The structuring of political territory in early printed atlases

Abstract

The atlas emerged as a cartographic and bibliographic response to early modern Europeans’ search for geographical order in a rapidly changing world. In particular, atlases were mediators in the restructuring of European ideas about political territory which culminated in the emergence (by the end of the eighteenth century) of the territorial state and its progeny, the nation‐state. For more than two centuries atlases defined political territories ever more precisely for their readers and expressed hierarchical relationships among those territories, while giving form to the political territoriality and geopolitical orientations of particular nations.     

G.E. Moore and political philosophy: Gerald F. Shove's fellowship dissertation (1911)

In 1911 Gerald F. Shove, later to become a leading Cambridge economist, submitted to King's College a fellowship dissertation on the application of G.E. Moore's ethical philosophy to political theory. In the article the dissertation, hitherto unpublished, is discussed with reference to both the acceptance and elaboration of Moore's Principia Ethica by the members of the Apostles and Bloomsbury groups and Shove's intellectual and personal biography. The thesis tackles some major concepts in political theory like the nature of human societies, self-government, justice and freedom.     

International political theory and the question of justice

The aim of the international justice theorist is to find coherence among ideas about justice at the international or global level. Linking justice to coercion and law can bridge the gap between just war theory and theories of international distributive justice. The idea of humanitarian intervention illustrates how the argument might go. Underlying that idea is the idea of a duty to protect. That duty is often thought to be an imperfect and therefore unenforceable duty based on a principle of beneficence. But we can also think of it as a perfect, enforceable duty to resist the violent, where that duty rests directly on the principle of respect, unmediated by beneficence. Respect also implies action to prevent non-violent harms. To do nothing while people are dying of starvation or disease is to fail to respect them as human beings by making their wellbeing a matter of indifference. We can therefore justly be compelled to prevent such harms by being taxed to support efforts to prevent them. A theory of justice that made the duty to protect central would ground the theory of international distributive justice in the justice—coercion link that underlies just war theory.     

Religion and political principle: New studies on the political theory of the english revolution

William Lamont, Richard Baxter & the Millenium, Croom Helm, London, 1979.

James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke & His Adversaries Cambridge University Press, 1980.

C.C. Weston & J.R. Greenberg, Subjects and Citizens: The Grand Controversy Over Legal Sovereignty in Stuart England, Cambridge University Press, 1981.

George Yule, Puritans in Politics: The Religious Legislation of The Long Parliament, Sutton Courtney, Oxford, 1982.     

The problem of interests in contemporary liberal political theory

‘Interest’ is a central concept in contemporary liberal political theory. Much of this discussion is marked by related confusions between ‘interest’ and ‘actions‐in‐interests’ and between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ interests. These confusions are damaging, since liberal theorists are ostensibly firmly opposed to treating objective interests as politically relevant, but they inevitably finish up admiting the relevance of some form of objective interests. They do this by limiting valid interest judgements to those which are rational, or which favour future over present interests, or which are made post facto, or which favour public over individual interests. This admission of objective interests into liberal theory has important implications for the way in which liberal theorists conceive of relationships between the liberal democratic state and its citizens. In particular, it seriously undermines the democratic element in contemporary liberal democratic theories of political representation.