Europe in the nineteenth-century American mind: The literary perspectives

This article evaluates Karl Popper's contribution to analytic philosophy, and outlines some of the contradictions in his work which make it difficult to locate in any particular tradition. In particular, the article investigates Popper's own claims to be a member of the rationalist tradition. Although Popper described himself as a member of this tradition, his definition of it diverged quite radically from that offered by other supporters of rationalism, like, for example, Mach, Carnap, and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. The reason for this was that Popper believed the rationalist tradition, if it were to remain coherent and relevant, needed to overcome the dilemma posed by Hume's problem of induction. Popper believed that this problem rendered conventional understandings of rationalism, science, and inductive reasoning incoherent. This article suggests that Popper's principal contribution to modern philosophy was to reconfigure the rationalist tradition in such a way as to circumvent the problem of induction while preserving the rationalist commitment to reason, rational debate, and objective knowledge. Popper's reconfiguration of the epistemological bases of the rationalist tradition challenged dominant understandings of rationalist and analytic philosophy, and may be appropriately understood as part of a wider move among philosophers like Quine and Putnam to challenge conventional understandings of analytic philosophy, and of what philosophy itself could and could not achieve. It also informed a vision of social and political life (and of the social and political sciences) as rooted in principles of freedom, equality, and rational debate, but which cannot be fit within the traditional ideological landscape.     

Ferdinand Tönnies and Enlightenment: A Friend or Foe of Reason?

Ferdinand Tönnies, the founder of sociology, has been characterised as contributing to the “destruction of reason,” although he viewed himself as a champion of Enlightenment with a social vocation. Here, we shall consider Tönnies’s discussion of the epistemological bases of what he called “rationalism”: his theory of the state, based on the rationalism of Hobbes, and of society, based on the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith and Hume; his implicit development of rationalist ethics and the positions he took on Spinoza and Kant; and the relationship between his philosophy of history and that of his philosophical forebear, Adam Ferguson, who wrote in the age of bourgeois emancipation that marked the high Enlightenment. We shall conclude with reflections on the grounds on which Tönnies has been read as an opponent to rationalism and even as a foe of Enlightenment.     

Benjamin Constant and the politics of reason

This paper makes a claim about Constant’s intellectual sources in order to throw additional light on the nature of his liberalism. It assesses Constant’s views against the background of a tradition of political rationalism. Constant both criticized and inherited that tradition. This paper shows how this process of critical re-appropriation occurred principally with two figures that had a particular significance for Constant: the very Francophile William Godwin and Nicolas de Condorcet. Constant resisted these authors’ desire to replace a consent-based decision-making model by a truth-based decision-making model, and condemned their tendency to enrol individual judgment at the service of a politics of truth. At the same time, Constant did not renounce completely to their dream of bringing certainty into politics. As this double-move shows, it is not clear to what extent Constant succeeded in distancing himself from this tradition of political rationalism in order to establish what I call a rationalist liberalism. This problematic intellectual lineage not only challenges received interpretations of Constant’s liberalism either in terms of ‘scepticism’ or ‘pluralism.’ It should also invite us to reconsider the widespread idea according to which the French liberal tradition had a common and exclusive source in Montesquieu.     

The Positivism Dispute in German Sociology, 1954–1970

This article offers a re-contextualization of the Positivism Dispute between the Frankfurt School and advocates of empirical sociology in the German sociological profession between 1954 and 1970. Investigating the reasons why the German Sociological Association convened in Tübingen in October 1961, it assigns a more peripheral role to Karl Popper and this now famous seminar. Focusing instead on the debate among German sociologists from the mid-1950s which prompted the convention of the seminar and the invitation for Popper to speak, the article maintains that philosophy of history was the central concern of the Positivism Dispute. In this debate, members of the Frankfurt School emphasized contingency in history and society, while sociologists such as René König, Helmut Schelsky, Ralf Dahrendorf, and Arnold Gehlen advocated sociology as the empirical study of ‘given’ social facts. By doing so the article questions the narrative of the Positivism Dispute advanced by Karl Popper and some of his followers, as well as interpretations which have focused on debates during the aftermath of the Tübingen seminar in the 1960s.     

The beginning of ideology: Consciousness and society in the French reformation

David Lewis presented Convention as an alternative to the conventionalism characteristic of early-twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Rudolf Carnap is well known for suggesting the arbitrariness of any particular linguistic convention for engaging in scientific inquiry. Analytic truths are self-consistent, and are not checked against empirical facts to ascertain their veracity. In keeping with the logical positivists before him, Lewis concludes that linguistic communication is conventional. However, despite his firm allegiance to conventions underlying not just languages but also social customs, he pioneered the view that convening need not require any active agreement to participate. Lewis proposed that conventions arise from “an exchange of manifestations of a propensity to conform to a regularity” (87–8).

In reasserting the conventional quality of languages and other practices resting on mutual expectations, Lewis comfortably works within the analytic tradition. Yet he also deviates from his predecessors because his conventionalist approach is comprehensively grounded in instrumentalism. Lewis adopts an extension of David Hume's desire-belief psychology articulated in rational choice theory. He develops his philosophy of convention relying on the highly formal mid-twentieth-century expected utility and game theories. This attempt to account for language and social customs wholly in terms of instrumental rationality has the implication of reducing normativity to preference satisfaction. Lewis’ approach continues in the trend of undermining normative political philosophy because institutions and practices arise spontaneously, without the deliberate involvement of agents. Perhaps Lewis’ Convention is best seen as a resurgent form of analytic philosophy, characterized by “a style of argument, hostility to [ambitious] metaphysics, focus on language, and the dominance of logic and formalization” that solves the dilemma of “combining the analytic inheritance…with normative concerns” by reducing normativity to individuals’ preference fulfillment consistent with the axioms of rational choice.     

Normativity and Instrumentalism in David Lewis’ Convention

David Lewis presented Convention as an alternative to the conventionalism characteristic of early-twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Rudolf Carnap is well known for suggesting the arbitrariness of any particular linguistic convention for engaging in scientific inquiry. Analytic truths are self-consistent, and are not checked against empirical facts to ascertain their veracity. In keeping with the logical positivists before him, Lewis concludes that linguistic communication is conventional. However, despite his firm allegiance to conventions underlying not just languages but also social customs, he pioneered the view that convening need not require any active agreement to participate. Lewis proposed that conventions arise from “an exchange of manifestations of a propensity to conform to a regularity” (87–8).In reasserting the conventional quality of languages and other practices resting on mutual expectations, Lewis comfortably works within the analytic tradition. Yet he also deviates from his predecessors because his conventionalist approach is comprehensively grounded in instrumentalism. Lewis adopts an extension of David Hume's desire-belief psychology articulated in rational choice theory. He develops his philosophy of convention relying on the highly formal mid-twentieth-century expected utility and game theories. This attempt to account for language and social customs wholly in terms of instrumental rationality has the implication of reducing normativity to preference satisfaction. Lewis’ approach continues in the trend of undermining normative political philosophy because institutions and practices arise spontaneously, without the deliberate involvement of agents. Perhaps Lewis’ Convention is best seen as a resurgent form of analytic philosophy, characterized by “a style of argument, hostility to [ambitious] metaphysics, focus on language, and the dominance of logic and formalization” that solves the dilemma of “combining the analytic inheritance…with normative concerns” by reducing normativity to individuals’ preference fulfillment consistent with the axioms of rational choice.     

Continuity,chance, and change: The character of the industrial revolution in England

This article examines the life and works of Robert Blakey, author of the first English-language history of political thought. Studies of Blakey have typically concentrated on one aspect of his life, whether as an authority on field sports or as an historian of philosophy. However, some of Blakey’s lesser-known ventures, particularly his early Radical politics, his hagiographies, and his attempts to write a biography of Charlemagne, heavily influenced his more famous works. Similarly, Blakey’s upbringing in a Calvinist tradition, rooted in the Scottish School of Common Sense philosophy helps makes sense of his philosophical and theological commitments, yet has been largely ignored. This article provides a sketch of Blakey’s life, tying these disparate strands together, and explaining their influence upon, and relevance to, the first history of political philosophy.     

Rational economics and the public sphere: An essay in retrieval

This article considers the current debate about economic rationalism in Australia which has in large part been generated by the work of Michael Pusey. It draws on contemporary political philosophy and argues for a more encompassing approach. It argues, first, the merits of preferring discourses of prudent deliberation over discourses of rationality; second, it criticises Pusey's grounding in the thought of Habermas; third, it considers the relevance of contemporary reassessments of Machiavelli's thought; and fourth, it concludes that wise government requires a public space for lively and prudent deliberation of many policy alternatives for dealing with the endless contingencies of political life.     

Selected writings on Philosophy,Religion and Politics

Benedetto Croce was the author of the most important and original theory of history in the 20th century. His theory was that of ‘absolute historicism’, and this necessarily entailed an acute critique of inherited ideas about the Enlightenment. This article studies both Croce's theoretical analysis of Enlightenment and his historical analysis of the Neapolitan Enlightenment. Croce's interest in the Enlightenment had political as well as philosophical roots. All over Europe in the 1920s and 1930s historical and theoretical research was occurring into in the Age of Enlightenment. The broad goal of such research was to bring forth a new concept of reason, which would have purchase in the contemporary debate about rationalism and irrationalism. This debate, which flourished in the era of totalitarian regimes, raised a series of further questions: What was culture? What was the task of culture in the fight against political irrationalism? What was the relationship between culture and the growth of public opinion? With respect to the latter relationship an important role was played by intellectuals, as evinced by the works of Benda, Max Weber and Croce himself. The genealogy of the modern intelligentsia led again to Enlightenment. In the third part of the article Croce's position on this issue is discussed in the light of his historical researches on Enlightenment by reference to his correspondence with two young historians, Delio Cantimori and Franco Venturi.     

Rethinking the Political Thought of James Harrington: Royalism,Republicanism and Democracy

Traditional accounts of seventeenth-century English republicanism have usually presented it as inherently anti-monarchical and anti-democratic. This article seeks to challenge and complicate this picture by exploring James Harrington's views on royalism, republicanism and democracy. Building on recent assertions about Harrington's distinctiveness as a republican thinker, the article suggests that the focus on Harrington's republicanism has served to obscure the subtlety and complexity of his moral and political philosophy. Focusing on the year 1659, and the pamphlet war that Harrington and his supporters waged against their fellow republicans, it seeks to re-emphasise important but neglected elements of Harrington's thought. It suggests that the depth and extent of Harrington's sympathy with royalists and royalism has been underplayed, while too little attention has been paid to the fundamental differences between his ideas and those adopted by other republican thinkers at the time. In addition it brings to light, for the first time, Harrington's innovative endorsement of both the term and the concept of ‘democracy’ and draws attention to his intellectual and personal affinities with the Levellers. Finally it outlines some implications of these findings for understandings of English republicanism and the republican tradition more generally.     

The political logic of discourse: a neo-Gramscian view

This article contrasts Mark Bevir's approach to the history of ideas with a neo-Gramscian theory of discourse. Bevir puts the case for an ‘anti-foundationalist’ approach to understanding ideas, yet he defends a weak rationalism centred on individual intentions as the original source of all meanings. Discourse theorists—specifically Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe—also adopt an anti-foundationalist perspective but pursue its implications beyond any rationalism. The advantages of discourse theory are argued to lie in its emphasis on power and conflict in the consitution and transformation of social meanings and identity. Laclau and Mouffe's work, it is claimed, alerts us to a political logic of discourse that Bevir's more rationalist approach to ‘ideas’ sidesteps.     

The political logic of discourse: a neo-Gramscian view

This article contrasts Mark Bevir's approach to the history of ideas with a neo-Gramscian theory of discourse. Bevir puts the case for an ‘anti-foundationalist’ approach to understanding ideas, yet he defends a weak rationalism centred on individual intentions as the original source of all meanings. Discourse theorists—specifically Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe—also adopt an anti-foundationalist perspective but pursue its implications beyond any rationalism. The advantages of discourse theory are argued to lie in its emphasis on power and conflict in the consitution and transformation of social meanings and identity. Laclau and Mouffe's work, it is claimed, alerts us to a political logic of discourse that Bevir's more rationalist approach to ‘ideas’ sidesteps.     

20世纪西方分析或批判的历史哲学

分析或批判的历史哲学的兴起,一方面批判了思辨的历史哲学,另一方面将历史哲学研究的重点从解释历史的性质转移到解释历史知识的性质上来。这极大地推进了史学理论的发展,也为历史学确立了更为稳固的根基。德国历史哲学家狄尔泰、文德尔班、李凯尔特继承德国历史主义传统,从文化科学与自然科学相异的角度来分析历史知识的性质;克罗齐、柯林武德也遵循了这个传统。分析学派罗素、波普尔、亨佩尔等人,则从语言逻辑的角度来分析理解历史的方式和历史知识的可能性。这两个方向共同构成了20世纪西方历史哲学的主流,进一步深化了人们对自我的认识。     

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.     

Rousseau,Pufendorf and the eighteenth-century natural law tradition

The relationship between the political theory of Rousseau and modern natural law continues to be the subject of debate, both with regard to Rousseau's faithfulness to the idea of natural law itself and regarding the precise extent of the debt he owed to his predecessors. In this article the author re-examines this relationship by focusing attention on what has been defined as the protestant tradition of natural law. In particular she concentrates on the political and theoretical exercise that Jean Barbeyrac had sought to perform by constructing a particular version of this tradition, namely that of using the science of natural law to promote a policy of tolerance between protestants and to justify the right of citizens to resist catholic sovereigns who denied them religious freedom, as well as the right of protestant countries to come to the aid of persecuted fellow believers. The thesis asserts that Rousseau was fully aware of this exercise, just as he was aware that some of Barbeyrac's ideas had been adopted and reworked by another illustrious Genevan, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, a member of the Small Council, to support anti-populist and antidemocratic politics in Geneva. Viewed in this way it is possible to perceive in Rousseau's political thought not so much a “first crisis” of natural law as an intention to reformulate this science from a republican perspective in order to derive rigorous principles of political law from it. And in developing his republican political theory Rousseau took up and overturned the analysis of democratic sovereignty carried out by Pufendorf, who in opposing the “pro-monarchist” excesses of authors such as Hobbes and Horn had unhesitatingly demonstrated the complete validity of democratic sovereignty.     

The evolution of international political economy

The 'invisible college' of international political economy (IPE) is a house divided. The field is split between the rationalist species that dominates in the US and a diverse genus of critical scholars. Recent developments in IPE suggest, however, that there is scope to rebuild the invisible college. An increasing awareness of normative questions should make rationalist scholars more receptive to critical work, while critical scholars are discovering an independent identity as they reinvent themselves in the tradition of classical political economy. There is much to gain from a renewed exchange between rationalist and critical scholars, particularly in the context of empirical work, as demonstrated by the vivid politics of the global bioeconomy.     

The post-analytic roots of humanist liberalism

Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire's early engagements with logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy are examined as historical and philosophical reference points for locating an alternative – interpretive and humanist – tradition that developed within analytic philosophy at Oxford in the 20^th C. Berlin and Hampshire's writings show the legacy of an enduring Idealist philosophy, one that nonetheless had to be revised and reinvented against the new empiricist challenges brought on by the rise of analytic philosophy. Berlin and Hampshire rejected idealism's metaphysical pretensions of the Absolute in favor of the new empiricism's insistence on grounding philosophy in experience, but staunchly opposed applying the latter's narrowly ‘scientistic’ view of knowledge to human experience, re-affirming the indivisible connections between epistemological issues and moral and political issues. The idealist themes they expounded are most clearly evident in their arguments for an interpretive philosophy in opposition to the reductivist tendencies of logical positivism, and in their defense of humanist liberalism against the drive of analysis toward naturalism where inquiry into human life is concerned. Such themes include: (i) an anti-naturalist, vitalist, philosophy of human sciences, (ii) an insistence on the intrinsic force and importance of human values against moral relativism, and (iii) the recognition of the political significance of the plurality of human values. As such, Berlin and Hampshire reveal the strong interpretive and humanist ways of reasoning from within the analytic tradition itself. Moreover, these interpretive and humanist themes continue to have strong echoes, this paper argues, in the development of post-analytic political theory in the latter half of the 20^th century through today, as further evinced in the ideas of Bernard Williams (1929–2003) and Charles Taylor (b. 1931). By calling attention to such continuities, this paper reveals how moral and political philosophy in the Anglophone world lay not moribund but continued to develop in the heyday of analytic philosophy from the late ‘30s to the ‘50s and onward, thereby challenging the commonplace of the ‘death’ of normative political theorizing until Rawls reinvigorated it in the ‘70s.     

Michael Oakeshott’s Skepticism

In the debate about Michael Oakeshott’s philosophy there is very little agreement on the theoretical and historical meaning of his skepticism. Starting from the assumption that skepticism is not a fixed theory but a tradition of ideas, this article draws on both published texts and archival materials to contend that Oakeshott developed his thought by confronting himself with, and even merging, different strands of skepticism: the ancient, the modern, as represented by Hobbes and Montaigne, and the idealist, as conceived by F. H. Bradley. The article firstly shows Oakeshott’s awareness of ancient skepticism, even though its impact on his thought is contested and controversial. With regard to modern skepticism, it looks at how Oakeshott defines Hobbes’s skepticism in his “Introduction to Leviathan.” It also examines the relevance of Montaigne to Oakeshott’s image of conversation, his idea of human agency and conception of politics. Finally, the article illustrates the influence of Bradley’s skepticism on Oakeshott’s conception of philosophy and reveals the consistency between Oakeshott’s skepticism and idealism. What emerges is a complex picture, in which Oakeshott’s skepticism is a constellation of elements taken from a variety of sources.     

Schmitt and the Sovereignty of Roman Dictators: From the Actualisation of the Past to the Recycling of Symbols

The aim of this article is to analyse the complex roots of Carl Schmitt's theory on dictatorship in the classical world through the lens of classical receptions. It argues that Schmitt was deeply engaged with the classical tradition in formulating his theory on dictatorship. Knowingly or unknowingly, Schmitt legitimates his theory through a foundation in both the Roman idealisation of the virtuous dictators of the early Republic as well as the long tradition of the narrative of the enlightened sovereign as a guarantor of law, present in both Greek and Roman antiquity and in the subsequent European tradition. Schmitt skilfully repurposed the Roman historical tradition on dictators but glossed over the traditional antipathy of Roman republicanism towards sovereign rule. The claim that this article is presenting is that even though it has been overlooked by earlier scholars, Schmitt was both directly and indirectly influenced by the classical tradition of dictatorship and utilised their mythical and symbolic dimensions in the later Roman and the subsequent European legal and political traditions. The reason for this omission was that Schmitt, like his contemporaries, belonged to one of the last generations to be groomed in the classical tradition of literature.