Social relations on stage: Witnesses in classical Athens

The study of witness testimony raises questions which are fundamental for the student of other cultures, whether past or contemporary. What are the standards expected of a reliable informant and how is reliability to be recognised? How is reliable knowledge about the past established?

The aim of this paper is to analyse the use of witnesses in classical Athenian lawcourts both for its epistemological implications — what does it tell us about Athenian ideas of ‘expert witnesses’, of reliability, of truthfulness and bias — and for the information it gives us about Athenian society and court practice. What kind of men did Athenian litigants select to act as witnesses for them, and what effect did they hope their witnesses’ testimonies would have on the jury?

If we start out from the assumption of modern courts that witnesses are called to ‘establish the facts of the case’ we shall misunderstand the Athenian data. What witnesses actually testified often was not very important: their testimonies might be insignificant, irrelevant or repetitive. To understand their role it is necessary to see them as minor characters in a drama, whose presence provides the backdrop against which the litigant wishes his own actions and character to be seen. Respectable witnesses — officials, members of the ‘professions’, reputable politicians — establish his own respectability. The support of neighbours, associates and kin shows that those who know the milieu in which the dispute arose are on the litigant's side. Denigration Of the opponent's witnesses, kin and associates presents him as a vicious and unreliable character. In the construction of a character‐portrait in court witnesses had an important role to play.     

Levinas's beginnings: ethics,politics, and origins

It is commonplace in philosophy, political theory, and theology to speak of the other and the problem of the identity of the West. No one has done as much to foreground the language of the other in recent years as Emmanuel Levinas, whose works have sparked a renewed interest in ethics across the humanities. Moreover, few have advanced as forceful a critique of European otherness, not only its exclusivity (whereby the other is marginalized) but also its hegemony (whereby the other is absorbed). I explore Levinas's critique of Western ethical thought in order to try to pinpoint what exactly he offers to post‐Hegelian reflection on the other, focusing on his insistence that equality must be grounded in the asymmetry of ethics. The question is: does this take one further than Europe, modernity, the West? If so, where is one thereby going? If not, what is novel or important in these claims?     

Wolfgang Streeck's conception of the crisis-phase of democratic politics: a post-Keynesian critique

Depictions of the politics of crisis in advanced societies (what crisis is and what can be done) continue to pit different strands of political science and heterodox political economy against each other. Economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck's contributions to these controversies have emphasised ‘embeddedness’, or the need for economies to incorporate non-functional or deliberated elements which allow functional and market-focused processes to play themselves out. Streeck's recent writings on debt-induced crisis nonetheless accept too much orthodox liberal disquiet: most fatefully, a contempt for politics based on what seems to be an untenable assertion – that rich societies have hit the limits of their capacity to increase taxation. Capitalism has entered an ‘end point’, he claims. This article presents, again, contrary evidence and offers suggestions for a revised heterodox understanding of capitalism's current malaise.     

Seeing is believing: Symbolic politics and the opportunities of non‐democratic transition in Angola

Following the resignation of President José Eduardo dos Santos after 38 years in power, the August 2017 elections in Angola were peaceful, yet had questionable results and returned the ruling party, the MPLA (The Popular Liberation Movement of Angola) to power. However, in his first three months in office, the new president, João Lourenço, has proceeded to make some high‐profile reshuffles and symbolic actions that have induced a palpable sense of optimism in the broader population, which seemed hardly warranted before the elections. This article reassesses the outcome of the elections from an Angolan perspective, based on fieldwork carried out in the capital, Luanda, and the northern province of Uíge, shortly after the polls. By examining how certain actions become symbols and what those symbols enable among Angolan citizens, the article discusses the weight of symbolic politics and the opportunities for change under conditions that fall short of formal standards of the democratic process.     

Intimations of democratic impatience: The Book of Job

This article challenges democratic theorists’ disregard for democratic impatience by showing that the Book of Job not only defends impatience but that it intimates the merits of democratic impatience. Job is impatient along four dimensions that should speak to democratic theorists: he refuses to suffer, identifies his suffering as unjust, seeks to hold arbitrary power accountable, and recognizes patience’s irrationality in the face of injustice. Critically, I demonstrate that Job remains impatient in his mind, and thus does not abandon impatience – not even in an epilogue designed to stifle his impatient voice. While Job’s impatience is justified, it is not yet democratic, for it reneges on broader democratic claims, is not shared, and is undermined by his social privilege. I thus turn to Job’s wife – who is “Everywoman” both in a feminist and more generally democratic sense – to more fully develop a concept of democratic impatience.     

The mind of Baddo: Assassination in Merovingian politics

One of the more repellent aspects of the Merovingian age is the apparent ease with which its society resorted to assassination. Ambition, dissimulation, and cupidity all too often found an outlet in political murder. But such behavior may be more than simply the upwelling of pure barbarism. Assassination in Merovingian politics may be the logical, if unhappy, byproduct of an altered world-view.The people of the Merovingian age were prone to take deeds as an accurate sign of inward intention, which brought the ultimate revelation of right and wrong forward to the present. And if the holiness of an action were readily apparent, even disgusting actions such as assassination may be seen, with proper exegesis of the Books of Judges, to produce right results. An examination of the implied conceptual circumstances surrounding assassination, the ‘mind’ of society to the deed, reveals a mixed attitude to these violent acts.The permissibility of assassination in qualified cases coupled with'the immediate establishment of it as holy or unholy, encouraged attempts on the lives of public figures. Once the full taboo had been broken, assassination became a dangerously routine solution to political grievances, and society's response to it became chillingly casual.