History of Political Thought

The understanding of poverty as the main social problem in purely economic terms and the argument that poverty should be eradicated translates to making sense of it as a trans-historical concept entirely independent from capitalism. The modern state considers poverty as a major obstacle to economic development and claims to struggle with it. Social justice has spread to a process of fighting poverty, which becomes a constant pursuit like the struggle and dependence between the hero and antihero common to modern comic books. Far from being identified as an ideal situation that needs to be reached, social justice in the hands of the modern state has transformed into a tool for targeted stability within market conditions. In this process, the recognition involved with identifying poverty, narrowly perceived and purged of its political content, become invisible and the social suffering it causes is also suppressed. Based on these claims, this article aims to reexamine the connection between the changing meaning of poverty and modern distributive justice and to support the argument that poverty must be expressed as a social relationship involving recognitional aspects rather than a simple expression of having a limited share of social goods.

Most people acquire citizenship at birth; and modern liberal states regulate the migration of non-citizens as a matter of their sovereignty. Do contemporary border and migration controls based on citizenship therefore enforce the continuation of feudal birth privilege? In this paper I interrogate this question by examining the role of migration controls in the Westphalian Treaties, which  define a milestone in the development of territorial state sovereign. I find that the Treaties assumed that a sovereign’s subjects are not free to cross territorial borders, and that migration controls continue to enforce birth privilege. However, while feudal sovereigns ruled by bondage, modern liberal states rule by exclusion.

What do the British mean by the term 'The Establishment'? How does it function? Is it a collection of individuals who know each other or a network of interconnected groups based on power and privilege? How does it justify its behaviour? Do its group members share an ideology? Owen Jones's The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It seeks to answer these questions and explain how the neoliberal Establishment threatens British democracy.

This article analyses the assassination practices of the Council of Ten of the Republic of Venice, with special reference to the plots organised by the Council to kill Sigismund, King of Hungary and future emperor. Th e article explores the context of the conspiracies, the language used by the Council to justify them, and the legal and normative issues raised by the Council's assassination policy. Th e article shows that the Council resorted to the assassination of foreign sovereigns when it perceived that the Republic's interests were seriously threatened. As an ideal type, this kind of organised, institutionalised and state-sponsored assassination practice, approved through established procedures by rotating Council members within the stable political structure of the Republic, can be distinguished from other typologies of political murder, notably those ordered in the context of court intrigues, where the «public» nature of the act was less visible.

L'articolo si concentra sulla dimensione politica dei bisogni e discute la relazione tra il linguaggio dei bisogni e quello della rappresentazione. Identifica tre categorie generali di bisogno (bisogni vitali, bisogni di agenzia e bisogni sociali) e mostra come la loro definizione e soddisfazione sono questioni politiche che richiedono profonde trasformazioni nel nostro modo di intendere la democrazia e nelle proprie istituzioni democratiche.

Parole chiave: bisogni vitali, bisogni di agenzia, bisogni sociali, politica dei bisogni.

This article focuses on the political dimension of needs and discusses the relationship between the language of needs and the language of representation. It identifies three broad categories of needs (vital, agency, and social needs) and it shows how their definition and satisfaction are political issues that demand deep changes both in our understanding of democracy and in democratic institutions.

Keywords: vital needs, agency needs, social needs, politics of needs.

Le pape François a effectué une visite à Marseille les 22 et 23 septembre derniers. Plusieurs courants politiques français ont tenté de capitaliser sur cette visite papale pour tenter séduire une partie de l'électorat plus ou moins catholique.

Uno dei compiti del filosofo dovrebbe essere quello di mettere in dubbio l’ovvio, ciò che generalmente si tende a considerare come assoluto e immutabile; a maggior ragione è passibile di critica tutto ciò che riguarda la vita degli esseri umani, vita che non è scindibile dalla società che funge da teatro per la messa in scena della tragedia di cui gli individui sono attori. Il nostro sistema governativo e sociale – che ci ostiniamo a definire democrazia – è minato dal conflitto di interessi e i recenti fatti di cronaca italiana ne sono la prova. Cosa vi è alla radice del conflitto di interessi? Platone ci offrirà degli spunti di riflessione critica

The importance of housing as a social good has made it a frequent subject matter of discussion in both developed and developing nations, where it continues to be accorded great attention. Due to cities' unchecked and widespread urban growth, there is housing scarcity problem in many cities around the world, particularly in developing countries, such as Nigeria. Nigeria housing problem is not just quantitative in nature but also qualitative and unaffordability. Governments at various levels have introduced numerous housing scheme that is geared towards supplying housing and bridging housing gap, however, majority of these housing schemes are still beyond the reach of the low income earners in terms of affordability. Hence, this study assessed the affordability of Lagos State government social housing scheme through the Lagos state rent-to-own-scheme. The study revealed that the housing units are costly and not affordable to lowmedium income earners as 2bedroom and 3-bedroom flats are priced at N20,000,000.00 and N25,000,000.00 and above respectively. An applicant of a 2-bedroom flat is expected to pay an initial equity capital of N1, 000,000.00 and N1, 250,000.00 for a 3-bedroom flat, while the residue of the cost is payable for a period of 10years on monthly basis (N158, 333.3 and N197, 916.00 monthly repayment respectively). This is disheartening and appalling social housing scheme as it is not affordable and within the reach of most Nigerians using house price to income ratio as a threshold for measuring affordability It is therefore recommended that government should adopts affordable housing delivery strategies such as cost saving design approach, promotion of local building materials, vertical housing development, mass housing that incorporate sustainable strategies; recycling of building materials for reuse, while also increasing the repayment period from 10years to 15years. When these approaches are adopted, it will aid affordability and integrate low-medium income earners in the social housing scheme

Encuesta sobre Nueva Historia Intelectual  Intervienen Carlos Altamirano / Paula Bruno / Peter Burke / Mariana Canavese / Gabriel Cid / Horacio Crespo / Francois Dosse / Alexander Gallus / Juan Guillermo Gómez García / Aimer Granados / Martin Jay / Andrés Kozel / Gilberto Loaiza Cano / Carlos Marichal / Maria Elisa Noronha de Sá / Alexandra Pita González / Christophe Prochasson / Horacio Tarcus / Enzo Traverso   desde  Alemania / Argentina / Brasil / Colombia / Chile / Estados Unidos / Francia / Gran Bretaña / México   Cuestionario ¿Qué entiende por historia intelectual y qué es lo que considera que distingue esa práctica de otras aproximaciones, como la historia de las ideas, la historia de los intelectuales, la historia social de la cultura, etc.? ¿En qué medida el marxismo, o algunas de las escuelas o las formas de entender el marxismo, ha nutrido la formación de la historia intelectual, o bien el marxismo in toto ha quedado inscripto en la tradicional historia de las ideas? ¿En ...

This book examines the major contribution of Cornelius Castoriadis’s work, which elucidated the role of the social imaginary within human societies. What is significant, Sean McMorrow argues, is that Castoriadis’s work presents a unique perspective on the regimes of historicity; modes of instituting power that establish the legitimacy of institutional order in relation to the extensive social imaginary articulations of the world. The author assesses Castoriadis’s theorization of the radically creative capacity of the social imaginary and suggests that there remains a tendency to present an overly dichotomous view of autonomous and heteronomous modes of institution. McMorrow assesses how adherence to this inclination hinders the development of further insights into the creative capacities of social imaginary, while also imposing limits on Castoriadis’s own assessment of the ‘partially’ autonomous situation of modern societies. The author suggests that one way forward is to consider the role of an implicit dimension of instituting power, involved in the reproduction of dominant social imaginary articulations of the world, and which also shape the regulation of historicity more generally. The main purpose of this book is to develop the critical depth of Castoriadis’s work, showing how it remains an insightful framework to analyze the significance of the deepening depoliticization of contemporary ‘liberal-democratic’ regimes and the ‘partially’ autonomous dynamics that underlie their shift toward increasingly authoritarian modes of governance.

E tanulmány kifejezetten politikatudományi és politikafilozófiai karakterrel bír. A címének megfelelően szembeállítja a regnáló hatalom keresztény nacionalista patriotizmusát a valódi, tudományos szempontból hiteles patriotizmussal. Miután a keresztény nacionalista platform eszmetörténeti-történelmi gyökereit megvizsgáltam, az Annual Political Science egy cikke alapján bevezetem az ún. "polgári nacionalizmus" kifejezést, szembeállítva az "etnikai nacionalizmussal", majd levonom a megfelelő következtetést.

This article traces the immediate reception of Paine’s Rights of man (Part One) in Germany. It especially focuses on the publication history of the complete translation published in Berlin in 1792, featuring the translator Meta Forkel, her collaborator Georg Forster, and the publisher Christian Friedrich Voß. This reconstruction affords insight into the process of translation as a collaborative enterprise and clearly demonstrates the translator’s agency. When the publisher proved reluctant, publication was dependent on Forkel’s initiative, which highlights the factor of contingency and the willingness to take risks. By detailing the modifications a book might undergo even in the case of a very faithful translation, this article also exemplifies strategies employed in the dissemination of radical works and the adaptation to new cultural and political contexts. Finally, the evidence presented here shows that Paine’s work was considered central by German contemporaries and should be placed alongside the reception of Burke’s in future scholarship on the Revolution debate in Germany.

After the recent publication of a couple of succinct and overarching essays covering the state of the field in the history of political thought (in the English language), Prof. Davide Cadeddu from the University of Milan expressed polem-ical remarks on some of their content. At the same time, he asked for comments on his own article, inviting the response several of English-speaking scholars (or scholars educated in anglophone cultural context).
In response to this challenge, ten colleagues
John Dunn (King’s College, University of Cambridge)
Humeira Iqtidar (King’s College London)
Iain Hampsher-Monk (University of Exeter)
Richard Bourke (King’s College, University of Cambridge)
Adrian Blau (King’s College London)
Alexandra Chadwick (University of Jyväskylä)
Duncan Kelly (Jesus College, University of Cambridge)
David Leopold (Mansfield College, University of Oxford)
Peter Burke (Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge)
Richard Whatmore (University of St Andrews)
answered with texts of different length and complexity. Depending on each case individually, each scholar was either in agreement or disagreement with the statements previously formulated by him, henceforth eliciting, more or less implicitly, new reflections on the matter at hand.

Some very recent "states of the field" of the history of political thought are rich in valuable information and raise many considerations. As often happens, though, rather than dwelling on what is shared, perhaps it could be more fruitful to reason in dialogue with the authors on how their reflection surprises or perplexes. In order to avoid unconscious ideological trends, the main issues to debate seem to be the idea of a role for the history of political thinking, the global perspective, the meaning of context, the relationship between the history of political thought and political theory and, mainly, the concept of scholar's interest.

Dans Les principes de la philosophie, Descartes affirme que « La liberté de notre volonté se connaît sans preuve, par la seule expérience que nous en avons  ». On résume parfois cette phrase en affirmant que pour Descartes, la liberté ne se prouve pas, mais s’éprouve. Descartes s’appuie donc sur la conscience pour affirmer la liberté humaine. Il suffit que je sache, lorsque j’effectue un acte, que je pourrais très bien ne pas l’accomplir, pour prendre conscience de ma liberté. Il n’y a là rien d’étonnant chez un penseur comme Descartes qui enracine toute sa démarche philosophique sur la conscience que le sujet a de lui-même. Descartes relie d’ailleurs de manière indissociable l’évidence du cogito à la certitude de la liberté. Toujours dans Les principes de la philosophie, il écrit :
Car, au moment même que nous doutions de tout, et que nous supposions même que celui qui nous a créé employait tout son pouvoir à nous tromper en toutes façons, nous apercevions en nous une liberté si grande, que nous pouvions nous empêcher de croire ce que nous ne connaissions pas encore parfaitement bien .
La conscience étant considérée comme une source de vérité, tout se passe un peu comme si elle ne pouvait pas nous mentir et nous tromper.
Or, c’est précisément ce présupposé que Spinoza va remettre en question, en montrant en quoi la conscience peut être source d’illusion et en montrant que l’illusion principale que génère la conscience consiste principalement en la perception de la liberté sous la forme du libre-arbitre.
En effet, pour Spinoza, la conscience que nous avons de nous-mêmes n’est que partielle, elle ne concerne que nos volitions et non ce qui les produit. Aussi, affirme-t-il dans l’appendice à la première partie de l’Éthique que « si les hommes s’imaginent qu’ils sont libres, c’est parce qu’ils sont conscients de leurs volitions et de leur appétit, sans penser même en songe aux causes qui les disposent à avoir appétit et volition, ignorants qu’ils sont des causes  ».
Cette affirmation s’enracine dans le déterminisme total dont Spinoza s’efforce de faire la démonstration dans l’Éthique. Ce déterminisme, comme l’énonce la proposition 28 d’Éthique I, affirme que tout dans la nature est soumis à des lois de causalité constantes et nécessaires :
Une chose singulière quelle qu’elle soit, autrement dit toute chose qui est finie et possède une existence déterminée, ne peut exister ni être déterminée à opérer que si elle est déterminée à exister et à opérer par une autre cause, qui elle aussi est finie et possède une existence déterminée ; et cette cause à son tour ne peut pas elle non plus exister ni être déterminée à opérer sans une autre ; qui elle aussi est finie et possède une existence déterminée, pour la déterminer à exister et à opérer, et ainsi à l’infini .
En conséquence l’être humain n’échappe pas à ce déterminisme. Il n’est pas dans la nature une exception, il ne s’y trouve pas « comme un empire dans un empire  » ou comme « un État dans l’État ». Aussi, son comportement est-il déterminé par les lois de la nature au même titre que la trajectoire d’un corps est soumise aux lois du mouvement.
Est-ce à dire pour autant que les chemins de la liberté lui sont fermés à tout jamais ?
Si l’on entend par liberté un libre-arbitre se définissant comme totale indétermination ou comme capacité d’un sujet à agir et penser en étant la cause première de ses actions et des représentations que produit son esprit, il est clair qu’une telle conception de la liberté ayant été posée comme illusoire, elle ne peut plus être, d’une quelconque manière, réintroduite en l’homme.
En revanche, une autre conception de la liberté doit être envisagée. Si l’homme est dans la nature un être comme les autres, parce qu’il est soumis au déterminisme naturel, il n’est pas pour autant un être quelconque. Il dispose d’aptitudes qui lui sont propres et qui peuvent lui permettre de conquérir sa liberté. En effet, « l’homme pense  » et il est capable par la pensée et la réflexion de progresser dans la connaissance des causes qui le déterminent. Cette connaissance ne l’affranchit pas de l’action de ces causes, mais dans la mesure où cette connaissance le transforme, elle peut modifier certains des effets que ces causes produisent en lui et lui permettre d’appréhender plus rationnellement et plus raisonnablement son existence. Ainsi, lorsqu’il parvient à être guidé par la raison, c’est-à-dire par la perception sous l’attribut de la pensée des lois nécessaires de la nature, l’être humain progresse vers une plus grande liberté. Mais vers une liberté qui ne se définit pas comme libre-arbitre, mais comme libre nécessité, c’est-à-dire comme une liberté qui n’entre pas en conflit avec le déterminisme, mais qui lui est totalement intégrée. On peut d’ailleurs considérer que toute l’œuvre de Spinoza, et principalement l’Éthique, est le fruit d’un effort pour penser la liberté à l’intérieur du déterminisme et c’est la démarche qui accompagne cet effort que nous allons tenter de développer ici.

As Rebecca Whisnant has noted, notions of “national...and...bodily (especially sexual) sovereignty are routinely merged in rhetoric and metaphor.” (2008:155) Departing from this observation, this project explores the ‘existential infrastructure’ of the ‘logic of sovereign integrity’ in which personhood is thought as analogous to jurisdiction over a bounded territorial enclosure. It traces the philosophical history of this logic, and unfolds the post-Heideggerian French critique of sovereignty as an analysis of how sovereign imperatives are animated by a drive to deny the vulnerabilities of constitutive ontological relation, and are thus implicated in violent cycles of disavowal and appropriation. It then applies this analytic to the question of women’s sexuate personhood, suggesting that while sovereign invocations are an understandable response to attacks on women’s bodily self-determination, the logic of sovereign integrity is implicated in undermining the possibility of penetrable sexual subjects and in producing proprietorial notions of sexual interaction which confound our ability to successfully prosecute rape. Moreover, I argue that the imperative toward sovereign invulnerability itself issues in a drive towards appropriation, and is an animating impulse of the misogynist rage and aggrieved narcissistic entitlement that propel acts of sexual violence. Sovereign logics, that is, both undermine women’s sexuate personhood and are implicated in generating the acts of violent appropriation they are frequently deployed to resist.

Il tratto identitario di ciascuna società è la cultura che le è propria, ovvero quell' insieme di simboli, credenze, valori, religioni che ne costituiscono la linfa vitale. La perdita di questo nucleo valoriale si sostanzia, per una società, in una silenziosa perdita di sé. La cultura è qualcosa di ancestrale; è qualcosa che non può essere scissa dalla società, dagli uomini, e dal territorio ove essi vivono. Ciascuna società, attraverso la propria cultura e i propri valori è in grado di rispondere ai quei bisogni e a quelle richieste funzionali che vengono dal basso, dal popolo che anima la società stessa.

This article investigates the transfer of the concept of pauperism to the Russian Empire in the 1840s, exploring the published output of authors from the Kingdom of Poland and St Petersburg. Henryk Kamieński and Vladimir A. Milyutin published articles – in 1845 and 1847 respectively – for the first time in their native languages discussing the phenomenon of pauperism in Western Europe. Their reflections are parallel in many respects, especially concerning their conviction that despite the varying economic models, industrialisation and the mechanisation of labour would in general positively influence the social well-being in their native countries, even though it was producing miserable living conditions for the lowest social stratum in the West. The cases examined in this paper may also stimulate methodological reflections on conceptual transfers, and in particular their intricacies in the Eastern and Central European contexts.

Dans une tribune à « l'Obs », deux sociologues rappellent que le recours au référendum ne se réduit pas à une simple technique institutionnelle : il mobilise et constitue le peuple-souverain qui peut tomber dans le piège de sa toute-puissance.

The paper examines the book Martin Buber’s Theopolitics and analyzes the conflict between the hierarchy in nature and in human society. Buber qualifies our relations to nature and to other non-living objects as darker than human relations. This creates an imbalance between the human You and the other type of You. This reflection allows us to think about the meaning of the principle of humanity in relation to personhood, and in relation to different forms of communities (natural, or inorganic communities). It is an important question in the light of “conflicts” and tensions created by the environmental crisis we are facing today. The paper explains how to use the word “conflict” in this context and whether it is justified.

Among the most controversial reforms investigated by Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont was the idea of using inheritance as an instrument to diffuse property ownership. This article offers the first comparative account of the development of this concept across each of their major works. By situating their interventions within wider inheritance law debates, it is demonstrated how their evolving visions of democracy forced them to innovatively combine two normative arguments: (i) diffusing property ownership via inheritance was a precondition for placing democracy upon stable political foundations, and (ii) this could counter the rise of pauperism and the extreme wealth inequality of nineteenth-century industrial society. Far from being an anachronistic republican notion, such reforms were long considered too radical to be implemented in England and Ireland.

In November 1943 everything changed forever in Joseph Spring's life. Born in Berlin as the first son of Polish Jews, he had left Germany in 1935 to hide from Nazi capture first in Belgium and then in France. After years on the run from the Nazis, the sixteen-year-old was hoping to find refuge in neutral Switzerland together with his two cousins, Henri and Sylver Henenberg, who were at the time 14 and 21 years old. Accompanied by a catholic Frenchman, twenty-year-old Pierre Rollin, Spring and his cousins entered clandestinely into Switzerland from France during the night of 13 to 14 November. Once they had crossed the border in La Cure, the four fellow travellers passed by a farm where the lights were still on. There they asked for a phone to get in touch with a contact in Switzerland. The farmer misleadingly offered to take them to a nearby phone but, in reality, delivered Spring and the rest of the group to the Swiss border guards. Hoping for compassion, the three cousins presented to the guards not only their fake French passports but also their J-stamped documents and informed them about Henri's tuberculosis. This made little impression on the border guards who sent the four back to France, warning them that they would be handed directly to the German authorities should they try again to enter the country. Seeing no real alternative, Spring and his fellow travellers made again an attempt to the cross the border two days after their first attempt. This time, they tried to avoid any contacts with the local population and to move as quickly as possible from the border to the interior of the country. Proceeding at a slow pace to avoid the crunching noise of the snow, the group walked on the rails of the narrow-gauge railway connecting La Cure with Saint-Cergue and Nyon. After approximately an hour of walking, however, Spring and his fellow travellers were intercepted by Swiss border guards and immediately taken back to La Cure. These happened to be the same guards who had interrogated Spring and the others on their first border crossing attempt. Despite Henri's young age and ill health and the life-threatening danger Nazism posed to Jews in those days, they had no intention to back away from their earlier warning. After a brief document check, Joseph Spring and his two cousins were handed over to the German officials at La Cure checkpoint. But the Swiss officials did more than that: they provided the Germans also with the J-stamped documents that identified the three cousins as Jews thus sealing their fate. The three refugees were as a result deported to Auschwitz via the Drancy transit camp. Both cousins were killed on their arrival. Spring miraculously survived and emigrated after the war to Australia. On 26 th January 1998, fifty-five years after his deportation to Auschwitz, Joseph Spring sued the Swiss Confederation for having been handed to the German officials. The Federal Council, Switzerland's seven-member governing body, rejected Spring's demand in a split decision of four votes against three. The rejection was later confirmed by Switzerland's highest Court, the Supreme Federal Court in Lausanne. At the time of the verdict, I was working as a legal collaborator for Switzerland's historians' commission (commonly known as the 'Bergier-Commission', after its president, Swiss historian Jean-François Bergier) in charge of investigating Switzerland's Second World War past. Switzerland in the late 1990s was facing a deep political crisis triggered by the international scandal over the 'dormant accounts' of Holocaust victims in Swiss banks. Virtually overnight, Switzerland's popular self-image as a nation courageously standing up against Nazi Germany and heroically struggling for survival came to be fundamentally questioned. The Spring case vividly displayed all the human tragedy of a refugee policy which,

Reseña de la obra de Umberto Eco (coord.). La Edad Media. I. Bárbaros, cristianos y musulmanes. Traducción: Omar Daniel Alva Barrera y Dennis Peña Torres. Revisión Técnica: Juan Carlos Rodríguez Aguilar. Sección Obras de Historia. México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2015. 864 p. ISBN. 978-607-16-3447-4 (Rústica). 978-607-16-4250-9 (electrónico-epub). 978-607-16-4301-8 (electrónico-mobi) + II. Catedrales, caballeros y ciudades. Traducción: Jorge Enrique Popoca López y Omar Daniel Alva Barrera. Revisión Técnica: Juan Carlos Rodríguez Aguilar. Sección Obras de Historia. México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2018. 794 p. ISBN. 978-607-16-5835-7 (Obra Completa). 978-607-16-5836-4 (Tomo II) + III. Castillos, mercaderes y poetas. Traducción: José Andrés Ancona Quiroz. Sección Obras de Historia. México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2018. 993 p. ISBN. 978-607-16-5837-1 (Tomo III).+ IV. Exploraciones, comercio y utopías. Traducción de José Andrés Ancona Quiroz. Sección de Obras de Historia. Méxi...