How do people excluded from political life achieve political agency? Through a series of historical events that have been mostly overlooked by political theorists, Martin Breaugh identifies fleeting yet decisive instances of emancipation in which people took it upon themselves to become political subjects. Emerging during the Roman plebs's first secession in 494 BCE, the _plebeian experience_ consists of an underground or unexplored configuration of political strategies to obtain political freedom. The people reject domination through political praxis and concerted action, (...) therefore establishing an alternative form of power. Breaugh's study concludes in the nineteenth century and integrates ideas from sociology, philosophy, history, and political science. Organized around diverse case studies, his work undertakes exercises in political theory to show how concepts provide a different understanding of the meaning of historical events and our political present. _The Plebeian Experience_ describes a recurring phenomenon that clarifies struggles for emancipation throughout history, expanding research into the political agency of the many and shedding light on the richness of radical democratic struggles from ancient Rome to Occupy Wall Street and beyond. (shrink)

In his Florentine Histories, Machiavelli offers an ambivalent portrayal of the revolt of the textile workers in late fourteenth-century Florence, known as the tumult of the Ciompi. On the face of it, Machiavelli's depiction of the insurgent workers is not exactly flattering. Yet this picture is undermined by a firebrand speech, which Machiavelli invents and attributes to an unnamed leader of the plebeian revolt. I interpret this speech as a radical and egalitarian vector of thought opened up by Machiavelli's text. (...) The revolutionary address reveals an untimely and not entirely self-conscious political radicalism, a plebeian politics that repudiates the logic of oligarchic privilege and is simultaneously not available for subsumption under the mantle of civic republicanism. (shrink)

How do people excluded from political life achieve political agency? Through a series of historical events that have been mostly overlooked by political theorists, Martin Breaugh identifies fleeting yet decisive instances of emancipation in which people took it upon themselves to become political subjects. Emerging during the Roman plebs's first secession in 494 BCE, the _plebeian experience_ consists of an underground or unexplored configuration of political strategies to obtain political freedom. The people reject domination through political praxis and concerted action, (...) therefore establishing an alternative form of power. Breaugh's study concludes in the nineteenth century and integrates ideas from sociology, philosophy, history, and political science. Organized around diverse case studies, his work undertakes exercises in political theory to show how concepts provide a different understanding of the meaning of historical events and our political present. _The Plebeian Experience_ describes a recurring phenomenon that clarifies struggles for emancipation throughout history, expanding research into the political agency of the many and shedding light on the richness of radical democratic struggles from ancient Rome to Occupy Wall Street and beyond. (shrink)

The authors examine the Slovak ethos of plebeian resistance to the First World War in several of its forms. First, they examine intellectual forms of resistance against war, against its Christian justification. Several Slovak authors emphasized that the First World War was in direct contradiction to Christian ethics, asserting that it served as proof of the failure of all European nations and their elites, who were proud of their humanity and ability to solve problems peacefully. Secular authors who based their (...) opposition to the First World War on universal cultural and moral values represented the second form of resistance. After the end of the war, they also expected the equal rights of the Slovak ethnic group in the new post-war situation. The third form of resistance is literature, and the authors of the article focused mainly on Milo Urban’s novel Živý bič (1927) as the most important anti-war novel of Slovak interwar literature reflecting wartime events in the Orava village of Ráztoky. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

In this sequel to his prize-winning book, The Eyes of the People, Jeffrey Edward Green draws on philosophy, history, social science, and literature to ask what democracy can mean in a world where it is understood that socioeconomic status to some degree will always determine opportunities for civic engagement and career advancement. Under this shadow of unfairness, Green argues that the most advantaged class are rightly subjected to compulsory public burdens, but he also attends to the uncomfortable aspects of ordinary, (...) “second-class” citizenship as well: above all, the “reasonable envy,” “principled vulgarity,” and need for “extrapolitical solace” that will inform everyday citizens’ efforts to seek democratic ends within a political landscape permanently darkened by plutocracy. Deeply engaged in the history of political thought, the book is still first and foremost an effort to illuminate present-day politics. With the plebeians of ancient Rome as his muse, Green develops a plebeian conception of contemporary liberal democracy, at once disenchanted yet idealistic in its insistence that the Few-Many distinction might be enlisted for progressive purpose. Green’s analysis is likely to unsettle all sides of the political spectrum, but its purpose looks beyond narrow partisan concerns and aims instead to understand what the ongoing quest for free and equal citizenship might require once it is accepted that our political and educational systems will always be tainted by economic inequality. (shrink)

This article discusses the current debate between populist and republican accounts of democracy. To talk about democracy is inevitably to talk about the idea of a people and its power. From the beginnings of the Western political tradition, ‘the people’ has referred to both a constituted part of society (populus) and to a part excluded from political society (plebs). The article examines the differences between populism and republicanism in light of the different ways in which these two parts relate to (...) each other, and the resulting conceptions of the power of the people. For populism, the people have power when the plebs achieves hegemony within the populus by wresting control of the state from the ‘wealthy’ elites. According to the alternative republican account developed in this article, instead, the people have power when the plebs inscribes within the state the possibility of abolishing relations of rule. The distinction between these two conceptions of popular power is pursued in terms of the opposing attitudes that populism and republicanism have in relation to the rule of law. The article also raises a hypothesis as to the historical reasons for these distinctions between populism and republicanism by examining three historical moments, which are crucial for the development of plebeian politics: the early Roman republic, the Augustinian foundation of a Christian republic and the crisis of guild republicanism in Machiavelli's age. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

This article reads the work of Luiz Gama (1830-1882), the Brazilian abolitionist, former slave, and self-taught lawyer, as both theorizing and enacting a politics of institutional prefiguration. Against oligarchic domination by slave-owning elites and the monarchical rule of the Brazilian Emperor, Gama defended a radical republican vision of the law: the ‘right of revolution’ (direito de revolução), which he saw as already being practiced in acts of resistance. Repurposing the legal pluralism of Friedrich Carl von Savigny for emancipatory politics, Gama’s (...) provocation – his insurgent legality – consisted in envisioning the resistance of the enslaved as an inaugural site for a republican order in the making. More than strategically mobilizing law in freedom suits, Gama presented the self-organization of maroons as both defending usurped rights, inherited from Roman law, and laying the foundations of an emergent republic. Drawing on broader currents of plebeian republicanism in the Atlantic world, he conceptualized the resistance of the enslaved as a ‘civic virtue.’ Gama’s insurgent legality thereby recasts the relation between prefigurative politics and institutional forms, questioning dichotomies of resistance and order, rupture and durability. Beyond nineteenth-century Brazil, Gama’s institutional thought speaks to debates in contemporary radical democratic and republican theory. (shrink)

RESUMEN El artículo explora la articulación entre lo femenino y lo plebeyo desde una ver sión contemporánea de la tragedia de Antígona. Se muestra primero cómo Hegel y Kierkegaard configuraron una lectura filosófica que presta atención tanto a su dimen sión ético-política, como a su dimensión trágica. Se estudian, luego, las reescrituras que hacen Zambrano y Zizek de la tragedia de Sófocles, y cómo nos permiten pensar lo femenino y lo plebeyo en la filosofía ético-política contemporánea. Finalmente se expone la (...) necesidad de un puente entre ambas figuras. ABSTRACT The article explores the articulation between the feminine and the plebeian on the basis of a contemporary version of Antigone. It first discusses the philosophical readings of the tragedy by Hegel and Kierkegaard, which address both its ethical-political and tragic dimensions. It then studies Zambrano's and Zizek's rewritings of Sophocles' tragedy and the manner in which they allow us to think the feminine and the plebeian in contemporary ethical-political philosophy. Finally, it argues in favor of a necessary bridge between the two figures. (shrink)

Promoting a better understanding of the phenomenon of colonization and its connection with environmental knowledge and technology, this article proposes a reframing of research agendas to take into account the municipal character of colonization in the Hispanic realm and to ask new questions. Questions should address what human–ecosystem relations, and the ways of knowing and techniques for transforming the physical realm, can tell us about colonization itself; who the historical agents involved were, and what these actors knew, learned, and did (...) in their environments. Using the Basin of Mexico’s drainage and the agency of commoners, this article proposes that colonization depends on the massive deployment and generation of tacit knowledge about how to harness matter, energy, and time for the reproduction of human societies; the quotidian appropriation and reworking of autochthonous knowledge, techniques, and technology by the colonizing groups; the collaboration of the local populations in whom these are vested; and the agency of commoners with practical skills, environmental knowledge, and technological savvy derived from and honed in the realm of material production. In the Ibero-American realm, these agents were primarily commoners with skills in agropastoral production and the building trades; race, ethnicity, language, and gender were secondary conditions. (shrink)

This article addresses – from a theoretical and historical perspective – the discussion on republicanism and populism, in connection to different ways of conceiving political modernity. It places republicanism and populism within the framework of contemporary democracies in the Latin American context, looking at the reciprocal interaction between these political traditions, and their relevance for understanding the current challenges of the liberal model in the region.

The essay looks into the pedagogical role of philosophy in shaping the practice of dissent. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s radical understandings of philosophy as a machinic assemblage, it redeploys philosophy as a pedagogical tool which gathers traction from social events and remains invested in a dissensual politics. As a machinic assemblage committed to a dissensual politics philosophy works alongside collective modalities of enunciation that operate outside conventional structures of the academia. Such assemblages of enunciation often inhabit a (...) zone of critical inarticulacy brimming with the promise of new kinds of knowledge. How does philosophy critically interact with spaces of dissent along lines of gender, caste, ethnicity and nationalism to enable novel critical interventions? Deleuze and Guattari’s answer redirects us to a pragmatic engagement with philosophy which involves the manufacture of new pedagogical concepts as part of a schizoanalytic apparatus of protest. These concepts often emerge out of a visceral response to events unfolding around us. Needless to emphasize that such a philosophy which emerges out of a praxial encounter with life cannot be framed as an institutional staple, but takes shape as part of a visceral politics of the now. What then is the role of pedagogy in shaping an ethics of dissent and how can such a pedagogy mobilize plebeian acts of resistance in the sphere of the everyday? (shrink)

The article presents a plebeian strand of republican constitutional thought that recognises the influence of inequality on political power, embraces conflict as the effective cause of free government, and channels its anti-oligarchic energy through the constitutional structure. First it engages with two modern plebeian thinkers – Niccolò Machiavelli and Nicolas de Condorcet - focusing on the institutional role of the common people to resist oppression through ordinary and extraordinary political action. Then it discusses the work of two contemporary republican thinkers (...) – Philip Pettit and John McCormick – and contrasts their models of ‘contestatory’ and ‘tribunician’ democracy. Finally, I incorporate a political economy lens and propose as part of republican constitutionalism not only contestatory and tribunician institutions but also anti-oligarchic basic rules to keep inequality and corruption under control. (shrink)

In this paper we show how a realistic normative democratic theory can work within the constraints set by the most pessimistic empirical results about voting behaviour and elite capture of the policy process. After setting out the empirical evidence and discussing some extant responses by political theorists, we argue that the evidence produces a two-pronged challenge for democracy: an epistemic challenge concerning the quality and focus of decision-making and an oligarchic challenge concerning power concentration. To address the challenges we then (...) put forward three main normative claims, each of which is compatible with the evidence. We start with a critique of the epistocratic position commonly thought to be supported by the evidence. We then introduce a qualified critique of referenda and other forms of plebiscite, and an outline of a tribune-based system of popular control over oligarchic influence on the policy process. Our discussion points towards a renewal of democracy in a plebeian but not plebiscitarian direction: Attention to the relative power of social classes matters more than formal dispersal of power through voting. We close with some methodological reflections about the compatibility between our normative claims and the realist program in political philosophy. (shrink)

I reconstruct the civic republican foundations of Eugene Debs’s socialist critique of capitalism, demonstrating how he uses a neo-roman conception of freedom to condemn waged labour. Debs is also shown to build upon this neo-roman liberty in his socialist republican objections to the plutocratic capture of the law and threats of violence faced by the labour movement. This Debsian socialist republicanism can be seen to rest on an ambitious understanding of the demands of citizen sovereignty and civic solidarity. While Debs (...) shares some of the commitments of earlier American labour republican critics of capitalism, he departs from them in his thoroughgoing commitment to common democratic ownership of productive property. His socialist republicanism remains valuable today for its ability to illuminate features of plutocratic control, judicial autocracy, and the regime of property best suited to suppressing economic domination. I conclude that Debs not only deserves a prominent place in an emerging radical republican canon but presents a distinctive contrast with many of his Marxist contemporaries and offers a compelling challenge to recent liberal, plebeian, and socialist forms of republicanism. (shrink)

A bold new approach to combatting the inherent corruption of representative democracy This provocative book reveals how the majority of modern liberal democracies have become increasingly oligarchic, suffering from a form of structural political decay first conceptualized by ancient philosophers. Systemic Corruption argues that the problem cannot be blamed on the actions of corrupt politicians but is built into the very fabric of our representative systems. Camila Vergara provides a compelling and original genealogy of political corruption from ancient to modern (...) thought, and shows how representative democracy was designed to protect the interests of the already rich and powerful to the detriment of the majority. Unable to contain the unrelenting force of oligarchy, especially after experimenting with neoliberal policies, most democracies have been corrupted into oligarchic democracies. Vergara explains how to reverse this corrupting trajectory by establishing a new counterpower strong enough to control the ruling elites. Building on the anti-oligarchic institutional innovations proposed by plebeian philosophers, she rethinks the republic as a mixed order in which popular power is institutionalized to check the power of oligarchy. Vergara demonstrates how a plebeian republic would establish a network of local assemblies with the power to push for reform from the grassroots, independent of political parties and representative government. Drawing on neglected insights from Niccolò Machiavelli, Nicolas de Condorcet, Rosa Luxemburg, and Hannah Arendt, Systemic Corruption proposes to reverse the decay of democracy with the establishment of anti-oligarchic institutions through which common people can collectively resist the domination of the few. (shrink)

Conspiracies are, by definition, a group activity; to conspire requires two or more people working together towards some end, typically in secret. Conspirators have intentions; this is borne out by the fact they want some end and are willing to engage in action to achieve. Of course, what these intentions are can be hard to fathom: historians have written a lot about the intentions of the assassins of Julius Caesar, for example; did they want to restore the Republic; was Marcus (...) Brutus lusting after power; was it an attempt to curb the ambitions of the plebeian class, who saw in Caesar someone not unlike themselves? If intentions can be hard to infer, who is a knowing conspirator and who is a dupe is almost as tricky to parse. Not all purported members of a conspiracy are conspirators, even if they aid and abet the conspiracy. Take, for example, the notorious lax engineer who the conspirators know will sign off on substandard building compliance measures, making it all the easier for them to plant their controlled demolitions. On some account of causal or even moral responsibility the lax engineer would then be responsible for the subsequent event, the one the conspirators desired. Yet it also seems clear that even if she is responsible in some sense for the culminating event of the conspiracy, it is clear that they did not conspire. Or, at least, we would like to think so, although should the authorities find out about the lax engineer’s involvement, they may well be considered part of the conspiracy, especially if the conspirators do their best to hide their own involvement or identities. (shrink)

We argue that a reinvention of the plebeian tribunate should play a key role in addressing the challenges stemming from increasing concentrations of, and inequalities in, social, political, economic, and cultural power in liberal democracies. Addressing these challenges, which negatively affect parliamentary representation, requires a form of institutional innovation that gives voice to non-elites who are ruled but do not rule. We propose revisions of the composition and tasks of the tribunate that are tailored to these current challenges. Our fully (...) randomly selected tribunate emerges as a vehicle not only for contesting concentrated power but also for articulating lines of conflict, disruptive agenda-setting, and political experimentation. Our proposal contributes to developing realist democratic theory. We argue that the reinvented tribunate not only meets realist commitments to avoiding moralization and idealization but also demonstrates the underexploited capacity of realism to inform institutional innovation and thus contribute to substantial political analysis. (shrink)

What kind of polity is justified by classic Confucian values? Adopting an interpretive approach, this paper explores the idea of leadership democracy being expressive of classic Confucian values by first introducing the models of leadership democracy associated with Weber and Schumpeter and second connecting Confucian elitist values to them. I argue that leadership democracy best realizes the Confucian emphasis on the people as the source of legitimacy and the ruler as the engine of good governance. The Confucian idea of people-rootedness (...) is borne out by citizens behaving as democratic plebeians who are empowered to choose their leader but devoid of moral and intellectual capabilities for collective decision-making. The Confucian idea of rulership is expressed by democratic leaders displaying competent statesmanship and compensating for intra-elite tensions within the Confucian tradition. (shrink)

Introduction In ancient rome, legend has it, a plebeian revolt was once quelled when the tribune Menenius Agrippa argued ...

In this research, I advance an interpretation of Machiavelli’s philosophy for constitutional change. I suggest that Machiavelli’s reading of Polybius’s theory of anacyclosis (circular theory of political change) opens up a new vision for political action and historical transformation. Machiavelli subjects the inherited metaphysical conception of constitutional change to a secular view, one characterized by virtue of action and uncertainty of outcomes ( Virtù/Fortuna), social divisions (nobility/plebeians), and political ideals (Republicanism). The interpretive suggestion put forth here is that Machiavelli’s innovation (...) of the ancient theory of constitutional changes can be appreciated in terms of an oscillating pendulum rather than as a cycle, thereby fictitiously referring to the pendulum as an instrument mimicking the ‘truth of the matter’ ( verità effettuale) of a perpetual shift between principalities and republics rather than as an esoteric rite to foresee the future. (shrink)

This study contains some comments on the Old Polish Convival gathering in the light of litetary relations. The author pionted a few aspects o f the concept “ convival gathering”, which used to function in the age o f Renaissance and Baroque. Than she carried out the analysis o f Anonim Protestant’s work titled Biesiada o dobrym gospodarzu, setting it in the wide literary and cultural background. She proved that the poet created plebeian inapproval satire, that he was not the (...) uncritical admirer of life in “ the pecelul and jouful county". He also had the tendency to hyperbolize phenomena pictures from the social life. However, everything that was the subject of criticism for the 16th century critics, in the plebeian and epistolary literature o f 17th and 18th century was seen and was presented as the social norm. (shrink)

McCormick’s book engages with the theoretical and political positions discussed by the Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli about five centuries ago, and, in particular, the creation of the tribunes of the plebs. In ancient Rome, plebeian power had been institutionalised through the creation of tribunes. According to McCormick, a similar institution would offer a legitimate forum for expression to the people in modern democracies. In fact, following Machiavelli’s suggestions, this would contribute to the implementation of a new form of democracy, more (...) respectful of the people and more eager to defend values such as freedom and independence from the influence of the powerful and the rich. In this review, Filippo Del Lucchese comments on McCormick’s book from a Marxist point of view. One of the strongest points of the book is the discussion of the opposition between democracy and republicanism. Over the last decades, the latter has in fact been absorbed into the sphere of influence of the Cambridge School, and neutralised, or at least defused its most interesting and radical aspects. McCormick’s attempt to repoliticise the Machiavellian discourse is indeed praiseworthy, yet, by mainly focusing on the ‘institutionalisation’ of popular power, McCormick fails to discern the most radical elements of Machiavelli’s thought. From this angle, the review discusses McCormick’s use of the category of ‘class’ and offers a different perspective on the revolutionary dimension. (shrink)

The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made. This quarrel is the subject of civil history. The conservative party established the reverend hierarchies and monarchies of the most ancient world. The battle of patrician and plebeian, of parent state and colony, of old usage and accommodation to new facts, of the rich and the poor, reappears in all (...) countries and times. The war rages not only in battle-fields, in national councils, and ecclesiastical synods, but agitates every man's bosom with opposing advantages every hour. On rolls the old world meantime, and now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities. Such an irreconcilable antagonism, of course, must have a correspondent depth of seat in the human constitution. It is the opposition of Past and Future, of Memory and Hope, of the Understanding and the Reason. It is the primal antagonism, the appearance in trifles of the two poles of nature. (shrink)

In the past two decades, public sociologists have sought to revive what C. Wright Mills called a 'democratic society of publics'. The publics that such sociologists promote are intellectual ones that resemble Socratic dialogues in which people search for the good order. Nietzsche criticizes such publics for their plebeian character and introduces an alternative type of publics: aesthetic publics. Rather than Socratic dialogues, the art of tragedy is the model of such publics. In this article it is argued that the (...) art of tragedy sheds a different light on the concept of publics and can only enrich the sociological discipline. (shrink)

This essay examines the two means by which Machiavelli thought republics could address the political problem of predatory socio-economic elites: Healthy republics, he proposes explicitly, should consistently check the “insolence of the nobles” by establishing constitutional offices like the Roman tribunes of the plebeians; corrupt republics, he suggests more subtly, should completely eliminate overweening oligarchs via the violent actions of a tyrannical individual. Roman-styled tribunes, wielding veto, legislative and accusatory authority, contain the oppressive behavior of socio-economic elites during normal republican (...) circumstances. By contrast, having overthrown a republic grown corrupt through oligarchic encroachment on the commonweal, Machiavelli suggests that Greek-styled tyrants lay the foundation for a more robust—that is, more egalitarian and martial—republic down the road by eliminating elites entirely and by instituting economic redistribution and military reforms. (shrink)

This paper argues that much of Jacques Rancière’s redefinition of emancipation owes a lot to one key character from his archival research on nineteenth-century worker-poets, Louis-Gabriel Gauny, the self-proclaimed plebeian philosopher. This is especially the case in regard to Rancière’s understanding of subjectivation forming a double of the self and a double of social reality as worlds within worlds. The paper puts forward that Gauny’s form of emancipation is valid today as an aesthetic revolution that reveals Rancière’s practices of equality (...) to be an emancipatory way of life. In doing so, it will engage with Gauny’s connection with the contemporary precariat. (shrink)

In this essay I evaluate a new and influential interpretation of Nietzsche’s idea of the slave revolt in morality. This interpretation was first proposed by Bernard Reginster and has since been extended by R. Lanier Anderson and Avery Snelson. Citing textual evidence from Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, these scholars have argued for the counterintuitive view that nobles, not slaves, instigated the slave revolt in morality. This is because Nietzsche says that nobles create new values, (...) introduces priests as nobles, and claims that priests began the slave revolt. However, against this new approach I argue that these scholars neglect important evidence from these same texts in which Nietzsche claims that the psychologically slavish can also create values, assumes that politically subordinated nobles can lose their psychological nobility, and asserts that the slave revolt was instigated by psychologically slavish priests. I also argue that these scholars ignore Nietzsche’s related claims that the priestly peasant Luther renewed the Jewish slave revolt against re-ascendant Roman nobles and that the plebeian philosopher Socrates led a slave revolt in morality against the Athenian nobles. Thus, it turns out that none of the leaders of the slave revolt were noble and that one of them was not even priestly. I conclude with a defense of the traditional and straightforward view that Nietzsche always conceived of the slave revolt in morality as an act of revenge by oppressed people who are politically and psychologically ignoble. (shrink)

In the mid fourth century b.c. some Roman gentes drew on a Pythagorean tradition. In this tradition, Numa's role of Pythagoras’ disciple connected Rome with Greek elites and culture. The Marcii, between 304 and 300 b.c., used Numa's figure, recently reshaped by the Aemilii and the Pinarii for their propaganda, to promote the need for a plebeian pontificate. After the approval of the Ogulnium plebiscite, the needs for this kind of propaganda fell away. When Marcius Censorinus became censor, Numa's pontificate (...) was no longer relevant for promoting the gens. For this reason, the Marcii used another genealogy for similar propagandistic effect: the figure of Marsyas, a symbol of plebeian ideals. (shrink)

Divided beauty (Dresden, 1764) -- Little gods of the street (Munich-Berlin, 1828) -- Plebeian heaven (Paris, 1830) -- The poet of the new world (Boston, 1841-New York, 1855) -- The gymnasts of the impossible (Paris, 1879) -- The dance of light (Paris, Folies Bergère, 1893) -- The immobile theatre (Paris 1894-95) -- Decorative art as social art: temple, house, factory (Paris-London-Berlin) -- Master of surfaces (Paris, 1902) -- The temple staircase (Moscow-Dresden, 1912) -- The machine and its shadow (Hollywood, 1916) (...) -- The majesty of the moment (New York, 1921) -- Seeing things through things (Moscow, 1926) -- The cruel radiance of what is (Hale County, 1936-New York, 1941). (shrink)

In Umberto Eco’s classic novel The Name of the Rose, we are introduced to a decidedly Platonic fear of laughter. According to the blind librarian Jorge de Burgos, “[l]aughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh. It is the peasant’s entertainment, the drunkard’s license;... laughter remains base, a defense for the simple, a mystery desecrated for the plebeians.”1 Laughter could not accompany insight or clarity or revelation. By destroying the last known copy of the second part of Aristotle’s Poetics, (...) which delves into comedy after the already-familiar investigation of tragedy, de Burgos hopes to undermine any argument that claims to find significance in comic content. Indeed, the central plot of... (shrink)

There is widespread agreement that democracy today faces unprecedented challenges. Populism has pushed governments in new and surprising constitutional directions. Analysing the constitutional system of illiberal democracies and illiberal phenomena in 'mature democracies' that are justified in the name of 'the will of the people', this book explains that this drift to mild despotism is not authoritarianism, but an abuse of constitutionalism. Illiberal governments claim that they are as democratic and constitutional as any other. They also claim that they are (...) more popular and therefore more genuine because their rule is based on conservative, plebeian and 'patriotic' constitutional and rule of law values rather than the values liberals espouse. However, this book shows that these claims are deeply deceptive - an abuse of constitutionalism and the rule of law, not a different conception of these ideas. (shrink)

A major characteristic of the aristocratic attitude—and I would not know how to better define the flavor that pervades the whole of Abhinavagupta’s work—is the downgrading of all painful effort, seen as a plebeian feature. The aristocrat intends to show that what inferior people can achieve only at the cost of long and painful exercises is accessible to him promptly and very easily. One of the recurring qualifications for Abhinavagupta’s attitude to the spiritual path is precisely absence of effort, absence (...) of exertion or fatigue, easiness. This can be clearly detected in Abhinavagupta’s attitude to yoga, or, to be more precise, to Pātañjala yoga. In the summary of the topics of the Tantrāloka, at the end of Āhnika I, he lists “uselessness of yogāṅgas.” When all yogāṅgas, abhyāsa, vairāgya, etc., are viewed from the peak of the highest aesthetically marked spiritual experiencer, they are condemned unreservedly. On the other hand, after delivering such a pitiless death sentence, Abhinavagupta seems to gracefully suspend it, and allow common people to follow pāśavayoga ‘yoga for limited souls’ in the context of the “minimal means” with the motivation that after all everything is made of everything, and, as the MVU teaches, “nothing is to be prescribed, nothing to be prohibited.”. (shrink)

This article contends that Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic understanding of corporeality is central to his interpretation of intellectual emancipation. Concretely, I will argue that Rancière’s aesthetic understanding can be viewed as a torsion of a body that affects its vital arrangements, which thereby open paths for political emancipation. I will support my claim with Rancière’s reading of the plebeian philosopher Gauny, as well as works that have not been sufficiently considered in secondary literature, such as The Nights of Labor and The (...) Ignorant Schoolmaster. My reading will, I maintain, help to question common interpretations of emancipation in Rancière that tend to read this notion either in dichotomous terms or as a merely ephemeral, evental practice with no concrete conditions of possibility and without long-lasting or verifiable effects in the world. (shrink)

Este trabajo plantea el papel de la providencia y de la religión en los principales temas de la Ciencia Nueva: el mito, las primeras comunidades, la dialéctica de nobles y plebeyos, la lógica poética, etc., esbozando el proceso de cómo los hombres pasan a ser de hombres sin Dios a hombres con leyes. This paper deals with the role of both Providence and religion within the range of the main themes in the “New Science”: myth, the first human communities, the (...) dialectics between nobles and plebeians, logic, politics, etc., sketching in turn the way in which human beings became men with laws from the stage of Godlessmen. (shrink)

Eugen Fink propone 5 fenómenos fundamentales de la existencia humana, que son los siguientes: muerte, trabajo, dominio, Eros y juego. En el presente artículo nos ocupamos de dos de ellos: juego y muerte. A modo de destacar algunos de los rasgos primordiales de estos fenómenos -juego y muerte- cabe decir del primero que sobre todo destaca la fantasía, la ficción, y ambos relacionados a su vez con la estructura específicamente lúdica del como-si. De modo espontáneo el niño juega como-si fuera (...) policía, ladrón, rey, plebeyo, padre, madre e incluso niño, es decir, el niño transita con la mayor naturalidad a mundos ficticios. Y esto mismo hará posteriormente el actor profesional. Ello revela a la par el parentesco entre juego y arte. En el caso de la muerte, probablemente lo que más corresponde destacar es su carácter de fenómeno filosófico fundamental, dado que ella se asocia con la concepción del ser en tanto devenir, como que todo lo que es, está transido por el llegar a ser y dejar de ser. Y a la vez que la muerte tiene por lo mismo una peculiar cercanía con el ser, lo tiene también con la nada, y junto con ello, con la pregunta por el sentido. Eugen Fink proposes 5 fundamental phenomena of human existence, which are the following: death, work, dominion, Eros and play. In this article we are dealing with two of them: play and death. How to highlight some of the key features of these phenomena -play and death- it may be said of the first that stands out above all the fantasy, fiction, and both in turn related to the specifically playful structure of the as-if. Spontaneously the child plays as-if he was police, thief, king, plebeian, father, mother and even child, i.e. the child passes naturally to fictional worlds. And the same will do later on the professional actor. This shows at the same time the relationship between play and art. In the case of death, in the first place should be noted its condition as a fundamental philosophical phenomenon, since it is associated with the conception of being as becoming, which implies that everything that is, is determined by the coming to be and the passing away. Death has therefore a unique proximity to being, as with the nothing, and also with the question about meaning. (shrink)

Political theorists concerned with ways to counteract the oligarchic tendencies of representative government have recently paid more attention to the employment of “class-specific institutions” (CSIs)—that is, political institutions that formally exclude wealthy elites from decision-making power. This article disputes a general objection levelled against the justifiability of CSIs, according to which their democratic credentials are outweighed by their explicit transgression of formal political equality—what I call the political equality objection. I claim that, although CSIs do not satisfy political equality fully, (...) their exclusionary thrust is inter alia justified in virtue of the fact that they unfold against the background of badly ordered, class-divided societies. Parallel to recent arguments in nonideal theory arguing for the priority of the right to resist economic oppression over the protection of private property rights, access to the empowering properties of CSIs should take priority over the full satisfaction of formal political equality. Yet, I also claim that the justification of CSIs depends on their orientation toward overcoming class divisions because, otherwise, we might end up wrongly naturalizing those divisions—a conclusion that needs to be avoided to reply to the political equality objection. The result is, I believe, a convincing egalitarian case for the democratic justifiability of CSIs. (shrink)

This essay examines the political trials through which, according to Machiavelli's Discourses, republics should punish magistrates and prominent citizens who threaten or violate popular liberty. Unlike modern constitutions, which assign indictments and appeals to small numbers of government officials, Machiavelli's neo-Roman model encourages individual citizens to accuse corrupt or usurping elites and promotes the entire citizenry as political jury and court of appeal. Machiavellian political justice requires, on the one hand, equitable, legal procedures that serve all citizens by punishing guilty (...) parties and discouraging retaliatory reprisals, including foreign intervention. On the other hand, frankly acknowledging the power disparities that exist in every republic, Machiavelli outlines how political trials enable pro-plebeian magistrates and populist reformers to thwart patrician-generated smear campaigns and oligarchic conspiracies. (shrink)

The prestigious French publisher Presses Universitaires de France has recently brought out (November 1995) a new French edition of Elie Halévy's well known book "The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism", first published in France in three volumes as "La formation du radicalisme philosophique" (1901-1904) and translated into English in 1926. The prevailing opinion on this book is that it gives an excellent account of English utilitarianism. Thus, in the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, Talcott Parsons speaks of it as the ‘virtually (...) definitive analysis of utilitarianism’. More recently Donald Winch, in his introduction to the Penguin edition of John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy, describes Halévy's book as: ‘Still the best study of the ideas and activities of the school taken as a whole’. In this short essay I express a very different opinion. I show that Halévy, who qualifies utilitarianism (with obvious disgust) as ‘a plebeian or rather bourgeois morality’, as ‘much too simple’, completely misunderstood the writings of the English and Scottish utilitarian philosophers. (shrink)

Following a summary of M. Breaugh’s book The Plebeian Experience, the question of the relationship of plebs and class is addressed. Drawing on N. Thoburn’s discussion of the ‘lumpenproletariat’ as well as E.P. Thompson’s conception of class, the case is made for keeping ‘plebeian’ and ‘class’ experiences in conceptual tension.

This satire has often been accounted a poor poem, repetitive, irrelevant and self-indulgent. Rather than recover one more cultured display of refinement as disguise, this essay explores instead the fall-out that radiates from a classic text's play with the ‘loose talk’ of plebeian gossip. The proposal here is that Horace and his intimates could, and can, easily share a view of the view of ‘their’ populace, but at the price of surrendering control over the import of their intervention. This claim (...) turns on the figure ‘Brutus’, which noises a republican politics of resistance to tyranny through what linguists term nonphonation: as we shall find, Horace both tells a dummy tale about ‘przemilczenie’ and at the same time performs a dumbshow of his own. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 121.4 (2000) 655-658 [Access article in PDF] RONALD MELLOR. The Roman Historians. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. x + 212 pp. Paper, $21.99. This is a textbook, the purpose of which is to provide "an introduction to the masterpieces of Roman historical and biographical writing" (ix). Although the question of the usefulness of these writings to the modern historian is not overlooked, the principal (...) concern is "to take Roman historical writing on its own terms" (196). Very little background is assumed, and no Latin (by "Roman" the title refers to works composed in Latin, regardless of subject matter: hence Nepos' Pelopidas is in, but Polybius, Diodorus, and Dio are out, except [End Page 655] as background or comparanda). The author is a distinguished Tacitean scholar, and his style is at once clear and attractive. His survey begins with the origins of Roman historiography, with special attention given to what can be known of the early annalists, to the contribution of the elder Cato, and especially to Cicero's verdict on the efforts of them all. Fine chapters on Sallust and Livy follow, and, naturally in view of the author's predilections, a long and adoring chapter on Tacitus. Ammianus Marcellinus also gets his due, in a chapter that is actually longer than Sallust's. A single chapter is devoted to Roman biography (Nepos, Tacitus once more, Suetonius and the Historia Augusta), another to autobiography (Caesar, Augustus' Res Gestae). An appraisal of the Roman achievement, and its influence, concludes the book. The strengths of Mellor's treatment of every author and every subject are many. He is keenly attentive to ancient expectations and the particular context of the central authors whose works he examines; he is especially good at fitting the purposes of a historian's writings to the historian's actual circumstances. He constantly reminds the reader of the differences between Roman and modern conceptions of historical writing. He appreciates the importance of style in appraising and understanding ancient historiography. And he makes frequent acute observations that will save instructors who use this book a good deal of time and explanation, as when he remarks of Tacitean characterization that, "since he could not easily explain ambiguities, they are expressed as contradictions" (104). In sum, then, the volume is intelligent, congenial, and will be very serviceable in courses dealing with Roman history or with historiography.It is inevitable, when anyone reviews a work of such scope, that there will be quibbles. Let me record a few of mine. Students are likely to be misled by the use of "plebeian" on p. 20. To say that, in 52 B.C., Clodius Pulcher was "Caesar's man," in contrast to Milo who by implication was Pompey's (31), is to get it wrong (cf. W. Jeffrey Tatum, The Patrician Tribune [Chapel Hill 1999] 214-15, 234-35). Since Caesar reached the senior magistracies at the earliest possible age, it is not clear to me that "his early career progressed slowly" (171). The view of Roman marriage represented on p. 69 is somewhat old-fashioned, and, along those lines, it is anachronistic to speak of "the bigamous marriage celebration of the empress Messalina" (90: Tacitus' Narcissus is accurate when at Ann. 11.30 he asks Claudius: an discidium... tuum nosti?). One does not often hear, these days, of the "clinical objectivity of Thucydides" (44). In discussing Sallust's attraction to Thucydides (43-45), it might have been helpful to discuss the (admittedly not uncomplicated) issue of Atticism in late-first-century Rome. I am less convinced than Mellor is that the speech of Sallust's Caesar constitutes the historian's "plea for common sense" (38) in the midst of the triumviral proscriptions; after all, Sallust wrote Cato's speech as well. It can hardly be true, if only in view of Pliny's keen interest in his friend's literary productivity, that Suetonius' Lives "is a book written by and for the equestrian" (152), nor do I think the description of the imperial equestrian order that is given on [End Page 656] that page... (shrink)