II Political Thought and Theory / Théorie et Pensée Politiques
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00208345221142063 |
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
784
II
POLITICAL THOUGHT AND THEORY
THÉORIE ET PENSÉE POLITIQUES
72.7155 BŁESZNOWSKI, Bartłomiej — The self as a multitude: Ed-
ward Abramowski’s social philosophy and the politics of
cooperativism in Poland at the turn of the 20th century.
European Journal of Political Theory 21(4), Oct. 2022 : 692-
714.
The article aims to analyse the thought of Edward Abramowski — a Polish
philosopher, pioneer of psychology and theorist of the socialist coopera-
tive movement. It attempts to reconstruct the impact that his social thought
and his philosophical anthropology have had on the political activity of
Polish cooperativism. In keeping with Michael Freeden’s thesis that an ide-
ologist translates philosophical concepts into political practice, the author
sees Abramowski as a thoroughly modern thinker who opened an alterna-
tive ideological path to the great political narratives of the day. The article
points out the originality of the Polish philosopher’s proposition for the so-
cialist movement, the goal being to achieve the political emancipation of
the popular classes through economic activity undertaken by grassroots
cooperatives operating outside state structures. The philosophical-socio-
logical concept of ‘fraternity’ or ‘pure socialization’ leads Abramowski to
formulate a doctrine of ‘stateless socialism’, in which popular political or-
ganizations use primordial, human-based cooperation to create new op-
portunities for community life. [R, abr.]
72.7156 BOCHSLER, Daniel — Duverger and the territory: explain-
ing deviations from the two-party-competition-law. Journal
of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties 32(3), 2022 : 501-520.
According to Duverger’s Law, plurality voting systems lead to two-party
competition. However, many results of national parliamentary elections
deviate from this rule. In contrast to previous research, which argues that
in countries with territorial splits, regional two-party systems aggregate to
national multi-party systems, this article shows that this explanation ac-
counts for only a small proportion of the empirical exceptions to Duverger’s
Law. Instead, this article distinguishes three explanations for Non-Duver-
gerian outcomes at the national level. The three mechanisms relate to the
level of electoral constituencies, to the aggregation of constituency results,
and to the interaction between constituency- and aggregation effects. This
article assesses the explanatory power of each of the three explanations
on an extensive sample of election results from plurality vote systems,
linking national to constituency-level results. [R]
72.7157 BRUNSTETTER, Daniel R. — What reading Montaigne dur-
ing the Second World War can teach us about just war.
Journal of International Political Theory 18(3), Oct. 2022 : 355-
374.
Revisionist just war scholarship employs the rigors of analytical philosophy
to make arguments about the deep morality of war. Accepting the individ-
ual and cosmopolitan are paramount to making sense of war as many re-
visionists do, this essay looks outside the just war canon to Montaigne —
a sixteenth century French humanist hailed for his exploration of the self
and cosmopolitan musings — for alternative insights. It explores how Mon-
taigne was read during the Second World War by three intellectuals to
make sense of war: Stefan Zweig, Jean Guéhenno, and François Mauriac.
While Montaigne’s skepticism and turn to the self as an act of preservation
was, in the 1930s, rejected as a strategy to combat rising authoritarianism
in Europe by philosophers such as Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt
school, the thinkers studied here shed light on Montaigne as a source of
active humanism based in reflective action that leads to Resistance. [R,
abr.]
72.7158 CAMPBELL, Chris — The rhetoric of Hobbes's translation
of Thucydides. Review of Politics 84(1), Winter 2022 : 1-24.
In several key passages in Thomas Hobbes's understudied translation of
Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, Hobbes's Pericles directs
audiences to distrust rhetoric in favor of calculative self-interest, inward-
focused affective states, and an epistemic reliance on sovereignty.
Hobbes's own intervention via his translation of Thucydides involves sim-
ilar rhetorical moves. By directing readers to learn from Thucydides,
Hobbes conceals his own rhetorical appeals in favor of sovereignty while
portraying rhetoric undermining sovereignty as manipulative, self-serving,
and representative of the entire category of “rhetoric.” Hobbes's double
redescription of rhetoric is an important starting point for an early modern
project: appeals that justify a desired political order are characterized as
“right reason,” “the law of nature,” or “e nlightenment,” while rhetoric
constituting solidarities or publics outside the desired order is condemned.
[R, abr.]
72.7159 CANON, Jason S. — Three general wills in Rousseau. Re-
view of Politics 84(3), Summer 2022 : 350-371.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduces three conceptions of the general will:
an implicit will of collectives, a declared will of assemblies, and a personal
will toward the common good. Where his Discourse on Political Economy
uses only the first conception, the Social Contract and its unpublished “Ge-
neva Manuscript” turn to the second and third. I argue that Rousseau's
mature account in the Social Contract grounds legitimacy on the capacity
of citizens to declare their common good through deliberation and the ex-
ercise of private discernment. This finding helps resolve a long-standing
interpretive impasse between “formal” and “transcendent” accounts of the
general will and illumines the role of democratic sovereignty in the Social
Contract. [R]
72.7160 COLLINS, Gregory M. — Adam Smith on the navigation
acts and Anglo-American imperial relations. History of Po-
litical Thought 43(2), 2022 : 273-304.
Although many scholars have cited the Navigation Acts as one of Adam
Smith's key exceptions to his general embrace of natural liberty, there re-
mains a need for a systematic account of Smith's under-explored beliefs
on the Acts, and specifically the Act of Navigation of 1660. My article seeks
to fill this gap by providing a descriptive and critical examination of his
commentary on the commercial restraints, and locating it in wider eight-
eenth-century debates over their utility in Anglo-American imperial rela-
tions with specific reference to Thomas Pownall and Edmund Burke. I ar-
gue that Smith's thoughts contained important tensions that were exposed
by Pownall's and Burke's analyses of the Acts. I conclude, however, by
offering a possible explanation for the ambiguities in Smith's qualified sup-
port for the Act of Navigation of 1660: Smith suggests that the legislator
should not establish ironclad rules for national defence policy and com-
mercial policy stripped of circumstance — such as always promote either
protectionism or free trade — but rather should be willing to modify them,
and if necessary discard them, in a manner that is responsive to the his-
torical evolution of the international imperial order, the progressively heavy
burdens of empire, and the spirit of natural liberty. [R]
72.7161 COLLINS, Kristen R. — “Secrecy or silence with her finger
on her mouth”: Jeremy Bentham’s other model of visibil-
ity and power. Political Theory 50(4), Aug. 2022 : 596-620.
To challenge the Foucauldian legacy of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon
prison, scholars often highlight Bentham’s later writings on the democratic
power of public opinion. In doing so, they reaffirm Bentham’s reputation as
a unreserved proponent of transparency. To recover the limits of Ben-
tham’s embrace of publicity, I examine the model of visibility exemplified
by his designs for the Sotimion, a residence for unmarried, pregnant
women. The Sotimion draws our attention to Bentham’s appreciation for
concealment as a method of preventing individual and social harms
caused by publicity and his criticisms of ascetic sexual norms. By being
able to see visitors without being seen by them, the residents of the So-
timion would have avoided social censure while continuing to meet with
friends, family, and even lovers. The Sotimion designs eschewed the pan-
optic principle, the use of asymmetric surveillance to reform moral behav-
ior, and offered what I call the “soteric principle,” the use of asymmetric
surveillance to protect the observer from punishment. [R, abr.]
72.7162 COSTA, Paolo — “Democracy is always going to be hard”:
an interview with Charles Taylor. Review of Politics 84(2),
Spring 2022 : 238-251.
This interview with the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor was designed
and realized to celebrate his ninetieth birthday in November 2021. The
interview touches on all the main themes of Taylor's oeuvre, from his view
of philosophy to the inherent link between human intelligence and strong
evaluations, from the Immanent Frame to post-secularity, from today's
democratic crisis to the 1980s debate between liberals and communitari-
ans, from Xi Jinping's China to the global health emergency, from spiritu-
ality to Philosophical Romanticism. It is both a hindsight analysis by a first-
class thinker and a glance into the future by an incurable optimist. [R]
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