The growing interest in bioethics has given rise to a new group of experts: experts in bioethics. They come from different walks of life and their motives, claims, and qualifications for expertise are manifold. Various academic disciplines can be said to contribute to one's status as an expert in bioethics. Studies and research in, say, philosophy, law, anthropology, history, theology, and sociology with an emphasis on bioethical matters are often thought of as suitably qualifying a person as a bioethicist. In (...) addition to these academic qualifications there are two routes to becoming a bioethicist. I will call these the self-nomination and the through-work-experience routes. Self-nominated expertise is most common with medics who have strong religious or other ideological views about ethical matters. Another path to self-nominated expertise starts with strongly held ideological views with interest in bioethical matters. For this category of bioethical experts there does not have to be any institutional acknowledgment of their status; they are experts because they think they are. The other nonacademic type of expert in bioethics emerges through administrative channels. When the various ethics committees and regulatory bodies that now abound were first founded, there were no experts in bioethics to sit on these committees. People became experts by serving in these institutions for sufficiently long periods of time. This still happens with ethics committees in which just a few of the members are experts in ethics. People join the committees as experts of other fields, but are thought to have become experts through the fact that they have served on such committees. (shrink)

This paper introduces scholars of Greek political thought to the continued existence of the phenomenon of demagoguery, or ‘leadership of the people’, in the Hellenistic period. After summarizing Classical elite discourse about demagoguery, I explore three areas in which political leaders continued to run afoul of elite norms in Hellenistic democratic poleis: 1) political persecution of the wealthier members of a political community; 2) ‘pandering to’ the people in a way considered infra dignitatem; and 3) stoking bellicosity among the common (...) people. I show that considerable continuities link the Classical and Hellenistic periods and that demagoguery should be approached as a potential window onto ‘popular culture’ in Greek antiquity. (shrink)

One way of characterising the present political conjuncture - worldwide, not just in Europe and North America - is to point to the rise to power of politicians best described as demagogues. Trump, Duterte, Putin, Modi, as well as the leaders of Europe's neo-fascist racists have in common not just certain policies and attitudes, but, significantly, a political style: that of the demagogue. Thinking through that term, ‘demagogue', is instructive in helping us to understand this phenomenon, no less (...) historically than politically. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between ignorance, authority and nationalism in neoliberal thought and practice to argue that, far from signalling its end, the recent global rise of the right-wing demagogue is firmly rooted in neoliberalism. Part one mobilises the aesthetic concept of the sublime to explore the central place of, and relationship between, ignorance and authority. Part two argues that neoliberalism has its own form of nationalism which is underpinned by a social Darwinist logic. It is here that (...) we find the basis for the intersection between neoliberalism and the forms of vitriolic and xenophobic nationalism which have helped propel the global ascendency of the neoliberal demagogue. The concluding section argues that, in the context of growing inequality and insecurity, the demagogue mystifies social relations, projecting blame for the failings of the system on those constructed as "enemies of the people" in the interests of maintaining the status quo. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFor the Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Ferguson and many of his time, the history of the Roman Republic furnished the best case study for discussions of internal threats to a mixed system of government. These included factionalism, popular discontent, and the rise of demagogues seeking to concentrate power in their own hands. Ferguson has sometimes been interpreted as a ‘Machiavellian’ who celebrated the legacy of Rome and in particular the value of civic discord. By contrast, this article argues that he (...) is better understood as a disciple of Montesquieu, who viewed Rome as an anachronistic and dangerous ideal in the eighteenth century, the era of the civilized and commercial monarchy. The greatest fear of Ferguson was military despotism, which he believed was the likely outcome of democratic chaos produced by the levelling instincts of the ‘common’ people and demagogues prepared to harness their discontent. In such a scenario, a legitimate order in a mixed government would be turned into a faction putting the constitutional balance at risk, undermining intermediary powers, and ending liberty for all. (shrink)

Aristotle’s Politics offers both a broad diagnosis of the hazards of contemporary populism and a broad characterization of actionable remedies, and it does so in conjunction with an ideal of political societies as properly partnerships in living well, characterized by voluntary cooperation, mutual advantage, and civic friendship. The task of this paper is to explain the diagnosis, remedies, and ideals more fully and to illustrate their currency and value in contemporary political analysis. It addresses Aristotle’s views on demagogues and civic (...) friendship, the nature and circumstances of populism in the U.S., and the Aristotelian remedies that may be helpful in strengthening civic friendship today. (shrink)

The study examines how truth-tellers and truth-telling can be cultivated in the context of post-truth politics in the U.S. Following Foucault, it is not concerned with examining the problem of truth, with the philosophical question of how truth is determined, but with the problem of truth-tellers or truth-telling as a practical activity of self-improvement. To this end, the study traces the emergence and nature of post-truth politics in the U.S. and analyzes its relation to patterns of fascist propaganda and the (...) psychological appeal of authoritarian leaders through a psycho-social perspective. To counter the nature and ubiquity of post-truth politics, the unrelenting flow of lies, disinformation, and conspiracy theories disseminated by the far-right news and information ecosystem, the author argues that educators can help students recognize truth-tellers and become truth-tellers themselves by employing certain pedagogical strategies, informed by Foucault’s analysis of parrhesia, that can equip them to criticize and resist post-truth propaganda and demagogues. (shrink)

While lecturing on the philosophy of history at the University of Berlin, Hegel was asked by a student if the United States ought to be considered the country of the future. Obviously irritated, he answered: “As the country of the future, America does not concern me … Philosophy deals with the eternal, or with reason, and with that there is enough to do.” In his famous lecture on science as a vocation, addressed to students at the University of Munich at (...) the end of the First World War, Max Weber responded to insistent questions on his views as to the future of Germany: “The classroom is neither for demagogues nor for prophets.”. (shrink)

Probably written by a student of Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution is both a history and an analysis of Athens' political machinery between the seventh and fourth centuries BC, which stands as a model of democracy at a time when city-states lived under differing kinds of government. The writer recounts the major reforms of Solon, the rule of the tyrant Pisistratus and his sons, the emergence of the democracy in which power was shared by all free male citizens, and the leadership (...) of Pericles and the demagogues who followed him. He goes on to examine the city's administration in his own time - the council, the officials and the judicial system. For its information on Athens' development and how the democracy worked, The Athenian Constitution is an invaluable source of knowledge about the Athenian city-state. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. (shrink)

Western democracy is now at a critical juncture. Some worry that power has been wrested from the people and placed in the hands of a small political elite. Others argue that the democratic system gives too much power to a populace that is largely ill-informed and easily swayed by demagogues. This classic study of democratic principles is thus now more relevant than ever. A renowned historian of antiquity and political philosophy, Sir M.I. Finley offers a comparative analysis of Greek and (...) modern conceptions of democracy. As he puts the ancient Greeks in dialogue with their contemporary counterparts, Finley tackles some of the most pressing issues of our day, including public apathy, partisanship, consensus politics, distrust of professional politicians, and the limits of free speech. Including three lectures that Finley delivered at Rutgers University, plus two additional essays that further illuminate his thinking, _Democracy Ancient and Modern _explores the dramatic differences between the close-knit civil society of the ancient Greeks and our own atomized mass societies. By mapping out democracy’s past and its present manifestations, this book helps us plot a course for democracy’s future. (shrink)

One of the most resolute dichotomies in the modern and contemporary study of religion is that between good/bad religions. The bases for making such judgments are fluid, but the outcome is generally recognizable; “good” religions and good religious practitioners adhere to the expectations and norms of the bourgeois modern. The reasons for the endurance of the good/bad religion dichotomy are historical, rooted in the rise of the study of religion as an academic discipline, globally and in the United States; economic, (...) reflecting recent trends in giving to higher education; and ideological. But in Meir Kahane, Shaul Magid upends the good/bad distinction, using a “bad” religious actor, in this case, a virulent anti‐Black racist, demagogue, and violent street fighter as a lens through which to explore recent Jewish history in the US and Israel. Magid's steadfast refusal to render Kahane safely other to this broader religious story is a powerful challenge to scholars of religion. (shrink)

Prescient essays about the state of our politics from the philosopher who predicted that a populist demagogue would become president of the United States Richard Rorty, one of the most influential intellectuals of recent decades, is perhaps best known today as the philosopher who, almost two decades before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, warned of the rise of a Trumpian strongman in America. What Can We Hope For? gathers nineteen of Rorty’s essays on American and global politics, including four (...) previously unpublished and many lesser-known and hard-to-find pieces. In these provocative and compelling essays, Rorty confronts the critical challenges democracies face at home and abroad, including populism, growing economic inequality, and overpopulation and environmental devastation. In response, he offers optimistic and realistic ideas about how to address these crises. He outlines strategies for fostering social hope and building an inclusive global community of trust, and urges us to put our faith in trade unions, universities, bottom-up social campaigns, and bold political visions that thwart ideological pieties. Driven by Rorty’s sense of emergency about our collective future, What Can We Hope For? is filled with striking diagnoses of today’s political crises and creative proposals for solving them. (shrink)

The article is motivated by a growing interest to solve local problems by infusing indigenous knowledge systems. It discusses the strained interface between religious and political actors using a local brand of theology, termed bindepinde [stout rope] theology. This theology is based on a local fable told to children, on how a Hare abused Hippopotamus and Elephant using a tethering rope. The folk story is taken as a metaphor in which Hare represents the sly politician abusing the rope to control (...) Hippopotamus and Elephant, representing religious actors. Though Zimbabwe has a special place in this research, the research has shown that politicians act as third forces the world over. Religious entities often act as fodder for the progress of political demagogues, whose egos are legitimised by competing religious ideologies. Many religious bodies inadvertently enable politicians, thinking that they are fulfilling their own mandates. The article proposes negotiated versions of liberation theology and synodality as possible ways of overcoming inadvertent scaffolding of bindepinde theology. It concludes that while it may be difficult to tame the politician, it may be worthwhile to minimise the damage by making him focus more on the common good. Contribution: This article contributes bindepinde brand of theology as an indigenous theory of knowledge in the area of religio-political dialogue. The bindepinde theology has proved applicable to various contexts globally, where it thrives on dualism. Its mitigation lies in Kairos theology. (shrink)

Alcibiades is one of the most explicitly sexualized figures in fifth-century Athens, a "lover of the people" whom the demos "love and hate and long to possess" (Ar. Frogs 1425). But his eros fits ill with the normative sexuality of the democratic citizen as we usually imagine it. Simultaneously lover and beloved, effeminate and womanizer, Alcibiades is essentially paranomos, lawless or perverse. This paper explores the relation between Alcibiades' paranomia and the norms of Athenian sexuality, and argues that his eros (...) reveals an intrinsic instability within the sexual economy of the democracy: the desire he embodied blurred the categories that defined Athenian masculinity; the desire he inspired rendered the demos passive and "soft." This same instability can be seen in Thucydides' juxtaposition of the mutilation of the Herms and the legend of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. These two episodes (obscurely linked by Thucydides) together tell of an idealized citizen body under threat. The tyrannicide story figures the democratic citizen as an elite lover, whose sexual dominance is vital to his political autonomy. The Herms, with their prominent phalloi, symbolized this citizen-lover, and thus their mutilation was an assault on the masculinity, as well as political power, of the demos. The tyrannicide legend seems to promise a defense against this threat of civic castration; but instead of shoring up the sexually-dominant citizen, Thucydides' version of the legend merely reveals his frailty and fictionality: even in Athens' heroic past there is no inviolable democratic eros to cure the impotence of mutilation and tyranny. Reading these two episodes against the backdrop of Alcibiades' paranomia (as described by Plutarch and Plato), this paper examines the nature of democratic masculinity, the (eroticized) relation between demagogue and demos, and the place of perverse desire within the protocols of sex. (shrink)

This book is a critically informed challenge to the traditional histories of rhetoric and to the current emphasis on Aristotle and Plato as the most significant classical voices in rhetoric. In it, Susan C. Jarratt argues that the first sophists—a diverse group of traveling intellectuals in the fifth century B.C.—should be given a more prominent place in the study of rhetoric and composition. Rereading the ancient sophists, she creates a new lens through which to see contemporary social issues, including the (...) orality/literacy debate, feminist writing, deconstruction, and writing pedagogy. The sophists’ pleasure in the play of language, their focus on historical contin-gency, and the centrality of their teaching for democratic practice were sufficiently threatening to their successors Plato and Aristotle that both sought to bury the sophists under philosophical theories of language. The censure of Plato and Aris-totle set a pattern for historical views of the sophists for centuries. Following Hegel and Nietzsche, Jarratt breaks the pattern, finding in the sophists a more progressive charter for teachers and scholars of reading and writing, as well as for those in the adjacent disciplines of literary criticism and theory, education, speech communication, and ancient history. In tracing the historical interpretations of sophistic rhetoric, Jarratt suggests that the sophists themselves provide the outlines of an alternative to history-writing as the discovery and recounting of a set of stable facts. She sees sophistic use of narrative in argument as a challenge to a simple division between orality and literacy, current discussions of which virtually ignore the sophists. Outlining similarities between _écriture féminine _and sophistic style, Jarratt shows that contemporary feminisms have more in common with sophists than just a style; they share a rhetorical basis for deployment of theory in political action. In her final chapter, Jarratt takes issue with accounts of sophistic pedagogy focusing on technique and the development of the individual. She argues that, despite its employment by powerful demagogues, sophistic pedagogy offers a resource for today’s teachers interested in encouraging minority voices of resistance through language study as the practice of democracy. (shrink)

Democracy is both an obvious and dubious idea. Here's why democracy is an obvious idea: For most of history, most governments divided people into the few who rule and the many who obey. The few then used the state to advance their own private interests at the expense of the many. Rulers were less like noble protectors appointed by God and more like intestinal parasites. The obvious solution is to eliminate the distinction between those who rule and those who obey. (...) Make every citizen both a ruler and a subject of that rule. This ensures government promotes everyone's interests. Thus, democracy is the best form of government. It's too bad it took most of civilized history to realize this-and too bad that the world isn't more democratic than it is. Here's why democracy is a dubious idea. Government decisions are high stakes. It decides matters of war and peace, prosperity and poverty, freedom or oppression. Yet we let incompetent people steer the ship of state. Most voters are ignorant and process what little information they have in biased and irrational ways. They fall prey to propaganda and demagogues. They are conformists and don't even try to vote their interests. Democracy is the political equivalent of drunk driving. Thus, democracy is a defective form of government. Democracy is a method by which the masses shoot themselves in their feet. Philosophy students often start essays by writing, "Since the dawn of time, humanity has pondered..." In this case, these arguments and concerns are old, if not dawn-of-time old. We find laypeople, pundits, social scientists, and philosophers making these two arguments today. But in ancient Athens, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle said similar things. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Seven Poems NICOLAS CALAS (Translated by Avi Sharon) hellenizing surrealism: a greek door to europe Nicolas calas (Kalamares) may be considered merely a minor Greek poet, but he had a major global persona and influence. In the middle of the last century he played a catalyzing role in the international avant garde: He was a Zelig-like polemicist in three languages (Greek, French, and English) and across three cultural (...) capitals (Athens, Paris, and New York). But he always fought on a singular front: surrealism. Born in Lausanne in 1907, he grew up in Athens and by the later 1920s began to stand out in literary circles (he was over 6' 4") for his modernist if not revolutionary views. Starting from an interest in Freud and Marx, the subconscious and the revolutionary, Calas soon arrived at their natural synthesis—surrealism. Around the time when a distinctly Greek form of surrealist poetry emerged, with the 1935 publication of “Blast Furnace” by Andreas Embiricos, Calas was on his way to becoming its unofficial spokesman. He moved to the epicenter of the movement in Paris and with the 1938 publication of Foyers d’Incendie became the “most lucid and audacious” of founder André Breton’s acolytes, both prophet and demagogue of the group. Carried along in the current of European artists and thinkers leaving Europe for New York, he would continue the fight on the western wing of the faction (literally, coming to blows at a cocktail party with Clement Greenberg, representing the opposing Abstract Expressionist side). In 1942 he published another clarion pamphlet, Confound the Wise, giving the movement voice in English and befriending its most visible local supporters and practitioners, from Peggy Guggenheim to Marcel Duchamp. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 The Wyndham Lewis of the operation, Calas was a cross-border catalyst, evangelizing the role of surrealism as a liberating and generative force in modern literature and art. For him and other writers and poets, the weapon that would most effectively derange the reader’s habitual conformism into revelatory and revolutionary perception was the surrealist image, poetry’s lingua franca. For Greek practitioners it was completely natural for that magical representation to arise out of their god-infested, sun-filled landscape. Here they had a force that was both blinding and enlightening, penetrating and transformative, local and universal. For Calas, the primary echo or reflection of that essential image was the island of Santorini, referenced in several of the translations here (and reminiscent of his fellow national Nikos Gatsos’s use of the island of Amorgos in a similar context). It stood as the very symbol of fiery transformation, an image monstrous enough to shock the reader into a super-rational embrace of its own form of logic. This Hellenization of surrealism, like the Hellenization of modernism itself, was to become an important, transformative power in its own right. For many, the origin (and likewise, for many, the enclosing border ) of surrealism was France. “But it is French. It is their invention,” was how William Carlos Williams saw it, to his chagrin. Williams was convinced that the objective concentration on the image itself (“no ideas but in things”) could offer a salutary corrective to American poetry of his time. “It is the surrealists who have invented the living defense of literature,” he wrote in a 1929 essay. But for a poet so at one with the American Grain to be reconciled with surrealism’s ‘Francite’ he needed some way to cross the divide. His admiration for Calas’s work in clarifying and promoting the group’s ideas enabled the Greek poet to serve as a mediator, to allow the creative transference of its rebellious wisdom into Williams’s poetry. To borrow the title of one of his early American essays, Calas provided Williams a “Greek door to Europe.” In translating four of Calas’s French poems into English, published in 1941 with a frontispiece by the surrealist painter and magician Kurt Seligman, Williams leveraged Calas as the vehicle through which the “enabling foreignness” of surrealism could be grafted into the grain of his American modernist work, just as he set out on his magnum opus, Paterson. In a similar way... (shrink)

Nationalism is an evil. It causes wars, its roots lie in xenophobia and racism, it is a recent phenomenon – an invention of the last few centuries – which has been of immense service to demagogues and tyrants but to no-one else. Disguised as patriotism and love of one's country, it trades on the unreason of mass psychology to make a variety of horrors seem acceptable, even honourable. For example: if someone said to you, "I am going to send your (...) son to kill the boy next door" you would hotly protest. But only let him seduce you with "Queen and Country!" "The Fatherland!" "My country right or wrong!" and you would find yourself permitting him to send all our sons to kill not just the sons of other people, but other people indiscriminately – which is what bombs and bullets do. (shrink)

Dans ce livre savant et moqueur, Pierre-André Taguieff passe au scalpel l'idéal moderne par excellence, celui d'émancipation, qui exalte, mobilise et aveugle depuis longtemps les Modernes. Le temps est venu de soumettre à un examen critique sans complaisance cette notion qui fait partie du prêt-à-penser dont se sont emparés les utopistes et les démagogues de toutes obédiences. Comment expliquer que cette notion banale ait pu devenir un thème philosophique et politique majeur depuis la fin du XVIIIe siècle, sous la forme (...) du projet universaliste de l'émancipation du genre humain comme sous celle de l'autonomie croissante de l'individu? Taguieff analyse la formation philosophique de l'idée d'émancipation, explore ses usages politiques et dissèque ce qu'il appelle "l'émancipationnisme ", produit de la corruption idéologique de cette idée-force. Car l'émancipation comme projet global appelle une critique fondamentale : ce qui est rejeté subrepticement, voire diabolisé, ce sont les attachements, les fidélités, les enracinements, les mémoires particulières, donc la transmission. Il s'agit d'un programme de refonte anthropologique, visant à créer l'" homme nouveau ", chimère d'une société mondiale d'individus également émancipés. La généalogie d'une idée floue, pour penser librement le monde de demain. (shrink)

At Aristophanes, Equites 230–2, one of the slaves who speak the prologue informs the audience that, when the Paphlagonian appears onstage, his mask will not resemble him, for the σκεoπoιoí were afraid to make one that depicted him accurately. In an important article, K. J. Dover argued that it must in fact have been very difficult to create easily recognizable portrait-masks, and suggested that the joke in Eq. 230–2 may be that the Paphlagonian's mask is horribly ugly but allegedly still (...) nowhere near ugly enough. In response, D. Welsh, following an anonymous ancient commentator on Lucian, argued that Cratinus fr. 228 K-A shows that the historical Kleon had strikingly unattractive eyebrows. Had anyone wished to caricature the demagogue's physical appearance, therefore, he coule easily have done so, and portrait-masks may not have been so uncommon after all. Welsh's argument is at first glance quite appealing, and has been endorsed without further comment or argument by Sommerstein and Storey. I suggest, however, that the ancient commentator was confused, and that Cratinus’ remark is much more easily explained by reference to what is known about the use of facial expression as a communicative strategy in classical and early Hellenistic Athens, particularly as it appears in the comic poets. Kleon's eyebrows were probably no more ugly than those of anyone else, although he may have used them in an offensive way, and as Dover saw long ago, Eq. 230–2 cannot be taken as evidence for the use of portrait-masks on the late 5th-century comic stage. (shrink)

In 1993, investigators from George Washington University Medical Center separated the cells of 17 human embryos and produced 48 embryos, an average of three embryos for each original. The method, variously called twinning, cloning, embryo splitting, and blastomere separation, demonstrated that human embryos could be split to create genetically identical entities during conception. When publicized, however, the experiment brought to mind a different view of cloning repeated since the beginning of the new reproductive technologies. In the early 1970s, when research (...) on in vitro fertilization was in its infancy, commentators worried that cloning–defined as the duplication of persons–would be next, leading to a scenario of “boys genetically exactly like the father, girls like the mother, or individuals like some true or false hero of art, science, or sports, or like some demagogue or some saint.”. (shrink)

The “folk” theory of democracy that typically justifies the administrative state cannot help but lead to a discourse of constraint. If agency action is only legitimate when it mechanically applies the will of the voters as transposed by Congress through statutes, then the norms guiding that action will inevitably restrain agency discretion. As a result, attempts to establish the democratic credentials of the administrative state ironically obstruct the application of collective power. But this “folk” theory of democracy is bad theory. (...) It is empirically incredible and, alarmingly, facilitates dangerous populist politics. Political theory instead suggests that a theory of democratic representation not only better explains legislative outcomes, but also deprives demagogues and deregulatory partisans of the fictions that prop up their agendas. After a brief survey of representative theory, this article will demonstrate that a model of trustee representation adequately describes administration, reinforces its democratic credentials and constitutes a space for politics in shaping the regulations that govern us all. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:278 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY What a revolution the past century has made in both the general idea of morality andin the practical attitudes of "moral sense"l The political and moral earthquakes that have cracked the solid ground of Wayland's "moral law" and "didactic" complacency have blown us all into a space whose air may be purer but whose endless visibility into the dark void is less assuring. HERBERT W. (...) SCHNEIDER Claremont, California Le Pluralisme Dramatique de Georges Sorel. By Georges Goriely. (Paris: Marcel Rivi~re et Cie, 1962. 244 pp. Price not given.) Professor Georges Goriely of the Free University of Brussels has made one more valiant attempt to rescue Sorel the thinker from the reputation fastened upon him by the title of his Rdflexions sur la Violence in 1906. For most readers he has been the author of that one book, which is seldom read in the light of his other works. It is significant that Goriely reaches it only upon his page 199, barely twenty pages before his study terminates. Also worthy of note is the fact that of the over one hundred critical books and articles about Sorel which are listed in his bibliography, only two are in English: Richard Humphrey's Georges Sorel: Prophet Without Honor (1954) and James M. Meisel's The Genesis of Georges Sorel (1951). In European discussions Sorel frequently shares the company of such names as Croce, Bergson, and Nietzsche. But in the Anglo-Saxon world he has had in general a bad press, or none at all. A far-from-systematic philosopher, his writings, most of them originally articles composed in the heat of European controversies, have seemed remote from transatIantic concerns. He has been reputed "the father of syndicalism" in a country where the adjective most often applied to syndicalism is "criminal." When Mussolini proclaimed at one time that the R~flexions was his favorite bedside book, Sorel seemed to add the paternity of Fascism to his list. All that was needed to complete his damnation by labels was the dread word "anti-intellectual," and that has been freely applied to him. Nevertheless, Professor Goriely finds it possible to take Sorel's ideas seriously, quite apart from the political misuses which have been made of them. He sees that Sorel was primarily a pragmatic moralist immersed in his times and intent upon finding some way to bring about a European ricorso, a rejuvenation of classic republican ethics. At the turn of the century he saw only mediocrity and decadence: democracy had become demagogy, and industrial capitalism a mess of corruption. Sorel's great search was for a moral lever, for something dynamic, some source of energy in men which could be tapped in order to restore virtue and dignity and morale in the common man. Being imbued with historical relativism, and played upon by vigorous and contradictory influences (Vico, Marx, Bergson, Nietzsche, P~guy), Sorel steadily revised his views. It is that fact which gives his contradiction-filled philosophy the character of a "dramatic pluralism." Of one thing, however, Sorel was always convinced: intellect alone could not re-invigorate European ethics. The feelings must be stirred by something which, as early as 1894, he called a "myth." He had no use for rationally planned utopias operated by savants in the manner of Saint-Simon or Comte (whom he constantly attacked). He groped for a moving, even an "infinite" goal to be generated from history by the creative activity of men, such as the famous "general strike." A Norman like Alexis de Tocqueville, his roots were in a mixed liberal-republican aristocracy on the classic model, calling for large numbers of "social heroes" adapted to the industrial age. This r corps has nothing in common with the BOOK REVIEWS 279 shirted gangsters of the totalitarian regimes. Only gradually did Sorel come to seek his paragons of virtue among the proletariat, partly because of his disillusionment with Jean Jaur~s over the Dreyfus case. Sorel had been one of the first to champion Dreyfus, but felt that demagogues had transformed the latter's cause into a new dogmatism and a new establishment. Sorel was genuinely concerned about some of the... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment is a creative, careful, and mostly convincing study of the predictive accuracy of political experts. My only major complaints are that Tetlock (1) understates the predictive accuracy of experts, and (2) does too little to discourage demagogues from misinterpreting his work as a vindication of the wisdom of the average citizen. Experts have much to learn from Tetlock's epistemological audit, but there is still ample evidence that, compared to laymen, experts are very good.

Dans cette contribution jouée à quatre mains, l’une des intervenantes veut espérer que l’on puisse répondre aux populismes actuellement dominants, démagogues et xénophobes, par une autre forme de populisme, rassemblant les masses autour de quelques slogans émancipateurs et de quelques récits mobilisateurs. L’autre craint que le ver ne soit dans le fruit dès lors qu’on cherche à parler au peuple (dans un effort de massification) plutôt qu’à penser avec les gens (dans leur pluralisme).

Passer en revue les conceptions de la maladie qui s’expriment dans la tradition juive est une entreprise risquée et qui – l’auteur de ces lignes en a fait maintes fois l’expérience – expose le théologien de service qui a accepté d’en traiter ex cathedra aux tirs de barrage de ceux-là même, spécialistes d’autres disciplines, qui l’ont prié de le faire. Je prends donc ce risque, non sans demander au lecteur de faire preuve de cette disposition favorable du cœur et de (...) cette humilité de l’esprit, sans lesquelles l’écoute de l’autre n’est que politesse formelle, ou concession momentanée de parole de la part d’un interlocuteur qui n’a un instant endigué le fleuve de ses certitudes que pour les déverser ensuite sur l’imprudent que vous êtes, dès qu’il estimera que vous avez épuisé vos chances de le convaincre. À l’instar de son collègue chrétien, et peut-être avec plus de rigueur, le théologien juif est confronté à un dilemme. D’une part, conscient de l’auguste dignité de l’être humain, créé à l’image de Dieu, mais aussi de sa faiblesse et des difficultés de sa condition incarnée, il voudrait passionnément parler de Lui à ses semblables, leur dire ce qu’il attend d’eux, en termes que chacun et chacune puissent comprendre et accepter. Par ailleurs, s’il n’est pas lui-même dévoyé ou démagogue, il sait que ce Dieu, dont il s’efforce d’exposer les voies et les exigences, agit et s’exprime souvent de manière tellement déconcertante, à vue humaine, que le simple énoncé de ses actions et de ses paroles, telles qu’elles sont relatées dans les Écritures, risque de scandaliser les esprits les mieux disposés. Dieu ne dit-il pas lui-même (Ex 20, 5) : "Je suis un Dieu jaloux qui punis la faute des pères sur les enfants, les petits-enfants et les arrière-petits-enfants pour ceux qui me haïssent." Ou encore : (Dt 32, 35) : "À moi la vengeance et la rétribution, pour le temps où leur pied trébuchera…" Contrairement à une opinion très répandue, il ne s’agit pas là de conceptions vétérotestamentaires «totalement étrangères à l’Évangile d’amour de Jésus-Christ». En témoignent des passages néotestamentaires tels que ceux-ci : [C’est Jésus qui est censé parler (1), en faisant allusion au jugement eschatologique]: "Quant à mes ennemis, ceux qui n'ont pas voulu que je règne sur eux, amenez-les ici, et égorgez-les en ma présence." (Lc 19, 27). "Quand le Fils de l'homme viendra dans sa gloire, escorté de tous les anges, alors il prendra place sur son trône de gloire… Alors il dira encore à ceux de gauche: Allez loin de moi, maudits, dans le feu éternel qui a été préparé pour le diable et ses anges…" (Mt 25, 31-33; 41) À la lumière de cet aperçu, forcément sommaire, il est facile d’entrevoir que les réponses de l’Écriture et de la tradition juive au dramatique problème de la souffrance humaine, en général, et à celui de la maladie, en particulier, risquent d’être tout aussi dérangeantes, voire scandaleuses pour le croyant moyen. Je procéderai, ci-après, à un inventaire sommaire des conceptions relatives à la maladie, telles qu’elles s’expriment dans les écrits bibliques canoniques (I), dans le Nouveau Testament (II), et dans la littérature rabbinique des premiers siècles (III), en les illustrant par des textes de référence, choisis parmi ceux qui font autorité tant pour le judaïsme que pour le christianisme. Enfin, dans la dernière Partie de cette étude (IV), je brosserai, à grands traits, un panorama des opinions et des croyances des penseurs juifs orthodoxes, du Moyen Âge à l’époque moderne, et des comportements qu’ils préconisent face à la maladie et aux souffrances qui en découlent. Tenant compte du fait que, sauf exception, je m’adresse à un public non versé dans les sciences juives, j’ai choisi de donner à mon exposé un caractère plus descriptif que spéculatif. (shrink)

In the opening lines of Aristophanes' Acharnians, Dicaeopolis counts first among his greatest joys ‘the five talents Cleon coughed up’, and he professes his love of the Knights for this service ‘worthy of Hellas’. The ancient scholiast gave what he thought an obvious explanation from Theopompus : he tells us that Cleon was accused of taking bribes to lighten the tribute of the islanders, and he was then fined ‘because of the outrage against the Knights’. Evidently Theopompus connected the charges (...) against Cleon with some earlier proceedings instigated by Cleon against the Cavalry. There is, as often, some difficulty in determining what Theopompus said and what the scholiast inferred, and, aside from that editorial problem, the scholiast's all-too-simple solution faces at least three major objections regarding the legal and political implications of such a trial. On the strength of such objections it was long ago supposed that Dicaeopolis rejoices not at a recent political defeat for the demagogue, but in recalling a theatrical expose in Babylonians of the previous year. This theory of a stage trial, however, encounters obstacles of its own in any reconstruction of the lost play. In recent work there have been many comments but no altogether satisfactory solution on this problem. It is the view of many that Cleon indeed suffered some political defeat in the year preceding Ach.; but, by this approach, ingenious solutions are required to make sense of the scholia. The assumption of a stage-trial, involving the Knights and Cleon in Babylonians, is still found persuasive by others, but if we are to discount the fragment of Theopompus, which has supporting testimony elsewhere in the scholiastic tradition, we would like to have something more than mere inference that Cleon was tried and convicted in Babylonians. The purpose of this paper is to find a more cogent explanation for these lines in Ach. and the equally puzzling scenario in Theopompus. It will be helpful to begin with the broad outlines of the problem , and then proceed to re-examine the prevailing views, the stage-trial theory and historical theories based upon the scholia. (shrink)

Over sixty years ago, it was written of early Greek tyranny that it ‘had arisen only in towns where an industrial and commercial regime tended to prevail over rural economy, but where an iron hand was needed to mobilize the masses and to launch them in assault on the privileged classes… But tyranny nowhere endured. After it had performed the services which the popular classes expected of it, after it had powerfully contributed to material prosperity and to the development of (...) democracy, it disappeared with an astonishing rapidity… The people regarded tyranny only as an expedient. They used it as a battering ram with which to demolish the citadel of the oligarchs, and when their end had been achieved they hastily abandoned the weapon which wounded their hands.’ Thus Gustav Glotz, whose view found favour with de Ste Croix. He too concluded with appeal to Aristotle, who in a famous passage declared that unlike monarchy, which arises to help ‘the great and good’ against the People, and the monarch who is appointed as one of ‘the great and good’, ‘the tyrant comes from the People and the multitude to confront the men of note and prevent the People being unjustly treated by them. This is clear from what actually happened, for, generally speaking, the majority of the tyrants became tyrants from being demagogues so to speak, having got themselves trusted by their abusive attacks on the men of note.’ Against this view of Aristotle and all his latter-day satellites, this paper is directed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When Hyperbole Enters Politics: What Can Be Learned From Antiquity and Our Hyperbolist-In-Chief W. ROBERT CONNOR introduction: an age of hyperbole Everywhere we turn these days we encounter hyperbole—in the colloquialisms of every day speech, advertising, salesmanship, letters of recommendation, sports-casting, and not least in political discourse. This may be a good moment, then, to open a conversation between ancient and modern understandings of verbal “over-shoot,” as the Greek (...) term for exaggeration might be rendered in English. The evidence gathered in H. Lausberg’s Handbook of Literary Rhetoric1 shows that while ancient rhetoricians agreed that hyperbole should be counted among the “figures of speech,” they found much to argue about: was hyperbole a violation of the Aristotelian middle course, hence an extreme to be avoided, or was it a legitimate form of augmentation (auxēsis in Greek, amplificatio in Latin)? Could diminution (meiōsis ) also be regarded as a form of hyperbole? In the interpretation of texts hyperbole poses a further difficulty —unlike simile, alliteration or some other figures of speech, it is “unmarked,” that is, it has no linguistic sign to alert the reader to its presence. Hyperbole likes to disguise itself as if it were going to a masquerade ball, presenting itself as simile or wearing metaphorical dress, or appearing not infrequently as litotes. It can sneak up on you and take you by surprise. The critic Longinus in On the Sublime, ch. 38, and some rhetoricians noted that hyperbole could be most arion 26.3 winter 2019 powerful when least recognized. Many ancient rhetoricians and some modern critics, however, have followed Quintilian, who asserted that “expressions (often hyperbolic), such as “storms of public assemblies, thunderbolts of eloquence, are used merely for ornament” (Institutes 8.6.7). In this view hyperbole is a conspicuous ornament used to embellish speech and make it more elegant and attractive, but today it is more often treated either as an excuse for an outrageous statement (as when the CEO of Cambridge Analytica characterized as “a certain amount of hyperbole” his suggestion of using prostitutes to discredit a political opponent), or as a euphemism for a falsehood (as when a politician promises he will eliminate the national debt—$20 trillion—and his budget director shrugs the claim off as “hyperbole.”) The term seems to extinguish any feeling of embarrassment. None of these understandings of hyperbole is simply wrong, but together they eclipse an alternative view, grounded in one ancient understanding of language, and corroborated by modern experience. In this approach language in general and hyperbole in particular are not simply a set of signs whose meaning is arbitrarily determined by social convention. Instead, they have their own nature (physis, as Isocrates says in Panegyricus 8) and hence their own power to arouse and motivate listeners. Hyperbole, viewed in this light, is a force in its own right, with the ability to give voice to otherwise unarticulated emotions, to intensify them, to push aside doubts and hesitations, and then to turn feelings into action. Language is power, and hyperbole, as an extreme form of language, provides great power to those who use it skillfully. These need not be the docile students of the rhetoricians ; politicians sometimes seem to have an innate understanding of it. The extreme breed among them, the demagogues, are often the ones who know best how to put this extreme of language to use. True, you don’t have to be a politician to put hyperbole to work. It is a favorite mode of speech among lovers, poets, travellers. Holy Men use it, too: Jesus of Nazareth, for exam16 when hyperbole enters politics ple, proclaimed that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God (Matthew 19.24). Almost everyone uses it at some point, except policy wonks whose soulless prose withers before its onslaughts. When people use hyperbole they may be neither lying nor embroidering the truth to make it more ornamental. They exalt and intensify what they see as truth, make it come alive, and thereby rouse their listeners from apathy and distraction. Ordinary people, too, use... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 279 shirted gangsters of the totalitarian regimes. Only gradually did Sorel come to seek his paragons of virtue among the proletariat, partly because of his disillusionment with Jean Jaur~s over the Dreyfus case. Sorel had been one of the first to champion Dreyfus, but felt that demagogues had transformed the latter's cause into a new dogmatism and a new establishment. Sorel was genuinely concerned about some of (...) the deepest problems facing modern industrial man. He could not believe that they could be solved, either by "demagogic plutocracy" or by orthodox Marxism. Hence he sought to synthesize Vico, Proudhon, Marx, and Bergson in a new movement that should be both liberal and revolutionary and heroically virtuous. The strongest influence upon his thinking, says Goriely, came from Vico, from whom he borrowed "the fundamental idea of his whole work: "Man does not know what he does' " (105). History can therefore be rational only after it has happened: "The future is the field in which we use our imaginations, not our understandings" (109). That Sorel anticipated many twentieth-century developments in philosophy and politics, there can be no doubt. The author says that he was "the first philosopher in France who sought not only to locate man in history and society, but also to locate history and society in man, to give them a significance which may be called existential" (148). Before William James's pragmatism reached European shores, Sorel had made such statements as "Science is a means of verifying the possibility of acting in a certain manner." 1Even some of his pessimistic fears anticipated such developments as Burnham's "managerial revolution," at the same time that he welcomed the growth of industrial techniques in other hands (155). Professor Goriely's careful tracing of Sorel's profusion of suggestions for the ethical redemption of mankind in a machine age reveals the unreconciled contradictions in his pluralism. In the R~[lexions he could resolve the conflicts of myth versus utopia, force versus violence, liberalism versus absolutism, says Goriely, only "'by a conceptual jugglery.., which sets the mind's teeth on edge rather than stimulates it" (200). Caught between the poles of an attachment to historical tradition and to liberty, Sorel celebrated the constant tension between the two. Man lives only to create; he "has no other end than the creative ~lan itself. Born of liberty, history can never block its course.., it is always a point of departure toward the future.... Human institutions, the products of an infinity of obscure causes, never realize any universal moral principle. They live in the relative, which man ought to accept with moderation and a sense of the limits of the possible, without ever losing the sense of the unlimited" (222). HAROLD A. LARRABEE Union College 1Georges Sorel, "Storia e scienza sociale," Rivista itallana di sociologia, March-June, 1902,p. 224. Storia Della Filosofia: La Filosofia del Novecento. By E. Paolo Lamanna. Intuizionismo, filosofia dell'azione e modernismo--Prammatismo--La problematica della scienza--La problematica della storla. (Firenze: Felice Le Monnier, 1963. 671 pp. 3800 L.) This first of three volumes describing the philosophies of the twentieth century, and the fifth volume in Lamanna's History of Philosophy, is truly a monumental and encyclopedic work. In this volume alone there are concise, clear, scholarly expositions of the important ideas of more than fifty philosophers, including biographical information and bibliographical references. The style is exceptionally intelligible and the organization of even complicated materials is well defined with good headings and with definitions that are intelligible 280 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY even to a layman. The work is not only very informative but amazingly objective and dispassionate. And despite its disinterestedness it is highly interesting, for it succeeds in presenting each philosopher's ideas as one imagines he would like to present them himself, sympathetically and persuasively. One leaves the book after reading about the achievements of our own little century marvelling at the variety and range of recent achievements. For over and above our follies and horrors, these thinkers emerge as men trying hard and ably to be sane and tell the truth. Lamanna himself emerges as a mind with an extraordinary critical ability to... (shrink)

_An exploration of the uncomfortable connections among performances in life, art, and politics_ “All the world’s a stage,” declares the melancholy Jacques in Shakespeare’s_ As You Like It._ Today that’s an unhappy thought. A cluster of demagogues has recently dominated the public realm through their powers as actors; they are brilliant performers. More unsettling, the demagogue, the dancer, and the musician all share the same nonverbal realm of bodily gestures, lighting and blocking, costuming, and stage architecture. So, too, the (...) roles and rituals of everyday life and everyday acting can be malign or sublime, repressive or liberating. Performing constitutes one art—an ambiguous art. In this book, the acclaimed sociologist Richard Sennett explores uncomfortable connections among performances in life, art, and politics. He draws on his own early career as a professional cellist as well as histories both Western and non-Western. He is not a pessimist; at the end of his study, he shows how this ambiguous art might become more ethical. (shrink)

Evolutionary biology tries to explain the adaptability of different traits including social behaviour. However, it does not and cannot say anything about what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ behaviour. If scientists try to do so they risk being put into the same category as ideologists and political demagogues. Evolutionary biology can tell us something about the phylogeny of certain types of behaviour including xenophobia. It can describe which constraints can lead to the outbreak of such behaviour, without thereby legitimating this behaviour.

In the opening lines of Aristophanes'Acharnians, Dicaeopolis counts first among his greatest joys ‘the five talents Cleon coughed up’, and he professes his love of the Knights for this service ‘worthy of Hellas’. The ancient scholiast gave what he thought an obvious explanation from Theopompus (F 94): he tells us that Cleon was accused of taking bribes to lighten the tribute of the islanders, and he was then fined ‘because of the outrage (ὑβρ⋯ζειν) against the Knights’. Evidently Theopompus connected the (...) charges against Cleon with some earlier proceedings instigated by Cleon against the Cavalry. There is, as often, some difficulty in determining what Theopompus said and what the scholiast inferred, and, aside from that editorial problem, the scholiast's all-too-simple solution faces at least three major objections regarding the legal and political implications of such a trial. On the strength of such objections it was long ago supposed that Dicaeopolis rejoices not at a recent political defeat for the demagogue, but in recalling a theatrical expose inBabyloniansof the previous year. This theory of a stage trial, however, encounters obstacles of its own in any reconstruction of the lost play. In recent work there have been many comments but no altogether satisfactory solution on this problem. It is the view of many that Cleon indeed suffered some political defeat in the year precedingAch.; but, by this approach, ingenious solutions are required to make sense of the scholia. The assumption of a stage-trial, involving the Knights and Cleon inBabylonians, is still found persuasive by others, but if we are to discount the fragment of Theopompus, which has supporting testimony elsewhere in the scholiastic tradition, we would like to have something more than mere inference that Cleon was tried and convicted inBabylonians. The purpose of this paper is to find a more cogent explanation for these lines inAch.and the equally puzzling scenario in Theopompus. It will be helpful to begin with the broad outlines of the problem (section I), and then proceed to re-examine the prevailing views, the stage-trial theory (II) and historical theories based upon the scholia (III). (shrink)

A physician and spokesman for the French Ideologues, Pierre-JeanGeorges Cabanis (1757-1808) stands at the crossroads of several influential developments in modern culture--Enlightenment optimism about human perfectibility, the clinical method in medicine, and the formation and adaptation of liberal social ideals in the French Revolution. This first major study of Cabanis in English traces the influences of these developments on his thought and career. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously (...) out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

How many citizens take part in moral and political decisions concerning the results obtained by the contemporary life sciences? Should they blindly follow skilled demagogues or false and deceptive leaders? Should they adhere to the voice of the majority, or should they take a different decisional path? Deliberative democracy answers these questions, but what is deliberative democracy? Can we really deliberate if we are completely ignorant of the relevant issue? What about ethical or political expertise, is it strictly necessary? Finally, (...) and most significantly, can a deliberative process take place if we ignore the techniques governing it; that is, the techniques required to be minimally skilled in rational argumentation? Giovanni Boniolo goes back to the historical and theoretical foundations of deliberation showing us, with some irony, that deliberation is a matter of competence, and not just a matter of a right to decide. His conclusion might not delight everyone: “anyone who is not sufficiently acquainted with the subject matter or lacks the sufficient deliberative competence ought not be admitted to deliberative discussions. This restriction makes both good deliberation and a proper deliberative democracy possible, otherwise debate degenerates into demagogy and hypocrisy”. (shrink)

La récurrence de la méchante expression « France d’en bas » dans les mois ayant suivi les récentes élections françaises s’est accompagnée d’un recours fréquent à l’échappatoire européenne pour excuser par avance le renoncement à des promesses et une prétendue impuissance des gouvernements nationaux à traiter les problèmes de leurs mandants. La cohorte des démagogues communautaristes,..

There is growing agreement among scholars and citizens that our planet and its peoples are presently living through an era of great political uncertainty. Global pestilence, species destruction, shrinking US power and the birth of a new Chinese global empire are among the forces said to be responsible for the rising tides of uncertainty. Some observers even speak of a great leap backwards, a regression towards catastrophe, a rebirth of the disquiet and fear that marked the world of the 1920s (...) and 1930s. They are sure that the future will bring only threats, rather than new opportunities to live well. This essay notes the seriousness of things, but it raises doubts about these pessimistic claims of a new age of uncertainty. Historical comparisons are needed. So is greater clarity about the role played by communicative abundance in inflating our collective sense of doom. And a paradox is noted: calamities do more than stir up questions about how best to classify and measure the experience of uncertainty. Definitions of uncertainty also become uncertain. This should be unsurprising. Only institutions and everyday experiences unaffected by the flow of time could be defined and lived with any certainty. The insight not only has rich implications for the way we think about politics and democracy and its vulnerability to morbid backlashes and yearnings for demagogues. Doubt can generate fresh ideas and positive practical breakthroughs. Disquiet and incertitude are fickle characters, but they are also challengers of all forms of human arrogance, including the dogmatic conviction that our world is now headed for hell. (shrink)

Democracy faces threats from an emerging right-wing movement in democratic governments around the world. This may be even more prevalent in the United States because there is an evil that uses rhetorical tropes to undermine the anchor institutions of democracy: press, courts, universities, and Congress. This evil has a personification--former President Donald Trump. All the rhetorical critiques of Trump, that he is a demagogue, an authoritarian, a serial liar, a populist on steroids, fail to take into account the evil (...) that is fomented by his angry and vengeful rhetoric. Pictures of evil in Scripture, philosophy, and rhetoric bear a striking resemblance to Trump. It is not enough to say that he is dangerous to democracy. Kennedy claims that he is the evil seed in democracy that is even now sprouting new versions of the Trump rhetoric as each acolyte attempts to outrage the next. Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy screams at the evil, fights against the evil, and then attempts to sing the songs of goodness and democracy from poets, prophets, and rhapsodes. For the health of democracy these words have been written. (shrink)

When is it a good time to think about time? The answer provided by this essay is that there is no time like the present, especially the crazy, tense present of the year 2020. In this year four distinct scales of temporality have collided in a prolonged period of crisis and uncertainty: (1) the onset of a global pandemic that devastated the world economy and killed over a million people, the worst public health disaster since the Spanish flu of 1918; (...) (2) a political crisis featuring the rise of authoritarian governments around the world that threatened to overturn two centuries of efforts to secure stable representative democracies, centered in the rise of a would-be tyrant and demagogue in the US; (3) an explosive social movement centered in the endemic condition of systemic racism in the US; (4) a global environmental crisis that threatens the stability of the planetary ecological system as a sustainable habitat for thousands of species, including the human. Quarantined in monkish isolation by the pandemic, the author has engaged in a set of reflections on these convergent time scales. Instead of the classic (and unanswerable) philosophical question “What is time?” this essay reflects on the ways we picture time in metaphors, figures, personifications, and diagrams. In an anachronistic gathering of images of time from ancient and modern sources, the essay attempts to replace the ontology of time with an iconology that may provide some useful tools for finding our way through this epochal crisis. (shrink)

Discussions of demagoguery are, unfortunately, back in vogue in popular political discourse. Within the contemporary political landscape, the question of whether various world leaders should be considered demagogues abounds. In the American context, many perceive strong demagogic tendencies in President Donald Trump, and others see it in candidates like Bernie Sanders. This assessment, while perhaps not always stated in such specific terms, is prevalent throughout much of the rhetoric in public debate and deliberation, with Democrats and Republicans demonizing each other (...) with more frequency. While this discussion seems particularly relevant to the contemporary political climate, demagoguery as a term dates all the... (shrink)

A. C. Cassio has recently pointed out that Μαρικς, the name which Eupolis applied to the demagogue Hyperbolus, is a transliteration of the Old Persian word. In fact, a Persian origin μαρικς was suspected long ago. The seventeenth-century English scholar Edward Bernard, whose notes were used by J. Alberti in his edition of Hesychius, connected μαρικς with the Modern Persian mardekeh, which literally means ‘a little man’ and has the connotation ‘a vile person’, ‘a scoundrel’. A. Meineke followed Bernard's (...) derivation of μαρικς from Persian, as did K. Latte in his recent edition of Hesychius. These references should be added to Cassio's citation of E. Maass' quotation of K. F. Geldner's opinion. (shrink)

A. C. Cassio has recently pointed out that Μαρικς, the name which Eupolis applied to the demagogue Hyperbolus, is a transliteration of the Old Persian word . In fact, a Persian origin μαρικς was suspected long ago. The seventeenth-century English scholar Edward Bernard, whose notes were used by J. Alberti in his edition of Hesychius, connected μαρικς with the Modern Persian mardekeh, which literally means ‘a little man’ and has the connotation ‘a vile person’, ‘a scoundrel’. A. Meineke followed (...) Bernard's derivation of μαρικς from Persian, as did K. Latte in his recent edition of Hesychius. These references should be added to Cassio's citation of E. Maass' quotation of K. F. Geldner's opinion. (shrink)

Political thought has long identified demagogic leadership as one of the key pathologies of democracy. Unusually among political thinkers, Max Weber not only accepts the inevitability of demagogy in democratic politics but also appropriates the figure of the demagogue for democratic thought, praising certain kinds of ‘responsible’ demagogic leadership. This paper examines the role of demagogues in democracy through the lens of Weber's political thought. It critically reconstructs Weber's view of demagogy in terms of the kind of representation charismatic (...) leaders can offer. Demagogues articulate images of ‘the people’ that express a group's deep values and identities. However, Weber worried that demagogues often act irresponsibly, exacerbating dangerous divisions, given their ability to overcome legal and normative constraints. For Weber, democracy requires institutions that encourage an ‘ethic of responsibility’ in leaders while also holding them accountable. Weber's partial defence of demagogy provides useful perspectives on representation and on the institutional prerequisites for responsible leadership that neither deliberative nor minimalist models of democracy sufficiently appreciate. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface That an overtly white-nationalist misogynist demagogue was voted into power in the United States is cause for alarm and despair. As the election results sink in and analyses take shape, we at Feminist Studies mark this moment via poetry, a tradition of feminist expression that we have long nurtured. We include in this issue a special section on poems responding to the election. Raw by necessity, they (...) allow for a collective processing of feelings experienced in this moment, even as we prepare for the courage and acuity needed in days ahead. The scholarly works in this issue offer reflections on the travels of the term gender: in French Canadian feminist circles; the misreadings of gender and sexuality in histories of post-WWII New York City; and the gains and gaps in activism against gender-based violence and inequality. Geneviève Pagé recounts how the term gender was taken up in French Canadian scholarship, while Alix Genter offers a visual history of what butchness meant in 1950s and 1960s New York City. Julie R. Enszer tracks the representation of women writers through literary grants offered by the National Endowment for the Arts and in Norton anthologies, making the case that gender parity remains an elusive goal. Elizabeth Jean Hornbeck narrates the 1980 horror film The Shining as a commentary on violence against women and child abuse that uses the Gothic form to salutary effect. Nikki Lane reviews recent scholarship in black queer ethnography, and Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor introduces us to the feminist eco-art of Pamela Longobardi. Our featured poets, apart from our special section, are Hannah Baker Saltmarsh and Karen An-hwei Lee. Our closing forum on trigger warnings narrates the innovative practices that Alexis Lothian and Ramzi Fawaz propose in response to a contentious pedagogical debate. 560Preface Geneviève Pagé describes the history of the journey of the term gender in feminist circles in Montreal, using this case to comment on the dilemmas that arise from Anglocentrism in feminism. Pagé argues that in many ways, the term gender was not well suited to the context she highlights: Quebec feminists already possessed an intellectual infrastructure for referencing the meanings of the term gender through alternative phrasing, such as rapport sociaux de sexe. Furthermore, the grammatical concept of genre was “a concept central to the French language, but only peripheral in the English language,” and therefore, its use in French carried a potential “naturalizing” connotation. Nonetheless, given the dominance of English in feminist theory, Pagé concludes that “the polysemic nature of gender” allowed “for a fluid and multiple account of the local and global processes at work in the construction of women and men” in this context. Alix Genter gives us a nuanced understanding of butch genders and butch-femme aesthetics. Rather than relying on a stereotypical version of the 1950s queerly legible butch in masculine clothes, Genter argues that butchness itself was visually nuanced and coded in different ways than expected. Referencing a rich archive of 1950s-era photographs, Genter demonstrates that butch-identified women “conveyed their identities through alternate means that included clandestine codes and plays on women’s fashions.” This approach to butch aesthetics and lesbian self-representation opens up the common notion of a strict butch-femme contrast and introduces the concept of conscious mutual survival between the two lesbian identities. The appreciation of nuance continues in Nikki Lane’s review essay of reflexive ethnographic research about black queer communities. Lane’s review of recent work by Jafari S. Allen, Marlon Bailey, Mignon Moore, and Mireille Miller-Young highlights the attention these authors give to the complex politics of sexuality in everyday experiences of black communities. With an emphasis on the illuminating potential of ethnography and qualitative methodologies, Lane discusses how each text adds to our understanding of processes of “racialization, gendering, and sexualization.” Lane concludes that black queer and feminist ethnographic methods help accrue an embodied knowledge—the “flesh”—of black queer experience. Preface 561 The art featured in this issue is by Pamela Longobardi, who uses found-plastic objects to create painting, sculptures, installations, assemblages, photographs, and community-art projects. As an artist with training in biology, Longobardi focuses on the... (shrink)

Undoubtedly, democracy is in constant danger. The Athenian creation -later taken by the Latin American countries in the political-administrative figure of the Republic- has demonstrated not to be the best government model, but, the less evil, as expressed by an English politician when he saw that his empire era was coming to an end. And one of those defenders was the critical acid of the Vienna Circle and contemporary philosopher Karl Popper, who lived on his own flesh the mistakes of (...) democracy and the horrors of totalitarianism. Popper, defender of democracy to the limit, who even within his writings we can appreciate the paradoxes he sees in this, will not hesitate when the system of government of the people, for the people and the people, fall into the temptation to choose the dictatorship. For this, the philosopher tells us, democracy must create mechanisms so that this does not happen and we do not have a popular election that takes a demagogue and criminal to power, as was Hitler’s Germany. The thinking of the critical philosopher of historicism is liberal. An English liberalism and not as we understand it and we live in several States of America, where people is economic liberal and conservative in the ideas. No, Popper is liberal. A true liberal. (shrink)

In Aristophanes' Wasps , Bdelykleon tells his jury-mad father that because the allied states are aware that the ordinary Athenian juror is an exploited creature, deliberately kept poor by the demagogues in whose hands the real power lies, σ μν γονΤαι Κννου ψφον, Τοτοισι δ δωρоφоρоῡσιν. The scholia see that Κόννου ψφον must mean ‘something worthless’, but they add on the authority of Kallistratos and Euphronios that Ar. has altered the original phrase: ΚαλλĺστραΤος παροιμαν φησ “Κόννου θρον”, παρ՚ ν παίζει (...) Εφρόνιος δ τι λέΧθη δι τ δύν τινα τν Κόννον εναι. … ψφον δ επε δι δι τ περ δικαστο λγειν. We cannot tell whether Euphronios was commenting on κóννον θριον or κóννον ψον, since although he was writing before Kallistratos, the latter need not have been the first to cite the phrase κóννον θριον in connection with our passage; indeed, the credit for first noting its relevance may belong to Euphronios himself. I shall be reverting to Euphronios' interpretation of the phrase presently. (shrink)