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2 Early modern friendship: politics and law Horizontal and hierarchical power relations within a community Medieval Scholastic scholarship and its intellectual agenda shaped by ideas of a universal order were irrevocably challenged by the Reformation and the consequent segmentation of Europe, a process accelerated by rivalries among major political powers. The demand for intellectual tools to account for manifested contingency and the particularity of political situations necessitated a turn to a powerful alternative able to be sensitive to the experience of
Despite its long history, plague has not been an internationally significant disease since the mid-twentieth century, and it has attracted minimal modern critical attention. Strategies for treating plague are generally outdated and of limited effectiveness. However, plague remains endemic to a few developing nations, most prominently Madagascar. The outbreak of a major plague epidemic across several Madagascan urban areas in 2017 has sparked a wider discourse about the necessity of improving global preparedness for a potential future plague pandemic. Beyond updating treatment modalities, a key aspect of improving preparedness for such a pandemic involves a process of sophisticated review of historical public health responses to plague epidemics. As part of this process, this article outlines and compares public health responses to three separate epidemics from the early modern era onwards: Marseille in 1720–22, San Francisco in 1900–04 and Madagascar in 2017. Based on this process, it identifies three key themes common to successful responses: (1) clear, effective and minimally bureaucratic public health protocols; (2) an emphasis on combating plague denialism by gaining the trust and cooperation of the affected population; and (3) the long-term suppression of plague through the minimisation of contact between humans and infected small mammals.
. , Seem , M. and Lane , H. R. ( Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press ). Eisenstein , E. ( 2005 ), The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press ). Frontier Economics
the contingency of the authority and power of states can usefully take us back into the history of political thought, which has M1218 - THOMPSON TXT.qxp:GRAHAM Q7.3 6 10/3/08 13:10 Page 6 Might, right, prosperity and consent become regrettably separated from much contemporary political science, and in particular to early modern debates about reason of state. Although he did not use the term, reason of state was Machiavelli’s legacy to political understanding.11 He insisted, as nobody in western political thought had previously, that preserving authority
early modern and contemporary diplomatic practice. Therefore, it is reasonable to suppose that the study of such documents is likely to uncover linguistic conventions and political practices that are antithetical to natural and ethical interpretations. The unintended consequence of the conceptual transformation in philosophical debate was to divert the attention of students of international politics from one of the most salient and possibly most political functions of friendship in diplomatic communication. In this way, early modern discourse of and about
/ moralist and sceptical/realist perspectives is a product of ‘the social construction’ of knowledge. The construction can be traced back to early modern theoretical, and hence rhetorical, debate over the principles upon which relations among sovereign polities in international society are built. Making a successful and convincing contribution to the debate required re-describing the concept of friendship in naturalistic and ethical terms. Thenceforth, the naturalistic and ethical concept of friendship established itself as dominant and effectively foreclosed theoretical
3 The ethics of friendship in early European diplomacy Surprising as it may sound, Humanist discourse in early modern Europe operated with a range of linguistic conventions that signalled the existence of a concept of friendship that was not only distinct from but also often entirely excluded the possibility of the contractual concept discussed in the previous chapter, despite sharing its key terms – ‘friendship’ and ‘amity’. The conventions that determined its distinct conceptual identity stemmed from the realm of ethics and morality, which many believe to be
Introduction The problem This book is about friendship between sovereign political agents, whose role in the modern world is performed by states. However, not all the political friends that feature in this book fit contemporary ideas about state and sovereignty, unless we anachronistically describe as states agents acting on behalf of aggregate entities or representing their own realms in the classical and early modern periods. This book therefore focuses on relations of friendship that bind together whole polities. What this book is not about are international
1 The ambivalence of ancient friendship In this chapter I set out to highlight common ways in which classical literature uses the concept of friendship in the context of relations with foreign powers. I do not aim to analyse the whole corpus of ancient Greek and Roman literature. The task of this chapter is much more modest. It will deal with a small number of classical authors who were invoked, often in an eclectic manner, in early modern literature on the law of nations, and later in international relations, as intellectual authorities or sources of
benevolent political relations among public persons. Hobbes also uses the term ‘amity’ in the sense of civil concord common to earlier thinkers. Early modern moralists put forward the concept of amity as concord, together with the virtues of love and benevolence, to neutralise or mitigate the perils of civil factions and to achieve the ideals of the good life within a political entity. In Leviathan, we find a seemingly identical use of the concept: ‘it is they say, impossible to entertain a constant Civill Amity with all those, with whom the Businesse of the world