Abstract
74.252 ADAIR-TOTEFF, Christopher —
Hans Kelsen has been praised for his defense of democracy but that defense has also been criticized, most notably by Carl Schmitt. Leo Strauss was just as critical but his critique has gone unnoticed. Much of this neglect is because the relevant works remained unpublished. In one work Strauss contends that his conception of authority guarantees order and security whereas Kelsen’s notion of democracy leads to anarchy and chaos. This essay is intended to fill this gap by providing an examination of Strauss’ criticism of Kelsen’s democratic liberalism. [R]
74.253 ADALET, Begüm, et al. —
In October 2021, [the authors] met with Inés Valdez to discuss her groundbreaking Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft (Cambridge U. P., 2019). Our Zoom conversation began with a series of opening remarks from the participants, which were followed by a response from Valdez. We also had the opportunity to discuss the important questions that were raised by the text, such as the relationship between transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, Black Internationalism, and Pan-Africanism, as well as questions of normative and contextualist interpretation, and the scholarship on Kant, Du Bois, and cosmopolitanism more broadly. As a result of its multidisciplinary significance and fluency, Transnational Cosmopolitanism occasioned a wide-ranging conversation, drawing on literatures in political theory, philosophy, international relations, disciplinary history, Black studies and history, and anti-colonial thought. [R]
74.254 ALFARO ALTAMIRANO, Adriana —
Using insights from two of the major proponents of the hermeneutical approach, Paul Ricoeur and Hannah Arendt — who both recognized the ethicopolitical importance of narrative and acknowledged some of the dangers associated with it — I will flesh out the worry that “narrativity” in political theory has been overly attentive to story-telling and not heedful enough of story listening. More specifically, even if, as Ricoeur says, “narrative intelligence” is crucial for self-understanding, that does not mean, as he invites us to, that we should always seek to develop a “narrative identity” or become, as he says, “the narrator of our own life story.” I offer that, perhaps inadvertently, such an injunction might turn out to be detrimental to the “art of listening.” [R, abr.]
74.255 ARNOLD, Kathleen R. —
This essay focuses on the contemporary relevance of Hannah Arendt’s work insofar as it relates to US racism, imperialism, and migration. While Arendt denied that US migration policy and racism were linked or even similar to exercises of racialized sovereignty, totalitarian tactics, and mass displacement in Europe, I suggest that her analyses help us to understand important racialized dialectics between prison and camp, citizen and stateless, and external displacement and internal displacement. In effect, this essay suggests that many of Arendt’s analyses of racism, migration, and camps are more relevant to US history and contemporary US reality than she did or would have admitted. Arendt’s work importantly suggested that the stateless were so rightless that they lacked even criminal rights. [R, abr.]
74.256 ASHCROFT, Caroline —
This paper identifies an overlapping critique of technology in the work of four influential Cold War political thinkers: Adorno, Horkheimer, Arendt and Ellul, illustrating how a widely shared critique of technology mediated much thinking about political modernity during this era. Modern technology possesses a certain dynamism, they argue, and can no longer be considered a neutral ‘tool’ but rather a process by which modern politics is being continuously reshaped. Technology, as such, is a critical problem of modernity for these thinkers. Focusing particularly on their analyses of the impact of modern media and communication technologies, the article highlights some of the ways in which technology is seen to influence contemporary politics, specifically through the use of propaganda and the shifting relationship between the public and private in modernity. Whilst technology does not wholly determine politics, it has done much to shape it, these theorists believe, and the modern age presents a politics which is uniquely unfree, they contend, largely because of the cumulative effect of modern technology. Thinking in terms of technology, therefore, is key to understanding the claim, central to the work of each of these political thinkers, that the character of modernity is essentially hostile to freedom. [R]
74.257 AVGOUSTI, Andreas —
In this article, I analyze the role the household (oikos) plays in Isocrates through an exegesis of the author’s letters to his erstwhile student and current monarch of Salamis of Cyprus, Nicocles. The monarch’s household has a threefold role in the relationship between the elite ruler and his subjects. First, as the locus of his ancestors and their achievements, it offers competitors to Nicocles to be surpassed and a known standard for his subjects to judge their ruler. Second, as the source of the monarch’s public outlay, the household is a means by which Nicocles can appear magnificent; at the same time, however, he should be wary lest his subjects judge him ostentatious. Third, Nicocles invites his subjects to judge his conjugal behavior, offering it as evidence of his moderation. I conclude my argument with a challenge to an interpretation of the relationship between the few and the many as a contract; rather, this relationship is better characterized through the metaphor of service (therapeia) drawn from the household. Isocratean political thought treats private and public domains as continuous with one another, regarding participation in political institutions as neither necessary nor sufficient to achieving good political judgment. [R]
74.258 BLANCHARD, Alexander —
This article introduces the idea of contextual shift for refining understanding of use and meaning of the concept of violence. Much theoretical work on violence today begins from the recognition that ‘violence’ is inextricably entangled with, and used to contest, the values that form the subject-matter of politics. Making sure that the concept of violence remains responsive to its real-world instances therefore requires tracing the way it is strategically appropriated and used by political actors. This article argues that a focus on contextual shift provides greater analytical purchase on these uses by showing how structural transformations open up new opportunities for using the concept of violence as actors seek to navigate contradictory commitments. The explanatory value of contextual shift is presented through an account of strategic appropriations of ‘violence’ by revolutionary actors during the Long 1960s, with particular attention paid to the uses made by Frantz Fanon and Stokely Carmichael. [R]
74.259 BOYD, Eric —
This paper demonstrates the role that Judith Butler’s concept of derealisation has to play in the analysis of slow and structural violence within extractivism. I deploy derealisation to examine the denial of public mourning and memorialisation of the evacuated and ruined former city centre of Kiruna, Sweden, by the mining company LKAB. Kiruna is home to the largest underground iron-ore mine in the world. The ore-body extends over two kilometres directly below Kiruna. As a result of ongoing mining practices threatening the stability of the city, Kiruna is currently in the process of a 20-year resettlement. By contrasting the roles of enforced silence and silence as a means of creating a collective, often counter-hegemonic narrative, I highlight the bifurcated roles silence plays in Kiruna, speaking to the simultaneity of structural violence and the emergence of resistance as slow. Resistance here is argued to be emergent in the desire for my informants to collectively memorialise the ruination of the Deformation Zone, the former city centre now owned by LKAB. The fieldwork for this research was conducted ethnographically in Kiruna between September 2020 and August 2021, using semi- and un-structured interviews and an abductive approach. [R] [First article of a thematic issue on " Power, resistance and social change". See also Abstr. 74.244, 248, 804, 917, 1418]
74.260 BURGESS, J. Peter —
A public debate has raged in Europe and the Americas for the last year, almost as predictable in its substance as in its form: Has the suppression of individual liberties, in the form of lockdowns, curfews, imposed maskwearing, and vaccination justified by and indeed legitimated by the sanitary crisis? On virtually all levels of public debate, positions have been formulated on the right (or responsibility) of public authorities to require citizens to take measures in the name of their own personal health and the health of others. In International Studies, biopolitics has become the go-to concept for both analyzing and politicizing the COVID-19 pandemic. This article draws out the implications of this alternative conceptualization of biopolitics for the analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 74.275]
74.261 BURLES, Regan —
As the origin story of the present world political order the globalization of international society serves as a unifying frame for the discipline of international relations. This paper considers the consequences of the shift from the ‘expansion’ to the ‘globalization’ of international society in relation to two main texts: Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society and Tim Dunne and Christian Reus-Smit’s The Globalization of International Society. The analysis shows that Bull’s conception of world order depends on a key distinction between aggregate and system which marks the difference between an aggregate of local political orders and a systematically unified world political order (a global international system). Because recent histories of the globalization of international society remain guided by Bull’s distinction, they are unable to explain this transition in historical terms without transforming the global international order from the explanandum of the globalization of international society to its explanans. As a result, global histories of the globalization of international society grant a global international system a structural permanence the original expansion story was meant to contest. In doing so they change profoundly the kind of questions that can be asked regarding the origins, character, and future of political order on earth. [R]
74.262 CROCE, Mariano ; SALVATORE, Andrea —
This article offers an in-depth analysis of Carl Schmitt’s social ontology to explain how and why he came to reject exceptionalist decisionism. To this end, the authors unearth the considerable shifts in terms of social ontology that paved the way for this conceptual turn. The gist of their argument is that Schmitt’s Political Theology (1922) espoused a Hobbesian conception of the political as the possibility condition for stable patters of social interaction. Though the first three chapters of Political Theology were originally designed for and published in a posthumous Festschrift, for Max Weber, his understanding of the social was indebted to a Hobbesian legacy. Nonetheless, shortly thereafter, he began to revise his conception of the social and to put stress on the organisational dynamics of social institutions as independent of there being a political authority. From 1927 through to 1950, Schmitt never got back to his 1922 exceptionalist view of politics and rather sought to make sense of how the state could and should draw the contents of the legal order from the normative life of social institutions. [R]
74.263 ENROTH, Henrik —
This article is a critique of the notion of post-truth. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, I argue that the epistemological crisis suggested by the notion of post-truth is epiphenomenal to a more general crisis of authority, a crisis that is poorly understood in the literature. I also argue that revisiting Arendt’s account of authority can help us elucidate the vexed dynamics of authority in modern society, as well as the dynamics behind its current crisis. The post-truth situation is a loss of authority that is political before it presents as epistemological. Effectively addressing this situation, I conclude, is a much more challenging and complex proposition than what is suggested in the literature on post-truth. [R]
74.264 FULLER, Steve —
The post-truth condition is just as much about naming a meta-game as winning it. This condition can be tracked across Western intellectual history from the Homeric epics to popular culture. The common thread is that players are more likely to succeed in this meta-game if they have a certain consistency of character, which Thomas More called “integrity.” The presence of integrity means that the historical losers have often had an advantage in defining for subsequent generations the name of the game because the steadfastness of their characters may make them be regarded as the agents of history, for better or worse. Further, naming the game tends to be stabilized by a variety of mental and material conditions, including “modal power” — control over what people think is and is not possible. Modal power is related to both Machiavellian politics and Kantian transcendentalism, and to the phenomenon of “truthiness.” The character of the post-truth player is epitomized by Thomas More, the “man for all seasons,” who remained consistent as he moved between multiple games, and ultimately to his execution. [R]
74.265 GOODMAN, Rob —
Drawing on evidence from W. E. B. Du Bois’s education, I argue that rhetoric is an important, yet overlooked, source of his concept of double consciousness. Du Bois transposed ideas of a divided self as a source of both power and anguish from classical rhetoric to the experience of racial oppression. I show how rhetoric supplies the ‘causal mechanism’ of double consciousness; readThe Souls of Black Folk as superimposed addresses to doubly- and singly-conscious audiences; and argue that Du Bois’s 1930s turn to black-separatist cooperativism represents an attempted escape from double consciousness — and a recognition of rhetoric’s limits under systemic injustice. [R]
74.266 GREY, Alexander —
In 2019, Victor Davis Hason revived Popper’s autarkic reading of Plato to justify the foreign policy of President Donald Trump, suggesting Trumpism aligns with Plato’s project. This modern application compelled our re-examination of the autarkic tradition. Yet, the issues surrounding this false tradition did not end with Trump’s 2021 unseating; this use of Plato reveals broader, perennial questions around abusing philosophy for electoral ends. Building on the work of Carol Atack and Allan Bloom, we unearth a tradition of moderate cosmopolitanism and suggest this cosmopolitan trend is the more accurate tradition of Plato and thus should be his enduring legacy. [R]
74.267 HALL, Edward —
This study seeks to correct several prominent misreadings of Judith Shklar’s liberalism of fear in recent scholarship. By exploring and developing overlooked elements of Shklar’s thought, I argue that the liberalism of fear motivates a perspective on the political world that can spur more clear-eyed political reflection on concrete realities in order to improve the plight of the weak and the powerless. I illustrate that this fatally compromises the interpretative line recently defended by critics who position themselves to Shklar’s left that regards the liberalism of fear as a stifling form of Cold War liberalism. [R]
74.268 HERZOG, Lisa —
The legitimacy of putting public activities — such as providing education and welfare, but also running prisons or providing military services — into the hands of private companies is hotly contested. In The Privatized State [Princeton U. P., 2020], Chiara Cordelli puts forward an original argument, from a Kantian perspective, for why it is problematic: it replaces the omnilateral will of all citizens, which is realized through public institutions, with the unilateral will of agents to whom these activities have been delegated. While adding an important dimension to the debate, I am not fully convinced that private institutions always fail to realize the omnilateral will, and that this is the only, or always most central, normative problem of privatization. Instead, many concrete cases of privatization seem normatively overdetermined in their wrongness. Nonetheless, Cordelli’s brilliant discussion invites us to rethink these phenomena from an important angle and helps us to better understand what an ideal civil service would look like. [R]
74.269 HIRUTA, Kei —
Discussing An Outline of a Theory of Civilization by the Japanese thinker Fukuzawa Yukichi, this essay shows how theorists of liberal nationalism might draw on “non-Western” theoretical resources to enrich their normative ideas and better appreciate their own tradition. I argue that Fukuzawa’s work represents an alternative strand of liberal nationalism that complements its mainstream counterpart pioneered by David Miller, Yael Tamir, and others. More specifically, I argue that Fukuzawa’s contributions help us reconsider three central claims made by his more mainstream peers: (1) cosmopolitanism poses the most important threat to liberal nationalism, (2) the strength of liberal nationalism lies in its perceptiveness about ordinary people’s sense of national belonging, and (3) liberal nationalism emerged in mid-19th-c. Europe and spread elsewhere in the age of decolonization. [R, abr.]
74.270 HULTGREN, John —
W.E.B. Du Bois’ theorization of the ‘wages of whiteness’ has factored prominently into recent scholarship examining the roots of Trumpism and resurgent right-wing movements in the United States. How might the ‘wages of whiteness’ shed light on contemporary anti-environmental politics? To provide insight into this question, I put Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America, as well as more recent work in whiteness studies, into conversation with environmental and social histories of the mid-nineteenth century frontier. I observe that struggles over access to and control over land and natural resources, and anger over exposure to polluted air and water, were central to class and racial formation during an historical period that continues to weigh heavily on contemporary American politics. I argue that understanding the origins and evolution of the natural wages of whiteness can help us develop strategies for combating anti-environmentalism and mobilizing in pursuit of environmental justice. [R]
74.271 ILOTT, Luke —
Michel Foucault was an energetic activist, yet his bleak depiction of totalizing power and his refusal to make normative claims have led many to judge that Discipline and punish (1975) did not sustain a positive political project. This article offers a new, contextualist account of Foucault’s political purposes by reading Discipline and Punish as a tool for coalition-building through historical worldmaking. Addressing the division and marginalization of movements on France’s “alternative left” like feminism and gay liberation, Foucault wove together their differentiated concerns into a shared historical world. His apparently demoralizing identification of the same forms of power everywhere in fact revealed new possibilities for alliance. Focusing on Foucault’s unifying historical narratives reveals a positive project beyond the negative, denaturalizing “critique of power” we usually associate with his political thought. Foucault’s coalitional work of worldmaking may offer a model for genealogical political theory today. [R]
74.272 JACOBSEN, Jeppe T. —
Microsoft is making strategic attempts to change the US government’s practices of exploiting technical vulnerabilities in Microsoft software for military and intelligence purposes. Microsoft’s strategy has much in common with one of the most common strategies proposed by the IR literature on norm-entrepreneurship in terms of exposing the contradictions between the government’s ideals and practices. The article examines Microsoft’s strategy through Lacanian psychoanalysis and suggests that it fails to work as intended, not because the US public or those in government remains unaware of the contradictions, but because the strategy is unable to address the existing desire to transgress the cyber ideals. Lacan’s formula for transformation, the Analyst Discourse, provides an alternative framework for examining norm-entrepreneurial potential in light of such transgressions. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 74.275]
74.273 KARKOUR, Haro L. —
A recent debate emerged on the possibility of rendering nationalism compatible with addressing the climate crisis. E. H. Carr’s analysis of nationalism and global reform is relevant to this debate. Carr’s analysis highlights a negative relationship between nationalism and peace in the international order; a relationship that extends to, and is exacerbated by, climate change. This analysis is relevant to the contemporary debate on nationalism and climate change in three ways. First, it shows that competition over resources, border control and conflict are likely to increase in the climate age. Second, it explains the failure of UN-led attempts to address the climate crisis. Third, it problematises mid-way solutions to render nationalism compatible with addressing the climate crisis – whether these are realist, liberal institutionalist or green nationalist. Carr’s work however does not simply present a pessimistic outlook on the climate crisis; it also offers a positive lens to think of the crisis as an opportunity. Times of crisis to Carr are times of opportunity for humanity to re-define its sense of purpose. The emergence of issuespecific climate movements and sector-specific green projects is testimony to the presence of this opportunity today to move beyond nationalism, towards multi-scalar identity frameworks. [R]
74.274 KIM Sungmoon —
After a decades-long debate on the compatibility between and human rights, Confucian political theorists now seem to generally agree that the fallback theory of rights provides an account of human rights acceptable to both sides of the debate. Interestingly, some Confucian political meritocrats make a distinction between non-political human rights and political rights, and argue that while the former are subject to the fallback theory of rights, the latter are subject to the so-called “service conception” of rights, which authorizes political hierarchy among citizens. After identifying the irresolvable tension between the fallback theory of rights and the service conception of political rights as a critical threat to Confucian political meritocracy’s internal stability, this article suggests that Confucian political meritocracy can overcome the instability problem only by taking seriously the political implications of the fallback theory of rights, which entails the endorsement of the right to political participation. [R]
74.275 KINNVALL, Catarina ; SVENSSON, Ted —
We read the COVID-19 pandemic from a Lacanian perspective, in which trauma and ontological insecurity are at the heart of the analysis. Using a psychoanalytical approach allows us to grasp why the most common response to the pandemic consisted of intensified commitments to home, nationalism, and exclusionary bordering practices and, in effect, a return to geopolitical notions of “sovereignty.” This can be read in light of Lacan’s discussion of memory as a form of repetition, implying that any attempt to construe history in terms of a coherent narrative misses the unconscious, traumatic compulsion to repeat. In light of this, we consider populist responses to the pandemic as well as how the pandemic has worked as a “great unequalizer.” [R, abr.] [Introduction to a series of articles on "Interrogating the void: Lacanian psychoanalysis in International Relations", edited by Andreja ZEVNIK and Moran M. MANDELBAUM. See Abstr. 74.260, 272, 280, 282, 292, 293, 297]
74.276 LENCI, Mauro —
In 1790, Edmund Burke was among the first to brand the French representative government as democracy. Revolutionary France was generating the spectre of ancient Greece and that of direct participation in government. In his battle Burke went beyond these rhetorical tropes and transformed the concept of democracy into a complex polemic target. In fact, he analyzed the features of the emerging political order highlighting the dangers and weaknesses therein and demonizing it completely. In so doing, Burke ascribed a wealth of new meanings to the idea of democracy, going beyond the experience of the ancients and contributing to a wholly negative assessment of the Revolution that posed it as the antithesis to the gallant civilization of the Old Regime. Burke radically rejected the idea that the right to vote could be based on an abstract natural right and criticized the so-called ‘revolt of enterprising talents’ in all fields, because it would have led to the destruction of aristocracy and religion. He also described the religious dimension of the democratic project, which turned democracy into a secularized religion and addressed the issue of power legitimacy: a democratic order posed dire and unpredictable dangers and offered no guarantees of surviving over time. [R]
74.277 LIU Licheng ; PANG Xun —
This paper proposes a Bayesian multilevel spatio-temporal model with a time-varying spatial autoregressive coefficient to estimate temporally heterogeneous network interdependence. To tackle the classic reflection problem, we use multiple factors to control for confounding caused by latent homophily and common exposures. We develop a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm to estimate parameters and adopt Bayesian shrinkage to determine the number of factors. Tests on simulated and empirical data show that the proposed model improves identification of network interdependence and is robust to misspecification. Our method is applicable to various types of networks and provides a simpler and more flexible alternative to coevolution models. [R]
74.278 LOIZIDES, Antis —
The reception of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869) has changed considerably during the last half century. In the increasingly positive reading and re-reading of the book, one criticism persists unchallenged: Mill’s argument was universalistic. Not only did his analysis posit a uniform trajectory of both the subjection and the liberation of women, [but] Mill failed to acknowledge the interrelation of identity and society by adhering to an abstract view of persons. [However,] Mill’s legal prescriptions were not merely a symptom of a liberal theory of progress. He thought the unobstructed participation in the public life of the community the only way out of the vicious circle of habituation and oppression for women. This paper argues that his conclusion was grounded on ethological analyses of English national character, legal history, social institutions, and practices. [R, abr.]
74.279 LONG, Elly —
Augustine is not included among the many ancient thinkers that Martha Nussbaum draws upon for her cosmopolitan project. This is surprising both because Augustine is often read as a cosmopolitan and because Nussbaum engages with and critiques him on other related matters, particularly the purported ‘otherworldliness’ of this thought. This article remedies this lack, putting Augustine into conversation with Nussbaum’s cosmopolitanism. By investigating Augustine’s view of contingency generally and the contingency of place specifically, I show that Augustine’s thought supports both universal ethical concern of the sort Nussbaum praises and particular attachments to place which Nussbaum has been criticized for lacking. In addition, Augustine’s view of contingency avoids the ironism of Richard Rorty’s patriotism, which Nussbaum also criticizes. Augustine sees more clearly than both Nussbaum and Rorty how particular and universal commitments need not be competitive. Therefore, Augustine is not quite the cosmopolitan thinker that he is often recognized to be, but neither is he the severely otherworldly thinker that Nussbaum reads him as. [R]
74.280 MAHER, Henry —
To theorize the enduring appeal of neoliberalism, this article uses Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic concept of fantasy. For Lacan, a fantasy is a narrative that structures our experience of reality, organizing our pursuit of desire. I argue historical neoliberal thinkers constructed a fantasy narrative in which the “free market” functions as the crucial object of desire. The fantasy determines a priori that all historical and material progress is a result of the free market, and that any failings can be blamed on its binary opposite, the transgressive state. To illustrate the role of fantasy in preserving and reanimating neoliberalism, I examine neoliberal fantasy logic at the G20 leader’s summits organized in response to the Global Financial Crisis. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 74.275]
74.281 MAMET, Elliot —
Incarceration served as a primary apparatus by which abolition democracy was defeated after Reconstruction. Carceral institutions — such as the penitentiary, the convict-lease system, and the chain gang — functioned to demarcate the racial limits of citizenship and to impede equal political power. This article turns to W. E. B. Du Bois to argue that incarceration constrains democratic political equality. Turning to Du Bois’s treatment of crime and imprisonment in works including The Philadelphia Negro (1899), “The Spawn of Slavery” (1901), and The Souls of Black Folk (1903), alongside archival material, I situate incarceration in Du Bois’s democratic thought. According to Du Bois, carceral institutions bounded ideas of full citizenship, fueled panic over Black “criminality,” fomented feelings of inferiority, and hampered the possibility for abolition democracy, a multiracial, multiclass movement committed to worker democracy and a future rid of slavery and subjugation. [R, abr.]
74.282 MANDELBAUM, Moran M. —
Interpellation, the production and hailing of subjectivities, is key to poststructuralist IR theory and yet with some notable exceptions interpellation/hailing as an analytical concept remains somewhat undertheorized. This paper presents a Lacanian-Žižekian psychoanalytical theorization of interpellation in IR, while engaging with the ontology and epistemology of belonging. More specifically, this paper develops four major psychoanalytical concepts: void/lack, fantasy, jouissance, and desire, as it argues that void/lack at the subjective and objective levels renders interpellation possible and destabilises it, thus accounting for the im/possibility of belonging. This paper illustrates the psychoanalytical framework of interpellation by analyzing national-populism as manifested in the Brexit discourse in the UK as well as the interpellation in homonationalism. [R] [See Abstr. 74.275]
74.283 MORRISSEY, Christopher S. —
A typology of sacrifice is applied to the study of Roger Scruton’s religious philosophy, in order to contemplate the ways in which dissidence against totalitarianism can become a positive form of self-giving. The mimetic theory of René Girard can help us to see how totalitarianism creates a sacrificial crisis by demanding, on the one hand, that individuals sacrifice themselves for the regime, and yet, on the other hand, empties such sacrifices of the type of self-giving that makes a sacrifice not just efficacious but also nonviolent. The deprivations that a regime inflicts on its subjects, for example with respect to education and careers, are enforced forms of sacrifice. The difficult question Scruton confronts is how any regenerative selfgiving is possible among people who in their isolation and powerlessness have nothing to give. [R, abr.]
74.284 MULIERI, Alessandro —
Even if political theorists rarely read him, Italian political thinker, Marsilius of Padua, presents one of the most radical theories of the multitude prior to Machiavelli and Spinoza. This article reconstructs Marsilius of Padua’s political theory of the multitude in his Defender of Peace and pays special attention to two main sources from which Marsilius frames his theory: Aristotle and Ibn Rushd. Compared to Aristotle, Marsilius advances a more epistemic view of the multitude as a lawmaker. Marsilius’ ideas on the multitude also depend on Ibn Rushd’s theory of collective knowledge and, to a certain extent, on his position on natural law. [R]
74.285 MURR, Andreas ; TRAUNMÜLLER, Richard ; GILL, Jeff —
When analyzing data, researchers are often less interested in the parameters of statistical models than in functions of these parameters such as predicted values. Here we show that Bayesian simulation with Markov-Chain Monte Carlo tools makes it easy to compute these quantities of interest with their uncertainty. We illustrate how to produce customary and relatively new quantities of interest such as variable importance ranking, posterior predictive data, difficult marginal effects, and model comparison statistics to allow researchers to report more informative results. [R]
74.286 PICCOLO, Samuel —
This article recovers the thought of Viola Cordova, the first Indigenous woman to receive a PhD in philosophy in the US. By unearthing her unpublished dissertation, a comparative study of Navajo philosophy and that of Benedict de Spinoza, I argue that Cordova’s work is both a significant Indigenous engagement with Spinoza and an important methodological contribution to comparative political theory (CPT). I show that her distinct method for understanding and comparing philosophic paradigms involves asking three questions: What is the world? What is the human in the world? How should we act? I provide an account of Cordova’s interpretation of Navajo thought, Spinoza, and her comparison between the two. I argue that Cordova’s method indicates that we should pay attention to the metaphysical and ontological content of Indigenous thinking. [R, abr.]
74.287 PLOOF, Rebecca Aili —
An important branch of environmental theory frames the climate crisis as a moral problem in need of a moral solution: human hubris is responsible for environmental degradation and must be atoned for through humility. Politically indeterminate, however, such argumentation is vulnerable to depoliticizing and mal-politicizing capture. In an effort to fend off the threat of either, this paper turns to the history of political thought and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who theorized the environment as both a moral and a political domain. I examine how Rousseau understood the availability of republican self-rule to be contingent both on the natural environment and on the relationship we construct with it such that freedom, in his words, is not automatically ‘a fruit of every Clime.’ This is the case, he suggests, because of the environment’s intersection with political economy and political culture. [R, abr.]
74.288 SLOTHUUS, Lukas —
What does it mean to disagree with people with whom you usually agree? How should political actors concerned with emancipation approach internal disagreement? In short, how should we go about critiquing not our enemies or adversaries but those with whom we share emancipatory visions? I outline the notion of comradely critique as a solution to these questions. I go through a series of examples of how and when critique should differ depending on its addressee, drawing on Jodi Dean’s figure of the comrade. I develop a contrast with its neighbours the ally and the partisan, thus identifying key elements of comradely critique: good faith, equal humanity, equal standing, solidarity, collaboration, common purpose and dispelling fatalism. I then analyse Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse’s private correspondence on the 1960s German student movement as an illustration of (imperfect) comradely critique. I conclude by identifying a crucial tension about publicness and privateness. [R]
74.289 TESINI, Mario ; ZAMBERNARDI, Lorenzo —
Alessandro Manzoni is chiefly known for The Betrothed. What is less wellknown is Manzoni’s interest in writing history which in later life would bend his literary talent to reconstructing and analysing the French Revolution. Incomplete and published posthumously in 1889, Manzoni’s last text appeared as The French Revolution of 1789 and the Italian Revolution of 1859: Comparative Observations. While Manzoni’s literary and poetic works won him the reputation of being among the greatest writers of the nineteenth century, the posthumous book on the French Revolution sank rapidly into oblivion. This article, while pointing out certain shortcomings in Manzoni’s interpretation, argues that his analysis is to be taken seriously by all scholars interested in the thorny history of the French Revolution. In particular, Manzoni’s narration concentrates on unveiling the political mechanics that link delegitimization of the old monarchical order with the ensuing power vacuum and, eventually, with anarchy and the Terror. In his opinion the latter was no accident of history, but the outcome of previous events, especially the political void created by destroying the government without managing to set up a new political order. [R, abr.]
74.290 THAKKAR, Jonny —
This paper considers the relationship between the critique of moneymaking that Aristotle develops in Book I of the Politics and the rest of his social and political theory. I argue that there are several places where Aristotle ought to have drawn out the consequences of the former for the latter, and that his failure to do so reveals something about the deep structure of his way of thinking about political life. In short, Aristotle’s account of economic life is constrained by his political ontology, according to which a polity consists in a particular arrangement and distribution of offices. [R]
74.291 THALER, Mathias —
A common charge against utopianism is that any attempt to create blueprints for a better future disregards a basic fact: humans’ proclivity for failure. In response, defenders of social dreaming have argued that failure can become generative, once we abandon the perfectionism that ostensibly inheres in utopian visions. Building on this revaluation, the paper applies a crucial lesson from engineering and design studies — that often artificial failure modes are required to enhance the safety of tools and machines. To flesh out this point, I turn to utopian fiction and discuss Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital-trilogy, which rejects technooptimism about our climate-changed world, yet hails the transformative potential of an anti-capitalist scientific community. Ultimately, the paper claims that, if we cannot have success in addressing the climate emergency without committing serious mistakes, then one (but clearly not the only) path forward is to imaginatively prefigure the faultlines along which ecomodernist dreams for a “good Anthropocene” might rupture. [R]
74.292 TOLIS, Valeria —
I propose a return to Jacques Lacan; I develop a Lacanian discourse-analysis (LDA) as one possible method in IR and demonstrate its potential by sketching out the case of climate change policy within the EU. Lacan’s theory of the four discourses as conceptual “mind maps” informs a method of discourse-analysis enabling researchers to empirically investigate how a hegemonic discourse can be challenged and potentially subverted. Via the case study of the energy efficiency policy in the EU, I first illustrate how an LDA allows us to investigate climate knowledge and the authority of the discourse. Then, by looking at how energy efficiency is spoken in the enunciation, I expose the excess of meaning produced as an effect of language, which “fractures” the discourse. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 74.275]
74.293 VALLE, Luiz —
This article presents a sympathetic critique of the concept of “queer” operative in the subfield of Queer International Relations from a psychoanalytic perspective. I first reconstruct queer IR in relation to disciplinary IR and queer theory, and offer an appraisal of the current state of the field’s division between LGBT+ theorists and queer theorists. I then consider Cynthia Weber’s recent work and suggest that the boundary between the two camps of queer IR is precarious in that both require and presuppose an opposition to some concept of the straight world. I suggest that, thus construed, the form of the queer/straight distinction approximates that of the mirror stage Jacques Lacan theorized in the 1930s. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 74.275]
74.294 VECCHIO, Antonio Del —
This article considers how Grotius’ ideas on war have mirrored the nexus between the construction of a territorialized order of sovereign states, the emergence of a world-wide system of exchange and accumulation, and the dynamics of imperial expansion. It will be argued that in order to understand the scope and the ambivalences of the jurist’s multifaceted account of the laws of war and his dealings with the traditional literature on just war, it is necessary to elucidate the spatial frameworks underlying his theory, as well as the complex and global geography of power existing in the early seventeenth century. [R]
74.295 VEROVŠEK, Peter J. —
Recent developments have highlighted the tension between democracy and late capitalist economics. In the wake of the Great Recession, international market forces have increasingly taken de facto control of politics. My basic thesis is that a modified version of Jürgen Habermas’ colonization thesis, which opposes the takeover of social and political life by the forces of power (administration) and money (economics), productively conceptualizes these developments. I argue that this framework can help to both diagnose and combat the dangers associated with the overexpansion of functional systemic forces, as well as the broader instrumentalization that they promote. By drawing on his political writings on the future of the European Union after the crisis of the Eurozone, I oppose interpretations of Habermas as a pacified liberal by demonstrating that he shares Karl Marx’s commitment to combatting naturalized views of economics and material reproduction as a force that lie outside of human control. [R]
74.296 WARE, Alan —
During the winter of 2022-3, three of the most influential individuals in the development of empirical political science in Europe, died. All had been active in research between at least the early 1960s and the present century. David Butler had pioneered, especially, the study of electoral behaviour and particularly in the UK. Jean Blondel had founded the outstanding Department of Government at Essex University and he was one of the principal academics responsible for the creation and subsequent flourishing of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR). Peter Pulzer not only published important comparative work on European politics, but he also supervised doctoral theses on topics beyond Europe’s own borders. This essay discusses their respective roles and contributions in the founding of a discipline that was only newly forming when they started their own research during the 1950s. [R]
74.297 ZEVNIK, Andreja —
The summer of 2020 saw a global mobilization protesting the murder of George Floyd, during which statues glorifying white supremacy were toppled. Drawing on the narratives surrounding the removal of the Colston statue in Bristol and the Confederacy statues in New Orleans and Charlottesville, the paper examines the role of statues in the construction of political identities and social fantasies through Lacan’s theory of anxiety. For Lacan, anxiety tells us what subjects identify as threatening or familiar is not a reflection of objective circumstances but individual desires. By proposing the concepts of working against anxiety and working with anxiety, the paper examines (1) fantasies that aim to re-establish the old narratives and identities that were challenged in the process of statue removal and (2) practices that dwell in the moment of anxiety in an attempt to repair historical violences. [R, abr.] [See Abstr. 74.275]