Search results
-first-century social and economic conditions. Turning to the wide-ranging form of political thought known as anarchism, we discuss anarchist views of human nature, the state, liberty and equality, and economic life. The chapter ends with a critique of anarchism and some thoughts as to its relevance to modern politics. POINTS TO CONSIDER Is Marxism correct in identifying class as the most important form of
We have seen how Shklar is, in various ways, a widely acknowledged and significant influence on the approach to political thinking that we have called political non-moralism. Like many political non-moralists, hers is a sceptical approach that focuses on protection against the greatest political evil, namely cruelty, and arguably tyranny is its apotheosis. Nonetheless, scepticism is not the only characteristic of her mature political thought, and it may not even be the most important when it comes to the question of how she understands
Since the 1970s the Scottish Enlightenment has become the subject of study across a range of branches of intellectual history. The development of this scholarship occurred alongside the moves in the history of political thought that stressed the need to recover the republican or civic humanist vocabulary of politics that had been obscured by an excessive focus on the natural law
-contractual, positive ties which bind citizens in political communities. Moreover, in the history of political thought, and especially with Kant, legality appears to be closely wedded to an idealist and deeply individualist notion of human subjectivity which, despite Kant’s critique of metaphysics in the Critique of Pure Reason , is still too metaphysically reified and static to do justice to the plural and transient dimensions of existence
effect, in other words, the intellectual labour of decolonisation. In outline, with necessary brevity, I’ve described the main contours of Padmore’s political thought from the days of The Negro Worker to the time of the Pan-African Congress in Manchester in October 1945. The Congress marks a turning point in Padmore’s political life. Present were Nkrumah, Kenyatta and Hastings
emancipation decree, this chapter explores some of the strongest examples of direct ideological linkages between the French and Haitian Revolutions as well as the underlying disjunctures that limited the influences of metropolitan political thought in the former colony. The revolutions in Saint-Domingue and France A Jamaican-born slave named Boukman Dutty was the principal organizer of the great rebellion of August 1791 that initiated the Haitian Revolution. Three months later Boukman was killed in battle and the French prominently displayed his head on a pike. In November
revival in the late twentieth century. Chapter 8 looks at the very different region of East Asia. Specifically, the chapter explores Japan’s deeper connections with China and the West and how these have influenced cultural and political thought. The Conclusion is a précis of the overall argument with highlights of what is absent from civilisational analysis at large. At the very end I ask questions about the vocation of civilisational analysis in contemporary contexts of creation and transformation, which includes critical global problems of the human condition. I
English translation after 1689, pervades Toland’s methodology and political thought. Toland’s application of historical criticism, to both Scripture and patristic sources, was undoubtedly inspired by Spinoza’s writing on the ideas of revelation and canon. The connections between virtue, liberty and a materialistic metaphysics evident in Pantheisticon (1720) show Toland thinking through the arguments linking republican politics and the rule of reason made by Spinoza in the second half of the Tractatus. The influence of Spinoza should not be overstated however. In making
away. Notes 1 For the relationship between Hobbes and Hyde, see Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Edward Hyde and Thomas Hobbes’s Elements of Law, Natural and Politic’, Historical Journal, 32.2 (1989), 303–17. 2 Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, ed. by Paul Seaward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 6–10; the latest and most sophisticated account of the attack on Hobbes in 1666–68 is Jon Parkin, ‘Baiting the Bear: the Anglican attack on Hobbes in the later 1660s’, History of Political Thought, 34.3 (2013), 421–58. 3 Richard Ollard, Clarendon and his Friends (London
institution that ultimately symbolised the British Empire and presided over its dissolution’ 7 – and the place of republicanism in anti-colonial Indian nationalist political thought. It offers a perspective on these phenomena from the vantage point of a minority, diasporic South Asian population in the Indian Ocean city of Durban in South Africa’s most Anglophone province. 8 It juxtaposes the varying Indian