According to one interpretation, Montesquieu believed that laws should be suited to the particular physical and moral characteristics of a nation, and that political change should not be abruptly imposed. However, as Montesquieu nonetheless condemned despotism, he argued that change in despotic regimes should happen gradually through the noncoercive alternative of doux commerce. My aim is to challenge this interpretation of Montesquieu in two ways. First of all, Montesquieu was far more skeptical about the possibility of political change; so (...) strong was his physical determinism that Montesquieu himself thought that despotic states could not be reformed, even through commerce. Second, even though successors of Montesquieu—such as the Abbé Raynal—did view the use of force in reforming despotic states as futile and preferred commerce as a benign alternative, they had to acknowledge that even commerce could not take root in those supposedly despotic states without coercion. The two most representative doux commerce theorists of the eighteenth century, when confronted with the prevailing trope of Oriental despotism, were far less optimistic about the civilizing effect of commerce than today’s interpretations suggest. My reading of The Spirit of the Laws and The History of the Two Indies suggests the limits of turning to eighteenth-century doux commerce ideals to theorize political reform in so-called despotic governments today. (shrink)

The leading arguments of Anquetil-Duperron's Legislation Orientale (1778) are analysed as a sustained attempt by this early Indologist to refute Montesquieu's influential theory of oriental despotism with respect to the Muslim regimes of Turkey, Persia and India (the Mogul empire). Anquetil adduces literary evidence and his own observations to refute the claim that Asian governments are invariably arbitrary, lawless and without property rights. Rather, similarities in these basic respects between European and Asian societies underline the common humanity of (...) their inhabitants, in keeping with the convictions of Enlightenment humanism and contrary to some eighteenth-century justifications for European empires. (shrink)

European portraits of the great Asian states, China, India, and Persia, remained remarkably constant from the establishment of the Chinese silk trade in the first century B.C. until the religious and mercantile expeditions to the Orient prominent in the late Middle Ages. For more than a millenium, the Eastern empires had been classified by Europeans as stable despotisms – stationary societies governed by custom and tradition and devoid of economic, political, or cultural dynamism. Only during the Enlightenment did the proper (...) interpretation of the merits of ‘Oriental despotism’ become a matter of controversy. To some Enlightenment figures, the paternalistic despotisms of Asia appeared to be superior to the nations of Europe ethically and in the quality of their political, legal, and educational institutions. Many social philosophers of the period agreed that the example afforded by Asia could contribute much to the rejuvenation of European society they hoped to effect. (shrink)

This study considers the relations between James Mill's _The_ _History of British India_ and Enlightenment historiography, especially William Robertson's _Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge the Ancients had of India_. David McInerney argues that it was in _The History of British India_ that Mill first published his theory of government, which appears there in his account of 'Oriental despotism' and his criticisms of Robertson's account of the caste system, and that, contrary to the opinion of certain critics, Mill's usage (...) of 'history' in _The History of British India_ is not rationalist but rather entails a distinctively empiricist conception of the relationship between historical records and the improvement of government. (shrink)

The East/West divide seems to be as old as history itself, the roots of Orientalism and anti-Semitism lying far beyond the origins of modern Western imperialism. The very project of Western classical republicanism had its darker side: to purloin the legacy of the Greeks, distancing them from Eastern systems deemed 'despotic' and 'other'. Western Republicanism and the Oriental Prince is a thoroughly revisionist book, challenging not only the comfortable view the West has of its own political evolution, but the (...) negative stereotypes of non-Western systems. Not only did these images serve to legitimate early modern European nation states struggling for an identity, but they also served to justify slavery and other forms of domination over subject peoples. Drawing upon archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Springborg discusses the Mesopotamian and ancient Egyptian contribution of political forms and cultic institutions to classical Graeco-Roman civilization, an Eastern legacy to the West long obscured for political reasons. A different reading of the foundation myths of Athens and Rome, certain texts of Plato, Aristotle, and the writings of Herodotus, Isocrates, Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus, permits us to restore possible lines of filtration. Renaissance thought, long believed to have ushered in the Western classical republican tradition, demonstrates a curious ambivalence towards powerful Eastern system, objects of fascination as much as fear. We do not yet find sedimented the divide between Western Democracy and oriental despotism, in which post-Reformation thought as been set in stone. This major new study will be of interest to students of political history, political theory, comparative politics and political archaeology. (shrink)

Imagine an idealized Islamic people named “Kazanistan.” Is realistic utopia a fantasy? Using an intellectual device reminiscent of Montesquieu’s evocation of oriental despotism in his Persian Letters as a pretext allowing him to criticize eighteenth-century European monarchies, a columnist has recently reflected on the “fantasy nation” that certain Americans dream of. What would exemplify a Neoconservative vision of society as put forward in debates about questions of social justice in the United States? asked Nicholas D. Kristof in the (...) New York Times (June 4, 2011). He presented this question as an enigma and offered a few clues meant to help in guessing what type of society would conform to Neocon .. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFree versus unfree was a fundamental axis of differentiation in ancient Near Eastern societies. Liberty was conceptualized as the power to govern oneself, free from another's domination, thus free to participate in constituting political authority. More concretely, the subject of the state was by definition free, this being the condition of obliging him for duty. Thus the relation between people and polity was predicated on liberty, not servitude as commonly supposed of an area still shackled to the Western ideology of (...) Oriental despotism. I argue that liberty was an operative principle in the organization of ancient Near Eastern polities, basing the case on sources from the Late Bronze Age. The first section sets forth general propositions, and the second puts them in ancient Near Eastern terms. The third and fourth sections examine documents from Ugarit and Emar, two polities under Hittite suzerainty, that illustrate how these principles operated in the lives of individuals. The fifth section examines how they were articulated at the scale of communities, through the lens of the poet who composed the Hurro-Hittite ‘Song of Liberation'. The conclusion draws together the ideas of liberty, bondage and liberation these sources disclose, ideas that remained productive in later ages. (shrink)

This article discusses the egalitarian ideas of the French Orientalist Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron, showing that they inform his writings on Zoroastrianism and India, his critique of Montesquieu's theory of Oriental Despotism, as well as his later defense of the Arctic peoples of America and Eurasia. It further shows that Anquetil's global egalitarianism was part of his project for a comparative study of world religions and civilizations. Anquetil's case fits into the recent historiography of the Enlightenment, which has underlined (...) the importance of strong currents of critique of European expansion and Eurocentrism in eighteenth-century thought. (shrink)

Theorists of the Russian conservatism have made a considerable contribution to the development of axiology, the philosophy of history and comparativistics. In their studies of the local civilisations existing at different times and at different places they have focused on the dynamics of their origin, development, collapse or transformation into new civilisational forms. The best known slavophiles such as A. Khomyakov, K. Axakov, I. Kireyevskiy saw the mission of the Russian civilisation in synthesising Europe and Russia which has preserved the (...) true Christianity – the Orthodoxy. According to N. Danilevskiy, the founder of the culturohistorical school of thought, Europe has an irreconcilable hostility towards Russia. He proves that Europe and Russia are two different culturohistoricaltypes (local civilisations). He understood Russia’s mission as that of unification of Slavic peoples. K. Leontiev develops the so-called theory of Byzantism, according to which the West is doomed and Russia will be saved thanks to its Orthodoxy and the oriental despotism underlying its statehood. He advocates a merger between Russian and oriental traditions. From the point of view of the proponents of the Eurasian theory such as P. Savitskiy, N. Trubetskoy, etc., the merger has already occurred, so Russians should be viewed as Eurasians and Russia as a Eurasian civilisation. Russian thinkers were criticising the so-called Eurocentrism in their efforts to prove that progress should be measured not only by the accumulation of material wealth, but also by the development of various spiritual aspects of human beings. The anthroposociogenesis does not have any predetermined patterns, its development is of co-evolutionary, often broken, discrete nature. (shrink)

Confucianism’s long historical association with despotism has cast doubts on its compatibility with democracy, and raise questions about its relevance in contemporary societies increasingly dominated by democratic aspirations. “Confucian democracy” has been described as a “contradiction in terms” and Asian politicians have appropriated Confucianism to justify resistance to liberalization and democratization. There has been a lively debate over the question of whether democracy can be found in Confucianism, from ancient texts such as the Analects and Mencius, to Confucian institutions (...) such as those recommended by Song dynasty Huang Zongxi. Philosophers have examined similarities and differences between Western ideas, such as autonomy, liberty, and rights, that are central to democratic theories on the one hand and Confucian ideas of virtue, ren , yi , li , zhi , exemplary person and authority. Scholars have studied the biographical accounts of prominent Confucians to understand the Confucian ideal person and society. Works arguing that there are elements of democracy in Confucianism, or that some Confucian ideas could provide the basis for a contemporary Confucian democracy, differ in the kind of democracy they choose as models. Liberal democracy was the model of earlier works; with increasing criticisms of liberal democracy in the past decades, a growing number of works arguing for Confucian democracy seek alternatives to liberal democracies, many proposing some kind of communitarian democracy as having affinity with the Confucian philosophical orientation. Besides conceptions of democracy that view it in terms of political systems, Dewey’s conception of democracy as the idea of community and primarily a moral ideal has also inspired attempts to reconstruct Confucian democracy. (shrink)

Resumen Este artículo da cuenta de la forma en que el liberalismo del filósofo chileno Jenaro Abasolo (1833-1884), al conceder un rol activo al Estado en la “habilitación de la masa desheredada”, responde al adjetivo “social”. En Abasolo, el deber de asegurar en lo posible la prosperidad de las personas, se sostiene en el derecho natural y en una teología de la historia pan[en]teísta afín al krausismo. Abasolo piensa que la redención del desheredado en naciones aun juveniles debe apoyarse en (...) una forma de Estado “casi socialista”. Esto implica una acción de centralización y de tutela del pueblo que enfrenta a los autores del artículo a la gran dificultad de determinar cómo el autor chileno realiza la transición de una habilitación consumada a través de un buen grado de despotismo, hacia la libertad. Es decir, resulta controversial establecer la factibilidad de la realización de esta vía cuasi socialista a un liberalismo contrafácticamente orientado por el laissez faire. Abstract This article shows how the liberalism of the Chilean philosopher Jenaro Abasolo (1833-1884), by granting an active role to the State in the “empowerment of the disinherited mass”, responds to the adjective “social”. In Abasolo, the duty to ensure as far as possible the prosperity of the people is based on natural law and on a pan[en]theistic theology of history akin to Krausism. Abasolo thinks that the redemption of the disinherited in even juvenile nations must be supported by an “almost socialist” form of state. This implies an action of centralization and guardianship of the people that confronts the authors of the article with the great difficulty of determining how the Chilean author makes the transition from an empowerment consummated through a good degree of despotism, towards freedom. That is to say, it is controversial to establish the feasibility of the realization of this quasi-socialist path to a liberalism counterfactually oriented by laissez faire. (shrink)

The author's aim is to show that Leontev's ideas are not disconnected, as many critics have held, but form a system that is both logically consistent and interconnected by the "inner logic" of a powerful emotion. To uncover the emotional sources of Leontev's philosophy, half the book is devoted to Leontev's life, and especially his relation to his mother. Since childhood, he feared and loved her, and associated her with religion, refinement, and absolutism. Leontev's first formulation of his doctrine of (...) aestheticism when he returned from the Crimean War probably coincided with his first suspicions of his homosexuality. His unexpected marriage to his former mistress was an attempt to overcome his guilt and weakness. His first ideological work, Byzantism and Slavdom was written under the double strain of his mother's death, and his own experience of fear of death during an illness. Leontev's doctrine of aestheticism when applied to the individual, yields "a poetry of life" beyond good and evil. One's personal life must be maximally original, complex, and unified at whatever cost in happiness to oneself or others. Religious faith is needed to reconcile one with suffering and death. Yet, religion dictates an ethics which conflicts with the aesthetics of life. The constant struggle between the two principles enriches personality and heightens creativity, and must finally end in a heroic total rejection of aesthetics. Applied to society and history, aestheticism demands a society stratified into unequal and hostile classes and unified by ruthless despotism. Such a society was to be most conducive to the development of original personalities. The egalitarian, happiness-orientated West was in decline and sacrificed beauty to banality. Without much confidence in its realization, Leontev advocated "freeze up Russia" to avoid infection from the West.--T. D. Z. (shrink)

(1994). An impossible pluralism? European jews and oriental Jews in the Israeli history curriculum. History of European Ideas: Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 41-51.

Classic of Changes is a Chinese cultural classic born more than 3000 years ago. Its profound philosophical thoughts and the use of divination have brought Classic of Changes to a strong oriental mysticism. The view of the heaven and man of yin and yang and the five elements states of Classic of Changes are completely different from the Western elemental theory of ancient Greece. The latter gave birth to classical and modern scientific theories, and the yin and yang and (...) the eight trigrams symbol has become synonymous with oriental mysticism. In fact, the cosmology of the Holism of Classic of Changes is a precious scientific heritage of mankind. The axiomatization of the symbolic formal system of Classic of Changes aims to unveil the veil of oriental mysticism and provide oriental wisdom for the development of modern science. Transforming the symbolic system of Classic of Changes into a formal axiom system is the crystallization of the fusion of wisdom between the East and the West. The axiomatization of the symbolic formal system of Classic of Changes shows that the oriental and the western scientific tradition harmony but not sameness and there is no conflict. Classic of Changes can also be interpreted by the axiomatic system like Euclid’s Elements. The main contribution of this paper is that the author skillfully uses mathematical language to formulate the system of Classic of Changes, reconstructs the ideological system of Classic of Changes with the axiomatic method and realizes the scientificalization of Chinese classical natural philosophy. The formal axiom system of Classic of Changes may give us such a revelation: the gap between the oriental and western scientific traditions is mainly in the axiomatization, but the lack of oriental scientific tradition may be the bottleneck of the development of modern science. (shrink)

Early oriental historians have used two series of sources about ancient history of Iran, including Iranian and non-Iranian sources. As these sources are independent of each other, two different chronologies about these ancient periods have arisen. Naturally, this duality has led to different and contradictory results about dating important events of this period. One of them is the contradictory reports about two separate religious personalities - Messiah Mehr and Jesus of Nazareth. Despite the fact that these historians have taken (...) the identity and time of appearance of Messiah Mehr and Jesus from the abovementioned two sources, they unknowingly considered the two characters as one and the same person. Al-Mas'udi is one of the earlier oriental historians who made remarkable reports and points regarding the alterations of political and religious history of the Ashkanian dynasty by the earlier Sasanians. These alterations caused the reality of Messiah Mehr to be concealed. This article tries to explain briefly the reasons for this topic through the viewpoints of oriental historians with emphasis on Al-Mas'udi's reports. (shrink)

Within the political lexicon of the European Middle Ages, tyranny (along with related terms such as tyrant and tyrannical) constituted one of its most ubiquitous and flexibly applied discursive fields. Moreover, once Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics began to circulate in the West after their translation into Latin in the mid-1200s, a closely related term for tyranny emerged: despotism. Yet when we turn to Marsiglio of Padua, the fourteenth-century political theorist who is often regarded to be the quintessential medieval exponent (...) of Aristotelian political ideas, we find remarkably few references to either tyranny or despotism. The present article examines how Marsiglio deploys the languages of tyranny and despotism in his major work, the Defensor pacis (completed in 1324). Three intertwined theses are proposed. First, the occasions on which Marsiglio invokes tyranny and despotism reveal a great deal about his intellectual connection to his supposed source, Aristotle. Second, unacknowledged dimensions of Marsiglio’s highly critical attitude toward the papacy, especially the doctrine of the papal plenitude of power (plenitudo potestatas), may be illuminated. Third, examination of the languages of tyranny and despotism reveals additional insights into Marsiglio’s signature theory of political consent espoused in the first discourse of the Defensor pacis. (shrink)

Language‟s definition varies in the literature. One of the most accurate definitions of language is that the language is the voice through which people express their purpose, it is a tool for communication, understanding and interaction between people, and this is a phenomenon that reflects human knowledge and culture. At the same time, it is a powerful factor that animates people and helps them to develop and thrive. The beauty of the language is reflected in examples of poetry and prose (...) of folk literature. It is one of the most famous and widely spoken languages in the world. Arabic is the language of science and culture and helps to transmit religious, scientific and literary knowledge throughout history. There is no doubt that Arabic literature emphasizes the beauty of the Arabic language from preIslamic times to the present day. Arabic literature attracts the attention of the whole world, both ancient and modern. One of the countries where the Arabic language and its literature is taught is Azerbaijan. There are universities and institutes that contain faculties of Arabic literature and its departments. One of the scientific institutions that study the Arabic literature is the Institute of Oriental Studies named after Ziya Bunyadov of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan. It should be noted that the most important results of scientific research and books of the Institute are used in educational institutions within the country and abroad. (shrink)

The U.S. military is developing augmented reality (AR) capabilities for use on the battlefield as a means of achieving greater situational awareness. The superimposition of digital data—designed to expand surveillance, enhance geospatial understanding, and facilitate target identification—onto a live view of the battlefield has important implications for virtuous conduct in war: Can the soldier exercise practical wisdom while integrated into a system of militarized legibility? Adopting a virtue ethics perspective, I argue that AR disrupts the soldier’s immersion in the scene (...) such that he is blinded to features beyond those identified in advance by the military’s system of cybernetic judgment. I turn to Michael Walzer’s classic account of the “naked soldier” dilemma to illustrate how AR capabilities radically shrink the bounds within which the soldier can cultivate the capacity for right conduct. By transforming the ambiguous ethical matter of killing an enemy combatant into the straightforward application of a rule, AR hollows out the soldier’s potential for virtuous action. The “smart battlefield” leaves no space for deliberative judgments that transcend the technical and legal determinations already written into the soldier’s view of the scene. (shrink)

ArgumentMetrological techniques to establish shared quantitative measures have often been seen as signs of rational modernization. The cases considered here show instead the close relation of such techniques with antiquarian and revivalist programs under imperial regimes. Enterprises in survey sciences in Egypt in the wake of the French invasion of 1798 and in India during the East India Company's revenue surveys involved the promotion of a new kind oforiental metrologydesigned to represent colonizers’ measures as restorations of ancient values to be (...) applied to current systems of survey and measurement. Surveyors’ practice and hardware help clarify the significance of the complex historical and political functions of scientific standards. The balance of the paper discusses the survey work of later nineteenth-century indigenous Egyptian astronomers at a conjuncture of major economic and political dislocation to explore the various versions of antiquity at stake in these metrological programs. (shrink)