This essay takes a critical and reflective look at two recently published books on contentious politics in the Balkans and Eastern Europe: Social Movements in the Balkans and Ideology and Social Protests in Eastern Europe. Focusing on regions somewhat neglected in scholarly analyses of the recent global upsurge of protests, these books aim to fill the gap by highlighting some contextual and regional specificities: a position of economic and geo-political periphery, weak or unconsolidated democratic institutions, post-socialist and transitional environments, (...) societal divisions, etc. By critically assessing both contributions, in a manner that looks for their complementarity, this essay: examines the characteristics of popular mobilizations and grievances in Southeast and Eastern Europe; questions dominant narratives of political and economic transition and EU integration; re-evaluates socialist heritage and post-socialist political trajectories; discusses the possibilities of articulating political alternatives to representative democracy and free market economy; and addresses the burden of conflicting memories and attitudes towards the region?s socialist past. (shrink)

This article presents a broad analysis of the political economy and dynamics of social change during the first year of the Evo Morales government in Bolivia. It situates this analysis in the wider historical context of left-indigenous insurrection between 2000 and 2005, the changing character of contemporary capitalism imperialism, and the resurgence of anti-neoliberalism and anti-imperialism elsewhere in Latin America. It considers at a general level the overarching dilemmas of revolution and reform. Part III examines the complexities of the (...) politics of indigenous liberation and the political economy of the Movimiento al Socialismo government between January 2006 and January 2007. It pays special attention to the limits of reform in the hydrocarbons sector. Also explained in Part III is the formation of an autonomist right-wing movement in the eastern lowlands, and how the new Right has intervened in the process of the Constituent Assembly. The article shows how the actual Constituent Assembly set into motion by the Morales administration in 2006 differs in fundamental terms from the revolutionary assembly envisioned by leading left-indigenous forces during the cycle of revolt in the first five years of this century. (shrink)

Democracy has come under pressure in many countries in recent years. Authoritarian tendencies, populism and the cult of leadership threaten pluralistic societies in Europe and other parts of the world. But democracy is more than just a method of finding a majority; it is inextricably linked to the fight against oppression and injustice in all contexts of life. Especially in times of democratic crisis, it is necessary to focus on its core aspects. The political thinking of French philosopher and (...) writer Albert Camus, who died in 1960, offers the basis for a redefinition of democracy that is linked to and dependent on rebellion. From his reflections, a radical theory of democracy can be derived that is based on the absurdity of the world, its incompleteness, revolt and resistance to authoritarianism, on doubt, dialogue and foreignness. (shrink)

This paper studies both Locke's Two Treatises of Government and Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government. It suggests that there is a much closer relationship between them than has usually been assumed. In particular, there is a community of language, and of argumentation, underlying their justifications of resistance. This hinges upon the rights, and the law, of war. This language was a Dutch inheritance: it derived specifically from Hugo Grotius' classic The Law of War and Peace (1625). But its development here also (...) drew upon two English contexts: both the political crisis of 1678-83 and the earlier experience of the English civil wars. I have argued elsewhere that the crisis of 1678-83, usually called the exclusion crisis, was at one level a reliving of the experience of the civil wars. It was the Restoration crisis, and it was triggered by a collapse of confidence in the Restoration settlement. Indeed beneath the constitutional veneer of the Restoration period as a whole -- a restoration of constitutional normality as superficial as it was brief -- lay the proximity, and eventually the fact, of political (and judicial) violence. It was within this context that there emerged, in the work of Locke and Sidney, an ideology of political and judicial violence that drew upon the experience of half a century of England's troubles. In so tracing their use of Grotius we will be considering the reflections of some of Early Modern Europe's most influential writers upon what was the primary political problem of their age. (shrink)

Rogue One is a complex film that invites a wide range of philosophical questioning. This chapter focuses on the film's political aspect. Rogue One powerfully illustrates an essential and timely claim made about the nature of democracy by John Dewey. Rogue One is significantly different from earlier Star Wars films. It does not offer a simple, mythic morality tale, where the difference between right and wrong is as stark as the contrast between Leia's white gown and Vader's black mask. (...) Rogue One takes place in a messy and unfair world in which traditional moral frameworks appear naive and ill‐suited. The rest of Rogue One is exceptionally powerful not only because of amazing acting, sound design, and cinematography, but because it uses the tropes and setting of gritty war cinema to tell a universal story about the power of hope and faith in others. (shrink)

Investigation of classic philosophical thought -- Ethical leadership : justice in practice -- Living the good life -- Political excellence.

Intrigued by the so-called “rebellion of the poor,” this paper traces back the current South African concern with popular protest to its reconfiguration during the last years of the apartheid order. Focusing on the discourse around grassroots resistance in the mid- to late-1980s, I begin by showing how, in juxtaposition to an ideal notion of civil society, popular mobilization had been largely delegitimized and the emancipatory politics of ungovernability recast as antidemocratic by the first few years of the post-apartheid (...) regime. In deploying particular notions of violence and culture, this discursive shift, I suggest, fed into reconstructing the ungovernable subject as the racial other of the new South Africa’s citizenry. The second part of the paper mobilizes Foucault’s genealogy of liberalism to draw parallels between this process and the liberal effort to resolve the potentially conflicting principles of governing the economic subject and the subject of rights within the realm of civil society. Finally, via the postcolonial critique of liberal notions of civility and their rootedness in racial thinking, I suggest that civil society secures the governability of the population through rendering the potentially disruptive freedom of the people as the excess freedom of the racialized other. (shrink)

Arendt’s concept of the social is at the heart of her interventions in racial politics in the United States. Readers of Arendt often focus on whether her distinction is too rigid to accommodate the reality of US racial politics, or whether it can be altered to be more capacious. The central issue here is that of closing the gap between conceptual abstraction and concrete reality. However, by extending our archive regarding the social and political beyond Arendt—to work in subaltern (...) studies and the thought of Arendt’s radical Black contemporaries—I argue that we can craft a concept of the social as a counterinsurgent logic by which political acts are reduced to social disorder, neutralizing the political edge and novelty of revolt. The distinction between the social and political is therefore useful not to describe or categorize kinds of revolts or struggles but to critically examine the way they are interpretatively and concretely transformed from ‘political’ to ‘social’ struggles. Situating Arendt among contemporary revolutionaries such as James and Grace Lee Boggs, I argue that they mobilized such a distinction, asking not what rebellions were but what might be made of them. (shrink)

This article presents a broad analysis of the political economy and dynamics of social change during the first year of the Evo Morales government in Bolivia. It situates this analysis in the wider historical context of left-indigenous insurrection between 2000 and 2005, the changing character of contemporary capitalist imperialism, and the resurgence of anti-neoliberalism and anti-imperialism elsewhere in Latin America. It considers at a general level the overarching dilemmas of revolution and reform. Part II of this three-part essay addresses (...) four major themes. First, it reviews the literature on revolution in contemporary Bolivia. Second, it explains why the 2000 to 2005 period is best conceived as a revolutionary epoch in which left-indigenous social forces were engaged in a combined liberation struggle against racial oppression and class exploitation. However, it argues that this revolutionary epoch has not led to social revolution. Third it examines in detail the electoral rise of Evo Morales and his Movimiento al Socialismo party in the December 2005 elections. Fourth, it explores the historical trajectory of the MAS in terms of its changing class composition, ideology, and political strategies since the party's inception in the late 1990s. (shrink)

This essay follows Michel Foucault’s inspiration to develop an archaeology of subaltern politics. In the archives left from the Haitian Revolution, we find occasional references to slaves wearing the tricolor cockade, the famous symbol of French republicanism. The archives are silent on what wearing the cockade “meant,” however, or why whites found it so threatening. Rich layers of meaning are packed into these silences. They reveal a great deal about the performative character of the public sphere and the epistemological complexity (...) of mixing race with revolutionary politics. Wearing the cockade was a screen of projection for all kinds of ideas, including the paranoid fears and guilty conscience of white slaveholders. It probed tensions implicit within Enlightenment colonialism, making those tensions explicit to white elites. By eliciting this self-critical response, the cockade served as a disruptive enigma well suited to the critical and political needs of people not allowed to speak. (shrink)

Marx's Rebellion Against Lenin is a representative of the contemporary revitalization of the thought of Marx. It fulfils this task in three ways. First, it overthrows the dialectical materialism of Engels and of Stalinist Bolshevism by exploring 18th century historical thought and illustrating how these Enlightenment historians and political theorists first explored method of historical explanation that were later adopted by Marx. It is shown that contrary to the theory of Stalinist Bolshevism, Hegel was a vital influence on (...) Marx. Second, Levine's book represents Marx as an exponent of Classical Humanism. Marx did not define communism as a form of materialism, as economic egalitarianism, but rather related communism to the Classical ethics of Aristotle, to the Aristotelian ideas of polis citizenship and the ethics of distributive justice. Third, it is argued that the 17th and 18th Century Enlightenment was not simply a liberal center extolling property, individual rights and capitalism. Instead it is shown that the 17th and 18th century Enlightenment was divided between an Enlightenment Center and an Enlightenment Left, with the Enlightenment Left challenging the domination of capitalism and private property. Marx's Rebellion Against Lenin traces the flow of the theories of the Enlightenment Left into Marx and in doing so liberates Marxist thought from its imprisonment in 19th century materialism and relocates it within the traditions of Classical Humanism. (shrink)

Caroline New is an energetic activist who has interpolated critical realist ideas into the front-line of political activism. In this wide-ranging interview, she begins by reflecting on her life and how she became a realist and her account is illustrated with personal anecdotes recalling memories of well-known philosophers and activists from the time. She discusses how her position set her apart from other feminists and she examines the interacting threads of longstanding debates on the political left, as well (...) as longstanding debates within critical realist circles, such as the relative importance of quantitative methods in social research and the scope for agency as a source of intentional change. Finally she brings some of her ideas to bear on contemporary issues. This engaging interview notably provides some of the social context in which critical realism developed, while also pointing towards its future potential. (shrink)

One of the important domestic developments during the Umayyad period is the rebellions carried out by members of the Ahl al-bayt. After the rebellion of Zayd b. ʿAlī in Kufa, his father, Yaḥyā was intensely prosecuted by the governor of Iraq Yūsuf b. ʿUmar, so he moved to Khurāsān, where he would feel more secure and his supporters were located. In fact, ʿAbbāsids, Kaysānī and Zayd b. ʿAlī’s supporters were active in Khurāsān. Under these circumtances, Yaḥyā left Iraq and (...) followed the road Nineveh, Madāʾin, Ray, Nīshāpūr towards the east and came to Sarakhs and resided here about six months. Here, a group from the Khārijites came and made a revolt proposal, but this proposal was rejected by those with Yahya. After this, Yaḥyā continued on his way to the east and came to Balkh and he stayed until the death of the caliph Hishām b. ʿAbd al-Malik. The general purpose of Yaḥyā’s journey from Iraq to Balkh is probably to get rid of the prosecution of Iraqi governor Yūsuf, and to establish the appropriate political atmosphere for the rebellion by contacting the Ahl al-bayt supporters in Khurāsān. The governor of Iraq Yūsuf b. ʿUmar determined the location of Yaḥyā in Balhk, and he ordered the governor of Khurāsān Naṣr b. Sayyār that he ensured Yaḥyā was imprisoned in Marw. However, as his imprisonment was reported to the caliph al-Walīd b. Yazīd, he ordered him to be released. Governor Naṣr advised Yaḥyā to go directly to the caliph and avoid situations that could cause sedition. In this case, Yaḥyā first came to Sarakhs, and then reached Nīshāpūr via Ṭūs. Meanwhile, the Khurāsān governor Naṣr wrote a letter to the governors on the route and ordered them to follow the movements of Yaḥyā and to not allow him to stay in the cities for a long time. Yaḥyā did not advance further west from the city of Bayhaq because he was afraid he might be killed by the Iraqi governor. Therefore, he returned from Bayhaq and came to Nīshāpūr. Here, they confiscated the mounts of a caravan they encountered on the way along with seventy other people, but they also paid their fees. Due to this incident, the governor of Nīshāpūr sent soldiers to Yaḥyā and his entourage, but in the clash that broke out, the supporters of Yaḥyā were successful against the soldiers, who were more than them. Yaḥyā and his followers continued their movements towards Balkh in the east after that. Even though the sources do not fully state the reason for Yaḥyā 's movement to Balkh, the geographical distance and the possible Shīʿī potential in the region may have guided him. However, this time Yaḥyā aimed to reach Balkh via Herat and Jūzjān by traveling in the southeast direction, not via Marw. Upon the news that Yaḥyā reached Jūzjān, the governor Naṣr sent an army of eight thousand men on him. Yaḥyā had to fight against the Umayyad army with his small number of supporters, consisting of seventy or one hundred and twenty people. As a result, he and his supporters were killed. Yaḥyā's head was cut off from his body and sent to the caliph, and his body was hung over the entrance gate of the city of Jūzjān. There are some reasons why the revolt of Yaḥyā failed. First of all, Yaḥyā did not prepare a road map to follow in advance for the rebellion movement, and he could not communicate with a large mass of people and did not set his goal. Secondly, Yaḥyā did not have enough support to resist the Umayyad armies in the rebellion. As a result, we can conclude that Yaḥyā was hidden during the three-year period he spent in Khurāsān because he was under prosecution and therefore could not operate openly. In addition, he could not get enough support from the Shīʿī communities in the region. Although Yaḥyā's rebellion was unsuccessful, it had some effects on the peoples of the region in the following process. Especially the murder of Yaḥyā in Khurāsān helped to create a suitable ground for the ʿAbbāsid revolution. In addition, it ensured that all Shīʿī groups were gathered under the invitation of the ʿAbbāsid "Āl-i Muḥammad”. (shrink)

The contrast between the Marxian emancipatory project and what the progressive left has made of it has never been more glaring than now, a time in which capital no longer seems to confront a political barrier. It is this predicament that The Conformist Rebellion evaluates, for a renewed approach to emancipation from capital.

The works of Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus--two of the most compelling political thinkers of the "resistance generation" that lived through World War II--can still provide penetrating insights for contemporary political reflection. Jeffrey C. Isaac offers new interpretations of these writers, viewing both as engaged intellectuals who grappled with the possibilities of political radicalism in a world in which liberalism and Marxism had revealed their inadequacy by being complicit in the rise of totalitarianism. According to Isaac, self-styled (...) postmodern writers who proclaim the death of grandiose ideologies often fail to recognize that such thinkers as Camus and Arendt had already noted this. But unlike many postmodernists, these two sought to preserve what was worthy in modern humanism--the idea of a common human condition and a commitment to human rights and the dignity of individuals. Isaac shows that both writers advanced the idea of a democratic civil society made up of self-limiting groups. Although they criticized the typical institutions of mass democratic politics, they endorsed alternative forms of local and international organization that defy the principle of state sovereignty. Isaac also shows how Arendt's writings on the Middle East, and Camus's on Algeria, urged the creation of such institutions. The vision of a "rebellious politics" that Arendt and Camus shared is of great relevance to current debates in democratic theory and to the transformations taking place in Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union. (shrink)

This article, which will appear in three parts over three issues of Historical Materialism, presents a broad analysis of the political economy and dynamics of social change during the first year of the Evo Morales government in Bolivia. It situates this analysis in the wider historical context of left-indigenous insurrection between 2000 and 2005, the class structure of the country, the changing character of contemporary capitalist imperialism, and the resurgence of anti-neoliberalism and anti-imperialism elsewhere in Latin America. It considers, (...) at a general level, the overarching dilemmas of revolution and reform. These considerations are then grounded in analyses of the 2000–5 revolutionary epoch, the 18 December 2005 elections, the social origins and trajectory of the Movimiento al Socialismo as a party, the complexities of the relationship between indigenous liberation and socialist emancipation, the process of the Constituent Assembly, the political economy of natural gas and oil, the rise of an autonomist right-wing movement, US imperialism, and Bolivia's relations with Venezuela and Cuba. The central argument is that the economic policies of the new government exhibit important continuities with the inherited neoliberal model and that advancing the project of indigenous liberation and socialist emancipation will require renewed self-activity, self-organisation and strategic mobilisation of popular left-indigenous forces autonomous from the MAS government. (shrink)

This paper deals with Derrida's analysis of Kant's Critique of Judgment in his essay 'Economimesis'. I argue that Derrida's analysis of Kant's aesthetics can be used to describe the aporia within Kantian politics between rebellion and progressive revolutionary acts. The focus of my argument falls on examining how the recent debate over Derrida's ethics can be usefully considered from the background of this treatment of Kant. In particular, the analysis Derrida gives of Kant's aesthetics commits him to a series (...) of conceptual constraints that can be detected in his recent commentaries on 'forgiveness' and 'hospitality'. I suggest that these recent commentaries on political topics also depart from his earlier practice of ethics in 'Economimesis' as a 'witnessing' of the particular. This departure can be clearly seen once the Kantian background to Derrida's recent writing is set out. (shrink)

In the Theological-Political Treatise, published in 1670, Spinoza asked why people “fight for their servitude as if for salvation.” In doing so, he foregrounded the affective dimension of despotism, putting forward the idea that servitude is not just passively endured but passionately strived for—something people want and will. Three hundred years later, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari repeated this formula in Anti-Oedipus, arguing that it was the central question of political philosophy. They read Spinoza through Wilhelm Reich, stating (...) that the astonishing thing is that “those who are exploited are not continually out on strike.” In doing so they shifted the political question from domination to exploitation. Following Deleuze and Guattari, I argue for an updated version of the question, asking why people fight for exploitation as if it were rebellion. Asking this question involves reexamining the way in which the critique of religion is the antechamber of the critique of political economy in Marx, and is the thread connecting Spinoza to Marx. Finally, I argue that reframing the question in terms of rebellion and exploitation is useful in making sense of contemporary forms of right populism that present themselves as rebellion, but actually deepen the domination of capitalism over our lives. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article contrasts Francis Bacon’s understanding of civil war, sedition, and rebellion with that of his near contemporaries and predecessors, especially Montaigne, Bodin, Machiavelli, Alberico Gentili and Edward Forset. The article contends that for Bacon, civil war, sedition, and rebellion are the antitheses of good government and that which prudent policy aims to avoid. The article further argues that for Bacon as sedition and its extremities are caused by poverty and discontentment, and these, in Bacon’s view, are (...) the result of overpopulation or ‘surcharge of people’, Bacon’s view for the avoidance of civil war aims at policies of outward expansion in the form of colonies and wars of aggression, both of which aim to reduce the metropole’s own population and therewith its propensity to civil war. The article argues that a consideration of Bacon on civil war in particular will shed considerable light on the ideological origins of the British Empire which have often been ignored – where some contemporary political theorists and historians are keen to link ideologies of empire to corresponding positions in political anthropology. A consideration of Bacon’s thought on civil war will show, instead, the article contends, that for key ideological originators of imperial justifications, imperial projects have their origin in domestic politics and the avoidance of civil war. (shrink)

“Stab, smite, slay!” These are not the words of Bashar al-Assad telling his forces how they should deal with the Syrian rebel movement, or indeed those of any other contemporary political leader, but rather the words of Martin Luther exhorting the German nobility to a harsh response to the peasants' rebellion of 1524–1525. His writings show that he sympathized with many of the peasants' grievances so long as these did not issue in rebellion, but when they turned (...) to force of arms, he responded sternly. This was not a peculiarity of Luther. Consider the following from an English courtier, Thomas Churchyard, writing admiringly of the treatment of Irish rebels in 1579 by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, commander of the English army sent to put down the rebellion: He further tooke this order infringeable, that when soever he made any ostyng [military campaign], or inrode, into the enemies Countrey, he killed manne, woman, and child, and spoiled, wasted, and burned, by the grounde all that he might, leavyng nothing of the enemies in saffetie, whiche he could possiblie waste, or consume. (shrink)

This article discusses the use of some Tacitean key terms and techniques by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon in his History of the Rebellion, on the English Civil War, and in his autobiographical account of his times, the Life. Tacitism is a broad term denoting sceptical and secular historical and political ideas, inspired by the works of Cornelius Tacitus. English Tacitism dates back to the last decades of the sixteenth century and gained special importance during the reign of (...) Charles I, when it became a recognisable element of political debate. Clarendon had been connected with one influential Tacitist group, i.e. Ben Jonson's circle. The paper explores the ways in which Clarendon used this intellectual background in presenting a conservative, royalist and idealistic worldview. I analyse the use of two Tacitean keywords connected with the discourse of reason of state, prudence and dissimulation, and their synonyms introduced by Clarendon, skilfulness, seasonableness, dexterity and uningenuity, and Clarendon's portrayal of Cromwell. Clarendon uses these terms and Tacitean narrative techniques precisely to present a religious and ‘counter-Tacitist’ vision of history, influenced by late-humanist ideas, but also demonstrating the importance and persuasive power of the Tacitean discourse in seventeenth-century England. (shrink)

There are two aims to the present paper. The first is to support the assertion that traditional justifications of revolution, rebellion and civil disobedience, though not wrong, are culturally inappropriate. The second is to outline, in the most basic of forms, what a “culturally appropriate” form of political resistance would require. The latter aim will be attempted by offering a counter-enlightenment model of resistance, derived in a large part from a Hegelian reading of Sartre's later work on groups, (...) appropriate to the cultural conditions of late modernity. (shrink)

Politically motivated attacks against civilians are typically evaluated by focusing on objective factors, such as the loss of innocent life, the justness of a rebel organization's political vision, and whether the attacks are successful in advancing that vision. Albert Camus' philosophy on rebellion provides an alternative approach that focuses on subject experience of the rebel. The rebel experiences a genuine moral dilemma created by the passionate desire to fight injustice and the feeling of universal solidarity that encompasses even (...) those who the rebel believes it is necessary to kill. From this standpoint, any action the rebel takes is immoral. Camus thus makes authenticity the focus of his analysis. Authentic rebels continue to value solidarity, which creates a limit on how violence can be used in rebellion. Drawing from The Rebel and The Just Assassins, this paper develops several criteria for immoral but authentic acts of political violence, which are then applied to suicide bomb attacks directed against civilians. (shrink)

Bringing together leading observers of the 2018 teachers’ strikes in the United States, this forum surveys the origins, character, and trajectory of the rebellion as a whole. We examine the relations between union bureaucracies and the rank and file, the wider political context of the United States, the geography of the strike, immediate and longer-term grievances in the public-education sector, spontaneity and organisation, local cultural contexts and labour histories, strategies and tactics, social reproduction and gender, race and racism, (...) and the potentialities and obstacles facing the movement in the near future. (shrink)

The roots of the formation of a post-Mongol political theology that situated Muslim emperors and sultans at the center of an Islamic cosmos are found in the Ilkhanid court in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Iran. This article investigates the case of the short-lived rebellion of the Mongol governor of Rūm and Mahdi-claimant Temürtash. It demonstrates how the discourse of religious reform was recruited to translate and support the claims of non-Chinggisid commanders to the transfer of God’s favor, (...) thus opposing the Chinggisids’ heaven-derived exceptionalism. Exploring affinities with the Timurid appropriation of the mujaddid tradition a century later, the article argues that Temürtash’s rebellion signaled the early stages of the dispersion of a new political language that freed Muslim kingship from the restrictive genealogical and juridical Sunni models of authority. (shrink)

RESUMEN Esta investigación aborda la validez del espacio público como auspiciador de la participación política, centrándose en las diversas formas de apropiación del espacio que pueden fomentar dicha participación. El objetivo principal consiste en demostrar las posibilidades de acción política de las y los ciudadanos al expresar su desacuerdo a través de distintos procesos de apropiación del espacio público: la apropiación por dominación, por rebelión, la apropiación vandálica y artística. Se sostiene que la legitimidad de un sistema de gobierno puede (...) cuestionarse o debilitarse según la actuación pública del cuerpo ciudadano contra el Estado o la entidad que ejerce la soberanía sobre el espacio. El análisis se llevará a cabo desde la filosofía política de la vertiente disociativa y el realismo político a través de los conceptos de conflicto, soberanía y desacuerdo. ABSTRACT This research addresses the validity of public space as a promoter of political participation, focusing on the various forms of appropriation of space that can foster said participation. The main objective is to demonstrate the possibilities of political action of citizens by expressing their disagreement through different processes of appropriation of public space: appropriation by domination, appropriation by rebellion, vandalic, and artistic appropriation. It will be argued that the legitimacy of a government system can be questioned or weakened depending on the public actions of the citizen body against the State or the entity that exercises sovereignty over space. The analysis will be carried out from the political philosophy of the dissociative aspect and political realism, through the concepts of conflict, sovereignty, and disagreement. (shrink)

The Arab Spring has generated a variety of responses from the West. While broad political support was voiced for uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen, the responses to protests in Bahrain and Morocco were muted. The swift decision to intervene in Libya stands in marked contrast to the ongoing hand-wringing on Syria. While political realists might see these contradictions as evidence that geopolitical concerns determine foreign policy, from an ethical point of view these responses also reveal a fundamental (...) tension in Western thinking about rebellion. On one hand, rebellion is viewed with a distrustful eye—as a disruptive, chaotic force that threatens to destroy the day-to-day order on which civilization is built. On the other, rebellion is perceived more optimistically—as a regenerative, creative force that can leave a better civilization in its wake. These two radically disparate ways of thinking about rebellion have deep philosophical and theological roots. The pessimistic view has historically dominated just war thought, as James Turner Johnson's contribution to this roundtable illustrates; whereas the perspective of Enlightenment liberalism offers a more optimistic judgment, as found, for example, in the works of Locke and Rousseau. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Recovering Aquinas's Common-Good-Oriented Right of RebellionNathaniel A. MoatsIntroductionAs recent events have woefully displayed, armed rebellion is not a topic of merely theoretical interest.1 While theory seemingly has very little impact on the citizens participating in armed rebellions, theory still remains of paramount importance, providing crucial criteria to evaluate, restrain, apply, and respond to such force. Criteria such as legitimate authority, just cause, right intention, necessity, proportionality, and likelihood (...) of success have been offered by thinkers advocating "just war" theory from across diverse political, philosophical, and religious backgrounds, garnering widespread agreement over the centuries. Contemporary scholars who identify as "historically oriented" just war thinkers have continued to defend that historical tradition as a sufficient and substantial guide for contemporary practice.2 Yet some have questioned whether the it can provide useful aid for dealing with contexts of political tyranny. In a 2013 article, Valeria Morkevičius describes [End Page 175] Western culture as divided over the moral permissibility of armed rebellion, with advocates basing their views on the Enlightenment ideas found in John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whereas traditional just war theorists have generally denied a right to armed rebellion.3 In Morkevičius's perspective, she argues that there can be justified use of armed force against tyranny and calls upon other scholars to help create a "just rebellion theory" that would "radically reimagine" traditional just war thinking.4 She claims that there is a "lack of a systematic and rigorous ethical framework for evaluating the justness of rebellions"5 and that "a new theory of just rebellion—a systematic way of evaluating the justness of real world rebellions, of determining appropriate state responses to domestic rebellions, and of weighing the pros and cons of intervention" is needed.6In line with Morkevičius' sentiments, the last ten years has seen the increasing rise of self-proclaimed just war revisionists.7 Jeff McMahan, the figurehead for this movement, claims that the classical just war criteria "can no longer stand."8 McMahan argues that traditional just war theory has [End Page 176] depicted war as a morally sui generis category of violence in which unique moral principles apply.9 The moral asymmetry of war is also reinforced by a "statist" and "collectivist" orientation that overrides the importance of individuals and their rights of life, liberty, property, and other fundamental goods. Instead of seeing war as a distinct category of violence, McMahan argues that war and self-defense are morally symmetrical. Further, he argues that combatants should be depicted as individuals distinct from their political or collective identity.10 In other words, McMahan offers a theory of war oriented around individuals and their rights based in the concept of justified self-defense.11 Extending McMahan's theory, Cécile Fabre has particularly targeted the criterion of legitimate authority as morally problematic.12 Rejecting the exclusive authorization of armed force by political authorities, she argues in favor of an individual's right to war, and by extension the right to rebellion.13 Therefore, given the historical just war tradition's emphasis on the criterion of legitimate authority (i.e., the restriction of armed force [End Page 177] to established authorities) and resistance to support armed rebellions due to the lack of recognized political leaders, revisionists conclude that traditional just war thinking is inadequate for providing contemporary guidance in the context of rebellion.14To challenge revisionist claims, I analyze Thomas Aquinas's ingenuity and relevance for future "just rebellion" thinking. First, I argue that classical just war thinking is not as antithetical to armed rebellion as suggested.15 One just rebellion theory has coexisted alongside the classical formation of just war theory, albeit often neglected or ignored by contemporary thinkers.16 It is well known that Aquinas formalized the Augustinian classical just war theory revolving around the criteria of legitimate authority, just cause, and right intention. Much less known, however, is the fact that Aquinas also crafted criteria for justified armed rebellions. While Aquinas's just war thinking rearticulates Augustine's perspective, Aquinas appropriated his mentor's views to allow for justified armed rebellions. Aquinas's originality was displayed not only in allowing justified armed... (shrink)

In the year 308 CE, the African army raised to the purple the agens vices praefectorum praetorio Lucius Domitius Alexander. This rather unique case of a vicarius becoming emperor is deserving of investigation. Scholarly interest on the matter has traditionally focused on the broader political significance, treating Alexander as a traditional usurper. This paper argues that, contrary to traditional studies, the regime of Alexander focused on very local, African tropes. The uniqueness of the advertisement suggests that this African usurpation (...) was the product of discontent internal to Africa; in other words, it is a departure from the usurpations of the third century. The achievements of Diocletian, who supposedly stabilized the Empire, ended when he withdrew, and the rebellion of 308–310 demonstrates that there remained unaddressed tensions between the provinces and the remaining tetrarchs. (shrink)

This article examines how Muslim religious scholars find space within political and legal discourses to deal with thorny issues such as rebellion. It takes as its case study a treatise by Ibn al-Jawzī regarding the permissibility to curse the second Umayyad caliph Yazīd b. Muʿāwiya. Although written to address the cursing of Yazīd, the treatise also speaks to questions regarding rulership and rebellion. Overall, the article argues that Ibn al-Jawzī adopted a juristically prudent approach to rebellion (...) against an unjust and sinful ruler which synthesizes various elements of the Sunni caliphate discourse and the Islamic legal discourse on the treatment of rebels. This allowed him to shift the debate from one on the permissibility of rebellion to one on the question of legitimacy, thus enabling him to justify actions against Yazīd without overtly condoning the act of rebellion. (shrink)

The global age is distinguished by disobedience, from the protests in Tiananmen Square to the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the anti-G8 and anti-WTO demonstrations. In this book, Raffaele Laudani offers a systematic review of how disobedience has been conceptualized, supported, and criticized throughout history. Laudani documents the appearance of "disobedience" in the political lexicon from ancient times to the present, and explains the word's manifestations, showing how its semantic wealth transcended its liberal interpretations in the 1960s and (...) 1970s. Disobedience, Laudani finds, is not merely an alternative to revolution and rebellion, but a different way of conceiving radical politics, one based on withdrawal of consent and defection in relation to the established order. (shrink)

Kant’s theory of taste supports his political theory by providing the judgment of beauty as a symbol of the good and example of teleological experience, allowing us to imagine the otherwise obscure movement of nature and history toward the ideal human community. If interpreters are correct in believing that Kant should make room for pure judgments of ugliness in his theory of taste, we will have to consider the implications of such judgments for Kant’s political theory. It is (...) here proposed that pure, formal ugliness symbolizes regressive, counter-teleological trends in nature and history. Kant’s paradoxical stance on the right to rebellion, both condemning and supporting the French Revolution, is interpreted as failing to take into account negative social forces signified by ugliness, and therefore neglecting the role of moral agency in social change. (shrink)

An update of one of the indispensable political and social histories of African Americans since World War II.

ABSTRACTAbel Evans's poem Vertumnus celebrates Jacob Bobart the Younger, second keeper of the Oxford Physick Garden, as a model monarch to his botanical subjects. This paper takes Vertumnus as a point of departure from which to explore the early history of the Physick Garden, situating botanical collections and collecting spaces within utopian visions and projects as well as debates about order more widely in the turbulent seventeenth-century. Three perspectives on the Physick Garden as an ordered collection are explored: the architecture (...) of the quadripartite Garden, with particular attention to the iconography of the Danby Gate; the particular challenges involved in managing living collections, whose survival depends on the spatial order regulating the microclimates in which they grow; and the taxonomic ordering associated with the hortus siccus collections. A final section on the ideal ‘Botanick throne’ focuses on the metaphor of the state as a garden in the period, as human and botanical subjects resist being order and can rebel, but also respond to right rule and wise cultivation. However, the political metaphor is Evans’s; there is little to suggest that Bobart himself was driven by utopian, theological and political visions. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive analysis of late eighteenth-century Irish patriot thought and its development into 1790s radical republicanism. It is a history of the rich political ideas and languages that emerged from the tumultuous events and colourful individuals of this pivotal period in Irish history. Stephen Small's exploration of the ideology of the movements for legislative independence, parliamentary reform, Catholic relief and separation from Britain sheds new light on the Rebellion of 1798 and the origins of Irish (...) republican nationalism. (shrink)

The contemporary West is biased in favor of rebellion. This is attributable in the first place to the dominance of liberal political philosophy, according to which it is the power of the state that always poses the greatest threat to human well-being. But it is also because of consequent anti-imperialism, according to which any nationalist rebellion against imperial power is assumed to be its own justification. Autonomy, whether of the individual or of the nation, is reckoned to (...) be the value that trumps all others. I surmise that it is because in liberal consciousness the word “rebel” connotes a morally heroic stance—because it means the opposite of “tyrant”—that Western media in recent years have preferred to refer to Iraqi opponents of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and Taliban opponents of the ISAF in Afghanistan not as “rebels,” but as “insurgents.”. (shrink)

Political violence in the form of wars, insurgencies, terrorism and violent rebellion constitutes a major human challenge. C. A. J. Coady brings a philosophical and ethical perspective as he places the problems of war and political violence in the frame of reflective ethics. In this book, Coady re-examines a range of urgent problems pertinent to political violence against the background of a contemporary approach to just war thinking. The problems examined include: the right to make war (...) and conduct war, terrorism, revolution, humanitarianism, mercenary warriors, the ideal of peace and the right way to end war. Coady attempts to vindicate the contemporary relevance of the just war tradition to current problems without applying the tradition in a merely mechanical or uncritical fashion. (shrink)

Two Mencian political notions are examined: rebellion against tyranny and righteous martyrdom, as explored theoretically by prominent Japanese scholars of the Tokugawa period (1603-1867). It is argued here generally that Confucianism, as represented by the Mencius, was more than a feudal ideology legitimizing the hegemony of Tokugawa shoguns, since these two Mencian notions were advocated and/or opposed by both supporters and opponents of the Tokugawa regime. In the development of this argument, it is also revealed that the two (...) notions were important topics of Confucian debate among major Tokugawa scholars of all stripes throughout this period, and even in the early Meiji period. Without claiming that these two notions necessarily convey the central message of Mencius vis-à-vis political behavior, it is suggested that virtually all important Tokugawa scholars viewed them as crucial topics of debate, with most leaving a definitive statement or essay on them in their writings. (shrink)