded (at least some) arts as conducive to such growth, he also recognized the potential significance of music and poetry for the development of virtue. Thus, if “Sophocles draws men as they ought to be and Euripides draws them as they are,”2 then the exploration of moral ideals provided by

The Elusive Polity: Imagining and Contesting Colonial Authority in Cyprus during the 1930s

In 1931, an uprising of Greek Cypriots proclaiming “ Enosis ” (political union of Cyprus [with Greece]) swept the island of Cyprus, then a British colony. Rapidly recovering from the initial shock, British authorities seized the opportunity to abolish representative institutions (long considered an impediment to the sound administration of the island) and impose limitations on freedom of expression. Under Governor Sir Richmond Palmer, an era of authoritarian rule began. The broader aim of British rule in the 1930s was to reshape Cyprus as an ideal polity, whose inhabitants would thrive materially and civically; however, the two preconditions for the establishment of such a polity—the neutralization of local politics and the international isolation of the island—would be rendered unattainable owing to the activity of Greek-Cypriot notables who seized the opportunity of a vacancy in the Throne of the Orthodox Archbishop of Cyprus to restructure a political arena with international ramifications.

Averting the Captain Vere 'Veer': Billy Budd as Melville's Republican Response to Plato

This article shows how Melville's Billy Budd, rightly one of law and literature's most widely studied canonical texts, answers Plato's challenge in Book X of the Republic: Show how poets create better citizens, especially better rulers, or banish them from the commonwealth of reasoned law. Captain Vere is a flawed but instructive version of the Republic's philosopher-king, even as his story is precisely the sort of poetry that Plato should willing allow, by his own republican principles, into the ideal polity. Not surprisingly, the novella shows how law's agents must be wise, even as their law must be philosophical, if they are to do justice. Paradoxically, the novella also shows how poetry can save law's agents, particularly the more Platonic, from Captain Vere's veer, a dangerous turn from fully legal justice to false and fatal severity. Captain Vere has a tragic flaw all too common among leaders otherwise completely conscientious and competent: When faced with a range of courses - all legal, moral, and practicable - Vere invariably charts the most personally painful. Part of his no pain, no gain course steers him into fastidious studies that exclude both mere fiction and pure theory, ironically banishing Plato himself along with his poets. But Vere's own story, with its narrator's frequent theoretical interruptions and occasional allusions to Plato, demonstrates that the reading of just such stories may deliver leaders like him from over-harsh treatment of themselves and their most vulnerable charges. The novella, then, not only reveals Captain Vere's veer; it also shows a way to avert that ever dangerous, often fatal tack. If the studious captain had been prepared to study stories like his own, his readings might have made him a vastly better guardian of his symbolic flock, particularly of Billy Budd, his most innocent sheep; had Starry Vere been more a philosopher-king and less a surrogate father-god, he need never have made his excruciating mistake, sacrificing his most beloved foster son to save their microcosmic world.

The Political Economy of Nullification: Ohio and the Bank of the United States, 1818-1824

The Political Economy of NullificationOhio and the Bank of the United States, 1818-1824 Kevin M. Gannon (bio) Between twelve and one o'clock on the afternoon of September 17, 1819, a wagon pulled up in front of the Chillicothe Office of Discount and Deposit, one of the two branch offices of the Bank of the United States in Ohio. Dismounting from the wagon, John Harper and his companions James McCollister and Thomas Orr burst into the bank's lobby. McCollister and Orr, "in a ruffian-like manner," quickly jumped the counter and made their way to the bank's vault. The bank's cashier, Abraham Claypoole, attempted to block McCollister and Orr and protect the vault, but was "forcibly prevented" from doing so by Harper, who had roughly "intruded himself behind the counter." Claypoole remonstrated with the men and repeatedly tried to detain them, but he was again "forcibly repulsed" as Harper and his companions made off with more than $120,000 from the bank's vault. Frustrated in their efforts to apprehend the "ruffians," Claypoole and the bank's president, William Creighton, could only give a deposition of the afternoon's events to Chillicothe's mayor and hurriedly write the central office of the Bank of the United States for further instructions.1 The events of the seventeenth would have been sensational enough if they were a simple bank robbery. But this episode was much more complex. Harper and his cohorts were not mere "ruffians"; they were state officials operating under a commission from the Auditor of Ohio. Their confrontation with Claypoole and the forcible removal of funds from the Chillicothe branch's vault were actually efforts to collect a tax—a levy mandated by Ohio's legislature with the intent of driving the branch offices of the Bank of the United States out of the state altogether. In collecting the tax, Ohio's leadership firmly asserted what [End Page 79] it saw as the state's inviolable sovereignty against the perceived abuse of federal powers represented by the Bank. In addition, the day's proceedings were in direct defiance of the United States Supreme Court's ruling in the case of McCulloch v. MaryMaryland, handed down earlier that year, which held that taxation of the Bank or any of its branches was outside the purview of a state's powers. Ohio's decision to ignore the ruling and proceed with its attempts to tax the Bank out of existence represented an intensification of a larger struggle against not only the Bank but against what Ohioans saw as the corrupt and despotic national authority that lay behind the its actions. With its defiance of that national authority, and espousal of states' rights ideology and nullification, Ohio's battle against the Bank of the United States became a larger conflict over the locus of sovereignty. The leadership of Ohio's anti-Bank forces was determined to preserve a particular vision of the ideal polity, a vision that it saw as fundamentally threatened by the operations of the national Bank within the state. In their use of the ideals of states' rights and nullifi cation, Ohioans tapped into a wider tradition in antebellum political culture—a tradition that sought to preserve republican virtues against the forces of corruption and arbitrary despotism and which placed the idea of Union distinctly second to this preservation.2 Ohio had not always been a hotbed of anti-Bank sentiment. In fact, the years immediately following the War of 1812 were a period of heady economic prosperity for the state—prosperity that owed a large part of its existence to a rapid expansion of banking. Ohio was caught up in an economic boom experienced to some degree by most of the country after the war's conclusion in 1815. A continuing agricultural surplus that fed a high European demand, as well as the proliferation of salable land and easy credit, however, made Ohio a singular example of economic growth. Financing this boom was a rapidly expanding armada of state-chartered banks. Before the War of 1812, there were four of these state-sanctioned banks operating in Ohio, with a total capitalization of just under...

THE UNACKNOWLEDGED LEGACY

This paper presents a critical discussion of the treatment of mimetic art, and particularly poetry and the theatre, in the work of the Athenian philosopher Plato (427–347 BC). It centres on Plato’s discussion of the corrupting powers of the arts in the Republic, and the implications that his fierce attack on poetry and theatre have for his construction of the ideal polity. The legacy of Platonic ideas in later elaborations of the corrupting power of the arts is discussed. Furthermore, the paper investigates the relationship between current debates on cultural policy and the Platonic idea that the transformative powers of the arts ought to be harnessed by the state to promote a just society. The conclusion thus reached is that “instrumental cultural policy”, rather then being a modern invention, was in fact first theorized precisely in Plato’s Republic.

Relations between science and culture in the ideal polity: an anthropological view

Science and religion tend to occupy polarised positions in our everyday conceptions and categorisations of the world in the West: science, we might say, deals with an actual apprehension of the world, and religion with a moral evaluation. But while useful ideology and common rhetoric this polarisation is not a necessary one. Indeed, there is much to be gained in overcoming it: to recognise in science a fuller worldview than it has formally allowed itself in seeking to distinguish itself from religion. Western science grew out of a Judaeo-Christian cosmology in which fact and value were combined, in which 'is' and 'ought' were inextricably conceived. Why may not science still contain within itself notions of good, ethical practice; a moral message, concerning not only its own methodology but also a 'social methodology'? Science is part of a moral history, why might it not embody a moral presence? In a wide ranging discussion, drawing in particular on the work of Karl Popper and Ernest Gellner, this essay suggests an affirmative answer to the above questions and argues that scientific practice affords a lesson in openness; an openness which characterises alike good science and a liberal society potentially supracultural, universal, in its provenance. The precise balance to be sought would be between a societal domain run according to the best scientific data concerning the nature of human beings, their needs and wider global environment, and a cultural domain replete with community groupings whose memberships were voluntary and whose affairs were symbolically freestanding. The 'scientific society' might thus be seen as responsible for encompassing (regulating and legitimating) a plethora of cultural communities while remaining itself a 'culture free' zone.

Communitarianism and Civic Education

Nowadays, there is a serious confrontation between liberalism and communitarianism. Civic education based on liberalism considers freedom as the educational goal, while civic education based on communitarianism considers virtue as the educational goal. Freedom and virtue are compatible in the common life. But in a case where priority is required, the emphasis must be laid on virtue. Love and friendship are the means to overcome excessive individualism. Individuality and community must be dialectically balanced to produce a good polity. Communitarian civic education can approximate to the ideal polity. Returning to Aristotle's friendship and Rousseau' love may invoke the sentiment of oneness from the heart of our species.

Jordanian Islamists and the agenda for women: between discourse and practice

The resurgent Islamist movement in Jordan2 presents itself as a movement with a clear vision of what constitutes a society based on Islamic principles. Islamist activism and institution-building projects are presented as part of a grand strategy for the reconstruction of an Islamic society and the repossession of an Islamic heritage long denied to the Muslims due to colonialism and the alienation of ordinary Muslims from their own religion and traditions. Can we indeed identify such a coherent Islamist project in Jordan today? An examination of Islamist discourse and practice reveals that in Jordan, as in most other Arab countries, the Islamists have yet to elucidate a consistent and coherent societal project. What we witness is the process of constructing an Islamist agenda. As can be expected from an experiment in the making, we find varying degrees of inconsistency and dissonance both at the level of discourse and practice, and more important, between discourse and practice. This lack of coherence can be attributed to several factors. First, and on the political level, the Islamist movement operates in a political field which has undergone some important changes since the launching of the state's democracy campaign at the end of the 1980s. The campaign jettisoned the Ikhwan into a political field for which they were not fully prepared. While the 'modern' political concepts such as democracy, political pluralism, and freedom of thought and expression were easily incorporated into the vocabulary of the nationalist, liberal and leftist parties, they presented a problem to the Ikhwan. How were they to reconcile these concepts, products of secular Western culture, with Islamic political principles such as shura and ta'a and with their own traditional formulations of the ideal polity? While the Ikhwan have embraced the new concepts enthusiastically in their official discourse, they have yet to resolve the many thorny questions which inevitably arise in the world of practice when the new abstract notions come up against long-held beliefs and ingrained practices. Second, the Ikhwan are faced with a range of constraints imposed upon them by interests and forces external to the movement. Primary among these is the state, which, despite the close relations between the

The Ideal Polity of the Early Stoics: Zeno's Republic

Social or political proposals of the “ideal polity,” some of which amounted to outright Utopias, came to be fairly common during the fourth and third centuries B.C. In addition to Plato's famed Republic (which is said to have been influenced in part by Hippodamus as well as by certain Pythagorean ideas) and Antisthenes' somewhat “unorthodox” social views, Diogenes of Sinope, Iambulus and Zeno the Stoic, for instance, wrote on the “ideal city.” Also, a great many treatises On Kingship, which frequently were nothing more than part of that “mirror of princes literature” which can be traced back at least to Antisthenes, were authored during the same period. But it will be noticed that these relatively early Polities, including that of Zeno, uniformly advocated a small and highly articulated city-state with extremely narrow limits and relatively limited objectives rather than a pan-humanitarian or cosmopolitan ideal. The well-known Stoic cosmopolitanism, which some scholars have called the philosophic corollary of Alexander's conquest, is definitely of later date, later even than Zeno's widely known Republic, which still adheres to the confining notions of the traditional (and fateful) Greek particularism. This, in turn, compels us to distinguish between the early Zeno who in his original dependence on early Cynic teachings apparently shared in this limited outlook, and the late Zeno, who was able to conceive the whole universe as one single great city of gods and men without distinction of race or nationality. It is safe to assume, therefore, that Zeno's Republic is one of his earliest works and perhaps his earliest.