The Lost Intermediaries: The Impact of 1870 on the European System

Abstract

Among the colourful characters that populate eighteenth-century military history, the French-born comte de Bonneval (1675–1747) has been kept alive in historical memory longer than most. His surprising conversion to Islam and contribution to Ottoman military reform long made him a popular subject for biography in his own right. Nowadays, he mainly features in biographies of Prince Eugene of Savoy. Both were commanders in the Habsburg army, and for nineteen years they were close companions in war and peace.¹ The circumstances that turned Bonneval's friendship with Eugene to enmity also led him in 1729 to offer his services to the Ottoman Empire. For most scholars, this is the moment when his actions became of lasting historical significance. The Ottomans, who suffered in the eighteenth century a series of military defeats, employed foreigners to help them reform their army. After converting to Islam and renaming himself Ahmed Pasha, Bonneval became the first of these when the grand vizier, Topal Osman, invited him in 1731 to reform the Ottoman artillery corps. He moved to Constantinople, added the sobriquet ‘Humbaracl’ (bombardier), and became a noted figure at the court of Sultan Mahmud I. Until Bonneval's death in 1747, Europeans having dealings with the Ottoman regime looked to him for assistance in navigating its internal politics.²     

Liberty and Community: A Liberal Resolution

Much has been written in the last few years regarding Leo Strauss's political attachments, especially with respect to his purported influence over American neoconservatives. Problematically, Strauss scrupulously avoided explicit ideological entanglements, rarely addressed particular policy debates, and left little guidance for the statesman or thoughtful commentator interested in drawing practical political inferences from his philosophical writing. To add further ambiguity to already muddy waters, Strauss's discussion of the relation between prudence and philosophic insight coupled with the many and incompatible roles he assigns to the philosopher within the city make it unclear if there is anything at all that philosophy can teach us of political significance. The following essay aims to explain Strauss's view of the political function of philosophy in light of his distinction between classic and modern utopianism and what he calls in On Tyranny "philosophic politics."     

Theory and Akrasia in Aristotle's Ethics

Abstract

In book 7 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that vice, lack of self-restraint (akrasia), and brutishness are to be avoided. While the opposite of vice is virtue, the opposite of akrasia is self-restraint, and of brutishness a form of divinity. This article explores Aristotle's analysis of self-restraint and its lack, akrasia, focusing on the phenomenon of akrasia and its causes. Self-restraint is the experience of excessive and idiosyncratic desires that are nevertheless resisted. Like self-restraint, akrasia, or lack of self-restraint, involves the experience of excessive and idiosyncratic desires. However, those lacking in self-restraint give in to these desires; the unrestrained person knows the good but does the opposite nonetheless. Possible causes of akrasia are the overpowering of reason by desire among the young and the effeminacy of some women and womanly men. This article argues, however, that the most interesting cause of akrasia in Aristotle's account is theoretical thinking.