Explanatory structures

Muratori has often been portrayed as a moral philosopher who represented the traditional neo-Aristotelian mainstream of Italian intellectual life in the early part of the eighteenth century. His loyalty to Christianity as a basis from which societies ought to be reformed has determined his reputation as a ‘pre-enlightened’ thinker. Yet, it is argued here that not only was Muratori very much in touch with the state of the art of early eighteenth-century moral philosophy, but also that he was really a historian with political interests who came to develop a renewed Christian moral philosophy as a tool to respond to the political challenges of the time. Fallen man's preference for self-preservation to natural freedom prepared him for engaging in increasingly sociable contexts that required further self-disciplining and moral improvement. Thus, man cultivated his fallen condition into prudence and ultimately developed a capacity both for charity and for functioning in modern commercial societies.     

Philosophy,Sociability and Modern Patriotism: Young Herder between Rousseau and Abbt

Summary

In his early years Herder is known to have been a follower of Rousseau (via Kant). This article argues that there was indeed a substantial overlap between Herder's and Rousseau's ideas in Herder's early writings, particularly in terms of their joint critique of abstract philosophy and their understanding of the sentimental foundations of morality, as well as their commitment to the ideals of human moral independence and political freedom. Yet Herder's admiration for Rousseau's moral philosophy did not lead him to adopt Rousseau's critique of sociability even in this early period, and there was in fact a deep divergence between their political views. Herder attempted to combine a Rousseauian cultural critique, ‘human’ moral philosophy and philosophy of education with ideas inspired by Thomas Abbt's theory of monarchical patriotism. In contrast to Rousseau, and following Abbt, Herder posited the existence of natural patriotic feelings and underlined their importance in guaranteeing good government and political freedom. Thus, Herder could have a relatively optimistic view of the role of ‘human philosophy’ in regenerating patriotism in a modern setting. Herder embraced Abbt's emphasis on the positive aspects of modern monarchies and ‘modern liberty’ when compared to ancient republics, highlighting the compatibility of Christianity, international commerce and religious tolerance, and the general possibility of developing one's natural inclinations in modern monarchies.     

A closed country in the open seas: Engelbert Kaempfer's Japanese solution for European modernity's predicament

By offering an apology of Japan's closed country policy, Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716) was contributing not so much to the literature of exotic journey record, but rather to the field of European political and moral theory, and importantly to the debate over the relative merits of ancient and modern societies and effects of international commerce. There is a marked lack of scholarly attention given to Kaempfer as a modestly interesting political theorist, compared to a substantial body of research praising his record as a scientifically minded observer of remote cultures. As a deceptively straightforward specimen of the genre of travelogue, and also because it has tended to be treated mostly as a pioneering attempt in western Japanese studies, Kaempfer's work has not generally been considered in its relation to the debate on Europe's own moral and political predicament. When it has, the emphasis tended to be on the influence his work exercised on the enlightened European mind and its awareness of alien cultures, rather than on the extent to which the moral and political questions he sought to answer regarding Japan's situation were in fact standard questions formulated within the wider European debate on commerce and government. This paper hopes to correct the imbalance by placing Kaempfer's argument into the context of such contrasting contemporaneous positions as those represented, respectively, by Joseph Addison's view of global commerce in The Spectator and by François Fénelon's vision of the ideal commonwealth of Salente in his Aventures de Télemaque.     

Michael Polanyi's Social/Political Order: Design for a Society of Explorers

Abstract

Michael Polanyi's fascinations throughout his lifetime were threefold: (1) science—specifically physical chemistry; (2) philosophy—specifically epistemology and ontology; and (3) political society, understood, in the British tradition, to include economics. In developing his recommendations for political society, Polanyi draws broadly upon insights and even concepts from his experiences and reflections in both science and philosophy. His search for meaning in all of his philosophical works provides for him the definition of what he considers the most important human endeavor and is that which the political order must strive to encourage and protect. In addition, the gratification he found in the collegiality and conviviality of scientific research, conducted most productively in what Polanyi identified as “societies of explorers,” suggested to him the diverse groups—as in science, “polycentrically” ordered—and engaged in all kinds of productive activities that came to represent, for him, the grassroots source of a society's creative vitality. Having come to appreciate the necessity of freedom for scientific discovery, freedom became a paramount value in the model he proposed for political society. But this freedom, he realized, had to operate within the boundaries of legal and moral constraint if it was not to dissolve into the oppressions of anarchy. So we find in Polanyi's model of political society a dynamic very similar to that which he had developed in his epistemology: an indwelling of tradition for the purpose of social stability but also a “breaking-out” of established ways to engage in creative endeavors. Similarly, as Polanyi had recognized higher and lower “orders” of existence in his ontology that were necessary for the “emergence” of more comprehensive and novel entities, “greater than the sum of their parts,” he provided for a similar vertical, or qualitative, “layering” in his social order. These insights, and more, that Polanyi draws from his scientific and philosophical reflections in the process of constructing his model of a political society are what I attempt to develop in this essay.     

Challenging moral corruption in the postcolony: Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Hannah Arendt’s notion of individual responsibility

This article focuses on Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), which portrays a nameless protagonist who clings to his own ethics as he resists corruption in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana in the 1960s, an instance of what Achille Mbembe has called the postcolony. This situation bears comparison with Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy, which emphasises individual responsibility in political situations in which common democratic norms no longer apply. Based on Arendt’s insights, I claim that the ethical choices of Armah’s nameless individual suggest a way towards a better communal future. This article further suggests that Arendt’s political philosophy – read in critical dialogue with theorisations of the African postcolony – can offer valuable analytical approaches to discussions of moral decay in postcolonial Africa.     

Did Harrington’s cats catch Harvey’s chick? Vitalistic imagery in early modern republican political theory

In an early modern context, ‘vitalistic’ natural philosophies had been associated with antiauthoritarian political theories. Whilst mechanical philosophy has been characterized as amenable to (or even, sometimes, inspired by) conservative politics on account of the structural analogies between passive and inert particles that can only be organized by externally imposed strict mechanical laws on the one hand, and similarly passive citizens, on the other, vitalism understood as a monistic, dynamic materialism purportedly implicated alternative modes of agency and organization. This alternative model incorporated inherently active, self-organizing agents allegedly capable of bringing about higher structures in a bottom-up fashion both in the natural and in political realm. In this paper, I focus on James Harrington’s appropriation of William Harvey’s physiology and examine whether the republican philosopher actually made use of the political potential said to be inherent in vitalistic discourse. I intend to show that Harrington, rather than boldly capitalizing on vitalism’s decentralizing and democratic potential, adapts his physiological imagery to his wider set of ideas concerning human nature and moral psychology underpinning his politics. Simple analogy between vitalism and antiauthoritarianism is then lost in Harrington’s writings, pointing to a more complex relationship between early modern natural and political philosophy.     

Found in Translation: Habermas and Anthropotechnics

Abstract

In his recent work on postsecular societies Jürgen Habermas has stressed the need for a dialogue between religious and nonreligious citizens aimed at strengthening social integration and rejuvenating the moral bases of modern political and juridical institutions. This dialogue should focus on the translation of religious traditions into rational, secular forms. In his more recent work on the social function of rituals, however, he rejected the Durkheimian view of public secular rituals as mechanisms for fostering social integration. In this article I discuss Habermas’s early reflections on postsecularism and assess his interpretation of public religious rituals as sources of social integration. I then propose an alternative to his translation proviso whereby religious symbolic content would be translated into behavior-regulating technologies aimed at developing the dispositional resources needed for a continuous postsecular dialogue between religious and nonreligious citizens.     

The Poison and the Spider's Web: Diderot and Eighteenth-Century French Epicureanism

This article argues that the term ‘Epicurean’ had multiple meanings in the moral and political thought of the eighteenth century. Concentrating on the reception of Epicureanism in France, it shows that some critics focused on Epicurus’ hedonistic moral psychology and labelled Epicurean those thinkers who denied natural sociability; for others, who instead focused on Epicurus’ materialist natural philosophy, to label a thinker an Epicurean was to label them an atheist. This polyvalence is presented as a salutary caution against essentialising claims about the content of eighteenth-century Epicureanism per se. Despite this sceptical stance, however, the article goes on to argue that it is nevertheless fruitful to investigate the engagement with Epicureanism by particular thinkers or in particular texts. Indeed, a comparative reading of Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie entry on ‘Epicuréisme’ and his source material in Johan Jakob Bruker and Pierre Bayle demonstrates that Diderot used his discussion of Epicureanism to intervene directly in contemporary theological controversies over the immortal soul and a providential god.     

Entre Littérature Et Religion Les Pratiques D’Auteur De Jean Goulu

The activities of Jean Goulu in the 1620s, an author and superior of a religious order, the Catholic congregation of the « Feuillants », are a good example of the conflicts over the uses of print in France in the early xvii ^th century. An erudite translator of Greek philosophy and author of anti-protestant pamphlets, spiritual books, but also of a polemical book on eloquence, Goulu was uniquely positioned at the crossroads of the political, religious and literary debates of his time. On one level, his books obviously serve to advance his very successful career within his religious congregation, but they also represent a moral and political attempt to control the publications intended for the growing number of non scholarly readers. Goulu’s books aim to guide this relatively uneducated public. He hopes to satisfy these inexperienced readers’ request for novelty with attractive, but moral, writings. Last but not least, his books seek to fashion good reading and interpreting habits. This study thus makes it possible to understand how one can use books to build one’s social identity as well as to act concretely upon the society in which they are published.     

Antonio Genovesi's Diceosina: Source of the Neapolitan enlightenment

Antonio Genovesi (1713–1769) is known as the thinker who raised a whole generation of Southern Italian intellectuals, among them Francesco Pagano and Gaetano Filangieri. One of the most influential of his works was the notoriously difficult Diceosina, o sia della filosofia del giusto e dell’onesto (1766), a textbook destined for use in the universities. The Diceosina was a powerful, if controversial, attempt to mediate between the history of moral philosophy on the one hand, and the specific problems encountered by eighteenth-century commercial society on the other. In fact, it contained the greater part of Genovesi's political, philosophical, and economic thought; a synthetic guidebook for Neapolitan economic and social development. This essay explores the work's context, rich intellectual origins, and ultimate significance through its long and complicated reception. The cultural and political connotations of Genovesi's Diceosina become particularly evident through an engagement with the works of Ermenegildo Personè, one of the book's most arduous critics.     

Western women and imperialism: Complicity and resistance

The eighteenth-century moral philosopher Archibald Campbell is now largely forgotten, even to specialists in the Scottish Enlightenment. Yet his work is worth recovering both as part of the immediate reception of Bernard Mandeville and Francis Hutcheson's rival moral philosophies, and for better understanding the state of Scottish moral philosophy a decade before David Hume published his Treatise of Human Nature. This paper offers a reading of Campbell as deploying a specifically Epicurean philosophy that resists both the Augustinianism of Mandeville, and the Stoicism of Hutcheson. This leads him onto ground later claimed more conclusively by Hume, whilst helping us to better conceptualise the deployment and recovery of Hellenistic thought in the early modern period.     

‘Iustitiam non includo’: Carl Schmitt,Hugo Grotius and the Ius Publicum Europaeum

Through a discussion of Hugo Grotius’ conception of just war, this essay shows that within his critique of liberalism, Schmitt clashed with the very intellectual tradition he claimed to represent. Both historically and philosophically Schmitt's concept of the Ius Publicum Europaeum was a mirage. Indeed, his concept of the political was a rejection of the moral and civil philosophy that sees politics as the world of active citizens and commonwealths arguing with each other about fundamental questions of justice and equity.     

‘Iustitiam non includo’: Carl Schmitt, Hugo Grotius and the Ius Publicum Europaeum

Through a discussion of Hugo Grotius’ conception of just war, this essay shows that within his critique of liberalism, Schmitt clashed with the very intellectual tradition he claimed to represent. Both historically and philosophically Schmitt's concept of the Ius Publicum Europaeum was a mirage. Indeed, his concept of the political was a rejection of the moral and civil philosophy that sees politics as the world of active citizens and commonwealths arguing with each other about fundamental questions of justice and equity.     

Rhetoric and communication in Joseph Conrad

Early modern natural philosophers such as Francis Bacon are frequently seen as providing a legitimating ideology for British imperial expansion. Although this has been challenged by one recent study, much of Bacon's work on English colonisation remains unexplored. This article argues that far from being an ideological apologist for English colonisation, Bacon had two sets of colonial anxieties. The first derived from a tradition of civic humanism which concerned the moral corruption, dispossession of indigenous people and the greed involved in the British colonization of Ireland and America. Bacon's second anxiety was not moral but epistemological, and stemmed from his natural philosophy. For Bacon, colonies were not simply new commonwealths, they were places which potentially produced the natural knowledge vital for the recreation of man's original, epistemic empire over the world. Consequently, Bacon was not only interested in the morality of colonising, but also whether the knowledge produced in colonies was reliable. An exploration of Bacon's views on colonisation also offers us a point of entry into the scholarly debate about the relationship between Bacon's natural philosophy and his political thought.     

Self-Ownership and Moral Relations to Self in Early Modern Britain

Summary

This paper scrutinises early modern thinking about our moral relations to ourselves. It begins by reiterating the too-often-ignored point that full self-ownership was not a position defended in Britain—by Locke or anyone else. In fact, the actual early modern positions about the moral relations we have to ourselves have been obscured by our present-day interest in self-ownership. The paper goes on to organise the moral history of the self by examining the reasons available for prohibiting self-harm. Those reasons typically had their source in God, self, and others. Major divisions in the period arose over which kinds of reasons could be invoked and why. The defining feature of this intellectual landscape was the debate between ‘other-regarding’ and ‘dignity’ theorists, who differed over the moral status of the self and over its importance as a source of moral reasons. More dramatically and controversially, various freethinkers and sceptics questioned the importance of God as a source of prohibitions for self-harm. After offering an interpretation of this history, the paper concludes by noting some connections and contrasts between early modern and present-day moral and political philosophy on the moral status of the self.     

Blondel,the Philosophy of Action and Liberation Theology

Abstract

Maurice Blondel's philosophy of action and concrete political theology provide foundations for modern theologies of action. By commencing with the reflective subject, Blondel compensates the deficiencies of collectivist Marxist social analysis. He did not live to complete his account of the social, political and economic implications of his philosophy, but they are realized in the work and witness of others: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Yves de Montcheuil, Henri de Lubac and John McNeill. Liberation theologians of diverse persuasions need especially to acknowledge their debt to Blondel in an era when, in Western societies, the fundamental context of action is no longer material but intellectual, spiritual and interpersonal. The abstract nature of his thought means that he frequently opens suggestive paths into further reflection rather than prescribing complete solutions to specific practical questions.     

Unsociable Sociability and the Crisis of Natural Law: Michael Hissmann (1752–1784) on the State of Nature

Summary

This article studies the impact of the debate about human sociability on the crisis of natural law in the later eighteenth century examining the Untersuchungen über den Stand der Natur of 1780 by the Göttingen scholar Michael Hissmann. It makes the case that this crisis ensued from Rousseau's Discours sur l‘inégalité and a revival of neo-Epicurean trends in moral philosophy more generally. The sociability debate revolved around the question to what extent society was natural or artificial to man. This had important implications for the problem of whether distinctions between right and wrong or just and unjust were natural and inborn, or had developed at a much later stage of mankind's history, reflecting merely the respective needs and utility of different societies and cultures. Hissmann's essay summarises this European debate concisely. His point of departure is Rousseauian premises, yet his political conclusions turn Rousseau upside down. Here, Hissmann's essay opens up several questions regarding the allegedly radical political character of one-substance theories in philosophy.     

John Campbell’s Present State of Europe (1750): Toryism and balance of power

John Campbell’s Present State of Europe has been viewed, particularly by Guido Abbattista, as a change in Campbell’s view on British intervention on the continent. Campbell certainly alters his position from a conventional ‘Country’ and ‘Tory’ critique of British interventionism to acceptance, but this shift aligns him more closely with the Bolingbrokean political philosophy that undergirds much of his early thought as he accommodates this political philosophy to the dominant theory of foreign policy of his day, ‘balance of power’. Campbell articulates a moderate, Tory view of balance of power by drawing upon Samuel Pufendorf’s idea of states-system, which allows Campbell to extend his ‘Country’-Bolingbrokean philosophy from inside to outside the state. By extending his views outside the state, Campbell indicates how continental intervention not only may be required based upon a nation’s fluctuating, indeterminate circumstances but also may be needed to protect far-flung subjects within an expanding British Empire.     

William Rufus: myth and reality

The commonly accepted view of the reign of William II (1087–1100) is a political myth, primarily the work of Eadmer, who depicted the king as the villain against whom St Anselm strove to impose the revolutionary Gregorian reform programme in England. Henry I, moreover, denigrated his brother's regime as a cover for furthering William's harsh but constructive policies. Eadmer's writings were quarried by subsequent twelfth-century writers in the mainstream of the English monastic historical tradition, who added their own literary embellishments. Nineteenth-century historians uncritically accepted these accounts and Henry I's gloss on the reign. They then contributed moral judgements of their own, which passed without qualification into modern secondary works.This paper re-evaluates William II's political and governmental achievements, and his ecclesiastical policy. His character is considered in the light of recent work on twelfth-century intellectual and psychological attitudes, and the accounts of more favourable chroniclers. It is concluded that the king developed his father's strong policies in every direction with considerable success, making possible the more publicized but essentially imitative work of Henry I. William's expansion and consolidation of national frontiers, his legal and financial developments, and his maintenance of royal control over the Church are revealed under the distortions of ecclesiastical and Henrician historiography.     

Moralism in theories of secession: a realist perspective

Moral reasoning is the most common approach to secession in political philosophy. Just‐cause, choice and liberal‐cultural theories rely on moral conceptions of political authority. This article examines an alternative view through an exploration of moral theories of secession from a realist perspective. Realism has recently seen a revival as a form of normative political philosophy and focuses on political disagreement and legitimacy rather than rights and moral analysis. I claim that realism would reject utopianism and moralism present in theories of secession. Instead of regarding secession as a right, realism would frame secession as a political option. According to this view, this article explores a realist theory of secession that would be based on the priority of politics and disagreement among other concepts. This would be a middle‐ground theory, compatible with liberal values and existing moral theories.