III Political Thought and Theory / Théorie et Pensée Politiques
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00208345231157666 |
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
33
III
POLITICAL THOUGHT AND THEORY
THÉORIE ET PENSÉE POLITIQUES
73.202 ALTMAN, William H. F. — Xenophon, the old oligarch, and
Alcibiades. Polis (Journal of Ancient Greek Political Thought)
39(2), 2022 : 261-278.
Modifying the conjecture of Wolfgang Helbig (1861) by means of the dis-
tinction between Xenophon and his various narrators introduced by Ben-
jamin McCloskey (2017), this paper uses the insights of Hartvig Frisch
(1942) to show how drawing a distinction between the first-person speaker
in pseudo-Xenophon’s Constitution of the Athenians and its author indi-
cates that the former is Alcibiades and the latter is Xenophon himself. [R]
73.203 ANDERSON BARKER, Kye — Kant, wonder, and the order
of freedom. History of Political Thought 153(3), Autumn 2022 :
492-516.
This article is an examination of enthusiasm and wonder throughout Kant's
works. In a historical sense, I argue that Kant took upon himself the task
of transforming the wonder experienced by enthusiasts into a form befitting
a republican and cosmopolitan order. This analysis is based both within
the immediate revolutionary context of Kant's writings and the enthusiastic
movements of the late medieval and early modern period. In a theoretical
sense, I argue that both enthusiasm and wonder address the supposed
motivational deficit in Kantian, rational politics by supplementing an im-
pulse to order the world in accordance with practical reason. [R]
73.204 ARNALL, Gavin — The many tasks of the Marxist transla-
tor. Approaching Marxism as/in/with translation from An-
tonio Gramsci to the Zapatistas. Historical Materialism
30(1), 2022 : 99-132.
This article examines numerous conceptions of translation within the
Marxist tradition. It begins with Antonio Gramsci’s theorization of the con-
cept before turning to the problem of Marxism in Latin America and how
the Zapatistas have dealt with this problem. The aim is to shed light on a
critical school of Marxist thinking, which requires that Marxism’s universal-
ist claims be translated in response to changing historical conditions so
that they may become concrete formulations capable of speaking to and
intervening in concrete situations. Yet the Zapatistas go further by main-
taining that translation must also occur between the universalist claims of
Marxist theory and the competing universalist claims of indigenous Maya
cosmology. [R, abr.]
73.205 AUDARD, Catherine ; FORSÉ, Michel — Rawls’s A Theory
of Justice at Fifty. Tocqueville Review 43(1), 2022 : 5-15.
Throughout 2021, numerous celebrations, conferences and events took
place to pay tribute to John Rawls (1921-2001) and to his A Theory of
Justice published in 1971. It brought back to the forefront major normative
political and moral issues such as the meaning of distributive justice and
its value for democracies, as well as a definitive critique of welfarism.
Through an evocation of Rawls’s impact as experienced in the States, in
France and Europe, from different disciplines ranging from political and
moral philosophy to economics and politics, this issue of The Tocqueville
Review/La Revue Tocqueville will help to understand the complex nature
of European-American cultural and political relations, well in the spirit of
Tocqueville. This introduction to this issue presents the various contribu-
tions that have been brought together to achieve this goal. [R, abr.] [First
article of a thematic issue on “Rawls’s A Theory of Justice at fifty”. See
also Abstr. 73.215, 218, 226, 241, 243, 246, 250]
73.206 AUGUST, Vincent — Network concepts in social theory:
Foucault and cybernetics. European Journal of Social The-
ory 25(2), May 2022 : 271-291.
Network concepts are omnipresent in contemporary diagnoses (network
society), management practices (network governance), social science
methods (network analysis) and theories (network theory). Instigating a
critical analysis of network concepts, this article explores the sources and
relevance of networks in Foucault’s social theory. I argue that via Foucault
we can trace network concepts back to cybernetics, a research pro-
gramme that initiated a shift from ‘being’ to ‘doing’ and developed a new
theory of regulation based on connectivity and codes, communication and
circulation. This insight contributes to two debates: Firstly, it highlights a
neglected influence on Foucault’s theory that travelled from cybernetics
via structuralism and Canguilhem into his concept of power. Secondly, it
suggests that network society and governance are neither a product of
neoliberalism nor of technological artefacts, such as the Internet. They ra-
ther resulted from a distinct tradition of cybernetically inspired theories and
practices. [R]
73.207 BARDIN, Andrea — Liberty and representation in Hobbes:
a materialist theory of conatus. History of European Ideas
48(6), 2022 : 698-712.
The concepts of liberty and representation reveal tensions in Hobbes's
political anthropology that only a study of the development of his philo-
sophical materialism can fully elucidate. The first section of this article
analyses the contradictory definitions of liberty offered in De cive, and ex-
plains them against the background of Hobbes's elaboration of a deter-
ministic concept of conatus during the 1640s. Variations in the concepts
of conatus and void between De motu and De corpore will shed light on
ideas of individuality, unity and agency that carry direct political relevance.
The second section explains why the concept of representation that
Hobbes elaborated at the end of the decade in Leviathan cannot be inter-
preted within an exclusively political and juridical framework. Rather, I will
claim that it should be explained in the light of Hobbes's materialist theory
of the power exerted by the sovereign persona on human imagination. [R]
73.208 BHORAT, Ziyaad — Automation, slavery, and work in Aris-
totle’s Politics Book I. Polis (Journal of Ancient Greek Politi-
cal Thought) 39(2), 2022 : 279-302.
Engaging Aristotle’s broader corpus, this paper offers an exegesis of his
counterfactual statement in the Politics regarding self-weaving shuttles
and self-playing lyres. It argues that Aristotle imagines and offers his own
theory of automation — if by automation we understand the conditions,
limits, and consequences of substituting human work with artificial tools
capable of acting themselves to complete the relevant task. Because such
automated tools are impossible in Aristotle’s time, his political thought is
never positively released from its foundational dependence on living tools
and the extremity of natural slavery. By analysing what it means for these
workers to be considered tools, the perceptual requirements of the work
they are to perform — as understood through the disjunctive conditions
under which automated tools could replace them — and the conse-
quences to masters and master-craftsmen of employing such tools, Aris-
totle’s disparagement of slave and craft subordinate work is thus also re-
emphasized. [R]
73.209 BLAIR, Robert A. — Civil war and citizens' demand for the
state: an empirical test of Hobbesian theory. British Journal
of Political Science 52(4), Oct. 2022 : 1748-1768.
How does violence during civil war shape citizens' demand for state-pro-
vided security, especially in settings where non-state actors compete with
the state for citizens' loyalties? This article draws on Hobbesian theory to
argue that in post-conflict countries, citizens who were more severely vic-
timized by wartime violence should substitute away from localized author-
ities and towards centralized ones, especially the state. The author tests
the theory by combining two original surveys with existing media and non-
governmental organization data on wartime violence in Liberia. The study
shows that citizens who were more severely affected by violence during
the Liberian civil war are more likely to demand state-provided security,
both in absolute terms and relative to non-state alternatives. More spo-
radic collective violence in the post-conflict period does not reverse this
substitution effect. Also consistent with Hobbesian theory, citizens who
were more severely victimized are more fearful of threats to peace almost
a decade later. [R]
73.210 BOSWORTH, William ; TAYLOR, Brad R. — The impossibil-
ity of a Bayesian liberal? Journal of Politics 84(4), Oct. 2022 :
2023-2033.
Aumann’s theorem states that no individual should agree to disagree un-
der a range of assumptions. Political liberalism appears to presuppose
these assumptions with the idealized conditions of public reason. We ar-
gue that Aumann’s theorem demonstrates they nevertheless cannot be
simultaneously held with what is arguably political liberalism’s most central
tenet. That is, the tenet of reasonable pluralism, which implies we ca n ra-
tionally agree to disagree over conceptions of the good. We finish by elab-
orating a way of relaxing one of the theorem’s axioms that arguably lends
itself to a coherent account of political liberalism, namely, the conditio n of
indexical independence. [R]
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