The analogies between religious and secular juridical arguments interest political theorists because they suggest a hidden link between religion and politics. However, merely describing analogies does not show that the link is significant. Why are there such analogies? The question matters because answering is a prerequisite for determining whether there can be a neutral political background to religion. This paper argues that there are such analogies because arguments in theology and arguments in the juridical theory of the state share a (...) common structure. This structure is such that the meaning of some concepts in the theory of the state, like political order and sovereignty, cannot be fully understood without reference to theological concepts. This thesis – political theology – has become associated with Carl Schmitt, but the argument in this paper differs importantly from his. Unlike Schmitt, this paper claims that in the contemporary state political theology can be superseded. (shrink)

This article undertakes a comparative study of the conjectural histories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Ferguson, focusing on the convergences in the moral and political ideals expressed and grounded in these histories. In comparison with Scots like Adam Smith and John Millar, the conjectural histories of Ferguson and Rousseau follow a similar historical trajectory as regards the development and progress of commercial, political and cultural arts. However, their assessment of the moral progress of humanity does not, or in a much (...) more limited way than in Smith and Millar, correlate with this trajectory. Rousseau and Ferguson see a candour and vigour in savage and barbarian societies that is much less easily supported by the complex socio-economic framework of modern, commercial societies. It is argued that the convergences in their conjectural histories arise from a similar fusion of these histories with Stoic and republican perspectives. While Rousseau and Ferguson do not see history as cyclical, they think that the forces that push towards moral decline are strong and can, on the political level, only be countered by firm republican policies. Furthermore, their shared Stoic ideal of the life lived according to nature informs their solutions for modern societies. (shrink)

This article undertakes a comparative study of the conjectural histories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Ferguson, focusing on the convergences in the moral and political ideals expressed and grounded in these histories. In comparison with Scots like Adam Smith and John Millar, the conjectural histories of Ferguson and Rousseau follow a similar historical trajectory as regards the development and progress of commercial, political and cultural arts. However, their assessment of the moral progress of humanity does not, or in a much (...) more limited way than in Smith and Millar, correlate with this trajectory. Rousseau and Ferguson see a candour and vigour in savage and barbarian societies that is much less easily supported by the complex socio-economic framework of modern, commercial societies. It is argued that the convergences in their conjectural histories arise from a similar fusion of these histories with Stoic and republican perspectives. While Rousseau and Ferguson do not see history as cyclical, they think that the forces that push towards moral decline are strong and can, on the political level, only be countered by firm republican policies. Furthermore, their shared Stoic ideal of the life lived according to nature informs their solutions for modern societies. (shrink)

This article undertakes a comparative study of the conjectural histories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Ferguson, focusing on the convergences in the moral and political ideals expressed and grounded in these histories. In comparison with Scots like Adam Smith and John Millar, the conjectural histories of Ferguson and Rousseau follow a similar historical trajectory as regards the development and progress of commercial, political and cultural arts. However, their assessment of the moral progress of humanity does not, or in a much (...) more limited way than in Smith and Millar, correlate with this trajectory. Rousseau and Ferguson see a candour and vigour in savage and barbarian societies that is much less easily supported by the complex socio-economic framework of modern, commercial societies. It is argued that the convergences in their conjectural histories arise from a similar fusion of these histories with Stoic and republican perspectives. While Rousseau and Ferguson do not see history as cyclical, they think that the forces that push towards moral decline are strong and can, on the political level, only be countered by firm republican policies. Furthermore, their shared Stoic ideal of the life lived according to nature informs their solutions for modern societies. (shrink)

The article critically engages with Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Rousseau in order to explore the affinities between the two authors’ subtractive approach to political subjectivation. In The Kingdom and the Glory. Agamben argues that Rousseau’s Social Contract reproduces, in a secularized manner, the providential paradigm of government, whose origins Agamben finds in early Christianity. This paradigm establishes a fictitious articulation between transcendent sovereignty and immanent government, presenting particular acts of government as emanating from general divine laws. We shall demonstrate that (...) Rousseau was neither unaware of the problematic character of this paradigm nor did he venture to conceal its problems, but, on the contrary, he highlighted them throughout the Social Contract, whose key motif was the danger of the contamination of general will by particular acts, identities or interests. The same wariness of particularism characterizes Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker, often read as entirely heterogeneous to the political project of the Social Contract. By reading these two works together as the affirmation of generic existence against all forms of particularism, we bring Rousseau’s analysis closer to Agamben’s own attempts to rethink politics as subtracted from all identity predicates and contained in the affirmation of ‘whatever being’. The elucidation of affinities between Rousseau and Agamben will permit us to identify the limits of this subtractive approach to politics and outline an alternative to it. (shrink)

Intellectual history and the history of political thought are siblings, perhaps even twins. They have similar origins and use similar materials. They attract many of the same friends and make some of the same enemies. Yet like most siblings, they have different temperaments and ambitions. This essay explores the family resemblances and draws out the contrasts by examining two major works by one of the most prominent political theorists of the past half-century, Alan Ryan, who has recently published two big (...) books that intellectual historians will find rewarding and provocative. (shrink)

This article displaces the terrain upon which the question of power in modern societies has been framed by reference to the concept of hegemony. It presents a genealogy of power which pays attention to what has been at stake in the shifts in the effectivity of the concept of hegemony for cultural theory from the 1960s, correlating the mutations in the analyses of power to shifts in the analysis of the relations of culture, politics and the economy. Questions of the (...) relation of internality or externality of power with regard to the governed, and issues of counter-conducts and 'counter-hegemonic' struggles will guide the development of this genealogy. The article brings to bear on the issues the point of view of hybrid forms of sovereignty, such as imperial governmentality and implications relating to the emergence of biopolitics in the 19th century. It is argued that the situation today regarding global governance and new forms of rule compels us to re-examine the problem of consent and consensus by turning to the apparatuses for constituting hybrid publics that work through biomedia and new strategies of securitization and insecuritization. (shrink)

The concept of positive liberty includes both the regulative autonomy to do what we will and the constitutive autonomy to become what we will. However, the latter represents the full meaning of the idea. Liberty in this meaning is a creative power: we are most free in the positive sense when we give our defining constitutive rules to ourselves. The original conceptual model for liberty as creativity did not belong to classical Greek tradition but came to us from Judaism. The (...) religious idea of spontane- ous, supra-natural, existential self-sufficiency provided the template for the idea of positive liberty, often described explicitly as a god-like power, by writers including Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx. The value of creativity became secularized in modernity as a core belief in politics, morality and the arts. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPolitical rituals, like the sovereign acclamation described in Rousseau’s social contract, exhibit a logic of representation that seem to oscillate between presence and absence, and enact a problematic identification of the people as a multitude of individuals and as a whole. This article explores this logic of rituals by comparing problems of political representation in Rousseau and Agamben with the highest principle of Aristotle’s philosophy. It thus elucidates the problem of representation in rituals of political power.