The polis and the res publica: two Arendtian models of violence

The influence of the ancient Greek world on Hannah Arendt’s thought is well documented, yet her interest in the politics of the Roman Republic is often considered less central to her work. This paper explores Arendt’s analysis of both these political worlds, with a particular emphasis on what this comparison can tells us about her understanding of the role of violence in politics. Arendt has generally been understood to structurally exclude violence from the political, in part due to the claims she makes in her later essay ‘On Violence.’ Yet in her portrayal of Roman politics, and her preference for this political system above the Greeks’ (in certain respects), a genuinely political engagement with violence can be discerned. The paper claims that this particular case study indicates the framework of the vita activa, set out by Arendt in The Human Condition, should be reinterpreted, particularly insofar as ‘fabrication’ or ‘work’ here appears as something that is legitimately part of the political, and incorporates within it some forms of violence. The claims that violence is structurally anti-political, this paper concludes, are temporally specific to a twentieth-century context, rather than constituting a foundational ‘rule’ of political practice for Arendt.     

‘Barons’ Wars,under Other Names’: Feudalism,Royalism and the American Founding

SUMMARY

The Machiavellian Moment was largely responsible for establishing what remains the dominant understanding of American Revolutionary ideology. Patriots, on this account, were radical whigs; their great preoccupation was a terror of crown power and executive corruption. This essay proposes to test the whig reading of patriot political thought in a manner suggested by Professor Pocock's pioneering first book, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. The whig tradition, as he taught us, located in the remote Saxon past an ‘ancient constitution’ of liberty, in which elected monarchs merely executed laws approved by their free subjects in a primeval parliament. This republican idyll, whigs believed, was then tragically interrupted by the Norman Conquest of 1066, which introduced feudal tenures and monarchical tyranny. Did patriot theorists accept this narrative? The answer, I shall argue, is strikingly mixed. By the early 1770s, appeals to the ‘ancient constitution’ had become less common in patriot writing. And by the end of the 1770s, many patriots had absorbed a completely different understanding of the feudal past—one pioneered by Royalist historians of the seventeenth century and then adapted by Scottish historians of the eighteenth. This shift reflects a broader transformation in patriot political and constitutional theory.     

Bentham on asceticism and tyranny

In the late 1810s, Jeremy Bentham wrote a set of texts entitled Not Paul, But Jesus, arguing against the religious authority of St. Paul, and the principle of asceticism he propagated. This paper argues that Bentham’s critique of the principle of asceticism was not only or primarily a religious one, but a political one. Bentham objected to the principle of asceticism because it could be used to provide practical and ideological support for tyranny. The principle of asceticism, as a principle which repudiated common pleasures, provided a ‘cloak’ for tyranny, in giving rulers a reason to establish laws which penetrated further into the everyday activities of men and women (than would have been justified under the principle of utility), and so enabled them to increase their power over their subjects. The principle of asceticism also enabled rulers to create the conditions of fear and social isolation, which encouraged obedience to their laws. The Not Paul texts and related writings can be read as an extended argument against the principle of asceticism as a political principle, and as a defence of common pleasures.     

Ultra-modern thoughts: political theology in Leo Strauss’s Philosophy and Law

A primary theme in Leo Strauss’s early work is how medieval Jewish and Islamic political philosophy, while influenced by Plato, differs from him in crucial ways. This theme is central to Strauss’s 1935 book Philosophy and Law. Philosophy and Law concerns the medieval ‘philosophic foundation of the law,’ which provides a rational justification of revelation. For Strauss, the foundation provides this justification by virtue of some difference it has from Plato. In this paper, I offer a new interpretation of Strauss’s view of this difference. I suggest that, for Strauss, whereas Plato conceived of the legislator and his legislation, the foundation conceives of the sovereign and his sovereign laws. On this basis, I also suggest a solution to a perennial mystery of Philosophy and Law: Strauss claims that the medieval foundation reveals ‘ultra-modern thoughts,’ yet does not explicitly state the identity of these thoughts. I suggest that their author is Carl Schmitt.     

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.     

Editorial: Social Spirituality: Monastic Cell or Hectic Street?

Abstract

What makes theology political? Is it the social location of the author, the sources drawn upon, or the content of the argument? Each of these three possibilities is theologically significant, but a little reflection proves none of them decisive in claiming the adjective ‘political’ for a theology. The ‘material production’ of theological works cannot, by itself, render one theology political and another apolitical; for all theological works share a similar ‘social location’ given the similar socio-economic reality of publishing. Whether or not theology is political, or adequately political, cannot finally be determined by material production, the authors' social location or the content of the argument per se. Such forms of apodictic reasoning cannot distinguish apolitical from political theology. It can only be a function of practical reasoning. It alone can advance the current stalemate among persons that theology should be characterized as ‘church’, ‘confessional’, ‘sectarian’, ‘liberatory’, ‘political’ or ‘public’. I argue that the best we can do to adjudicate these differences is to engage in, as Charles Taylor has so aptly put it, practical ad hominem arguments.     

Memory and Non-Place: Visual Testimonies of Japanese American Internment During World War II

This article addresses the little-known history of Japanese Latin American internment during WWII. Classified as ‘illegal aliens’ and ‘enemy aliens’, 2,264 Japanese Latin Americans were stripped of citizenship from their home countries, denied rights in the United States, and ultimately deprived reconciliation due to their undocumented status. Using the traces of this history as a case study, I explore the strategic memories Japanese Latin Americans create about non-place – spaces of statelessness or states of exception – that allow them to make claims about state violence committed against them under these conditions, and, second, argue that demands for justice against political violence entail not only bringing light to erased histories but also developing engaged acts of reception that account for survivors’ claims to the memories of non-place. Visual testimonies, such as the Denshō Digital Archive and the short documentary Hidden Internment: The Art Shibayama Story (2004), affectively connect a viewer/listener to the memory of trauma, to an inexpressible haunting, and thus are critical platforms for creating a collective memory between survivors and the digital generation of postmemory.     

Non-domination and the libera res publica in Cicero's Republicanism

ABSTRACT

This paper assesses to what extent the neo-Republican accounts of Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit adequately capture the nature of political liberty at Rome by focusing on Cicero's analysis of the libera res publica. Cicero's analysis in De Republica suggests that the rule of law and a modest menu of individual citizens’ rights guard against citizens being controlled by a master's arbitrary will, thereby ensuring the status of non-domination that constitutes freedom according to the neo-Republican view. He also shows the difficulty of anchoring an argument for citizens’ full political participation in the value of non-domination. While Cicero believed such full participation (by elite citizens) was essential for a libera res publica, he, like other elite Romans, argued for participation on the basis of liberty conceived as the space to contend for and enhance one's social status. The sufficiency of the rule of law and citizens’ rights for securing a status of non-domination taken together with their insufficiency for ensuring a libera res publica suggests that neo-Republican accounts of liberty do not fully capture the idea as articulated in Cicero's Republicanism.     

Was Fichte a Remonstrant?

On reading Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation (1806–7), one is struck by the numerous references to religion it contains. The religious aspect of Fichte's writing is interesting in itself as it touches upon wider issues of theology and political thought, but it is also surprising given that Fichte had been labeled an atheist. The purpose of this article is to explore the ‘religious’ aspect of the Addresses looking specifically at the relationship between Fichte's work and the idea of ‘a chosen people.’ I argue that though not restricted to Reformed theology or even to the Christian faith, the idea of a chosen people can be found in Fichte's work but that it cannot be understood in a Lutheran nor Calvinistic manner but rather through the teachings of Jacob Arminius and the Remonstrants.     

European integration and the social science of EU studies: the disciplinary politics of a subfield

This article takes the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome as an opportunity to reflect upon half a century of academic discourse about the EU and its antecedents. In particular, it illuminates the theoretical analysis of European integration that has developed within political science and international studies broadly defined. It asks whether it is appropriate to map, as might be tempting, the intellectual ‘progress’ of the field of study against the empirical evolution of its object (European integration/the EU). The argument to be presented here is that while we can, to some extent, comprehend the evolution of academic thinking about the EU as a reflex to critical shifts in the ‘real world’ of European integration (‘externalist’ drivers), it is also necessary to understand ‘internalist’ drivers of theoretical discourse on European integration/the EU. The article contemplates two such ‘internalist’ components that have shaped and continue to shape the course of EU studies: scholarly contingency (the fact that scholarship does not proceed with free agency, but is bound by various conditions) and disciplinary politics (the idea that the course of academic work is governed by power games and that there are likely significant disagreements about best practice and progress in a field). In terms of EU studies, the thrust of disciplinary politics tends towards an opposition between ‘mainstreaming’ and ‘pluralist versions’ of the political science of EU studies. The final section explores how, in the face of emerging monistic claims about propriety in the field, an effective pluralist political science of the EU might be enhanced.     

Prices and Politics in Andean Water Reforms

Water rights are best understood as politically contested and culturally embedded relationships among different social actors. In the Andean region, existing rights of irrigators’ collectives often embody historical struggles over resources, rules, authorities and identities. This article argues, first, that the neo‐liberal language that is increasingly used in water policies is ill‐suited for recognizing and dealing with these social, cultural and political dimensions of water distribution. Local water rules and rights, their dynamics, and the way they are linked to power relations, local identities and contextualized constructions of legitimacy, remain invisible in neo‐liberal policy discourse. Second, this same discourse actively destroys these local rights systems and presents itself as the only viable cure to the problems it generates. The ways in which local irrigators’ collectives attempt to protect their water security raise questions about the fundaments and effects of neo‐liberal water reforms, but these questions are neglected or poorly understood. This article proposes a more situated, layered and contextualized approach to Andean water questions, not just to improve representational accuracy but also to increase political visibility and legitimacy of peasant and indigenous water claims. What is needed is not just a new ‘typology’ or ‘taxonomy’ of water rights, but an alternative ‘water rights ontology’ that understands locally existing norms and water control practices, and the power relations that inform and surround them, as deeply constitutive of water rights.     

The Republican Discourse on Religious Liberty during the Exclusion Crisis

Summary

Much recent historiography assumes that republican calls for religious liberty in seventeenth-century England were limited to Protestant dissenters. Nevertheless there is evidence that some radical voices during the Civil War and Interregnum period were willing to extend this toleration even to ‘false religions’, including Catholicism, provided their members promised loyalty and allegiance to the government. Using the case study of the republican Henry Neville, this article will argue that toleration for Catholics was still an option during the Exclusion Crisis of the late seventeenth century despite new fears of a growth of ‘popery and arbitrary government’. Neville's tolerationist approach, it will be shown, was driven by his Civil War and Interregnum experience, as well as by political pragmatism and very personal circumstances which shaped his attitude towards Catholics in his own country and abroad.     

The rediscovery of ‘the national’ in the 1990s – contexts,new cultural forms and practices in reunified Germany

This article examines how and in which societal and political contexts nationhood is expressed and symbolised in reunified Germany. This ‘rediscovery’ of nationhood since the 1990s mixes new and old motifs of the cultural repertoire of ‘the national’ for different purposes. Three main contexts triggered a rediscovery of ‘the national’ after 1989: reunification, immigration and the retrenchment of the social state. I argue, by analysing ethnographic material and political discourses, that these contexts, on the one hand, rearticulate old forms of ethnic and cultural nationalism and, on the other hand, create new images and symbols of an open civic society and immigration country. There are ‘playful’ forms, such as campaigns of nation branding, that symbolically include the ‘productive’ and ‘useful’ immigrant into the national project. Moreover, such campaigns serve to legitimatise the downsizing of the national state that – according to a neoliberal attitude – relies on a new community spirit of entrepreneurial, ‘activated’ citizens who ‘help themselves’. Thus, focusing on these pluralised renationalisation processes makes evident how polyvalent ‘the national’ still is. It can be employed by those who attempt to ‘reunite’ the East and West Germans, by businesses to sell their goods and ideas and by almost any political orientation, be it right‐wing or left‐wing.     

The Poison and the Spider's Web: Diderot and Eighteenth-Century French Epicureanism

This article argues that the term ‘Epicurean’ had multiple meanings in the moral and political thought of the eighteenth century. Concentrating on the reception of Epicureanism in France, it shows that some critics focused on Epicurus’ hedonistic moral psychology and labelled Epicurean those thinkers who denied natural sociability; for others, who instead focused on Epicurus’ materialist natural philosophy, to label a thinker an Epicurean was to label them an atheist. This polyvalence is presented as a salutary caution against essentialising claims about the content of eighteenth-century Epicureanism per se. Despite this sceptical stance, however, the article goes on to argue that it is nevertheless fruitful to investigate the engagement with Epicureanism by particular thinkers or in particular texts. Indeed, a comparative reading of Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie entry on ‘Epicuréisme’ and his source material in Johan Jakob Bruker and Pierre Bayle demonstrates that Diderot used his discussion of Epicureanism to intervene directly in contemporary theological controversies over the immortal soul and a providential god.     

European solidarity: a semantic history

Abstract

‘European solidarity’ is one of the most frequently used words in contemporary public discourse, but what does it mean? This article investigates the historical and semantic background of the term in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish since the French Revolution, when ‘solidarity’ became a political keyword for the first time in European history. With the founding of the Holy Alliance in 1815 the idea of ‘European solidarity’ as an instrument for achieving political order on the continent emerged. A historical longitudinal analysis via the Ngram Viewer reveals that the frequency of ‘solidarity’ follows or depends on certain crisis moments in history, such as revolutions, wars or economic troubles. ‘Solidarity’ belongs to the history of emotions and propaganda but is not a stable value system that consolidates political culture. It also seems to play a greater role in the national rather than in the European context. As a European political expression, ‘solidarity’ is not genuinely European but borrowed from the national political vocabulary. Moreover, the article outlines the semantic field of ‘European solidarity’ by showing linkages between ‘solidarity’ and other words.     

Towards Hume – the discourse on the liberty of the press in the age of Walpole*

The liberty of the press became one of the main topics of public debate in the 1720s and 1730s in response to Walpole’s restrictive press policy. This debate was carried on mainly in newspapers such as the Craftsman and the London Journal. Country and Court writers did not limit their discussions to legal questions, but conducted a lively debate about what press freedom actually was, and what role the press should have in political life. Among other things, they discussed to what extent it was appropriate for the press to take on an anti-governmental role. This debate is important, not least because it is a foil for one of the ‘classical’ eighteenth-century texts on the problem of press freedom, David Hume’s essay ‘Of the Liberty of the Press’. The debate reveals to what extent, and in what respects, Hume was breaking new ground in this essay.     

Nudging Bentham: indirect legislation and (neo-)liberal politics

SUMMARY

The debates over Sunstein and Thaler’s Nudge oppose libertarianism and paternalism, or defend the authors’ proposed manipulation of individuals’ ‘choice architectures’ as a consistent system of libertarian paternalism. My essay looks beyond the terms of this debate and revisits Bentham’s ‘Indirect Legislation’ in order to excavate the issues raised by the deployment of technologies of behavioural economics in schemes of government. On the one hand, nudging is nothing other than a mild and carefully considered mode of indirect legislation, and the authors are right to join Bentham in pointing out that the landscape they seek to improve is always with us; we are always already governed and governing others, and we might as well govern and be governed better than we do/are. On the other hand, nudge-like innovations reveal the extent to which Bentham’s insights have been captured by a disciplinary orientation that removes its subjects from political space. Put differently, the issue with this kind of government is not that it interferes with our liberty so much as that it presumes our lack of political orientation and efficacy. Bentham’s liberal subjects inhabit a public and even republican space that Sunstein and Thaler’s neo-liberal subjects have long since abandoned.     

Governing the Bottle: Alcohol,Race and Class in Nineteenth-Century India

Following a series of aggressive military campaigns across India, by the early nineteenth century, the East India Company had secured a more definitive political space for itself in India. However, in taking over the administration of the diwani, or administration and revenue collection duties in Bengal, the Company gained responsibility for the taxes that governed the production and sale of alcohol and drugs—the abkari system. The abkari duties represented an opportunity and challenge for the colonial state. What followed changed the social landscape of India as the Company developed a series of regulations to govern alcohol in both military and civil space. These laws quickly moved beyond earlier Mughal dictates on alcohol, revealing the state’s intent to mould society through taxation.

This article frames these colonial taxes on alcohol as a tool of governmentality. It argues that the state utilised the abkari department not simply as a means of generating revenue, but as a means of managing social relations and economic life in nineteenth-century India. It explores the path that the colonial state sought to forge between arguing for the ‘moral uplift’ of drinking populations and securing reliable revenue for Company (and later Crown) coffers. The laws themselves were often race- (and class-) specific, suggesting, for example, the pre-disposition of certain peoples to particular drinks. Moreover, the drinks themselves, whether toddy or ‘European’-style distilled spirits, were assigned a racial identity. While European observers viewed toddy as ‘natural’ and even beneficial when drunk by poor Indian labourers, in the throats of European soldiers it was labelled ‘dangerous’ or even lethal. Conversely, later Indian campaigners warned that ‘alien’ distilled spirits, such as whisky or rum, were completely foreign to India and that their introduction suggested a darker, less benevolent, side to India’s colonial rule. As such, these colonial controls on alcohol, and the debates that swirled around them, illuminate the ways in which the colonial state both understood and attempted to shape its subjects and servants.     

Agamben and the Migrations of Glory

Abstract

In the American political imagination, there is a longstanding and wide-ranging discussion about the separation of church and state. Though Americans argue about whether it should be a ‘‘high wall,’’ or whether certain ‘‘breaches’’ in it might be desirable, they all take ‘‘separation’’ to describe an institutional arrangement. From Giorgio Agamben's perspective, however, ‘‘separation’’ is an image that conceals much more than it reveals about the religious character of the state and the global economy. Agamben traces ‘‘the migrations of glory’’ from church, to state, to global capitalism. For part of this task, Agamben accepts Michel Foucault's diagnostic approach to power. By one reading, certainly, governmentality has us in its grip. But now government itself is overshadowed by the power of global capitalism. While Foucault sought only to make us ‘‘a little less governed,’’ Agamben is interested in a deeper iconoclasm and a greater emancipation. According to Agamben, our less-than-free condition can be illuminated by reflection on: (1) the state of exception and the camp, which are only made possible by a form of idolatry in which the sovereign assumes to themself a power that they should not have; (2) On another of the ‘‘maps’’ drawn by Agamben, however, there is a further ‘‘migration of glory,’’ away from national sovereignty, toward postmodern global capitalism; (3) The Coming Community provides the barest sketch of Agamben's hope for a remedy, while his reading of Paul's Letter to the Romans in The Time that Remains brings a more visible kind of messianic expectation or vocation back into the discussion of political life. A concluding section discusses five sorts of questions that might be put to Agamben about the overall shape of his project.