Political Theory (Political Science)

Un análisis de las convicciones políticas de los españoles desde la teología política. Resumen: En el presente artículo se hace una observación de las convicciones españolas más arraigas, que operan bajo la creencia de que es posible solucionar los problemas del país meramente votando a uno u otro partido, analizando qué mitos están cimentados en el imaginario colectivo para que funcione de tal manera. Enfocándolo desde el estudio de la Escuela de Frankfurt, de los autores Adorno y Horkheimer, los cuales consideraban que el proyecto ilustrado retornaba al mito que trataba de superar, donde la racionalización absoluta derivaba en una regresión y perversión de los fundamentos de la realidad y, por tanto, de la esencia de lo político. En cuanto la humanidad renuncie toda ella a Dios, […] de por sí, sin recurrir a la antropofagia, caerá toda la anterior concepción del mundo y, lo que es más importante, toda la antigua moral, y todo será nuevo. Los hombres se unirán para tomar de la vida cuanto esta pueda darles, pero, eso sí, para la felicidad y la alegría en este mundo únicamente. El hombre exaltará con el espíritu de un orgullo divino, titánico, y aparecerá el Hombre Dios (Dostoievski [1880] 2015: 950). Harán 76 años de la publicación de la Dialéctica de la Ilustración (Adorno y Horkheimer, [1944] 1994). En esta obra se procuraba explicar que el proyecto de la Ilustración recaía en el propio mito que quería erradicar. Su intento por desencantar el mundo y vaciarlo de magia estuvo viciado desde el comienzo porque creaba sus propios mitos y mantenía otros. La creencia férrea en el cientificismo moderno ponía de relieve que "las grandes invenciones se pagan con una creciente decadencia de la cultura teórica" (Adorno y Horkheimer, [1944] 1994: 51), lo que producía una inmanentización del mundo en el que toda verdad estaba encerrada en él, siendo accesible al ser humano. Si todo era posible al limitar la realidad a pura materia, "[l]a semejanza del hombre con Dios consiste [entonces] en la soberanía sobre lo existente" (Adorno y Horkheimer, [1944] 1994: 64); nada es irrealizable para este nuevo sujeto deificado. Pero no toda persona podría ser endiosada, sólo algunos tienen tal privilegio. De aquí nace la concepción del superhombre con carácter salvífico que podría otorgar la redención a la humanidad a través de un acto revolucionario. Todos sabemos lo que ocurrió entre los siglos XIX y XX. La culminación del proyecto Ilustrado quedaba así consagrada. Sin embargo, ¿qué mitos han llegado a nuestros días en el caso español?

3774 1700 99 crossreferences which belong to the individualistic discourse -rationalism, say, or market. How can we take that complexity into account? The answer to second -or third -level associations cannot be one of just loosely surfing from one crossreference to another, a game that with the computer can be played out to the mathematical limit. With such an unstructured pattern, rather than gaining in complexity we would only be adding confusion. Moving from network to interlinked networks, by the third round we would reach sixtyfour combinations (4 3 ), with the end not yet in sight. Once again, a one-way ticket to chaos.

The 'structural injustice' framework is an increasingly influential way of thinking about historical injustice. Structural injustice theorists argue against repara-tions for historical injustice on the grounds that our focus should be on forward-looking responsibility for contemporary structural injustice. Through the use of a case study-the Caribbean Community (CARICOM's) 10-Point Plan for reparations from 2014-I argue that this reasoning is flawed. Backward-looking reparations can be justified on the basis of state liability over time. The value of backward-looking reparations is that they ensure that historical perpetrators do not evade their reparative obligations and that affected communities are taken seriously. However, I argue that this backward-looking approach should be supplemented by a forward-looking structural injustice approach and the 'social connection model' of responsibility, which can (a) expand the scope of responsible agents and forms of injustice that warrant repair and (b) explain how citizens living now can be expected to pay for crimes of the past.

Anti-colonialism in the Caribbean dates back to the earliest colonial presence at the end of the fifteenth century. It has involved slave resistance, revolution, and intellectual challenges to colonial rule articulated by journalists, scholars, activists, democratic politicians, and armed rebels. In the territories of the American, Dutch, and French Caribbean there continue to be active anti-colonial expressions into the twenty-first century. Anti-colonialism in the Caribbean began at the moment of the first colonial presence in the region at the end of the fifteenth century. The first European settlement was established by Christopher Columbus at La Navidad on the north coast of Hispaniola at the end of 1492. It was destroyed by the Taíno of Hispaniola sometime between then and the return of Columbus in the next year; that action marks the beginning of anti-colonialism in the Caribbean. Anti-colonial activity continued in the form of resistance to the Spanish settlement of the Greater Antilles in the sixteenth century, notably by the Taíno chieftain Hatüey and by the African slaves who were brought in to replace the Taíno who were disappearing in the face of epidemic diseases,

Este artículo analiza la distinción entre populismo e institucionalismo en Laclau. La hipótesis es que al identificar el populismo con la política y el institucionalismo con la muerte de la política, Laclau modifica su concepto de hegemonía de Hegemonía y Estrategia Socialista generando una tensión entre política como hegemonía y política como populismo. El artículo debate con las principales reflexiones que tratan el concepto de hegemonía en Laclau. El objetivo es mostrar que la política no es sólo impugnación sino también reproducción del orden, y que la muerte de la política es contradictoria con la noción de identidad como diferencia. Las conclusiones plantean una diferenciación entre política y populismo, entendiendo a éste como una forma óntica de construcción de hegemonía.

Don't expect anything more subversive in my discourse than that I do not claim to have a solution. (Lacan 2007: 70) Lacan and the Ontological Turn The irreducible difference between la politique (politics) and le politique (the political) is central to post-foundational thought (Marchart 2007; cf. Swyngedouw 2014). For post-foundational thinkers, 'politics' and 'the political' signify radically different and non-symmetrical instances of political life. Politics refers to the contingent and always incomplete attempt to ground a particular set of power relations and particular forms of social organization on an ultimately absent foundation. It is through politics that society comes into 'being', gains a certain coherence, takes a functional form, distributes a sociospatial order of people, things, and activities, held together through particular modes of institutionalization, representation and symbolization of the social order, and routinized or ritualized practices of encounter and relating (Swyngedouw 2011). The political, however, is nothing but the name for the empty core of politics. The political arises because of the absent ground of the social. In other words, it is based on the fact that there 'is' no ontological foundation (such as ethnicity, nationality, class, religion, or whatever) that grounds the social, and on which a political community or 'people' can be founded. This ineradicable presence of absence, of non-ground, un-ground, continually undermines politics and the social order constructed upon it, always holding open the possibility of radical change (albeit not always in progressive ways). To put it simply, the political is the signifier of an indelible emptiness at the core of any social order. While politics stands for the fullness/wholeness of

This is a final draft of the article published in Environmental Ethics 11 (Fall 1989): 243-258. This assessment of  the Promethean dimension of Marx's thought is accurate, but though it mentions Marx's more dialectical side and its potential implications, this aspect is seriously neglected in the article . A more balanced assessment is presented in "Marx's Natures," a draft version of which can be found on this site. This article should be read in connection with the latter one.

Resumo Este artigo irá tratar das tensões trazidas para a temática dos direitos humanos pelas reivindicações do multiculturalismo. A análise será focada nos estudos sobre direitos humanos e multiculturalismo que surgiram na década de 1990, destacando o embate entre universalismo versus relativismo para os direitos humanos e a consequente relativização do pressuposto da universalidade, resultado deste debate. Por fim, será demonstrado uma das principais implicações problemáticas que as perspectivas multiculturais dos direitos humanos enfrentam na atualidade: o paradoxo da vulnerabilidade multicultural. Palavras-chaves: 1. Multiculturalismo. 2. Direitos Humanos. 3. Vulnerabilidade.

The goal of this article was to present the research subject of political science as a fuzzy set of cognitive elements, which is a blurred area of theoretical political research with a margin of indeterminacy. It is an area, where interdisciplinary merging of knowledge and experience from various formalized scientific disciplines occurs. Moreover, it is also a theoretical-research space that, in fact, breaks the positivist demarcation line in favor of contextual, inter-area, multi-level, syndromatic, etc. analyses. In this sense, the author analyzes in detail such issues as: scientific arguments against demarcation, specifics of the research subject of political science, subject errors made in political science, and
syndromaticity of the political science research subject.

Keywords: fuzzy sets theory, demarcation, conventionalism in science, syndromaticity, the research subject of political science

Europe, an effective confederal municipalist Green movement in the u.s. could demonstrate an alternative way forward. Social Ecology is a comprehensive holistic conception of the self, society, and naturei. It is, indeed, the first ecological pHlosophy to present a developed approach to all the central issues of theory and practice. It sets out from the basic ecological principle of organic uni$ in dfuersity, affirming that the good of the whole can be realized only through the rich individuality and complec< interrelationship of the parts, and it applies this fundamental insight to all realms of erperience. ln affirming such a holistic approach, Social Ecology rejects the dualism that has plagued Western civilization since its beginning;s: a dualism that sets spirit against mattet soul against body, humanity against nature, subjectivity against ofiectivity, and reason against feelings; a dualism that is intimately related to the social divisions that are so certral to the history of civilizationruler versus ded, rich versus poo4 urban versus rural, "civilized" versui "savagef'male versus femalq in short, the dominant versus the dominated. ln opposition to this dualism, Social Ecology proposes a principle of ecological wlnleness, which Bookchin defines as 'a dynamic unity of diversity" in which "balance and harmony are achieved by wer-changing differentiation." As a result, "stability is a function not of simplicity and Iahn

A paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree in the Master of Arts Program in the Committee on International Relations of 1 43 better sense of the best circumstances for using these "negative" instruments as well as the ideal means of managing their use. However, with a few notable exceptions, far less effort has been devoted to discerning the most favorable circumstances and strategies for employing incentives or rewards, rather than penalties or punishments, to shape the conduct of problem regimes," Haass and O'Sullivan, Honey and Vinegar, 1.

Les trois essais présentés dans cette brochure ont été traduits de l'américain par M.V. Ramariavelo ; traduction revue et corrigée par Ronald Creagh. Nous tenons à les remercier ainsi qu'André Bernard pour l'aide qu'ils nous ont apportée. (première édition : 1993) Merci à Maureen P. pour ses corrections et son aide. Atelier de création libertaire BP 1186, F-69202 Lyon cedex 01 Tél/fax : 04.78.29.28.26 site Internet : http://www.atelierdecreationlibertaire.com

open access:
https://meson.press/books/pandemic-media/ and https://pandemicmedia.meson.press/

With its unprecedented scale and consequences the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a variety of new configurations of media. Responding to demands for information, synchronization, regulation, and containment, these “pandemic media” reorder social interactions, spaces, and temporalities, thus contributing to a reconfiguration of media technologies and the cultures and polities with which they are entangled. Highlighting media’s adaptability, malleability, and scalability under the conditions of a pandemic, the contributions to this volume track and analyze how media emerge, operate, and change in response to the global crisis and provide elements towards an understanding of the post-pandemic world to come.

The discussion of issues in political ecology has expanded greatly in recent times, above all as the result of growing concern about far-reaching ecological problems that seem to require an effective political response in the near future. These problems include global warming, ozone depletion, species extinction, desertification, loss of topsoil, depletion of global fisheries, disposal of nuclear waste, global population growth, environmentally-related illness, acid rain, and decline in air and water quality. Concern about disruptions caused by global climate change and the massive global loss of biodiversity has been a major impetus to debates in political ecology.

The question addressed by this article is whether esotericism or secret teachings exist in Machiavelli's writings. This question has been a major point of contention between the commentators of Machiavelli, with many denying the existence of esoteric teaching in the Machiavellian corpus. This article will explore the controversy by studying Machiavelli's own works, and on this basis it will be contended that there are many references and elements present in Machiavelli's works that justify an esoteric interpretation. Consequently, it is reasonable to assume that Machiavelli has esoteric intentions that are different from the surface meaning of his texts. It is therefore necessary for commentators to go beyond the surface of his writings to uncover his deeper teachings.

Cet article se penche sur la question de la présence d'éléments ésotériques ou d'enseignements secrets dans l'oeuvre de Machiavel. Le sujet est un point de désaccord important parmi les commentateurs de l'oeuvre de Machiavel, puisque plusieurs nient l'existence d'un tel enseignement. L'article explore cette controverse en examinant l'oeuvre de Machiavel, pour ensuite montrer qu'il s'y trouve plusieurs références et éléments justifiant une interprétation ésotérique. En conséquence, il est vraisemblable que Machiavel ait eu des intentions ésotériques différentes du propos apparent de ses écrits. Il s'avère donc nécessaire que les commentateurs aillent plus loin que la surface de son oeuvre afin de découvrir ses enseignements cachés.

Nel pieno della crisi delle istituzioni politiche e degli antichi valori etici espressi dal mos maiorum che afflisse Roma nell’ultimo secolo della res publica, Cicerone cercò di attuare attraverso i suoi scritti una vera e propria forma di educazione etico-politica, di paideia, rivolta alle presenti e future generazioni, in particolare ai giovani nei quali egli vedeva l’auspicata classe dirigente del domani. La paideia politica ciceroniana si fondava sull’elaborazione di un linguaggio etico e politico a connotazione universalistica, con l’obiettivo di formare una nuova classe politica che si sarebbe sempre più dovuta confrontare con lo spazio geopolitico “globale” aperto dall’imperialismo romano. In un tale contesto viene elaborato da Cicerone il concetto politico di societas hominum, di società degli esseri umani. Lo studio che qui presentiamo ha l’obiettivo di contestualizzare sul piano storico e filosofico-politico tale concetto, approfondendone le funzioni, gli aspetti ideali nonché ideologici di cui si connota all’interno della riflessione politica di Cicerone.

This article develops W. E. B. Du Bois's notion of democratic despotism to illustrate the entanglement of popular sovereignty and empire through an excessive form of western self-determination and theorize how features of this formation remain today. Democratic despotism implies that-in Western democracies at the turn of the century-popular sovereignty was an impulse to partake of the wealth and resources obtained by empire. Rather than a self-contained unit, Western democracies issued a claim to determine themselves (democratically), as well as others (despotically), i.e., what I call "self-and-other-determination." I frame the question of imperial democracy within the literature on empire and racial capitalism and through the writings of Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Saidiya Hartman to conceptualize how racial affective attachments allow citizens past and present to restrict democratic concern to a limited community, whose wealth relies on imperial exploitation of racialized others. I discuss the absence of these questions in the literature on self-determination and, in concluding, reflect on the implications of my framework for the contemporary rise of right-wing populism.

In the spring of 1987, Donald Davis, an environmental sociologist at the University of Tennessee arranged a talk there by Murray Bookchin. At the time, I was working very closely with Bookchin, and I went there to meet with him and Davis, who had been a student and staff member at the Institute for Social Ecology. During the visit, Bookchin showed me the proofs for an article entitled "Thinking Ecologically: A Dialectical Approach," a large part of which was an attack on deep ecology, systems theory, Asian thought, and the radical environmental organization Earth First! I was disturbed by what I read. I found it to be seriously lacking in careful analysis or nuance, and often to be unfair to the objects of attack. I suggested that he rewrite it, making sure that he did not over-generalize or misrepresent any positions. He replied, rather unconvincingly, that it was too late to make any changes, and he did not respond in any way to the content of my suggestions. 1 What I did not know at the time was that he had recently written a much more extreme attack on deep ecology, in which he had parodied, and, indeed, The Trumpeter

Este texto examina la idea de origen en la teología histórica cristiana y en la filosofía de la historia secular, así como sus varias conexiones con la teoría de la revolución. Siguiendo la hipótesis de Karl Löwith, quien vio la tradición revolucionaria europea como un telos semejante al de cualquier otra escatología religiosa, intentaré evaluar cómo la teología histórica cristiana impregnó el pensamiento revolucionario occidental. Como veremos, las escatologías de los revolucionarios llevarían implícita la idea de retorno al origen o, como rezaba el argumento que Hannah Arendt aparejó siguiendo el rastro de la revolución americana, la idea de un Novus Ordo Saeclorum —un nuevo orden temporal. Aunque las cosas resultaron al final algo más complejas de lo que la tradición liberal había imaginado.

Despite more than a decade of widespread pubric discussion of "ecological crises" and,,enviro.r*arrtul problems,,, r"tfra"ti. ecological thinking has had only the *ort *u.ginal influence on contemporary society. The widespread tendenry to triviarize ecology is not limited ro its recycting Uy media, industry and politics for inclusion on their endless lists of ,.issues,,, ,,corcJrns,,, and "items on the agencra-" More disturbing irirr. ""..iii.ur treatment of ecological concep-ts by virtuallyitt tt. prevailing currents in social theory, including .,r., ih. allegldly most radical varieties.

2021 Spring semester Political realism is an internally diverse current (with a liberal and a radical strand) in contemporary normative political theory that has emerged during the last three decades as a critical response to the mainstream rationalistic and high liberal understanding of politics in modern political philosophy and political theory. In spite of what its name might suggest, political realism is not primarily about how to get a more realistic understanding of politics. Instead, realism can be best understood along three lines: (1) realism is engaged in a methodological debate about how to do political theory; (2) realism seeks to offer a normative political theory that is based on a broad set of distinctively realist background assumptions about how societies work, what motives people have for living in political societies, the role of conflict, power, the state, the relationship between political and moral normativity etc; (3) realism seeks to address classical political theoretical issues in a distinctively realist key and explores issues that might be largely overlooked in political theory but seem important from a realist angle. The course will consist of three parts. The first part (classes 1 to 5) will overview the co-called realist tradition (from Thucydides to Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hume, Weber etc.), the emergence of contemporary realist political theory, its central concerns, internal strands, and criticism against realism. The second part (classes 6-8) will focus on classical political theoretical issues that have been sought to be reframed in realist political theory (feasibility, legitimacy political obligations). The third part (classes 9-12) will turn to the arguably most interesting question of realism: how to deal with the intersections and conflicts between political and moral norms. Four issues will be discussed: the dirty hands problem, the concept of loyalty, a democratic ethics of political offices, and the problem of integrity will be discussed.

This thesis has two main aims. The first of these is to study available methodologies for researching the future in the social sciences, and particularly in political science and international relations (IR). To be more specific, it attempts to determine whether it is possible to establish, given the present state of scientific knowledge, a relatively rigorous method for examining the futures of socio-political phenomena. The second aim is to set out to use the methodological approach(es) established in the first part of the study to examine the future of China, both as an applied example of the use of the methodology as well as an end in itself within IR’s sub-field of China studies. Thus, the thesis fits within the areas of future studies and China studies, but with a particular focus on the implications of the research for political science and IR within the broader social sciences.
The research reveals that the most suitable candidate for researching socio-political futures, at least until computer modelling and complexity theory are refined enough to examine the future with greater accuracy (if this is possible), is scenario construction, given that it deals not with prediction of definite outcomes, but with future possibilities. Since scenario construction, however, is a faute de mieux methodology (meaning that, despite inadequacies, it is less inadequate than the alternatives), there is a need to develop it further. The thesis’ primary research attempts to do this by taking and adapting Delphi method’s premise that consensus expert opinion can, at least to a degree, act as a counterweight to individual bias, and thereby constructing scenarios on the basis of a typology of expert forecasts. The main part of the research thus focuses on constructing scenarios of China’s future out of a typology of expert forecasts concerning China’s development up to 2050. The ultimate goals are to assess the degree of success of the resulting scenario construction project, and to develop a basis for further research into both China’s future in particular and the study of socio-political futures in general.

For a research project I engaged in from 2004-2007, I gathered and analysed statements made by representatives of Islamist terrorist movements on the Internet andcompared key themes of their ideology (such as "democracy", "capitalism", "globalization", "colonialism" and "underdevelopment") to the writings and ideology of authors in various traditions of Christian "political theology". In this paper, it is being established that there are clear similarities in the socio-political analysis advanced by Christian political and liberation theologians and representatives of Islamist terrorist movements and radical Islam, respectively. The paper also offers a short history and extended discussion of the concept of "political theology" and elaborates on radical Islam's understanding of theology and politics. Primary and secondary literature on Christian and Islamic political and liberation theologies and radical Islam are being reviewed (including the most recent writings on "political theology" emanating from, mainly leftist, theory circles in Europe and the US). In an attempt to expand the term "political theology" to cover the socio-political analysis, arguments, and ideology of radical Islam, anti-liberalism is revealed as the single most important factor underlying all political theology. The argument is made that being anti-liberal means being (at least potentially) anti-democratic as well. A discussion of future lines of academic inquiry opens up the possibility of a common definition or framework covering all forms of political and liberation theologies and asks whether comparative political theology may be the ultimate political theory.