读《西方政治思想史》札记

西方政治思想是世界政治明的宝库,它推动了人类对政治现象的认知与思维。中国越是开放,越需要了解世界,越需要吸收借鉴人类明的积极成果,越需要深入地、发展地去认识和理解那些斑驳陆离、变幻无穷的政治现象以及各种思想化的进步性与局限性,把握人类社会政治发展的规律,从而启迪我们的政治思维．结合国情,拓展思路,改革和完善自己的政治体制。     

History of Political Thought as Detective-Work

This paper offers practical guidance for empirical interpretation in the history of political thought, especially uncovering what authors meant and why they wrote what they wrote. I thus seek to fill a small but significant hole in our rather abstract methodological literature. To counter this abstraction, I draw not only on methodological theorising but also on actual practice—and on detective-work, a fruitful analogy. The detective analogy seeks to capture the intuition that we can potentially find right answers but must handle fragmentary evidence that different people can plausibly read in different ways. Placing the focus on evidence, and on combining different types of evidence, suggests that orthodox categories like ‘contextualist’ and ‘Marxist’ too often accentuate differences between scholars. This paper instead highlights core principles that unite us—ideas that underpin good textual interpretation across all ‘schools of thought’.     

The History of Political Thought as secular genealogy: the case of liberty in early modern England

ABSTRACT

The History of Political Thought originated in, and partially remains an adjunct to the academic study of politics. As such it is not a mere subject matter or authentic tradition of speculation, but a secularising genealogy in some tension with an impulse to rigorous historicity. It provides an under-acknowledged context for the thinkers and concepts placed within it. The difficulties and consequent distortions are illustrated with reference to seventeenth-century discussions of liberty. It is argued that notions of negative liberty and Republican liberty as an ideological alternative are secularising genealogical projections that distort the character of seventeenth-century debate; but that republican liberty can be reformulated in more historically plausible terms as a special case of one of the entailments of contentious office-holding in and beyond a secularised conception of the political. Thomas Hobbes's conceptions of liberty provide a concluding illustration.     

Hannah Arendt's Mythology: The Political Nature of History and Its Tales of Antiheroes

Current scholarship has focused on analyzing how Arendt's storytelling corresponds to her political arguments. In following up this discussion, I offer a closer examination of the unusual myth Arendt uses to explain the condition of the modern age, a myth she refers to as the “political nature of history.” I employ literary terms along with the standard vocabulary of political theory in shaping this reading of Arendt. Following Robert C. Pirro, I also consider Arendt's story as a tragedy, but in the broadest sense, that of a collision of two goods, freedom and security. By describing Arendt's thought in this manner, I hope to reveal another way in which Arendt represents the call to action that she believes so crucial to humanity, as a summons to we flawed antiheroes through the device of a heroic myth.     

Political History and Political Philosophy: Making Sense of the West

Abstract

The old Western synthesis, the coming together of self-government, the Christian proposition, modern equality, and the commitment to relieving man's estate, appears to be unraveling. In the European context, it is being replaced by a “pure democracy” that cannot do justice to the continuity of Western civilization. Rejecting the twin temptations of Progress and Decline, Pierre Manent recovers the perspective of the human agent. While the polis or classical city is no longer available to us, the self-government of free human beings remains at the heart of the Western enterprise. Manent shows that the Christian notion of conscience preserved the classical analogy between the soul and the political association and is at the hear of Western liberty. The West as a whole rests on the synthetic and mediating notion of conscience.     

Moral Injury as Inherent Political Critique: The Prophetic Possibilities of a New Term1

Moral injury is a term developed specifically to highlight the moral harm accrued by U.S. veterans during war, the salience of which seems to exceed the analytical range of terms such as “trauma.” Veterans can feel that they violated fundamental moral ideals, leaving some to feel they have lost the ability to be “good.” Moral injury as a term originally had an important political dimension, however, one that has been lost in a turn to a more clinical approach. I argue that the experience of moral injury can lend itself to potential, prophetic insights into the effects of one's culture on the wider world. Instead of seeing moral injury as a disorder in need of clinical treatment, it can be the basis of a religiously informed social ethic empowering veterans to engage the broader social conditions and policies that lead to war in the first place.     

The Political Thought of David Walsh: A Symposium

Abstract

David Walsh has published a trilogy of books on the ideological, political, and philosophical trajectories of modernity. He confronts the crisis of modernity and argues that modernity has the resources within itself to reestablish a collective commitment to the order of existence. This symposium offers four essays reflecting on and responding to Walsh's assessment of modernity and its prospects.     

俄国斯拉夫派的政治思想

斯拉夫派是 19世纪中期“俄国与西方”问题的历史性的大争论中 ,强调俄国历史道路的特殊性 ,与西方派对立的派别。斯拉夫派的主要代表人物有 :霍米雅科夫、基列耶夫斯基、阿克萨科夫兄弟和尤·萨马林等。作为倡导俄罗斯民族独特精神的思想体系 ,斯拉夫派思想———斯拉夫主义 ① 在俄罗斯思想发展的长河中占有独特而重要的地位。斯拉夫主义的哲学世界观的突出之处是以精神整体性反对西方唯理主义 ,以东正教的聚合性对抗西方的个人主义 ;斯拉夫主义的社会政治理想是保持村社和地方会议的君主制社会的和谐有机发展 ;斯拉夫主义的经济观点表现…     

Shifting Narratives: Modern Chinese History since the Economic Reform and a Critique of Popular Opinion

When discussing the trans-formative shifts having occurred in the field of Chinese modern history following the economic reforms, one cannot avoid mention of the “revolutionary history paradigm,” the “paradigm of modernization” as well as the “postmodern paradigm.” According to popular belief, the course of development taken by the academic world during the past forty years was marked by a series of transformations: First was the progressive replacement of the “revolutionary history paradigm” by that of the “paradigm of modernization”; following that was the rise of the “postmodern paradigm” and the challenging of its predecessor. This set of divisions, though logically clear and succinct, cannot possibly conform to the realities of history in all of its complexness. While academic circles in the 1980’s were largely concerned with the issues of “what exactly is the historical driving force of Marxism” and “who are the revolutionary class,” the notion of the “paradigm of modernization” was rather a product of the conservative historical viewpoint and its rise during the late 1990’s. In this sense, then, the latter cannot possibly embody the former. On the surface of things, though the “postmodern paradigm” appears to refuse the narrative of revolutionary history, it in fact shares deeper connections with Chinese revolutionary thought at its roots. In short, then, these trans-formative shifts in modern Chinese history are not a simple “exchange” whereby one paradigm transfers into the next, but are rather a process of incessant and interconnected change.