Historians have often either ignored Anacharsis Cloots (1755–1794) or considered him deranged because he claimed to be the ‘orator of the human race’ and devised a ‘universal republic’ based on the ...‘sovereignty of the human race’. This book is the first comprehensive study of the entire body of Cloots’s written works and political actions. By contextualizing them, the book non only rehabilitates Cloots as a political thinker worthy of consideration, but also argues that his political thought constitutes a specific branch of republicanism in the age of Atlantic revolutions: cosmopolitan republicanism. The introduction suggests how 18th-century French cosmopolitanism was a new philosophical tradition, but was composed of several themes, which the book then analyses in Cloots’s writings. The first chapter provides a brief overview of his life. The second chapter explains why he called himself orator and wrote pamphlets, and why contemporary readers should not discard this as non-philosophical. Having established Cloots’s writings as constituting a philosophical system, the following chapters explores it through the themes laid out in the introduction. First, the concept of reason and his understanding of science. Second, the paradigm of natural law and the role of nature in moral and political thought. Third, the conception of humanity and individuals in nature and society. Finally, republicanism and its principles. The last chapter summarizes the elements of Cloots’s cosmopolitan republicanism and opens a research programme to other political thinkers in the age of Atlantic revolutions for historians and political theorists. ; Historians have often either ignored Anacharsis Cloots (1755–1794) or considered him deranged because he claimed to be the ‘orator of the human race’ and devised a ‘universal republic’ based on the ‘sovereignty of the human race’. This book is the first comprehensive study of the entire body of Cloots’s written works and political actions. By contextualizing them, the book non only rehabilitates Cloots as a political thinker worthy of consideration, but also argues that his political thought constitutes a specific branch of republicanism in the age of Atlantic revolutions: cosmopolitan republicanism. The introduction suggests how 18th-century French cosmopolitanism was a new philosophical tradition, but was composed of several themes, which the book then analyses in Cloots’s writings. The first chapter provides a brief overview of his life. The second chapter explains why he called himself orator and wrote pamphlets, and why contemporary readers should not discard this as non-philosophical. Having established Cloots’s writings as constituting a philosophical system, the following chapters explores it through the themes laid out in the introduction. First, the concept of reason and his understanding of science. Second, the paradigm of natural law and the role of nature in moral and political thought. Third, the conception of humanity and individuals in nature and society. Finally, republicanism and its principles. The last chapter summarizes the elements of Cloots’s cosmopolitan republicanism and opens a research programme to other political thinkers in the age of Atlantic revolutions for historians and political theorists.
Populism is a growing threat to human rights. They are appropriated, distorted, turned into empty words or even their opposite. The contributors to this volume examine these practices using the ...example of freedom of religion or belief, a human right that has become a particular target of right-wing populists and extremists worldwide. The contributions not only show the rhetorical patterns of appropriation and distortion, but also demonstrate for various countries which social dynamics favor the appropriation in each case and propose how to strengthen human rights and the culture of debate in democratic societies.
It is often claimed that conspiracy theories are endorsed with the same level of intensity across the left‐right ideological spectrum. But do liberals and conservatives in the United States embrace ...conspiratorial thinking to an equivalent degree? There are important historical, philosophical, and scientific reasons dating back to Richard Hofstadter's book The Paranoid Style in American Politics to doubt this claim. In four large studies of U.S. adults (total N = 5049)—including national samples—we investigated the relationship between political ideology, measured in both symbolic and operational terms, and conspiratorial thinking in general. Results reveal that conservatives in the United States were not only more likely than liberals to endorse specific conspiracy theories, but they were also more likely to espouse conspiratorial worldviews in general (r = .27, 95% CI: .24, .30). Importantly, extreme conservatives were significantly more likely to engage in conspiratorial thinking than extreme liberals (Hedges' g = .77, SE = .07, p < .001). The relationship between ideology and conspiratorial thinking was mediated by a strong distrust of officialdom and paranoid ideation, both of which were higher among conservatives, consistent with Hofstadter's account of the paranoid style in American politics.
Nation Building Wimmer, Andreas
2018, 2018., 20180508, 2018-05-08
eBook
A new and comprehensive look at the reasons behind successful or failed nation building Nation Building presents bold new answers to an age-old question. Why is national integration achieved in some ...diverse countries, while others are destabilized by political inequality between ethnic groups, contentious politics, or even separatism and ethnic war? Traversing centuries and continents from early nineteenth-century Europe and Asia to Africa from the turn of the twenty-first century to today, Andreas Wimmer delves into the slow-moving forces that encourage political alliances to stretch across ethnic divides and build national unity. Using datasets that cover the entire world and three pairs of case studies, Wimmer’s theory of nation building focuses on slow-moving, generational processes: the spread of civil society organizations, linguistic assimilation, and the states’ capacity to provide public goods. Wimmer contrasts Switzerland and Belgium to demonstrate how the early development of voluntary organizations enhanced nation building; he examines Botswana and Somalia to illustrate how providing public goods can bring diverse political constituencies together; and he shows that the differences between China and Russia indicate how a shared linguistic space may help build political alliances across ethnic boundaries. Wimmer then reveals, based on the statistical analysis of large-scale datasets, that these mechanisms are at work around the world and explain nation building better than competing arguments such as democratic governance or colonial legacies. He also shows that when political alliances crosscut ethnic divides and when most ethnic communities are represented at the highest levels of government, the general populace will identify with the nation and its symbols, further deepening national political integration. Offering a long-term historical perspective and global outlook, Nation Building sheds important new light on the challenges of political integration in diverse countries.
The present research examined the relationship between political ideology and perceptions of the threat of COVID-19. Due to Republican leadership’s initial downplaying of COVID-19 and the resulting ...partisan media coverage, we predicted that conservatives would perceive it as less threatening. Two preregistered online studies supported this prediction. Conservatism was associated with perceiving less personal vulnerability to the virus and the virus’s severity as lower, and stronger endorsement of the beliefs that the media had exaggerated the virus’s impact and that the spread of the virus was a conspiracy. Conservatism also predicted less accurate discernment between real and fake COVID-19 headlines and fewer accurate responses to COVID-19 knowledge questions. Path analyses suggested that presidential approval, knowledge about COVID-19, and news discernment mediated the relationship between ideology and perceived vulnerability. These results suggest that the relationship between political ideology and threat perceptions may depend on issue framing by political leadership and media.
Bringing together Marx’s original writings on land, rent and the landed property class, this book applies them to contemporary cities in the Global North and Global South. The book shows how landed ...property, and not just labour and capital, directly affects urban economic development, the built environment, urban governance and the quality of life of people living in cities. It also shows how land, rent and class transform cities in different ways depending on the indigenous, Asiatic, feudal, capitalist or other modes of production that mould the form and substance of cities. Presenting a new comparative approach, this book provides novel insights into the origins of, and solutions to, many of today’s urban problems including urban enclosures, exclusive property development, the financialisation of land, land grabbing, and climate change.
Business leaders have traditionally avoided wading into society’s debates. Yet more and more CEOs are taking visible public stands on hotly contested issues, engaging in what has come to be called ...CEO sociopolitical activism. Despite its growing prevalence and potentially major implications, this class of executive behaviors remains largely unexplored by organizational scholars. Our study tests and elaborates on stakeholder alignment theory to investigate the influence of CEO activism on employees’ attitudes and behaviors, particularly its effects on employees’ organizational commitment and support for the ideology underpinning the CEO’s public stance. Our theoretical predictions hinge on the degree of alignment between the CEO’s stance and the prevailing ideological tilt of the employee population, as well as the degree to which employees view the CEO as a credible leader. We test our ideas in the context of a highly publicized letter signed by nearly 100 public company CEOs in opposition to North Carolina’s controversial 2016 “bathroom bill.” Relying on multiple data sources to examine differences between firms whose CEOs signed the letter and firms whose CEOs declined the invitation to sign, we find general support for our theory, indicating that CEO activism has important intra- and extra-firm implications.
A theory of system justification was proposed 25 years ago by Jost and Banaji (1994, Br. J. Soc. Psychol., 33, 1) in the British Journal of Social Psychology to explain ‘the participation by ...disadvantaged individuals and groups in negative stereotypes of themselves' and the phenomenon of outgroup favouritism. The scope of the theory was subsequently expanded to account for a much wider range of outcomes, including appraisals of fairness, justice, legitimacy, deservingness, and entitlement; spontaneous and deliberate social judgements about individuals, groups, and events; and full‐fledged political and religious ideologies. According to system justification theory, people are motivated (to varying degrees, depending upon situational and dispositional factors) to defend, bolster, and justify aspects of existing social, economic, and political systems. Engaging in system justification serves the palliative function of increasing satisfaction with the status quo and addresses underlying epistemic, existential, and relational needs to reduce uncertainty, threat, and social discord. This article summarizes the major tenets of system justification theory, reviews some of the empirical evidence supporting it, answers new (and old) questions and criticisms, and highlights areas of societal relevance and directions for future research.
Two decades before the war against Ukraine, a “special operation” was launched against Russian historical memory, aggressively reshaping the nation’s understanding of its history and identity. The ...Kremlin’s militarization of Russia through World War II propaganda is well documented, but the glorification of Russian medieval society and its warlords as a source of support for Putinism has yet to be explored. This book offers the first comparison of Putin’s political neomedievalism and re-Stalinization and introduces the concept of mobmemory to the study of right-wing populism. It argues that the celebration of the oprichnina, Ivan the Terrible’s regime of state terror (1565–1572), has been fused with the rehabilitation of Stalinism to reconstruct the Russian Empire. The post-Soviet case suggests that the global obsession with the Middle Ages is not purely an aesthetic movement but a potential weapon against democracy. The book is intended for students, scholars, and non-specialists interested in understanding Russia’s anti-modern politics and the Russians’ support for the terror unleashed against Ukraine.
Die kritische Theorie erklärte Faschismus und autoritäres Bewusstsein aus den Widersprüchen und Krisentendenzen der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Die Analyse der extremen und populistischen Rechten kann ...an die Einsichten von Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno und Co. anknüpfen. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes rekapitulieren zentrale theoretische Überlegungen zum autoritären Charakter und zum autoritären Staat, zu Antisemitismus und Rassismus sowie zum Verhältnis von liberalem und völkischem Denken. Darüber hinaus setzen sie sich in der Tradition der kritischen Theorie mit verschiedenen Aspekten der gegenwärtigen extremen Rechten auseinander.
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