Kirkland, Frank M. Review of Lawrie Balfour, DEMOCRACY'S RECONSTRUCTION. NDPR (November 2011).

Balfour, Lawrie.  Democracy's Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois.  Oxford: OUP, 2011.

Lawrie Balfour's Democracy's Reconstruction points out a kind of negligence in political theory. The laxity stems from political theory's longstanding inattention to race and racial injustice as important in a full-fledged and fundamental way to both the character of democratic life and to the inquiry into the ideals and conditions of freedom, equality, and justice that enable that life. If it does attend to them, it treats them as specialties of the aforementioned inquiry or as incidental to the aforementioned life. But it is not simply that race and racial justice have appeared now and then on the democratic landscape, with political theory focusing either on other things or specifically on them as atypical to that life or those ideals. Rather they have mattered and continue mattering to democratic life without political theory seriously attending to them at all. Balfour is of the mind that political theory as a practice remains shadowed by an "unowned past," pertinent not only to the object of political theory's investigation -- democratic life -- but also to the way political theory conducts its investigation on that life.

The aim of Balfour's book is to challenge these states of affairs by endorsing the importance of the corpus of W. E. B. Du Bois. She regards his work as having both longstanding and current significance in its investigation of the democratic experiment, because it strives to understand "the meaning of freedom, equality, leadership, citizenship, and democracy with the slave trade, slavery, and colonial conquest always in sight" (p. 6, emphasis added). Slavery, the slave trade, and colonial conquest are historically not tangentially concurrent with or not simply the underside of democratic life, a life defined and justified by its embrace of the norms of freedom and equality. They are rather historically integral to and concomitant with that life and these norms. Living freely and equally and analyzing the socio-political structures that enable one and all to live historically and currently in that way must be thought in unison with the "peculiar institution," its history, and the ongoing extent of its ramifications.

Not to do so is to cleave the democratic experiment (the enabling of one and all to live freely and equally in an ongoing way) from any account grappling with the life and afterlife of slavery stamped on the cultural, economic, and political arrangements pertinent to the experiment. Not to do so is to give carte blanche to political theory consigning intellectually that life and afterlife to historical oblivion while conveying an account of that experiment as a rather unproblematic and progressively uninterrupted movement toward freedom and equality. Du Bois is unique as a political theorist, Balfour contends, because he thinks these aspects as always in unison and views all people, especially those of the African-diaspora, as those who should have to live with them jointly for the purpose of constantly re-orienting their comprehension of what democracy requires. Otherwise they continually live with them separated, which has as its consequence acquiescence to undemocratic practices by virtue of an ongoing forgetfulness of deliberate actions and policies of racial injustice. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/27285-democracy-s-reconstruction-thinking-politically-with-w-e-b-du-bois/

"The Politics of Interpretation and the Interpretation of Politics," Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, September 23-24, 2011.

Within the last fifty years, interpretation has become one of the most important intellectual paradigms of humanities and social sciences scholarship. Theories about law and literature, philosophy and political thought, history and theology all rely on textual interpretation. Issues such as the role of intentions in the interpretation of texts, the question of whether texts determine, or constrain, interpretations of them, and how much, if any, contextual information is required for their understanding, concern all those disciplines, and call for cross-disciplinary collaboration and exchange. Finally, the simultaneous proliferation of certain interpretive approaches such as ‘hermeneutics’, ‘deconstruction’, and ‘feminist (re)readings’ of texts across disciplinary divides has shown the permeability of these boundaries, and has thus made this call for collaboration even more pertinent.

This conference will provide a setting in which distinguished proponents and critics of some of the prevalent interpretive approaches currently used in humanities and social sciences research are able to engage, for the first time, in a rigorous debate about the advantages and costs of each approach, and to discuss the political assumptions that inform them, as well as aims that drive them.

One of the primary goals will be to evaluate the validity of each interpretive method in reference to the readings it produces when applied to texts. Some of the key questions in this respect include: What is it that each method can or cannot claim to be able to show? To what extent do these methods succeed both in theory and in practice? Do they prevent or improve our understanding of texts? A second focus of the conference is to shed light upon the political dimension of interpretive enterprises and to decode their ideological presuppositions. There has virtually been no interdisciplinary exchange about the question of whether these approaches are ideologically sustained, and if so, whether ideologically charged approaches in turn induce interpreters to systematically ignore some aspects of texts, whilst emphasizing others. Here, consequences will be drawn for the interpretation of politics, widely construed.

In order to address these questions properly, the conference will be structured around panels of up to four presenters each on ‘Strauss and Esoteric Reading’, ‘Contextualist Approaches’, ‘Hermeneutics’, ‘Deconstruction’, ‘Feminist Interpretations’, and ‘Philosophy, Law & Interpretation’.  In so doing, the conference seeks to create a workshop environment in which individual methods are considered as what they are—the results of methodological disputes between different schools of interpretation rather than unconnected monolithic blocs.

Contact: jens.olesen@POLITICS.OX.AC.UK

"Left and Right: the Great Dichotomy Revisited," University of Minho, Braga, Portugal, March 23, 2012.

Ever since the French Revolution, the terms 'left' and 'right' have been used to frame and explain the political positioning of parties, voters and public policies. Although many thinkers claim that this dichotomy is exhausted and no longer provides an adequate understanding of contemporary political divisions, 'left' and 'right' remain central in political debate. But is the content of these terms really understood by all political actors? What does each individual or group recognize as 'left' and 'right'?

It is true that other classifications of political cleavages have been suggested, but none seems to have replaced the traditional division between left and right. Many people have thought that an opposition between materialist and post-materialist orientations or between libertarian and authoritarian values could cut across left and right. However, these new oppositions seem to have been absorbed, at least partly, by the old dichotomy. But is this really the case? Are there, in fact, no other sets of terms that might provide a clearer division of the political spectrum? The standard most commonly used to distinguish left from right has been the concern with equality. But is this social-economic criterion actually the best? Particularly at a time when very divisive “new politics” issues arise? And even if one accepts the validity of the traditional criterion, how can we describe and explain the approaches from left and right on equality issues?

Furthermore, there is more than one ideology within each side of the political spectrum – there is not only one left, there are several lefts, and the same is true about the right. If we accept that there is something that unifies these several lines within each side of the political divide, what, then, separates different views of the left or the right and allows us to distinguish between them? Which are the political values that are shared by the different ideologies on the left and on the right and which are those that keep them apart?

Contact BOTH Ana Rita Ferreira (arita_ferreira@yahoo.com) and João Cardoso Rosas (rosas@ilch.uminho.pt) by November 30, 2011.

Haddad, Samir. Review of Nathan Eckstrand, et al., eds. PHILOSOPHY AND THE RETURN OF VIOLENCE. NDPR (August 2011).

Eckstrand, Nathan, and Christopher S. Yates, eds.  Philosophy and the Return of Violence: Studies from this Widening Gyre.  London: Continuum, 2011.

Philosophy and the Return of Violence: Studies from this Widening Gyre is a thought-provoking collection of thirteen essays by philosophers working in the Continental tradition. While some reference is made to empirical events -- the wars and the peace movements of the last century and the terrorism of this one -- the approach taken by the contributors is firmly theoretical, with the focus divided between accounts of structures responsible for violence, proposals for the pursuit of nonviolence, and critiques of other philosophers' writings on this theme. One shortcoming of the book as a whole is the brevity of the essays; in several instances I wanted to read more from the particular author, to see the next step in the argument or justification for a certain claim. But that is inevitable in this kind of edited collection, and most if not all of the authors have written more on these topics in other publications. Philosophy and the Return of Violence is thus perhaps best treated as a sampler of sorts, providing the reader with a diverse snapshot of ideas, analyses, and arguments that can be pursued elsewhere should they pique her interest. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25435-philosophy-and-the-return-of/

Arrow, Ruaridh. "Gene Sharp: Author of the NONVIOLENT REVOLUTION RULEBOOK." BBC NEWS February 21, 2011.

In an old townhouse in East Boston an elderly stooped man is tending rare orchids in his shabby office. His Labrador Sally lies on the floor between stacks of academic papers watching him as he shuffles past. This is Dr Gene Sharp the man now credited with the strategy behind the toppling of the Egyptian government.

Gene Sharp is the world's foremost expert on non-violent revolution. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages, his books slipped across borders and hidden from secret policemen all over the world.

As Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine fell to the colour revolutions which swept across Eastern Europe, each of the democratic movements paid tribute to Sharp's contribution, yet he remained largely unknown to the public.

Despite these successes and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 2009 he has faced almost constant financial hardship and wild accusations of being a CIA front organisation. The Albert Einstein Institution based on the ground floor of his home is kept running by sheer force of personality and his fiercely loyal Executive Director, Jamila Raqib.

In 2009 I began filming a documentary following the impact of Sharp's work from his tranquil rooftop orchid house, across four continents and eventually to Tahrir square where I slept alongside protesters who read his work by torchlight in the shadow of tanks. . . .

Read more here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12522848.

Cfp: "Forms of Domination and Emancipation," Annual Studies in Social and Political Thought Conference, University of Sussex, June 16-17, 2011.

[T]he fact above all which so demoralizes the modern world [is] that the greater the efforts made, the more terrible are the new forms in which the old social problems reappear. (C. L. R. James)

Keynote speakers include Chris Arthur (ex-Sussex) on “Dialectic of Domination and Emancipation” and Stathis Kouvelakis (Kings College London) on "The Actuality of Revolution?”

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

Forms of domination: Capital; (neo-)Liberalism; Patriarchy; Imperialism and (neo-)Colonialism; Hegemony; Ideology; Biopolitics; Discipline; Governmentality; Psychology and Psychoanalysis; Legality and Legitimacy.

Forms of emancipation: Communism and Communization; Radical Democracy; the State; Politics of Difference, Otherness, Non-Identity; Anarchism; Multitude; Psychology and Psychoanalysis; New Social Movements.

Possible thinkers include but are not limited to: Alain Badiou; Walter Benjamin; Judith Butler; Gilles Deleuze; Frantz Fanon; Michel Foulcault; Antonio Gramsci; G.W.F. Hegel; C.L.R. James; Freud and Lacan; Henri Lefebvre; Rosa Luxemburg; Karl Marx; Antonio Negri; Evgeny Pashukanis; Jacques Rancière; Edward Said; Early Frankfurt School; Neue Marx-Lektüre; Value-Form Theory; Théorie Communiste.

Some participants might also like to consider the relations between different thinkers and forms of domination and emancipation.

Abstracts or questions should be addressed to: sspt@sussex.ac.uk.

"The Populist Front: On the Role of Myth, Storytelling and Imaginary in Populist Movements," Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, March 18, 2011.

Welcome & Introduction

• Jorinde Seijdel - editor-in-chief Open: Cahier on Art and the Public Domain
• Merijn Oudenampsen - guest editor Open 20

First Panel: Populism in Theory

• Rudi Laermans & Koen Abts - Sociologists, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, "The Populist Triangle: People, Leader, Establishment"
• Oliver Marchart - Political Theorist, Universität Luzern, "Populism in Political Theory and Visual Culture"
• Sara R. Farris - Political Theorist, Universität of Konstanz, "Populism Unveiled: The Defence of Women as the Founding Myth of the New-Right"

Q&A

Lunch break

Second panel: Imagery & Myth

• John Kraniauskas - Latin American Studies, Birkbeck University London, "Eva Peron as the Image of Peronism"
• Sven Lütticken – Art Critic, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, "A Heteronomous Hobby: Report on the Netherlands"
• Aukje van Rooden - Philosopher / Literary Theorist, Universiteit Utrecht, "The Myth of Modern Politics"

Q&A

Tea and coffee break

Presentation:

• Steve Lambert – Artist / Intelligent Troublemaker, "Constructing Small Scale Temporary Utopias"
• Screening of the film Museum Songspiel, Followed by Q & A with filmmakers Chto Delat – Art Collective, Sint Petersburg / Moscow

Cfp: "Psychoanalysis and Politics: National and the Body Politic," Norwegian Psychoanalytical Society, Oslo, March 25-27, 2011.

We cannot, argued Gullestad in Plausible Prejudice (2006), understand the appeal of right-wing politics if we do not take into account how this rhetoric is underpinned by and embedded in rearticulated neo-ethnic ideas. She argued that politicians from non-right-wing populist parties have resisted specific ways of talking that are considered too extremist, rather than their underlying frame of interpretation.  Recent news stories appear to lend support to her view: Civil rights campaigners have accused governments, not just in France but across Europe, of adopting anti-immigrant and anti-Roma policies to win popular support. The issue of the so-called 'Ground Zero mosque' has caused agitation in the US. In Denmark, the nationalist party is now in government, while the Sweden Democrats have been battling up in the recent elections, appealing to hostility towards immigrants and Muslims in particular, employing the slogan Tradition and Security. In relation to the Wolf-man's phantasies, where the passive role he played towards his sister was envisioned as reversed, Freud (1914) wrote that they corresponded exactly to the legends by means of which a nation that has become great -and proud tries to conceal the insignificance and failure of its beginnings. Given that we are witnessing a revival of nationalist ideas, it is worth asking what fantasies these give voice to. One might think in terms of 'cultures of fear' (Moïsi 2009) in reference to recent developments in USA and Europe and of fantasies of fusion or 'imagined sameness' (Gullestad). Alongside the image of the nation as a mother and/or father, Reich (1933) called attention to the fantasy of the nation as a body. This metaphor is echoed in Money-Kyrle's (1939) haracterization of 'group hypochondria' in connection with the burning of witches and heretics. The Church, with the State united to it, could tolerate no foreign body within itself, and turned ferociously upon any that it found. The analogy may call to mind fantasies of scooping out, sucking dry, of poisoning, or of the other's supreme enjoyment. Where 'the foreign body' in Freud/Breuer's (1893-95)formulation designates the memory of the trauma, the analogy breaks down in that resistance is what infiltrates the ego. The treatment consists in enabling the circulation to make its way into a region that has hitherto been cut off. Conversely, one might think, along the lines of Butler's (2004) reflections on the obituary as an act of nation-building, the instrument by which grievability is publicly distributed, which calls attention not as much to the iconic images celebrated as to what violence and what losses are derealized. When the national public sphere is constituted on the basis of a prohibition on certain forms of public grieving, what has been cut off?

This is an interdisciplinary conference – we invite theoretical contributions and historical, literary or clinical case studies on these and related themes from philosophers, sociologists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, literary theorists, historians and others. Perspectives from different psychoanalytic schools will be most welcome. Please send an abstract of 200 to 300 words to psychoanalysis.politics@gmail.com by December 1st 2010.

Ball, Terence. Review of Robert B. Talisse, DEMOCRACY AND MORAL CONFLICT. NDPR (October 2010).

Talisse, Robert B.  Democracy and Moral Conflict. Cambridge: CUP, 2009.

[I]f there once was a fairly seamless American consensus (which I rather doubt, as I shall later explain), there is no longer. This is the ragged backdrop against which Robert Talisse attempts to argue a new and compelling case for democracy in post-consensus America and elsewhere. He writes that at present "our popular democratic politics is driven by insults, scandal, name-calling, fear-mongering, mistrust, charges of hypocrisy, and worse" (p. 1). Hardly Habermas's "ideal speech situation" in which "the forceless force of the better argument" carries the day![3]

Philosophers, political theorists and others who try to account for and make sense of such discord are at a loss to do so in any wholly satisfactory way. Oversimplifying somewhat, two general accounts have emerged of late. The first is "the clash of civilizations account, which holds that the world is on the brink of . . . a global conflict between distinct and incompatible ways of life." This is the view advanced in very different ways in Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations (1996) and in Benjamin R. Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld (1995). There are global and local variants of this view; according to the latter, a clash of civilizations or a "culture war" is being waged within the United States.

A second account -- "the democracy deficit narrative" -- holds that a once-widely shared commitment to democracy is in decline, as citizens draw ever-sharper lines dividing them from their fellow citizens, which makes it ever more difficult to find common ground or to compromise (pp. 1-2). According to these two accounts, politics is thus either a politics of difference driven by a kind of "us vs. them" tribalism or by a militant moralism -- which is of course different from morality -- that brooks no quarter and no compromise.

Under these conditions of moral pluralism and fundamental clashes of conviction, the stage seems set for a Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes. If this war is to be avoided, Talisse argues, we shall as democrats have to forgo any claim to base our commitment to democracy on prior moral commitments, since those very commitments are in contention and conflict. Talisse opts instead for an epistemic defense of democracy. His contention is that even though we disagree morally, we are all pretty well in agreement epistemically. This is because we subscribe to a real but largely unconscious and unargued "folk epistemology" (about which more in a moment). Before expounding and defending that bold and even audacious claim, however, he has some spade-work to do. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=21609.

Lane, Melissa. "Ancient Political Philosophy." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY September 6, 2010.

Ancient political philosophy is understood here to mean ancient Greek and Roman thought from the classical period of Greek thought in the fifth century BCE to the end of the Roman empire in the West in the fifth century CE, excluding the rise of Christian ideas about politics during that period. Political philosophy as a genre was invented in this period by Plato and reinvented by Aristotle: it encompasses reflections on the origin of political institutions, the concepts used to interpret and organize political life such as justice and equality, the relation between the aims of ethics and the nature of politics, and the relative merits of different constitutional arrangements or regimes. Platonic models remained especially important for later authors throughout this period, even as the development of later “Hellenistic” schools of Greek philosophy, and distinctively Roman forms of philosophical adaptation, offered new frameworks for construing politics. . . .

Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-political/.

Lec: Stephen White, "Continental and/versus Analytical Political Thought," University College London, June 14, 2010.

Prof Stephen White (University of Virginia) will be giving a talk entitled 'Continental and/versus Analytical Political Thought' on Monday 14 June in London. The discussant will be Prof Jane Bennet (Johns Hopkins University). Venue: The Council Room, School of Public Policy, 29/30 Tavistock Sq, London WC1H 9QU. Time: 5-7 pm, 14 June 2010. This event is organised by UCL and the Centre for the Study of Political Thought at Queen Mary, University of London. For further information please contact Prof Jeremy Jennings at j.r.jennings@qmul.ac.uk.

Cfp: "Deconstructing Democracy." DERRIDA TODAY (November 2011).

Deconstructing Democracy: CFP The November, 2011 issue of Derrida Today will be a special issue on “Deconstructing Democracy.” Derrida’s evocation of a “democracy-to-come” is most famously associated with global politics immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the announcement of a New World Order. Over subsequent years, the term recurred in Derrida’s discussions of religion, sovereignty, justice, human rights and the War on Terror. How adaptable was this deconstructive construction of democracy, and how well has it survived into the era after both established communism and evangelical neo-conservatism, the era of stalemate in Iraq and Afghanistan, of the Global Financial Crisis and Climate Change? Far from being a mere restatement or celebration of Derrida’s own discussions of democracy, this issue will hope to encourage a critical re-appraisal of the relationship between deconstruction and the democratic: • What are the horizons of the deconstruction of democracy with, beyond or against Derrida; with, beyond or against democracy? • Does ‘democracy-to-come’ have an enduring legacy? • What does deconstruction have to offer democratic thinking now? • Does deconstruction help us re-think the strengths and limitations of democracy both as it is currently practiced and as an idea? • Whatever happened to the ‘New International?’ • Is deconstruction democratic? Contributors should send a 250-word proposal and a 100-word Bio, to dteditors@gmail.com by June 30, 2010. Complete papers will be due by December 31, 2010.

Olkowski, Dorothea. Review of John Protevi, POLITICAL AFFECT. NDPR (April 2010).

Protevi, John. Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. In Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic, John Protevi purports to bring together politically activist philosophy with cognitive science to obtain a nonmechanistic materialism, which he then applies to three contemporary social crises. According to his thesis, individualistic subjectivity is bypassed insofar as the social and somatic (including emotion) are directly linked to one another in the production of social states of affairs that result in the crimes attributed to individuals, thereby bypassing individual responsibility. At least one of the author's case studies supports this account, but it is questionable that the other two do. Nor do they present the reader with solid ethical alternatives other than the destratification of the body such that neither emotion nor reason are qualities of a person, but only moments affecting a body. The philosophy that Protevi uses to carry out this study is primarily that of Gilles Deleuze, and the cognitive science comes from a variety of sources in the field of embodied or affective cognition. Their coming together initially takes shape around the concepts of emergence and complexity. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19247.

"New Paths in Political Philosophy," SUNY, Buffalo, and Centre for Modern Thought, University of Aberdeen, March 28-29, 2008.

Friday, March 28 9:00-10:00: Coffee 10:00-10:30: Welcoming Remarks by Dean Charles Stinger (Arts and Sciences, SUNY-Buffalo). 10:30-1:00: David Johnson (SUNY-Buffalo), Chair

• Carlo Galli (University of Bologna, Italy): "Carl Schmitt nell’etá globale"
• Adam Sitze (Amherst College): "A Space Without War, a War Without Space: Remarks on Carlo Galli’s Political Spaces"

1:00-2:00: Lunch @ 904 Clemens Hall 2:00-4:30: Galen Brokaw (SUNY-Buffalo), Chair.

• Giuseppe Duso (University of Padua, Italy): "Pensare la politica oltre i concetti moderni"
• Miguel Vatter (Universidad Católica de Chile): "Republicanism or Modern Natural Right? The Question of the Origins of Modern Representative Democracy and the Political Thought of Giuseppe Duso"

4:30-5:00: Coffee 5:00-6:30: Sergio Villalobos (University of Arkansas), Chair.

• Brett Levinson (SUNY-Binghamton): "Politics and Optimism for the Blank Generation"
• Jon Beasley-Murray (University of British Columbia): "Biopolitics in Esposito and Negri"

9:00: Dinner at Lombardo’s Ristorante, 1198 Hertel Ave., Buffalo NY (873-4291) Saturday, March 29. 9:00-10:00: Coffee 10:00-12:30: Sara Nadal (University of Pennsylvania), Chair

• Roberto Esposito (University of Naples, Italy): "Persona, Uomo, Cosa: Per una filosofia del impersonale"
• Tim Campbell (Cornell University): "'Foucault Wasn’t a Person': Reflections on Idolatry and the Impersonal in Roberto Esposito’s Terza persona"

12:30-1:30: Lunch @ 904 Clemens Hall 1:30-4:00: Susana Draper (Princeton University), Chair.

• José Luis Villacañas (University of Murcia, Spain): "Representación/politización: Los supuestos liberales de la razón populista"
• Alberto Moreiras (University of Aberdeen, UK/SUNY-Buffalo): "Heimlich/Unheimlich: La in/domesticación del estar político"

4:00-4:30: Coffee 4:30-6:30: Laurence Shine (Buffalo State College), Chair.

• Bruno Bosteels (Cornell University): "Politics, Infrapolitics, Impolitics"
• Vincent Gugino (Legal Aid, Buffalo): "Republican Anxiety, or Franklin as Constitutional Thinker"

Further information may be found here: http://abdn.ac.uk/modern/node/23.

"States of Freedom: Freedom of States," Duke University and University of the West Indies, Mona, June 17-18, 2010.

How are notions of freedom and governance practiced and contested within and across national spaces in the Caribbean postcolonial? This symposium explores questions of freedom and governance generated from the heart of creolization; a process that forged a uniquely global exploitation of discrete island territories for economic activity, regional influence, and military advantage by many of the major European metropoles. The continuities and discontinuities in this history form the inspiration for our consideration of discourses, cultural forms, geo-political alliances, models of states and citizenship, and forms of (un)freedoms that have emerged in the Caribbean. In this interdisciplinary symposium we will consider how states of freedom (and felt un-freedoms), have been, and are currently being imagined, performed and represented in politics, the visual and cultural arts, as well as in literature, and also examine the consequences of this for the creolization/kreyòlisation of places, power, people, ideas and knowledge. This symposium fosters an intellectual partnership and new networks of collaboration between Duke University and the University of the West Indies-Mona. It is co-sponsored by the Duke University Center for International Studies (DUCIS) and the Office of the Principal and Vice Chancellor at the University of the West Indies, Mona, and supported by the Deans of the Faculties of the Social Sciences and Humanities, the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES), the Department of History, the Institute of Caribbean Studies as well as the Center for Caribbean Thought. The organizing committee includes: Duke University, Michaeline Crichlow (AAAS and Sociology), Deborah Jenson (Romance Studies); UWI-Mona, Patricia Northover (SALISES, Mona), Matthew Smith (Department of History& Archaeology), Sonjah Stanley-Niaah (Institute of Caribbean Studies). Keynote speakers include: Prof. J. Lorand Matory (Chair, African and African American Studies, Duke University), and Prof. Rupert C. Lewis, (Professor of Political Thought, Department of Government, University of the West Indies). For further information, please contact: patricia.northover@uwimona.edu.jm, pat.northover@yahoo.com; tel: 876 927 1020 or 876 927 1234. Proposed titles and abstracts should be submitted by email under the subject heading “States of Freedom proposal,” by March 5, 2010.

Hall, Edith. Review of Peter J. Ahrensdorf, GREEK TRAGEDY AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. NDPR (March 2010).

Ahrensdorf, Peter J. Greek Tragedy and Political Philosophy. Cambridge: CUP, 2009.

This new study of the relationship between religious and political thought in Sophocles consists of three substantial chapters analysing the 'Theban plays', Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone respectively, framed by an Introduction and Conclusion. Ahrensdorf opens his study with the claim that, since the Enlightenment, political theory has tended to sideline the issue of religion. One way of countering this is to consider pre-modern thought about the relationship between religion and political enlightenment. Sophoclean tragedies, and in particular the 'Theban plays', offer a promising arena in which to conduct such an analysis. Ahrensdorf nails his colours to the mast at the beginning of the book: Sophoclean drama, in his view, is both deeply respectful of the power of religion and at the same time politically rationalist. In the Sophoclean world it is, basically, possible to be both respectful of divinity and a rational political agent. According to Ahrensdorf, Nietzsche was therefore quite mistaken in seeing in the Greek tragic hero (and especially in Oedipus) a figure of huge grandeur who only achieves his nobility and wisdom through accepting the utter chaos, mystery, and cruelty of the world, along with the human inability to comprehend the metaphysical forces which govern it. Ahrensdorf argues in his Introduction that the Nietzsche's reading has been predominant ever since the early 20th century, with scholars as diverse as Heidegger, Harold Bloom, Peter Euben and Arlene Saxonhouse acquiescing in Nietzsche's insistence on the anti-rationalism of the Sophoclean tragic hero. He identifies his own position as one that differs from what (he claims) is this post-Nietzschean scholarly consensus. His Sophocles is in fact not a critic of rationalism, but advocates, rather, a 'humane rationalism'. Its vehicle is a model of statesmanship that follows a middle way. It involves neither an extreme rationalism that excludes a religious perspective, nor an extreme anti-rationalism that excludes the power of reasoned argument and self-questioning. A good leader will do a great deal of Socratic inductive reasoning, but leave a substantial place for acknowledging the power of the divine and the unknowable in human life. . . .

Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19167.

Romano, Carlin. "Amartya Sen Shakes Up Justice Theory." CHRONICLE September 14, 2009.

Sen, Amartya. The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009. Suppose three children—Anne, Bob, and Carla—quarrel over a flute. Anne says it's hers because she's the only one who knows how to play it. Bob counters that he's the poorest and has no toys, so the flute would at least give him something to play with. Carla reminds Anne and Bob that she built the darn thing, and no sooner did she finish it than the other two started trying to take it away. Intuitions clashing yet? Need something more complex to tingle your justice antennae—perhaps a puzzler from game theory? The example is Amartya Sen's, from the Nobel-Prize-winning economist's just-published The Idea of Justice (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press), his magnum opus on a line of work he's long addressed and now thoroughly re-examines: justice theory. And what a growth industry it's been since John Rawls revived the subject with his classic, A Theory of Justice (1971), and colleague Robert Nozick made its core principles into an Emerson Hall battle with his libertarian Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). Since Rawls, one hardly ranks as a political theorist without a whack at the J-word. Sen's stepping into the fray should keep things hopping, but justice theory is one subsidiary of philosophy that never really suffers a bad century. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/Amartya-Sen-Shakes-Up-Justice/48332.

"Possibility and Paradox: On Rhetoric and Political Theory," Northwestern University, April 2-5, 2009.

(This conference is over but I thought the information would be still useful to some.) International Conference for the Study of Political Thought. This conference brings together distinguished and emerging scholars in political theory, philosophy, communication, literature, history, and other areas of the social sciences and humanities who share an interest in the rhetorical character of political thought and discourse. Our discussions will focus on a wide range of issues regarding the pivotal function of rhetoric in the history of political thought and contemporary political theory. These include, but are not limited to, questions about the performative dimensions of language, the role of affect and emotion in political life, the poetics and aesthetics of political discourse and experience, the rhetorical structure of political texts, the relationship between the logic and style of political argument, between author and audience, and between what political texts say and what they do. To provide our inquiries with historical scope and interpretive depth, each of our nineteen speakers will focus on a single key figure in the history of social and political theory, from Thucydides and Plato to Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon. Our goal is to make the case that an understanding of rhetoric is not just relevant but central to an understanding of political thought and conduct. Visit the conference webpage here: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/polisci/cspt/2009_conference.html.

Myers, Ella. Review of Boudewijn de Bruin, et al., eds. NEW WAVES IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. NDPR (August 2009).

de Bruin, Boudewijn, and Christopher F. Zurn, eds. New Waves in Political Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Reviewing an edited volume is arguably more challenging than reviewing the work of a single author. That task becomes all the more daunting when the volume in question lacks any organizing theme. In the case of New Waves in Political Philosophy, there are no central questions, concepts, thinkers, or texts linking the contributions to one another. The editors, to their credit, announce this fact in the introduction, explaining that the text offers a "snapshot" of contemporary political philosophy and is intended to reflect the "heterogeneity" of recent research. According to De Bruin and Zurn, the collection of 11 essays demonstrates the "vibrancy" of the field by treating a vast array of topics, some "perennial", some resurgent, and others "more recently put on the agenda". (Some of the categorizations here are truly bizarre. "Citizenship" is a new issue in political philosophy? Tell that to Aristotle.) The breadth of the work included in the volume ensures that any attempt to create a thread connecting the pieces to one another is bound to feel forced. The most fruitful approach to take to a book of this kind is to treat each contribution individually. Due to space constraints, however, I will simply list eight of the pieces, to give potential readers some hint of the offerings, before reflecting on three particularly interesting and thought-provoking contributions. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16865.

Sellers, Mortimer. "The Influence of Marcus Tullius Cicero on Modern Legal and Political Ideas." CICERONIA (2008).

Abstract: Marcus Tullius Cicero is the father of modern law and politics. Cicero's influence was significant throughout subsequent European history, but never so much nor so directly as in the emergence of modernity and in the development of modern law and constitutional government. The early moderns became faithful apostles of Cicero's thought and ideals because their world and political circumstances were in many ways closer to those of Cicero than to those of any intervening centuries. The influence of Cicero's legal and political ideas on the modern world illustrates the decisive importance that the study of history can have on legal innovation and social change. The modern world would not have developed where it did, when it did, nor as it did were it not for the life and writings of Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Download the paper here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1354102.