Suchergebnisse

The eighteenth-century House of Commons -- Edmund Burke's theory of parliamentary politics -- The French Revolution and the liberal parliamentary turn -- Reinventing parliamentarism : the significance of Benjamin constant -- Democracy in America, parliamentarism in France : Tocqueville's unconventional parliamentary liberalism -- John Stuart Mill and the Victorian theory of parliament.

Like Karl Marx, Edmund Burke has remained a partisan figure, even though the specific partisan context in which he wrote is long gone. To a greater degree than Marx, however, Burke's partisan identity is itself frequently contested. Burke was a hero to the conservative writer Russell Kirk, who devoted his life to undoing the triumphs of twentieth-century American progressivism. But Burke was also a hero to Woodrow Wilson—whose presidency enacted and inspired so many of the progressive reforms that Kirk wanted to overturn—and to a number of the Victorian liberals who did so much to form Wilson's political mind-set.

In her well-known piece on Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt wrote that "posthumous fame… seems to be the lot of the unclassifiable ones." It is achieved by "those whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre that lends itself to future classification." If she is right, then there may be some hope that Richard McKeon will one day have his moment. For McKeon (who was, in fact, a friend of Arendt) is eminently unclassifiable. Born in 1900, he studied philosophy both with the great French medievalist Étienne Gilson and with John Dewey. He was a twentieth-century American pragmatist who sought to revolutionize philosophy so that it could deal with the novel challenges of a technological age. Yet he was also a brilliant scholar of classical and medieval thought, who wrote such articles as "Poetry and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century," "Rhetoric in the Middle Ages," and "The Hellenistic and Roman Foundations of the Tradition of Aristotle in the West."

For nearly half a century John Stuart Mill was a major critic of the forms of electoral corruption prevalent in Victorian England. Yet this political commitment has been largely overlooked by scholars. This article offers the first synoptic account of Mill's writings against corruption. It argues that Mill's opposition to corruption was not accidental or temperamental, but sprung from fundamental principles of his political thought. It also shows that Mill's opposition to electoral corruption put him at odds with other leading liberal thinkers of his era, who thought that the existing ways in which wealth influenced elections had positive effects – or at the very least that they did not impede a healthy electoral contest from taking place. Mill's fervent intent to eliminate corruption also distinguishes him from many liberal theorists today, who either do not write about electoral corruption, or consider it an issue to be managed and lived-with. Reflecting on Mill's political thought alongside other liberal thinkers raises the question of whether liberal states can draw a definitive line between prevalent forms of corruption and legitimate modes of political action, and eliminate the former, or whether we must regard corruption as among the constitutive dilemmas of a liberal politics.

Hannah Arendt'sThe Origins of Totalitarianismis a distinctively international history. It traces Nazism to a "collapse of the nation-state" across Europe, brought on by European anti-Semitism and European imperialism, rather than to specifically German developments. This essay recovers the political meaning of that methodological choice on Arendt's part, by documenting the surprising intersection between Arendt's involvement in political debates over postwar European reconstruction, where she made an intellectual alliance with Resistance groups across Europe and strongly argued for European federation, and her involvement in historiographical debates over the sources of Nazism. I show the explicit connection that Arendt drew between an internationalist historiography of Nazism and the need for an internationalist European politics, in a series of essays she wrote in the mid-1940s. I then argue that this connection continues to play a prominent role inOriginsitself, sharply differentiating Arendt from other prominent theorists of Nazism.

AbstractEdmund Burke'sReflections on the Revolution in Franceis most famous and controversial for Burke's opposition to the philosophy behind the Revolution. This essay examines Burke's more practical criticisms of the French National Assembly which pervade the pamphlet, and shows their connection to his earlier arguments about corruption in the House of Commons. Burke's insight into the future course of the French Revolution is based in his distinctive approach to thinking about the pathologies of legislative assemblies, which he initially developed in the House of Commons, and later applied to the French National Assembly.