Tradition Of Political Philosophy Research Articles

The open society and the future of political philosophy

Abstract This paper defends traditional political philosophy against the challenges Gaus leverages against it in The Open Society and Its Complexities. Granting Gaus that consensus on the principles of political philosophy is not forthcoming and that complexity undermines many of our most ambitious reform efforts, the paper argues that much work remains for political philosophy as it has been practiced for centuries. This is for three reasons. First, Gaus's own defense of the open society requires resources from the very traditions that he tends to dismiss. Secondly, the kinds of reform Gaus encourages us to focus on in light of complexity presuppose answers to philosophical questions, answers that philosophers have long attempted to provide. Thirdly, not all politically salient philosophical questions are aimed at action guidance. Despite the value in Gaus's analysis, I conclude that political philosophy's future will look, at least in part, like its storied past.

Coercion and justification: a global public reason perspective on Security Council reform

AbstractThe Security Council is the only international body capable of authorizing the use of force in cases other than self‐defence. Its main mission is to protect international peace and security, and this has been reinterpreted in recent decades to include the protection of human rights in situations of grave humanitarian emergencies as well as to allow it to exercise legislative powers. Given this extraordinary range of functions, it is worth asking whether the Security Council is justified in their exercise. Should the international community entrust such power to an institution with the authority, structure, and decision‐making process of the Security Council? This article explores the implications of a distinctive tradition in political philosophy – namely, the public reason tradition – for judging the adequacy of some of the proposals for reform of the Security Council. I show that the scope of authority of the Security Council, as well as some of the proposals for reform, can be challenged on the basis of an emerging global public culture.

Misogyny and Western Political Philosophers: An Analytical Study

The tradition of political philosophy has been the greatest and oldest tradition to understand the origin of the family, society, and the state, which is clearly visible in the thoughts of Western philosophers, but in this tradition, misogyny has also been revealed. Western philosophers, from Socrates to John Rawls, have been pioneers in doing so. Western philosophical heritage rests largely on the notion of a natural inequality of the sexes. Women could not be included as equals within political philosophy until deeply held assumptions about the traditional family, its sexual roles, and its relation to the wider world of political society were challenged. This was only a major reason for the emergence of independent feminism. In the present study, therefore, an attempt is being made to find out the misogynistic ideas of western philosophers for which descriptive and analytical approach has been adopted. As a result, it is acknowledged that the misogyny of Western philosophers has been the only reason for the emergence and development of independent feminism because of which most feminists are still standing in line to counter this misogyny and to challenge their gendered interpretations to promote gender equality in the world.

Shiwei Zhang, The Logical Deduction of Chinese Traditional Political Philosophy

Shiwei Zhang, The Logical Deduction of Chinese Traditional Political Philosophy

Socialism: Utilitarian and Deontic

This article argues that those who advocate the capitalist market system on the basis of the ‘invisible hand’ or ‘spontaneous order’ belong to a tradition in political philosophy which attempts to find ways to get the most out of a flawed human nature, whereas socialists tend to belong to the opposing tradition which maintains faith in human improvement. The former tradition involves a kind of consequentialism in which goodness can be achieved irrespective of people’s intentions, whereas the latter tradition, with its emphasis on conscious decision making and the ‘good will’, includes Kantian deontology. Both utilitarian and deontological arguments for socialism are discussed, but it is argued that the emphases on human dignity and on deliberate planned action make socialist arguments sit more comfortably with deontology. This is most clearly the case when socialist thinkers transform Kantian monological universality into dialogical and communicative mutuality.

The Historical Past as the Foundation of the Russian Polity: Vladimir Putin’s 2012–2018 Speeches

ABSTRACT This article is dedicated to studying the reasons and political meaning of the contemporary Russian government’s increasingly active appeal to the past. Building on the post-fundamentalist tradition in political philosophy, the author argues that during V. Putin’s third term, history turned into a quasi-transcendency aimed at providing political life with a value dimension. Evidence for this includes, in particular, phenomena like the growing “securitization” of historical memory and the use of historical arguments as a basis for significant political decisions. The choice of history as a main source of value legitimization for Russian policy is tied both to seemingly evident historical facts and to the underdevelopment of Russia’s moral discourse, given the dominance of virtue-based ethics over principle-based ethics. Based on discursive analysis of Putin’s 2012–2018 speeches, the author concludes that the state is the main actor in Russian history, while the key political virtue is service to it. The persuasiveness of historical arguments is due, first of all, to the idea of objectivity of the past, and second, to the emotional power of images of heroes who sacrificed themselves in the name of the Fatherland. The latter explains not only the dominance of military themes, but also the desire of ruling elites to push topics related to political repressions to the margins of public space so that emotionally powerful images of victims are not used to justify alternative political values. Through his performative remarks, Putin has introduced historical themes into various areas of state activity and expanded the space of the relevant past to the prerevolutionary period. The repertoire of past used for political ends is limited to events that precede the early 1990s, that is, to the “political moment” when contemporary Russian politics began taking shape. This has led to greater autonomization of the space of collective memory. Correlating the collective “We” with the pages of the distant past requires imagination, but that same imagination often generates its own semantic world far from the real political problems of the present day.

Rawls's Teaching and the “Tradition” of Political Philosophy

This article explores Rawls's evolving orientation to “the tradition of political philosophy” over the course of his academic career, culminating inJustice as Fairness: A Restatement(2001). Drawing on archival material, it argues that Rawls's fascination with tradition arose out of his own pedagogical engagement with the debate around the “death of political philosophy” in the 1950s. Throughout, I highlight the significance of Rawls's teaching—beginning with his earliest lectures on social and political philosophy at Cornell, to his shifting views on “the tradition” in his published works, culminating in the increasingly contextually minded and irenic approach on display inPolitical Liberalism(1993) andJustice as Fairness. This neglected aspect of the “historical Rawls” offers insight into how Rawls himself might have read “John Rawls” as a figure in the history of political thought—and reveals that he spent a lot more time contemplating that question than one might think.

“Religion and the Commonweal in the Tradition of Political Philosophy”: An Unpublished Lecture by Leo Strauss

AbstractThe transcript published here for the first time is of Leo Strauss’s 1963 lecture on, and discussion of, the relation of religion to the commonweal in the tradition of political philosophy....

Research on Habermas’s Thought on the Relationship Between Right and Power

How to accurately grasp the relationship between right and power is one of the core propositions of political philosophy, and is also a theoretical issue that Habermas has always paid great attention to. By studying Habermas’s thought of the relationship between right and power, we can not only deeply understand the basic concepts of his political philosophy, but also explore the way of thinking to safeguard civil rights and balance political power. Compared with traditional political philosophy, it is not difficult to find that Habermas neither advocates the separation of right and power as liberals, nor advocates the absolute integration of the two as republicans. In his view, the right to be the outcome of citizens’ spontaneous interaction must rely on coercive political power to enter into force. At the same time, political power can only obtain the legitimacy of existence in accordance with the principle of “people’s sovereignty” of the discourse theory, and this legitimacy foundation is precisely reflected in the right system of communication cycle. In short, right and power restrict each other and depend on each other, and they present an isomorphic relationship with moderate tension. Obviously, this view is a historical advance of political philosophy and has great theoretical and practical value.

Политическая философия китайских исторических сериалов

В статье на материале сериалов на историческую или околоисторическую тематику рассматриваются представления современных китайцев о государстве, народе, взаимных правах и обязанностях человека и общества, надлежащих методах и акторах государственного управления, роли и месте Китая в системе международных отношений. Автор вычленяет основные идеи, в явной или скрытой форме лежащие в основе этого комплекса представлений: этатизм, монархизм, патернализм, шовинизм. В связи со значительно возросшей экономической самостоятельностью китайских женщин автор также считает необходимым уделить отдельное внимание тем политическим воззрениям, которые историческое кино презюмирует и старается сформировать у зрительниц. Некоторые политические представления, как доказывается в этой статье, под влиянием изменившихся социально-политических реалий претерпели отпределнную эволюцию от традиционного к более современному мышлению, в частности стала более благосклонной оценка женского правления, изменились взгляды на участие военных и гражданских чиновников в жизни государства, образ варвара приобрел черты младшего, подчиненного парнтнера по взаимовыгодной коммуникации. Но, в целом, автор отмечает чрезвычайную устойчивость комплекса политических представлений китайского народа, их прямую преемственность с традиционной политической философией старого Китая, выработанной еще в доимперский и раннеимперский периоды.

The Historical Past as the Foundation of the Russian Polity: Vladimir Putin’s 2012–2018 Speeches

ABSTRACT This article is dedicated to studying the reasons and political meaning of the contemporary Russian government’s increasingly active appeal to the past. Building on the post-fundamentalist tradition in political philosophy, the author argues that during V. Putin’s third term, history turned into a quasi-transcendency aimed at providing political life with a value dimension. Evidence for this includes, in particular, phenomena like the growing “securitization” of historical memory and the use of historical arguments as a basis for significant political decisions. The choice of history as a main source of value legitimization for Russian policy is tied both to seemingly evident historical facts and to the underdevelopment of Russia’s moral discourse, given the dominance of virtue-based ethics over principle-based ethics. Based on discursive analysis of Putin’s 2012–2018 speeches, the author concludes that the state is the main actor in Russian history, while the key political virtue is service to it. The persuasiveness of historical arguments is due, first of all, to the idea of objectivity of the past, and second, to the emotional power of images of heroes who sacrificed themselves in the name of the Fatherland. The latter explains not only the dominance of military themes, but also the desire of ruling elites to push topics related to political repressions to the margins of public space so that emotionally powerful images of victims are not used to justify alternative political values. Through his performative remarks, Putin has introduced historical themes into various areas of state activity and expanded the space of the relevant past to the prerevolutionary period. The repertoire of past used for political ends is limited to events that precede the early 1990s, that is, to the “political moment” when contemporary Russian politics began taking shape. This has led to greater autonomization of the space of collective memory. Correlating the collective “We” with the pages of the distant past requires imagination, but that same imagination often generates its own semantic world far from the real political problems of the present day.

Politics of the Idea: (Anti-)Platonic Politics in Arendt and Badiou

ABSTRACT This paper compares two influential but conflicting contemporary models of politics as an activity: those of Hannah Arendt and Alain Badiou. It discovers the fundamental difference between their approaches to politics in their opposing evaluations of the contemporary political significance of the legacy of Plato, Platonism, and the Platonic Idea. Karl Popper’s and Arendt’s analyses of the inherently ideological nature of totalitarianism are contrasted with Badiou’s vindication of an ideological “politics of the Idea.” Arendt and Badiou are shown to share an understanding of politics as a realm for the human deployment of novelty and world-transformation. Their key disagreement concerns the form of activity that accomplishes this deployment. For Arendt, political activity has the basic form of noninstrumental and nonteleological action (praxis), devalued by the Platonic tradition of political philosophy. Badiou, by contrast, follows Plato in regarding politics essentially as a process of production (poiēsis) oriented to an ideal end.

Biopolitics: Context and text of philosophy

The article focuses on the process of conceptualizing biopolitics within the framework of philosophy, which is developing in the context of modern biopolitics. The text of “biopolitical philosophy” becomes part of its own context — the real biopolitical situation, thereby changing it. In addition, it correlates with the general philosophical context of the Western philosophical tradition, namely, denying it, deconstructing, and overcoming it in different senses, which are far from being reduced to Hegel’s Aufhebung. In this manner, the text of biopolitical philosophy is integrated into the current post-metaphysics with its well-known “turns” (practical, linguistic, ethical, etc.). As a political philosophy, biopolitics is a radical rethinking of the political philosophy of modernity, caused by the collapse of the “project” of the Enlightenment and the crisis of bourgeois representative democracy. This relationship of biopolitics with philosophical classics is analyzed in the article on the example of the two most significant biopolitical concepts created by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. Agamben’s ambition is to complete what Foucault had begun; but the way he “develops” the ideas of his predecessor is at a fundamental departure from Foucault’s version of biopolitics. Despite the fact that both begin with criticism of traditional political philosophy, turning from the “essential” formulation of the question of power and government (the problem of the source of power, its legitimation and sovereignty) to the question of how power is exercised. In this context, the problem of dispositive arises. For Foucault it is a historically defined type of ruling rationality (gouvernementalité). Agamben understands dispositive as a universal structure, thanks to which the animal is “humanized” through the exclusion of “naked life”. A different understanding of dispositive gives rise to two different “archaeologies”. Foucault is wary of philosophical universalism, while Agamben is enthusiastic about immersion into “beginnings”, albeit conceivable “event-wise”.

Stop Understanding “Power” Through the “State”: Gouvernementalité, Governmentality Studies, and the Fate of Michel Foucault’s Analytics of Power in Russian Translations

Gouvernementalité is a neologism that was coined by Michel Foucault in 1978, and soon followed by “governmentality” in English. It has become one of the key concepts in the social sciences. Those terms both refer to the novel perspective that Foucault arrived at to understand and analyze the phenomenon of power or, more specifically, various types of power relations typical of different cultures and political communities. Over the past several decades, that perspective has provided the methodological basis for an emerging interdisciplinary field called Governmentality Studies in the English-language social sciences. One purpose of this approach is to reassess the genealogy and specific features of modern societies and modern states without conceptualizing “power” through the “state” as traditional political philosophy has done. However, contemporary social science in Russia has largely been deprived of the opportunity to use Foucault’s conceptual instruments and research methods because of problems with translation among other barriers. The article 1) summarizes the Foucauldian critique and analysis of power embedded in the concept of gouvernementalité and compares that approach with traditional paradigms in political philosophy, 2) highlights how that concept has been used over the years in Foucault’s works dealing with power relations and the topic of the ethical subject, 3) demonstrates that current Russian translations of Foucault’s primary texts incorporating the term gouvernementalité are not merely imprecise, but exemplify what the French call contresens - interpretations that directly contradict the essence of the original. As a corpus, the available translations do not convey Foucault’s thought, but rather bar Russian-speaking readers from his conceptual and exploratory perspective

O DIREITO DE RESISTÊNCIA EM SPINOZA E A INSTITUCIONALIZAÇÃO DO DECRETO Nº 8243/14

Este trabalho tem o escopo de investigar o conceito de Direito de Resistência em Baruch de Spinoza, através da sua obra Tratado Político e de seus comentadores. Inicialmente a resistência é apresentada em diferentes visões, Hobbes e Locke, seguida pela tradição hegemônica da filosofia política e logo contraposta ao conceito de Desobediência Civil. Em seguida, Spinoza surge com sua perspectiva inovadora, não diferenciando resistir de obedecer, caso certas circunstâncias se apresentem no ambiente político, a partir de uma breve contextualização e análise do fundamento da Resistência neste autor, a potência da multidão. Por fim, busca-se o Decreto nº 8243/14 para submetê-lo a seguinte questão: pode este ser visto como uma institucionalização da Resistência, nos termos espinosanos?

Machiavelli’o Valdovas: dorybių galvosūkis

[only abstract in English; full article and abstract in Lithuanian] The article deals with the attitude of Nicollo Machiavelli towards virtues and its political meaning explained in his famous work The Prince. Philosopher discusses the meaning of virtues in different stages of his reasoning. He makes partial conclusions at each stage and leads to the final conclusion, which states that virtues are harmful for the prince, while the deceptive appearance of virtues is most useful. The context of classical political philosophy allows to demonstrate that Machiavelli’s proposal to use deception of virtues equates to a perfect injustice. It can be concluded that Machiavelli breaks radically with the Platonic tradition of political philosophy and starts creating a new tradition on the grounds of ideas of ancient sophists about human nature and politics.

Leviathan’ın Hayaletleri: Schmitt ve Neumann’da Hukuk ve Devlet

20. yüzyıl siyaset felsefesine damgasını vuran en önemli tartışmalardan ikisi, yeni bir siyasal biçim olarak totaliter devletin tanımlanma biçimi ve hukuk devleti idealinin eleştirisidir. Almanya’da Weimar Cumhuriyeti ve ardından gelen Üçüncü Reich’taki siyasal problemler üzerinden Alman devlet kuramı bu iki tartışmada merkezi konumda olmuştur. Nazi hukukçularının Üçüncü Reich’a hukuksal temellerini kazandırmak için verdiği uğraş, sosyal demokrat hukukçular tarafından savaş sonrası dönemde çokça eleştirilmiştir. Bu çalışmada Nazi hükümetinin başhukukçusu olarak bilinen Carl Schmitt ile Frankfurt Okulu düşünürlerinden Franz L. Neumann’ın hukuk devleti eleştirileri üzerinden hukuk ve devleti nasıl tanımladıkları ve bu iki kavramı birbiriyle nasıl ilişkilendirdikleri ele alınacaktır. Zira her iki düşünür de kendi devlet tanımlarında Hobbes’un Leviathan’ını temel aldıkları halde birbirlerine zıt sonuçlara ulaşmış ve Nazi Devleti’nin hukuksal yapısı üzerinden nasıl bir devlet olarak adlandırılacağı üzerine itilafa düşmüşlerdir. Neumann, Nazi devletinde Leviathan’ın ölümünü ve Behemoth’un doğuşunu görürken, Schmitt’e göre Leviathan’ın ölümüne sebep olan hukuk devleti idealidir ve ancak totaliter bir “Lider Devleti” [Führerstaat] onu diriltebilir. Her iki düşünür arasındaki hukuk ve devlet kavramları hakkındaki bu tartışma, siyaset felsefesi geleneğindeki “hukuk antinomisi” olarak adlandıracağımız problemi canlandırmıştır. Söz konusu tartışmayı ele alarak bu antinomiyi yorumlamak, günümüzde hukuk devletini yeniden düşünmek için elverişli bir başlangıç sunmaktadır.

Apartar la mirada del origen: la crítica a la fenomenología política de Hannah Arendt desde el pensamiento impolítico de Roberto Esposito

Este artículo estudia el lugar que la fenomenología tiene en el pensamiento de lo impolítico de Esposito. Para ello, en primer lugar, expone la tarea del deconstruccionismo en el marco general del pensamiento de Esposito acerca de la comunidad. En segundo lugar, expone la relevancia y el sentido que las categorías de sujeto y sustancia tienen para la tradición metafísica de la filosofía política. Y, a partir de aquí, el artículo se adentra en la lectura que Esposito hace de la fenomenología de Arendt en torno al problema del origen. El objetivo de este artículo es mostrar cómo lo impolítico se constituye como un pensamiento de la comunidad que lleva en sí la negación de lo político como el esfuerzo de un sujeto metafísico para hacer visible el origen como fenómeno.

Scatter—Freedom!

Scatter—Freedom! Matías Bascuñán (bio) GEOFFREY BENNINGTON. SCATTER 1: THE POLITICS OF POLITICS IN FOUCAULT, HEIDEGGER, AND DERRIDA (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). [End Page 4] This fundamental experience where there is a certain madness that alone makes reading possible. —Geoffrey Bennington, "Le Temps de la lecture," in Géographie et autres lectures Philosophy will in fact remain unable to respond to the challenge of deconstruction until it can do better with the question of reading, which is one place in which Derrida's legacy will inevitably be played out in the years to come. —Geoffrey Bennington, "Beginnings and Ends," in Not Half No End Click for larger view View full resolution Scatter 1: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida is, in more than one way, the inscription of an interruption. For one thing, this book grew out of a digression from what now stands as the yet-to-be-published Scatter 2, which, Geoffrey Bennington tells us, will be an explicit deconstructive engagement with the tradition of political philosophy "from Plato to Rawls and beyond."1 For another, through patient readings of Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Søren Kierkegaard, and Jacques Derrida, Scatter 1 accounts for how "teleological" understandings of decision, truth, and rhetoric inform a sustained effort in political philosophy to bring politics to an end by reducing what Bennington calls "the politics of politics." Scatter 1 thus registers the scatter at stake in the interruption of teleological narratives that aim at leaving politics behind by "speaking the truth" of politics. This is what Bennington's book announces and deploys through its six chapters that stage an originary and endless scatter as interrupted teleology. Perhaps, then, this book is not so much the inscription but the scattering of interruptions. In a crucial moment, Bennington argues that "'the politics of politics' is primordial and interminable," and that "there is no politics before, after, or outside the politics of politics. Politics begins with this doubling up." He continues: As opposed to metaphysical thinking, for which the end of politics is the end of politics, the putting down of politics in the interest of some redemptive future after the big trumpet moment of the Last Judgment, a deconstructive thinking of politics "discerns eschatology from teleology" and tries to think the future not as a horizon that both conceals and opens onto death as redemption, nor … as more modestly guided by an Idea in the Kantian sense (the more sober and apparently secular form of redemption), but as a "to-come," an à-venir that does not gather up the Moment even in a Heideggerian way but projects a scatter of moments, of eskhata without telos, of kairoi that do not add up to any grand design of history. (243) In reading this passage, one should not hastily assume that what Bennington calls the "politics of politics" yields some kind of totalization of the political because of its primordiality and interminability. Scatter 1 does not have any pretension, in fact, to fulfill any political teleology, but to think politics as interrupted teleology and thereby avoid a metaphysical stance with respect to politics ("for which the end of politics is the end of politics"). In this passage, the interruption of teleology—"a deconstructive thinking of politics"—becomes legible in the distinction between teleology and eschatology, which [End Page 5] leads Bennington to a reconsideration of the very notions of origins and ends beyond any kind of "archeo-teleology." This reconsideration of beginnings and ends—the primordiality and interminability of the politics of politics—is enabled by a thinking of the event that is contingent on what he names the "necessarily-possibly-not." Accordingly, politics resists (precisely because of the irreducible "distortion and deceit" [4] produced by its politics; i.e., precisely because of what is political in politics) the reduction of the necessary possibility of not living up to the truth of politics found in philosophy books. In Interrupting Derrida, Bennington already suggested as much while commenting on the primordiality of the "economy of violence" in Derrida's "Violence and Metaphysics": Positing a primordial "violence" in this way upsets all traditional political philosophies, which are bound up in...

The Bible and Leo Strauss

ABSTRACTAccording to Leo Strauss, the Hebrew Bible is to be regarded as being in “radical opposition” to philosophy and as its “antagonist.” This is an influential view, which has contributed much to the ongoing omission of the Bible from most accounts of the history of political philosophy or political theory. In this article, I examine Strauss's arguments for the exclusion of the Bible from the Western tradition of political philosophy (i) because it possesses no concept of nature; (ii) because it prescribes a “life of obedient love” rather than truth-seeking; and (iii) because it depicts God as “absolutely free” and unpredictable, and so without a place in the philosophers' order of “necessary and therefore eternal” things. I suggest that Strauss's views on these points cannot be accepted without amendment. I propose a revised view of the history of political philosophy that preserves Strauss's most important insights, while recognizing the Hebrew Bible as a foundational text in the Western tradition of political philosophy.