Politics Of Honour Research Articles

The Europeanization of Honour: Wehrmacht Veterans and European Integration in the 1950s

This article analyses the Europeanization of West German associations of Wehrmacht veterans in the 1950s. Using archival sources concerning the foundation of a European veterans’ umbrella organisation, the article argues that the veterans’ attempts at political reassertion in the post-war decades cannot be understood without accounting for their European dimension. Indeed, the veterans considered their European outreach to be a core pillar of their ‘politics of honour’, which manifested itself mainly in the agitation for the war criminals in Allied custody. Thus, aiming to establish themselves as effective and legitimate interest representatives, the veterans Europeanized. This process was consciously modelled after the ongoing process of integration while simultaneously exhibiting distinct characteristics stemming from the veterans themselves. The article tracks the veterans’ transnational interactions, their competitive dynamics in West German associational politics and the veterans’ associational interests to explain their specific form of an alternative Europeanization.

Recognition in Blue

ABSTRACT Gerald Early's remark that black people are seminally important to the modern world because they created the blues is examined as a contribution to the politics of recognition that deviates from the liberal model that dominates in political theory. Central to this deviation is the politics of honor and Paul Corcoran's distinction between formal and aesthetic recognition. The politics of aesthetic recognition is examined here through Hans-Georg Gadamer's discussion of hermeneutics in Truth and Method as well as through Martin Heidegger's phenomenology and philosophy of Dasein (being-there), inspired by Aristotle's Rhetoric, and his writings on art. The significance of art and specifically of the blues to the politics of recognition goes beyond the representation or the relaying of others' voices, in that it calls forth modes of being-there over against difference.

From Ethics to Politics: The Case of William Paley

This paper will explore the thought of William Paley (1743-1805). Its aim is to convey a picture of Paley’s ethical philosophy in its connection to his political science. The paper begins with a brief comment on Paley’s “rise and fall” as an influential thinker. It then enters into Paley’s thought proper by addressing his conception of human happiness. The paper next addresses Paley’s analysis of the moral sense the existence of which he denies. The paper then proceeds to Paley’s discussion of the heroic and the Christian virtues, the nature of envy and emulation, the desire for recognition, the politics of honor, the ethics of lying and the philosopher’s situation in relation to the political community. The thinkers whose names will emerge in the course of the paper either for comparative comment or simple reference include Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, Hume, Kant, Burke, Mill, Fitzhugh and others along with scholarly references.

Burke, Godwin, and the Politics of Honor

Recently, Kwame Anthony Appiah claimed, “We may think we have finished with honor, but honor isn’t finished with us.” With Appiah in mind, this essay explores honor as a central ethic of modernity by situating it within William Godwin’s late eighteenth-century masterpiece Caleb Williams , a novel whose protagonist is both attracted to and repelled by chivalric honor and its role in public life. The novel, it is argued, stages a cultural battle in the 1790s between two contrasting versions of honor: an ethos rooted in sentimentalism to which even the most rational subject must acquiesce (as described by Edmund Burke) and a staid virtue of collective dignity—one that presupposes by nearly a century the concept of public solidarity.

Honor among Orphans: Girlhood, Virtue, and Nation at Rio de Janeiro's Recolhimento

Honor Among Orphans explores the implications of state interests in girlhood, honor, and female citizenship in nineteenth-century Brazil through an examination of transformations in the practices of a colonial institution, the Recolhimento of the Santa Casa de Misericordia in Rio de Janeiro. Founded in 1739, the Recolhimento was created as a place for the deposit of women and girls, where reputations could be protected or restored. In the 1800s, the Recolhimento became a girls' orphanage, a statement of emerging liberal values that privileged the education and socialization of youth. Despite extensive reforms, the Recolhimento continued to be a symbol of female virtue. Its prominence, longevity, and ties to the state make it a privileged location for examining transformations in the politics of honor in the nation building process

The politics of honor: patriarchy, the state and the murder of women in the name of family honor

(2002). The politics of honor: patriarchy, the state and the murder of women in the name of family honor. Journal of Israeli History: Vol. 21, No. 1-2, pp. 1-37.

Calderón and the Politics of Honour

The relationship of the theatre's honour-vengeance code to the prescriptions of Christian morality has over the years attracted considerable attention, and the comparison of one with the other has led many to the logical conclusion that no Christian dramatist worthy of the name could possibly have been recommending — as has been claimed by those innocent enough to believe that art seeks to promote what it depicts — the slaughter of the innocent or even the not-yet-guilty. However, to bring into confrontation two such opposed value systems is by itself, perhaps, too starkly polarized an exercise to provide the basis for an adequate understanding of the contortions of honour as they are depicted in Calderon's wife-murder plays, and therefore of the authorial attitudes possibly inscribed in them. That they should have been condemned by some contemporary churchmen as harmful and praised by others as highly moral in itself reveals the difficulty of measuring their ‘enormes crueldades’1 by the yardstick of the ...