Rationality and revolution

The article deals with the political thought of the young Spanish philosopher and intellectual, José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955). The main aim is to examine to what extent his political thought was articulated in a systematic manner, and to understand if it was meant to be practically implemented. Ortega's political thought has been described as liberal on the one hand, and anti-democratic and conservative on the other. The disparities regarding Ortega's politics usually arise from his declarations, which aimed to confront the changing social and political situation in Spain. To many researchers, these declarations seem incoherent, evolutionary, or ideas that can be directly deduced from the evolution of his philosophical theory. The extent to which Ortega's political theory was systematic will be understood through focusing on the role designed for the Spanish intellectuals in Ortega's declarations and works. Instead of considering his political thought in relation to either his philosophy or the political events and changing circumstances in Spain, I will attempt to examine how, during the years of his youth, his political declarations were always guided by a consistent feature with a practical political purpose: to challenge the Spanish intellectuals to promote social awareness of and reflection on the country's problems, and to consider potential solutions to these problems.     

Helmut Schmidt and the Shaping of Western Security in the Late 1970s: the Guadeloupe Summit of 1979

On 5 and 6 January 1979, US President Jimmy Carter, British Prime Minister James Callaghan, French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt met on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. These secret talks à quatre were intended to be a relaxed frank and free exchange on the current state of global politics, though Western security issues lay at the discussions’ heart. As we now know, it had been Schmidt who, behind the scenes, had been pressing the Carter administration to pursue informal (transatlantic) summitry - the Chancellor's preferred modus operandi. In view of growing Euro-strategic imbalances due to Soviet arms build-up, he sought to achieve political co-ordination among the key North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) players on the theatre-nuclear-forces-modernisation-cum-arms-control issue. Schmidt's pushiness reflected West Germany's new political assertiveness, but also the Chancellor's desire to personally promote national interests in nuclear politics at the top table (similar to his approach as a shaper of international economic and energy policies). This article will explore why this ‘parley at the summit’ mattered, how within this intimate forum Schmidt pursued his goals, what diplomatic tactics and methods he employed, and to what extent he managed to control and shape proceedings and outcomes.     

The Paradox of Subjective Truth

Abstract

This paper focuses in part on Jan Assmann's interpretation and refutation of Carl Schmitt's very well-known secularization theory that all significant modern concepts of the state are secularized theological notions. It will be demonstrated that Assmann attempts to counter Schmitt's conception of modern secularization by suggesting that Mosaic monotheism inaugurated a revolution by theologizing the political. By briefly exploring Assmann's interpretation of Egyptian religion, it will be argued that a conception of the political as distinct from the theological characterized the political form of ancient Egypt. This leads to a discussion of Assmann's argument that Schmitt's conception of the friend/enemy distinction should be understood as an aberration of the political form of ancient Egypt and therefore viewed as a category of political illegitimacy. In order to illustrate this, attention will first be drawn to Assmann's distinction between primary and secondary religion. This is followed by a discussion of Assmann's notion of the structural transform of the political by theology, which then moves specifically into his argument for the intellectual origins of Schmitt's concept of the political. It will be attempted throughout this paper to bring conceptual clarification to Assmann's notion of theologization by relating it to the question of political theology currently taking place in France and the English-speaking world. Towards the end I offer a number of criticisms of Assmann's notion of theologization.     

Political Philosophy,Education, and Statesmanship

How are we to understand the connection between political philosophy, education, and statesmanship? Using Harry V. Jaffa's Crisis of the Strauss Divided as a guide, the following essay explores this question by reflecting on a teacher-student lineage that stretches across the twentieth century. It explains and defends Jaffa's understanding of political philosophy but argues that one of Jaffa's students improved or perfected Jaffa's approach. In doing so, Jaffa's student did what Jaffa had done for his teacher, and Jaffa's teacher had done for his teacher. While at first glance the teacher-student lineage might appear to trace a descent, from another angle it appears to be an ascent, or at least the preparation for a possible ascent.     

Halford Mackinder's “new” political geography and the geographical tradition

This article re-examines Halford Mackinder's conception of geography in general and his practise as a political geographer in particular by placing his work in the context of the history of geography. The nature and politicisation of early modern (c.1600–1850) geography are depicted, and used as a contextual standard against which to assess Mackinder's claims to have propounded a “new” geography and a “new” form of political geography. Mackinder's conception of geography is found to have been a substantial departure from the early modern one, in terms of its definition of geography, its textual format and its placing of geography in a broader educative structure. By contrast, Mackinder's political geography is shown to effect a far less radical break, for whilst Mackinder's rhetoric suggests that geography will drive his political analysis, it is in fact his pre-existent politics as a tariff-reforming conservative which drove his political geography. To the extent that geography acted as a container for politics, Mackinder was still in the tradition of the early modern period, although he did change the form of that argument.     

The Inglorious

Abstract

The essay argues that Sheldon Wolin's case for decoupling democracy and liberalism, which he makes in both editions of Politics and Vision (1960 and 2004), significantly depends on the historical argument Henri Cardinal de Lubac made in his book Corpus Mysticum: L'Eucharistie et l'Eglise au moyen âge (1944 and 1949). Such a claim for the importance of this dependence deepens our understanding of the significance of both Wolin and Lubac for contemporary debates about religion and democracy. To this end, the essay has two proximate goals: (1) by displaying Wolin's use of Lubac's arguments concerning the shifting use of the term corpus mysticum, we will have a better theological understanding of Wolin's complex criticisms of liberal democracy; and (2) in the midst of claims to uncertainty about the political implications of Cardinal de Lubac's thought, we will see some of the conclusions that one political theorist came to after considering a theological argument. Finally, this particular instance of a mutually critical dialogue of faith and political reason raises crucial questions for thinking about the ends of democracy.     

‘With All My Oldest and Native Friends’. Joseph Parkes: Warwickshire Solicitor and Electoral Agent in the Age of Reform1

Joseph Parkes, Birmingham solicitor, electoral agent, whig party advisor and secretary to the Parliamentary Municipal Corporation Commission was a modern master of exposing corrupt and fraudulent electioneering and using it as a catalyst for the election of reform and Liberal politicians immediately following the 1832 Reform Act. Warwickshire's own political and legal history was the foundation for Parkes's understanding of how politics worked in Britain and what was wrong with it, and helped forge his vision for an effective reform in parliamentary and local government. This essay examines Joseph Parkes's understanding of national electoral politics, informed by his work in Warwickshire. As a local solicitor, Parkes gained the wisdom of controlling electoral registration, canvassing in a routine and orderly manner and establishing a network of professionals to secure that registrations turned into votes at elections. This experience would culminate in the formation of the Reform Club, a national organisation of whigs, Liberals and radicals, that would, eventually, become the base of the Liberal Party in modern British politics. In short, Joseph Parkes was a man who could not, and did not wish to, escape where he came from, at least in terms of his political education. His Warwickshire experiences and lessons learned, solidified a series of political reform goals that he pragmatically approached as a political advisor, operative and attorney, rather than an elected public servant, and marked the direction of politics for the rest of the century.     

Rethinking the Polis: Implications of Heidegger's questioning the political

Heidegger's thought has, in recent years, been relentlessly examined for glimpses of the political. This paper approaches that debate by looking at one of themes of Heidegger's lectures during the Nazi years: one which explicitly questions the notion of the political itself. This questioning, through a rethinking of the Greek word πóλις [polis], is a result of Heidegger's retreat from his own political involvement. Heidegger's active political career was theoretically underpinned by his interpretation of Plato's call for philosopher-kings: his rethinking is important in understanding his turn away from Nazism. In his rethinking Heidegger suggests that looking at the polis with our modern, political, eyes does not give us fundamental insights into the meaning of this word. Heidegger looks to the choral ode in Sophocles' Antigone, and focuses on a line which begins “hypsipolis apolis”. Through a detailed reading, Heidegger suggests that polis should be understood not as “city” or “state” but as “site”, the historical site of being. We cannot use our modern understanding of politics to understand the polis, but we can use our understanding of polis to rethink the notion of the political. The political, means relating to the site of abode of human history, and is therefore primarily spatial, or better, platial. Such an understanding allows us to understand Heidegger's work on technology from a better position; to distance ourselves from the modern, Schmittian notion of the political; and to rethink the principle concepts of politics with due attendance to the role of space, or place.     

“The Pull of Love”: Mutual Love as Democratic Virtue in Niebuhrian Political Theology

Although Reinhold Niebuhr's account of democracy aims to protect marginalized communities by restraining sin through the diffusion of power, the conceptions of sin and love that inform his political theology have anti-democratic consequences for members of these communities. I address this inconsistency by revisiting his under-developed idea of mutual love and clarifying his account of sin. Mutual love occupies crucial terrain between agape and justice for Niebuhr, and therefore enables moral agents to achieve democratic goals. Given the nature and importance of mutual love, I clarify Niebuhr's account of sin by making his position on “self-love” more moderate than it often appears.     

‘An Old Carriage with New Horses’: Nietzsche’s Critique of Democracy

Debates about Nietzsche's political thought today revolve around his role in contemporary democratic theory: is he a thinker to be mined for stimulating resources in view of refounding democratic legitimacy on a radicalised, postmodern and agonistic footing, or is he the modern arch-critic of democracy budding democrats must hone their arguments against? Moving away from this dichotomy, this article asks first and foremost what democracy meant for Nietzsche in late nineteenth-century Germany, and on that basis what we might learn from him now. To do so, it will pay particular attention to the political, intellectual and cultural contexts within which Nietzsche's thought evolved, namely Bismarck's relationship to the new German Reichstag, the philological discovery of an original Aryan race, and Nietzsche's encounter with Gobineau's racist thought through his frequentation of the Wagner circle. It argues that Nietzsche's most lasting contribution to democratic thinking is not to be found in the different ways he may or may not be used to buttress certain contemporary ideological positions, but rather how his notions of ‘herd morality’, ‘misarchism’ and the genealogical method still provides us with the conceptual tools to better understand the political world we inhabit.     

The economic of agricultural land tenure

This article sheds new light on the interesting but little-studied figure of Thomas Scott of Canterbury (1566–1635). In presenting Scott's ideas I will modify the interpretation laid out by Peter Clark whose groundbreaking study, ‘Thomas Scott and the Growth of Urban Opposition to the Early Stuart Regime’, is still the only secondary source that pays detailed attention to Scott and his thought, especially his religious opinions. The necessity to revisit Clark's interpretation of Scott's place within the political and doctrinal debates of early Stuart England stems from the conviction that his political work and his ideological stances deserve more subtle attention. Most importantly, they were part of the emerging reaction against the policies of the first two Stuart Kings which can be labelled ‘country patriotism’. Finally, the elucidation of Scott's writings will provide a novel insight into an early configuration of English national identity.     

Jeremy Bentham,the French Revolution and political radicalism

An unresolved debate in Bentham scholarship concerns the question of the timing and circumstances which led to Bentham's ‘conversion’ to democracy, and thus to political radicalism. In the early stages of the French Revolution, Bentham composed material which appeared to justify equality of suffrage on utilitarian grounds, but there are differing interpretations concerning the extent and depth of Bentham's commitment to democracy at this time. The appearance of Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and other essays on the French Revolution, a new volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, containing definitive texts of Bentham's writings at this crucial period, offers an opportunity to reassess this debate. First, Bentham's most radical proposals for political reform came not in the so-called ‘Essay on Representation’ composed in late 1788 and early 1789, as has traditionally been assumed, but in his ‘Projet of a Constitutional Code for France’ composed in the autumn of 1789, where he advocated universal adult (male and female) suffrage, subject to a literacy test. Second, it may be doubted if the very question as to whether Bentham was or was not a sincere convert to democracy is particularly helpful. Rather, it may be better to see Bentham as a ‘projector’ during this period of his life. Third, the nature of Bentham's radicalism was very different at this period from what it would become in the 1810s and 1820s, for instance in relation to his commitment to the traditional structures of the British Constitution. Having said that, his attitude to the British Constitution remained complex and ambivalent. At his most radical phase, in the autumn of 1789, he advocated wide-ranging measures of electoral reform while at the same time harbouring aspirations to be returned to Parliament for one of the Marquis of Lansdowne's pocket boroughs. To conclude, it was, arguably, the internal dynamic of Bentham's critical utilitarianism, rather than the events of the French Revolution, which was ultimately responsible for pushing him into a novel form of radical politics.     

John Marshall Harlan's Political Memoir

Near the end of his life, John Marshall Harlan wrote a number of biographical essays, presumably at the request of his children. Most of the essays relate to his experiences in the Civil War. The essay reprinted here instead recounts Harlan's political career before he joined the Supreme Court. Although he rarely won any elections and only held a couple of offices, Harlan's political odyssey is significant in that it shows how his social views were formed. Harlan's transformation from a staunch anti‐abolitionist to a civil‐rights advocate can be viewed as a series of reactions against various opponents as he struggled to find his political identity after the collapse of the Whig party in the 1850s.     

The Secularization of Providential Order: F. A. Hayek's Political-Economic Theology

In this article I argue that the concept of spontaneous order that underlies F. A. Hayek's political-economic thought is a secularized version of classical liberalism's understanding of order as providential. In Adam Ferguson's writings on history and social order, from which Hayek draws the notion of spontaneous order, the classical liberal paradigm reveals its intimate connection to providential theology. It is in three features of Ferguson's thought, namely his understanding of order, the politics of laissez-faire he dictates, and his providential optimism, that a providential theology reveals itself. Hayek's restatement of liberalism involves the secularization of this notion of order, which forces him both to ground his thought in a different ontology and to formulate a different politics. By contrasting Hayek's political economy to Ferguson's thought I trace the implications of this secularization. In the conclusion I contend that despite his secularizing gesture, Hayek does not succeed at emptying his understanding of order of all theological traces. Consequently, his notion of “spontaneous order” still carries a distinct theological charge, making it impossible for Hayekian political economy to countenance the destruction wrought by markets.     

3. CARL SCHMITT'S CONTRIBUTION TO A THEORY OF POLITICAL MYTH

My goal in this essay is to show that myths have played a larger role than we might think in politics and in political theory and that myths are essential to politics. For this purpose I will use Schmitt's theory of myth, since he elaborated his theory with strong interpretations of two different myths: Hobbes's Leviathan and Shakespeare's Hamlet. I will compare Schmitt's interpretations of Hamlet with my own, as doing so will provide a critical view of Schmitt's conclusions, and it will enable me to develop my own conception of myth and its relations to political theory and history.     

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: the Futurist as Fascist, 1929–37

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the leader of Futurism, is no stranger to scholarly inquiry, and the centenary of 2009 only magnified this attention. However, what is often avoided, downplayed, or misunderstood are Marinetti's politics, and specifically his connection to the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. In this article Ialongo investigates just what this connection was, and concludes that Marinetti was exactly what Mussolini called him, a ‘fervent Fascist’, and not simply an opportunistic fellow-traveller, as many have argued. By putting the Futurist initiatives of the 1930s, such as Aeropittura, Arte sacra futurista, Cucina futurista and Naturismo into a broad political perspective, Ialongo demonstrates that each of these initiatives were all geared towards furthering Marinetti and Mussolini's twin goals of strength at home as a springboard for imperial expansion abroad, culminating in the conquest of Ethiopia in 1936. Ialongo argues that the political goals of each of these initiatives were evidence of Marinetti's ‘working towards the Duce’ in the 1930s.     

REOCCUPYING SECULARIZATION: SCHMITT AND KOSELLECK ON BLUMENBERG'S CHALLENGE

This article analyzes the compound of the categories of secularization and reoccupation in its variations from Hans Blumenberg's philosophy to Carl Schmitt's political theory and, ultimately, to Reinhart Koselleck's conceptual history. By revisiting the debate between Blumenberg and Schmitt on secularization and political theology with regard to the political‐theoretical aspects of secularization and the methodological aspects of reoccupation, I will provide conceptual tools that illuminate the partly tension‐ridden elements at play in Koselleck's theorizing of modernity, history, and concepts. For Schmitt, secularization is inherently related to the question of political conflict, and, correspondingly, he attempts to discredit Blumenberg's criticism of secularization as an indirectly aggressive, and thereby hypocritical, attempt to escape the political. To this end, I argue, Schmitt appropriates Blumenberg's concept of “reoccupation” and uses it alternately in the three distinct senses of “absorption,”“reappropriation,” and “revaluation.” Schmitt's famous thesis of political concepts as secularized theological concepts contains an unmistakable methodological element and a research program. The analysis therefore shows the relevance of the Blumenberg/Schmitt debate for the mostly tacit dialogue between Blumenberg and Koselleck. I scrutinize Koselleck's understanding of secularization from his early Schmittian and Löwithian theory of modernity to his later essays on temporalization of history and concepts. Despite Blumenberg's criticism, Koselleck holds onto the category of secularization throughout, but gradually relativizes it into a research hypothesis among others. Simultaneously, Koselleck formalizes, alongside other elements, the Schmittian account of reoccupation into his method of conceptual analysis and uses the term in the same three senses—thus making “reoccupation” conceptually compatible with “secularization,” despite the former notion's initial critical function in Blumenberg's theory. The examination highlights a Schmittian residue that accounts for Koselleck's reserved attitude toward Blumenberg's metaphorology, regardless of a significant methodological overlap.     

Young Mr. Lincoln in Ford's Theater

In Young Mr. Lincoln, director John Ford and screenwriter Lamar Trotti engage an issue that is central to Ford's films and to Lincoln's political thought. That issue is the tension between individual greatness and the rule of law, a tension heightened in a democracy by the demos's passion for equality. In the film's portrayal of Lincoln, Ford and Trotti suggest a solution to this tension that is fundamentally consistent with the one Lincoln suggested in the Lyceum Address. To remain within the political community, the great man must hold a sincere reverence for the law and be willing to exhibit humility in declaiming his own superiority. In the context of these characteristics, greatness can be a force that preserves the law and protects the community from harm. The film depicts Lincoln as the paradigmatic combination of these characteristics and alludes to his mature leadership based on these commitments in his later career.     

Travel,migration, exile: Garibaldi's global fame

In this article, it is argued that Garibaldi's global fame owes much to his own experiences as a migrant and exile in the Americas. Overseas, Garibaldi not only acquired several practical and political skills, he also built up an important network of friends and supporters and became a hybrid figure able to adapt his image to diverse political settings. At the same time, Garibaldi relied on the trope of exile, developed by people like Ugo Foscolo, to define his opposition to, first, Italy's Restoration governments and, after Italian unification, the new moderate liberal regime. The article also looks at Garibaldi's life on Caprera and it is further argued that here Garibaldi combined elements of his previous experiences to fashion a role for himself as a ‘foreigner in Italy’. Garibaldi was a symbol of many worlds as well as a hero of two and it is precisely this hybrid nature of his appeal that can explain his global popularity.