Any attempt to apply Aristotelian political categories to the principles of modern constitutionalism is undoubtedly at risk of anachronism. This paper acknowledges non-trivial differences between the Ancient Greek politeia, as theorised by Aristotle, and the modern constitution. It nonetheless argues that the central principles of the modern liberal constitution can be elucidated within the explanatory frame of the Aristotelian concept of the politeia as a political determination of institutional structures and competences oriented by an interpretation (...) of the public good. The paper is divided in three sections. Section 1 outlines Aristotle’s account of the politeia. Section 2 considers some central principles of modern constitutionalism. Section 3 then examines these principles under an Aristotelian lens. The conclusion sketches a potential objection, implicit in the paper’s arguments, to a recent proposal for a ‘neo-Aristotelian’ normative constitutional theory. (shrink)

Niccolò Machiavelli is the father of modern constitutionalism. Constitutionalism began anew in the modern world with the study of the ancient republics and it was Machiavelli who inaugurated this revived science of politics. Five hundred years after the composition of Il Principe and the Discorsi we are still working out the implications of applying reason to the structures of law and government in pursuit of justice and the common good. Modern constitutionalism and (...) class='Hi'>ancient republicanism share three central beliefs: first, that government should serve justice and the common good; second, that government should do so through known and stable laws; third, that these will best be secured through the checks and balances of a well-designed constitution. Machiavelli took the theories and experiences of republican Rome and applied them to his own era. This application of reason to constitutional design transformed the politics of emergent modernity and reconfigured government throughout the world. (shrink)

The present article commences analyzing the origins and influences of the religious discourse on the configuration of the modern constitutional discourse and the contributions of the jus-positivism in the consolidation of this sacred-civil language. The second issue is the definition of the U.S. Constitution as a mixed and not as a democratic constitution, with regard to the influences of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Polybius to the Drafters of the first modern constitutional text; stability and equilibrium took preference over (...) democracy in a wide sense. I also analyze how the Drafter’s decision has conditioned the modern constitutional system up to the present. (shrink)

This essay concerns Constant’s classic text The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns. Although this is a frequently quoted text, what makes reading it still something of an effort is that it contains a baffling shift from the complete exaltation of modern liberty in its first part to the recognition of the significance of political participation in safeguarding modern liberty in its final part. The text is also replete with additional treasures, including Constant’s famous (...) distinction between the liberty of the ancients and that of the moderns and his turn to the basic human capacity of self-development to support his stubborn insistence on the irreducibility of political participation. With regard to the aforementioned shift in the 1819 text, some have argued that in order to reveal the richness of the text we must be aware that its two parts were written under different historical circumstances. Accepting this claim, I argue that the basic tone of the text is Constant’s attempt to combine modern liberty and political participation and that deciphering the argumentative thrust inherent in the text helps reveal its richness. I focus on the centrality of the representative system, which, I argue, plays an important role in Constant’s endeavour to unify the liberty of the moderns and political liberty throughout the text. To see how he defends both the enjoyment of individual interests and the practice of political liberty, it is necessary to recognize the nature of representative assemblies in Constant’s constitutionalism and to characterize his appeal to self-development as a justification of the practice of political liberty. (shrink)

Recently, scholars have looked more closely at the philosophical importance of the imaginative and literary aspects of Plato's writing, and have begun to appreciate the methods of ancient philosophers and commentators who studied Plato. This study brings together leading philosophical and literary scholars to investigate these new-old approaches.

During the last decade, scholars have set forth a variety of interpretations to explain how liberalism, republicanism, and several other traditions of political thought interpenetrated and interacted within the political thought of the American Founders. This essay first identifies several alternative versions of the ‘multiple traditions approach’ and then provides a retrospective and prospective analysis of the debate over the intellectual origins of the American republic. Ultimately, I argue that scholars need to explore the way in which the Founders selectively (...) adopted, creatively integrated, and substantially reconstructed these traditions into a conception of political thought that is at once peculiar and significant. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in Pyrrhonism among both philosophers and historians of philosophy. This skeptical tradition is complex and multifaceted, since the Pyrrhonian arguments have been put into the service of different enterprises or been approached in relation to interests which are quite distinct. The diversity of conceptions and uses of Pyrrhonism accounts for the diversity of the challenges it is deemed to pose and of the attempts to meet them. The present volume brings together twelve (...) essays by leading specialists which explore the history and philosophical significance of this form of skepticism: they discuss some thorny questions concerning ancient Pyrrhonism, explore its influence on certain modern thinkers, and examine it in relation to contemporary analytic philosophy. The essays combine historical and exegetical analysis with an assessment of the philosophical merits of the Pyrrhonian outlook, with the aim of understanding it both in its historical context and in connection with contemporary concerns. This volume, the first entirely devoted to a detailed study of the Pyrrhonian tradition, is intended to open up new exegetical and philosophical perspectives on Pyrrhonism and to motivate further examination of certain difficult issues. It will be a valuable resource for scholars of ancient philosophy, historians of modern philosophy, and epistemologists, as well as for graduate students interested in skepticism. (shrink)

This far-ranging collection of essays represents a conference of the same name held at Emory University in conjunction with a meeting of the “Rethinking Plato’s Parmenides” seminar sponsored by the Society of Biblical Literature.In embracing authors as diverse as Plato himself, Epictetus, Ralph Cudworth, Yeats, and Levinas, to name a few of the Platonists identified herein, the volume clearly and deliberately stretches the meaning of this rubric to its outer limits. This review will reprise some of the articles from each (...) of the book’s sections—Ancient, Late Antique, Renaissance and Modern, and Post-modern Platonisms—in an effort to help readers gauge the argument of the book, which may or may not be endorsed by each of the individual contributors. The editors, at least in compiling this anthology, do so in the belief that Platonism might better be considered “as an inexhaustible mine of possible trajectories each of which helps us to see the richness of Platonic texts,” rather than “as a series of determinate doctrines” .Thomas Slezak opens the volume with a rehearsal of his programmatic way of reading Plato’s dialogues, involving two possibly competing claims: what Plato means by philosophy is not contained within the. (shrink)

This paper examines the case of Lawrence v. Texas to bring out the philosophical commitments of Justices Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia. It is proposed that Justices Kennedy and Scalia, while both Catholics, represent fundamentally different visions of the “ends and reasons” of democratic law. A close reading of the Justices’ opinions in Lawrence indicates that Justice Scalia belongs to the tradition of the “ancients” and Justice Kennedy to the tradition of the “moderns.” The paper focuses in particular on the (...) Justices’ interpretations of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It is claimed that the interpretation of this clause turns on a philosophical commitment regarding the ends and reasons that the Constitution should be understood to serve, and thus that justices cannot help acting as “philosopher kings” here. Which of the two Justices is more consistent with the Catholic tradition is proposed as a question for another day. (shrink)

The second edition of David Wootton's Modern Political Thought: Readings from Machiavelli to Nietzsche offers a new unit on modern constitutionalism with selections from Hume, Montesquieu, the Federalist, and Constant. In addition to a new essay by Wootton, this unit features his new translation of Constant's 1819 essay "On Ancient and Modern Liberty". Other changes include expanded selections from Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy and a new Hegel selection, all of which strengthen an already excellent anthology.

ABSTRACT This article explores how our thinking about time shapes epistemological and ontological understandings of the world. It considers the idea of modernity as constituted by the ancient/modern binary through an examination of Montesquieu’s and Benjamin Constant’s development of this binary in relation to their understandings of commerce, the law of nations and conquest, political rule and freedom in the context of European colonial empire. Modernity demarcates a break in (historical) time between a past and a present that (...) extends into a future. This rupture plays a role in distinctions between modern European and pre-modern non-European societies. The ancient/modern binary underpins conceptions of collective and individual liberty. It associates modernity with individual liberty, progress, reason and science. I analyse how this binary operated across space to categorise various societies as not modern, pre-modern or less developed according to levels of scientific, technological, political and economic progress in Montesquieu’s thought and through Constant’s silences. This article develops an innovative reading of the ancient/modern binary in French political thought. (shrink)

In this study, first of all, it was important to analyze this technique of returning to the ancient tradition of two outstanding thinkers of the 20th century. M. Heidegger and Sri Aurobindo Ghosh in order to understand to what extent the language of the ancient sages and rishis is still accessible to our understanding; Has it not already happened that the voice of the ancient sages will turn out to be completely foreign to us, like the language (...) of the unconscious, which we do not hear and do not understand? The conducted analysis showed that a certain intellectual conflict arose between Heidegger and the ancient Greeks. This conflict connected with the fact that the German thinker, repeatedly turning to different periods of Greek philosophy and different Greek thinkers and trying to apply to them the phenomenological method of his teacher Husserl, being atheistically minded, never managed to capture the original spiritual intuition of the pre-Socratics in the understanding of being. And at the same time, he himself could not find a suitable name for understanding being in modern culture. Where Heidegger still very carefully writes about the “open clearing” as a manifestation of the truth in the original ancient Greek thinkers, the essence of which, from the point of view of the German thinker, was still given to Heraclitus and Parmenides only intuitively (they did not yet understand the reason for this phenomenon of our consciousness), Sri Aurobindo directly indicates the existence of a connection between the ancient rishis and the existence (revelation) of the gods. Moreover, the processes described by the Indian thinker are very similar to those described by Heidegger. Everything indicates that the thinking of the ancient Greeks and ancient Hindus was very similar. The ancient Greeks (pre-Socratics) tried to understand why our consciousness is given to existence at all, and discovered the existence of inner peace in man – human openness to understanding the existence. Vedic sages, listening to the “voice” of the subconscious, discovered the waves of the subconscious and realized that man is like gods. It is important to note the difference between the pre-Socratics and the ancient Indian rishis in their interpretation of knowledge of existence. For the Greeks, true knowledge of being awakens human existence for knowledge (the logos, the world of naming, the world of concepts). According to the ideas of the ancient Indian rishis, when the gods awakened by man descend into their own world of existence, the consciousness of man in his actual existence also awakens. That is why the truth for the Greeks, according to Heidegger, is the opening and concealment of the truth of being (things), and the truth for the Rishi, according to Sri Aurobindo, is the ascent to true existence together with the gods that awaken in us. (shrink)

Modernity and What Has Been Lost comes out of a conference held at the Jagiellonian University in Krakw̤, Poland, on June 4-5, 2009 that sought to identify Leo Strauss's intellectual background in re: the repudiation of a modern idea of homogenous, universal state (considered as an illegitimate synthesis of Jerusalem and Athens, i.e., the claims of Reason and Revelation). The world we live in, molded by science and historical relativism, may be described as hostile to human dignity or perfection, (...) or abhorrent to those who love the search for wisdom. Straussian teaching consisted in the steady effort to reopen "the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns," and refers to the esoteric way of writing practiced by the most profound thinkers of the past which has been apparently forgotten in the last three centuries. Strauss binds the concept of natural right with the question of maintenance of conditions for philosophizing, and it probably seems to him that such defense of philosophy is the highest task in our times. However, one must be well aware that philosophizing always means a perilous way of life. Indeed, it may be destructive of the city (polis) itself as far as the city exists due to some crucial beliefs the philosopher might put in doubt. Reflecting on those issues, Strauss engaged in several highly important debates with his contemporaries, in an open way with, e.g., Carl Schmitt, Karl Lw̲ith and Alexandre Kojv̈e, and more tacitly with Martin Heidegger"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

By questioning the modern categories of Plato and Platonism, this book offers new ways of reading the Platonic dialogues and the many traditions that resonate ...

The jurist A. V. Dicey’s study of the Law of the Constitution (1885) has been since its publication the dominant analysis of the British constitution and the source of orthodoxy on such subjects as parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law. This canonical status has obscured the originality of Dicey’s ideas in the history of legal and political thought. Dicey reworked the traditional idea of sovereignty into two separate concepts – legal and political sovereignty – in order to square the (...) common law notion of the sovereignty of parliament with the democratic idea of the sovereignty of the people. He forged a new concept – ‘the rule of law’ – to explain the legal basis of liberty in common law countries in a manner that was both Benthamite and constitutionalist. Finally, he provided a democratic and anti-federalist rationale for maintaining the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. This majoritarian, centralist and utilitarian constitutionalism has been one of the most enduring products of Victorian scholarship. This article seeks to recover it in its original context and, in so doing, to show the value of reintegrating legal thought into the mainstream of modern British history and the history of political thought. (shrink)

This book examines issues related to the concepts of space, time and causality in the context of modern physics and ancient Indian traditions. It looks at the similarity and convergence of these concepts of modern physics with those discussed in ancient Indian wisdom. The volume brings the methodologies of empiricism and introspection together to highlight the synergy between these two strands. It discusses wide-ranging themes including the quantum vacuum as ultimate reality, quantum entanglement and metaphysics of (...) relations, identity and individuality, and dark energy and anti-matter as discussed in physics and in Indian philosophical schools like Vedanta, Yoga, Buddhist, Kashmiri Shaivism and Jaina Philosophy. First of its kind, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researches of philosophy, Indian philosophy, philosophy of science, theoretical physics and social science. (shrink)

This paper examines Hume’s comments on and claims about ancient philosophy. A clear and consistent picture emerges from doing so. While Hume is a lover of ancient literature, he holds ancient philosophy in very low regard, as passage after passage discloses, with one qualification and one important exception. Hume appropriates the mantle of ‘Academic’ sceptic for himself; but in fact his Academic (or ‘mitigated’) scepticism has only minimal affinity with the ancient school of this name, having (...) more in common with early modern sceptical positions. The exception is found in the ‘painterly’ depictions of character and other features of moral life, where Hume holds many of the ancients in very high regard, seeing them as superior to the moderns. The bases of these respective views of Hume’s are explored, with an interpretation which construes Hume’s ‘anatomist’/’painter’ contrast as meant non-ironically. On the anatomist or theoretical side, Hume nonetheless – rightly or wrongly, and contrary to the views of a number of his prominent readers – sees a radical, dramatic break between early modern ‘scientific’ philosophy, and anything which preceded it. (shrink)

There are two dominant schools of thought addressing problems of cosmopolitanism and conflict: democratic national sovereigntism, inspired by Hegel, and global constitutionalism, inspired by Kant and reformulated by Habermas. This paper develops a third position by reading Adorno's critique of both theoretical traditions. Rather than compromising between these camps, Adorno triangulates between them. Critically illuminating their respective deficiencies in view of the changing conditions of a globalized modern world has critical implications for cosmopolitics. Although largely negative, Adorno's critique (...) provides an important framework for a contestatory reformulation of cosmopolitanism, one that is better equipped to confront societal and political global conflicts insufficiently reflected in sovereigntist and global constitutionalist models. (shrink)

The neo-republican conception of freedom as non-domination has emerged as a powerful framework for conceptualizing the dynamic relationship between power, democracy, and constitutionalism in modernity. Despite this, I argue that adaptations of republican freedom to the problem of slavery displace attention to race and foreclose more productive ways of addressing how racial slavery constitutes a distinct form of oppression. To illuminate the limitations of neo-republicanism, I turn to the political thought of abolitionists David Walker and Ottobah Cugoano. Both utilize (...) comparative histories of race and slavery to reveal the specificity of modern slavery as a form of oppression, which cannot be captured as an issue of domination in the technical sense of the term. They thus pose challenges to neo-republican theory for its failure to fully appreciate the historical differences between ancient and modern slavery. To do so would illuminate how neo-republican theory faces severe limitations in providing an adequate conceptualization of oppression in the case of racial slavery. (shrink)

The volume studies, from different perspectives, the relationship between ancient thought and biopolitics, that is, theories, discourses, and practices in which the biological life of human populations becomes the focal point of political government. It thus continues and deepens the critical examination, in recent literature, of Michel Foucault's claim concerning the essentially modern character of biopolitics. The nine contributions comprised in the volume explore and utilize the notions of biopolitics and biopower as conceptual tools for articulating the differences (...) and continuities between antiquity and modernity and for narrating Western intellectual and political history in general. Without committing itself to any particular thesis or approach, the volume evaluates both the relevance of ancient thought for the concept and theory of biopolitics and the relevance of biopolitical theory and ideas for the study of ancient thought. The volume is divided into three main parts: part I studies instances of biopolitics in ancient thought; part II focuses on aspects of ancient thought that elude or transcend biopolitics; and part III discusses several modern interpretations of ancient thought in the context of biopolitical theory. (shrink)

While Foucault claimed that biopower, as a form of political pastorate, did not exist in ancient Greece, he did take the view, following Hegel, that the ancient ‘ethical community’ [sittlichkeit] constituted a kind of ‘political technology of the individual’, an ancient form of ‘police’. In this paper, I trace Foucault’s conception of ‘police’ in his Tanner Lectures to Hegel’s analysis of politeia as the origin of the modern polizei. Through an examination of politeia in ancient (...) political and military literature, I uncover a military–pastoral technology, founded on the relation not between shepherd–flock, but between leader [hegemon] and follower [epistatae]. I suggest two forms that a military–pastoral technology has taken shape, both in the politeia of the Spartans and in the early American Republic. This line of inquiry, I conclude, would not only suggest that a political pastorate existed in ancient Greece, but would also force us to re-consider modern forms of ‘police’ through the lens of a military–pastoral technology. (shrink)

The study of recent ‘traditional’ Mediterranean rural economy has long been a predilection of ancient historians and archaeologists working in that area. Traditional practices and production norms have been used by ancient historians in the interpretation of the often enigmatic testimony of the ancient agronomic writers, while archaeologists have used the same information to fill in the many gaps in the material record supplied by the spade. Much of the relevant data on traditional rural economy are gleaned (...) from the accounts of early travellers or of modern geographers, ethnographers and agronomists. Butcomparandaacquired at first-hand enhance the credibility of archaeologists and ancient historians as fieldworkers, and chance summer encounters with Cretan shepherds or Cycladic fishermen are valuable currency in competitive displays at academic conferences. (shrink)

part I. The unconscious: Into the darkness ; Spirits everywhere ; The unconscious in the laboratory ; The magical instinct ; The shadow -- part II. Magic: Fairy tales ; Alchemy ; Mystical numbers ; The tarot -- part III. Transcendence: Becoming transcendent ; The circulatio and the conjunctio.

This essay proposes a new reading of Cohen’s polemical text, Germanism and Judaism. It argues that the development of Cohen’s late philosophy reveals him not as a helpless philosopher overwhelmed by the maelstrom of a world war, but as an “engaged” thinker who carries forward what he takes to be philosophy’s duty to struggle against war by going to “war” in the space of theory and culture. Cohen’s text needs to be placed in the context of his other wartime writings (...) which, on the one hand, assigned a new and more radical function to messianic Judaism within his ethics, and simultaneously transplanted his neo-Kantianism into the more “realistic” political philosophies of Plato and of Spinoza, respectively. This essay argues that the thought of the later Cohen does not break with his previous commitments to cosmopolitanism and social democracy, as much as it tries to confront the harsh realities of European nationalist and anti-Semitic politics by articulating the roles of philosophy and of Judaism in modernity no longer through a strictly idealistic and cosmopolitan optic. (shrink)

Arnopoulos explains the thoughts and practices of the ancient Greeks with regard to external affairs, or exopolitics, integrating political philosophy with modern international theory. He examines the political ideas of Plato and Aristotle specifically, and evaluates the ancient Greek policy ideals regarding constitutionalism, statesmanship, and foreign policy. In many ways, Arnopoulos would say this is a study not of what people do, but rather how they justify their deeds. He has been writing on the subject for (...) about 30 years, and this monograph is a consolidation of his thinking. His current academic affiliation is not noted. (shrink)

Lately, several commentators have argued that there are significant differences between ancient and modern skepticism. For example, it has been argued that ancient skeptics disavow belief, whereas the moderns disavow only knowledge. It has also been argued that the scope of ancient skepticism is considerably less radical than that of modern skepticism: unlike the moderns, the ancients do not question whether they have bodies or whether there is an external world furnished with the sorts of (...) objects we generally take there to be. They do not suspend judgment as to whether, for example, honey exists, but only as to whether it is sweet. One explanation that has been given for the allegedly modest scope of ancient skepticism is its practical concern: ancient skepticism is a way of life, one that is supposed to secure the skeptic’s happiness. But, according to Myles Burnyeat, “[s]uch being his primary concern, he cannot doubt in a completely general way his ability to act in the world.” Modern skepticism, by contrast, is said to be “a strictly methodological affair,” with the result that, unlike ancient skeptics, modern ones can act in the face of radical skepticism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe opening reference to masturbation in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels provides evidence of not only an embedded cultural commentary on the masturbatory tendencies of modernity but also specific contempt for the novel as a masturbatory literary form. The same point is made elsewhere in Swift’s poetry and his parody of the erotic scene of female masturbation that continued to be a staple of amatory fiction. Yet the same body of writing reveals Swift’s recognition that he too was guilty of producing (...) literary fuel for masturbation, as were the Ancients themselves whose works continued to invite a sexualized response from readers. As such, Swift reveals an ironic point of agreement with female authors of amatory fiction such as Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood, who represent instances of the poetry of the Ancients being put precisely to this use, providing tacit excuse for their own erotically charged writing. In his later notorious diagnosis of Swift as a chronic masturbator literary physician Thomas Beddoes is arguably responding at least in part to Swift’s own sense of entrapment within masturbatory modernity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article examines the prominent Japanese postwar thinker Maruyama Masao’s critical engagement with his contemporary German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Maruyama engaged with Schmitt’s decisionistic notion of “the political” and sovereignty since he found it useful in addressing the pathological elements of Japanese political culture, namely, the widespread political passivity and fatalistic ethos of the Japanese public. In his view, such a “decision-avoiding” political culture, which had contributed to the rise of fascism in interwar and wartime Japan, posed a (...) fundamental threat to the viability of Japan’s postwar democracy. Although Maruyama objected to Schmitt’s authoritarian theory of political leadership, he nevertheless believed Schmitt provided important insights into the key concepts of modern politics, such as political agency and the constituent power of the people. In his efforts to foster political subjectivity and liberal individuality in postwar Japan, Maruyama attempted to strike a balance between two extremes: Schmittian normless decisionism, on the one hand, and a politically naïve liberal constitutionalism, on the other. I conclude by suggesting that the hitherto overlooked intellectual affinity between Maruyama and one of the leading Weimar-era constitutional theorists—Hermann Heller—can enrich our understanding of Maruyama’s unceasing effort to formulate and insist on the imperative role of political subjectivity and liberal individuality in consolidating liberal democracy in postwar Japan. (shrink)

Discusses the nature of philosophical rationality and modernity.

Examines prudential and moral reasoning in ancient and modern ethics. Ancient ethical theories' task of articulating the agent's overall goal; Structural differences between ancient eudaemonist theories and modern theories; Virtue as a complex intellectual kind of understanding.

Constitutional scholarship has put much emphasis on Montesquieu's principle of separation of powers as developed in the chapter of 'The Spirit of the Laws' devoted to the English constitution (XI, 6). It has also been quite common to mix up this model of separation of powers with elements taken from other sections of Montesquieu's masterpiece. The starting point of this paper is that there is an alternative, second model of separation powers based on the French monarchy of intermediate powers, which (...) is also an instantiation of limited government. From this premise, the paper's aim is to carve out a second version of the principle of separation of powers by focusing on the different role and nature of judicial power in the English and French models. It turns out that the French version of the separation of powers is not based on a strict separation, since it bestows on the higher judicial intermediate bodies both judicial and legislative functions. This also leads to a kind of constitutionalism that is 'in between' ancient and modern, as it is exemplified by Montesquieu's take on the functioning of parliaments. As is typical of his political thought, he sees this intermediate power as representative of traditional and conservative social forces but, at the same time, in virtue of its social status, as an institution which strengthens, by opposing it, the monarch's legislative rationality, and legally contains political action. (shrink)

(1992). Chaos and constitutionalism: Toward a post‐modern theory of social evolution. World Futures: Vol. 34, Evolutionary Models in the Social Sciences, pp. 131-156.