BOOK: Richard WHATMORE, The History of Political Thought: A Very Short Introduction [Very Short Introductions] (Oxford: OUP, 2021), 160 p. ISBN 9780198853725

 

(image source: OUP)

Abstract:

Thinking about politics has tended to be historical in nature because of the comparisons and contrasts that can be drawn between past and present. Different periods in politics have used the past differently. At times political thought can be said to have been drawn directly from the study of history; at others, perhaps including our own time, the relationship is more indirect. This Very Short Introduction explores the core concerns and questions in the field of the history of political thought. Richard Whatmore considers the history of political thought as a branch of political philosophy/political science, and examines the approaches of core theorists such as Reinhart Koselleck, Strauss, Michel Foucault, and the so-called Cambridge School of Quentin Skinner and John Pocock. Assessing the current relationship between political history, theory and action, Whatmore concludes with an analysis of its relevant for current politics.

On the author:

 Richard Whatmore is a Professor of Modern History and Co-Director of the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St. Andrews. He is the author of Republicanism and the French Revolution (OUP, 2000); Against War and Empire (Yale, 2012); What is Intellectual History? (Polity, 2015); and Terrorists, Anarchists and Republicans (Princeton, 2019).

(read more with OUP) 

BOOK: Annabel BRETT, Megan DONALDSON & Martti KOSKENNIEMI (eds.), History, Politics, Law. Thinking Through the International (Cambridge: CUP, SEP 2021), ISBN 9781108903516

 

(image source: CUP)

Abstract:

Historians of political thought and international lawyers have both expanded their interest in the formation of the present global order. History, Politics, Law is the first express encounter between the two disciplines, juxtaposing their perspectives on questions of method and substance. The essays throw light on their approaches to the role of politics and the political in the history of the world beyond the single polity. They discuss the contrast between practice and theory as well as the role of conceptual and contextual analyses in both fields. Specific themes raised for both disciplines include statehood, empires and the role of international institutions, as well as the roles of economics, innovation and gender. The result is a vibrant cross-section of contrasts and parallels between the methods and practices of the two disciplines, demonstrating the many ways in which both can learn from each other.

On the editors:

Annabel Brett, University of Cambridge Annabel Brett is a leading historian of late medieval and early modern political thought, with a particular interest in natural law and the law of nations. She is the author of Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought (1997) and Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law (2011).  Martti Koskenniemi is a leading critical scholar of the theory and history of international law. His works are studied by lawyers, historians and international relations scholars across the world. He has held visiting professorships at many of world's leading universities, is Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Martti Koskenniemi, University of Helsinki Megan Donaldson, University College London Megan Donaldson has published on nineteenth and twentieth-century shifts in treaty-making, statehood and international organisations. Her forthcoming monograph traces the evolution of secrecy in the international legal order.

Contributors:

Annabel Brett, Martti Koskenniemi, David Kennedy, Armin von Bogdandy and Adeel Hussain, Jennifer Pitts, Emma Hunter, Megan Donaldson, Surabhi Ranganathan, Joel Isaac, Anna Becker, Karen Knop

(read more on Cambridge Core) 

BOOK: Oliver EBERL. Naturzustand und Barbarei. Begründung und Kritik staatlicher Ordnung im Zeichen des Kolonialismus (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2021), 552 p. ISBN 978-3-86854-349-0; € 40

 

(image source: Hamburger Edition)

Book description:

Im Zuge des Denkmalsturzes ehemaliger Sklavenhalter werden auch westliche Konzepte auf ihren Beitrag zu Rassismus und Unterdrückung hin untersucht. Ein solches Konzept ist der fest im europäischen Denken verankerte Begriff »Barbarei«. »Barbarei« ist der zentrale Begriff für die Beschreibung anderer Völker, die seit der Antike die Abwertung anderer Kulturen markiert und immer wieder neu bestimmt wird. In der europäischen Geschichte ist »Barbarei« auf das Engste mit dem Kolonialismus verbunden und muss somit als dessen Komplize und Erbe verstanden werden. »Barbarei« steht für das »Andere« westlicher Ordnung und zivilisierter Werte. Man beklagt damit furchtbare Verbrechen und verurteilt sie als moralisch besonders verwerflich. Zurückgreifen können diese politischen Verwendungsweisen auf eine lange Geschichte theoretischer Konzepte der »Barbarei«. Obwohl ein enger Zusammenhang zwischen »Barbarei« und Kolonialismus besteht, ist es bemerkenswert, dass der Begriff im Alltag und in der Theorie weiter verwendet wird – wenn auch in kritischer Absicht. Im Topos der »Barbarei« vereinen sich über die Zeiten die Gegenbilder verschiedener Wertesysteme: der Vernunft, des Christentums, der Humanität, der Zivilisation, der Kultur oder der Menschenrechte. Wie fand diese theoretische und begriffsgeschichtliche Entwicklung statt? Oliver Eberl hat mit dieser Studie die Dekolonisierung der Politischen Theorie zum Ziel, die ihr Denken mit Blick auf den Staat und seine Kritik vielfach von dem Begriffspaar »Naturzustand und Barbarei« anleiten lässt. Dazu zeichnet er die Theoriegeschichte des Begriffs »Barbarei« nach. Im Zuge der neuzeitlichen Staatsbegründung wurde »Barbarei« als Vergangenheit der europäischen Staaten verstanden und Staatlichkeit vor dem Hintergrund der Gefahr des Rückfalls in den »Naturzustand« theoretisiert. Zentral ist dabei die Verknüpfung mit dem europäischen Kolonialismus, dem »Barbarei« von der Antike bis zum 20. Jahrhundert zur Abwertung der Kolonisierten diente und der das »Barbarische« als das Nichtstaatliche mit dem zu Kolonisierenden gleichsetzte. Die seit der Aufklärung vollzogene Wende vom kolonialen zum kritischen Gebrauch sichert den theoretischen Stellenwert des Begriffs bis heute. Diese Wende hat dem Begriff »Barbarei« einen festen Platz in unserem Denken gesichert, so die These des Autors. In der Auseinandersetzung mit den Nationalsozialisten wurde der Begriff dann zum Platzhalter für die Kritik von Menschheitsverbrechen. Dabei wurde verdrängt, dass auch der Kolonialismus ein Menschheitsverbrechen ist und als solches kritisiert werden muss. Eindrücklich verdeutlicht Oliver Eberl, wie fatal es für politische Theoriebildung ist, in kritischer Absicht die Wirkungsgeschichte des Kolonialismus zu verlängern.

On the author:

 Oliver Eberl, PD Dr. phil. ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter für Politische Theorie und Ideengeschichte an der Leibniz-Universität Hannover und Privatdozent an der Technischen Universität Darmstadt; vier Semester Vertretung der Professur »Politische Theorie und Ideengeschichte« an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. Forschungsschwerpunkte: Politische Theorie, Demokratietheorie, Gesellschaftstheorie, Ideengeschichte. Ko-Leiter des Projekts »Der Blick nach unten. Soziale Konflikte in der Ideengeschichte der Demokratie«.

See publisher's website for more information.

This book has been reviewed by Prof. Miloš Vec (Vienna) in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 23 June 2021.

BOOK REVIEW: Simon MILLS reviews Noel MALCOLM, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450–1750 (Oxford: OUP, 2019) (English Historical Review CXXXVI (2021), nr. 579 (Apr), 422-424

(image source: OUP)

First paragraph:

As its title suggests, Noel Malcolm’s book analyses the longue durée history of ideas on two distinct but closely related topics within Western political thought: Islam and the Ottoman Empire. Rejecting the ‘Orientalist’ paradigm—the contention, set out most famously by Edward Said, that European writing on Islam and the East was ‘a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient’—Malcolm argues instead that Western authors demonstrated an ‘active—even, creative—engagement with their Islamic or Ottoman subject matter as part of a larger pursuit of religious and political arguments within their own culture’ (p. 417).

Read more with Oxford Journals  (DOI 10.1093/ehr/ceab045)

ADVANCE ARTICLE: Danielle CHARETTE, David Hume’s Balancing Act: The Political Discourses and the Sinews of War (American Political Science Review)

(image source: Cambridge Core)

 Abstract:

Both champions and critics of “neorealism” in contemporary international relations misinterpret David Hume as an early spokesman for a universal and scientific balance-of-power theory. This article instead treats Hume’s “Of the Balance of Power,” alongside the other essays in his Political Discourses (1752), as conceptual resources for a historically inflected analysis of state balancing. Hume’s defense of the balance of power cannot be divorced from his critique of commercial warfare in “Of the Balance of Trade” and “Of the Jealousy of Trade.” To better appreciate Hume’s historical and economic approach to foreign policy, this article places Hume in conversation with Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Andrew Fletcher, and Montesquieu. International relations scholars suspicious of static paradigms should reconsider Hume’s genealogy of the balance of power, which differs from the standard liberal and neorealist accounts. Well before International Political Economy developed as a formal subdiscipline, Hume was conceptually treating economics and power politics in tandem.

(source: Cambridge Core; DOI 10.1017/S0003055420000726) 

ARTICLE: Erez MANELA, 'International Society as a Historical Subject' (Diplomatic History XLIV (2020), No. 2, 184-209)

(image source: Oxford Journals)

First paragraph:

For some time now, historians have been venturing well beyond the spatial and methodological enclosures of nation-states that had long defined the modern discipline, writing more history that is variously described as international, transnational, transregional, global, or world history.¹ This essay sets out to examine one aspect of the turn away from methodological nationalism—which is the assumption that the nation-state is the natural frame for the study of history—an aspect that has often been described as the emergence of a “new international history.”² The term “international history” has had a rather complicated history in the U.S. historical profession,

Read more with Oxford Journals.

ARTICLE: Adrian BLAU, "Textual context in the history of political thought and intellectual history" (History of European Ideas 2019)

(image source: Taylor&Francis Online)

Abstract:

We can easily misread historical texts if we take ideas and passages out of their textual contexts. The resulting errors are widespread, possibly even more so than errors through reading ideas and passages out of their historical contexts. Yet the methodological literature stresses the latter and says little about the former. This paper thus theorises the idea of textual context, distinguishes three types of textual context, and asks how we uncover the right textual contexts. I distinguish four kinds of textual-context error, and offer practical tips for avoiding these errors. However, the beating heart of this paper is the history–philosophy debate: in contrast to the prevailing assumption that historical and philosophical analysis are fundamentally different, I show that a commitment to textual context, which should be entirely uncontroversial, also commits one to think philosophically.

(read more on Taylor&Francis Online)

BOOK: Laszlo KONTLER & Mark SOMOS (eds.), Trust and Happiness in the History of European Political Thought [Studies in the History of Political Thought, Volume: 11] (Boston: Brill, 2017), ISBN 978-90-04-35367-1, € 159

(image source: Brill)

Book abstract and contributors:

The notions of happiness and trust as cements of the social fabric and political legitimacy have a long history in Western political thought. However, despite the great contemporary relevance of both subjects, and burgeoning literatures in the social sciences around them, historians and historians of thought have, with some exceptions, unduly neglected them. In Trust and Happiness in the History of European Political Thought, editors László Kontler and Mark Somos bring together twenty scholars from different generations and academic traditions to redress this lacuna by contextualising historically the discussion of these two notions from ancient Greece to Soviet Russia. Confronting this legacy and deep reservoir of thought will serve as a tool of optimising the terms of current debates. Contributors are: Erica Benner, Hans W. Blom, Niall Bond, Alberto Clerici, Cesare Cuttica, John Dunn, Ralf-Peter Fuchs, Gábor Gángó, Steven Johnstone, László Kontler, Sara Lagi, Adriana Luna-Fabritius, Adrian O’Connor, Eva Odzuck, Kálmán Pócza, Vladimir Ryzhkov, Peter Schröder, Petra Schulte, Mark Somos, Alexey Tikhomirov, Bee Yun, and Hannes Ziegler.

On the editors:

László Kontler, Ph.D. (1996) is Professor of History at Central European University (Budapest). He has published widely on intellectual history, political and historical thought, translation and reception, including Translations, Histories, Enlightenments: William Robertson in Germany, 1765-1795 (Palgrave, 2014) Mark Somos (Ph.D. Harvard, 2007; Ph.D. Lugd. Bat., 2014) is Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Heidelberg), Senior Visiting Research Fellow at Sussex Law School, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Grotiana. 

 (source: Brill)