During the eighteenth century, elite women participated in the philosophical, scientific, and political controversies that resulted in the overthrow of monarchy, the reconceptualisation of marriage, and the emergence of modern, democratic institutions. In this comprehensive study, Karen Green outlines and discusses the ideas and arguments of these women, exploring the development of their distinctive and contrasting political positions, and their engagement with the works of political thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville and Rousseau. Her exploration ranges (...) across Europe from England through France, Italy, Germany and Russia, and discusses thinkers including Mary Astell, Emilie Du Châtelet, Luise Kulmus-Gottsched and Elisabetta Caminer Turra. This study demonstrates the depth of women's contributions to eighteenth-century political debates, recovering their historical significance and deepening our understanding of this period in intellectual history. It will provide an essential resource for readers in political philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and women's studies. (shrink)

T. H. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics is a classic of modern philosophy. It begins with Green's idealist attack on empiricist metaphysics and epistemology and develops a perfectionist ethical theory that aims to bring together the best elements in the ancient and modern traditions, and that provides the moral foundations for Green's own distinctive brand of liberalism. David Brink's new edition will restore this great work to prominence, after two decades in which it has been hard to (...) obtain. The present edition uses the text of the fifth edition, accompanied by a new introductory essay, bibliographical essay, and index. Translations are provided for Green's quotations from other languages. Of particular importance is the editor's extended introductory essay, which situates the Prolegomena in its intellectual context, sympathetically but critically engages its main themes, and explains Green's enduring significance for the history of philosophy and contemporary ethical theory. Students and scholars of the history of ethics, ethical theory, political philosophy, and nineteenth century philosophy will find this new edition an invaluable resource. (shrink)

This is a new edition of T. H. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics (1883), a classic of modern philosophy, in which Green sets out his perfectionist ethical theory. In addition to the text of the Prolegomena itself, this new edition provides an introductory essay, a bibliographical essay, and an index. Brink's extended editorial introduction examines the context, themes, and significance of Green's work and will be of special interest to readers working on the history of ethics, ethical (...) theory, political philosophy, and nineteenth century philosophy. (shrink)

Diversity is both an unavoidable aspect of twenty-first century living and a powerful challenge to older philosophical traditions that still assume as normatively universal a set of values, ways of thinking, institutions, and habits of living that emerged within earlier eras of more homogeneous cultures, less developed technologies, and more accepted forms of linguistic, legal, religious, economic, political, and military domination. Within recent years, new styles of philosophical discourse, including deconstruction, postmodernism, feminism, post-colonialism, and critical race theory, have (...) persuasively challenged these universalistic assumptions to reveal the important human differences they marginalize. Experience-based appreciation of the mutually educative potential of diverse standpoints as well as sober concern about the perils of our present times have led many thinkers to look for contemporary forms of pragmatism and cosmopolitanism as hospitable intellectual gathering places for urgently needed cross-difference conversations that may reflect and give substance to shared visions of democratic diversity. The eight authors in this volume engage in cross-difference conversations with other thinkers from earlier periods and other philosophical traditions, as well as with each other, in order to reconstruct pragmatism and cosmopolitanism in ways that are more attuned to our lived experience of diversity as well as our hopes for a diversity-appreciating democratic future. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes's theory of the laws of nature covers only a subset of these rules, namely, those that “concern the doctrine of Civill Society”. There are many interpretations that attribute more ambitious aims to Hobbes, such as reconciling the claims of morality and interest, defending a version of divine command theory, showing that some aims are supremely rational, or using a theory of reciprocity to unite reason and morality. This chapter argues that Hobbes can accomplish his most (...) important goals with the minimalist theory. Hobbes describes the behavior of societies in the state of nature whose members support themselves by raiding other cities. Hobbes's moral theory makes the case for the state because it holds that social life governed by the laws of nature is available only within the state. In addition to supporting Hobbes's political theory, the minimalist theory presents an alternative to Aristotle's theory of justice. (shrink)

25 leading contemporary theorists of criminal law tackle a range of foundational issues about the proper aims and structure of the criminal law in a liberal democracy. The challenges facing criminal law are many. There are crises of over-criminalization and over-imprisonment; penal policy has become so politicized that it is difficult to find any clear consensus on what aims the criminal law can properly serve; governments seeking to protect their citizens in the face of a range of perceived threats have (...) pushed the outer limits of criminal law and blurred its boundaries. To think clearly about the future of criminal law, and its role in a liberal society, foundational questions about its proper scope, structure, and operations must be re-examined. What kinds of conduct should be criminalized? What are the principles of criminal responsibility? How should offences and defences be defined? The criminal process and the criminal trial need to be studied closely, and the purposes and modes of punishment should be scrutinized. Such a re-examination must draw on the resources of various disciplines-notably law, political and moral philosophy, criminology and history; it must examine both the inner logic of criminal law and its place in a larger legal and political structure; it must attend to the growing field of international criminal law, it must consider how the criminal law can respond to the challenges of a changing world.Topics covered in this volume include the question of criminalization and the proper scope of the criminal law; the grounds of criminal responsibility; the ways in which offences and defences should be defined; the criminal process and its values; criminal punishment; the relationship between international criminal law and domestic criminal law. Together, the essays provide a picture of the exciting state of criminal law theory today, and the basis for further research and debate in the coming years. (shrink)

The modern state claims supreme authority over the lives of all its citizens. Drawing together political philosophy, jurisprudence, and public choice theory, this book forces the reader to reconsider some basic assumptions about the authority of the state. Various popular and influential theories - conventionalism, contractarianism, and communitarianism - are assessed by the author and found to fail. Leslie Green argues that only the consent of the governed can justify the state's claims to authority. While he denies (...) that there is a general obligation to obey the law, he nonetheless rejects philosophical anarchism and defends civility - the willingness to tolerate some imperfection in institutions - as a political virtue. (shrink)

In this sequel to his prize-winning book, The Eyes of the People, Jeffrey Edward Green draws on philosophy, history, social science, and literature to ask what democracy can mean in a world where it is understood that socioeconomic status to some degree will always determine opportunities for civic engagement and career advancement. Under this shadow of unfairness, Green argues that the most advantaged class are rightly subjected to compulsory public burdens, but he also attends to the uncomfortable aspects (...) of ordinary, “second-class” citizenship as well: above all, the “reasonable envy,” “principled vulgarity,” and need for “extrapolitical solace” that will inform everyday citizens’ efforts to seek democratic ends within a political landscape permanently darkened by plutocracy. Deeply engaged in the history of political thought, the book is still first and foremost an effort to illuminate present-day politics. With the plebeians of ancient Rome as his muse, Green develops a plebeian conception of contemporary liberal democracy, at once disenchanted yet idealistic in its insistence that the Few-Many distinction might be enlisted for progressive purpose. Green’s analysis is likely to unsettle all sides of the political spectrum, but its purpose looks beyond narrow partisan concerns and aims instead to understand what the ongoing quest for free and equal citizenship might require once it is accepted that our political and educational systems will always be tainted by economic inequality. (shrink)

For centuries it has been assumed that democracy must refer to the empowerment of the People's voice. In this pioneering book, Jeffrey Edward Green makes the case for considering the People as an ocular entity rather than a vocal one. Green argues that it is both possible and desirable to understand democracy in terms of what the People gets to see instead of the traditional focus on what it gets to say. The Eyes of the People examines democracy (...) from the perspective of everyday citizens in their everyday lives. While it is customary to understand the citizen as a decision-maker, in fact most citizens rarely engage in decision-making and do not even have clear views on most political issues. The ordinary citizen is not a decision-maker but a spectator who watches and listens to the select few empowered to decide. Grounded on this everyday phenomenon of spectatorship, The Eyes of the People constructs a democratic theory applicable to the way democracy is actually experienced by most people most of the time. In approaching democracy from the perspective of the People's eyes, Green rediscovers and rehabilitates a forgotten "plebiscitarian" alternative within the history of democratic thought. Building off the contributions of a wide range of thinkers--including Aristotle, Shakespeare, Benjamin Constant, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, and many others--Green outlines a novel democratic paradigm centered on empowering the People's gaze through forcing politicians to appear in public under conditions they do not fully control. The Eyes of the People is at once a sweeping overview of the state of democratic theory and a call to rethink the meaning of democracy within the sociological and technological conditions of the twenty-first century. In addition to political scientists and students of democracy, the book likely will be of interest to political journalists, theorists of visual culture, and anyone in search of political principles that acknowledge, rather than repress, the pathologies of political life in contemporary mass society. (shrink)

We review articles about corporate political activity published in Business & Society since its beginnings 60 years ago and in a set of other leading management journals over the past decade. We present evidence that most studies of CPA use the political markets’ perspective. Under the premise that the contemporary political environment has changed significantly since the inception of the political markets’ perspective, our review asks two interconnected questions. First, to what degree have changes in the (...) political environment challenged the ability of the political markets’ perspective to understand the pillars of politics: issues, institutions, interests, and information? Second, to what degree have CPA scholars augmented or diversified their theoretical arguments to accommodate these changes in the political environment? We document the CPA literature across these dimensions and questions and note that many scholars are already adopting other theories side by side with the political markets’ perspective. (shrink)

Despite the fact that the High-Church Tory, Mary Astell, held political views diametrically opposed to the Whiggish Catharine Trotter Cockburn and Catharine Macaulay, it is here argued that their metaethical views were surprisingly similar. All were influenced by a blend of Christian universalism and Aristotelian eudaimonism, which accepted the existence of a law of nature, that we strive for happiness, and that happiness results from living in accord with our God-given nature. They differed with regard to epistemological issues; the (...) means by which we can know the law of nature, and with regard to the characterization of that nature; our telos. Traces of the ethical theories developed by these women can also be seen in the works of the philosophically informed novelists, Sarah Fielding, Jane Collier, Sarah Scott, and Hannah More. (shrink)

In this article we argue that the legitimacy and stability of the social and political order in Britain is undermined by persistent inequalities of skills and opportunities. We first contend that British society is characterised by a liberal regime of social cohesion. Crucial to such a regime is the belief in individual opportunity and rewards based on merit. We demonstrate, through comparative analysis, that skills inequality is actually higher and social mobility lower in Britain than in other western countries. (...) Also the perception of equal opportunities is lower. In Britain there is thus a mismatch between the cherished ideal of meritocracy and the reality of a stratified society, both objectively and perceived. This, we postulate, is likely to contribute to the political alienation of disadvantaged groups. We argue that in theory adult learning could reduce the skills gap but that in reality it only magnifies skills inequality since in Britain the well educated and people in work have higher participation rates than the poorly educated and unemployed. (shrink)

The disappearance of Catharine Macaulay’s eighteenth-century defense of the doctrines that justified the seventeeth-century republican parliament, has served to obscure an important strand of enlightenment faith, that was active in the lead up to the American and French Revolutions, and that also played a significant role in the history of feminism. This faith was made up of two intertwined strands, ‘Christian eudaimonism’ and ‘rational altruism’. Dominant contemporary accounts of the origins of republicanism and democratic theory during the eighteenth-century have (...) excluded serious consideration of Macaulay’s writing. Bringing her works into the mix, both poses difficulties for certain genealogies of the political thought of the period, and tends to favour a once popular view, which emphasized the centrality of Locke. Nevertheless, the Locke whose influence is found in Macaulay’s writing is not the possessive individualist, or rational egoist, that he and other liberals have been represented as being, but rather a rational altruist, whose political philosophy is grounded in natural law and harks back to Milton. This same philosophy provides the philosophical foundations for Wollstonecraft’s two most significant political texts, the Vindication of the Rights of Men and Vindcation of the Rights of Woman. (shrink)

This is a timely re-appraisal of feminist political thinkers and their male contemporaries, providing a re-evaluation of feminist humanism.

The tension between organizational values and the operation of aged care as a business is often characterized as the “mission versus margin” dilemma. It is common across the industry in both not-for-profit and for-profit organizations. However, in for-profit aged care facilities, there is no question about the intention to make a profit or the purpose of the profits. This is not so clear in not-for-profit aged care organizations. This article explores the tension through the examination of a detailed case study (...) of one of the larger not-for-profit social service organizations—All Saints Christian Care. It analyses the culture and managerial decisions though the lens of the political philosophy value pluralism. Finally, based on the value-plural theory, recommendations are made that would create greater operational transparency in not-for-profit aged care service. (shrink)

At first glance, Germaine de Staël and Immanuel Kant evince strikingly different attitudes to aesthetic judgment. Yet she promoted Kant's aesthetics and philosophy. This paper examines both Staël's early literary works and her later De l'Allemagne in order to tease out the relationship between their aesthetic theories.

While standard histories of Western political thought represent women’s rights as an offshoot of the earlier movement for the equal rights of men, this essay argues that the eighteenth-century push for democracy and equal rights was grounded in arguments first used to defend women’s right to moral and religious self-determination, based on their rational and spiritual equality with men. In tandem with the rise of critiques of absolute monarchy, ideal marriage, which had previously involved lordship and subjection, was transformed (...) into an equal companionate relationship based on inclination and affection. The essay argues that the transformation, by the time of the American and French revolutions, of neo-Roman republicanism—which had been aristocratic and oligarchic—into egalitarian, democratic republicanism had been mediated by the extension of arguments, widely distributed in the literature criticizing the slavery of marriage, into a general critique of slavery and support for the equal rights of men. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric and Capitalism:Rhetorical Agency as Communicative LaborRonald Walter GreeneIt is a commonplace to describe rhetorical agency as political action. From such a starting point, rhetorical agency describes a communicative process of inquiry and advocacy on issues of public importance. As political action, rhetorical agency often takes on the characteristics of a normative theory of citizenship; a good citizen persuades and is persuaded by the gentle force (...) of the better argument. More radical visions of argument might include strikes, sit-ins, and boycotts in the rhetorical arsenal of good citizenship, and some might even flirt with violence as rhetorical action. This model of rhetorical agency requires a translation of the conceptual apparatus of rhetoric and its alignment with the problematics of democratic theory and actually existing democratic regimes. Classical models that hoped to harness rhetorical agency to the making of the "orator-statesman" (sic) must reimagine political participation in terms of publics and counterpublics, social movements, electoral campaigns, communication media and technologies, as well as supra- and sub-national institutional settings. As the classical norms of citizenship rub against (post) modern realities, a permanent anxiety over the meaning and potential of rhetorical agency seems destined to be lodged in the critical imagination of rhetorical studies. If politics today is, in Jodi Dean's words, "a domain of financially mediated and professionalized practices centered on advertising, public relations, and the means of mass communication," then actually existing rhetorical agency manifests itself in efforts to "raise the money, buy the television time, register the domain names, build the website, and craft the accessible, user-friendly, spectacular message" (2003, 96).If we recognize Dean's description of the political as an accurate description of the rhetorical situation today, rhetorical studies is left with three strategies: It can refashion a deliberative vision of rhetorical agency into a normative ideal for critiquing the structural conditions (capital, media [End Page 188] concentration) of political participation. Second, it can enlarge the field of normatively acceptable ways and means of political participation, for example, by embracing the more spectacular politics associated with visual and body rhetorics. Finally, rhetorical studies can work on the "demand" side and design new strategies and tactics for activating the rhetorical participation of citizens, for example, by encouraging the creation of communicative norms necessary for reinvigorating voluntary and civic organizations. However, while each of these approaches provides a research agenda, none of them gets at the root cause of the anxiety over agency: the attachment of rhetorical agency to a vision of political change. The anxiety over agency pushes rhetorical critics and theorists into becoming moral entrepreneurs scolding, correcting, and encouraging the body politic to improve the quality and quantity of political participation.The purpose of this paper is to offer an escape route from theorizing rhetorical agency as a model of political communication.1 In opposition to a political-communicative vision of rhetorical agency, this paper suggests a different materialist ontology, one that imagines rhetorical agency as a form of living labor. I will argue that rhetorical agency belongs to the domain of communicative labor, a form of labor increasingly necessary to the workings of contemporary capitalist production. In other words, I want to replace a political-communicative model of rhetorical agency with a materialist-communicative model. To highlight the similarities and differences between the two models, I will focus on how the interface between politics, communication, and economics plays out in the Marxist tradition of rhetorical studies. I will organize this tradition into two sections: the first, represented by James Aune, advocates a hermeneutic approach to rhetorical agency, and the second, represented by Dana Cloud, argues for imagining rhetorical agency as a class-based social movement. By focusing on the work of my comrades, the paper risks being received as a "left sectarian" polemic.2 As I will demonstrate in each section, the problem with these two approaches has less to do with Marxism and more to do with how they turn to hermeneutics and social movements to imagine rhetorical agency in the idiom of communication theory. In the third section of the paper I will resituate rhetorical agency into a materialist ontology of labor and capitalist production. In so... (shrink)

Theories of Hope: Exploring Affective Dimensions of Human Experience explores the nature of hope from varied and diverse perspectives. This volume includes chapters examining hope within contexts of social and political philosophy, policy, and struggle from both deeply theoretical and practical approaches.

Three times between 1640 and 1651, once at considerable length, Hobbes used and accepted, and then mocked, repudiated and discarded, the ancient/medieval term recta ratio/right reason. These repeated fluctuations in his thinking and rhetorical strategy occurred during the writing of his three major treatises on moral and political theory, one additional note on the term in De Cive, and an unpublished commentary on Thomas White's De Mundo. They are made obvious by his substitution of recta ratio for reason (...) or natural reason when recycling passages from Elements of the Law for use in De Cive, and by his subsequent reversal of that substitution when revising other passages in De Cive for use in Leviathan. Despite incorporating recta ratio as a structural element in De Cive, he finally reverted in Leviathan to regarding the term as a deceptive verbal construct, non-existent in rerum natura, and ridiculing its users and proponents. Right reason carried connotations linked to it in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, and Hobbes's reversals in his view and use of it, and his final dismissal of it, provide further evidence and justification for the now familiar modern claim that he was a herald of modernity. (shrink)

The revolt against expertise is a novel aspect of a larger and longer-standing discontent with the power of managerial elites within modern democracies. In the United States, scientific expertise is contested adversarially on the model of a public trial. In broadcast media, expert disagreement proceeds via staged debates with opposing sides (generally representing extremes of more complex debates) arguing scientific questions bearing on public policy. By the mid-20th century many observers agreed that this broadcast format had transformed the active ‘public’ (...) – the target audience of these debates – into a passive ‘mass society’ that could listen to or view them, but had few or no means, outside of electoral politics, to engage with them. Two recent developments have challenged the traditional approach to public debates of scientific expertise, and challenged that expertise itself. The first is the rapid privatization of science since about 1980, changing public perception of scientists from disinterested servants of truth to spokespersons for government or economic interests. The second (since about 2007) is the combination of the universality of smartphones and direct access to internet discussion platforms not controlled by managerial elites, which have transformed the mute ‘mass’ into a highly vocal assortment of selforganizing publics (like those imagined in classical democratic theory) demanding to be heard directly on scientific questions. The matter of who now is a scientific expert, for whom, and under what circumstances, is a pressing question for historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science. (shrink)

This paper addresses representations of Burns and Stalker’s theory that arose soon after its publication in The Management of Innovation in 1961. Different conceptions of Burns and Stalker’s contingency theory as portrayed in organisation and management texts are discussed. It will be argued that what has been represented as their theory stems in the main from ideas based on different positions within the spectrum of the positivistic, functionalist ‘paradigm’.

Recent scholarly attention to ‘legitimate expectations’ and their role in legal transitions has yielded widely varying principles for distinguishing between legitimate and non-legitimate expectations. This article suggests that methodological reflection may facilitate substantive progress in the debate. Specifically, it proposes and defends the use of a wide reflective equilibrium methodology for constructing, justifying and critiquing theories of legitimate expectations and other kinds of normative theories about legal transitions. The methodology involves three levels of analysis — normative principles, their theoretical antecedents, (...) and considered judgements about their implications in specific cases — and iteration between these three levels in an effort to ensure coherence. The payoffs from applying this methodology to the legitimate expectations debate are illustrated through a discussion of examples from the existing literature. Some proposed innovations to the methodology, including the incorporation of insights from the ideal/non-ideal theory debate, are likely to be of wider interest to political theorists. (shrink)

More than three decades after its advent in political science, rational choice theory has yet to add appreciably to the stock of knowledge about politics. In Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory we traced this failure to methodological defects rooted in the aspiration to come up with universal theories of politics. After responding to criticisms of our argument, we elaborate on our earlier recommendations about how to improve the quality of rational choice applications. Building on suggestions of contributors (...) to this volume, we lay out an empirically based research program designed to delineate the conditions under which rational choice explanations are likely to be useful. (shrink)

This article uses the framework of “traditions of thought” and “dilemmas” to problematize and revise the English School’s Expansion Narrative of international relations history in the crucial ninet...

The concept of cheating is ubiquitous in ourmoral lives: It occurs in contexts as varied asbusiness, sports, taxpaying, education,marriage, politics, and the practice of law. Yet despite its seeming importance, it is aconcept that has been almost completely ignoredby moral theorists, usually regarded either asa morally neutral synonym for non-cooperativebehavior, or as a generalized, unreflectiveterm of moral disapprobation. This articleoffers a ``normative reconstruction'''' of theconcept of cheating by showing both whatvarious cases of cheating have in common, andhow cheating is related (...) to, and differs from,other morally wrongful acts, such as stealing,promise-breaking, deceiving, disobedience, anddisloyalty. A paradigmatic account of cheating is developed that entails two elements: First, the cheater must violate a prescriptive (rather thandescriptive), mandatory (rather than optional),regulative (rather than practice-defining), andconduct-governing (as opposed todecision-governing) rule. Second, the rulemust be fair and enforced even-handedly, andmust be violated with an intent to obtain anadvantage over some party with whom therule-breaker is in a cooperative, rule-governedrelationship. Along the way is a discussion ofpuzzling cases of ``judicial cheating,''''``strategic cheating,'''' cheating because``everyone else is doing it,'''' ``cheatingoneself,'''' ``altruistic cheating,'''' and ``ulteriormotive cheating.'''' The article then applies thecheating paradigm in the context of whitecollar criminal law, arguing that the conceptof cheating provides a better framework forexplaining the ``moral wrongfulness'''' thatunderlies and helps to define offenses such astax evasion and insider trading. (shrink)

This volume offers new perspectives on some better known authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, as well as neglected figures from the British Isles and continental Europe. The collection advances discussion of how best to understand women’s political contributions during the period, the place of salon sociability in the political development of Europe, and the interaction between discourses on slavery and those on women’s rights. It will interest scholars and researchers working in women’s (...) intellectual history and Enlightenment thought and serve as a useful adjunct to courses in political theory, women’s studies, the history of feminism, and European history. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the representation in academic journal articles and textbooks of an organisation theory. In the case of Burns’ and Stalker’s book The Management of Innovation (1961,1966), summaries of the text by other scholars have arguably differed from the original authors and among themselves in their emphases. Similar points have been made about representations of other theorists such as Kurt Lewin and, perhaps most famously, Adam Smith. They all raise issues about the meanings of texts and (...) where such meanings lie: with the author, the reader, the text itself or perhaps some combination of these. They also raise questions about whether texts can be shown to have definitive meanings; and if not, whether there are any criteria for adjudicating on the validity of varied interpretations. Representations by textbook writers are analysed and questions about the meaning of texts raised by ‘structuralist’ and ‘deconstructionist’ writers examined. Their writings beg certain questions about textual representations. Perhaps the most extreme of these views is Barthes’ concept of the ‘death of the author’. Like Barthes, Derrida argues, for the reasons mentioned above, that there is no underlying, final decipherable meaning in a text, but gives more credence to the role of the author, accepting the validity of the author’s consciousness and intentions as one of the sources of meaning in texts. There are also other sources: the situatedness and historical context of the text and the text itself. Derrida’s concept of ‘différance’ requires the reader to engage in an analysis of the text which offers limitless possibilities for interpretation and a renunciation of the certainty of truth, because the meaning of a text may extend beyond the limits of our knowledge at any one time. His notion of the ‘logic of supplementarity’ is a further means to analyse texts, as it also disprivileges obvious or overt meanings in texts by overturning hierarchy in oppositions and questioning univocal definitions of meaning. Questions inspired by these and other writers give rise to an exploration of who is speaking in the text; which subject matter is represented as central and which as marginal; binary oppositions within the text and intertextual connections. The paper then begins the more ambitious task of answering the broader question as to whether it can be shown that there are more and less ‘representative’ or ‘stronger’ interpretations of a text. (shrink)

Abstract This essay takes up the fundamental question of the proper place of history in the study of political thought through critical engagement with Mark Bevir's seminal work, The Logic of the History of Ideas . While I accept the claim of Bevir, as well as of other exponents of the so-called “Cambridge School,“ that there is a conceptual difference between historical and non-historical modes of reading past works of political philosophy, I resist the suggestion that this conceptual (...) differentiation itself justifies the specialization, among practicing intellectuals, between historians of ideas and others who read political-philosophical texts non-historically. Over and against the figure of the historian of ideas, who interprets political thought only in the manner of a historian, I defend the ideal of the pupil, who in studying past traditions of political thought also seeks to extend and modify them in light of contemporary problems and concerns. Against Bevir, I argue that the mixture of historical and non-historical modes of learning, in the manner of the pupil, need not do damage to the historian of ideas' commitment to scholarship that is non-anachronistic, objective, and non-indeterminate. (shrink)

Anna Julia Cooper has gained wider recognition in philosophy, thanks to the work of black feminist scholars, generating increased interest in Cooper’s ideas on race, gender, education, and social problems in the United States. However, the global scope of Cooper’s political theory has not yet received sufficient attention. Cooper’s 1925 dissertation is an analysis of slavery and the Haitian revolution, which demonstrates the fundamental contradictions within French enlightenment discourses of liberty. Cooper shows how European discourses of liberty were (...) hampered by the realities of enslavement, predating arguments that would become more widely known in later works, such as C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins (written in 1938) and Eric Williams’s Columbus to Castro (written in 1970). As Cooper demonstrates how ideologies of racial inequality undermined the stated ideals of the French revolution, she argues from a natural law position to not only maintain that slavery is “a supreme crime against humanity,” in her words, but also that “it is natural and just that it contains its punishment within itself.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 13.4 (2003) 393-406 [Access article in PDF] U.S. Defunding of UNFPA:A Moral Analysis Ronald M. Green Ethical decisions made inside the Beltway sometimes have global consequences. Nowhere is this more true than with respect to the decision by Secretary of State Colin Powell on 21 July 2002 to halt $34 million in U.S. funding for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Behind this (...) decision lay the forces of America's abortion politics as well as tangled issues in law and bioethics.I became involved in this debate when, in early September 2003, I served as a member of a nine-person delegation of U.S. religious leaders and ethicists that traveled to China to meet with those associated with the UNFPA program there. The delegation was assembled by Frances Kissling, of Catholics for a Free Choice, which also provided support and funding for the necessary travel and administrative services. In China, our contacts included UNFPA administrators, Chinese government officials, and ordinary villagers touched by UNFPA efforts. In the middle of its week-long stay, the delegation left Beijing in three separate groups to travel to remote provincial regions (Hubei, Gansu, and Ningxia). Our goal was to respond to the Bush administration's defunding decision by deepening our understanding of the current Chinese population program and UNFPA's relationship to it. In the course of this enquiry, I encountered challenging questions that drew on my own training in ethics in novel ways. Historical Background UNFPA is the world's largest organization providing family planning and reproductive health services. It was established in 1969 as the United Nations Fund for Population Activities. In 1987, the Economic and Social Council decided to rename it the United Nations Population Fund, but to retain the original abbreviation-acronym. UNFPA works to improve access to and the quality of family planning services in more than 140 of the poorest countries in the world. It is also very active in providing services aimed at preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS. It does not provide abortion services, but works to prevent abortion through family planning and to help countries provide services for women suffering from the complications of unsafe abortion. [End Page 393]Although UNFPA is officially an agency of the United Nations, its budget, currently about $200 million per year, comes from voluntary payments by donors, including UN member states. U.S. funding has been irregular. In 1985, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a foreign operations appropriations measure that has come to be known as the "Kemp-Kasten Amendment." This measure, which has been repassed in substantially unchanged form every year since, forbids funding for "any organization or program which, as determined by the President of the United States, supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization."1 From 1986 on, the Reagan and Bush administrations halted all U.S. funding for UNFPA activities around the world on the grounds that the agency's activities in China caused it to be involved in supporting or participating in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization, and, hence, put it in violation of Kemp-Kasten.Efforts by the People's Republic of China to slow the increase of its population date from the early 1970s when, in a striking departure from classical Marxist theory, which had insisted on the positive value of added labor power and denied the need for demographic controls, the government imposed a policy of delayed marriage and birth spacing. In 1979, these efforts intensified with the advent of the "one child policy." (In fact, this name is misleading since the number of children allowed a couple varies significantly from urban to rural areas, with rural residents and members of ethnic minorities permitted to have larger families.) To implement this program, the government established a National Family Planning Commission (now National Population and Family Planning Commission) which, among other things, set up a network of family planning service centers around the country, where birth control... (shrink)

Periodization is rooted in historical theory. It reflects our priorities, our values, and our understanding of the forces of continuity and change. Yet periodization is also subject to practical constraints. For pedagogical reasons, world historians must seek reasonable symmetry between major historical eras despite huge discrepancies in the availability of historical data for separate time periods and for different areas of the world.Political issues arise in periodization. Should world history provide integrated treatment of the evolution of civilization, focusing (...) upon the most developed societies ? Or should it provide equal time to cultures outside the evolutionary mainstream ? If integration is to be preferred--as this article advocates--it is incumbent upon integrationists to provide some overarching theory of change to demonstrate how the destinies of the world's peoples have been linked through the millennia.Although the article attempts to demonstrate how comprehensive theories of change can facilitate the formulation of world history periodization, it does not minimize the difficulty of developing a universally operative organic theory of change. It examines several theoretical orientations, but principal attention is given to world-systems analysis, the most fully refined and well articulated body of theory currently commended as a vehicle for structuring world history.Acknowledging that no body of theory currently achieves a satisfactory universal integration of world history and that this situation may prevail in the future, the author recommends, for the present, an eclectic periodization of four epochs divided at roughly 1000 B.C.E., 400-600 C.E., and circa. 1492. (shrink)

This article argues that it is far from trivial to convert social science concepts into accurate categories on which algorithms work best. The literature raises this concern in a general way; for example, Deeks notes that legal concepts, such as proportionality, cannot be easily converted into code noting that ‘The meaning and application of these concepts is hotly debated, even among lawyers who share common vocabularies and experiences’ (Deeks in Va Law Rev 104, pp. 1529–1593, 2018). The example discussed here (...) is recidivism prediction, where the factors that are of interest are difficult to capture adequately through questionnaires because survey responses do not necessarily indicate whether the behaviour that is of interest is present. There is room for improvement in how questions are phrased, in the selection of variables, and by encouraging practitioners to consider whether a particular variable is the sort of thing that can be measured by questionnaires at all. (shrink)

Bradley's critique of abstract, atomic individualism in social and political theory addresses persistent shortcomings of liberalism. At the same time, his account of the growth of moral order in the individual offers a counterweight to excessively organicist theories of the moral self, which dissolve it into social context and undercut the possibility of non-social, non-trivial moral norms. This thesis argues that Bradley avoids this by complementing the contextual determination of individual ends with a developmental moral psychology that provides (...) a conception of human nature and specific ends which are not socially formed, and develops more fully his conception of the community as the embodiment of moral order. ;In the introduction I describe the development of atomic individualism in social theory and nineteenth century opposition to it. In chapters two and three I examine Bradley's critique of Mill's atomism and Michael Sandel's criticisms of Rawls's social theory and compare these criticisms. The comparison indicates significant agreement between communitarian criticisms of deontological liberalism and Bradley's critique of Mill. ;In chapters four through six I give an account of Bradley's moral psychology which explains his philosophical motivation for espousing social organicism. I examine the notion of self-realization as a psychological principle and make tangible the central importance Bradley gives to realization of the self as a whole. I consider: Bradley's basic psychological "law," its bearing on the early stages of moral development, the development of 'objective interests' which become constitutive of our mature moral identity, Bradley's formula for self-realization, and the nature of some concrete ends which give it substantial content. I incorporate these into a consideration of Bradley's conception of the community or 'moral organism,' and defend this from the objection that it requires strong metaphysical claims. ;In chapter seven I develop the conception further through a comparison of Bradley's ethics to A. E. Murphy's account of the language of moral reasons in The Theory of Practical Reason. My conclusion indicates its present importance by relating it to a recent study of ethical culture in America--Habits of the Heart--and by suggesting its potentially salutary effects. (shrink)

Can Catharine Macaulay’s enlightenment, democratic, republicanism be justified from the point of view of contemporary naturalism? Naturalist accounts of political authority tend to be realist and pessimistic, foreclosing the possibility of enlightenment. Macaulay’s utopian political philosophy relies on belief in a good God, whose existence underpins the possibility of moral and political progress. This paper attempts a restoration of her optimistic utopianism, in a reconciliation, grounded in a revision of natural law, of naturalist and utopian attitudes to (...) political theory. It is proposed that the co-evolution of language, moral law, and conscience (the disposition to judge one’s own actions in the light of moral principles) can be explained as solutions to the kinds of tragedy of the commons situations facing our ancestors. Moral dispositions evolved, but, in the light of its function, law is subject to rational critique. Liberal democracy plausibly offers the best prospect for developing rationally justifiable law. (shrink)

This edited volume provides a coherent and comprehensive assessment of Antonio Gramsci's significant contribution to the fields of political and cultural theory. It contains seminal contributions from a broad range of important political and cultural theorists from around the world and explains the origins, development and context for Gramsci's thought as well as analysing his continued relevance and influence to contemporary debates. It demonstrates the multidisciplinary nature of Gramscian thought to produce new insights into the intersection of (...) economic, political, cultural, and social processes, and to create a vital resource for readers across the disciplines of political theory, cultural studies, political economy, philosophy, and subaltern studies. (shrink)

Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Law is an annual forum for some of the best new philosophical work on law, by both senior and junior scholars from around the world. The essays range widely over issues in general jurisprudence, the philosophical foundations of specific areas of law, the history of legal philosophy, and related philosophical topics that illuminate the problems of legal theory. OSPL will be essential reading for philosophers, academic lawyers, political scientists, and historians of law (...) who wish to keep up with the latest developments in this flourishing field. (shrink)

Christine de Pizan, one of the earliest known women authors, wrote the Livre de paix (Book of Peace) between 1412 and 1414, a period of severe corruption and civil unrest in her native France. The book offered Pizan a platform from which to expound her views on contemporary politics and to put forth a strict moral code to which she believed all governments should aspire. The text's intended recipient was the dauphin, Louis of Guyenne; Christine felt that Louis had the (...) political and social influence to fill a void left by years of incompetent leadership. Drawing in equal parts from the Bible and from classical ethical theory, the Livre de paix was revolutionary in its timing, viewpoint, and content. This volume, edited by Karen Green, Constant J. Mews, and Janice Pinder, boasts the first full English translation of Pizan's work along with the original French text. The editors also place the Livre de paix in historical context, provide a brief biography of Pizan, and offer insight into the translation process. (shrink)

Machiavelli can be read as a plebeian thinker supportive of plebeian institutions that, as such, differentiate the few from the many and aim to regulate and burden the few. Yet, like numerous contemporary plebeian thinkers, Machiavelli is mostly silent about the moral transgressiveness required by the advocacy of plebeian institutions and ideas. The theses offered here argue that advocates of plebeianism will need, like the Machiavellian prince, to learn how not to be good. In explaining what this means in practice, (...) the theses also defend the propriety of anachronistic readings, caution again plebeian violence, and explain other dynamics of plebeian leftism. (shrink)

Anglo-American theories of criminal responsibility require scholars to grapple with, inter alia, the relationship between the formal rule of law and the powers of the lay jury as well as two inherent ideas of freedom: freedom of the will and political liberty. Here, by way of canvassing my past work and prefiguring future work, I sketch some elements of the history of the Anglo-American jury and offer some glimpses of commentary on the interplay between the jury—particularly its application of (...) conventional morality to criminal judgments—and the formal rule of law of the state. My central intent is to pose questions for further study regarding the historical behavior of the jury, the jury’s role in reinforcing notions of political liberty and free will, and, primarily, how scholarly conceptions of the jury’s role and behavior have informed elite theory regarding the justifications for imposing criminal responsibility. (shrink)

The ‘celebrated’ Catharine Macaulay was both lauded and execrated during the eighteenth century for her republican politics and her unconventional life. This comprehensive biography in the “life and letters” tradition situates her works in their political and social context and offers an unprecedented, detailed account of the content and influence of her writing, the arguments she developed in her eight volume history of England, and her other political, ethical, and educational works. Her disagreements with conservative opponents, David Hume, (...) Edmund Burke, and Samuel Johnson are developed in detail, as is her influence on more progressive admirers such as Thomas Jefferson, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Mercy Otis Warren, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Macaulay emerges as a coherent and influential political voice, whose attitudes and aspirations were typical of those enlightenment republicans who based their progressive politics in rational religion. She looked back to the seventeenth century levelers and parliamentarians as important precursors of the struggles for liberty and political rights that she advocated for Great Britain, America, and France. Her defence of republican liberty and the equal rights of men offers an important corrective to certain misleading contemporary accounts of the origins of democratic republicanism during this crucial period. (shrink)