Perspectives on Political Science最新文献

{"title":"Introduction to Symposium on David Walsh’s the Priority of the Person: Political, Philosophical, and Historical Discoveries","authors":"J. V. Heyking","doi":"10.1080/10457097.2021.1973301","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10457097.2021.1973301","url":null,"abstract":"David Walsh’s The Priority of the Person: Political, Philosophical, and Historical Discoveries is the author’s second volume explicitly devoted to the person.1 It follows the 2016 publication of Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being.2 Both volumes are the product of the author’s working out of the contours of modernity in the trilogy of books: After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom, The Growth of the Liberal Soul, and The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence.3 The trilogy consists of Walsh’s effort to explain how the person is the aim of modern philosophy and politics. Instead of treating modernity essentially as a derailment from the richer premodern tradition, Walsh insists it is a condition that human beings are obliged to work through: “The modern revolution in philosophy does not so much introduce something new as bring us back, in the manner of revolutions, to the point from which it began. Return is in this sense never simply a return to the beginning. It is a new beginning...” (p. 174). After Ideology explains how figures including Eric Voegelin, Albert Camus, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, and Fyodor Dostoevsky before them mounted a defence of humanity against totalitarianism’s destruction of humanity. The Growth of the Liberal Soul confronts the so-called crisis of liberal democracy’s foundations by explaining how liberal democratic thinking consists of a series of abbreviations meant to protect the human person whose inner worth can only be intimated. The crisis of liberalism is only apparent because inability to provide theoretical justification marks not the failure of liberalism but reflects how the “liberal soul” exceeds all possibility of articulation. The author turns from liberal practice to modern thought in the Modern Philosophical Revolution by showing how the person becomes its prime subject, with special emphasis on the mark that Immanuel Kant’s emphasis on the priority of practical reason made upon German idealism. Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being places the person not only at the forefront of reflection, but also by thinking from the person, thereby deepening understanding of the person in its fuller amplitude. The Priority of the Person assembles previously published essays on the person. Some trace the “modern philosophical revolution” to the person from Kant to its culmination in Søren Kierkegaard. Others consist of reflections on various thinkers and topics including John Rawls, Benedict XVI, Eric Voegelin, Jacques Maritain, Kierkegaard, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the 2008 financial crisis, and the scientific method in an age when the truth of science is doubtful. While each of these essays stands on its own, each also illuminates the author’s larger project. To borrow a phrase of Maritain’s personalism, the book is a “whole of wholes.” The content of the book therefore nicely matches its form. The reader is able to enter Walsh’s project at any point and at","PeriodicalId":55874,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Political Science","volume":"50 1","pages":"218 - 223"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48731423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Iron Law of Elites and the Standards of Political Judgment","authors":"Giulio De Ligio","doi":"10.1080/10457097.2021.1976022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10457097.2021.1976022","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In a time when “elites” come under many cogent critiques and “populism” gives rise to manifold fears, the cohesion and even future of liberal democracy is today in question in ways that it has not been for some time. This essay approaches the issue of our “divided city” by way of an examination of the thinkers of the Italian School—Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto and Roberto Michels. Better known as “the neo-Machiavellians,” they aimed at a rigorously scientific understanding of social composition and change. Central to their findings was the so-called “iron law of oligarchy.” No society, modern democracy included, can escape the reality of the rule of the few. This essay argues that their scientific methodologies and generalized laws necessarily precluded them from understanding the main alternatives of political life and what is essentially at stake in human history. Paradoxically, their perspective ends up being unable to judge the changing relations between elites and peoples. Like many authoritative social sciences in contemporary academe, this theory appears to be intrinsically silent about, or blind to, the contents of human life. Throughout the analysis of the theory of elites, the approach of classical political philosophy is invoked to highlight the modern scientific alternative. This essay is then a contribution to the understanding of the science of the practical realm, the stakes of politics, the articulations of the parts and the whole of human community.","PeriodicalId":55874,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Political Science","volume":"50 1","pages":"262 - 277"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47685910","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Aristocracy, Democracy, and Liberalism: Using the Tocquevillean Dichotomy to Understand Modern Liberalism","authors":"V. Lewis","doi":"10.1080/10457097.2021.1953909","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10457097.2021.1953909","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract While previous scholarship has created anachronistic categories to analyze the political thought of notable liberals like John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, this article improves our understanding of liberalism by using an analytic category supplied by the writers themselves. Using Tocqueville’s aristocracy-democracy dichotomy, this paper demonstrates important differences in the social and political thought of Mill and Tocqueville previously overlooked. Specifically, by focusing on Mill’s reviews of Tocqueville’s work and correspondence between the two authors, this essay points out the differences between Mill’s “elitist democratic” liberalism and Tocqueville’s “aristocratic democratic” liberalism. This distinction has important implications for understanding the dominant forms of modern liberalism.","PeriodicalId":55874,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Political Science","volume":"51 1","pages":"15 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10457097.2021.1953909","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44517322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Uses and Misuses of Politics: Karl Rove and the Bush Presidency,","authors":"Richard D. Ferrier","doi":"10.1080/10457097.2021.1951567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10457097.2021.1951567","url":null,"abstract":"William G. Mayer is Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University, and the author of a number of well received books on American elections and parties. His latest book, The Uses and Misuses of Politics, examines the elections and domestic policies of George W. Bush, with particular emphasis on his relationship to his chief policy advisor, Karl Rove, who was also his campaign manager and domestic political advisor. The ambitions and self-assessment of the two men can be gathered from their own words. First, President Bush, in 2008: “Look, I know that this probably sounds arrogant to say, but I redefined the Republican Party.” Then Karl Rove: “Rove [suggested] that the electorate in 2000 ...was ripe for realignment and implied ... that he was the guy who had figured it out...” Joshua Green, “The Rove Presidency”, Atlantic, September 7, 2007. One notices the two large “R-words”: redefinition and realignment. Mayer conducts a careful and dispassionate analysis to determine the features of the redefinition or reorientation that Bush claimed as his achievement, and to judge whether it was achieved. Likewise, he demonstrates that, for Rove, remaking the GOP was the necessary first move in a strategic plan to produce an historical “Realignment,” comparable to those achieved by FDR, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and, according to Rove, William McKinley. Accordingly, Mayer examines theories of “Political Realignment,” as well as the evidence bearing on whether Rove and his boss had achieved one. What was to be the look of this new GOP? The simple description, and likely the best, is that it was supposed to appear “Nice.” The slogan “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) was its perfect expression. This was to have been painted all over the GOP big tent, with the main acts still being national security, low taxes, smaller government, and sane Supreme Court appointments. The “Realignment” Rove aimed at would have made the GOP the dominant party in American politics for an extended period, perhaps decades. Mayer has little trouble in showing that Rove and his boss did not get close to it. There was no seismic shift toward the GOP, either right away, or up to the present day. The more interesting question is, “Why did this plan fail?” The book’s title indicates Mayer’s answer. Rove was at the same time the President’s chief advisor on domestic policy and on political matters, something without precedent in recent American government. Bush relied on Rove’s counsel in both areas, and Rove counseled unwisely in both. Moreover, he favored politics, which Mayer defines as “the art of acquiring and keeping power,” over the real work of administration. Rove, and Bush following him, produced mediocre policy, and at the same time undermined the power of their party. In all, this is quite an indictment by Mayer. Is he correct? A look at two instances that Mayer explores at some length, the aforementioned “No Child Left Behind” and “Compassionate Conservativism,” i","PeriodicalId":55874,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Political Science","volume":"51 1","pages":"49 - 52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10457097.2021.1951567","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47148065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Religion” and the Human Thing","authors":"Thomas W. Heilke","doi":"10.1080/10457097.2021.1944759","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10457097.2021.1944759","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Paleolithic cosmos-dwellers likely understood their environment in an integrated fashion–the realm of the gods and the realm of everyday life were not two separate spheres of activity. Religion has been abstracted in modern thought into a set of beliefs, practices, or activities that reside “outside” of or aside from the natural world in which human beings live. This abstraction makes it difficult to fully imagine how pre-modern humans conceived of existence in a cosmos. Thucydides provides interesting insights into how one can “bracket” religious beliefs and practices, yet continue to recognize the integration of religion into quotidian human affairs.","PeriodicalId":55874,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Political Science","volume":"50 1","pages":"209 - 215"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49224254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Justice and Charity: An Introduction to Aquinas’s Moral, Economic, and Political Thought","authors":"Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Gilbey","doi":"10.1080/10457097.2021.1951566","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10457097.2021.1951566","url":null,"abstract":"The thought of St. Thomas Aquinas is an invaluable point of entry to the whole Catholic tradition, including Catholic social doctrine. But we have needed an introduction to Aquinas’s political thought in English for some time. Thomas Gilbey, O.P.’s study is over 60 years old and John Finnis’s Aquinas was as much about new natural law theory as about the Angelic Doctor. Moreover, scholars have produced a wealth of secondary literature on all aspects of Aquinas’s moral, political, and economic thought in the last quarter century. Michael Krom’s specific achievement is to have synthesized Aquinas’s writings and recent scholarship in an excellent introduction that is faithful to its subject. Both specialists and novices will profit from reading Justice and Charity. The work is organized into three parts on Aquinas’s moral, economic, and political thought, respectively. Krom uses the virtues as the organizing principle for the book. Each part is divided into two sections, the first a philosophical exposition of Aquinas’ account of natural or acquired virtues, both cardinal and secondary. The cardinal or primary virtues—prudence, justice temperance, and fortitude—are the foundation of secondary virtues, which apply them to more specific circumstances. These natural virtues are called acquired virtues insofar as we practice them through human effort alone. The second section follows with Krom’s account of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity and infused natural virtues. The natural virtues are called infused when we receive divine grace, which complements and strengthens human effort. Being a good Thomist, Krom never forgets that the virtues must be ordered by charity to our ultimate end, God. This manner of organization allows him to analyze distinct philosophical and theological lines of argument without separating them or confusing their interrelations. Krom differentiates the Thomistic way of thinking from philosophies prevailing in our culture, illustrating them with examples any contemporary can understand. The purpose of life is not to obtain what we happen to desire at any given moment, nor dispassionate performance of duty, but the pursuit of happiness through the practice of the virtues. He does a very fine job explaining other political forms the city of God opposes? Ogle rightly holds that “Augustine is aware of the earthly city’s constant designs on political life, but he does not concede politics to the earthly city, nor does he make the Church the new realm of politics.” But if the city of God must oppose certain political forms, like empire, does that not mean that the Church is, in some way, an implacable critic of all politics? That does not seem to be what Ogle Roberts reads Augustine as saying. Relatedly, what are we to make of situations in which a potential reader is excessively un-attached to his or her political community? Is Augustine’s rhetoric designed always to detach, or could his principles also be used to at","PeriodicalId":55874,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Political Science","volume":"50 1","pages":"293 - 295"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10457097.2021.1951566","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59590384","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Response to Reviews","authors":"B. Cooper","doi":"10.1080/10457097.2021.1944760","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10457097.2021.1944760","url":null,"abstract":"Let me begin my response to these very generous reviews of my recent book, Paleolithic Politics, with the remarks by Tilo Schabert. Knowledge, he said, is precarious, though scholarship aims to make knowledge lastingly available. Moreover, the “production” of knowledge is accompanied by ambition: one always wants one’s work to be accepted as well as to be true. Often, however, acceptance hinges upon following the right method or confirming accepted conventions and judgements. Schabert then drew attention to what he called “the arrogance of scholars” expressed within various schools of thought, which nevertheless succeed one another, usually in a cloud of recrimination and sharp criticism of how one’s predecessors could have been so foolish. This is as true for the study of Paleolithic art as it is of the study of democratic government, and it is one of the themes I emphasized in Paleolithic Politics, using the succession of French schools, from the Abbe Breuil to Jean Clottes as exemplars, and notwithstanding their otherwise remarkable scientific achievements. Specifically, the insights of Alexander Marshack, which began with his reflections on a problem he initially encountered as part of a very conventional and journalistic research project, happened to be recognized by a major archaeological scholar, Hallam Movius Jr., director of the Peabody Museum at Harvard. In addition, Movius happened to be open-minded with respect to Marshack’s enthusiasm. Marshack was excited to realize that the well-known cave and mobile art of the Upper Paleolithic was symbolic, not just decorative, and that it conveyed a meaning that could be decoded and reconstituted by contemporaries typically using the discursive language of archaeological science. With Movius’ help he did so. Marshack’s work was, and remains, controversial. Moreover, because it was based on a finely developed connoisseurship that took many years to perfect, it has scarcely been replicated. To the impoverishment of archaeology, it has been turned into something of a period piece. A second scholar, who was even more of an “outsider” with respect to any archaeological school, was Marie König. She was less pugnacious than Marshack, but her insights (to my mind) were more profound. In addition, she had much greater difficulties receiving a hearing from the established scholars, being both female and what the Germans called a “private scholar,” Privatgelehrtin, which is not a term of praise. Her interpretations were based on her recognition that similar symbols were used by human beings remote from one another in time and space. She concluded that they expressed similar and perhaps equivalent experiences of cosmic order. König saw that the otherwise enigmatic petroglyphs visible today in the caves and rock shelters of the Fontainebleau Forest (and elsewhere) were expressions of that order. Even more audaciously, she argued that Paleolithic symbols were transmitted into Roman times through the unexpecte","PeriodicalId":55874,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Political Science","volume":"50 1","pages":"216 - 217"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10457097.2021.1944760","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49428777","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction to Symposium on Barry Cooper’s Paleolithic Politics: The Human Community in Early Art","authors":"J. V. Heyking","doi":"10.1080/10457097.2021.1944762","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10457097.2021.1944762","url":null,"abstract":"Barry Cooper’s Paleolithic Politics: The Human Community in Early Art applies Eric Voegelin’s concept of “primary experience of the cosmos” to paleolithic art, which expresses a compact form of consciousness that precedes the cosmological civilizations (Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, and the Achaemenian empire) that Voegelin examined in volume one of Order and History, Israel and Revelation.1 It is the third book that Cooper has written that applies Voegelin’s concepts to materials that Voegelin never wrote about. The other two are New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, which uses Voegelin’s concept of pneumopathology to study radical jihadis, and It’s the Regime, Stupid!: A Report From the Cowboy West on Why Stephen Harper Matters, which uses Voegelin’s concept of political myth to examine the low-boil stasis of the Canadian regime.2 Voegelin himself studied Paleolithic art and collaborated with paleontologist Marie König, which Cooper describes at length. However, Voegelin never wrote about that work. Because the focus of this volume precedes the materials covered in volume one of Order and History, Paleolithic Politics has received the nickname, “Volume Zero.” As an analysis of the most compact of available compact symbolisms, this book is counterpart to Cooper’s previous book, Consciousness and Politics: From Analysis to Meditation in the Late Works of Eric Voegelin, which considers Voegelin’s analysis of the most differentiated forms consciousness.3 Thus the earlier book establishes the methodology of the present book, although “methodology” is an inadequate term as shall be explained. The reader can assess the relationship of the two books by reading not only Politics and Consciousness but also the review symposium that was published in the Political Science Reviewer.4 Let this introduction, which considers the internal evidence of the present book, suffice. Paleolithic Politics is an unusual book. A superficial reading may frustrate the reader who expects detailed analysis of cave art, perhaps a treatment analogous to a political philosopher’s detailed exegesis of a Platonic dialogue. But this superficiality is misplaced because one does not analyze Paleolithic cave art to understand the politics of their tribes any more than one reads a Platonic dialogue to learn about the everyday politics of Athens. Cooper claims the “fact” of the paintings—the effort to produce them—reflects a spiritual crisis, perhaps a differentiation of consciousness reflecting a separation of the human from the animal. That “fact” brings us closer to why one would read a Platonic dialogue as well. Even so, the reader may be underwhelmed by the attention paid to the artifacts themselves. Instead of intensive analysis of cave and mobilary art, Cooper seems to take an extremely scholastic approach by standing on the shoulders of some of the giants of paleontology, including Marie König, Alexander Marshack, Jean Clottes, Henri Breuil, and André Leroi","PeriodicalId":55874,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Political Science","volume":"50 1","pages":"203 - 205"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10457097.2021.1944762","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46127781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"To Carl Schmitt, Letters and Reflections, by Jacob Taubes, translated by Keith Tribe, with an Introduction by Mike Grimshaw, New York: Columbia University Press, 120 pp., Hardcover, $26.00/£22.00, ISBN: 9780231154123, Publication Date: 2013.","authors":"S. G. Zeitlin","doi":"10.1080/10457097.2021.1944001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10457097.2021.1944001","url":null,"abstract":"As a young boy in the 1930s, Jacob Taubes (1923-1987) and his family left Austria for Switzerland to escape Nazism. In Switzerland, Taubes received both ordination as a rabbi and a classical education in philosophy (culminating in a doctorate), before going on to further study with Leo Strauss in New York and Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem. Taubes held teaching positions at Harvard and Princeton before attaining permanent academic positions at Columbia and the Free University of Berlin, the last of which he held until his death in 1987. Ranging widely from Biblical hermeneutics to the philosophy of Heidegger to the interpretation of Hobbes1 to the political thought of Carl Schmitt, Taubes’s works take up an impressive range of issues in political theory, the sociology of religion, and the politics of his own time. Aside from his doctoral dissertation from the late 1940s, Occidental Eschatology (Abendländische Eschatologie), most of the writings which appeared during his lifetime took the form of essays, reviews, editions, opinion pieces, and contributions to edited volumes. All of his other monographs, from To Carl Schmitt (Ad Carl Schmitt, 1987) to his widely read Political Theology of Paul (Die Politische Theologie des Paulus, 1993), From Cult to Culture (Vom Kult zur Kultur, 1996), and Apocalypse and Politics (Apokalypse und Politik, 2017), were published posthumously. Curiously, the first of these posthumous works to be published in German, To Carl Schmitt, is the most recent to appear in English translation. This book assembles a number of Taubes’s occasional writings on Schmitt’s works, as well as part of their correspondence. A fuller scholarly edition2 of their correspondence appeared in German shortly before the appearance of Tribe’s 2013 English translation. There are many poignant, subtle, and sharp phrases of the rabbi, intellectual historian, and political theorist which are rendered aptly, even beautifully, in the translation, which is published by Columbia University Press under the title To Carl Schmitt, Letters and Reflections. However, there are also many places in this translation where Taubes’s quotation marks have disappeared, his ellipses have been omitted, and even whole phrases and sentences have been silently cut from the text. In some instances, Taubes’s quotation marks signaling direct quotations from Heidegger have been omitted, in other instances Taubes’s sentences have been truncated and his claims have been altered. Here I will focus on some of the alterations and truncations relevant to political philosophers and historians of political thought wishing to think with (or against) Jacob Taubes, as well as those wishing to reconstruct Taubes’s political thought. Taubes’s Ad Carl Schmitt, Gegenstrebige Fügung presents a detailed portrait and radical critique of anti-Jewish sentiment in the thought of Carl Schmitt and his circle, as well as the prevalence of such sentiments in the early years of the German Federal Republi","PeriodicalId":55874,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Political Science","volume":"50 1","pages":"289 - 291"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10457097.2021.1944001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42860910","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Truth against Arrogance: Insights and Eclipse, Investigation and Insights Again","authors":"Tilo Schabert","doi":"10.1080/10457097.2021.1944761","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10457097.2021.1944761","url":null,"abstract":"Knowledge, rather than being a constant virtue of one’s mind, is an acquaintance of an unsteady, precarious character. Contrary to the expectations people like to associate with it, it is neither indisputably gained nor is the keeping of it ever assured. Still, there is the endeavor called scholarship, and a part of that endeavor is the promise to attain indeed unequivocal knowledge about the subjects taken up for study, and then to have this knowledge available lastingly. The promise sustains, boosts, and ennobles the activity of scholarship. It incites ambition, and the ambition sublimates all the hardships and sacrifices that scholarship entails. Without the sting of ambition the existence of scholars would be a rare, indeed a very rare occurrence. This is meant to be a strictly empirical remark, not the slightest moral judgment is here intended. Scholars may justly claim to be engaged, by their search for knowledge, in a noble, if not the most noble project for humans. Still, both the noble nature of their design and their purposeful aspiration to succeed with it pertain to their work. It is, in existential terms, not “pure.” Whatever the actual cognitive plan, the “research design,” might be, the established auxiliaries of ambition—accepted methods, trusted experiences, habitual judgements, seasoned emotions, professional confidence, collegial sharing of views—accompany it. Their influence on one’s scholarly work varies, of course. It can, in comparative terms, be greater or smaller. Much depends upon the nature of a scholar’s self-awareness. Is it a source, we may ask, only of self-regard, of gratifying ideas about one’s science, or rather of a critical view on the likely non-scholarly elements in the general and perhaps even one’s own practice of that science? However that may be, the auxiliaries of ambition of which I speak are invariably a formative force in the exercise of erudition. But to what extent? And are the people concerned conscious of them? Or are they not? Do they reflect on their “knowledge”? Or are they blind to the uncertainty of it? Do they recognize the limitations of their scholarship? Or do they excel by more or less doctrinairely confining their curiosity? Such questions arose in my mind when I read Paleolithic Politics, Barry Cooper’s new book.1 The story he tells illustrates, in a striking way, the arrogance that scholars can assume vis-à-vis the communication of essential insights rendered by the material they have chosen for their study and against which they have barricaded themselves with—remember the auxiliaries of ambition—an array of ingrained methodological, doctrinal, social, professional habits and preconceptions. In their “science”, truth—things unveiled—is eclipsed. It is “lost” barred from everyone who continues to practice that science. Barry Cooper amply portrays the study of Paleolithic art in such a state. A whole scholarly discipline, we are told, remained, throughout its history, blind to the true","PeriodicalId":55874,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Political Science","volume":"50 1","pages":"206 - 208"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10457097.2021.1944761","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49583849","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}