Rhetoric and Political Theory

2015 ◽  
pp. 624-636
Author(s):  
Andrew Norris
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Walter Lippmann

This chapter first details the prevailing hostility toward rhetoric and doxa (appearance/opinion) in the tradition of political theory from Plato to Walter Lippmann before turning to a close examination of Hannah Arendt’s critical response to that tradition. Where Plato attacks rhetoric as a deceptive form of domination, Arendt argues that politics is essentially a matter of doxa and hence of rhetoric. Reality itself is, in the polis, a matter of appearing in speech and deed, with the emphasis upon the former. Political action is first and foremost speech that reveals the speaker as “answering, talking back, and measuring up to whatever happened or was done.” Such revelatory speech is most appropriately judged by the standard of glory. Because such speech must inform as well as reveal, so does glorious speech rise to the level of greatness in part because of what is said, to whom, where, and how.

International Relations and the Reconstruction of Political Theory

Politics ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 135-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Williams
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
State Behaviour

International relations and political theory are generally seen as two distinct disciplines with their afferent methodologies and clusters of problems. This division of labour has in some respects proved useful but may now be too extreme. Political theory and international relations have a common subject matter in political action and state behaviour. The advantages for political theory and international relations in crossing the dividing lines between the disciplines are explored. A case is made for a political theory which is focussed on international relations and an international relations which exploits the approaches and methods of political theory.

scholarly journals POLITIK PEMUSNAHAN DAN PEMUSNAHAN POLITIK : Telaah Kritis Atas Konsep Hannah Arendt Tentang Totalitarisme

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Mathias Daven
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Total Domination ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Totalitarian Regime

If we wish to understand a totalitarian system as a whole, we need first to understand the central role of the concentration camp as a laboratorium to experiment in total domination. Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism in the twentieth century shows how a totalitarian regime cannot survive without terror; and terror will not be effective without concentration camps. Experiments in concentration camps had as their purpose, apart from wiping out any freedom or spontaneity, the abolishing of space between human beings, abolishing space for politics. Thus, totalitarianism did not mirror only the politics of extinction, but also the extinction of politics. As a way forward, Arendt analyses political theory that forces the reader to understand power no longer under the rubric of domination or violence – although this avenue is open – but rather under the rubric of freedom. Arendt is convinced that the life of a destroyed nation can be restored by mutual forgiveness and mutual promises, two abilities rooted in action. Political action, as with other acts, is identical with the ability to commence something new. Keywords: Totalitarisme, antisemitisme, imperialisme, dominasi, teror, kebebasan, kedaulatan, kamp konsentrasi, politik, ideologi, tindakan

Soviet Film

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-74
Author(s):  
Lisa Nanney
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Independent Film ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Film Treatment ◽  
Film Productions ◽  
The Masses

Dos Passos’s adaptation of cinematic methods to literary style beginning in the mid-1920s emerged further in his work after he visited Russia in 1928. Tepid public and critical response to New Playwrights dramas motivated Dos Passos to explore how the revolutionary state-supported Russian theater and film productions had engaged the masses, united them politically, and produced groundbreaking artists. In dramatist Meyerhold’s avant-garde theater, Constructivist industrial sets and “biomechanical” acting techniques created successful dramas about and for workers. Dos Passos observed that cinematic innovations emerged from the Soviet-controlled studios despite the state’s use of film as its primary tool of mass ideological education. Though Lenin, then Stalin increasingly controlled film productions and artists, Soviet filmmakers nonetheless evolved theories of montage that became foundational in filmmaking and informed Dos Passos’s modernist novels and his 1936 independent film treatment “Dreamfactory,” with its meta-filmic exposé of the Hollywood film industry. In particular, these works registered the formal and conceptual innovations of two directors: Eisenstein, whose films combined fiction and history to effect political action through art; and Vertov, whose films acknowledged the artist’s vision as controlling the camera “eye” and who embedded in one short film an auto-critique of movie-making.

Anonymous glory

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patchen Markell
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Reliable Source ◽  
Anonymous Processes ◽  
The Human Condition

Hannah Arendt’s political theory is often understood to rest on a celebration of action, the memorable words and deeds of named individuals, over against the anonymous processes constitutive of ‘labor’ and ‘society’. Yet at key moments in The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt seems to signal a different relationship between political action and anonymity; and she does so in part via citations of the novels of William Faulkner. Using the apparently contradictory notion of ‘anonymous glory’ as a heuristic, this essay reconsiders Arendt’s political thought through readings of the novels she cites, A Fable and Intruder in the Dust. The essay argues that, for Arendt, a conception of action adequate to the scale of modern social power must somehow be both indelibly tied to individual deeds and immersed in a processual field that is indifferent to the needs for meaning or purpose or satisfaction that individuals bring to what they do; and that Arendt’s engagement with this problem both complicates the relation of action to its supposed opposites, and makes it more difficult to conceive of action’s recovery as a reliable source of theoretical or political redemption.

On Political Theory and Political Action

1971 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl W. Deutsch
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Social Performance ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
American Political Science Association ◽  
Production Cycle ◽  
The Individual

This paper is a revision of the Presidential Address delivered to the 66th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Los Angeles, California, September 10, 1970. It identifies nine aspects of political theories: storage and retrieval of memories; assistance to insight; simplification of knowledge; heuristic effectiveness; self-critical cognition; normative awareness of values; scientifically testable knowledge; pragmatic skills; and wisdom, or second-order knowledge of what contexts are worth choosing—a wisdom subject to the possibility of radical restructuring. These nine aspects of theory form an integrated production cycle of knowledge. “Scientific” and “humanistic” political theorists need each other to understand the central task of politics: the collective self-determination of societies. To appraise this steering performance of political systems, large amounts of empirical data as indicators of social performance are indispensable. Political science has grown in knowledge of cases, data, research methods, and sensitivity to problems of disadvantaged groups and of the individual. It is learning to recognize qualities and patterns, verify the limited truth content of theories, and be more critical of its societies and of itself. It needs to increase research on implementation of insights, on positive proposals for reform, changes in political wisdom, and on the abolition of poverty and large-scale war. For these tasks, cognitive contributions from political theory are indispensable; working to make them remains a moral commitment.

scholarly journals Reading Silence

2018 ◽  
pp. 74-94
Author(s):  
Larry Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Everyday Language ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Wide Range

Stanley Cavell roams across a wide range of fields in his first book, Must We Mean What We Say? most obviously those of epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. But nowhere in the book’s ten essays does he advance an explicit political theory. Still, this book, published in 1969 and written over the course of the preceding decade, quietly poses persistent political questions, even in essays on such topics as skepticism and King Lear, Kierkegaard’s Book on Adler and Beckett’s Endgame, atonal music and ordinary language philosophy. Just who is the “we” spoken of in the book’s title (we philosophers? we Americans? we human beings?)? Is there any relationship between democratic equality and the philosophical appeal to our everyday language, as described in the book’s eponymous essay? 1 Does the account that Cavell offers in his piece on Wittgenstein of practices and behaviors shared across cultures—the “whirl of organism” of our forms of life—suggest a nascent theory of human solidarity? Our freedom in language and the responsibility we bear for meaning, topics of the book’s opening essays, raise the question of what we might owe to one another and how we might offer—or withhold—it in our choices of words. Is this the beginning of a theory of justice? The concept of acknowledgment, described in the book’s final essays as a response to the challenge of skepticism, shifts the problem from what I can know to what I might do. Is this a theory of moral or political action (or both)?

scholarly journals COVID and the Era of Emergencies

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 12-24
Author(s):  
Danielle Celermajer ◽  
Dalia Nassar
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Legal Concept ◽  
Reality Condition ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Democratic Principles ◽  
Political Solidarity ◽  
Emergency Measures

The threat of emergency measures introduced in face of COVID-19 has largely been framed in terms of individual rights. We argue that it is not the protection of the sovereign individual that is most at stake, but the relations between political subjects and the institutions that enable their robust political participation. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the ways in which isolation and the incapacity to discern truth or reality condition totalitarianism and are exacerbated by it, we argue that the dangers for the evacuation of democratic politics are stark in our era. We consider contemporary political action in concert in Germany to illustrate this critique of COVID-19 emergency measures. Drawing on the legal concept of “appropriateness,” we explicate how the German critical response to the shutdown is founded on a concern for democratic principles and institutions, and aims to achieve two crucial goals: governmental transparency and social-political solidarity.

scholarly journals Acting together: The art of collective improvisation in theatre and politics

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-40
Author(s):  
Sonja Vilc
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Collective Improvisation

The paper analyzes the concept of collective improvisation and draws out its potentials for social and political theory. Translating the ideas of collective improvisation from their original context in the theatre into the field of political thought, I argue that they offer a new understanding of political action by reevaluating the concepts of dissensus (Ranci?re) and community (Nancy), as well as the ways in which politics as a system needs to produce collectively binding decisions (Luhmann). I conclude that the ideas inherent in the practice of collective improvisation, as it has been developed within the tradition of modern theatre improvisation, subvert our intuitive ways of thinking about politics and thereby offer an alternative model of being and acting together.

Save the Appearances! Toward an Arendtian Environmental Politics

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
LAURA EPHRAIM
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Environmental Politics ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Anthropogenic Contamination ◽  
Vulnerable Communities ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Critical Resources

Drawing critical resources from Hannah Arendt, this article argues for a revaluation of the appearances of nature in environmental political theory and practice. At a time when pervasive anthropogenic contamination threatens the very survival of vulnerable communities and species, it would be wrong to revive the timeworn mythos of nature as an untrammeled beauty. Instead, with Arendt’s help, I advocate an environmental politics rooted in an alternative aesthetic of nature, one that respects and seeks to protect earth’s diverse lifeforms for the sake of their strange, disquieting appearances of otherness. Earth’s living displays of alterity are valuable, I argue, for their propensity to upset the destructive logic of mass production and consumption and spur political action. In an Arendtian frame, we can better recognize interdependence between biological and political life and appreciate the role of nonhuman lifeforms in constituting spaces of appearance where human freedom and plurality may flourish.

The haunting quality of racism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Durrheim ◽  
Amy Jo Murray
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
The Past ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Way

Anti-racism has nurtured many visions of post-racism futures. All this talk and political action relies on and reproduces discourses of racism. While much of this discursive force lies in what is said, we argue that a haunting quality of racism may arise from what is unsaid. This includes the multifarious points of connection between the present and the past. We are all implicated, albeit unevenly. This article describes the phenomenon of spectral racism that arises from such implicature. We develop a discursive account of its constitution in acts of dialogical repression, and we consider some of the social psychological and political ramifications of haunting racism. We illustrate our arguments by an analysis of the way the prohibition against the use of the k-word echoes the toxic past and zombifies racism via psychological enticement.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document