The Experts below are selected from a list of 23394 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform

Andrew Fitzmaurice - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • shakespeare and early Modern Political Thought the corruption of hamlet
    2009
    Co-Authors: Andrew Fitzmaurice
    Abstract:

    Modern criticism of Hamlet has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been dominated by the idea of Hamlet's Modern subjectivity, expressed (or, unexpressed) through his interiority. Immanuel Kant's influence looms large in this critical tradition. Samuel Taylor Coleridge introduced Kant to Hamlet, figuratively speaking, and they have subsequently been almost inseparable. Coleridge was profoundly moved by Kant's account of the creative imagination, and in turn he revealed Hamlet's self-reflexive life of the mind. Early twentieth-century discussions of Hamlet remained equally concerned by Hamlet's inner life. This critical preoccupation with Hamlet's interiority has only intensified in the historicist studies of Shakespeare of the past twenty years. Following Stephen Greenblatt, critics such as Francis Barker have used Hamlet's interiority to reveal Modern subjectivity as emergent rather than given. The main challenge to this notion of subjectivity has come from feminist critics. But these critiques have added that the play Hamlet also describes an emergent gendered subjectivity. They have not questioned the notion of an emergent Modern subjectivity itself, rather they have strengthened it. I will argue that Shakespeare's contemporaries would have seen Hamlet not as a Modern subject but as a man who withdraws from the corruption of Political life. Hamlet is a play profoundly concerned with corruption and its impact upon self-understanding and Political self-presentation. Readers of Hamlet have not failed to notice the commentary on corruption: it is surely one of the more obvious themes of the play. My aim here, however, is to place that concern in the context of early Modern Political Thought.

  • shakespeare and early Modern Political Thought
    Renaissance and Reformation, 2009
    Co-Authors: David Armitage, Conal Condren, Andrew Fitzmaurice
    Abstract:

    This is the first collaborative volume to place Shakespeare’s works within the landscape of early Modern Political Thought. Until recently, literary scholars have not generally treated Shakespeare as a participant in the Political Thought of his time, unlike his contemporaries Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney. At the same time, historians of Political Thought have rarely turned their attention to major works of poetry and drama. A distinguished international and interdisciplinary team of contributors examines the full range of Shakespeare’s writings in order to challenge conventional interpretations of plays central to the canon, such as Hamlet; open up novel perspectives on works rarely considered to be Political, such as the Sonnets; and focus on those that have been largely neglected, such as The Merry Wives of Windsor. The result is a coherent and challenging portrait of Shakespeare’s distinctive engagement with the characteristic questions of early Modern Political Thought: among them, corruption and citizenship, education and persuasion, the hazards of the court and the demands of the commonwealth.

Paul Brink - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • charting the path not taken pluralist explorations in early Modern Political Thought
    Social Science Research Network, 2011
    Co-Authors: Paul Brink
    Abstract:

    It is the fate of theories of strong pluralism to be notable chiefly by their absence from the mainstream of Modern Western Political Thought. Whether because of the concern to achieve a strong basis of unity amid warring religious factions, or, more strongly, to make a Political declaration of faith in the autonomy of human reason, Moderns have sought to develop rights-based theories of Political rule upon whatever non-religious bases that people might be found to hold in common. And so from Hobbes to Hegel, from Bodin to Bentham, students of the mainstream of Western Political theory learn that a healthy public life is one wherein people depend upon the things they have in common, rather than their differences.This paper explores the early development of this “common-basis” strategy, focusing on the 100-year period prior to Thomas Hobbes (approximately 1550-1650). It considers the strategies developed in this period that attempted to “filter out” certain complicating social phenomena or institutions - especially religion, but also the family, ethnicity and culture more broadly - in favor of a focus on the singular relationship between the individual and the state. As non-state social phenomena were diminished insofar as rights were concerned, differences between persons also faded from significance. The result was a Modern politics of rights that systematically diminished vital features of Political and social life, perhaps at the cost of the very resources we most need as we contemplate the great Political challenges around us. The paper concludes with a consideration of the possibilities for a re-reading of the tradition, including a search for solutions from countries where the Protestant Reformation was “incomplete,” and where approaches other than the “common-basis” strategy were pursued in order to find ways that groups who disagreed on a great deal could live together peaceably. This results of such an exploration, the paper suggests, will have relevance, first, to those societies presently experiencing great conflicts, including violent conflicts, concerning religion and other differences, but second, to Modern liberal democracies that experience great difficulty navigating the contemporary politics of difference.

Barbara Arneil - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Disability, Self Image, and Modern Political Theory:
    Political Theory, 2008
    Co-Authors: Barbara Arneil
    Abstract:

    Charles Taylor argues that recognition begins with the politics of “self-image,” as groups represented in the past by others in ways harmful to their own identity replace negative historical self-images with positive ones of their own making. Given the centrality of “self image” to his politics of recognition, it is striking that Taylor, himself, represents disabled people in language that is both limiting and depreciating. The author argues such negative self-images are not unique to Taylor but endemic to Modern Political Thought from John Locke to John Rawls, as the disabled (“irrational” and/or mentally disabled/ill people) are constituted in direct opposition to the rational person and/or citizen. Using contemporary social theories of disability, as articulated by disabled scholars and advocates, the author concludes that such negative self-images (and the binary of autonomy/justice and dependency/charity underpinning them) must be purged from Political theory and replaced with an alternative theory o...

Anna Becker - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • GENDER IN THE HISTORY OF EARLY Modern Political Thought
    The Historical Journal, 2017
    Co-Authors: Anna Becker
    Abstract:

    In the history of early Modern Political Thought, gender is not well established as a subject. It seems that early Modern politics and its philosophical underpinnings are characterized by an exclusion of women from the Political sphere. This article shows that it is indeed possible to write a gendered history of early Modern Political Thought that transcends questions of the structural exclusion of women from Political participation. Through a nuanced reading of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentaries on Aristotle's practical philosophy, it deconstructs notions on the public/Political and private/aPolitical divide and reconstructs that early Modern thinkers saw the relationship of husband and wife as deeply Political. The article argues that it is both necessary and possible to write gender in and into the history of Political Thought in a historically sound and firmly contextual way that avoids anachronisms, and it shows – as Joan Scott has suggested – that gender is indeed a ‘useful category’ in the history of Political Thought.

Sankar Muthu - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • empire and Modern Political Thought
    2014
    Co-Authors: Sankar Muthu
    Abstract:

    Preface 1. Machiavelli's three desires: Florentine republicans on liberty, empire, and justice Mikael Hornqvist 2. Conquest and the just war: the 'School of Salamanca' and the 'affair of the Indies' Anthony Pagden 3. Alliances with infidels in the European imperial expansion Richard Tuck 4. John Locke: theorist of empire? David Armitage 5. Montesquieu on empire and enlightenment Michael Mosher 6. Edmund Burke on empire, self-understanding and sympathy Uday S. Mehta 7. Adam Smith in the British empire Emma Rothschild 8. Conquest, commerce, and cosmopolitanism in Enlightenment Political Thought Sankar Muthu 9. Liberalism, nation, and empire: the case of J. S. Mill Pratap Bhanu Mehta 10. Republicanism, liberalism, and empire in post-revolutionary France Jennifer Pitts 11. Colonies and empire in the Political Thought of Hegel and Marx Gabriel Paquette 12. Social theory in the age of empire Karuna Mantena 13. Political theory of empire and imperialism: an appendix Jennifer Pitts.

  • empire and Modern Political Thought conquest commerce and cosmopolitanism in enlightenment Political Thought
    2012
    Co-Authors: Sankar Muthu
    Abstract:

    The debate that lasted on and off from 1511 until the early seventeenth century was initially, as Francisco de Vitoria phrased it, an attempt to explore the right (ius) of the barbarians subjected to Spanish rule. Vitoria pointed to issues that have still not been resolved about the right of any people to impose upon others what it believes to be the natural rights of all humankind. Rome demonstrated that a conquest could only be justified if it were the outcome of a just war. Vitoria employed two more natural law arguments in favor of the conquests, both of which make broad general assertions that were to have a lasting impact on all subsequent thinking about the legitimation of the intervention of one state in the affairs of another. The Roman law of vicinage, to which Vitoria alludes, required that neighbors support each other in times of crisis.