Political Alignments,Political Economy and Political Change in Australia 1890-1940

This paper explores the applicability of class-coalitional explanations to broad patterns of public policy in Australia at the turn of the century and during the Great Depression. It argues that this approach, with its strong comparative emphasis, does shed light on the 'historic compromise' between capital and labour established after Federation and provides some useful hypotheses about Australia's failure to 'break with orthodoxy' in the 1930s. In particular, it provides an important comparative framework for understanding the nature and role of the labour movement in Australian history, and a corrective to prevailing interpretations. The paper also argues, though, that evidence from the Australian case calls into question simple factor-endowment models of political change.     

Political Differentiability

The urgent task of political ontology is, I believe, neither to investigate the nature of the political nor to define politics; instead, the pressing task is to put into question the political difference itself between the political and politics. The subject of my inquiry is, in other words, the political difference as political difference. To demonstrate this thesis, I examine Oliver Marchart’s and Giorgio Agamben’s positions. The political difference takes in Marchart the form of the never-ending play between the political and politics and in Agamben the constantly renewed sovereign decision between life and law. Besides reformulating Marchart’s and Agamben’s positions, I want to show that the never-ending play and the sovereign decision fail to capture the political difference, because it is approached through the differentiated—whether between the political and politics or between life and law. Drawing on the diverse works of Agamben, I argue that the political difference becomes intelligible as the political differentiability that points to the power of differentiation, to the ability of the political differencing to differentiate. And the task of thinking and of political practice is neither the thinking itself nor the political practice itself, but rather to experience political differentiability as the shared field of thinking and practice, as the common dimension of philosophy and politics. I argue that experiencing political differentiability, ontology and politics can avoid falling prey, respectively, to intellectualism and to wild practicism.     

Political Models and Political Transfer in the Shaping of Europe

This essays deals with the problem of reconstructing the ideological roots which made possible the phenomenon of political transfer in different European countries. The basis is obviously the dominance of the ‘British Model’ as the normal reference for the European Political Sciences. Even the opponents of such hegemony took it as the unavoidable polemic goal. This founded a sort of political ‘homogeneity’ that let live many different approaches and many national peculiarities, but in the end convinced the majority of European political scientists that some type of representative constitution had to be accepted. It was at the beginning of the twentieth century that the panorama changed. Elie Halévy's work on one side, discussing the sunset of the ‘British model’ in Britain itself, and on the other Max Weber's reflections on what he defined as ‘the community of destinies’ interpret a turning point in the approach of European political sciences to the possibilities of transferring political models.     

Idols and Grace: Re-envisioning Political Liberalism as Political Limitism

Abstract

An Augustinian analysis of the current version of political liberalism which is increasingly dominating Western politics recognizes it as idolatrous. Nonetheless, because of the parasitic nature of evil, idolatrous human politics may be sustained by God's grace as God gives people time to respond to God and to re-order their disordered loves in relation to Godself, the supreme good. The express recognition of this function of politics enables the advocacy of political limitism, a re-thinking of political liberalism in the light of eternity, which recognizes that politics has only a limited role to play in securing human goods and that the earthly polis is not the most important society.     

Radical Political Theology

Abstract

This essay investigates the claim, advanced by a number of contributors to Theology and the Political, that the potential for political transformation requires an analogical ontology. I argue that this is not the case, and that an ontology of immanence, as found primarily in the work of Gilles Deleuze, provides an alternative and superior paradigm for political transformation. This argument is advanced by examining the manner in which immanence enables a novel approach to creation. Such immanent creation is distinct in that it departs from analogy's dependence on the transcendent as well as from capitalism's dependence on communication.     

Reproducing Political Subjects: Feminist Scholarship and the Political Science Curriculum

In this article we analyse 16 politics textbooks that feature in introductory courses in politics, political theory or political thought taught in Australian universities. Our concern was to investigate how commonly used first-yearintroductory texts position feminist political theory (and its underlying scholarship) within political theory, and by extension within the discipline of political science. Our findings suggest that the scholarship of feminist theorists remains only occasionally visible to students of political science. It is mostly confined to the safety of managed enclaves, occasionally acknowledged, but certainly not integrated into what counts as the real knowledge of political theory.