Political Vocation Research Articles

Beyond populism: The diversity of thin anti-establishment contestation in turbulent times

Studies of ‘thin’ anti-establishment supply assess mainly the extent of populist messages. This paper analyses the diversity of thin contestation beyond just populism. I conduct a content analysis of 142 social media campaigns by anti-establishment (AEPs) and conventional parties during 23 elections across Europe 2010–2019. We find that in addition to popular will and extra-political technocratic expertise, AEPs increasingly enacted exceptional political calling, depicted as necessary to revive ‘true’ formal-representative politics itself. Regression analysis shows that political vocation cues played an important auxiliary role in AEP mobilization strategies. On average, those AEPs across the political spectrum which used more political vocation messages performed better electorally ceteris paribus than those which used them less. Conventional parties instead did not universally benefit if they increasingly spotlighted thin messages. The salience of anti-establishment and populism-related rhetoric played a further role within particular AEP groups, but neither was significantly associated with stronger AEP performance altogether. In order to better understand recent political turbulence, it is therefore useful to account for more diverse thin contestation supply.

Moral Faith and the Legacy of John Lewis's Political Vision of “Good Trouble”

AbstractThe late congressman John Lewis spent most of his political life engaging Black Power's commitment to economic and political freedom through a political vocabulary that aligned with his deeply held beliefs in nonviolence, human rights activism, and moral faith. The tension between the Black radical left and establishment Black politics dates back to Lewis's clash with elite Black leaders over the content of his prepared address for the 1963 March on Washington. The address provides a glimpse into Lewis's complicated political legacy. The youngest speaker at the March, Lewis faced the daunting task of both representing the political philosophy of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and meeting the expectations of established civil rights leaders. Negotiating the political interests of the organizers of the March alongside the demands of SNCC foreshadowed the congressman's political vocation: a lifetime of civil rights advocacy through a politics of respectability and Black Power's political philosophy of freedom and economic transformation. Lewis's political legacy is complicated; and yet, it was fueled by an unabashed commitment to Black freedom struggles, human rights activism, and racial reconciliation.

Diventare umano. Dalla memoria culturale ai nuovi sensi di appartenenza: storie di migrazioni negli albi illustrati contemporanei

This contribution aims to investigate the complex, transformative role children's literature can play in today’s socio-cultural context, offering a creative platform, not only in terms of plot or contexts, but also in terms of stylistic research and the book as a medium, on which to build new ways of thinking about and designing reality. The work focuses specifically on one of the most significant picture books on the topic of (real or metaphoric) migration, refugees, migrants’ difficult and controversial path to integration. The very rich production in recent years has, with different registers each time, emblematically interpreted the political vocation of contemporary children's literature, formulating relations with otherness, encouraging the deconstruction of cultural stereotypes and preventing emotional anaesthesia in the face of issues that demand the precise assumption of human and civil responsibility. In formal terms, it investigates the narrative strategies adopted by the authors and illustrators to guide the empathic involvement of the reader, aiming to foster reflexive and pro-social attitudes. In the picture books examined, the representation of the refugee, the stateless, the “destined to death”, to quote Hanna Arendt, for whom the loss of citizenship equals the denial of the most basic human rights, challenges the “danger of a single history”.

Extensions after Man: Race, Counter/insurgency and the Futures of Media Theory

This article returns to the geopolitical scene and racial logics that provide the underacknowledged conditions of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media and, specifically, its well-known proposition that media should be understood foremost as ‘outerings’ or ‘extensions of man’. Attending to the structuring inheritances of racial slavery and the plantation system in this founding statement of mid-twentieth-century media theory, as well as its debt to the literary and intellectual movement of the Southern Agrarians, I consider how the racializing figure of ‘Man’ conserved by the nascent field of media studies was contemporaneously brought to crisis by black (and) anticolonial freedom struggles. Arguing for the need to reread the career of western media theory through its political vocation in attempting to manage this crisis, the article concludes by turning briefly to a revisionary account of media and exteriority also circulated in 1964: the revolutionary intellectual James Boggs’s ‘The Negro and Cybernation’. Boggs’s writings, which situate emergent forms of computing and cybernation within a longer materialist genealogy of race, capitalism and technology, offer both a proleptic critique of the early disciplinary formation of media theory and a divergent set of coordinates for approaching media technology on the terrain of black political struggle.

Educación femenina en los albores de la república chilena: debate público, arquetipos y tensiones en tiempos de transición

The nineteenth century constituted a fundamental period for the education of women in Chile, which progressively moved from the privacy of the domestic world to educational spaces and levels defined by the State, with a public and political vocation. Although this process became evident from the second half of that century onwards, some legislative and press archives of the period of the independence and formation of the Chilean Republic (1810-1830) account for a gradual rhetorical resignification of female archetypes and the role of women in society and constitute relevant antecedents to understand the changes that, in practice, would materialize for women’s education in the following years. The article considers this period as a transitional stage between the colonial and the republican world, during which the leaders of the new Chilean order understood the relevance of having an illustrated social base, which would not only include men, but also women on the basis of a new political definition of their situation.

Psychoanalyst Examines How Culture Influences Suicide

Psychoanalyst Examines How Culture Influences Suicide

Calvin’s political theology in context

ABSTRACT Calvin’s political doctrine stems from his ecclesiology, in response to both the Papal doctrine on the delegate power of the magistrates and the Lutheran subordination of the Church to the civil authorities. He was not concerned with discussing the best possible form of secular government, but rather with preparing a theological justification of civil power that would make it depend exclusively on God, not on the people. I will hold that Calvin regards the people’s function as merely instrumental: they accept the authority chosen by God, but do not institute it. Political vocation and the transmission of power that is indispensable to it both derive uniquely and exclusively from God. The discrepancies apparent in different authors’ interpretations can be clarified by recovering the context of his argumentation. This is the central objective of this article.

Violence and Politics: Reconsidering Weber’s ‘Politics as a Vocation’

Today, more than ever, consideration of politics requires reflection on the role of violence and the ethical conduct of leaders. These and associated issues are central in Weber’s ‘Politics as a vocation’, published 100 years ago. While frequently cited, Weber’s definitions of politics and the state, and his understanding of the vocation of politics, are seldom subject to close examination. In the present article Weber’s treatment of the state and politics in terms of the means of violence is shown to be inadequate and misleading. The extra-territoriality of the modern state, necessary in war-making and international intrigue, is continuous with its means of violence, but curiously ignored in ‘Politics as a vocation’. Finally, Weber’s account of morality in the political vocation is shown to have high polemical resonance but low analytic value.

It is Time for Philosophy to Return to the City

Philosophy has been a subversive practice since the time of Socrates. Recognizing no authority other than the persuasiveness of dialectics, philosophy designated a thinking beyond the boundaries of the city: an estranging conception, an elsewhere of thought. It is from this critical distance that philosophy derived its political vocation. In the era of global capitalism, however, philosophy has become institutionalized and lost its subversive potential. To this end, philosophy has accepted that it should no longer pose too many questions, especially the ones which are most fundamental, resulting in a dearth of in-depth public questioning, and the slumber of critical reasoning. Hence, philosophy needs to rediscover its political vocation in order to reawaken consciences and to once again embrace that theoretical and practical commitment which never accepts anything without critical reflection. By doing so, it will be possible to restore philosophy to its original role as a guiding light for the community.

Construcción socio-política de una vocación docente dirigida a la transformación social: el caso de la pedagogía en el campo de la educación física

Does it make sense to talk about social and political vocation in Teacher Education in the field of Physical Education? This question is discussed in order to preserve need and validity of this issue, stating that the teaching vocation must also be understood from a socio-political perspective to ease, favor and encourage a process of reflection, regarding the teaching of professional identify which nowadays, appears to be delimited by prescriptions and normative codes, at the stage that educational policies have neglected on conceptualizing vocation linked to teaching. Socio-political dimension of teaching vocation shaping professional identity, takes on account an uncertain environment characterized by inequality and social segregation, within the Physical Education Teacher Education field. In addition, this issue is unfolded together with research proposals involving social transformative function in the Physical Education Teacher Education context that educational policies have not duly taken into account. Michel Foucault’s philosophical theory and Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, although from different epistemological perspectives, allow us to sustain why at present becomes relevant and necessary to ask us in which way socio-political teaching vocation is constructed in the field of Physical Education Teacher Education.

Virtues for the Vocation of Politics

This article aims to rebut the claim about Dirty Hands (DH) in politics and reorient the issue. Allegedly, decent politicians must sometimes do what is right by means that are deeply wrong and they are morally tainted as a result. DH is here rejected as contradictory since there can be no dirtying or guilt given the presumption of ultimate rightness, and politics is demeaned by supposing otherwise. DH is not entailed by moral complexity or conflicting duties or circumstantial regret, and does not hinge on utilitarianism versus deontology. A significant real-world case is explored where DH might seem manifest but is not. With DH dissolved, the refocussed and urgent question involves discerning apt personality-types for politics and its hard cases. The ideal: persons exceptional in being morally conscientious but more tough-minded than tender-hearted.

Max Weber’s concept of ‘modern politics’

In a critical approach to Mommsen’s classical thesis, which states the dependence of Weber’s sociology on his political position, the article reconstructs the foundation of Weber’s ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ on his sociological analyses of the political domain in the manuscripts for the posthumous publication of Economy and Society. The first two pages of his 1919 lecture particularly show that Weber can fall back on the definitions of State and politics that he had already developed for his political sociology. Yet, to appreciate the full extent of this theoretical contribution, it is necessary to present Weber’s entire ideal-typical analysis of the political. The article then shows that Weber provides an unlabelled definition of ‘modern politics’ that negates ante litteram Carl Schmitt’s foundation of politics on the idea of enmity. In this context, Weber’s sound plea for parliamentarism and against the fascination of civil war comes to the fore that he wanted to deliver to his audience of young revolutionaries in January 1919.

Finanzwissenschaft. Vorlesungen 1894–1897 by Max Weber (review)

Book Reviews 125© Max Weber Studies 2019. or a party machine driven process of party competition with popular election of the President as in the USA, is a matter of historical chance, and the opportunities for occasional and professional politicians are different in all of these political systems.6 But toward the end of the same work Weber employs his typology of legitimate ‘Herrschaft’ to predict with complete certainty that all revolutions will end up in the ‘spiritual proletarianisation [of the following] in order to achieve “discipline”’.7 Weber rhetorically plays both registers , contingency and possibility and quasi deterministic outcomes, depending on the political judgments he is seeking to draw and the positions he is seeking to discredit. Curiously, Palonen often follows a similar polemical strategy when arguing with opponents of parliamentary politics, as in his dispute with Arendt, though he claims to be merely invoking the contingent aspects of Weberian politics. This is not to say that Palonen’s ‘one-sided’ approach of focusing on ‘chance’ does not yield great interpretive insight across breadth of Weber’s political thinking. It most certainly does. It is merely to say, that given the sprawling nature of Weber’s work, we all face the danger that our ‘one–sided’ interpretations of his many concepts, categories, and developmental tendencies, may turn out to be too one-sided. Peter Breiner University at Albany, State University of New York Max Weber, Finanzwissenschaft. Vorlesungen 1894–1897, edited by Martin Heilmann, with Cornelia Meyer-Stoll (Max Weber Gesamtausgabe III/3; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), xiii + 443pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-3-16-153076-0. €194.00. In the autumn of 1894 Max Weber moved from Berlin to Freiburg, following his appointment as a Professor of ‘Economics and Financial Science’ in the state of Baden. The title was no mere formality: during the winter semester of 1894–95 he lectured four times a week on ‘general and theoretical economics’, and four times a week on ‘financial science’, what we would today call ‘public economics’. He 6. Max Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’, in Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 336-52. 7. Ibid., p. 365. 126 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2019. only began reading and preparing for these lectures in late July 1894; the manuscript upon which these lectures is based has all the signs of work under pressure, prepared from lecture to lecture, without time for even a properly organised expository framework. The state of Baden required those civil servants working in financial administration to have taken university courses in mathematics, agriculture, manufacturing, economics, and public finance, in addition to the core law subjects, and the university was obliged to run a public finance course every semester. However, while Weber had 24 students in the autumn of 1894, only one of them was on the public administration pathway; the remainder were law students. Other members of the faculty also taught the course; Weber only did so once more before he left for Heidelberg in 1897, and he never taught the subject again. By contrast, before he broke off his last complete course in theoretical economics in the early summer of 1898 he had taught this course five times. From this comparison, and the sometimes scrappy nature of his lecture notes on public finance, we could easily presume that he ended up teaching this subject simply because it went with the appointment. Why, however, was he able he teach the subject at all, let alone four times a week for weeks on end? Weber had lived in his parents’ Berlin house since 1886, working as an unpaid court clerk, preparing a doctoral dissertation supervised by Levin Goldschmidt, Professor of Commercial Law, and then in 1890 passing the second state law examination which formally qualified him for legal practice. But he then embarked on a second dissertation that would qualify him to teach law, eventually publishing this as a book on Roman agrarian history in October 1891, and gaining the right to teach in February 1892. From the spring of 1892 he lectured in the Law Faculty, substituting for his former supervisor , but was not even made...

Paradigms of politics and political science

Real politics, as it has been carried out and is implemented in the world for centuries, contributed to the fact that people formed an ambivalent relationship to it. Many understood politics as the manipulation by passions of people in a given area; they comprehend it as a dirty business or business segment, in which honest people do not wish to participate. Appeared even sayings that politics is an area of life into which “Angels do not want to enter” or “where enter anyone but man”. It is needless to say, such an attitude of the people is their natural reaction to the practice of power relations that are inconsistent with the theory of politics policies and standards of public decency. The true vocation of politics in society’s life is several other. Political science in unity with sociology and philosophy aims to become a kind of compass and effective guide, pointing the correct direction of social and human development. The article is a reflection on optimal policy paradigms and political science and on the conditions under which these paradigms may become a reality.

Political Vocation and Oratory in the Lives of Phocion, Cato Minor and Cato Maior

The pair of biographies Phocion – Cato the Younger begins by establishing, in the Life of Phocion, a comparison between the two protagonists that is illustrated and developed in the internal comparison that Plutarch implicitly traces throughout the two Lives. This can be seen, among other aspects, in their political vocation and in the description of their character and oratory. There is also a close parallel between these biographies and that of Cato the Elder, reinforced by the comparison of their protagonists with Socrates, which evokes the ideal image of the politician inspired by philosophy.

El poder político en España

The study of political institutions in general, and particularly in Spain, has devoted limited attention to the analysis of political elites, although there is a growing interest in recent times. However, the decisions that emanate from representative institutions are conditioned by the profiles, preferences and dispositions of the individuals in positions of authority. That is why a systematic analysis of the Spanish political elites is necessary, especially in times of widespread political disaffection. Based on data collected in an original study, this paper analyzes the fundamental characteristics of political representatives in the autonomous and national chambers in Spain, their political preferences, the ideas they have about the problem of political disaffection, the origins of their political vocation and the way in which parliamentary activity takes place within parliaments.

“No Poetry Will Serve”: The Cruel Optimism of Adrienne Rich's Last Poems

This article approaches Adrienne Rich's late poems in terms of the shifting conceptions of the poetic “career” in late modernity. I argue that if one were to place Rich's late writings into the normative framework of career “fulfillment,” one would crucially overlook Rich's considerably beleaguered persistence as a poet of radical left-wing politics. Thus the idea of a “career trajectory” in effect too rigidly tries to organize what for Rich has become a melancholic commitment to a conception of poetic practice that has endured temporal dislocations while sustaining an engagement with the present. Focusing on her last collection of poetry, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve (2011), I reconsider how Rich's late lyrics articulate the desire for and aesthetic difficulty of what the anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli calls the “possibility of being otherwise” under late liberalism. Rich's late poems thereby illustrate how late modernism constitutes an interstitial living or what Lauren Berlant has theorized as the “cruel optimism” of late-modern fantasies of the good life. These last poems face their own cruelly optimistic attachments to poetry's political vocation without succumbing to the paralyzing forms of ethical and epistemological violence that proliferate in the twenty-first century.

Insight and the Enlightenment: WhyEinsichtin Chapter Six of Hegel’sPhenomenology of Spirit?

AbstractHegel uses the termEinsicht(‘insight’) throughout several key subsections of Chapter Six of thePhenomenology of Spirit(notably in ‘Faith and Pure Insight’ and ‘The Struggle of the Enlightenment with Superstition’). Nowhere else in his work does the term enjoy such a sustained treatment. Commentators generally accept Hegel’s use of the term in thePhenomenologyas simply referring to the type of counter-religious reasoning found in the French Enlightenment. I show how Hegel derives the term, through the lens of Kant’s essay, ‘What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?’ from thePantheismusstreit, the philosophical debate between Mendelssohn and Jacobi about knowledge of God. TheAufklärungprovenance ofEinsichtshows how a deep complicity between faith and reason, in the form of immediate knowing, leads beyond the Terror to a happier outcome in the Morality section. Finally, passing reference toEinsichtin theVorbegriffof theEncyclopaedia Logicconfirms its role in the ethical and political vocation of Hegel’s Science.

Sydney Professor G.A. Wood and the Great War 1914-1918

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight the views of Professor George Arnold Wood, a leading Australian scholar at the University of Sydney, concerning the involvement of the British Empire in the Great War of 1914-1918. Design/methodology/approach The author has examined all of Professor Wood’s extant commentaries on the Great War which are held in the archives of the University of Sydney as well as the biographical material on Professor Wood by leading Australian scholars. The methodology and approach is purely empirical. Findings The sources consulted revealed Professor Wood’s deeply held conviction about the importance of Christian values in the formation of political will and his belief that the vocation of politics is a most serious one demanding from statesmen the utmost integrity in striving to ensure justice and freedom, respect for the rights of others and the duty of the strong to protect the weak against unprincipled and ruthless states. Originality/value The paper highlights Professor Wood’s values as derived from the core statements of Jesus of Nazareth such as in the Sermon on the Mount. And as these contrasted greatly with the Machiavellian practice of the imperial German Chancellors from Bismarck onwards, and of the Kaiser Wilhelm II. It was necessary for the British Empire to oppose German war aims with all the force at its disposal. The paper illustrates the ideological basis from which Wood derived his values.

A Theology of Political Vocation: Christian Life and Public Office

A Theology of Political Vocation: Christian Life and Public Office