Political Writings Research Articles

Black Faith and the Ethics of Human Dignity

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s theology and rights-based activism remain highly relevant in a constitutional democracy. However, King’s use of human dignity in his early sermons as an extension of political rights faces serious challenges from Black leftist political writers and the Black Lives Matter movement. At issue is the extent to which human dignity should be examined as a distinct political, aesthetic, and moral category that must be explored and embraced more explicitly and wholeheartedly in Black politics and political theory. Bracketing human dignity inside the category of political rights, which King often did in his early writings, undermines the comprehensive nature of antiblack racism and limits the scope and range of questions and resources we might employ to address the social ontology of Blackness. A sustained attention to human dignity provides an opportunity for new scholarly direction in the study of Black politics and political thought by expanding the boundaries of the political and creating space for morality and Black religion in the political (leftist) imaginary.

Underground Topography of the Political Unconscious in Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison

Coming from different socio-economic backgrounds but sharing the experience of being black intellectuals in the US before the Civil Rights movement, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison met in New York in 1937. Although they eventually grew distant, their friendship generated some of the most important political writings of African-American literature. They were interested in the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx for possible solutions to the “Negro question.” They argued for a Freudo-Marxist synthesis as a remedy for the broken black psyche under white supremacist pressure. With its dimension on American racism, the synthesis they proposed offers a distinct and important contribution to the dominantly European canon of the theory. This article investigates the political psychoanalysis of Wright and Ellison as represented in their ideationally interlinked novels, Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground (2021). It analyses how their novelistic writing emerges as a dynamic space to elaborate upon a political psychoanalysis through their own race-based version of a theoretical synthesis. Moreover, the study also offers a new approach to new material, as Richard Wright's The Man Who Lived Underground remained unpublished until it was recently rediscovered and printed for the first time in 2021.

Axiological Foundations of Russian Statehood: “Truth” and “Justice” in the Domestic Ideological and Political Discourse

The concept of “truth” as a valuable spiritual and political category is constantly present in Russian spiritual and political writings from antiquity to the present day. But in the 18th century, there is an important transformation of this concept in the domestic ideological and political discourse: Under the influence of the Western European tradition in Russian socio-political writings of the state, conservative-educational and radical-educational trends, there is a gradual transition from traditional concepts, including the concept of “truth”, to such concepts as “justice” or “common use”. Thus, it acquires a significance that persists, including in modern political science literature. However, the concept of “truth” in its traditional meaning does not disappear at all from the socio-political discourse of the 18th century, but is used mainly in fiction, primarily in poetry, and in the writings of the traditionalist-Orthodox trend. A similar conclusion was made possible by an original methodological approach: the analysis of the works of the authors of the 18th century. It was carried out on the basis of the search database of the National Corpus of the Russian language, while in total more than 800 texts created in 1701-1800 were studied, in which the words “truth” and “justice” were used. In addition to the general scientific methodological apparatus, the main research methods were content analysis and political-textual analysis.

Pleasure, and the Politics of Writing about It

Pleasure, and the Politics of Writing about It

Recenzie - ANDRAS BOZOKI Rolling Transition and the Role of Intellectuals. The Case of Hungary, 1977-1994 (Budapest-Vienna-New York: Central European University Press, 2022), 620 pp.

Transition to democracy in Eastern and Central Europe occurred as a consequence of the way communist regimes dismantled. Not as a momentum, but rather as a continuous overlapping series of phenomena, events around 1989 happened because of the actors, especially the intellectuals, that created them. This is the main thesis of András Bozóki’s book published in 2022, Rolling Transition and the Role of Intellectuals. The Case of Hungary, 1977-1994. This work fills the gap in a literature that focuses mainly on the democratic transition in Eastern and Central Europe as a unitary space or on the Ruling Elites in a newly capitalist system.1 More recently, political writings on Hungary discuss the democratic backsliding and the illiberal turns of the regime, including it in a regional framework affected by populism, and Euroscepticism.

El espacio de la Matemática y la Lógica en la teoría y la práctica política de Leibniz

Leibniz’s political writings are mainly collected in the nine-volume of Berlin’s Akademie edition of Political Writings. In addition, Leibniz’s way of thinking and working does not allow a single theme to be clearly extracted so that it can be commented on without derivations or external reflections and without relating it to the many others with which he turns out to have deep and suggestive relationships. His training as a jurist also deeply influences many related topics, such as economics, popular culture, international relations, etc. And of course, mathematics must collaborate in everything. Here we wanted to take an unusual point of view to understand how theory and practice must be coordinated in the lives of citizens to achieve true progress.

Thomas Mann’s political writings between 1914 and 1918

The subject of this article is Thomas Mann's political writings from 1914 to 1918 and their place on the map of his work. The author argues that texts such as Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, considered by many scholars to be an exception among Mann's writings caused by an outburst of national feeling on the threshold of the First World War — as they gravitate towards German nationalism and revolutionary conservatism — are in fact an integral part of his oeuvre, as they complete the themes that the German writer had addressed in novels and novellas written before The Magic Mountain. Foremost among these themes is the situation of the Bürger as a specifically German form of citizenship at the moment of the clash between Kultur and Zivilisation. In Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, Mann praises its twentieth-century, post-industrial incarnation, which Fritz Ringer calls the Mandarin. At the same time, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man serves as a space for the German writer to introduce irony as his leading artistic technique, preparing Mann to take no side in Settembrini's dispute with Naphta in a novel about a Swiss sanatorium.

Marx for Primitives

This analysis of Karl Marx centers one of his earliest political writings, the 1842 commentary on the Rhine Province Assembly debate on the Law on Thefts of Wood, to show an anthropological thread in his writings and this thread’s relevance to the struggles of Indigenous gathering and hunting peoples in the contemporary historical conjuncture. This “bush Marx” or “Marx for primitives” consistently engaged in a deep structural linguistic subversion, challenging ethnocentrism by turning Eurocentric concepts on their head.

Sound, Noisy Feelings, and the Audible Sublime in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Abstract: This article delves into the aural dimensions of Latin American literary tradition, exploring those instances when the sublime provides the vocabulary and syntax to textually inscribe sonic phenomena. As highlighted by Ana María Ochoa Gautier, the audible techniques cultivated by lettered elites found a way into their writing, thus forming a rich textual archive where they registered sounds, voices, and noises that often defied classification and overwhelmed the senses. In reading texts for sounds that emphasize adversity, discordance, and sono-racial designations, this article traces the sort of negative emotions characterizing Edmund Burke's and later theorists' definitions of the sublime as a combination of pleasure and pain, a negative moment of disturbance and confusion. Focusing on the sonic features of political writings by Simón Bolívar and foundational fictions such as Esteban Echeverría's La cautiva (1837) and Jorge Isaacs 's María (1867) , this article illustrates how sound shapes the discursive articulation of defining binaries such as civilization-barbarism, reason-emotion, nature-culture, and mind-matter.

Antigone’s Example: Early Modern Women’s Political Writing in Times of Civil War from Christine de Pizan to Helen Maria Williams by Mihoko Suzuki (review)

Antigone’s Example: Early Modern Women’s Political Writing in Times of Civil War from Christine de Pizan to Helen Maria Williams by Mihoko Suzuki (review)

“One Would at Least Like to Be Asked”

Abstract As the leading public intellectual of postwar West Germany, Jürgen Habermas was a prominent opponent of the unification of the two Germanies after 1989. While his fears regarding the identity, collective memory, Western orientation, and economic power of a united Germany are important, in contrast to the existing literature, I argue that Habermas's objections are primarily procedural, focusing on the normative deficiencies in Chancellor Helmut Kohl's executive-led, administrative approach to reunification. In Habermas's eyes this procedure short-circuited the democratic processes of public opinion- and will-formation necessary to fulfill the normative presuppositions of popular self-determination. Methodologically, I make this point by reading Habermas's “short political writings” alongside his theoretical writings, especially his early postwar readings of the German constitutional theory. In addition to reframing the debate over his opposition to unification, I also oppose realist critiques of his work by showing that Habermas's theoretical writings have direct implications for contemporary politics.

Traveling Political Knowledge

This article illustrates an unknown page in the fortunes of Giovanni Francesco Commendone’s (1524–84) Discorso sopra la corte di Roma. The analysis starts from the first circulation of the text in Roman circles. It then follows the work’s journey from Rome to the library of one of the most important universities of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Akademia Zamojska. Here the treatise was read along with a small selection of Italian political writings, informing and influencing the scions of the future Polish ruling class.

Religious progress and perfectibility in Benjamin Constant’s enlightened liberalism

ABSTRACT Benjamin Constant's On Religion was a major effort to include religion within liberal political thought, insisting on the possibility of religious progress and perfectibility. It was also a major critique of Catholicism and of clericalism in any form. And it was one of the most wide-ranging comparative studies of religion since it purported to cover all religions worldwide before Christianity. Constant worked on it for most of his adult life, more than 40 years. This article traces the rise of the language of progress and perfectibility in Constant's milieu, finding roots in Rousseau, Scottish thinkers, Germans and Swiss such as Madame de Staël, Condorcet, William Godwin, and others. He also sprinkled some of his ideas about progress and perfectibility in his wide-ranging political writings. But it was in On Religion that he went into the idea of progress and perfectibility in depth, finding both a universal human need for religion and religious progress in every religion and over time. It may be true that he underestimated the possibility of regress and failure in human development, but nevertheless this work stands as a monument to liberal confidence in a better future.

Two Theories of Self-Determination: The Discourse of Democratic Peoplehood in Colonial Korea

This article examines two distinct ways in which anticolonial thinkers in early twentieth-century Korea reconstructed their nondemocratic tradition in an attempt to justify (rather than take for granted) the claim of self-determination. The exposure to modern education and ideas of democracy prompted these thinkers to critically engage their tradition in the struggle for self-determination. That said, they could not simply abandon the cultural foundation of their nation. Japanese colonial rule drew its legitimacy from not only an assimilation ideology that the Japanese and Koreans shared the same ethnic origin but also a developmentalist conception of the colonized that they were premodern and incapable of self-rule. To reject imperial domination, Korean anticolonial thinkers needed to invent out of their country’s nondemocratic tradition (1) an unassimilable nation/people (2) capable of self-rule. Drawing upon the political writings of two early twentieth-century thinkers in colonial Korea, Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950) and Cho So-ang (1887–1958), I discover from their political thought two nuanced approaches to this project of inventing “the people” in the colonial world. I argue that while Yi succeeded in rebutting the colonial ideology of assimilation, he fell into the trap of developmentalism. I contend that Cho, on the contrary, sidestepped this trap with his revisionist reading of the Confucian past as a history of democratic transformation, thus providing an immediate alternative to imperial sovereignty.

Merleau-Ponty and “Dirty Hands”: Political Phronesis and Virtù Between Marxism and Machiavelli

ABSTRACT Despite rarely explicitly thematizing the problem of dirty hands, this essay argues that Merleau-Ponty’s political work can nonetheless make some important contributions to the issue, both descriptively and normatively. Although his political writings have been neglected in recent times, his interpretations of Marxism and Machiavelli enabled him to develop an account of political phronesis and virtù that sought to retain the strengths of their respective positions without succumbing to their problems. In the process, he provides grounds for generalizing the problem of “dirty hands” beyond Michael Walzer’s influential understanding that pertains primarily to “emergencies” and singular time-slice actions, and addresses concerns about the coherence of the very idea that there is justified action that one ought to do which remains wrong. Merleau-Ponty does this by emphasizing the diachronic relationship between theoretical principles and concrete political action over a period of time, thus imbuing the problem of dirty hands with a historicity that is not sufficiently recognized in the more static and action-focused discussions.

How Republics Perish: Lodovico Alamanni, the Medici, and Transformational Leadership

ABSTRACT The goals of the present study are to relate the transactional and transformational aspects of modern leadership theory to the history of Medici rule and influence in Renaissance Florentine politics, and, at the same time, to test leadership models against the humanist debates on the accession of the Medici to power. I will focus on the Discorso sopra il fermare lo stato di Firenze nella devozione de’ Medici [Discourse on holding the State of Florence in devotion to the Medici], written in 1516 by Lodovico Alamanni (1488–1526), a prominent Florentine statesman. Alamanni’s Discorso relates to the first restoration of the Medici government and engages with a number of issues that animate Machiavelli’s political theory as well as other memoranda for the Medici contemporaneous with The Prince. I argue that the two categories of leadership—the transactional and the transformational—first proposed by James MacGregor Burns, provide a new way of specifying Alamanni’s intentions and, by comparison, those of contemporary authors, including Machiavelli. I will also demonstrate that Alamanni’s work exemplifies more vividly than other political writings of the Medici period an approach to leadership that is predicated upon the combination of the transactional and transformational paradigms.

Frantz Fanon’s Psycho-Politics From Psychiatry to Revolution

This article examines the relationship between psychiatry and politics in the thought of Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. The article aims to demonstrate that Fanon developed a unique approach to psycho-politics that dialectically engages psychiatry and politics from his earliest works. Fanon’s psycho-politics can be traced from his work in the early 1950s, namely his doctoral dissertation and Black Skin, White Masks (1952). From his doctoral dissertation to Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon tries to explain colonialism as a psychiatrist. This search manifests itself again in Fanon’s best-known work, The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Although The Wretched of the Earth is known as the influential work of a political militant, it is the book of a scientist-thinker who analyzes colonialism from a psychiatric perspective. However, the connection between Fanon’s psychiatric thought and practice and his political writings has not been sufficiently revealed. Fanon has been thought of as a ‟Third World militant.” But there is a dialectical relationship between Fanon’s theory and practice of psychiatry and his political thought. Understanding Fanon’s thought can only be possible by analyzing its psycho-political structure. The aim of this article is to examine the development of Fanon’s political thought through his earliest psychiatric writings and clinical practice, to link psychiatric theory and practice to his political theory, and thus to outline Fanon’s psycho-politics.

SOCIAL CONCERNS IN MAHASHWETA DEVI’S MOTHER OF 1084

Mahasweta Devi is known not only for her political writings but her tremendous contribution towards landless laborers in eastern India where she worked for years. Her close connection with these communities gave her a deep insight to understand and write about these grassroots-level issues, thus making her a socio-political commentator of the marginalized community. As an eminent Bengali writer and social activist, writing in the mid-1900s, she did not shy away from pointing out the injustices prevalent in society. This paper deals with her novel titled ‘Mother of 1084’ and depicts the helplessness of a mother who gets acquainted with her son’s ideal after his death. The trauma of the tragic death of her son haunts her throughout the novel and makes her an aggrieved mother. The novel honestly depicts the trauma and psychological disturbances of a mother who has lost her son. ‘Mother of 1084’ at one end openly criticized the brutality of the government and the police in counteracting the Naxalite movement, while on the other end highlighted the political consciousness of a mother. It portrays many aspects of Indian society as well as the political state of West Bengal in the seventies where youth were ruthlessly suppressed by the government. The present paper also explores how she belongs to a male-dominated society that considers women as an object of sex, neglected and subjugated beings, and how she revolts against the traditional established system and trembles the base of that rotten society.

“Telemachising” the Poor Old Woman: Cathleen ni Houlihan “Restaged” at the Martello Tower

In 1904, Joyce launched his satirical broadside, “The Holy Office”, attacking the members of the Abbey Theatre. For the young Joyce, it appeared “that mumming company”, run by Yeats and Lady Gregory, had “surrendered to the popular will”. He craved to show how he had broken away from what he considered the folksy, pseudo Irishness of “gold-embroidered Celtic fringes” and those who in their “foolishness . . . sigh back for the good old times” (Occasional, Critical, and Political Writings 28) – times encapsulated, for him, in Cathleen ni Houlihan. Despite telling us that “Cathleen was received with rapturous applause”, Stanislaus Joyce stresses the fact that his brother “was scornful and indignant that Yeats should write such political and dramatic claptrap” (My Brother’s Keeper 187). In “Telemachus”, the more mature Joyce took the opportunity to put his art at the service of his taste for personal and literary revenge through incorporating a brief, parodic take on Yeats and Gregory’ play through the scene with the milk woman. By setting “Cathleen” before his “cracked lookingglass” (Ulysses 6), he was able not only to explore an ironic echo of various tensions between the colonised Irish and the colonising Englishman, but also to ridicule the romanticised view of Ireland presented by much Celtic Revival writing – including drama – at the time Ulysses was set, and that would extend well beyond the time in which it was written and published.

Constituent power: A history By LuciaRubinelli, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020Constituent power in the European Union By MarkusPatberg, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020

ConstellationsEarly View BOOK REVIEW Constituent power: A history By Lucia Rubinelli, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020 Constituent power in the European Union By Markus Patberg, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020 Joel I. Colón-Ríos, Corresponding Author Joel I. Colón-Ríos [email protected] Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand New Zealand Centre for Public Law, Wellington, New Zealand Correspondence Joel I. Colón-Ríos, Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand New Zealand Centre for Public Law, Wellington, New Zealand. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Joel I. Colón-Ríos, Corresponding Author Joel I. Colón-Ríos [email protected] Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand New Zealand Centre for Public Law, Wellington, New Zealand Correspondence Joel I. Colón-Ríos, Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand New Zealand Centre for Public Law, Wellington, New Zealand. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 07 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12688Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL REFERENCES Colón-Ríos, J. (2020). Constituent power and the law. Oxford University Press. Patberg, M. (2021). Constituent Power in the European Union. Oxford University Press. Rubinelli, L. (2020). Constituent Power: A History Cambridge University Press. Sieyès, E. (2003). Sieyès: Political writings: Including the debate between Sieyes and tom Paine in 1791. Hackett Publishing. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation