Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 459-476
Author(s):  
Tao Jiang
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Political History ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Personal Freedom ◽  
Moral Transformation ◽  
Chinese Intellectual ◽  
Political Project ◽  
The Ideal

The Conclusion offers a reflection on the tragic fate of the Zhuangist idea of personal freedom in Chinese intellectual and political history. It scrutinizes the widely shared premise of self-cultivation, what the author calls the “regime of self-cultivation” in Chinese moral-political philosophy, among most classical thinkers including Zhuangzi, and explores its constraint on the development of personal freedom in the mainstream moral-political discourse as well as in the building of political institutions. In this respect, it was the fajia thinkers who built their theories on the givenness of ordinary human dispositions, instead of on the promissory note of moral transformation. The author reflects on a path that was not taken in Chinese history, i.e., the integration of the Zhuangist idea of personal freedom into the mainstream moral-political project in conceptualizing a polity that can accommodate the ideal of personal freedom institutionally.

Zhuangzi’s Lone Project of Personal Freedom

2021 ◽  
pp. 287-338
Author(s):  
Tao Jiang
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Critical Space ◽  
Personal Freedom ◽  
Chinese Intellectual

This chapter argues that Zhuangzi was an intellectual outlier who was not a significant participant in the debate on humaneness versus justice, carried out primarily among the Confucians, the Mohists, the Laoists, and the fajia thinkers during the classical period. He ridiculed the misguided character of the dominant intellectual projects and warned against their potential for inhumanity and injustice, the very opposite of what is intended by the participants of the mainstream discourse. He extoled personal freedom within the context of overwhelming emphasis on order, structured by humaneness and/or justice, and single-handedly opened up a critical space for the discourse on personal freedom in Chinese intellectual history. However, the marginal nature of the Zhuangist vision of personal freedom did not portend well its prospect in the subsequent Chinese history. The kind of freedom envisioned by Zhuangzi is an effortless navigation through and around the constraints of the human lifeworld, not a reimagining of those very constraints.

Yuan Dynasty

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
Northern China ◽  
Yuan Dynasty ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
13Th Century ◽  
The Yuan Dynasty

The Yuan dynasty sits awkwardly in Eurasian history. The dynastic name, Yuan, is Chinese, as is the practice of naming dynastic houses not by the leading family’s surname but by the place where the regime began or, as was the case with the Yuan, a term that carried auspicious meaning. In the case of East Asia, dynasty also calls to mind a package of political institutions and conventions (including a dominant role for the emperor; a highly articulated bureaucracy; written law codes regulating political, commercial, and family life; a court with extensive and minutely described rituals; a capital with a grand palace) and a well-developed political philosophy that explained the place of the Son of Heaven in the cosmos, and the interaction among the realms of man, nature, social life, and much more. Thus, one approach to the Yuan period has been to view it in the longer span of Chinese history. Yet, the rulers of the Yuan dynasty were Mongol conquerors whose family, the Chinggisids (descendants of Chinggis khan), subjugated much of Eurasia. Although Mongols had conquered much of northern China in the mid-13th century, the Yuan dynasty was not established until 1271. It is generally used to describe China under Mongol rule, but equating the Yuan dynasty with China is both factually inaccurate and highly misleading because Mongolian (or, more broadly, steppe) traditions of rulership and governance differed importantly from those of earlier and later Chinese dynasties. Much recent Japanese scholarship thus uses the term “Great Yuan ulus” (Mongolian for nation) rather than dynasty to highlight such differences.

Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘War Machine’ as a Critique of Hegel’s Political Philosophy

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 304-325
Author(s):  
Nathan Widder
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
The State ◽  
Ethical Life ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Rational Structure ◽  
War Machine ◽  
Political Project ◽  
Partisan Warfare

AbstractThis paper elaborates Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘war machine’ in relation to key theses in Hegel’s political philosophy, with the aim of showing how it illuminates the conditions under which politics and political institutions as Hegel understands them both emerge and are compromised. After first introducing the idea of the war machine and its appropriation by discussing it in relation to Carl Schmitt’s theory of partisan warfare, it examines both the war machine and Hegel’s theory of the State by way of a focus on Hegel’s discussions of drive (Trieb) and semblance (Schein). Regarding the first, the paper explores how both Hegel and Deleuze and Guattari conceive of social structure in terms of a structure of drives even while they differ in their understandings of the drives in relation to desire and subjectivity. Regarding the second, the paper explores how moments of semblance identified by Hegel as he develops his system of Right reveal points where the war machine can emerge from within State structures. The paper argues that the war machine concept challenges understandings of politics built on friend/enemy antagonisms and the use of external conflict to secure internal unity, the former being Schmitt’s explicit political project and the second being the place at which Hegel’s project ultimately finds itself when it fails to secure the rational structure of Ethical Life.

scholarly journals The Genesis of Secular Politics in Medieval Philosophy: The King of Averroes and the Emperor of Dante

Labyrinth ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 209
Author(s):  
Sabeen Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Values ◽  
Clash Of Civilizations ◽  
Medieval Philosophy ◽  
Islamic Philosophy ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Ideal

In contemporary political discourse, the "clash of civilizations" rhetoric often undergirds philosophical analyses of "democracy" both at home and abroad. This is nowhere better articulated than in Jacques Derrida's Rogues, in which he describes Islam as the only religious or theocratic culture that would "inspire and declare any resistance to democracy" (Derrida 2005, 29). Curiously, Derrida attributes the failings of democracy in Islam to the lack of reference to Aristotle's Politics in the writings of the medieval Muslim philosophers. This paper aims to analyze this gross misconception of Islamic philosophy and illuminate the thoroughgoing influence the Muslim philosophers had on their Christian successors, those who are so often credited as foundations of Western political philosophy. In so doing, I compare the ideal states presented by Averroes and Dante – in which Aristotelian influence is intimately interlaced – and offer an analysis thereof as heralds of what we might call the secularization of the political, inspiring those democratic values that Derrida believes to be absent in the rich philosophy of the Middle Ages.  

The Tyranny of the Ideal

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Gaus
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Moral Inquiry ◽  
Open Society ◽  
The Past ◽  
Theories Of Justice ◽  
The World ◽  
Diverse Society ◽  
Just Society ◽  
The Ideal

This book lays out a vision for how we should theorize about justice in a diverse society. It shows how free and equal people, faced with intractable struggles and irreconcilable conflicts, might share a common moral life shaped by a just framework. The book argues that if we are to take diversity seriously and if moral inquiry is sincere about shaping the world, then the pursuit of idealized and perfect theories of justice—essentially, the entire production of theories of justice that has dominated political philosophy for the past forty years—needs to change. Drawing on recent work in social science and philosophy, the book points to an important paradox: only those in a heterogeneous society—with its various religious, moral, and political perspectives—have a reasonable hope of understanding what an ideally just society would be like. However, due to its very nature, this world could never be collectively devoted to any single ideal. The book defends the moral constitution of this pluralistic, open society, where the very clash and disagreement of ideals spurs all to better understand what their personal ideals of justice happen to be. Presenting an original framework for how we should think about morality, this book rigorously analyzes a theory of ideal justice more suitable for contemporary times.

Neuplatonische politische Philosophie in der Rede Περὶ βασιλείας des Synesios von Kyrene

Elenchos ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 151-177
Author(s):  
Michael Schramm
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Political Realm ◽  
The Ideal

Abstract This paper argues that Synesios’ De regno is a mirror for princes and a splendid example of Neoplatonic political philosophy. It is based on Plato’s Politeia and its model of philosopher-kingship. Synesios makes his audience compare the current political reality with the ideal of the philosopher-kings, who are the image of the transcendent god in the political realm. In doing so he recommends political virtue in general, especially phronesis and sophrosyne. Particularly he argues for reforming the recruitment of military and civil officials with reference to Plato’s concept of friendship in the Politeia.

The Church, the City, and Modernity

2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-111
Author(s):  
Florian Mazel
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political History ◽  
The State ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Binary Opposition ◽  
Institutional Church ◽  
The City ◽  
The Town ◽  
The Church ◽  
Political Figure

Dominique Iogna-Prat’s latest book, Cité de Dieu, cité des hommes. L’Église et l’architecture de la société, 1200–1500, follows on both intellectually and chronologically from La Maison Dieu. Une histoire monumentale de l’Église au Moyen Âge (v. 800–v. 1200). It presents an essay on the emergence of the town as a symbolic and political figure of society (the “city of man”) between 1200 and 1700, and on the effects of this development on the Church, which had held this function before 1200. This feeds into an ambitious reflection on the origins of modernity, seeking to move beyond the impasse of political philosophy—too quick to ignore the medieval centuries and the Scholastic moment—and to relativize the effacement of the institutional Church from the Renaissance on. In so doing, it rejects the binary opposition between the Church and the state, proposes a new periodization of the “transition to modernity,” and underlines the importance of spatial issues (mainly in terms of representation). This last element inscribes the book in the current of French historiography that for more than a decade has sought to reintroduce the question of space at the heart of social and political history. Iogna-Prat’s stimulating demonstration nevertheless raises some questions, notably relating to the effects of the Protestant Reformation, the increasing power of states, and the process of “secularization.” Above all, it raises the issue of how a logic of the polarization of space was articulated with one of territorialization in the practices of government and the structuring of society—two logics that were promoted by the ecclesial institution even before states themselves.

Open Democracy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hélène Landemore
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Direct Democracy ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Democratic Representation ◽  
The People ◽  
Laws And Policies ◽  
The Right ◽  
Turn Over ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Ordinary Citizens

To the ancient Greeks, democracy meant gathering in public and debating laws set by a randomly selected assembly of several hundred citizens. To the Icelandic Vikings, democracy meant meeting every summer in a field to discuss issues until consensus was reached. Our contemporary representative democracies are very different. Modern parliaments are gated and guarded, and it seems as if only certain people — with the right suit, accent, wealth, and connections — are welcome. Diagnosing what is wrong with representative government and aiming to recover some of the lost openness of ancient democracies, this book presents a new paradigm of democracy in which power is genuinely accessible to ordinary citizens. This book favors the ideal of “representing and being represented in turn” over direct-democracy approaches. Supporting a fresh nonelectoral understanding of democratic representation, the book recommends centering political institutions around the “open mini-public” — a large, jury-like body of randomly selected citizens gathered to define laws and policies for the polity, in connection with the larger public. It also defends five institutional principles as the foundations of an open democracy: participatory rights, deliberation, the majoritarian principle, democratic representation, and transparency. The book demonstrates that placing ordinary citizens, rather than elites, at the heart of democratic power is not only the true meaning of a government of, by, and for the people, but also feasible and, today more than ever, urgently needed.

scholarly journals Mahbub Djunaidi, Seniman Politik Nahdlatul Ulama (1960-1987)

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-174
Author(s):  
Farhan Nugraha ◽  
Muhammad Fakhruddin ◽  
Humaidi Humaidi
Keyword(s):  
Political History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Democracy ◽  
Source Criticism ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
Organizational Experiences ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nahdlatul Ulama ◽  
The Ideal

Abstrak: Nahdlatul Ulama merupakan salah satu organisasi Islam terbesar di Indonesia. Organisasi ini lahir tentu dari para tokoh-tokoh besar yang menggawanginya, salah satunya Mahbud Djunaidi. Kemampuan politiknya diperoleh dari berbagai pengalaman organisasi dan kemampuan dalam kepenulisan. Adapun permasalahan yang diangkat dalam penelitian ini yaitu bagaimana riwayat politik Mahbub Djunaidi sebagai aktivis politik Nahdlatul Ulama pada tahun 1960-1987. Berdasarkan permasalahan tersebut penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menguraikan perjalanan politik Mahbub Djunaidi (1960-1987). Berdasarkan permasalahan dan tujuan penelitian tersebut, maka metode yang digunakan adalah metode historis yang terdiri dari tahap heuristik, kritik sumber, interpretasi dan historiografi. Hasil dari penelitian menunjukkan bahwa Mahbub Djunaidi memiliki konsep khittah plus. Demokrasi politik ala Mahbub Djunaidi adalah cita-cita demokrasi yang diperjuangkan melalui garis politik.Kata Kunci: Mahbub Djunaidi, Demokrasi Politik, Nahdlatul Ulama.Abstract: Nahdlatul Ulama is one of the largest Islamic organizations in Indonesia. This organization was born of course from the big figures who oversee it, one of them Mahbud Djunaidi. His political abilities are obtained from various organizational experiences and abilities in writing. The problem raised in this research is how the political history of Mahbub Djunaidi as a political activist of Nahdlatul Ulama in 1960-1987. Based on these problems, this study aims to describe the political journey of Mahbub Djunaidi (1960-1987). Based on the problems and objectives of the research, the method used is the historical method which consists of heuristics, source criticism, interpretation and historiography stages. The results of the study show that Mahbub Djunaidi has the concept of khittah plus. Political democracy in the style of Mahbub Djunaidi is the ideal of democracy which is fought for through political lines. Keywords: Mahbub Djunaidi, Political Democracy, Nahdlatul Ulama.

Countervailing Deviation

Utopophobia ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
David Estlund
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Herbert Marcuse ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter explores a second way in which understanding an ideal or valuable arrangement might be thought to be practically valuable even if it is not to be attained, sought, or approximated. The first, that the ideal gives a structural ideal that is to be approximated, faces important limitations owing to the fallacy of approximation. But there is a second appeal to the ideal (and also to partial ideals) and the chapter emphasizes its promise. This happens also to be another way in which the fallacy of approximation can be illuminating in political philosophy. To begin with, we can bring the fallacy of approximation to bear on thinking about realistic practical political settings. Herbert Marcuse exemplifies the point in the context of what he calls “pure tolerance,” which the chapter stylizes slightly as the context of broad viewpoint—neutral freedom of expression.

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