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are suggested. Attention then turns to the political context that Habermas addressed. The failure of the Constitutional project and, five years on, the crisis of the Eurozone can be traced to the same underlying ‘conceptual deficit’: a dearth of postnational political thought. A reluctance to transcend the nation-state as a frame of reference has characterised elites as well as European populations – only a minority of key players (the late Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa 3 , for example) have stated this to be a problem. A critical
might.53 His theory of sovereignty was informed by the juxtaposition of origins and principles; by the identification of law and power; by the metaphorical overlapping of Adam and king. Patriarcha has thus to be seen as a representation of what sharpe has called ‘the social and political structure of the renaissance english state’.54 It articulated a new narrative of political thought within a framework familiar to many, namely the patriarchal structure of society. Whilst scholars as ideologically different as Gordon schochet, Glenn Burgess and carole Pateman all
Chapter 14 . States, monarchs and dynastic transitions: the political thought of John Hayward R. Malcolm Smuts F or some time, historians of early Stuart politics have sought to develop a British perspective by giving due weight to Scottish and Irish participation in the multiple kingdom ruled from Westminster. But with a certain literal mindedness, they have applied a three-kingdoms approach mainly to the period after 1603, although for many years previously Stuart claims to succeed Elizabeth had made Scottish politics a matter of vital concern to English
socialist’, ‘qualitative’ and ‘technocratic’. ‘Social reformism’ provided the ‘architecture’ of the post-war consensus and consisted primarily of ‘the New Thinkers’, the ‘Gaitskellites’ or ‘Revisionists’ who, ‘instead of reviving socialism, substituted a quite distinct tradition of political thought – New Liberalism’. Socialist ‘fundamentalism’ has been the antithesis of, and subordinate to, ‘social reform’. ‘Technocratic-collectivism’ is described as largely a temporary expedient; as a product of those who frequently ‘seek to procure a compromise between various segments
This book examines the impact that nostalgia has had on the Labour Party’s political development since 1951. In contrast to existing studies that have emphasised the role played by modernity, it argues that nostalgia has defined Labour’s identity and determined the party’s trajectory over time. It outlines how Labour, at both an elite and a grassroots level, has been and remains heavily influenced by a nostalgic commitment to an era of heroic male industrial working-class struggle. This commitment has hindered policy discussion, determined the form that the modernisation process has taken and shaped internal conflict and cohesion. More broadly, Labour’s emotional attachment to the past has made it difficult for the party to adjust to the socioeconomic changes that have taken place in Britain. In short, nostalgia has frequently left the party out of touch with the modern world. In this way, this book offers an assessment of Labour’s failures to adapt to the changing nature and demands of post-war Britain.
enables or facilitates stability and order. And it is this account of politics that makes realism a political theory for our time. In the intellectual context of a growing dissatisfaction with the so-called ‘high liberal theory’ exemplified by the work of Anglo-American theorists such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin that has dominated the discipline for several decades, it has been the work of Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss that has probably done the most to thrust realist political thought back into the academic spotlight.4 Well-known review articles by William
protest, we can focus in on the idea of enthusiasm itself as a resource to make sense of the grammar of democratic transformations – that is, the connections that link and organize political thought and action. The arguments I put forth in this book on political enthusiasm are both descriptive and normative. I investigate how political actors use enthusiasm to motivate allegiances, how we have come to
(and in particular between the British and American cases), I will nonetheless maintain that their rhetorical justification exhibited certain illuminating similarities.2 I must stress at the outset that this chapter is expressly interpretive rather than quantitative in its approach. It identifies the ideological structure and animating political strategy of redistributive political discourse through the methods of textual analysis familiar to scholars of political thought.3 Implicit in this approach is the assumption that, while the scrutiny of principles of social
atop the work of the influential early twentieth-century British pluralist and historian of political thought, John Neville Figgis. Both Figgis and Skinner trace the notion of sovereignty back through Hobbes and Bodin to ancient Roman notions of imperium and popular
SINCE the recent consolidation of what is often referred to as the linguistic turn of social and political thought and the related rise to academic and cultural prominence of postmodernism, it would appear that the modernist aspiration to elaborate an updated version of the Enlightenment has failed. Many observers regard the collapse of Soviet state socialism in 1989–90 and the subsequent globalisation