Introduction: Redefining the political

Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously proclaimed that everyone in society is an intellectual, although not everyone functions as an intellectual. With this definition, Gramsci conceptually divides the intellectual, firstly as one who has the capacity to critically engage with one’s life situation, and secondly as the one who functions as the moral and intellectual leader of their respective class. This leads him to propose that “[t]he task of any historical initiative is to modify the preceding stages of culture [and] to homogenise [sic] culture at a higher level than it was” . Such a problematic aim, I will argue, is rooted in Gramsci’s dated framework, which I will reveal through a distinctly queer reassessment of identity-based politics. En route to queering Gramsci’s intellectual, I will first subject Gramsci’s view of the subject and his assumptions regarding political action to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-Marxist critique. Upon this basis, I will then present Jack Halberstam’s low theory as a way of engaging a detail-oriented cultural politics that averts the problematic confines of identity-based politics. Ultimately, this study should be read as an update to Gramsci’s theory; a democratization and intensification of intellectual-governing activity for modern times.

Ethical Perspectives, 2016

ethical perspectivesjune 2016 and with considerable insight. Their book would be particularly valuable for students of political philosophy. Curiously both authors operate out of a John Rawlsian perspective. John A. Dick Leuven Andrew Fiala (ed.). The Bloomsbury Companion to Political Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 288 pp. This book has an ambitious goal: "[...] to offer an overview of the field [of political philosophy] and the depth of the issues" (2). The collection is aimed at postgraduate students, scholars and libraries, and includes a number of interesting companions: Philosophy of Mind (386 pp.), Philosophy of Science (475 pp.), Continental Philosophy (417 pp.), in addition to Companions to Aristotle (418 pp.), Kant (432 pp.), Hume (447 pp.), etc. Most are very useful and some even mandatory references. Unfortunately, this volume falls short of such an ambition. It certainly does not help that it is by far the shortest in the collection, at little more than 250 pages, considering the pervasive nature of the political problems it faces and the 2500 years during which political philosophy has occupied some of the world's best minds. The volume is composed of a set of fourteen essays, a small glossary (227-254), a brief chronology (223-225) and a suggestion of 'research resources' (255-258). Contrary to expectations, the first essay, on the history of political philosophy, authored by James Alexander, is not an overview of the history of political philosophy, but a mere ten-page discussion of the respective roles of history and theory. The essay arrives at the commonsensical conclusion that "If philosophy without history is a desert, and history without philosophy is a jungle, then we certainly need something of both" (16); that is, in the end, the history of political philosophy "[...] is not political philosophy, but political philosophy is nothing without it" (30). The author, however, takes the rather shallow view that all political philosophy is but an "[...] attempt to respond to the world," so we are not assured of its real perennial philosophical value, except maybe seeing it as predecessor to current political ideas. After serving old masters such as polis, or to empire, church or state, only "[...] in the twentieth century, there were attempts to define politics (or the category of 'the political') as something in itself" (19). If the book begins with the past, the final essays go from contemporary theory to a prediction of future political philosophy. This is part of the design of the Companion series, where the last two essays are supposed to present a vision of the possible future of the subject matter. The last essays are quite original, at least in their basic ideas. Mathew Voorhees and J. Jeremy Wisnewski "[...] analyze the publication record of six leading journals" (200) over 20 years to offer the informed guess that we should expect more work on global politics (202), inclusion (203) and democratic theory (203-204), the continuing presence of 'the Rawls industry' (204), and some new applied ethical-political problems (gender studies, etc.). Eduardo Mendieta writes the final essay on some of these 'trendy' subjects. 99037_Eth_Persp_2016-2_08_Bookreview.indd 350 30/05/16 13:40 brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Universidade do Minho: RepositoriUM 99037_Eth_Persp_2016-2_08_Bookreview.indd 351 30/05/16 13:40

Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, and …, 2007

Much of the writing we see about politics falls into two categories, each as unsatisfactory in its own way as the other. The first and by far the most common of these, which fills up acres of space in the newspapers every day, is commentary on the surface flow of events. Which politician has said and done what? What steps have governments announced, what policies have they promulgated? What response has been made to these by their political opponents? Who is gaining ground and who is losing it, by such indicators of public support as votes, press commentary, opinion polls, or more vaguely, 'mood', as in 'someone close to the Government said to me in the lobby earlier today'. Organisations and institutions get a say in this accounting, as when their spokespersons announce their dissatisfaction or approval. Even social movements get a look in, if they can raise enough noise by demonstration or direct action to raise them above the threshold of invisibility. One can, and does, devour volumes of this kind of stuff on a daily basis whilst feeling in the end that one has learned little. What's being described 2 here is of course the daily discourse of political practitioners, including the journalists whose practice is reporting and commentating. At the opposite pole, lie more abstract and more scientific forms of discourse, developed by political scientists and sociologists. These trade in models of systemic equilibrium and disequilibrium, statistical trends, profiles of public attitudes, models of class composition and political affiliation, and the like. These methods can be illuminating, and one can even draw comfort from them. An example of a recent interesting piece of work in this genre is Judis and Texeira's (2002) book the Emerging Democratic Majority, which predicted on the basis of the changing demographics of the United States of America, and the rise of a highly educated, post-industrial workforce to a leading position in the economy and society, an era of 'progressive centrism,'-'the emerging democratic majority' of the book's title. Cheered up by this volume, which I had acquired on a visit to the West Coast, I enthusiastically passed it over to Stuart Hall on my return home. 'It's somewhat optimistic', said he sombrely, never one to be deluded by false dawns. (Two years later, he was unfortunately proved right when George W, Bush won his second term). Texeira and Judis are politically engaged writers; practitioners of academic forms of political science generally hold themselves aloof from political practice, distinguishing their 'value-neutral' stance from committed political commentary or polemic. A gap is thus established between everyday political practice, and the academic study of politics,

Course Description This module focuses on some central normative issues in political thought, as theorised principally in the modern Western tradition. Political philosophy/theory deals with arguments about the way society should be structured and governed and is concerned with normative rather than empirical questions. The readings will, however, be related to concrete political debates, both past and present. The module aims to develop your ability to think critically and comparatively about the ideas that shape our world, and about how they are shaped by history and culture. Some knowledge of political philosophy, history, social science and current affairs are useful, but not necessary. By presenting a selection of themes and debates, the module enables students to assess theoretical arguments about issues, such as:  the nature of modern thought and society  the freedoms and obligations that should, or should not, be enjoyed by groups and individuals  the social distribution of resources  the relationship between majorities and minorities in society  the relationship between individual and community  the role played by gender, sexuality and ethnicity in political life  the legitimacy or illegitimacy of war and its role in history  our obligations towards the natural environment and the future Having read all the assigned readings and attended the lectures and seminars, students should be able to:  demonstrate knowledge of some key texts in modern political thought  demonstrate knowledge of a range of topics and concepts employed in contemporary political thought  evaluate a variety of normative arguments about political life  articulate their own positions based on their reading and classroom learning

Gramsci's Democratic Theory: Contributions to a Post-Liberal Theory of Democracy, 1992

Please note: this is Chapter 3 in Gramsci's Democratic Theory. I could only upload one section at a time - this is section 8 of 13 in total. FROM THE BOOK: The prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci serve as the foundation for Sue Golding's in-depth study of Gramsci's contribution to radical dem- ocratic theory. Her analysis encompasses English, Italian, and French debates on the subject, as well as political and philosophical discus- sions on the limitations of liberal and socialist democratic theory. Golding explains how Gramsci arrives at the conclusion that a funda- mentally pluralistic 'post-liberal' democracy - that is to say, one that is 'open/ fluid, and based on an immanent and heterogeneous will of the people - is not only possible and preferable, but actually obtainable. The consequences of his analysis are dramatic: on the one hand, Gramsci is able to provide a conception of the structure which is no longer static or reducible to a formal economic moment; it is, instead, profoundly political, since it becomes both the repository and expression of change as well as the terrain upon which a better society can emerge. On the other hand, he is able to incorporate as fundamental to a post-liberal democratic theory a number of concepts often overlooked in the theoretical discussions of socialist democracy. Gramsci demonstrates that if one is to take seriously historical materialism and the kind of democratic society to which it points, one will necessarily be faced with a clear choice. One can either accept a flawed but strategically powerful methodology based on the dialectics of a philosophy of praxis or, more to the point, take as a given the profundity of the political and the radical diversity this implies, and search for a new logic. In the concluding chapter, Golding takes a look at the possible resolutions offered by way of a discursive (or what has come to be known as postmodern) philosophy outlined in part by the surrealists and further developed in the work of Laclau, Mouffe, Foucault, and Derrida.

History of European Ideas, 2011

The University of Cambridge has long been a centre for the teaching of the history of political thought. 1 In 1873, to meet concerns that the study of history alone might ''exercise too exclusively the memory and receptive imagination of the student'' (at the expense of the higher faculties of abstraction and generalisation), the new Historical Tripos included a number of ''theoretical'' courses taken over from the longer-established degree in Moral Sciences. 2 Among these was a paper in ''Principles of Political Philosophy and General Jurisprudence'', for which undergraduates read a fairly miscellaneous selection of ten books, from Aristotle's Politics to Maine's Ancient Law via François Guizot, John Stuart Mill, and John Austin. 3 True to the purpose of the paper, these books were read for direct political and philosophical illumination rather than as episodes in intellectual history. 4 It was indeed the view of a series of Cambridge historians in the later nineteenth century-most notably Sir John Seeley and Oscar Browning-that the study of history was properly understood as a foundation for a political science, and that (in Browning's words) ''the Tripos ought to some extent.. .be regarded as a Political Tripos.'' 5 In this conception, Browning was fighting a losing battle even at the end of the nineteenth century, and today the question of how to supplement the learning of history so as to borrow a degree of intellectual rigour from elsewhere has long lost its point. 6 (Nobody now doubts that history is a proper university subject, and accusations of objectionable novelty and intellectual flimsiness have found new targets.) It was a sign of the times when in 1929 ''Political Science A''-essentially a course in the comparative study of political institutions-was replaced by a paper on ''The History of Political Thought''. 7 Political philosophy, originally included in the Tripos as an intellectually bracing addition to mere historical erudition, was now to be treated as itself part of the history to be studied. 8 This approach informed pioneering work by J.G.A. Pocock and Peter Laslett in the 1950s, and theoretical manifestos by Pocock, John Dunn, and Quentin Skinner in the following decade. 9 Since then, Cambridge has been associated with a distinctive way of studying the history of political thought, in which surviving texts are assigned to past contexts of political circumstance and intellectual practice in order to make possible the recovery of those texts' character as specific ''speech acts'' performed by historical agents. 10 It is an irony that this ''genuinely historical'' view of the history of political thought (to use Quentin Skinner's expression) has its origins in the inclusion of consciously nonhistorical subjects in the Cambridge Historical Tripos. 11 Between undergraduate education and the production of original historical research lies the training of graduate students, and at the graduate level the ''Cambridge School'' has had a pedagogical as well as a scholarly dimension from the outset. 12 It is a sign of the continuing vitality of graduate work in the history of political thought in Cambridge that since 2008 graduate students History of European Ideas 37 (2011) 396-402

Political theory is the work of abstract philosophers and tells us little about how to meet the challenges of a contemporary age.' Critically evaluate this statement.

This is a course in the history of political ideas from the early sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries, i.e. the period in which the vocabulary of politics more or less as we now know it was forged: the vocabulary of the state and of "reason of state", of sovereignty and of the individual, the "state of nature" and the social contract, of political and social equality and metaphysical liberty, of legitimacy, toleration and rights: in other words the language of political modernity.