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Confucian perfectionism
Since the very beginning, Confucianism has been troubled by a serious gap between its political ideals and the reality of societal circumstances. Contemporary Confucians must develop a viable method of governance that can retain the spirit of the Confucian ideal while tackling problems arising from nonideal modern situations. The best way to meet this challenge, Joseph Chan argues, is to adopt liberal democratic institutions that are shaped by the Confucian conception of the good rather than the liberal conception of the right.
Confucian Perfectionismexamines and reconstructs both Confucian political thought and liberal democratic institutions, blending them to form a new Confucian political philosophy. Chan decouples liberal democratic institutions from their popular liberal philosophical foundations in fundamental moral rights, such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and individual sovereignty. Instead, he grounds them on Confucian principles and redefines their roles and functions, thus mixing Confucianism with liberal democratic institutions in a way that strengthens both. Then he explores the implications of this new yet traditional political philosophy for fundamental issues in modern politics, including authority, democracy, human rights, civil liberties, and social justice.
Confucian Perfectionismcritically reconfigures the Confucian political philosophy of the classical period for the contemporary era.
eBook
A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle East
From ancient Mesopotamia into the 20th century, \"the Circle of Justice\" as a concept has pervaded Middle Eastern political thought and underpinned the exercise of power in the Middle East. The Circle of Justice depicts graphically how a government's justice toward the population generates political power, military strength, prosperity, and good administration.
This book traces this set of relationships from its earliest appearance in the political writings of the Sumerians through four millennia of Middle Eastern culture. It explores how people conceptualized and acted upon this powerful insight, how they portrayed it in symbol, painting, and story, and how they transmitted it from one regime to the next. Moving towards the modern day, the author shows how, although the Circle of Justice was largely dropped from political discourse, it did not disappear from people's political culture and expectations of government. The book demonstrates the Circle's relevance to the Iranian Revolution and the rise of Islamist movements all over the Middle East, and suggests how the concept remains relevant in an age of capitalism.
A \"must read\" for students, policymakers, and ordinary citizens, this book will be an important contribution to the areas of political history, political theory, Middle East studies and Orientalism.
eBook
Grace Lee Boggs on Chinese Political Thought and the Next American Revolution
This essay tracks how Grace Lee Boggs's lifelong engagements with Chinese political thought and US revolutionary praxis co-developed. We first show that Lee Boggs's concepts of roles and revolution drew on Confucian and Maoist philosophy; we next show that Lee Boggs later traced alternative, US-based genealogies of both concepts, just as she engaged more deeply with Asian American activism. Lee Boggs as a reader of Chinese thought tended towards cultural hybridity, transcontinental intimacies, and general intellectualism. We propose that these tendencies could be usefully developed in both Asian American political thought and political theory as a whole.
Journal Article
The Political Regard in Medieval Islamic Thought
Global intellectual history has attracted traction in the past decade, but the field remains focused on the modern period and the diffusion of Western political concepts, ideologies, and methodologies. This paper suggests that juxtaposing political texts from the medieval Islamic world with their Christian counterparts will allow for a better understanding of the contours of the debate on the space for politics, framed in primary sources as the perennial tug of war between religious and lay authority. The implications of this line of inquiry for the history of European political thought are significant as well. Many of the premises and characteristics that are considered singularly European, such as continuity between past and present, as well as a strong performative regard to political thought, are equally present in non-European (in this instance Islamic) debates. It is more a matter of perspective than essence that distinguishes the history of European political thought, and a wider perspective through juxtaposition of texts and concepts would enhance the global debate by introducing new questions from rarely visited quarters.
Journal Article
American Labyrinth
Intellectual history has never been more relevant and more important to public life in the United States. In complicated and confounding times, people look for the principles that drive action and the foundations that support national ideals.American Labyrinthdemonstates the power of intellectual history to illuminate our public life and examine our ideological assumptions.
This volume of essays brings together 19 influential intellectual historians to contribute original thoughts on topics of widespread interest. Raymond Haberski Jr. and Andrew Hartman asked a group of nimble, sharp scholars to respond to a simple question: How might the resources of intellectual history help shed light on contemporary issues with historical resonance? The answers-all rigorous, original, and challenging-are as eclectic in approach and temperament as the authors are different in their interests and methods. Taken together, the essays ofAmerican Labyrinthillustrate how intellectual historians, operating in many different registers at once and ranging from the theoretical to the political, can provide telling insights for understanding a public sphere fraught with conflict.
In order to understand why people are ready to fight over cultural symbols and political positions we must have insight into how ideas organize, enliven, and define our lives. Ultimately, as Haberski and Hartman show in this volume, the best route through our contemporary American labyrinth is the path that traces our practical and lived ideas.
eBook
Contours of Black Political Thought: An Introduction and Perspective
This essay aims to demonstrate how attention to black political thought might expand and complicate our understanding of modern politics and the conceptualization of the political in contemporary political theory, and in modern politics more generally. Black political thought can be viewed as the attempt to develop a set of critical tools to help explain the political distinctiveness of black life-worlds and how this distinctiveness is structured by a series of relations between individual and community, self and other, state and society, citizen and non-citizen, and national and multinational (or global) circumstances. Too often, black politics is exclusively considered as a form of minority group politics and phenomena reducible to empirical investigation and observation, rather than a set of practices with underlying conceptual, theoretical, and epistemological premises. If we understand race as a fundamentally relational concept, namely, an assumption of dynamic interaction between two or more putatively distinct groups, and racism as a political phenomena that is conditioned and articulated through politics, then taken together they provide the opportunity for reflection and consideration of how black peoples and subjects have conceptualized, created and engaged in politics, political communities, and their articulation. Race and racism, the modalities of political participation and, conversely, the modalities of political exclusion have been recurrent themes in black political thought. The distinctiveness of black political thought is symptomatic of the distinctive trajectories of black politics, which first emerged from spaces of exclusion in Western polities and colonies. The histories of black political and social movements provide evidence of the ways in which black subordination in Western societies and polities required the reconfiguration of the actual boundaries between the public and private, the political and the social. Race and racism, the distinction between identity and identification, black solidarities, and the relationship between history, context, and politics and the political are themes central to black political thought.
Journal Article
Democratical Gentlemen and the Lust for Mastery: Status, Ambition, and the Language of Liberty in Hobbes's Political Thought
Neorepublican treatments of Hobbes argue that his conception of liberty was deliberately developed to counter a revived and Roman-rooted republican theory of liberty. In doing so, Hobbes rejects republican liberty, and, with it, Roman republicanism. We dispute this narrative and argue that rather than rejecting Roman liberty, per se, Hobbes identifies and attacks a language of liberty, Roman in character, often abused by ambitious persons. This is possible because Roman liberty—and, by extension, Hobbes's relationship to it—is more complex than neorepublican authors have allowed. Drawing on Roman sources, along with Hobbes's major works, we argue that Hobbes's theory of liberty owes much to his engagement with Roman sources, and that this theory speaks to the egalitarian elements in his political thought.
Journal Article