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.     

Augustine's Ciceronian Response to the Ciceronian Patriot

This article argues that in the City of God Augustine takes up Cicero's project of cultivating good citizens through philosophy and rhetoric. He addresses the same audience, the dedicated citizen, with a new teaching, echoing the Ciceronian concern with Rome's moral decline and affirming the Ciceronian longing for justice, peace and true community. Yet, in teaching why neither Rome nor the Roman is better off when the citizen devotes himself completely to his earthly patria, Augustine challenges Cicero's construal of good citizenship. In this way, he offers dedicated citizens a new paradigm that remains true to Ciceronian concerns while surpassing the Ciceronian framework.     

Common good and private justice: letters of marque and the utilitas publica in fourteenth-century Marseilles

Political debate, even in medieval Europe, has often centred upon the relationship between individual liberties and the greater good. Fourteenth-century town councils had to think about protecting private property while ensuring the greater public good. The council registers of late medieval Marseilles offer the opportunity for insight into this public–private dichotomy through an examination of the council's decisions to suspend temporarily the execution of letters of marque. In fourteenth-century Marseilles, letters of marque helped citizens gain restitution from foreign debtors through a judicial authorisation to seize foreign assets. The suspensions, justified in the language of the utilitas publica, were declared for two reasons: to protect the integrity of the town's market by ensuring an ample supply of labourers and victuals, and to protect the town's honourable reputation when dignitaries visited. Study of these suspensions illustrates an overarching philosophy in urban government – that the public good must be safeguarded against private advantage.     

Placing Plato in the history of liberty

ABSTRACT

This paper explores and reevaluates the place of Plato in the history of liberty. In the first half, reevaluating the view that he invents a concept of ‘positive liberty’ in the Republic, I argue for two claims: (1) that he does not do so, insofar as this is not the way that virtuous psychological self-mastery in the Republic is understood, and (2) that the Republic works primarily with the inverse concept of slavery, relying on entrenched Greek ideas about the badness of the status of being a slave and the actions and dispositions associated with it. Turning in the second half to seek Platonic innovation not in the domain of ‘positive liberty’ but in reflection on liberty as a political value, understood as the liberty of action of citizens within the laws, I argue for two further claims: (3) that as such a political value, liberty is limited and reshaped in both the Republic and the Laws to be compatible with obedience to rule / willingness to be ruled, ideally willing obedience; and (4) that for this limited and reshaped value to be secured, such obedience must be manifested not only in regard to a constitution’s laws, but also to the magistrates who hold office within it.     

The Modern Revolution and the Collapse of Moral Analogy: Tocqueville and Guizot

Abstract

I locate the Leveller John Lilburne within the broader literature on the history of political thought and I challenge scholars who associate Lilburne's Leveller political thought with Hobbesian liberty, with proto-libertarianism, or with proto-bourgeois political thought. I advance an understanding of Lilburne as creatively merging central tenets of proto-liberalism with central tenets of republicanism. To develop this amalgamation of ideas, I go considerably beyond the Agreement of the People and the Putney Debates to explore the larger Leveller corpus. Through this investigation I articulate Lilburne's account of key concepts in the history of political thought including: liberty, tyranny, rights, rule, political participation, popular sovereignty, civic virtue, self-interest, harmony, antagonism, and institutional design. I conclude by arguing that we should consider the Levellers, particularly John Lilburne, as offering an early example of what has come to be called liberal-republican political thought, a way of theorizing found within the writings of English Commonwealthsmen.     

Theodorus Priscianus im lateinischen Oribasius

Recent readings of Fam. 12.16 have revealed that Trebonius' aim in writing to Cicero was the complicated result of anxieties over influence. I extend this complexity to Trebonius' citation of the satirist Lucilius and argue that Lucilius is mentioned for his literary status as well as libertas. Trebonius' satire was, in Lucilian vein, directed at the dead Julius Caesar, and Horace in turn refers obliquely in Satires 1.2 to Trebonius, and Cicero's literary representation of and connection with him.     

Collingwood's New Leviathan and classical elite theory

R. G. Collingwood's New Leviathan (1942) presents an account of two ‘dialectical’ political processes that are ongoing in any body politic. Existing scholarship has already covered the first: a dialectic between a ‘social’ and a ‘non-social’ element, which Collingwood identifies in Hobbes. This essay elucidates a second: a dialectic between Liberals and Conservatives, which regulates the ‘percolation’ of liberty and the rate of recruitment into what Collingwood calls ‘the ruling class’. The details of this second dialectic are to be found not in Hobbes, but in the work of Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, yet Collingwood's connections to these fathers of ‘classical elite theory’ have not previously been discussed.     

Republican patriotism and Machiavelli’s patriotism

The theories of republican patriotism, especially articulated by Maurizio Viroli, promote Machiavelli's patriotism as the archetype of patriotism without nationalism. The upshot is that in Machiavelli's republicanism, the ideal of liberty as non-domination cultivates moral obligations towards humanity. Rather than engaging in debates on the tension between republican liberty and republican imperialism in Machiavelli's writings, this article tackles this interpretation with textual evidences that shed light on Machiavelli's patriotism prone to the same problems as those Maurizio Viroli sees in nationalism. More specifically, I argue that Machiavelli's patriotic aspiration neglects the role of regulative principle in guarding patriotic loyalty from degenerating into collective selfishness.     

Citizens,Subjects or Tyrants? Relocating the People in Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment

SUMMARY

J.G.A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment played a pivotal role in inaugurating the important turn toward the classical republican tradition in the history of political thought. In this revival of republicanism, the people are primarily presented as integral to combining active political participation and military prowess in the context of a common defence of liberty against foreign and domestic tyranny. In this essay we wish to revisit the role of the people in Pocock's interpretation of Machiavelli's republican thought. In doing so, we wish to bring Pocock's contentions relative to the governo popolare one step further by introducing and analysing Machiavelli's expositions of popular behaviour in the context of the Florentine Histories. Contrary to Pocock's assumptions, the Florentine Histories shows how Machiavelli became substantively more critical of the people as a sound political agent. We demonstrate this by reconstructing important shifts in the presentation of the people apparent in this later work, suggesting a number of important elaborations to Machiavelli's understanding of both the people and citizenship.     

Accounts of early Christian history in the thought of François Guizot,Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël 1800–c.1833

This article compares different historical accounts of early Christianity written by François Guizot, Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël and shows that they played a significant role in the construction of their ideas about religious tolerance and political liberty in ancient and modern states. In his 1812 translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Guizot used his editorial footnotes to oppose Gibbon’s sceptical representation of the early Church and to assert that the development of Christianity had been crucial in condemning slavery, establishing religious toleration and fostering individual liberty. Benjamin Constant also opposed Gibbon’s representation of early Church history but he argued in his posthumously published Du polythéisme romain (1833) that the key achievement of the early Christians had been to revive the idea of individual religious sentiment against the anti-individualist Roman state. As Guizot developed his historical research in the 1820s he rejected this view and came to see the early Christians as demonstrating the inherently social nature of all religious practice. Some of these ideas were anticipated by Madame de Staël in De la littérature (1800), but all three thinkers sought to reintegrate religion into their ideas of modern liberty in ways that merit greater attention.     

Herbert Vere Evatt and British Justice: The Communist Party Referendum of 1951

Abstract

Through his role in the early United Nations, Herbert Vere Evatt is often credited with having advanced the cause of international human rights. But in 1951, Evatt articulated an alternative understanding of the roots of liberty, one centred on the role of British justice in checking ‘tyranny’ and ‘totalitarianism’. This neo-Roman conception of freedom had long competed in Evatt's thought with a belief in the need for an unfettered executive to achieve desirable social and economic goals. Although inconsistent in defence of liberty across his career, Evatt succeeded in this campaign because his case harmonised with contemporary understandings of freedom and its enemies in a post-war British-Australian community.     

Remarques sur l'emploi de l'ablatif et du génitif de qualité chez Tacite

Suetonius' Life of Augustus 52 emphasises Augustus' restraint with regard to divine honours and may have been written with the intention of contradicting Tacitus (Annales 1.10). Suetonius' statement that it was common for temples to be offered to proconsuls in the Republican period is not supported by the archaeological and epigraphical evidence. Two passages from Cicero's letters (ad Q.Fr. 1.1.26; ad Att. 5.21.7) have been seen as supporting evidence. They do not, however, necessarily provide evidence for the existence of temples to proconsuls, although it is possible that they may have been the source for Suetonius' statement.     

Between political emancipation and creole hegemony: Viscardo’s Letter to the Spanish Americans (c. 1791)

Viscardo’s Letter to the Spanish Americans inaugurates a tradition of nonconformist political writing against Spanish colonial rule during the second half of the eighteenth century, a period characterized by the Crown’s attempt to reorganize several aspects of the colonial administration. As an ex-Jesuit living in exile after the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from all Spanish territories in 1767, Viscardo had a political as much as a personal motive in designing a project that would cut the colonial ties between Spain and the New World. His plans for emancipation included the instauration of a monarchical form of government, but his design was out of touch with reality and would have hardly been taken seriously by the inhabitants had a British-backed expeditionary force reached the coasts of Chile and Peru, as he had planned. While Viscardo’s Letter may have stirred a sense of creole patriotism some years after his death, the political scruples of the ancien regime based on social privileges and racial distinctions were too strong to be dismantled by mere ideals of freedom, justice and equality. Thus, effective political participation was restricted to the creole elite, whom Viscardo saw as the legitimate guarantor of social order and economic prosperity.     

The Queen and the City: Royal Female Intervention and Patronage in Hellenistic Civic Communities

In 196 bce , Queen Laodike III issued a decree (I.Iasos 4, I) to Iasos in Caria, Asia Minor, announcing that she was giving the Iasians a ten‐year supply of grain to alleviate their penury after her husband's conquest of their city, and she specified that the grain ought to be sold and the income used to provide dowries for the daughters of poor citizens. This and other donations were part of rebuilding efforts in the wake of military violence by Laodike's husband Antiochos III. For her beneficence, Laodike was honoured by cities with foundations of festivals, priestesses and sacred areas dedicated to preserving her cult. This reciprocity of goodwill was gendered, not only in the establishment of priestesses, but in the nature of the honours given; for example Iasos celebrated Laodike III's birthday with a procession of a maiden priestess and couples who were about to wed (I.Iasos 4, II), and the people of Teos dedicated a fountain in their city centre to Laodike and required that all brides should draw from it the water for their baths (SEG 41, 1003). Laodike's patronage and the cities’ responses to her bring to light the role of female citizens within the structures, perpetuation and ceremonial of the civic body. At the heart of honours given Laodike and her own self‐promotion was the identity of sister and mother, roles shaping her own queenship and the civic participation and power of the women she assisted.     

The Declaration of Independence: A Global History

Twenty years after the publication of John MacKenzie's Empire of Nature, his characterisation of sport hunting tourism as a symbol of elite and imperial privilege remains strong. Using the example of two white hunters from New Zealand and their trip to Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in 1926, this article elaborates upon MacKenzie's brief mention of hunters in Africa from cultures other than Britain. In particular, the article argues that ‘home’ hunting cultures—in this case of New Zealand—need to be considered thoroughly when examining meanings of hunting tourism, and, second, that hunting trips could serve a range of purposes beyond the notion of reinforcing colonial rule.     

A. V. Dicey and English constitutionalism

The jurist A. V. Dicey’s study of the Law of the Constitution (1885) has been since its publication the dominant analysis of the British constitution and the source of orthodoxy on such subjects as parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law. This canonical status has obscured the originality of Dicey’s ideas in the history of legal and political thought. Dicey reworked the traditional idea of sovereignty into two separate concepts – legal and political sovereignty – in order to square the common law notion of the sovereignty of parliament with the democratic idea of the sovereignty of the people. He forged a new concept – ‘the rule of law’ – to explain the legal basis of liberty in common law countries in a manner that was both Benthamite and constitutionalist. Finally, he provided a democratic and anti-federalist rationale for maintaining the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. This majoritarian, centralist and utilitarian constitutionalism has been one of the most enduring products of Victorian scholarship. This article seeks to recover it in its original context and, in so doing, to show the value of reintegrating legal thought into the mainstream of modern British history and the history of political thought.     

Al-Fārābī’s Cave: Aristotle’s Logic and the Ways of Socrates and Thrasymachus

In his commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric al-Fārābī harmonizes Plato and Aristotle in terms of philosophic education by ordering Aristotle’s eight logical works onto Plato’s famous image of the cave. He represents the way out of the cave with Aristotle’s four logical works of ascent (Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, and Posterior Analytics) and the return into the cave through Aristotle’s four logical works of the descent (Topics, Sophistical Refutations, Rhetoric, and Poetics). Al-Fārābī’s image of ascent and descent also alludes to Socrates’ conception of protreptic education in Book VII of the Republic. In essence, protreptic education consists in the Socratic art that freely turns the soul from the images and political interpretations of things to being itself. In this essay I argue that for al-Fārābī the four logical works of ascent guide the soul to free itself from its habituations so as to contemplate real beings, particularly the good of one’s own soul and the souls of one’s fellow citizens. Yet the ruler needs to use the arts of “descent,” as demonstrated by Thrasymachus, in order to rule the city well. The way of Socrates consists of the logical methods used to come to possess knowledge of being, while the way of Thrasymachus comprises the methods of persuasion to habituate citizens and protect the philosophic quest for the truth. Al-Fārābī, I conclude, combines the way of Socrates and the way of Thrasymachus in order to show that both ways are useful and necessary for good governance.     

Building the New Cultural Finland: the student magazine Ylioppilaslehti,the public sphere and the creation of the Finnish cultural elite in the post-war era

The Finnish student magazine Ylioppilaslehti has been an important publication in the Finnish public sphere. This article studies the role of Ylioppilaslehti in creating the Finnish public sphere in the post-war decades. On the one hand, this was a period in which the political position of Finland was unstable, but, on the other, the students experienced ‘a hunger for culture’. The article is also interested in what role Ylioppilaslehti played in creating the Finnish elite. The magazine is an institution, which has been an arena for the Finnish cultural and political elite throughout the 20th century, and the 1950s was a particularly significant period for its participation in the Finnish process of social construction.     

Gender and Sexuality in Latina/o Miami: Documenting Latina Transsexual Activists

This article examines the borderlands between transgender MTF (male‐to‐female) and gay male communities in Latina/o Miami through an analysis of the participation of Latinas in the Transsexual Action Organization (TAO). Previous research suggests that Cuban and Cuban American gay male culture have historically been associated with gender transgressive behaviour and identity. Because of this, it is often unclear how to distinguish between what is gay male/homosexual expression and transgender expression. If outward gender manifestations that we now call ‘transgender’ were understood in other historical and cultural contexts as ‘homosexual’, how do we label those manifestations today? By labelling them as homosexual are we simply reinscribing the marginalisation of transgender individuals? On the other hand, by labelling them as transgender are we imposing a contemporary category and therefore performing another kind of intellectual violence? In order to address these questions, I analyse a Latino/a organisation that explicitly labelled itself ‘transsexual’. TAO was an early transsexual rights organisation founded in 1970 by Angela Douglas in Los Angeles which moved to Miami Beach, Florida in 1972. Drawing on the organisation's publications, Moonshadow and Mirage Magazine (1972–75), and Douglas's self‐published autobiographical texts, Triple Jeopardy: The Autobiography of Angela Lynn Douglas (1983) and Hollywood's Obsession (1992), I analyse the rarely discussed participation of Latinas in the organisation.