100 years have passed since the Balfour declaration, and this significant historical document is still under much scrutiny and at the same time highly relevant. Each side – the Jews and the Palestinians – makes a structured political use of it, in order to justify its arguments, and to criticizes what does not fit his narrative; and this mainly to deepen his justifications and nationalist ideology.

This article considers the theological influences on the Balfour Declaration which was made on the 2 November 1917 and for the first time gave British governmental support to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It explores the principal personalities and political workings behind the Declaration before going on to argue the statement cannot be entirely divested from the religious sympathies of those involved, especially Lord Balfour. Thereafter, the paper explores the rise of Christian Restorationism (...) in the context of Scottish Presbyterianism, charting how the influence of Jonathan Edwards shaped the thought of Thomas Chalmers on the role of the Jews in salvation history which in turn influenced the premillennialism of Edward Irving and his Judeo-centric eschatology. The paper then considers the way this eschatology became the basis of John Darby’s premillennial dispensationalism and how in an American context this theology began to shape the thinking of Christian evangelicals and through the work of William Blackstone provide the basis of popular and political support for Zionism. However, it also argues the political expressions of premillennial dispensationalism only occurred in America because the Chicago evangelist Dwight L. Moody was exposed to the evolving thinking of Scottish Presbyterians regarding Jewish restoration. This thinking had emerged from a Church of Scotland ‘Mission of Inquiry’ to Palestine in 1839 and been advanced by Alexander Keith, Horatius Bonar and David Brown. Finally, the paper explores how this Scottish Presbyterian heritage influenced the rise of Zionism and Balfour and his political judgements. (shrink)

Massimiliano Tomba's Insurgent Universality is a stunning book. Conceptually, historically, and rhetorically innovative, it shows how popular challenges to conservative and liberal forms of state-centered politics outlive attempts to contain and repress them. Tomba's reading of revolutionary declarations and manifestos in France, Saint-Domingue, Russia, Mexico, and elsewhere recalls experimental democratic practices that can animate contemporary political thinking. After surveying some of Insurgent Universality's key contributions, I ask how Tomba's argument could be extended in relation to recent debates about the politics (...) of memory and consider what possibilities its anti-statism forecloses. Finally, I explore what gets lost in formulations of modernity that do not come to terms with racialized forms of bondage and dispossession and invite Tomba to speculate about how radical theories of politics might navigate between romantic figurations of democratic excess, on one hand, and a tragic preoccupation with aftermaths, on the other. (shrink)

Well known as the British politician responsible for the Balfour Declaration during World War I, James Balfour was also a philosopher. Long forgotten, his remarkable book The Foundations of Belief (1895) merits contemporary reassessment. Critical of modern compartmentalization, Balfour argues for an integration of religion, philosophy, and science---a position now often identified as postmodern. This article presents some of Balfour’s contemporary scholarly significance, and hints at his usefulness in undergraduate teaching.

In 1925, A.J. Balfour, first Earl Balfour and author of the famous ‘Balfour Declaration’, attended the inauguration of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His education and experience of foreign policy equipped him to take a prominent role. However, the conditions of strife-torn Palestine weighed heavily upon him, and raised wider interests of imperial concern. This essay recounts the circumstances leading to his visit, and suggests that, whatever the region’s political destiny, Balfour’s vision of science-based economic (...) development would play an essential role in crafting its future. (shrink)

In October 1917 Martin Buber published an animal story by Franz Kafka in his monthly review Der Jude. Kafka's friend and literary executor, Max Brod, recommended it, assuring Buber that Kafka's work was among the most Jewish documents of our time. Kafka wrote “Jackals and Arabs” during the war-induced hiatus in Jewish immigration to Palestine, only half a year before the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 committed the British government to support a Jewish national home in Palestine. (...) The polyvalent story and its multilayered context crystallize Kafka's relationship to Zionism and Palestine as well as his German, Jewish, and Arab scholarly reception. The current revolutionary moment in the Arab world allows us to rethink Kafka and Arabs and, at the same time, the Palestine conflict. As such, this essay contains an intellectual affinity with the revision of Kafka scholarship offered in Critical Inquiry following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as Achmat Dangor's haunting postapartheid novel Kafka's Curse. (shrink)

In 1875, the geophysicist Balfour Stewart and the mathematician P. G. Tait published the second edition of The Unseen Universe. The book's aim had been 'to overthrow materialism by a purely scientific argument', and its initial success, and the controversy it aroused, prompted this revised edition. The treatise suggests that science and religion could be reconciled, and that by using science, it could be proved that the soul survives after death. The book begins with a historical account of the (...) beliefs about the afterlife of ancient Egypt, the Greeks, Buddhism and Christianity. The authors then refine a Ptolemaic vision of the universe in which the material universe is surrounded by concentric, invisible universes. The Unseen Universe discusses the nature of matter and ether, Newton's laws, and the idea that, through electromagnetism, the soul upon death transfers molecularly from the visible to the invisible universe. (shrink)

We have conducted a retrospective study of deaths on a paediatric medical intensive care unit over a two-year period and reviewed similar series from outside the UK. There were 89 deaths out of 651 admission (13.7% mortality). In almost two-thirds of the cases death occurred with a decision to limit medical treatment or withdraw mechanical ventilation, implying that additional or further therapy was considered futile. We highlight this as a crucially important issue in the practice of intensive care. More comprehensive (...) studies are needed to help clinicians derive consensus on what constitutes a futile intervention, and therefore when such an intervention should be withheld. This will help families and society better understand the limitations of intensive care. (shrink)

In a well-known paper, Nick Bostrom presents a confrontation between a fictionalised Blaise Pascal and a mysterious mugger. The mugger persuades Pascal to hand over his wallet by exploiting Pascal's commitment to expected utility maximisation. He does so by offering Pascal an astronomically high reward such that, despite Pascal's low credence in the mugger's truthfulness, the expected utility of accepting the mugging is higher than rejecting it. In this article, I present another sort of high value, low credence mugging. This (...) time, the mugger utilises research on existential risk and the long-term potential of humanity to exploit Pascal's expected-utility-maximising descendant. This mugging is more insidious than Bostrom's original as it relies on plausible facts about the long-term future, as well as realistic credences about how our everyday actions could, albeit with infinitesimally low likelihood, affect the future of humanity. (shrink)

This article scrutinizes James Baldwin's reflections on film and film-going, mainly as set out in the relatively late essays-cum-memoir entitled The Devil Finds Work. The paper considers Baldwin's experiences and reflections with an idea to how black and white are felt and described as asymmetrically oppositional forces, on the one hand, that nonetheless are subject to occasional and startling crossovers, especially in his early viewing of films, white, mixed-race, and all-black cast. Baldwin argues against an ontology of race, even as (...) he feels the full force of discrimination based on the putative absolutes of black and white. (shrink)

Toni Morrison: Imagining Freedom explores Morrison’s reflections on the idea of freedom in her novels and nonfiction from the 1970s to 2019. While Morrison’s literary achievements are widely celebrated, her political thought has yet to receive its due. Morrison’s writing illuminates the meanings of freedom and unfreedom in a democratic society that was founded on both the defense of liberty and the right to enslave and dispossess. Toni Morrison: Imagining Freedom argues that Morrison’s fiction and her meditations on the power (...) of language contest the wishful thinking of color-blindness and repudiate complaints that it is time to get beyond race. Morrison’s attentiveness to the experiences of people “no one inquired of,” especially her interest in the lives of black women and girls, reorients democratic inquiry in the shadow of racial slavery, settler colonialism, and the ongoing processes of theft and domination they set in motion. Morrison’s writings, Balfour contends, kindle new practices of freedom-seeking that do not rely on the subjugation of others. (shrink)

The popularity of theodicy over the past several decades has given rise to a countermovement, “anti-theodicy”, which admonishes attempts at theodicy for various reasons. This paper examines one prominent anti-theodical objection: that it is hubristic, and attempts to form an approach to theodicy which evades this objection. To do so I draw from the work of Eleonore Stump, who provides a framework by which we can glean second-personal knowledge of God. From this knowledge, I argue that we can derive a (...) theodicy which does not utilise the kind of analytic theorising anti-theodicists accuse of intellectual hubris. (shrink)

Excerpt from A Defence of Philosophic Doubt: Being an Essay on the Foundations of Belief What is meant by Ethics I have Shown at length in the Appendix which will be found at the end of the volume. Here it is only necessary to say that it includes, not only what are commonly called moral systems, but also some analogous systems not usually so described. Multitudes of propositions, all professing to em body knowledge belonging to one or other of these (...) departments, are being continually put forward for our acceptance. And as no one believes all of them, so those who profess to act rationally must hold that there are grounds for rejecting the propositions they disbelieve, and for accepting those they believe. The systematic account of. These grounds of belief and disbelief makes up the fourth of the Classes into which possible knowledge is divided, and is here always called Philosophy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

This essay considers W. E. B. Du Bois’s Darkwater (1920) as a window onto Du Bois’s political theory at an underexamined stage of his career and onto a challenge at the heart of black political thought: how to formulate a conception of collective life that regards the humanity of black women and men as a central concern. Exploring Du Bois’s attempt to articulate what can be seen through the lens of an avowedly “black” perspective and his creative juxtaposition of different (...) modes of writing, the author suggests why Darkwater remains a valuable resource for democratic theory in an age misleadingly described as “post-racial.”. (shrink)

The end of the twentieth century witnessed a resurgence of demands for reparations for slavery and segregation in the United States. At the same time, a chorus of prominent political theorists warned against the threat "identity politics" poses for democratic politics. This essay considers whether it is possible to construct an argument for reparations that responds to these concerns, particularly as they are articulated by Wendy Brown. To do so, I explore how Brown's analysis of the dangers of political organizing (...) around "wounded identities" and of appealing to the state for redress might inform and be informed by arguments for black reparations. (shrink)

Now is a good time to take stock of the global progress made toward achieving the ideals enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was passed by the UN General Assembly seventy years ago. Though the UDHR has played a vital role in advancing human rights globally, threats to human rights areever present. Two issues in particular stand out as barriers to further progress. The first is state sovereignty, which presents a fundamental challenge to any effort to (...) establish universal norms. Without strong global institutional mechanisms to ensure implementation, UDHR's impact remains limited. The second major concern is the “siloing” of human rights efforts, whereby civil and political rights have been given primacy over social and economic rights. Emphasis on some principles to the exclusion of others undermines the comprehensive advancement of human rights. The current state of affairs is a product of the collective failure to address human rights holistically and to implement real monitoring and accountability measures for states, which are directly charged with upholding them within their borders. (shrink)

One of the central themes of inquiry for Karl Barth, the twentieth-century Protestant theologian, was the notion of revelation. Although he was suspicious of natural theology, recent scientific advances and the flourishing modern dialogue between science and religion offer compelling reasons to revisit Barth’s thinking on the concept. We must again ask whether and how it might be possible to hold together the notion of revelation whilst employing reason and scientific evidence in the justification of belief. In The Heavens Declare, (...) author Rodney Holder re-examines Barth’s natural theology argument and then explores how it has been critiqued and responded to by others, starting with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Wolfhart Pannenberg. Holder then considers the contributions of two notable British participants in the science-religion dialogue, Thomas Torrance and Alister McGrath, who, despite their repudiation of natural theology in the traditional sense, also provide many positive lessons. The book concludes by defending an overall position which takes into account the ideas of the aforementioned theologians as well as others who are currently engaged positively in natural theology, such as John Polkinghorne and Richard Swinburne. Holder’s new study is sure to be of interest to theologians, philosophers of religion, and all scholars interested in the science-religion dialogue, especially those interested in natural theology as an enterprise in itself. (shrink)

: In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's "The Damnation of Women," which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath.

In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's “The Damnation of Women,” which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath.

While most of Political Theory’s 50th anniversary issue looks forward to imagining political theory in the future, the Book Review section looks backward to consider those books and schools of political theory not reviewed on the pages of the journal—but which went on to shape the field nonetheless. The aim of this section is not to constitute a new and newly virtuous canon, but rather to goad readers to reflect anew on knowledge production and the institutional and circulatory practices that (...) compose it, reaching from journal readers, to classrooms and conferences, and on to late night conversations and confabulations. (shrink)

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Psychologists live in a globalizing world where traditional boundaries are fading and, therefore, increasingly work with persons from diverse cultural backgrounds. The Universal Declaration of Ethical Principles for Psychologists provides a moral framework of universally acceptable ethical principles based on shared human values across cultures. The application of its moral framework in developing codes of ethics and reviewing current codes may help psychologists to respond ethically in a rapidly changing world. In this article, a model is presented to demonstrate (...) how to use the Universal Declaration as a guide for creating or reviewing a code of ethics. This model may assist psychologists in various parts of the world in establishing codes of ethics that will promote global understanding and cooperation while respecting cultural differences. The article describes the steps involved in the application of the model and provides concrete examples as well as several useful comments and suggestions. This guide for the application of the Universal Declaration may also be used for consultation, education, and training relative to the Universal Declaration of Ethical Principles for Psychologists. (shrink)