Political Writings Research Articles

Whitman's Eugenic Sustainability

Whitman's Eugenic Sustainability Abby L. Goode (bio) Walt Whitman's "The Eighteenth Presidency!" (1928) narrates the emergence of an American agrarian race. Unpublished during his lifetime but likely completed during the 1856 presidential campaign, this tract projects a future in which "the laboring persons, ploughmen, men with axes, spades, scythes" replace the nation's diseased, dysgenic politicians—"feeble old men," "pimps," and "malignants" who thrive on "the tumors and abscesses of the land."1 In contrast to these degenerates, the "true people, the millions of white citizens" represent "a different superior race" of "sturdy American freemen," their noble, working-class character reflected in their physical perfection: "healthy-bodied,… bold, muscular, young" (CP, 1311, 1314, 1312, 1308, 1309). Poised to overtake the despoiled politicians and city-dwellers and realize Thomas Jefferson's agrarian vision, this race of free laborers and farmers "copiously appears" as "the offspring and proof of These States" (CP, 1312). Emphasizing these laborers' physical dominance, "The Eighteenth Presidency!" foretells the rise of the white male working class as a form of population improvement and the path to an agrarian utopian future. [End Page 692] In this fantasy of demographic purification, "The Eighteenth Presidency!" presents a lesser-known early form of American sustainability rhetoric, one that emphasized breeding a fertile, laboring race that cultivates an equally fertile soil (CP, 1314). Throughout his life, Whitman struggled to preserve Jeffersonian agrarian ideals of small farming, independent labor, and plentiful land against what he believed posed persistent threats to the nation's future: economic inequality, agricultural blight, slavery, and population degeneracy.2 Jefferson had envisioned an ever-sustainable America, a vast expanse of "fertile lands" begging to be tilled and populated by independent farmers.3 But in Whitman's time this vision was far from a reality. Written following the Compromise of 1850 and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, legislative measures that failed to protect free laborers' interests, "The Eighteenth Presidency!" reflects Whitman's attempt to rescue the nation's deeply endangered agrarian future. The tract is not unlike Jeffersonian strains of contemporary American sustainability rhetoric that advocate returning to small farming, local economies, and stewardship.4 But rather than rehearse Jefferson's argument that small landowners and farmers are loyal, productive citizens, the essay takes a different rhetorical approach. It converts the seemingly economic ideal of free, independent, agricultural labor into an explicitly physical one of brawn and fertility. In so doing, it begins to reshape Jeffersonian agrarianism into a racial and reproductive discourse—one that envisions the American white working class as a prolific and ascendant race. Rendering these laborers biologically superior, ready to repopulate and invigorate the nation, "The Eighteenth Presidency!" attempts to transcend Whitman's unsustainable present. Read as a racial progress narrative, "The Eighteenth Presidency!" exemplifies a broader and unexamined trend inflecting Whitman's corpus—a tendency to adapt the [End Page 693] Jeffersonian ideal of small farming to nineteenth-century concepts of selective breeding and racial improvement. In the years preceding the Civil War, Whitman was particularly anxious about the erosion of agrarian values. But as the Free-Soil movement lost traction and slavery threatened to expand, he recognized the limitations of a predominantly political and economic approach to agrarianism. Influenced by American racial science, especially phrenology's popularization in the 1840s, Whitman developed a physiological and hereditarian vocabulary for describing the working class as he prepared his early political writings. This vocabulary permeates antebellum poems such as "A Woman Waits for Me" (1856) and "I Sing the Body Electric" (1855), which celebrate the dignity of average, industrious citizens through physical and seemingly inherited features: their "procreant urge," "strong, firm-fibered bod[ies]," and "massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome" sons (CP, 190, 256). These poems define agrarian laborers based on physique and fertility rather than economic status alone. Their virility safeguards the nation's agrarian future against dysgenic dangers: the "swarms of dough-face[d]," venereal-diseased politicians and "lousy" slave-holders who threaten to "eat the faces off the succeeding generations of common people worse than the most horrible disease" (CP, 1309, 1314, 1315). Highlighting these workers' reproductive futurity and physical supremacy, Whitman's antebellum writings depict racial progress and eugenic breeding as...

To Heaven or Hell: Bartolomé de Las Casas's Confesionario by David Thomas Orique

Reviewed by: To Heaven or Hell: Bartolomé de Las Casas's Confesionario by David Thomas Orique Patrick J. O'Banion To Heaven or Hell: Bartolomé de Las Casas's Confesionario. By David Thomas Orique, O.P. [Latin American Originals, Volume 13]. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2018. Pp. xvi, 127. $24.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-271-08098-7.) David Orique has done a great service by providing a very readable and useful translation of Bartolomé de Las Casas's 1546 Confesionario. The basis for his translation of this remarkable document, surprisingly the first ever into English, is the 1552 version published from Seville. Orique adds annotations in footnotes to help readers along and prefaces the document with three short chapters. The first places the Confesionario within the larger context of the Spanish Atlantic world and provides an account of Las Casas's early life and transformation into a defender of Native Americans in the New World. The second chapter explores the specific context within which Las Casas, as Bishop of Chiapas, wrote the confessionary and the dramatic responses that ensued from his opponents (including charges of high treason and inquisitorial scrutiny). The third chapter provides a helpful interpretive overview of the document and contextualizes it within the medieval canon law and summa confessorum tradition (although, unfortunately, not the broader early modern context of confessional manuals nor the substantial historiography that they have engendered). The Confesionario itself is an astonishing and brave document written to provide guidance for confessors in Las Casas's diocese. As Orique indicates, it follows the pattern established in Las Casas's earlier labors to tie together restitution, justice, and salvation (p.17). In particular, the Confesionario ordered confessors of conquistadors, encomenderos, slave owners, and, indeed, all Spaniards in the Indies (since he claims there were none who "acted in good faith" [p. 77]) to make restitution for the various ways in which they had robbed, oppressed, mistreated, or perpetrated violence of any kind upon the native inhabitants of the land. This might even entail handing over their entire estates. Failure to comply was to be met with exclusion from the Eucharist, a meaningful threat in a society that was organized around the annual Easter Duty and that saw sacramental grace as essential for salvation. By obeying these rules, the bishop asserted, "the conscience of the penitent will be assured, the aggrieved and the deprived will attain justice, and the confessor will fulfill his duty…" (p. 99). As that last phrase suggests, much of the burden for carrying out this program fell squarely on the confessors themselves, who were charged with implementing the [End Page 728] bishop's plan. He bound them to comply, lest by granting absolution they become "companion[s] and participant[s] in the crime and sin of the one who robs and destroys his neighbors" (p. 105). This gestures at the way in which Las Casas was attempting to establish a tightly regulated system of confessional oversight that would allow him to refashion social, economic, and ethical relations within his diocese. Frustratingly, the book does not effectively describe the consequences of that plan. Orique notes that Dominicans in New Spain supported it from 1546 and that, from 1560, mendicants in Peru also came on board (p. 69). But what does this mean? To what extent were conquistadors and encomenderos successfully pressured (if ever) to actually make restitution? One longs for a more explicit answer to this question. Professors will find this short text valuable for a variety of undergraduate courses. I expect that Las Casas's activist bent will intrigue many students. It might be effectively paired with Anthony Pagden's edition of Francisco de Vitoria Political Writings or, indeed, with a number of the "Latin American Originals" published by Pennsylvania State University Press, the series within which this book appeared. Patrick J. O'Banion Lindenwood University Copyright © 2018 The Catholic University of America Press

Desakralizacja myśli politycznej w czasach nowożytnych

The subject of this article is the demonstration of the changes that occurred in modern times in the perception of the goal of the state and politics and desirable attitudes of the ruler. The article presents a comparison of the medieval political thought and the thought developed by later political writers: N. Machiavelli, J. Bodin, H. Grotius, and T. Hobbes. The conclusion that follows from the considerations is that, in the Renaissance and Baroque times, the deprivation of the political thought of the sacral themes became evident. What is interesting is that the causes of transformations were at the same time found in the contradictions existing in the Middle Ages. The reception of Aristotelianism, undermining the authority of the papacy and the creation of sovereign states thoroughly and permanently changed the perception of politics and the functioning of the state.

Civil Disobedience – Not a Crime but a Punishable Political Action

The article argues that civil disobedience must be perceived as an action with progressive and political significance, thus reflecting, from a Kantian perspective, the recognizable paradox between morality and law, as expressed in Kant’s moral and political writings. Hence, this article firstly analyzes on which grounds Kant claims rebellion to be unjust. Secondly, it examines how and if people, from a Kantian point of view, can defend themselves against an unjust sovereignty. On this basis, it argues that ‘civil disobedience’ can be juxtaposed with the Kantian idea of ‘freedom of the pen,’ thus having the same function as a political corrective. However, two questions are still to be answered, namely if civil disobedience must be punished, and if civil disobedience as a political corrective can be justified? By considering civil disobedience primarily as political agency, both questions are answered in the affirmative.

Stagnacja, ewolucja czy rewolucja. Ustrój Polski między 13 grudnia 1981 a 4 czerwca 1989 r. Mity i fakty

The paper concerns the syncretistic, evolutionary nature of political transformation in Po- land prior to the introduction of political plurality in mid-1989. The author refers to the studies published in his books: Wojciech Jaruzelski wobec wyzwañ swoich czasów [Wojciech Jaruzelski and the challenges of his time] (2003) and Los genera3a [The General’s fate] (2008) where he confronts recorded facts with political propaganda. The evolution which eventually led to political plurality occurred in three stages. The first spanned the period ending when martial law was formally revoked after 586 days (on July 22, 1983), the second one was related to the office of Prime Minister that Wojciech Jaruzelski held (until September 25, 1985), and the third stage commenced when he gave up direct supervision of the government and assumed the office of Head of State (which continued to be combined with the actual power he held as 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party (KC PZPR)). The last stage was to continue for nearly four years, excluding over 18 months of his presidency, held under completely different conditions. Yet these 18 months were significant for the evolutionary process of the handover of power. Jaruzelski took into consideration the international context, particularly the balance of power in the Kremlin. Real change took place there only after Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power on March 11, 1985. On May 29, 1985 the Polish parliament passed the law on the Constitutional Tribunal, announced three years earlier in an amendment to the Constitution of March 1982. On July 15, 1987 the parliament passed the law on the Defense of Human Rights. The State Tribunal began working at the same time. The first president of Poland after the transformation drew attention to these facts a few years later. The ex-President has become a skilful polemicist and political writer, documenting the peaceful political transformation in Poland after 1980.

SIR JOHN ELIOT'STHE MONARCHIE OF MANAND EARLY STUART POLITICAL THOUGHT

AbstractThis article seeks to revise existing interpretations of the political writings composed by the early Stuart MP, Sir John Eliot (1592–1632), while imprisoned in the Tower of London between 1629 and 1632. In particular, it challenges the common understanding of Eliot as an absolutist writer. This characterization is shown to be based on a misreading of his principal treatise,The monarchie of man, and the problematic assumption thatDe jure– a translation he undertook of the continental absolutist, Arnisaeus – should be taken to epitomize Eliot's own views. The article also refutes the notion thatThe monarchie of manis an uncontroversial text that ignores contemporary political context. It is argued that the treatise can, in fact, only be read in relation to the constitutional crisis of the late 1620s: Eliot's work is presented as a subversive attack on Charles I's tyrannical pretensions, which supplies a remedy in the form of a Ciceronian insistence on active virtue. These findings in turn have implications for how we understand the political thought and culture of early Stuart England more generally.

Review: Austin Harrington, German Cosmopolitan Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar

Austin Harrington’s monumental investigation into the ‘radical centrists’ of the Weimar Republic is discussed in terms of key themes such as universalism, cosmopolitanism, and the critique of Eurocentrism that still resonate with recent debates. Contrasting the voices of lesser known critical intellectuals from this period such as Karl Jaspers and Kark Mannheim with the political writings of Max Weber and Georg Simmel, as well as with the reactionary positions of Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, Harrington’s book affords a useful critical perspective on ‘protesting the West’, yesterday and today.

COUNSELS OF PERFECTION AND REFORMATION POLITICAL THOUGHT

AbstractThe debate over counsels of perfection was a crucial aspect of the formation of political and ethical thought in the sixteenth century. It led both Protestants and Catholics to consider the status of law and to consider how far it obliged human beings, rather than simply permitting particular actions. From Luther onwards, Protestants came to see God's standards for human beings in absolute terms, rejecting any suggestion that there were good works which were merely counselled rather than commanded, and therefore not obligatory. This view of ethics underpinned the Protestant theological critique of Catholic doctrines of merit but it also shaped the distinctively Protestant account of natural law. It enabled Luther and his allies to defend magisterial control over the church, and it also formed a crucial element of Protestant resistance theory. By examining the Lutheran position on counsels, expressed in theological and political writings, and comparing it with contemporary Catholic accounts, this article offers a new perspective on Reformation theology and political thought.

The Union of 1707 and the Scottish Enlightenment

The Union of 1707 was a political act of enormous importance, but it was not limited to the decisions taken by English and Scottish statesmen. Between 1698 and 1707 more than 60 pamphlets were written by Scottish authors on various aspects of Scotland’s condition and its links with England. Their opinions deserve close attention on their own terms as they offer an opportunity to learn about the political, economic, social, religious and national ideas prevailing in Scotland in the early 18 th century. These opinions also allow to address a question about the intellectual links between the debate that preceded the Union on the one hand and the Scottish Enlightenment on the other. Despite the fact that the pre-union debate lacked many themes that were of great importance in the later parts of the 18 th century, such as philosophy, literature and the arts, the physical and natural sciences, there existed numerous intellectual links between early 18 th century Scottish political writers and such important figures of the Scottish Enlightenment as David Hume, William Robertson and Adam Smith.

A Liberal Ghost? The Left, Liberal Democracy and the Legacy of Harold Laski’s Teaching

ABSTRACTThis article explores the ways in which British socialism may have supported and strengthened liberal ideas held by postcolonial leaders who were educated in Britain. It attempts to do so by examining the role of liberalism in Harold Laski’s teaching at the London School of Economics and Political Science (1920–50), with particular attention to his Indian students. Laski, a self-declared Marxist, promoted socialism in his voluminous writings, frequent speeches, and in his lectures, which were attended by many future post-colonial leaders. Although often rigid in its adhesion to socialist dogma, Laski’s thought nevertheless reflected the malleability of political ideologies, incorporating liberal and pluralist elements in its makeup, which were in turn conveyed to students. This article focuses on how two former pupils, G.L. Mehta and Renuka Ray, responded to Laski’s thinking in the context of early Nehruvian India. Drawing on students’ lecture notes, political writings and assessments of their former professor, I suggest that Laski, and British socialism more generally, served to both radicalise students’ desire for economic planning while moderating their understanding of how to generate political change by reinforcing liberal norms, including a belief in constitutionalism and representative government.

Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and other Essays

Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and other Essays

The Evolution of the Aesthetic Vision in Kabbani’s Poetic Discourse

If poetry is the verbal art of beauty, and beauty is truth, then, poetry has its own truth which is universal by nature since the poetic patterns embody a particular vision of the universe. This universal truth is encoded in poetic image. The poet who creatively used the poetic image to express his aesthetic vision is Nizar Kabbani (1923- 1998). The study aims at exploring the development of the notion of beauty as structured in the modern Arab poetic works. It aims at investigating Kabbani’s poetic imagery in its amorous-erotic aspects. The study proceeds with the hypothesis that the modern love poet’s synesthetic imagery is an impressive representation of Kant’s aesthetic axioms as encoded in his Critique of the Aesthetic Judgment. The scope of the inquiry focuses upon the love lyrics and songs of the modern Arabic love poet regardless his political writings. Kabbani’s poetics is investigated in terms of Aesthetic Cultural Approach (ACA), a critical orientation that links the cultural patterns of meaning to the aesthetic structures of the poem. Of the seminal findings of the study is that Kabban’s love poems are pleasurable moments in which the body of the beloved becomes the source of the poet’s ecstasy and joyfulness.

The Political Worlds of Boxen and Narnia

C. S. Lewis is not generally considered a political writer. However, the Boxen tales, written when Lewis was between the ages of six and fourteen, depict an adult world of political intrigue and stultifying small talk. This paper offers a reading of Boxen, alongside George Orwell’s political writing and Lewis’s own mature work, to argue that political commentary underpins much of Lewis’s writing—a commentary that begins in the Boxen stories but does not end there. If the Boxen stories depict political scheming and negligent leadership, the Narnia Chronicles describe a paracosm founded on the Greek polis, or the ideal state. The two worlds complement one another, and both are important to a full appreciation of Lewis’s political thought.

‘Enclosing Some Snapshots’: James Patrick Brady, Photography, and Political Activism

James Brady was a mid twentieth-century Indigenous political organiser, trapper, prospector, writer, and intellectual. He was also a prolific photographer. This article considers the significance and aesthetics of Brady’s photographic archive through the lens of Indigenous visual sovereignty. Brady was Métis – one of Canada’s three recognised Indigenous peoples along with First Nations and Inuit. The Métis engaged in two conflicts with the Canadian state and negotiated the entry of a province into confederation. For a significant period of history, they lived outside Canadian infrastructures, whether the system of First Nations’ reserves created in the post-treaty era or Euro-Canadian settlements. Particularly vulnerable to land loss and displacement, the Métis were in desperate condition when Brady first began travelling with his camera. Brady’s photographs document the political rebirth of Métis people and the resilience and persistence of Métis communities in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan. They bear photographic witness to the lived experience of sovereignty rooted to place and continue to resonate with his subjects and their descendants.

A Return to the Concept

The journal Cahiers pour l’Analyse was founded in 1966 and disappeared in the aftermath of May 1968. At the time the intellectual and publishing world was dominated by texts that were broadly characterized as “structuralist.” Edited by a board of students at the prestigious École normale supérieure (Jacques-Alain Miller, François Régnault, Alain Grosrichard and Jean-Claude Milner), with the participation of Alain Badiou in its later stages, the journal accorded great importance to Jacques Lacan and to psychoanalysis in general. But it also played a role in Althusser’s political and intellectual strategy a year after the publication of For Marx and Reading Capital. Cahiers pour l’Analyse represents, then, the most complete example of the politicization of structuralism on the eve of May 1968. Yet it also had a focus on political philosophers, such as Machiavelli and Rousseau, and the political writings of classical philosophers such as Hume and Descartes. The editors also favoured the philosophy of the concept (Canguilhem) over phenomenology (particularly in its Sartrean interpretation). Analyzing the content of the journal and published interviews with its authors, this article indicates how the broad aim was to restore primacy of place to philosophy at a point when it was under challenge from the social sciences.

Is There a Distinctively Political Normativity?

A slew of recent political theorists—many taking their cue from the political writings of Bernard Williams—have recently contended that political normativity is its own kind of normativity, distinc...

Strengthening associated living: A Deweyan approach to occupational justice

ABSTRACTThe transactional perspective informed by John Dewey’s philosophy continues to mature in occupational science. Scholars have called for more attention to the community orientation within a transactional perspective, necessitating deeper engagement with Dewey’s political writings. As a contribution to that effort, this article outlines Dewey’s political philosophy and connects his notions of occupation and associated living with his broader ideas about freedom, equality, growth, and justice. Dewey’s enduring attention to democracy throughout his career established a particular function for occupation vis-à-vis the intentionally constructed social relations that constitute associated living. Culminating in his vision of a Great Community, Dewey’s focus on the conditions of associated living provides compelling directions for thinking about and pursuing occupational justice.

Rethinking the subject in feminist research: narrative personae and stories of ‘the real’

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I discuss the question of ‘the death of the subject’ within feminist narratology and beyond. In doing this, I bring forward the notion of the ‘narrative persona’, a configuration that refers to the writing of feminist genealogies by drawing on women's auto/biographical narratives. The narrative personae of my inquiries emerge from Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy and Arendt's political thought: they are taken as conceptual and aesthetic figures, who narrate and act and whose stories create a scene for dialogic exchanges, communication, understanding, ethical responsibility and action. In fleshing out the concept of the narrative persona, I draw on my research with women workers’ narratives particularly focusing on Désirée Véret-Gay, the seamstress who founded the first feminist newspaper La Femme Libre in nineteenth-century France. Her political writings in the form of letters, petitions and journal articles have become a significant body in the archives of feminist history. But although she lived a fully active political life she did not reveal much about her inner thoughts and passions, with the exception of a few letters that I will discuss in this paper entering into the dialogue of her epistolary discourse.

Immanence, transindividuality and the free multitude

Since the late 1960s there has been a resurgence of interest in Spinozism in France: Gilles Deleuze was among the first who gave life to a ‘new Spinoza’ with his seminal book Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1968). While Deleuze was primarily interested in Spinoza’s ontology and ethics, the contemporary French philosopher Étienne Balibar focuses on the political writings. Despite their common fascination for Spinoza’s relational definition of the individual, both thinkers have drawn very different consequences from the Spinozist inspiration regarding the relevance of his philosophy for a contemporary ethical and political thought. Deleuze draws from Spinoza an ethics of the encounter, an ‘ethology’ that is concerned with the composition of bodies on a plane of immanence. Balibar, on the contrary, deals with the modes of communication that we institute between one another and that are always effectuations on two levels at once: the real and the imaginary. Whereas Deleuze emphasizes the conception of a univocal plane of immanence, Balibar insists on a double expression of the real and the imaginary in any transindividual practice. The aim of this paper is to compare and finally assess their respective contributions to a conception of collective political action: the question of constitution of the ‘free multitude’.

Urban Terror: The Case of Lone Wolf Peter Mangs

ABSTRACTWhite racist serial killer Peter Mangs is the most politically conscious lone wolf terrorist Sweden has seen thus far. Adopting the tactics of Joseph Paul Franklin to the city of Malmö, Mangs committed at least three murders and twelve murder attempts between 2003 and 2010. Well-versed in white power literature and leaderless resistance tactics, Mangs aimed at “igniting a race war” by shooting Black, Muslim, and Roma citizens to amplify racialized tensions, grievances, and anxieties in the increasingly segregated city. Yet, Mangs is not included in any database of single-actor terrorism, as these depend on how a perpetrator or incident is defined by the police, the courts, and the media. In this case, Mangs’ political motives were ignored by everyone, except by people in the targeted communities and the white racist milieu. This fact highlights the importance of ethnographic methods to terrorism studies. Based on ten three-hour interviews with Mangs, an analysis of his own political writings, previously not known to the public, interviews with Mangs’ victims, their friends and relatives, and extensive fieldwork in Malmö among activists across the political spectrum, including people who hailed Mangs’ deeds as heroic, this essay explores the impact of urban lone wolf terrorism.