Politics has been defined in different and contradictory ways in the last century or so. If politics is to be a single subject of study then contradictory theories should be capable of being related together. In this article I argue that they can be related in terms of what I call the Aristotelian criterion. The article is in four parts. Firstly, I discuss the problem of defining politics; secondly, I introduce the criterion; thirdly, I consider five modern theories of politics (...) (those of Arendt, Oakeshott, Collingwood, Schmitt and Rancière) in relation to the criterion; and fourthly, I use the criterion to put forward an original and capacious definition of politics.1. (shrink)

In this essay I question an assumption of Card's, which seems to place the ethical in a directive relationship with respect to the political. I call attention to the rupture between the two as a marker of modernity and suggest that the political is not only a sphere of power but also a value-sedimented field, with the values in question developing historically as in the case of liberal democracy.

In this essay I question an assumption of Card's, which seems to place the (Kantianstyle) ethical in a directive relationship with respect to the political. I call attention to the rupture between the two as a marker of modernity and suggest that the political is not only a sphere of power but also a value-sedimented field, with the values in question developing historically as in the case of liberal democracy.

No cenário intelectual do renascimento italiano o pensamento político de Nicolau Maquiavel antecedeu e influenciou grandes inovações que fundaram a modernidade. Um movimento geral de ideias definido no século XVI e XVII pelo conceito de maquiavelismo engendrou mudanças profundas na arquitetura conceitual dos pensadores e articulistas dos assuntos públicos, afetando a obra de grandes filósofos, de Bodin e Lipsius até Hobbes. A partir de pesquisa desenvolvidas no programa de doutorado em filosofia da Unicamp pretendo demonstrar neste trabalho quais foram os (...) pressupostos filosóficos centrais dessa ruptura e como Maquiavel reconstruiu em suas principais obras, O Príncipe e Os discursos sobre a primeira década de Tito Lívio, uma série de conceitos antigos para dar-lhes um sentido completamente novo e radical. (shrink)

As Michel Foucault and others have shown, from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, Western political discourse has perpetuated an art of governing aimed at societies and populations. This article argues that this modern art of governing is now coming undone, in the name of governance. The discourse on governance is taking us from an art of governing premised on producing policy for a society or a population to an art of governing premised on solving problems with no necessary reference (...) to any kind of society or population. Tracing the evolution of that discourse, the article argues that existing social and political theory has failed to make sense of this shift. It concludes that in order to access and assess the new art of governing on its own terms we need a sociological imagination that stretches beyond societies and a political imaginary without the presupposition of collectivities. (shrink)