Revolution

Drawing upon the thought of Giorgio Agamben, this essay focuses upon the potential of a single act to change a political order. Agamben’s writings retain the possibility for a paradigmatic gesture that opens a space for a politics not founded on a form of belonging grounded in a particular property, such as national identity. To illustrate this event this essay turns to Agamben’s construction of whatever-being, which is constructed hyper-hermeneutically. This term is chosen deliberately. Whatever-being retains a hermeneutic structure, but (...) is constructed through singular paradigmatic examples. These examples are evidence for whatever-being’s existence as a pure singularity, unable to be reduced to a particular quality. Such examples are gestures that allow future modes of belonging to separate themselves from oppressive foundations and dominating constructions of political existence, through revealing the possibility of a new way of being that does not require a revolutionary “zero hour” to be brought about. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to compare the ideas of Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault. In his works Marcuse focused on the excluded social circles. Their revolt against the establishment shook up the normative foundations of the social order in the 1960s and the 1970s, which finally led to a cultural revolution. Inspired by these social changes, Foucault was interested in the effects of this revolution at the epistemological and moral level. He recognized that the actions of the excluded (...) circles weakened the institutional order which hitherto tempered the development of the alternative forms of knowledge and lifestyle in the western culture. Hence the contemporary western culture is a place of relentless conflicts between different values and conceptions of truth, but also a place of unique tolerance and a variety of lifestyles. (shrink)

This article discusses the authority problem involved in revolutions and the institution of legal order from a phenomenological perspective. Paradoxically, every new claim to power, every revolutionary beginning, should present itself as coherent with what has already been established as authoritative by law. This authority problem is due to the two-fold challenge revolutions pose: the new order has to both constitute a break with the old order (transgression) and retain a relationship with it (response). In order to meet this two-fold (...) challenge, I will draw on the work of Hannah Arendt and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and develop a concept of the institution of legal order that can embrace transgression and response as two sides of the same coin and can shed new light on the authority problem involved in revolutions. (shrink)

This article is based on the premise that the social and political foundations of the geopolitical entity known as the Irish Free State was of a conservative nature, unique in Western Europe. Of course, conservative forces also featured prominently in the early twentieth-century in other European countries. However, they were counterbalanced by forces of opposition sufficiently powerful to generate a social and political balance that was practically nonexistent within the Irish Free State. When exploring the root cause of Ireland's conservative (...) politics, I identify an ideological connection between the lack of radical forces in the Irish Free State and the revolution through which it was established. In other words, the 1916?23 Irish Revolution indisputably laid the foundations of the ideas that were to become the dominant ideology in southern Ireland during the 1920s and 1930s. (shrink)

“The idol of communism, which spread social strife, enmity and unparalleled brutality everywhere, which instilled fear in humanity, has collapsed.” These words, spoken by Russian president Boris Yeltsin before a joint session of the U.S. Congress in 1992, brought a tumultuous response from America's political leaders. The evocation of the theme of idolatry by a former member of the Communist Party was striking, all the more so because it must have called to his listeners' minds the dramatic scenes of the (...) destruction of the statues of Lenin then taking place throughout the Communist world. Nothing of the kind had been seen since the end of the Pagan era, when temples of the old gods were toppled throughout the Roman Empire. The events that historian Edward Gibbon, in his classic The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, described as happening in Alexandria in A.D. 389 might just as well have applied to what was happening in Minsk or Tirana: “The huge idol [of Serapis] was overthrown and broken into pieces, [its] limbs ignominiously pulled through the streets. (shrink)

While political revolution is frequently considered a nonmoral phenomenon, revolutionary discourse indicates that revolution is not immune from moral analysis. The "moral reality" of revolution is displayed in language that draws on "just war" considerations, the value of trust and the principle of respect for human dignity. Such appeals assume that justification of revolutionary violence is unavoidable. ;A critical study of prominent metaphors invoked by participants and observers to convey the meaning of revolution, including revolution as theatre, natural force, medical (...) care, birth, locomotive, and game, suggests the presence of amoral, premoral and moral models of revolution. The metaphor of revolution as religious conversion developed by Jon Gunnemann is particularly provocative, since this interpretation affirms that moral justification is incoherent relative to revolutionary violence. ;I argue that the principle of nonmaleficence, which is presupposed in the just war tradition and in revolutionary discourse about "systemic violence," provides insight into the concept of the moral reality of revolution and provides a basis for revolutionary ethics. The use of just war criteria in moral analysis on revolution, however, meets methodological objections as well as substantive difficulties in interpretation and application. From the standpoint of this tradition of moral reflection, the conditions of legitimate authority, reasonable chance of success, proportionality and discriminate conduct raise difficulties for morally justifiable revolution. ;The political ethics of John Locke provides one approach to the issue of morally legitimate authorization to use violence against the State. The problems of success and proportionality in revolution are illuminated through both Marxist and Weberian reflection on the "inevitability" of revolution. Finally, while revolutionary violence is often assumed to be the moral equivalent of terrorism, revolutionary discourse, as expressed in dehumanizing images of the enemy, and appeals to the concepts of systemic violence, moral necessity and reprisal, exhibits a moral logic to validate apparently "discriminate" violence. Nevertheless, revolutionaries often are murderers in a good cause, and their inability to resolve the problem of "dirty hands" represents a fundamental moral defect that prevents realization of the revolutionary ideal of a new society. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe work of Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues has established that people do not always think and act “rationally.” However, this amounts to saying that Kahneman and his collaborators interpret people's behavior in experimental settings to be inconsistent with the narrow understanding of rationality deployed by orthodox neoclassical economists. Whether this means that people make poor decisions in the real world, however, has not been demonstrated, a fact that calls into doubt the significance of the list of heuristics and biases (...) generated by behavioral economists. Dual-process theory was meant to give theoretical coherence to this list, but its empirical foundation, too, retains the premises of “rational” choice as an ideal. (shrink)

The social scientific study of revolution has been deviled by a lack of progress in recent years, divided between competing views on the universality of patterns in revolution. This study examines the origins of these epistemologies. Drawing on an insight that different modes of comparison yield different types of knowledge, I argue that the network structure of how cases are compared constrains or enables the development of a field’s theoretical sensibilities. Analysis of comparative studies of revolution published from 1970 to (...) 2009 reveals that the field overall is most amenable to knowledge about particular cases rather than the phenomenon of revolution broadly. Analysis of the changing structure of comparison over time reveals that comparison precedes the development of an epistemology. The results suggest that conclusions about the possibility, or lack thereof, of generalization may be an artifact of the comparative method. (shrink)

Examining the social revolutions in France, the United States, and England during industrialization this book looks at the different ways in which social upheaval has prompted radical divergences in the organisation and regulation of the legal profession.