Search results
generally agreed is that the obligation to obey the law is one of our political obligations, that we do have such an obligation in the first instance, and yet, under certain circumstances, we may be justified in breaking the law in the name of any one of a number of competing moral claims (Walzer 1970 , p. 16; cf. Smith 1973 ). What remains unresolved is when, precisely, such conflicts arise and how, exactly, they are to be resolved. And it is particularly illuminating to analyse Shklar's work on political obligation because, as we know, at different points in her
Shklar's liberalism of fear is, as we have seen, an approach to political thought that ranks the vices in a particular way. She is, of course, in various ways a sceptic as well. Nonetheless, my thesis here is that her putting cruelty first among the vices in this way is evidence of a not insignificant degree of epistemological ambition. Although she is offering a sceptical alternative to political moralism, in one important respect Shklar's work is not all that different from that of its most representative figures, including Rawls and Mill
, oppressive, and cruel (Shklar 1957 , p. 97; 1964a , p. 169; 1989a , p. 30; 1993a , p. 183). However, in her early work she maintains that we owe obligations of justice even in such circumstances, and we can be faced with moral conflicts precisely in relation to these demands. In contrast, by the time of her mature work, in the 1980s and 1990s, she concludes that tyranny cancels obligations of justice. There are a number of distinct strands of argumentation evident in Shklar's mature position on tyranny. As we saw in the last chapter, she maintains
fascism, Laclau actively avoided including such a dimension in his theorizations of populism. The more recent advocacy of ‘a left populism’ by Chantal Mouffe is vulnerable to the same criticism. 1 The Institute's work provides an analysis of modern demagogy that speaks to this absence while the Gramscian tradition offers the prospect of a theoretical elaboration of the contingency of populist movements and their potential demagogic capture. In short, both speak to this book's focus
This chapter examines what I will call ‘the Gramscian tradition’. The work of Ernesto Laclau and Stuart Hall are the best known self-styled Gramscians in non-orthodox populism studies and their work on populism constitutes a kind of ‘de facto’ critical theory of populism. Laclau's more elaborated theory of populism was long ignored in orthodox populism studies but has recently begun to inform it. 1 Hall's conception of ‘authoritarian populism’ represents only a brief component of his work but
his life he signed his work with the surname Rottweiler. This seems an appropriate indicator of the stringent, even fearsome tone of some of his writings. English-speaking readers can usefully start on Adorno by consulting the essays translated in a volume, edited by J.M. Bernstein, entitled The Culture Industry . 1 These are for the most part recognisably ‘sociological’ pieces. But then go and read Adorno’s essays on the philosophers Hegel and Husserl, the baroque Minima Moralia or his writings on music. Here we have, obviously enough, Adorno the philosopher
5 Hegel: the beginning of aesthetic theory and the end of art Which Hegel? Hegel’s work has come in recent years to exemplify many of the choices facing contemporary philosophy. The changed status of Hegel can, though, seem rather odd, given the labyrinthine nature of his texts, the huge divergences between his interpreters from his own time until today, and the fact that some of the philosophers who now invoke him come from an analytical tradition noted for its insistence on a clarity not always encountered in Hegel himself. Even contemporary interpreters range
: 214). Much of the rich heritage of the Frankfurt School, such as the work of Fromm ( Chapter 6 ) and Marcuse ( Chapter 7 ), has been needlessly displaced. Today, a frosty boundary exists between scholars loyal to Honneth’s ‘perspectival monist’ social theory, and those invested in Frankfurt School research as conceived by its original proponents. To those of us sympathetic to
of political convictions and commitments (if one is a liberal) and one's work as a political theorist? I believe that question to be of fundamental importance to political thought as a discipline. At its heart, it is about where we draw the limits on our theoretical work. It is a question that we will have sufficient opportunity to reflect on throughout this book, and one that I return to again, in detail, in the concluding chapter. There are other questions raised by our referring to Shklar as a liberal thinker. For we must first ask, what is
, they see it as constructed through the operation of power. Here, Foucault's combination of power/knowledge succinctly demonstrates the symbiotic character of the relationship between these two. What we count as knowledge is the operation of power in some form or another. Foucault's work operates to question the notion of truth itself – seeing it as a product of social relations. The posthumanist move in social theory has focused on the complexity of social relations. This has raised questions about the status of knowledge in a different way. Here