In the progression of Western political philosophy from Aristotle to the Enlightenment, even the most statist thinkers such as Hobbes and Machiavelli, who saw organized society as a necessary evil, ...never accepted the notion of absolutism that sucks man's free development. Central to Hobbes' conceptualization of the state is that an artificially created sovereign is owed the total submission of his subjects who are faced with an immanent existential threat. Subjects, nonetheless, exist as individual moral agents whose values of justice and liberty-the products of social thought and common conviction-are realized in civil society of the Commonwealth. With Machiavelli's principality, by contrast, while the success and survival of the state is closely tied together with that of the prince and his subjects, the political community could still be judged in terms of moral committal to the civic virtues of prudence, legitimacy, and order, constituting a venerated political and social force contributing consequentially to individual development. This article entails a comparative study of moral agency in light of Hobbes' Leviathan and Machiavelli's The Prince and examines its implications for Eritrea against the backdrop of its downward spiral into totalitarianism. It argues that both proponents of absolutism offer a critique of the state particularly pertinent to Eritrea where individual development is embedded on a single supreme moral authority. While notions of real or imagined existential threats, which affords regimes to roll state-society into one, enabled Eritrea to maintain a semblance of national unity, its flip side, the exercise and preservation of personal power through sheer repression, has subjected the state to idiosyncratic political attributes that militate against free agency: a nihilistic image to which neither Hobbes' sovereign nor Machiavelli's prince would wish to subscribe.
Hobbes Raphael, D D; Raphael, D. D.
1977, 20130513, 2004, 2013, 2013-05-13, 2014-06-03
eBook
Hobbes' writing surprises, shocks, amuses and, above all stimulates criticism both of himself and of our conventional wisdom. This book, which is both expository and critical, concentrates on Hobbes' ...s ethical and political theory, but also considers the effect of these on his metaphysics. Updated, with a new preface and critical bibliography, this book will be particularly useful as an introduction for undergraduates.
Both the rabbi Jacob Taubes and the sociologist Julien Freund chose in their articles to praise Thomas Hobbes for his actuality or contemporaneity for understanding the politics and government of the ...late 20th century. Their contributions to the anniversary symposium on Hobbes confront Carl Schmitt both in his interpretation of the 17th-century philosopher and his political thought more broadly. These pieces allow the reader to examine the thought and hermeneutics of Taubes and Freund anew: where both thinkers are often assimilated to Schmittian thought, their divergent interpretations of Hobbes allow one to see both where they dovetail and where they differ with Schmitt. Moreover, each of their critiques, conducted via the interpretation of Hobbes, occasions a reassessment of the status of hermeneutics and of the role of the history of political thought in late 20th-century political philosophy. Let us briefly examine each of their contributions in turn, beginning with the work of Freund before preceding to the more elaborate argument of Taubes.
Insofern nach Kant aus dem Naturzustand in einen rechtlichen Zustand zu treten sei, um den Selbstwiderspruch des Naturzustandes zu überwinden, mache dieser vom "Ideal des Hobbes" Gebrauch (vgl. 57). ...Der gesuchte Unterschied sei "analytischer Art": Der kategorische Imperativ stelle auf das innere Verhalten (Triebfeder) ab, während das Rechtsprinzip davon abstrahiere. Kant, der in wesentlichen Punkten dem "contrat social" Rousseaus folge (vgl. 112), greife das Element des allgemeinen Willens als Organisationsnorm gesellschaftlicher Selbstherrschaft auf und verknüpfe "die Theorie des allgemeinen Willens mit dem Prinzip der Volkssouveränität" (115).
In the article, Seneca's figure is rehabilitated as relevant to understanding the emergence of sovereignty and modern representation. The idea put forth by the author of De Clementia would become one ...of the bases for Bodin's writings and is also present in Hobbes' work. During the Renaissance, De Clementia promoted monarchical forms. In De Clementia, this Stoic philosopher presents Nero in a depersonalised form. He is not only the sovereign capable of shaping a multitude, representing it in its whole and giving it the character of "people", but also one who secures peace and rules with justice. Thus, in Seneca, one can discern a prototheory of sovereignty and representation, with decisionism as its result. If these readings of Seneca are plausible, genealogies of modern concepts that interpret their emergence as a revolutionary Trennung (e.g. Schmitt and early Conceptual History) (Lehmann and Van Horn Melton, 1994; Lehmann and Richter, 1996) could be facing a problem of omission. The conceptual support for the process through which the medieval social and political world was destroyed and substituted by modernity does not come from Cicero's republican tradition, but from a monarchical notion of unity among the governor and the governed; an idea defended by Seneca, according to which absolute sovereignty would guarantee private property, contracts, and a sui iuris apolitical soul.
V članku avtorja obravnavata temeljno problematiko v prehodu od srednjeveške k moderni politični teoriji - razmerje med krščanskim korporativizmom ter liberalizmom. Najizrazitejši prehod med ...navedenima doktrinama avtorja prepoznata v politični misli Thomasa Hobbesa, ki s koncepcijo negativne svobode postavi temelje liberalne politične doktrine in se tako, absolutističnim tendencam navkljub, izkaže za začetnega konstruktorja modernega miselnega okvirja. Moderna konceptualna inovacija je prepoznana kot intelektualni refleks takratnega progresivnega družbenega razreda - meščanstva na srednjeveški organicizem ter njegovo pojmovanje posameznika in družbe. Hobbesov posameznik je racionalen ter avtonomen družbeni akter, ki prek zasebne lastnine drži distanco do skupnosti, kateri pripada. S tem se vzpostavi kot nosilec modernega projekta izgrajevanja kapitalistične družbene ureditve.
Reviewed by Dr. Justus Conrad Gronau: English Department, Christian-Albrechts-Universitt zu mailto:gronau@anglistik.uni-kiel.de Web End =Kiel, Olshausenstrae 4, D-24098 Kiel, e-mail: ...gronau@anglistik.uni-kiel.de DOI 10.1515/zaa-2016-0044 In the history of Western philosophy as well as the natural sciences, the concept of the soul has undergone fundamental transformations. Yet, Haekel shows that the concept of the soul in British Romanticism is not only informed by Plato and Aristotle but also by mechanistic philosophy, physiological theories such as vitalism, proto-biological theories developing out of the discovery of the nervous system, as well as research on the brain. ...these chapters interestingly disclose the gender-bias of the discussions about the soul, because in contrast to their male counterparts, female Romantic authors tend to consider the soul to be androgynous (182).
In this paper, I provide an extensive examination of the political theory of Thomas Hobbes in order to discuss its relevance to an understanding of contemporary issues and challenges faced by ...criminal law and criminal justice theory. I start by proposing that a critical analysis of Hobbes’s account of punishment reveals a paradox that not only is fundamental to understanding his model of political society, but also can offer important insights into the preventive turn experienced by advanced liberal legal systems. I then suggest that the main importance of an analysis of Hobbes’s theoretical framework lies in how it reveals an inextricable and problematic link between individual autonomy and political authority in the normative conception of the modern liberal state, grounded on the notion of insecurity. By exploring how legal scholars have recently engaged with aspects of this problematic in criminal law and punishment posed by Hobbes’s work, I argue that the paradox found in punishment is such that it both legitimates the criminal law and undermines its normative aspirations, particularly the possibility of securing individual liberty against the power of the liberal state.
Philosophy BOYS-STONES, GEORGE
Greece and Rome,
04/2009, Letnik:
56, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Anaxagoras Intellect turns out to have brought about and nurtured the world on the model of a farmer for human benefit; Love and Strife set clear teleological boundaries to the operation of chance in ...Empedocles; Socrates emerges as a fundamentally anti-scientific creationist (and originator of the argument from design). In a series of acute and lucid essays, complementing a presentation and translation of the fragments of Anaxagoras, Curd argues instead for what she describes as the moderate view, that substances such as flesh and gold play a part at this level too though not such things as bread or dog, as an expansive wing of Anaxagorean scholarship has argued. ...he introduces a practical strategy for reading one of them: analyse the arguments; assess the dramatic setting; integrate those first two stages into a single reading; repeat. According to Bowler, for example, Aristotle argued that all motion, including that of life, is an interplay of spontaneity and affectivity (100).
Der Status quo in zeitgenössischen pluralistischen Gesellschaften konfrontiert die politische Philosophie mit dem Problem, eine Staatslegitimation zu formulieren, die für alle Bürger trotz ...konfligierender Interessen und Wertvorstellungen überzeugend ist. Im ersten Teil wird Thomas Hobbes' klassische Vertragstheorie, die Spieltheorie sowie James Buchanans ökonomische Vertragstheorie kritisch diskutiert. Die im zweiten Teil entworfene kontextbezogene Vertragstheorie analysiert eine Gesellschaft, in der Egoisten, moderate Altruisten und moralische Idealisten interagieren. Sie zeigt, dass ein Verfassungsstaat für fast alle Bürger interessenkompatibel ist, weil er Interaktionsprobleme vermeidet, die im Naturzustand, einem Sklavenstaat, einer Moraldiktatur und einem Minimalstaat auftreten würden.
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