Political Ideas Research Articles

고려 국왕 즉위에 관한 외교 형식의 변화와 의미

International relations of East Asian premodern society were established and kept limiting dominance of realistic power among nations to ritual order of Confucian political ideas. The most important medium of ritual order like this was enthronement and diplomacy regarding kings' enthronement which informed people of new kings' enthronement and led their investiture is the subject that can show relations among nations and political natures. Diplomatic formalities regarding enthronement of kings of Goryeo are divided into Chingsa(稱嗣), Cheongjeonwi(請傳位), and Cheongseungseup (請承襲). Most of Kings' enthronement in the early Goryeo Dynasty consisted of Sawi, which is a method of succession to the throne based on the recognition that Kings' political authority carries on legitimacy through bloodgiven succession. The kings who mounted the throne sent envoys who inform other countries of Sawi(稱嗣) to them and posted Pyomun. Then, the other countries sent condolence calls and Giboksa and Chaekbongsa who gave recognition to the new kings in time. This procedure was established as the ritual procedure among the Goryeo Dynasty and the countries that invested with stable succession to the throne called Sawi. Unlike Sawi, Seonyang was done depending on realistic political struggles for power and the powerful's will. Originally, Seonyang means to sell the pass to the high-calibre people. However, in reality, Seonyang means that kings were deposed under pressure of power and another kings mount to the throne being enthroned. In the Goryeo Dynasty, Hyeonjong of Goryeo's accession to the throne by the Political Upheaval of Gangjo, the case that Sukjong of Goryeo was abdicated from Heonjong of Goryeo, his nephew, and change of the throne by the military powerful are applicable to this. The Goryeo Dynasty informed the Liao Dynasty and the Jin Dynasty of the fact of Seonyang after the new kings' enthronement. Because the Liao Dynasty and the Jin Dynasty knew that they cannot get involved in change of the throne in the Goryeo Dynasty, they gave ritual recognition to it if the bilateral relationship is kept like before even though the throne is changed in the Goryeo Dynasty. In the relationship between the Goryeo Dynasty and Mongolia, the ritual surrounding the Kings' enthronement and positions and authority as the kings of the Goryeo Dynasty clearly change from before. The kings from Chungnyeol of Goryeo to Chunghye of Goryeo asked Mongolia's permission to make the kings abdicate the throne in favor of the crown princes [請傳位]. And as the emperors allowed this, the crown prices were invested and Kukin (國印) was given to the new kings. The new kings were generally invested from Mongolia. And after then, they returned to the Goryeo Dynasty and the enthronement ceremony to receive all the government officials' congratulatory ceremony was held. As the formalities that the emperors of Mongolia were involve in the Kings' enthronement like this were repeated, the meaning that Kings' enthronement is the formalities which are combined with investiture was strengthened. Enthronement's diplomatic formalities were again changed in the reign of U of Goryeo. U of Goryeo who mounted the throne after Gongmin of Goryeo suddenly died sent an envoy to ask its recognition [請承襲] to other countries. At this time, in the Goryeo Dynasty, diplomacy which was dependent on the Ming Dynasty was carried out while it was confronting against the Northern Yuan Dynasty. However, because the relationship with the Goryeo Dynasty was important to the Northern Yuan Dynasty to check the Ming Dynasty, the Northern Yuan Dynasty actively offered condolences for Gongmin of Goryeo and invested U of Goryeo as the king. However, as the Goryeo Dynasty did not recognize this and asked the Ming Dynasty to give recognition to Gongmin of Goryeo' posthumous name and U of Goryeo's succession to the throne eight times for ten years, it clarified its political course.

The Translation of Animal Metaphors in Politics between English and Arabic

Objectives: This study aims to examine the conceptualization of animal metaphors in political speeches delivered by Abdullah II, the King of Jordan, and President Trump. Additionally, the research investigates the translatability of metaphors between English and Arabic in political speeches.
 Methods: The study analyzes metaphors using the conceptual theory of metaphor. Translated metaphors are examined based on the triangulation of translation procedures suggested by Schäffner (2004) and Deignan et al. (1997).
 Results: The study reveals that metaphors play a significant role in shaping political discourse and serve as influential devices used by politicians to persuade their audience and communicate complex political ideas, particularly in relation to topics such as terrorism. Regarding the translatability of metaphors, the study finds that the similarities outweigh the differences, primarily in terms of the correspondence in the number of conceptual domains.
 Conclusions: It is widely acknowledged that metaphors are prevalent in politics and have been established as major linguistic devices. Therefore, many political figures extensively employ metaphors. The research recommends exploring other types of metaphors in different genres.

Putinism beyond Putin: the political ideas of Nikolai Patrushev and Sergei Naryshkin in 2006–20

ABSTRACT This essay adds to previous research of Putinism an investigation of the political thought and foreign outlooks of Russia’s Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev and Head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Sergei Naryshkin, with a focus on their statements between 2006 to 2020. The paper outlines Patrushev’s and Naryshkin’s thoughts regarding the United States, Ukraine, and the idea of multipolarity/polycentrism. We then introduce Patrushev’s critique of liberal values and color revolutions, and Naryshkin’s statements on the memory of World War II and Western institutions. The salience of these altogether seven topics is interpreted with reference to three classical topoi in Russian political thought: the Slavophile vs. Westerners controversy, the single-stream theory, and the civilizational paradigm. Our conclusions inform the ongoing debate on whether to conceptualize Putinism as either an ideology or a mentality.

Construction of Ideological and Political Cases for the Course "Compiling Technology"

This article aims at the current situation of college students' value shaping and emotional psychology that have not yet taken shape. By constructing ideological and political case construction ideas, ideological and political elements such as philosophy, ethics and regulations, and a sense of social responsibility are integrated into the teaching process of compilation technology. In the teaching process, dogmatic preaching should be avoided, and the basic teaching method of ideological and political education should be from perceptual to rational, from concrete to abstract, and from special to general. Ideological and political education should be integrated into the teaching of professional skills and knowledge. Taking a class teaching design as an example, this article introduces how to organically combine ideological and political education with professional knowledge.

Implementation of Human Rights

Human rights are understood as rights that belong to every individual as a consequence of being human, regardless of legal acts. By affirming the existence of human rights, we say that every human being, by the very fact that he or she is such, is entitled to something. The modern concept of human rights is rooted in experiences of "legal illegality" when crimes were committed under the authority of the law and when some human beings were denied such status. These rights are defined as those rights that are inherent in our nature and without which we cannot live as human beings. Basic human rights and freedoms give us the opportunity to fully develop and use our human qualities, our intelligence, our consciousness, and fulfill our demands. The issue of human rights has received a great deal of attention. Today, the violation of human rights is taken seriously by international bodies and most countries have their own legislation to guarantee the protection and implementation of human rights. Human rights are closely related to the state's obligation to protect and promote them. Putting the state in their focus refers to the governing model, the state is the main actor, the responsible and responsible entity for the promotion of human rights and freedoms. In fact, the obligation and role of the state does not consist only in a passive position to promote them, but at the same time, it also has as a duty and as a primary obligation the undertaking of actions to guarantee and protect human rights and freedoms through policies active. The issue of human rights has attracted the attention of many people. As a legal category, human rights are presented in the creation of the first legal rules, where these give us the opportunity to develop and fully use our qualities and fulfill our requirements. The most effective protection of human rights is through state public institutions, where the state has the most powerful monopoly of force through which it can realize political goals and ideas, The aspiration to protect human dignity represents the essence of the concept of human rights. This aspiration puts the human being at the center of interest, where it is based on the common universal system of values committed to the right to life, as an inviolable right, and provides a framework for building the system of human rights. to man.
 
 Received: 05 May 2022 / Accepted: 17 May 2023 / Published: 20 May 2023

Home as a site of resistance/repression? The intersection of family, politics and the Hong Kong 2019 protest movement

This article illuminates the mutually constitutive nature of activism and family life in the context of a high-risk protest movement, by focusing on the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong. Drawing on data collected through in-depth interviews with individuals who participated in the 2019 Movement, this article captures how politics penetrated individuals’ private lives through everyday family practices, and depicts the ways in which the protest movement undermined or fostered family cohesion. The findings illustrate the heterogeneity of family political interactions during political upheaval: while families were often sites of conflict and repression, which amplified political dissonance and reinforced hegemonic power relations within the domestic sphere, they could also become spaces of activism where individuals exchange political ideas and muster resources for collective actions. This study bridges the literature of family and social movement, by demonstrating how family lives and political participation are interwoven, and simultaneously structure protest participants’ biographical and social movement trajectories.

Listening to Human Rights: Class Conflict in Hanns Eisler’s Deutsche Sinfonie

Abstract In what began as a piece against the Nazi concentration camps, the composer Hanns Eisler and his collaborator, the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, created the eleven-movement, twelve-tone Deutsche Sinfonie, Op. 50 (1935–1958) to communicate political ideas. They soon expanded it to articulate what they saw as the very roots of fascism: militarism and capitalism. To explain the problems of class conflict in Europe, Eisler and Brecht focused on two groups that were central to Marxist–Leninist ideology: peasants and industrial workers. In two movements, the Peasant Cantata (Bauernkantate) and Workers Cantata (Arbeiterkantate), they portrayed long-standing injustices that peasants and industrial workers endured in the twentieth century. Eisler thus viewed the Deutsche Sinfonie, his largest and most ambitious work, as a way of explaining the arc of modern German history—from the late nineteenth century through to the 1940s—and how the Nazis came to power. The article further argues that the Deutsche Sinfonie can be analysed in relation to the discourse on human rights, drawing on the work of Martha Nussbaum, Micheline Ishay and other human rights theorists and historians, as a contribution to what Mark Philip Bradley calls the ‘global human rights imagination’. The article explains the vital role that the Peasant Cantata and Workers Cantata had in the overall conception of the work and how human rights issues were at the core of that musical idea. To place the Deutsche Sinfonie in historical and cultural context, this interdisciplinary analysis integrates methodologies of both cultural history and musicology.

German Kahn and Global Strategy

The article analyzes the political ideas of German Kahn, one of the major modern representatives of strategic thinking, and their role and significance in the states (especially in the US experience) and international political relations. In particular, aspects of strategic knowledge that work in the area of expanding our goals and opportunities, its habitual thinking is related to limited goals and opportunities, and the fact that strategic thinking arising from one of the two allows one to consider not only one’s own decisions, but also those of one’s opponent, were analyzed. Also, the possibilities of strategic thinking and analysis today are highlighted.

Mapping the research trends on political communication in Asia: A bibliometric analysis using R package and VOS

Political communication refers to developing and exchanging political ideas and opinions among the general public, elected officials, political parties and affiliated organisations like the media. Recent years have seen an enormous amount of literature in the area of political communication owing to the growing interest of academics in the subject. Using the R package bibliometrix and the Visualisation of Similarities viewer programme, this study aims to enhance graphical mapping of the bibliographic data for political communication publications in select countries of Asia. The results show that, especially since 2016, scholars have been paying more and more attention to the study of political communication in the age of fake news, hyperpolarization, etc. They also show that research publications on the topics of communication, China, Taiwan, India, the USA, social media, articles, politics, the internet, decision-making, democracy, governance and elections are gaining momentum in recent years. Additionally, the findings show that the top three nations for publishing articles on political communication are the USA, China and Russia. The findings also reveal that even scholars from non-democratic or less democratic countries have made substantial attempts to improve political communication studies, despite the fact that political communication is one of the most crucial components in democratic countries.

Shifting Patterns of Antisemitism in Latin America: Xenophobia, Exclusion, and Inclusion

AbstractThis article analyzes several patterns of antisemitism in twentieth-century Latin America. It identifies historical moments when carriers of social and political ideas projected negative images of Jews, sometimes pushing anti-Jewish policies and at times leading violent actions against Jews. Thus, antisemitism served to mobilize in defense of national identity; as a reaction to Jewish peddlers perceived as a threat to national economies; as a basis for the generalized rejection of “undesirable refugees” during World War II and the Holocaust; and as a Cold War phenomenon, along with anticommunism and neo-Nazism. Like other forms of xenophobia, antisemitism was grounded in prejudice and the demonization of a supposed enemy rather than being based on verified evidence. Analysis suggests that antisemitism has been deeply rooted in Latin America and has manifested over time with changing historical and social constellations. At the same time, while Judeophobic prejudices and actions have been intimidating and have at times precluded the legal immigration of Jews, antisemitism has rarely become dominant or led to systemic social discrimination, massive expulsion, or mass genocide, unlike in Europe.

The Elusive Mandate of Heaven: Changing Views of Tianming 天命 in the Eastern Zhou Period

Abstract The concept of tianming 天命 (Mandate of Heaven/Heaven’s Mandate) is often viewed as a foundational principle of Chinese political culture. However, as paleographic and textual evidence marshalled in our article suggests, during the formative age of this culture—the Eastern Zhou period (eighth through third centuries BCE)—this concept underwent profound changes and lost much of its original appeal. With the de facto collapse of Zhou authority in 771 BCE, tianming became dissociated from the idea of singular and universal rule. Henceforth it could refer to a regional lord’s hegemonic power, or the right to rule one’s state, or just to an opportune moment or individual destiny. The very idea of Heaven as an activist deity that guaranteed political order was questioned by many, further eroding the appeal of tianming. However, the Western Zhou notion of tianming did not perish altogether. It remained “an ideology in reserve,” part of a broad toolkit of political ideas, to be rediscovered and redeployed by Han dynasty imperial ideologues.

Revisiting Multiculturalism in Ambedkar’s Thought: A Theoretical Perspective

Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) was not only the messiah of the downtrodden people in India but was also the champion of minority rights, women’s rights, farmer’s and labourer’s rights. He was an individualist as well as a communitarian. He was a modernist, rationalist and moralist. His philosophy covers a wide range of ideas including justice, liberty, equality, democracy, minority rights, women’s rights, group representation, social exclusion and inclusion, majority–minority conflicts, cultural and linguistic diversity and identity and recognition which offer a non-western experience of the early part of twentieth century to the present-day literature on multiculturalism. But his ideas have paid little scholarly attention both in western and Indian scholarships. The existing scholarships on B. R. Ambedkar largely highlight on his socio-economic, cultural, religious, political and constitutional ideas. But his multicultural ideas are hardly explored in academic discourses. This article thus attempts first to highlight on some leading theorists of multiculturalism and their views and then discusses Ambedkar’s multicultural ideas. The article, however, restricts itself to some selected theorists of multiculturalism for deliberation only with an aim to compare them with Ambedkar’s writings.

Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands

Amid a journalist killing spree in Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) declared 2022 as the Year of Ricardo Flores Magón. Among the best-known Mexican journalists of all time, Flores Magón, as well as a cadre of like-minded colleagues, unleashed a far-reaching revolution that threatened dictator Porfirio Díaz's rule as well as US investments in Mexico. While AMLO's administration has used Flores Magón's history to legitimize its vision of a government that works for all, it struggles to deal with the country's unrelenting violence. Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández's Bad Mexicans could not have come at a better time, and while we can debate the effectiveness of AMLO's use of Flores Magón to gain popular support, Hernández's book on him and his colleagues is hard evidence of Flores Magón's far-reaching influence on Mexican and US history. It lays out clearly the reasons why Flores Magón remains a compelling historical figure.Engagingly written without sacrificing archival evidence, Hernández's book details the early twentieth-century Magonista revolutionary movement focused on ridding Mexico of Díaz to effect transformational change. She re-creates the vision and plotting, strategies, challenges, and real outcomes of Magonismo in both Mexico and the United States. Among the many lessons of Bad Mexicans is how social revolutions take constant perseverance and commitment, even when the bulk of the membership has lost faith. Visionaries such as Flores Magón, Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza, Librado Rivera, and others who risked everything day in, day out were labeled “bad Mexicans” by Mexican and US government officials. Such labeling had bloody consequences and reveals the centrality of rhetoric and discourse in enacting so-called progress and development through violence. Bad Mexicans reminds of how labeling people remains a dangerous tool too often used to promote both fringe and mainstream political ideas that marginalize and justify keeping certain populations out of the country (in both Mexico and the United States).Díaz's regime had grown strong, affecting every single aspect of life. Magonismo's concerns with the Díaz government's abuse of power were legitimate. Local jefaturas led by unscrupulous jefes políticos often sexually abused women as they wielded regional control. On a more national scale, Mexican agents wooed foreign investors with endless natural resources, access to cheap, readily available labor, and guarantees of a safe environment for US capital investments. This alliance went a long way. As Hernández explains, besides aiding Díaz in his quest to make Mexico modern, the safeguarding of US interests in Mexico yielded high returns. US agents worked to keep unruly, “bad” Mexicans such as Flores Magón at bay. Flores Magón and others had no other option than to take their movement underground, even while serving prison sentences in some of the period's most notorious jails. The silencing of movements by discrediting their leaders through labeling involved extensive transnational state collaboration and constant surveillance. As Hernández aptly points out, the Mexican state grew stronger as it sought collaboration with the United States to track these individuals who threatened the stability of both countries. Such alliance was further solidified with cooperation from newly formed departments like the Federal Bureau of Investigation.Hernández is quick to remind us, however, that while intricate transnational networks of state power could threaten democratic visions, grassroots networks rooted in alliances of workers, writers, and individuals seeking a dignified way of life—on both sides of the border—remained a constant threat to government officials. In the end, no strong transnational surveillance state could contain Magonismo's vision of a new and more equitable world. As the movement inspired many to demand land, women's, labor, and political rights, it also witnessed internal fissures, competing personal agendas, financial crises, and the continuation of a transnational crackdown on suspected rebeldes. As landed regional elites including Francisco Madero and Venustiano Carranza eventually served as president of Mexico, Magonismo meshed, clashed, or revived under new sociopolitical banners. As Flores Magón took his last breath and the revolution became institutionalized, Magonismo left an indelible mark on the growing Latino community in the United States. This legacy's importance sets this book apart from many others on Flores Magón. Bad Mexicans centers the way in which Magonista ideals shaped US residents and workers. Whether via labor collectives such as the Industrial Workers of the World or community-based efforts to end racially based lynching in Texas and other states, Hernández shows how Mexican and US history have always been entwined. Magonismo was a movement that countered a transnational vision of order and progress that favored industrial capitalist development over the lives of ordinary people; it not only sparked the beginning of one of the bloodiest revolutions of the twentieth century but uncovered the brutality with which US state and federal agents handled suspected revolutionaries, making clear its profound influence on contemporary ideas shaping immigration policy, law enforcement practices, and race relations.

U podstaw problematyki świadomości państwowej

These considerations concentrate on the set of conditions affecting funda- mental methods of governing and shaping the attitudes of the members of hu- man community organized politically and subjected to the state power by the whole of elements forming the present sense of state of the society. The latter is understood as a specially qualified sense of a group of people relating to the content of the relationship of the society to a particular state structure and to the forms and methods of functioning of a state mechanism. In the content of this relationship conviction of the society (or of its basic part) concerning the real value’ and doubtless advantages of the existence of a state in social developement, in safeguarding material and spiritual needs of the citizens, in realization of moral and political ideas acknowledged and accepted by the society constitutes an element of considerable importance. We should also stress that such convic- tion and the estimation of the advantaged of the existence of state structures will not rely on model schemes but on the practice of political activity and on its results.The Author considers a truism statements such as these: that the sense of state is a historical category, a phenomenon subject to constant changes and re- volutionary leaps from quantitative to qualitative changes or that the evolution of the character of a state is connected with the changes of its social and poli- tical content. Thus the bigger is a group of persons having influence on political issues concerning their country and having the possibility to make fundamental decisions relating to the fate and to the future of the nation, the stronger and the more durable are the grounds of the present sense of state.Considerations presented in this essey are supposed to show among other things that not only class conditions influence the contents, the degree of intensity and te durability of the sense of state. Also in the countries where there is one and the same class, can we notice that this content differs in a higher or smaller degree. The following elements may be decisive: intensity of tradition and of the proper, centuries-long tradition, national composition of the society, the level of political culture, some features of the bottomless area of the social psyche and so on.

The European Green Deal: a gateway to strategic energy autonomy?

The concept of “strategic autonomy” embeds the political idea of “independence” and the legal notion of “sovereignty”. As the EU largely depends for energy on foreign resources, particularly from autocratic regimes, difficult governance situations, notably wars, can deeply disrupt the Union’s energy supply. Specifically, war in Ukraine has been convincingly explained as an affirmation of the opposed development of Russia’s “sphere of influence”, whereby energy supply is used as a “weapon” to create dependency across sovereign State borders. Whereas scholars have advanced a dichotomy for the EU and its Member States to escape Russia’s sphere of influence, either diversifying energy sources or accelerating the green transition, it is argued in this paper that the two approaches should be considered complementary rather than alternative. It is therefore suggested that, at least in the short term, the EU and its Member States should seek to diversify their energy sources, whilst at the same time trying to accelerate the green transition under the Green Deal as a longer-term strategy. As the EU and its Member States should qualify as “non-belligerent” vis-à-vis Russia, necessity seems the most suitable legal justification to relinquish already contracted energy supply obligations and move to a newly balanced energy policy.
 Received: 26 October 2022Accepted: 27 January 2023

Welcome to Country: Geographical valuations and devaluations of First Nations’ presence on Country in Australia

First Nations’ custodianship of Country has provided incalculable benefits to Australia. Geographical devaluation of this custodianship has been central to settler colonial and later governmental economic and development policy that worked/s to remove First Nations from Country. Indeed, the negation of First Nations sovereignties to extract value from the environment for non-Indigenous dividends underpins the development and operation of state-directed economic activity in Australia. As a result, how First Nations are valued, or not, is tied to cultural, political and economic ideas about First Nations’ presence on Country. Welcome to Country ceremonies exemplify the complexities associated with geographical valuations of First Nations’ presence. Such ceremonies incentivise labour demands for Elder and older First Nations to enact language and culturally specific custodianship even as broader non-Indigenous institutions are hostile to self-determined development and Indigenous sovereignties. The article provides a theoretical account of the geographical valuations and modelling tendencies with respect to First Nations economic development that focus on the state as the key interlocutor. Where scholarship draws attention to the role of the state as recognising the cultural rather than economic dimension of First Nations activities, Welcome to Country ceremonies demonstrate the importance of regional and local scales of First Nations sovereign practices. First Nations and Elder capacities to perform these ceremonies are both a normalised and under-considered element of regional development activities. Welcome to Country constitutes an important case site for understanding the complex interactions between First Nations axiologies and non-Indigenous geographical valuations.

A Critical Analysis of the Role of Herodotus's Histories in Representing the Conflicts between the Persian Empire and the Greek States

Herodotus' Histories is the first truly historical work in Western literature. It describes how and why wars took place from 680 BC to 479 BC. As a historical record, Herodotus used documentary techniques to record the human geography, national customs and political ideas of the society at that time. This information served as the background and causes of the Greek-Persian War so that later generations could better understand the history of that period. This paper takes the first volume as an example to interpret Herodotus' description of the Lydian Empire, the Persian Empire and the core figures of the empire as well as the theological thoughts mixed in the explanation of the war, and to enrich the reasons for the occurrence and results of the war through the description of the national political system and other background information. Therefore, Herodotus' Histories not only records the war but also shows the influence brought by the war, such as the exchange and development of culture. By recording and describing the Greek-Persian War, Herodotus revealed the history of the ancient Greek period and expressed his sense of responsibility and mission as a historian.

Situ Meitang, Patriotic Overseas Chinese?

Abstract The article recounts the transnational political activities of Situ Meitang, who led the Hongmen Chee Kung Tong in the Americas in support of the Nationalist government during the Second World War. At the end of the Chinese Civil War, he endorsed the People’s Republic of China and settled in Beijing. The article shows that current biographies of Situ ignore the complexity of his political ideas, including a desire for democracy in China and the economic development of southern China. Through the lens of Situ Meitang, the article also considers the complicated political loyalties and sense of belonging among Chinese overseas who supported Situ Meitang’s political actions, as well as the transnational circulation of information, resources, and ideas.

The Management of Drinking Water in Trondheim from 950 to 1777 as a Source of Changing Attitudes toward Health

Abstract This article aims to illuminate how the management of drinking water and public health in Trondheim, Norway changed from 950 to 1777, from a private to public responsibility. A systematic analysis of five excavations in Trondheim shows that during the Middle Ages, only a few citizens had a well or a cistern on their property. This suggests that fetching water from above-ground sources was a regular practice. In the post-medieval period, this changed as the number of wells increased. However, the well water got polluted, and alternative water sources were too far away for the rising population. 18th-century political ideas emphasised how the citizens were now the state’s greatest resource, which prompted new mentalities on how authorities had to take care of the people. In 1777, the public authorities of Trondheim finally established a public water pipe system, ensuring clean water to its citizens.

War and Power Politics in the Service of Higher Ends

At the start of Early Modernity, the notion of raison d’état (reason of state) became a central issue in European politics. By means of that notion politicians and intellectuals reflected upon the legitimacy of violent and unethical means in the service of higher ends. Due, among others, to the nature of modern warfare, the role of the state acquired new significance in human affairs. Therefore, many philosophers and politicians argued that politics might be fundamentally different from other human activities and might require a special rationality and morality. Also, thus my hypothesis, the discourse and history of the raison d’état is throughout history characterized by some recurring themes, such as the consolidation of governmental power. In this study, I want to explore how the raison d’état, in various strengths, has been instrumentalised in the political doctrine of Richelieu and Louis XIII as well in the political ideas of Putin and his ideological right-hand Dugin. It will be discussed how in both political systems; sovereignty is considered to be an undifferentiated body of legitimate power with a firm basis in Christian-Stoic natural law. The stoic ideal of indifference (apatheia) is an important reference in the reason of state rhetoric since the individual is supposed to be prepared to sacrifice his life for the preservation of the State. The common good should be the objective of each person in the society. I will analyse to what extent Putin and Dugin, in defending their war politics, use similar arguments as cardinal Richelieu. By reflecting on the intellectual discourse about the nature and purposes of the State itself, and the element of justice and higher values in the public discourse, it can be analysed how the raison d’état operates in a political doctrine.