Natural Law Republicanism

Natural Law Republicanism PDF Author: Michael C. Hawley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197582338
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
By any metric, Cicero's works are some of the most widely read in the history of Western thought. Natural Law Republicanism suggests that perhaps his most lasting and significant contribution to philosophy lies in helping to inspire the development of liberalism. Individual rights, the protection of private property, and political legitimacy based on the consent of the governed are often taken to be among early modern liberalism's unique innovations and part of its rebellion against classical thought. However, Michael C. Hawley demonstrates how Cicero's thought played a central role in shaping and inspiring the liberal republican project. Cicero argued that liberty for individuals could arise only in a res publica in which the claims of the people to be sovereign were somehow united with a commitment to universal moral law, which limits what the people can rightfully do. Figures such as Hugo Grotius, John Locke, and John Adams sought to work through the tensions in Cicero's vision, laying the groundwork for a theory of politics in which the freedom of the individual and the people's collective right to rule were mediated by natural law. Tracing the development of this intellectual tradition from Cicero's original articulation through the American Founding, Natural Law Republicanism explores how our modern political ideas remain dependent on the legacy of one of Rome's great philosopher-statesmen.

Natural Law Republicanism

Natural Law Republicanism PDF Author: Michael C. Hawley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197582338
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
By any metric, Cicero's works are some of the most widely read in the history of Western thought. Natural Law Republicanism suggests that perhaps his most lasting and significant contribution to philosophy lies in helping to inspire the development of liberalism. Individual rights, the protection of private property, and political legitimacy based on the consent of the governed are often taken to be among early modern liberalism's unique innovations and part of its rebellion against classical thought. However, Michael C. Hawley demonstrates how Cicero's thought played a central role in shaping and inspiring the liberal republican project. Cicero argued that liberty for individuals could arise only in a res publica in which the claims of the people to be sovereign were somehow united with a commitment to universal moral law, which limits what the people can rightfully do. Figures such as Hugo Grotius, John Locke, and John Adams sought to work through the tensions in Cicero's vision, laying the groundwork for a theory of politics in which the freedom of the individual and the people's collective right to rule were mediated by natural law. Tracing the development of this intellectual tradition from Cicero's original articulation through the American Founding, Natural Law Republicanism explores how our modern political ideas remain dependent on the legacy of one of Rome's great philosopher-statesmen.

The Terror of Natural Right

The Terror of Natural Right PDF Author: Dan Edelstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226184404
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Get Book Here

Book Description
Natural right—the idea that there is a collection of laws and rights based not on custom or belief but that are “natural” in origin—is typically associated with liberal politics and freedom. In The Terror of Natural Right, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the “enemy of the human race”—an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities—to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. Edelstein further contends that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls “natural republicanism,” which assumed that the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he proves that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis’s trial until the fall of Robespierre. A highly original work of historical analysis, political theory, literary criticism, and intellectual history, The Terror of Natural Right challenges prevailing assumptions of the Terror to offer a new perspective on the Revolutionary period.

Natural Rights and the New Republicanism

Natural Rights and the New Republicanism PDF Author: Michael Zuckert
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400821525
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Natural Rights and the New Republicanism, Michael Zuckert proposes a new view of the political philosophy that lay behind the founding of the United States. In a book that will interest political scientists, historians, and philosophers, Zuckert looks at the Whig or opposition tradition as it developed in England. He argues that there were, in fact, three opposition traditions: Protestant, Grotian, and Lockean. Before the English Civil War the opposition was inspired by the effort to find the "one true Protestant politics--an effort that was seen to be a failure by the end of the Interregnum period. The Restoration saw the emergence of the Whigs, who sought a way to ground politics free from the sectarian theological-scriptural conflicts of the previous period. The Whigs were particularly influenced by the Dutch natural law philosopher Hugo Grotius. However, as Zuckert shows, by the mid-eighteenth century John Locke had replaced Grotius as the philosopher of the Whigs. Zuckert's analysis concludes with a penetrating examination of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, the English "Cato," who, he argues, brought together Lockean political philosophy and pre-existing Whig political science into a new and powerful synthesis. Although it has been misleadingly presented as a separate "classical republican" tradition in recent scholarly discussions, it is this "new republicanism" that served as the philosophical point of departure for the founders of the American republic.

Punishment and the History of Political Philosophy

Punishment and the History of Political Philosophy PDF Author: Arthur Shuster
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442647280
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Punishment and the History of Political Philosophy, Arthur Shuster offers an insightful study of punishment in the works of Plato, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Beccaria, Kant, and Foucault.

Becoming Political

Becoming Political PDF Author: Christopher Skeaff
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022655550X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this pathbreaking work, Christopher Skeaff argues that a profoundly democratic conception of judgment is at the heart of Spinoza’s thought. Bridging Continental and Anglo-American scholarship, critical theory, and Spinoza studies, Becoming Political offers a historically sensitive, meticulous, and creative interpretation of Spinoza’s texts that reveals judgment as the communal element by which people generate power to resist domination and reconfigure the terms of their political association. If, for Spinoza, judging is the activity which makes a people powerful, it is because it enables them to contest the project of ruling and demonstrate the political possibility of being equally free to articulate the terms of their association. This proposition differs from a predominant contemporary line of argument that treats the people’s judgment as a vehicle of sovereignty—a means of defining and refining the common will. By recuperating in Spinoza’s thought a “vital republicanism,” Skeaff illuminates a line of political thinking that decouples democracy from the majoritarian aspiration to rule and aligns it instead with the project of becoming free and equal judges of common affairs. As such, this decoupling raises questions that ordinarily go unasked: what calls for political judgment, and who is to judge? In Spinoza’s vital republicanism, the political potential of life and law finds an affirmative relationship that signals the way toward a new constitutionalism and jurisprudence of the common.

From Oligarchy to Republicanism

From Oligarchy to Republicanism PDF Author: Forrest A. Nabors
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826273912
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Get Book Here

Book Description
On December 4, 1865, members of the 39th United States Congress walked into the Capitol Building to begin their first session after the end of the Civil War. They understood their responsibility to put the nation back on the path established by the American Founding Fathers. The moment when the Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress remade the nation and renewed the law is in a class of rare events. The Civil War should be seen in this light. In From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction, Forrest A. Nabors shows that the ultimate goal of the Republican Party, the war, and Reconstruction was the same. This goal was to preserve and advance republicanism as the American founders understood it, against its natural, existential enemy: oligarchy. The principle of natural equality justified American republicanism and required abolition and equal citizenship. Likewise, slavery and discrimination on the basis of color stand on the competing moral foundation of oligarchy, the principle of natural inequality, which requires ranks. The effect of slavery and the division of the nation into two “opposite systems of civilization” are causally linked. Charles Devens, a lawyer who served as a general in the Union Army, and his contemporaries understood that slavery’s existence transformed the character of political society. One of those dramatic effects was the increased power of slaveowners over those who did not have slaves. When the slave state constitutions enumerated slaves in apportioning representation using the federal three-fifths ratio or by other formulae, intra-state sections where slaves were concentrated would receive a substantial grant of political power for slave ownership. In contrast, low slave-owning sections of the state would lose political representation and political influence over the state. This contributed to the non-slaveholders’ loss of political liberty in the slave states and provided a direct means by which the slaveholders acquired and maintained their rule over non-slaveholders. This book presents a shared analysis of the slave South, synthesized from the writings and speeches of the Republicans who served in the Thirty-Eighth, Thirty-Ninth or Fortieth Congress from 1863-1869. The account draws from their writings and speeches dated before, during, and after their service in Congress. Nabors shows how the Republican majority, charged with the responsibility of reconstructing the South, understood the South. Republicans in Congress were generally united around the fundamental problem and goal of Reconstruction. They regarded their work in the same way as they regarded the work of the American founders. Both they and the founders were engaged in regime change, from monarchy in the one case, and from oligarchy in the other, to republicanism. The insurrectionary states’ governments had to be reconstructed at their foundations, from oligarchic to republican. The sharp differences within Congress pertained to how to achieve that higher goal.

Infidels and Empires in a New World Order

Infidels and Empires in a New World Order PDF Author: David M. Lantigua
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108498264
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 373

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examines early modern Spanish contributions to international relations by focusing on ambivalence of natural rights in European colonial expansion to the Americas.

Cicero

Cicero PDF Author: Malcolm Schofield
Publisher:
ISBN: 019968491X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Founders of Modern Political and Social Thought series presents critical examinations of the work of major political philosophers and social theorists, assessing both their initial contribution and continuing relevance to politics and society. Each volume provides a clear, accessible, historically informed account of each thinker's work, focusing on a reassessment of their central ideas and arguments. The series encourages scholars and students to link their study of classic texts to current debates in political philosophy and social theory. Book jacket.

The Political Theory of the American Founding

The Political Theory of the American Founding PDF Author: Thomas G. West
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110714048X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 431

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides a complete overview of the Founders' natural rights theory and its policy implications.

Algernon Sidney between Modern Natural Rights and Machiavellian Republicanism

Algernon Sidney between Modern Natural Rights and Machiavellian Republicanism PDF Author: Luís Falcão
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527558762
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
The book investigates the political thought of Algernon Sidney (1623-1683), a historical character of the English civil wars, republic, protectorate, and Rump Parliament, who faced his trial and execution during the Exclusion Crisis. In his writings, Sidney mixed hugely different traditions of political philosophy: the modern natural rights, which were predominant in England in his generation, and the republicanism of Machiavelli. This volume will interest researchers in political philosophy, history of political thought and, particularly, republican theory. Its contribution to these topics explores the specificities of a thought that uses the language of natural rights and social contract and, on the other hand, the tumults, expansion and virtues of the republics.