You are here: Home / Archives for Politics
post

Habermas on Phronesis

27/05/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"Focusing on Aristotle and Hobbes, Habermas contrasts the classical and the modern conceptions of politics. The 'old doctrine of politics' has become alien to us in three respects. First, 'politics was understood to be the doctrine of the good and just life; it was the continuation of ethics. Aristotle saw no opposition between the constitution formulated in the nomoi and the ethos of civil life; conversely, the ethical character of action was not separable from custom and law. Only the politeia makes the citizen capable of the good life; and his is altogether a zoon politikon, in the sense that he is dependent on the city, the polis, for the realization of human nature' (TP, p. 42.).

Second, 'the old doctrine of politics referred exclusively to praxis in the narrow sense of the Greeks. This had nothing to do with techne, the skillful production of artifacts and expert mastery of objectified tasks. In the final instance, politics was always directed toward the formation and cultivation of character; it proceeded pedagogically and not technically' (TP, p. 42).21

Third, 'Aristotle emphasizes that politics, and practical philosophy in general, cannot be compared in its claim to knowledge with rigorous science or with apodictic episteme. For its subject matter, the Just and the Excellent in its context of a variable and contingent praxis, lacks ontological constancy as well as logical necessity. The capacity of practical philosophy is phronesis, a prudent understanding of the situation, and on this the tradition of a classical politics has continued to base itself, by way of the prudentia of Cicero, down to Burke's "prudence"' (TP, p. 42.)" (Bernstein 1995 :185-186).

Bernstein, Richard J.
1995[1976] The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory. Philadelphia, PA: The University of Pennsylvania Press.

Citation Style AAA

The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory at Amazon.com

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: , , , , ,
post

Hannah Arendt on Ruling and Being Ruled

09/04/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"Kingship, probably the oldest, and perhaps the most elementary political form of organization, rests on the experience of action in the general sense of beginning something new, of men starting together on a new enterprise. Action is the rallying point of the coming and staying together of heads of private households who have decided to leave behind their private concerns and who form a body politic as long as the enterprise lasts. What drives them together is the appetite for action that never can be satisfied by one man alone; for in distinction to laboring and fabricating, which can be pursued in loneliness or isolation, action is possible only where men join together and act in concert. This concert of action demands and, as it were, creates the king, who, as primus inter pares becomes an elected leader whom the others follow out of their own free choice in the spirit of loyalty. Where the element of free engagement is absent, kingship becomes a monarchy and, according to Plato, a tyranny when obedience is not granted voluntarily. The sovereign rulers of regal households who followed King Agamemnon to begin the Trojan enterprise helped him and Menelaos because they hoped to win for themselves 'eternal glory,' namely, the doxa of glorious appearance in the world of mortals, which will survive their deaths. Only in this common world where they themselves and everything they do is seen and noted by others can they hope to overcome their private destiny of mortality, that is, to be born and live and die as one unique, unexchangeable person who, in the privacy of his own concerns, could not hope to leave any trace of his earthly existence behind him. It is for its utter futility that private existence–the idion of the Greeks and, though to a lesser extent because of the integration of family life into the public political realm, the res privata of the Romans–always had the connotation of a life deprived of the most essential human possibilities. Yet something of this futility is also inherent in the great enterprises of the so-called heroic age. The common realm itself, constituted only for the requirements of action, disappears the moment the enterprise has come to an end–when Troy is destroyed, its people killed or distributed as slaves in the private households of the heroes. In a sense, kingship and its enterprises, inspired by the courage to do and to endure–poiein and pathein have a closer relationship in Greek than in any other language; they are like two sides of the same pragmata insofar as they signify the ever changing and fluctuating fortunes of men-begin what eventually emerges in the polis as a more stable common world of human affairs (ta ton anthropon pragmata). This later common world comprehends and assures survival for everything that men do to, and suffer from, each other, whereby it is understood that human greatness is not restricted to the deed and the doer in the strict sense of the word, but can equally be the share of the endurer and sufferer."

Source Citation
Arendt, Hannah. "The great tradition II. Ruling and being ruled.(Essay)." Social Research 74.4 (2007): 941+. Academic OneFile. Web. 11 Apr. 2011.
Document URL

http://find.galegroup.com.proxy1.ncu.edu/gtx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=AONE&docId=A174238907&source=gale&srcprod=AONE&userGroupName=pres1571&version=1.0

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: ,
post

The Meaning of Man as Political

09/03/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“It is rather a question which precedes any particular politics which I should like to lay before you: what is the meaning of this fact, manifest to whomever considers history and daily life, that man is political? This massive question touches on problems of law, sociology, and history, and I should like to approach it by its most disconcerting aspect: with the State there appears a certain violence which has all the characteristics of legitimacy. What is the significance of this strange fact, not only for our lives as men, but also for our moral reflection, for our philosophical and religious meditation? The political existence of man is watched over and guided by violence, the violence of the State which has the characteristics of legitimate violence.

Let us first make certain of our point of departure: what is the minimum violence instituted by the State? In its most elementary and at the same time most indomitable form, the violence of the State is the violence of a penal character. The State punishes; in the last analysis it is the State which has the monopoly over physical restraint. It has taken from individuals the right to do justice themselves; it has taken upon itself all the diversified forms of violence inherited from the primitive battle of man against man. For all violence, the individual may call upon the State, but the State is the last court of appeal beyond which there is no recourse. By approaching the violence of the State by way of its punitive, penal side, we have directed ourselves to the central problem; for the multiple functions of the State, its power to legislate, its power to make rulings and to execute them, its administrative function, its economic function, or its educational function, all these functions are ultimately sanctioned by the power of constraining as the final authority. To say that the State is a power and that it is a power of constraining is one and the same thing.

Let us not speak therefore of an evil State, of a totalitarian State, let us merely speak of the State and of what makes the State a State in the midst of different and even opposed regimes and forms of States. Anything which the State adds in the form of illegitimate violence only serves to aggravate the problem. It is enough for us that the State which is reputed to be the most just, the most democratic and liberal, reveals itself as the synthesis of legitimacy and violence, that is to say a moral power of exacting and a physical power of constraining.

Why does this union of law and force within the State constitute a problem? It would not be a problem if life in the State could fully express, integrally realize, and radically exhaust every exigency of the moral consciousness. We would be content if politics could be the fulfillment of ethics for us. But can life in the State quench the thirst for perfection? ” (Ricoeur 1998:234-235).

Ricoeur, Paul
1998[1965] History and Truth. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Citation Style AAA

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: , ,
post

People’s Councils

06/02/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“Arendt is alluding to what has been a tragic pattern, repeated over and over again, whenever these [people's] councils have briefly come into existence. The enemies of these people’s councils have been those ‘professional’ revolutionaries who have crushed them.

Arendt’s reflections on the emergence of such councils provides a perspective for reassessing her earliest reflections on the failures of a Jewish politics in the modern age. Arendt’s hope had been that the Jewish people themselves might create such revolutionary councils, that they might-as Lazare proposed-join with other oppressed groups to fight for and secure their freedom; and that they might do this ‘without leadership and without [a] previously formulated program’. This would have been the fulfillment of the populist strain in her thinking. And this idea of a council system (where Jews and Arabs would work together) is the political alternative to an independent sovereign Jewish or Arab state. Her thought-train concerning a Jewish homeland and her thought-train concerning the council system interweave and reinforce each other.

In describing the council system, she tells us that ‘the councils were born exclusively out of the actions and spontaneous demands of the people, and they were not deduced from an ideology nor foreseen, let alone preconceived, by any theory about the best form of government’. The councils are a paradigm of a democratic institution, ‘but in a sense never seen before and never thought about’.

Under modern conditions, the councils are the only democratic alternative we know to the party system, and the principles on which they are based stand in sharp opposition to the principles of the party system in many respects. Thus, the men elected for the councils are chosen at the bottom, and not selected by the party machinery and proposed to the electorate either as individuals with alternative choices or as a slate of candidates…. The elected, therefore, is not bound by anything except trust in his personal qualities, and his pride is ‘to have been elected by the workers, and not by the government’ or a party, that is, by his peers and from neither above nor below.

The council system helps us to understand two interrelated concepts that are central to Arendt’s political thinking: ‘no-rule’ and political equality (isonomy). At first (or even second) glance, Arendt’s repeated insistence that politics is not a question of who rules whom but involves a ‘no-rule’ seems strange-if not perverse. But now we can understand what she means. In the councils, members meet as political equals. Even leadership is not a matter of ruling, but of acting and speaking together with one’s peers. The councils-indeed, those councils which have spontaneously come into existence in modern times-are the very institutions in which equality or isonomy is created, a political equality which is not to be confused or reduced to the false and dangerous idea of social equality. ‘No-rule’ must not be confused with the bureaucratic rule of ‘Nobody’-which Arendt took to be such a pervasive trait of modern societies” (Bernstein 1996:127-128).

Bernstein, Richard J.
1996 Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Citation Style AAA

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: , ,