The Political Mistress: Intimacy,Emotion, and Parliamentary Politics in the Late 18th Century

Between c.1796 and 1809, Lady Harriet Ponsonby, Countess Bessborough and Lord Granville Leveson Gower were embroiled in a passionate affair. Their liaison created tensions in aristocratic society because they belonged to rival political parties, the Whigs and the Tories respectively. In the early years of their relationship, Leveson Gower was emerging on the political scene, while the countess was already well-versed in the complexities of party politics. Leveson Gower thus solicited her advice and support and Bessborough duly shared her knowledge and insight into the political world, which created an unusual dynamic that scholars have yet to explore. This article examines several letters that Bessborough wrote to Leveson Gower to analyse how she supported her lover's fledgling parliamentary career and how she navigated their political differences. I argue that Bessborough adapted a rhetoric of affection, deference, duty, and loyalty, that was typically used by aristocratic wives, to justify her interest in her lover's career and her passion for parliamentary politics. This article contributes to scholarship that explores aristocratic women's political participation by examining the strategies a political mistress could employ to exert influence over men. It also illustrates the value of using methodologies from the history of emotions to investigate the drives and passions that shaped interactions in the late 18th-century political sphere.     

Weber and Marshall on the State

The conventional understanding of Weber's discussion of state legitimacy and Marshall's treatment of citizenship and social class are partial and distorted. Rather than endorse the view that the modern state is based on legal‐rational legitimacy Weber's analysis shows that the state in class society is without legitimacy and that its political domination is based on coercion and manipulation. While Marshall does argue that the expansion of citizenship rights tend to reduce aspects of class inequality he also shows that the working class can use the legal and other advantages of ‘industrial citizenship’ to improve the conditions of its struggle with capital. Our understanding of state mediation is improved by an appreciation of Weber's and Marshall's full contributions to a consideration of these matters, even though their positions do contain certain limitations.     

Existential Failure and Success: Augustinianism in Oakeshott and Arendt

That Oakeshott and Arendt's political works contain Augustinian references is well known. What historians of political thought have had difficulty in is assessing the consistency and importance of the Augustinian themes within their work. It transpires that the traces of existentialism and personalism in Augustine are amplified and clarified by their use in Oakeshott and Arendt, to the extent that they form an important subtext to their work. One stumbling block for scholars attempting to link the ‘mature’ works of Oakeshott and Arendt to Augustine has been a sense of disparity between the eschatological character of Augustine's writings and the civic worldliness of Oakeshott's associations and Arendt's public realm. Returning to several strands of twentieth-century Augustinianism, from the personalist to the existentialist to the liberal, reveals an Augustinianism that is much more credibly linked to the whole of Oakeshott and Arendt's writings.     

The Proto-politics of Reconciliation: Lefort and the Aporia of Forgiveness in Arendt and Derrida

Reconciliation is often suspected of being an inherently ideological concept in the sense that it fosters acquiescence to a social order that is neither necessary nor desirable. In particular, it is sometimes argued that this is because reconciliation is a religious concept that has been transposed into political discourse. This transposition is seen to be inappropriate because reconciliation presupposes a prior social unity that needs to be restored when, in fact, no such unity has ever existed between historical antagonists. In this article, I argue that the presupposition of a social unity is, indeed, always in danger of becoming ideological to the extent that this unity is conflated with the nation. However, the invocation of a counterfactual social unity or ‘polity’ also potentially enables the staging of a reconciliatory politics in a way that politicises the terms of association between former antagonists.     

Judging appearances: The continuing legacy of Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics. Edited by Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), viii + 362 pp. $54.95 cloth $21.95 paper.

Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigrés and American Political Thought after World War II. Edited by Peter Graf Kielmansegg, Horst Mewes, and Elisabeth Glaser‐Schmidt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), x + 208 pp. $49.95/£35.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.

Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later. Edited by Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), viii + 384 pp. $40.00 cloth, $17.50 paper.     

Between Athens and Jerusalem: Western otherness in the thought of Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt

In understanding the meaning of the West, twentieth‐century political philosophers Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss called for a return to “Athens” (classical political philosophy) in order to address the “crisis of the West,” a loss of a sense of legitimate and stable political authority which, in their view, constitutes a nihilistic threat to Western democracy. The only way for the West to escape this nihilistic crisis is to return to Plato and Aristotle. Implicit in this critique is the belief that the other tradition of the West, “Jerusalem” (the Bible) has contributed to this nihilism, by undermining the authority of the Greeks. Is Jerusalem, then, the fatal “Other” for the West? Which tradition—Athens or Jerusalem—is best prepared to alleviate the crisis of the West, especially the survival of democracy? As I address these questions, I shall contend that it is Jerusalem, not Athens, which is the true source of Western democracy.     

Hannah Arendt on the Power of Creative Making in a World of Plural Cultures

Since culture is a form of poēsis and thus carries the danger of monologism and domination, and since today political “conflicts are increasingly defined from a cultural standpoint,” the question this paper addresses is whether culture can affect politics other than as a form of conflict and political aestheticism. Put differently: can culture become a source of communication and dialogue in politics? The answer this paper proposes is that culture can do so not by uncompromisingly divorcing praxis from any association with poēsis, but by making a distinction between two forms of poēsis. I argue that there are good grounds in Hannah Arendt's conception of the human condition and of the life of the mind to think that a distinction is possible between, on the one hand, technical, and thus non-creative, making and, on the other hand, metaphorical, imaginative, and creative making. It is the work of art that, through the joint employment of taste and polyphonic authorship, brings culture into politics in a manner that creatively and dialogically serves the purpose of augmenting the world. Through taste one is receptive to particulars and thus capable of judging their worldly suitability, while keeping one's mind open. Through polyphonic authorship one anticipates the unfinalized and open character of ideas and thus, the ongoing need to speak with other ideas, with the ideas of others.     

From Rosa Luxemburg to Hannah Arendt: Socialism,Barbarism and the Extermination Camps

The relationship between Rosa Luxemburg and Hannah Arendt has occasionally been noted but rarely systematically discussed. In fact, there is a profound sense in which Arendt's continuing preoccupation with the significance of the extermination camps owes much to Luxemburg's earlier expressed concern that barbarism was a real possibility. Luxemburg first raised this in the context of the First World War, which she saw as a catastrophe marking a fundamental break with the past and opening the way to terrible new possibilities. The terms that Luxemburg used to describe this catastrophe apply better to subsequent events that Arendt was to analyse, particularly the extermination camps (“hell” on earth). In explaining how barbarism could occur, Arendt drew extensively on Luxemburg, emphasising the impact of world wars, imperialism and nationalism, though she was of course then to go further in analysing what barbarism meant when it took place.     

Linkage Politics: the Role of the European Community in Greek Politics in 1973

Abstract

The convulsions which began to shake the Greek military regime with the first student protests at the end of 1972 and which reached their climax in 1973 with the uprising at the Polytechnic in November, have been exhaustively analysed and discussed. However, they have always been viewed either through the prism of internal political developments or in the light of events in Cyprus. The international context remains largely unexplored.     

Liberation from the Weberian Iron Cage: Pierre Manent on Max Weber

Abstract

In this article I contend that conventional social contract theory is self-referentially incoherent. Conventional contractarianism therefore fails to provide an adequate foundation for the authority of the state and for the obligation of citizens to obey. The insistence on consent for legitimate political authority has usually been rendered in contractarian terms. Thus, the fall of conventional social contract theory seemingly entails that we should reject the principle of consent as well. Yet, the necessity of consent for the authority of the state and, concomitantly, for the obligation of citizens to obey seems to be an entailment of human equality. Thus, insofar as human persons are equal, the legitimacy of the state seems to require a foundation logically precluded to it. We are therefore confronted with a theoretical crisis. Even so, I will argue that we need not reject the principle of consent. The self-referential incoherency of conventional contractarianism results from its conventionalism. We can begin the work of salvaging the principle of consent from the demise of conventional social contract theory by erecting it upon the foundation of moral and ontological realism.     

Class,Status and Party in the Analysis of Nationalism: Lessons from Max Weber

Abstract. Little attention has been paid by those seeking to understand nationalism to Weber's writing on class, status and party. These concepts can be used to analyse the groups which carry the nationalist idea outside the narrow circle of intellectuals and we use the example of Welsh nationalism to illustrate how this can be done. In our example the group in question is a status group which has a basis in class. The character of Welsh nationalism reflects the character of this status group – the ‘Welsh class’– and the changes (for instance in public policy and in the law) produced by nationalist agitation have been of most benefit to members of this status group. In terms of Weberian theory this nationalist activity can be understood as the activity of a status group which is monopolising resources through social closure.