Free and Happy Bonds: Loving v. Virginia's Nineteenth-Century Precedent on Marriage and the Pursuit of Happiness

Loving v. Virginia declares that marriage contributes to the pursuit of happiness. It supports this claim by citing 19^th century precedent, precedent which itself drew upon a longstanding view of marriage and happiness's pursuit. This article examines that view in state and federal opinions from the decades surrounding 14^th Amendment ratification. The courts saw marriage as fulfilling the human need for community, thereby aiding in the private happiness of those marrying and the public happiness of the political society. Marriage supported private happiness by forming a bond that provided for physical, material, and emotional needs. Courts sought to aid these goals while also protecting spouses' rights. Marriage supported public happiness through creating and educating future citizens as well as cultivating virtuous habits among those married—goals which the courts also sought to protect. The article concludes by discussing the continuity and discontinuity between these 19^th century cases, Loving, and Obergefell.     

Raumvorstellungen und Erkenntnismodelle im 18. Jahrhundert

Since the late 17^th century, two physical concepts of space exist. Isaac Newton's theory of an immovable ‘absolute space’ made it possible to explain motion and force by the quality of material elements. Less influential was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's concept of space as an ‘order of coexistence’, which focuses, contrary to Newton, on the relationship between material bodies. The author argues that both concepts not only concern physical notions, but also include general models to explain cause, effect and relation. In an analogy to Newton's ‘absolute space’, theories of natural law employ the state of nature to explain society according to the anthropological quality of human beings. Leibniz's concept, in contrast, is used to elaborate theories of complex dynamic interactions and relationships. This essay attempts to illustrate the application of Leibniz's concept with examples of 18^th century natural history, demography, economic theory and Charles Bonnet's natural law.     

The great war and the British people

The “Adam Smith Problem” is the name given to an argument that arose among German scholars during the second half of the nineteenth century concerning the compatibility of the conceptions of human nature advanced in, respectively, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and his Wealth of Nations (1776). During the twentieth century these arguments were forgotten but the problem lived on, the consensus now being that there is no such incompatibility, and therefore no problem. Rather than rehearse the arguments for and against compatibility and incompatibility, this paper returns to the German writers of the 1850s–1890s and demonstrates that their engagement in this argument represents the foundation of modern Smith scholarship. It is shown that the “problem” was not simply a mistake best forgotten, but the first sustained scholarly effort to understand the importance of Smith's work, an effort that lacked any parallel in English commentary of the time. By the 1890s British writers, overwhelmingly ignorant of German commentary, assumed that there was little more to be said about Smith's work. Belated international familiarity with this German “Problem” played a major role in transforming Smith from a simple partisan of free trade into a theorist of commercial society and human action.     

Spiritedness,Reason, and the Founding of Law and Order: John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Abstract

John Ford's 1962 classic Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, analyzes the difficulties inherent in founding a new political order based on the rule of law. Some critics have concluded that the film mordantly portrays the closing of the frontier, the tragic loss of the rugged individualism it promoted (represented by Tom Doniphon), and the ascendance in its place of a fraudulent political class (represented by Ransom Stoddard), while exposing that even free societies are founded on crime. Yet, as others have argued, Doniphon also represents the spirited part of the Platonic tripartite soul, revealing spiritedness's ambiguous relation to justice: he refuses to fight unless personally threatened; perpetuates servitude, if not slavery; and shows no interest in promoting equality of women. Doniphon stands in opposition to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, pointedly recited at the film's chronological center, and his eclipse by Stoddard is not a tragic mistake. In addition, John Locke's state of nature teaching unlocks why Valance's death is not a crime that sullies the foundations of the society. Finally, the legend told as fact at the film's conclusion combines both men into a single entity, “the man who shot Liberty Valance,” thereby propagating a salutary lesson for future citizens: reason must combine with and rule over spiritedness if law and order are to prevail.     

Slingsby Bethel's Analysis of State Interests

Summary

Seventeenth-century thinking on the relationship between trade and state power was routinely conducted using the concept of state interests, which enabled users to conceive a Europe of competing states that managed the balance of power through trade and war. Poor interest management could arise from ignorance, error, or the divergence between the private interests of rulers and a state's true interests. The stakes of pursuing or neglecting true interest were high: the survival and prosperity of the state. The dominance of ‘mercantilism’ as a historiographical category has obscured the role of interest in early modern thought. This paper examines the work of one of England's most prolific interest writers, Slingsby Bethel, to demonstrate the importance of reading interest writings without recourse to mercantilism. The two focuses are, first, how the rhetoric of counsel was used to defend an ordinary subject's presumption to comment on state affairs and, second, the capacity for interest writers to construe the rise and fall of state power in terms of good laws and statesmanship.     

Correcting Europe's political economy: The virtuous eclecticism of Georg Ludwig Schmid

The article provides an analysis of Georg Ludwig Schmid's ‘Reflexions sur l’Agriculture’, which was published as the first essay in the first issue of the publications of the Oeconomical Society of Berne, founded in 1759. Schmid connected the agricultural improvement movement of the time to the logic of international power competition that caused the 7 Years’ War and wished to preserve political economy as agronomy for the cause of peace and virtuous economic progress. In his essay on commerce and luxury, he devised a patriotic political economy based on the notion of a marche naturelle, or a natural progress of opulence, which enabled statesmen and political economists to separate the productive from the pathological features of economic development, healthy and necessary growth from luxury. Adam Smith deployed a similar model in the Wealth of Nations but argued that Europe's retrograde development was so fundamental and comprehensive that it made it impossible to use this kind of natural progress model on its own as a meaningful guide for comprehensive economic and political reform.     

Sentiment,Sensation and Sensibility: Adam Smith,Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis and Wilhelm von Humboldt

Summary

This article focuses on the analysis of sensibility in the works of three major late eighteenth-century philosophers: Smith, Cabanis and the young Wilhelm von Humboldt. It analyses to what extent Smith's concept of sympathy influenced Cabanis in France and Humboldt in Germany. It argues that modern anthropology, based on a specific theory of sensibility, assumes a strong connection between knowledge acquisition and life in society. This article reveals the strong links between the three authors which were made possible precisely because of their common philosophical background. It proves, for the first time, that Humboldt had access to Condillac's ideas before 1798, since in an early work on the state, the former makes numerous borrowings from speeches Cabanis wrote for Mirabeau, which were in turn strongly influenced by Condillac.     

Challenging New State Spatialities: The Open Marxism of Henri Lefebvre

Abstract: It is possible to identify a subterranean tradition within Marxism—one in which dialectical thought is harnessed not only to expose the necessarily exploitative and inherently crisis‐prone character of capitalism as an actual system of social organisation, but also to critique the very categories that constitute capitalism as a conceptual system. This paper argues that Henri Lefebvre's work can be included within this tradition of “open Marxism”. In demonstrating how Lefebvre's work on everyday life, the production of space and the state derives from his open approach, the paper flags a potential problem of antinomy in an emergent new state spatialities literature that draws upon Lefebvre to supplement its structuralist–regulationist (“closed”) Marxist foundations. A Lefebvre‐inspired challenge is therefore established: that is, to develop a critique of space which does not substitute an open theory of the space of political economy with a closed theory of the political economy of the regulation of space.     

四、五世纪东亚世界的形成与东晋南朝——以中国史料为中心

Adopting the historical periodization and the “ethnic awakening” theory of Konan Naito, this essay discusses the early formation of East Asian states such as Koguryō, Paekche, Silla and Wa during the 4^th and 5^th centuries, as well as the political order within the East Asian society shaped by the enfeoffment of the Eastern Jin and the Southern dynasties by using Chinese sources. It argues that the cultural influences of the Qin and Han dynasties promoted the ethnic awakening of East Asian peoples, and during the turmoil periods of the Wei, the Jin, and the Division Era these ethnic groups leaped rapidly in their roads of state-formation. The enfeoffment system of the Eastern Jin played significant role in this process, and therefore set up the basic structure of the international relationship in early modern East Asia.     

Maistre studies

This article examines the excitement that Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments generated in France during the French Revolution, focusing particularly on the writings of political theorists, participants and commentators such as the abbé Sieyès, Pierre-Louis R?derer, the Marquis de Condorcet and Sophie de Grouchy Condorcet, who were dismayed at their political opponents’ use of Rousseau, and looked to Smith for an understanding of the passions that was compatible with democratic sovereignty and representative government. In the political context of the early 1790s, clarifying the concept of natural sociability, which Rousseau had rejected, but Smith and Helvétius, in different ways, each regarded as indispensible to a society dependent on advanced division of labour, became a central concern in the public lectures delivered by Pierre-Louis R?derer as the Terror took hold.     

Capitalism and the Fall of Market Morality: How Piketty,Sandel, and the Skidelskys Vindicate R. H. Tawney's Economic Ethic

This article reappraises the thought of the British economic historian, writer on political economy, Christian socialist, and great intellectual of the Labour Party, R. H. Tawney on market morality. It extracts and synthesizes moral insights from Tawney's two most influential books Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and Equality in order to present his economic ethic, its political implications, and Christian theological roots. Tawney's ethic, which holds that market morality, social ethics, and politics are inseparably linked, is then evaluated in the light of contemporary economists and philosophers, including Thomas Piketty, Michael Sandel, Robert and Edward Skidelsky, and Harry Frankfurt. Tawney's ideas are found to be insightful and useful, particularly in linking unrestrained capitalism with inequality, exploring capitalism's opposition to market morality, finding synergies between theological and secular humanist critiques of capitalism, and in addressing criticisms of the moral significance of equality itself.     

Vattel's theory of the international order: Commerce and the balance of power in the Law of Nations

Vattel's Law of Nations (1758) claimed that a system of independent states could maintain the liberty of each without undermining the ideal of an international society. The chief institution serving this purpose was the balance of power. In Vattel's account, the balance of power could be stabilized if it operated primarily through a process of commercial preferences and restrictions. These limits on how states ought to defend themselves were grounded in Vattel's thoroughly forgotten writings on the mid-eighteenth-century luxury debates, which addressed the political economy of reforming the state and pacifying the international order. An examination of Vattel's Law of Nations in this context shows that his approach to the law of nations should not be dismissed as a capitulation to the harsh reality of international politics.     

两种主张的较量与战后德国经济发展

战后德国经济是在左和右,即主张国家干预和自由经济,这两股社会和政治势力交互作用下发展起来的。前者主由社民党体现,后者由基民彤社民盟主张。最初这两股势力形成了有效互补,使得德国社会和经济进入高发展期,后来由于这两股势力彼此抗衡过度,失落了有效互补,社会体制失去活力,经济和社会进入发展低迷期。如今,德国经济一直挣扎在这样的发展困境中。     

Two AHA Sessions: The Revolutionary Mr. Kuhn and the Evolutionary Mr. Bertalanffy

Abstract

Quantitative methods of content analysis have become established in most subfields of political science, but remain relatively unutilized in studies of political theory, despite the exclusive focus of that subfield on textual sources. This article develops a variation of content analysis—termed usage analysis—and employs it to resolve a standing debate in scholarship on Cicero's political theory regarding the synonymy of the major Latin terms for the state (civitas and res publica). The resulting distinction between these concepts then informs an exposition of Cicero's ideal state not as the Roman Republic itself or the mixed constitution alone, but as a universal, everlasting political society supported by justice, a mixed constitution, and active citizenship.     

Land Reform in the Time of Neoliberalism: A Many‐Splendored Thing

Abstract: Over the past 20 years, land reform – defined here as the redistribution of land from large to small properties – has emerged as an important political issue in the Global South. Actors with widely differing ideological perspectives have claimed land reform as central to their political, social and economic platforms. In this paper, I compare reforms championed under the neoliberal auspices of the World Bank (the so‐called Market Led Agrarian Reforms) with those supported by popular grassroots actors such as the Movement of Landless Workers (the MST) in Brazil. I argue that although these two approaches to land reform are often considered antithetical to one another, they share a common theoretical foundation. Both are rooted in a labor theory of property that attributes the fruits of one's labor to the laborer. Where the two differ is in their interpretation of the “original sin” through which land and labor came to be misaligned: neoliberal actors see the state as the key source of land‐related inefficiency while popular grassroots actors identify the market as the key source. I analyze case material from northeastern Brazil and suggest that the institutionalization of the labor theory of property (across civil society, state and market in the region) has generated insecurities for new land reform beneficiaries who must protect their property rights with visible evidence of their productivity.     

Sovereign Power,Biopower, and the Reach of the West in an Age of Diaspora‐Centred Development

Why at this particular historical moment has there emerged a rousing interest in the potential contribution of diasporas to the development of migrant sending states and why is this diaspora turn so pervasive throughout the global South? The central premise of this paper is that the rapid ascent of diaspora‐centred development cannot be understood apart from historical developments in the West's approach to governing international spaces. Once predicated upon sovereign power, rule over distant others is increasingly coming to depend upon biopolitical projects which conspire to discipline and normalize the conduct of others at a distance so as to create self‐reliant and resilient market actors. We argue that an age of diaspora‐centred development has emerged as a consequence of this shift and is partly constitutive of it. We develop our argument with reference to Giorgio Agamben's “Homo Sacer” project and in particular the theological genealogy of Western political constructs he presents in his book The Kingdom and the Glory (2011). We provide for illustration profiles of three projects which have played a significant role in birthing and conditioning the current diaspora option: the World Bank's Knowledge for Development Programme (K4D); the US‐based International Diaspora Engagement Alliance (IdEA); and the EU/UN Joint Migration and Development Initiative Migration4Development project (JMDI‐M4D). Drawing upon economic theology, we make a case for construing these projects as elements of the West's emerging Oikonomia after the age of empire.     

A Review of “The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact,Theory, and Sign of Contradiction”

Abstract

Responding to Samuel Huntington's argument in Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, this article explores the problematic character of American national identity. While Huntington presents himself as trying to conserve a traditional American identity based on both political creed and Anglo-Protestant culture, I contend that America's founding political theory and its philosophic sources are ambiguous on the question of culture and national identity. The Declaration of Independence and the social contract theories that helped inform it seem to invite a kind of cosmopolitan commitment to a creedal identity while at the same time leaving open the possibility of a more exclusive cultural identity. In the end, this ambiguity works to undermine a public sense that the political order should try to conserve a particular culture, a tendency that is furthered by a democratic regime's natural inclinations toward universalism and egalitarianism. It seems, then, that the problem of the preservation of American cultural identity is rooted in the very culture that Huntington wishes to preserve.     

La ragion di Stato in biblioteca

The Fondazione Luigi Firpo, based in Turin, houses the library collected by Luigi Firpo (1915–1989), one of the most distinguished European historians of early modern political thought. The collection includes around 6 000 16^th, 17^th and 18^th century books, among which one can find almost all European literature on the reason of State. The Foundation organizes international conferences, grants scholarships and publishes the research of young scholars. Therefore it has established itself as one of the leading research centres on political thought and on early modern and modern history.     

Reconstructing an urban and regional political economy: on the state,politics, scale,and explanation

This paper begins from the premise that a number of now fashionable institutionally focused accounts of urban and regional political economy often begin at a point that is analytically flawed (or at least partial) in that the institutional ensembles themselves—whether analyzed as an urban `regime', regional `thickness' or a local `regulatory mode'—are automatically assumed to be a pre-given part of the explanation. However, the authors contend that for a deeper analysis of urban and regional political economy to be advanced, these institutions themselves need to be explained. In order to proceed with such an explanation three key factors require more serious consideration. These are: (1) the need to outline one's chosen research object of enquiry, and all that this entails in terms of research methodology, theory selection, and an uncovering of the `constitutive properties' of causation; (2) a greater readiness to analytically interrogate the relational interplay between economic development, political governance and scale; and (3) an obligation to pay due respect to the politics of representation and active processes of state restructuring and political strategizing through and around which economic development is itself constituted. In order to explore these themes, the authors draw, variously, on a methodological (re-) reading of the regulation approach, recent theoretical innovations on the `politics of scale', Jessop's state-theoretical writings and his recently developed neo-Gramscian methodology for analyzing urban economic governance, alongside Jenson's political sociological approach towards the `politics of representation'. Where appropriate, they explore, briefly, ways in which these theoretical themes may be deployed in empirical research, by considering certain restructurings in and of the political economy of Britain during recent decades.