Search results for "political philosophy"
showing 10 items of 77 documents
Thomas Hobbes on fear,mimesis,aisthesisand politics
2011
Hobbes's theory of fear has two major implications for his political theory. One implication is how men's mutual fear is the source of a commonwealth by institution. The second implication is that sovereign power is the source of fear, and that sovereign power also uses that fear to govern people. These two implications have not been analyzed fully in past studies. In a way, a sovereign captures mutual fear reigning in a multitude and transforming it into a political tool designed for government of the subjects. Possessing the right and power to cause death, a sovereign takes the place of God on earth. A sovereign has certain expectations of citizens: they should obey and honour the soverei…
The Foundations of Legal Systems
1995
The most important institution claiming political authority in modern societies is the State and its legal system. Both in legal and in political theory the questions which are traditionally held to be the most fundamental are centered around this claim.
Beasts, Human Beings, or Gods? Human Subjectivity in Medieval Political Philosophy
2016
Human beings are not only self-conscious minds but embodied and social beings, whose subjectivity is conditioned by their social surroundings. From this point of view, it is natural to suppose that the development and existence of a subject that is distinctively human requires contact with other people. The present contribution discusses medieval ideas concerning the intersubjective constitution of human being by looking at the medieval reception of two ideas, which Aristotle presents at the beginning of his Politics: (1) human beings are political animals by nature, which means that those who live outside of political communities due to their nature are either deficient or above humanity –…
Inclusive Values and the Righteousness of Life: The Foundation of Global Solidarity
2009
Many scholars have argued that unity of humankind can be established on the basis of some basic or core human values. Instead of engaging in a comparative empirical research, compiling lists of core values derived from different cultures, discuss their relevance for human fellowship, I examine the simple values of life that during the 1980s united people in Poland and made them to form the powerful civic movement, which was Solidarity. Today we live in a world that is fundamentally different from that before 1989. We are no longer divided by a global ideological struggle between communism and liberal democracy. The key issue today is not a bipolar division but globalization. My thesis is to…
The Politics of Utopia: Walter Pater’s “Lacedaemon”
2016
Walter Pater is not usually considered as a politically committed writer, neither is Aestheticism of which he was the gifted theoretician with The Renaissance (1873). Although the political commitments of the Aesthetic movement have been questioned over the last two decades, both by including women aesthetes, and by re-evaluating the movement’s dissemination among the middle classes, discussion of Pater’s political ideas is almost non-existent. His Plato and Platonism (1893) is however not so remote from politics since it discusses Plato’s political philosophy. In particular, “Lacedaemon”, the chapter devoted to Sparta, enables Pater to intervene in the political debate from an original sta…
Political Action Beyond Resistance: Arendt and "Revolutionary Spirit" in Egypt
2016
The article examines what it calls the "politics-as-resistance" frame in contemporary political theory, originating in the works of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. This way of organizing political experience is contrasted with Hannah Arendt's political thought, particularly her writings on revolutionary action. Arendt's often overlooked – and partly unpublished – passages on virtù and fortuna are further suggested as important additions to her thinking on action. I argue that Arendt's "world-centric" approach can illuminate certain aspects of political experience that remain dimmed in the more subject-oriented politics-as-resistance frame. Particular focus is paid to the austere notion o…
How do Members of Parliament View the Public Value of Public Service Media? The Case of Latvia
2013
Abstract The Development of public media in Latvia as a post-communist country has essentially been influenced by politicians. The political community has had consensus that certain reforms are necessary to ensure the development of public media given the changes in the communication space and its role in the facilitation of the strengthening of democracy, yet during the last fifteen years the political elite has not been able to come to a common agreement and to make decisions on systemic reforming and the development of public media. Since the communication environment has changed post digitalisation of television, the question about public media development and legitimisation has become …
Checks and balances and international openness
1991
In the course of a long digression within his famous inspection of Plato’s political philosophy, Karl Popper (1945: 121) argues that “the problem of politics” is the following: “How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?” Popper’s answer is: “the theory of checks and balances”, which he defines as the striving to establish “institutional control of the rulers by balancing their powers against other powers” (122). From that general approach to “the problem of politics”, it follows that democracy is definitely not the rule of the majority, or the sovereignty of the people (a conception that entails various paradoxe…
Democracy in Constituent Moments: Exploring the Spanish Constitutional Debate of 1931 through Political Theory and Conceptual History
2019
This paper aims to answer the question of why constituent moments are relevant to political theory. It hypothesises the Spanish constitutional debate of 1931 as a case of conceptual innovation in parliamentary politics by arguing that debates in constituent moments entail a special kind of parliamentary argumentation when new political regimes are established. There, all sorts of theoretical, normative, historical, and institutional aspects are discussed to deliberate on the future character and functioning of a political regime. From a methodological point of view, this analysis draws on the revision of arguments and political terms used by MPs during the Spanish constituent assembly of 19…
Deliberative Democracy, Active Citizenship and Critical Culture: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Contemporary Political Philosophy
2013
The aim of this paper is to defend an adequate reading of Aristotle´s deliberative rhetoric that allows us to understand practical rationalization as a process of interpretation of human actions. After the consideration of rhetoric as a general human ability that is indispensable for political coexistence, the impact of the Aristotelian rhetorical proposal is presented, not just as a defense of the importance of rhetoric in a democratic society, but also as a novel attempt to understand what it means to speak of practical rationality.