In an exciting study of ideas accompanying the rise of the West, Thomas McCarthy analyzes the ideologies of race and empire that were integral to European-American expansion. He highlights the central role that conceptions of human development played in answering challenges to legitimacy through a hierarchical ordering of difference. Focusing on Kant and natural history in the eighteenth century, Mill and social Darwinism in the nineteenth, and theories of development and modernization in the twentieth, he proposes a critical theory (...) of development which can counter contemporary neoracism and neoimperialism, and can accommodate the multiple modernities now taking shape. Offering an unusual perspective on the past and present of our globalizing world, this book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of philosophy, political theory, the history of ideas, racial and ethnic studies, social theory, and cultural studies. (shrink)

Preface: Nature's Verdict Has Already Been Signed This is not prophecy. This is not metaphor. This is not the indignation of a moralist, not the ravings of a pessimist, not the agitation of a revolutionary. This is a statement of systems science. When a system's positive feedback loops lose all effective negative feedback regulation — when it places its own growth above the sustaining system that bears it — when it systematically dismantles every built-in damping mechanism — this system's destruction (...) is no longer a possibility but an inevitable conclusion already written into its initial conditions. The civilization we inhabit today is precisely such a system. It has a precise name: the Empire of Greed. The Empire of Greed was built, operated, and accelerated by two forces: the merchant class driven by unlimited greed, and the political class driven by unlimited power-seeking. The former converts the world into a resource bank of unlimited extractability; the latter converts institutions into power machines of unlimited self-reproduction. Their collusion has constructed the largest-scale, most deeply destructive, and most elaborately self-justifying civilizational form in human history. It flies the banner of progress, employs the slogan of freedom, practices the theology of development, and worships the totem of growth. It has built the most spectacular technological wonders in human history — and has simultaneously manufactured the most profound ecological debt, the most systematic spiritual desertification, the most comprehensive crisis of meaning, and the nearest civilizational terminus in human history. Nature is computing. The answer is being delivered. This book is a verdict — not a verdict written by a human being, but the verdict expressed by nature through the language of systems science and classical philosophy. It attempts to integrate the logic of thermodynamics, the laws of systems dynamics, and the ancient wisdom of the Dao De Jing into a systemic picture of the Empire of Greed's inevitable destruction and Natural Civilization's inevitable succession. Laozi, two thousand five hundred years ago, had — 2 — The Destruction of the Empire of Greed | A Philosophical Manifesto already perceived the core of this process: 'Those who know sufficiency are wealthy; diminish the surplus and supplement the deficit; the Dao follows nature' — these are not moral admonishments but the most refined classical expressions of Natural Cybernetics. This book's task is to restate this ancient and eternal truth in the language of modern systems science. The book unfolds across twelve chapters in three movements. Chapters One through Seven constitute the indictment and anatomy: the seven capital crimes of the Empire of Greed; the power structure of plutocratic collusion; the dynamics of the positive feedback death spiral; the death certificate of planetary boundaries; the desertification of the spiritual ecology; the casebook of historical civilizational collapses; and the intellectual genealogy of greed's legitimization. Chapters Eight through Eleven constitute the summoning and construction: the systems-scientific restatement of Natural Cybernetics; the civilizational form construction of Natural Civilization; the historical analysis of the Fourth Awakening; and the systematic refutation of the Empire of Greed's defensive arguments. Chapter Twelve delivers the final verdict: nature's judgment on the Empire of Greed. This book is grounded in the theoretical framework of the Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology — integrating the philosophical wisdom of Dao Follows Nature with the epistemological achievements of modern systems science to construct the core foundations of Natural Civilization theory. This framework has been progressively developed in a series of papers published on PhilArchive; this book is its most systematic and complete civilizational critique and constructive statement. The format of the verdict is pronouncement. Nature does not judge — nature only computes. And the computation is complete. (shrink)

Discusses how cultural and economic changes around the world have caused a shift in the concepts that shape modern politics and defined the new global order.

Place-based education is founded on the idea that the student’s local community is one of their primary learning resources. Place-based education’s underlying educational principle is that students need to first have an experiential understanding of the history, culture, and ecology of the environment in which they are situated before tackling broader national and global issues. Such attempts are a step in the right direction in dealing with controversial issues in a democracy by providing resources for synthesising curriculum though theory (curriculum (...) content, including traditional subjects) and practice (practical learning as experiential education). Nevertheless, many place-based accounts discount Indigenous conceptions of place, which are integral to Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing, especially in relation to the ontological relationship to Land and Country. Indigenous philosophy has the potential to inform what place-based education means by students developing a ‘sense of place’ when engaging with local communities as their ‘own’ place. In this article we re-imagine the community of inquiry as a place-responsive pedagogy by learning from Indigenous philosophy, and recentring Indigenous notions of place in experiential learning. In addition to exploring the pedagogical potential of a place-responsive account of the community of inquiry, we look to the implications for teacher preparation. (shrink)

This collection of original essays by leading historians of political thought examines modern European thinkers' writings about conquest, colonization and empire. The creation of vast transcontinental empires and imperial trading networks played a key role in the development of modern European political thought. The rise of modern empires raised fundamental questions about virtually the entire contested set of concepts that lay at the heart of modern political philosophy, such as property, sovereignty, international justice, war, trade, rights, transnational duties, civilization (...) and progress. From Renaissance republican writings about conquest and liberty to sixteenth-century writings about the Spanish conquest of the Americas through Enlightenment perspectives about conquest and global commerce and nineteenth-century writings about imperial activities both within and outside of Europe, these essays survey the central moral and political questions occasioned by the development of overseas empires and European encounters with the non-European world among theologians, historians, philosophers, diplomats and merchants. (shrink)

An outgrowth of Dosse's History of Structuralism, Empire of Meaning is an extended encounter with some of the most influential French intellectuals.

This essay brings together political theories of empire and racial capitalism to clarify the entanglements between socialist and imperial discourse at the turn of the twentieth century. I show that white labor activists and intellectuals in the United States and the British settler colonies borrowed from imperial scripts to mark non-white workers as a threat. This discourse was thus both imperial and popular, because it absorbed the white working class into settler projects and enlisted its support in defense of (...) imperial logics of labor control. While white workers’ demands of enfranchisement were part of a transnational imagination that was both imperial and narrowly emancipatory, this discourse reemerged as one of popular sovereignty and found channels and paths to institutionalization through national states. These institutional formations arose out of the encounter between capitalists interested in facilitating mobility of racialized laboring subjects around the globe, elite projects invested in sheltering settler spaces, and white workers concerned with protecting their own labor from competition by excluding exploitable non-white workers. White labor’s embrace of racial prejudice and the exclusion of workers of color created segregated labor spaces that fit neatly with both capitalist goals of labor control and the protection of the settler status of emerging polities. Bringing to the forefront the imperial genealogy of popular sovereignty and immigration control disrupts liberal political theory frameworks that condemn restrictions as well as those that find migration restrictions permissible. The analysis also illuminates contemporary immigration politics. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has pointed out that the diffusion of nationalism is a global transformation steered by empires to consolidate and camouflage their power. This essay argues that empires strategically foster nationalism, but struggle to overcome the intrinsic tensions between maintaining imperial structure and building nation-states. Thus, empires’ behaviors associated with their fostering of nationalism lapsed into multiple levels that demanded different commitment and resources. Empires were eager to weaponize nationalist movements to weaken their geopolitical rivals, but were less interested in (...) creating nation-states, and in general lacked motivation to sponsor nation-building for formerly oppressed nations. The tensions between maintaining imperial structures and fostering nationalism also bred empires’ internal reforms and competition among empires. Conservative empires were more reluctant and incapable of engaging with nationalism. The inter-empire competition caused the conventional formal empires to lose power to new hegemons that openly negated the political format of empire. Fostering nationalism also yielded consequences empires had not anticipated, which facilitated the global proliferation and empowerment of nationalism. (shrink)

ExcerptWhat are normally translated as “empire” (帝國, dìguó) and “imperialism” (帝国主义, dìguó zhǔyì) are the subject of considerable debate among scholars. While English language studies into empire and imperialism are almost without exception critical,1 Chinese-history and philosophy-inspired readings of tiānxià (“all under Heaven,” 天下) and virtue-based hierarchy, which have exploded in recent years, are more varied.2 Readings of U.S., Western, and Chinese imperial orders, while always important in the analysis of international affairs and domestic politics, are especially important (...) at a time of interregnum, when actors perceive a definitive shift in power capabilities and a recalibration of status and recognition.3. (shrink)

General and comparative studies of empire – like those of revolution – often suffer from insufficient attention to chronology. Time expresses itself both in the form that empires occur, often in succession to each other – the Roman, the Holy Roman, the Spanish, etc. – and, equally, in an awareness that this succession links empires in a genealogical sense, as part of a family of empires. This article explores the implications of taking time seriously, so that empires are not (...) considered simply as like ‘cases’ of a general phenomenon of empire but are treated as both ‘the same and different’. Concentrating on the European empires since the time of Rome, the article shows the extent to which empires were conscious of each other, seeking both to imitate admired features as well as to escape from those thought less desirable. It also shows the difference between ancient and modern empires, considered not so much as different types as in the differences caused by their location in different points in historical time. Comparative studies of empire, the article concludes, must pay attention to both continuity and change, both similarity and difference. (shrink)

In this article Roland Sintos Coloma argues for the relevance of empire as an analytical category in educational research. He points out the silence in mainstream studies of education on the subject of empire, the various interpretive approaches to deploying empire as an analytic, and the importance of indigeneity in research on empire and education. Coloma examines three award-winning books, Lawrence Cremin's The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957, John Willinsky's Learning to Divide (...) the World: Education at Empire's End, and David Wallace Adams's Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928, in order to delineate the heuristic spectrum of the use of empire in educational research. These texts are put in conversation with the interdisciplinary fields of American, postcolonial, race/ethnic, and indigenous studies where questions of empire have received considerable attention. Ultimately, mobilizing empire as an analytical category will enable researchers, policymakers, and educators to establish new connections and dispute long-standing views about discursive, structural, and affective dynamics at local, national, and global levels. (shrink)

Few historical subjects have generated such intense and sustained interest in recent decades as Britain's imperial past. What accounts for this preoccupation? Why has it gained such purchase on the historical imagination? How has it endured even as its subject slips further into the past?In seeking to answer these questions, the proposed volume brings together some of the leading figures in the field, historians of different generations, different nationalities, different methodological and theoretical perspectives and different ideological persuasions. Each addresses the (...) relationship between their personal development as historians of empire and the larger forces and events that helped to shape their careers. The result is a book that investigates the connections between the past and the present, the private and the public, the professional practices of historians and the political environments within which they take shape. This intellectual genealogy of the recent historiography of empire will be of great value to anyone studying or researching in the field of imperial history. (shrink)

Review of Aurel Codoban, Imperiul comunicării: corp, imagine și relaționare (The Empire of Communication: Body, Image and Relation), (Cluj-Napoca: Idea Design &Print, 2011).

Various approaches to Paul's relationship with the Roman Empire have come to the fore, including those who see Paul's discourse as anti-imperial, pro-imperial, ambiguous towards empire and those who argue that Paul's discourse transcends that of empire. The nature and influence of the Roman Empire are examined, and the various scholarly approaches to Paul's relationship to empire are considered. Romans 13:1-7 is used as a test case to better understand Paul's stance towards the Roman (...) class='Hi'>Empire or government authorities in general. Although it has been argued that Paul's stance towards empire was influenced by 'Jewish apocalyptic', in this contribution, it is argued that Paul's eschatology as laid out in his letters rather than 'Jewish apocalyptic' as such is key to understanding the seemingly ambiguous statements about the Roman Empire in his letters. CONTRIBUTION: This article's contribution mainly lies in its approach to understand Paul's relationship to the Roman Empire from the perspective of his own eschatology. Here, traditional understandings of Paul's relationship to empire is put in a larger perspective, which contributes in solving Paul's seemingly ambiguous stance towards Roman authority. (shrink)

Recent work on Statius’s Silvae has emphasized the poet’s efforts to create “intimacy” with his private patrons through espousing a value system based on friendship, connoisseurship, and shared literary interests, a system opposed to the public values of political ambition and the blunt glorification of military power in imperial expansion. This essay, however, argues that we have yet to comprehend the extent to which the dynamics of empire itself inform the creation of such intimacy in the Silvae. Specifically, what (...) Sara Ahmed has described as empire’s “queering” effect on the subject’s relation to objects of desire has a formative role in Statian intimacy. I focus on one of the Silvae that has been central to the formation of the current view of Statius outlined above: Silvae 4.6, on a Hercules statuette owned by Novius Vindex but previously the possession of three empire-builders, Alexander, Hannibal, and Sulla. (shrink)

This paper argues that Hegel’s account of modernity is already an account of postmodernity, according to Fredric Jameson’s definition of the cultural logic of globalized capitalism. First, Hegel’s account of the problematic of modernity will be sought in the Phenomenology of Spirit by considering the constellation of Athens, Rome and Christianity along with Hegel’s contrast between tragedy and comedy in the “Religion” chapter, in order to present a philosophical account of a concrete problem connecting social, political and economic structures with (...) their own self-representations. The core problematic will become instantiated in the legal figure of the “person” and the social world-structure of “empire”, associated with both Roman legality and comedy. It will be argued that Hegel’s socio-historical relevance today hinges on drawing a connection between Jameson’s periodization of Realism-Modernism-Postmodernism and Hegel’s aesthetic cultural categories of Epic-Tragedy-Comedy, and not Greece-Rome- Christianity. On this basis, the Phenomenology of Spirit stands as Hegel’s own “cognitive map”, for which comedy designates a problematic extreme of a social regime of representation commensurate with the contemporary cultural logic of late and imperial capitalism. (shrink)

The status of boundaries and borders, questions of global poverty and inequality, criteria for the legitimate uses of force, the value of international law, human rights, nationality, sovereignty, migration, territory, and citizenship: debates over these critical issues are central to contemporary understandings of world politics. Bringing together an interdisciplinary range of contributors, including historians, political theorists, lawyers, and international relations scholars, this is the first volume of its kind to explore the racial and imperial dimensions of normative debates over global (...) justice. (shrink)

Vladimir Putin’s legitimation of Russia’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine raises questions about traditional understandings of nation and empire. Should we contrast the two in terms of values and practices? In this case, Putin uses both nationalist and Imperialist rhetoric to justify his actions. My essay questions how we understand nation and empire using the example of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. How did this empire develop laws, institutions and administrative practices to manage conflicts and claims around (...) language use and nationalism? How did Austria’s governments rule a multi-lingual, multi-confessional society effectively, without resorting to brutal policies of nationalization? When nationalist conflicts arose in different settings, how and why did they originate? I conclude that in European terms, Imperial Austria and even nationalist Hungary apparently managed daily-life issues around diverse language use and religious practice far more humanely and effectively than did the successor nation states after 1918. (shrink)

Julian Bourg reviews Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri; Negri on Negri, by Antonio Negri and Anne Dufourmantelle; Time for Revolution, by Antonio Negri; Debating Empire, edited by Gopal Balakrishnan; and Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri, edited by Paul Passavant.

In 1995, Toulon became the largest city in Europe to come under the far right since the end of World War II. This book asks what led up to the far right's win; how it governed for six years; and what we learn from mainstream politicians who are keeping it weak. Empire's Legacy delves into a latent far right affinity in French society, traces the deep roots of this affinity, and explains why it has become a factor in French (...) politics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Empire Writes Back, With A VengeanceDenis DuttonOne of the more uplifting aspects of the turn toward theory in recent years has been the growth of postcolonial cultural studies. Postcolonial studies are in actuality constituted by counterdiscoursive, decolonizing practices which acknowledge the recognition of minority discourses, deconstructing hegemonic texts and imperialist metanarratives, opposing unduly overprivileging Western canonical paradigms of “literature,” and—well, you know what I mean. As Benita (...) Parry so lucidly explains, “The labor of producing a counter-discourse displacing imperialism’s dominative system of knowledge rests with those engaged in developing a critique from outside its cultural hegemony.” And what an awesome labor it is. The noted postcolonial theorist Georg M. Gugelberger sums things up by saying (I’m not inventing this) “postcolonialism can be conceptualized as the last bulwark against an encroaching total capitalism.”But what of the struggling masses of oppressed peoples whose interests and cultural sensitivities are so caringly looked after by practitioners of postcolonial studies? How do they feel about the fact that the only thing standing between them and “total capitalism” is resistance being mounted in a comparative literature department in Idaho, or someplace? This is a question seldom asked, let alone answered. Fortunately, new light has been thrown on the matter with the arrival of a booklet at this journal. Indian History from Above and Below, by Rukun Advani, is published by Ram Advani, probably a member of the family, in Lucknow. It is dedicated to “all Bengali intellectuals and those whose dollar salaries rise in proportion with obscurity and jargon.” Advani notes in his preface that although Bengali intellectuals talk torrents in their native tongue, when they [End Page 198] disseminate their thoughts abroad, they translate into a “clogged, colonial, unfluid flow,” with footnotes such as: “Derrida; ibid.; see my recent essay on the modes and moods of Foucault in JPS, III.iii, 3–333; on Lacan, see Lacan, On Lacan; Barthes, how many times a day do you have one in summer; idem., do you really?; differentiated peasantry; undifferentiated peasantry; for a feminist, though partially anthropologized, hermeneutic-critical discourse on the post-colonial subversive dimensions of the undifferentiated middle peasant in Midnapore district in June 1959, see the provocative controversy between Ranajit da and Amiya da in Gayatri di, ed., Gendered, Gendered, O Most Gendered: Epistemology and the Male Menopause in Bengal between June 1959 and July 1959 (Oxford University Press, forty years later).”The first of the booklet’s two essays, “Indian History from Below: a Swiftian Consideration,” discusses a neglected but “important arena of subaltern existence, namely the history of belching, wind-breaking and defecation.” Just to name these three functions posits “a bourgeois hierarchy of disgust with what Marx, in one of his most decisively Derridesque reflections, termed ‘The Asiatic Commode of Production.’” Beginning with the Foucauldian notion of “the peasant’s overdetermined relative autonomy from the olfactory,” Advani describes “the Barthesian notion of the impossibility of critical transcendence by the historian into either the symbiotic acculturation of the pastness, and indeed the presentness, of the present-subject, or indeed the even greater epistemological and hermeneutic problems posed by attempting a recreation of the ontological presuppositions of the peasant.” Much of this is elaborated in the classic essay by Professor Lavatri Lavatory Spewhack, “The Post-Colonial Lavatory and Its Radical Implications for Nomenclaturing Among Gendered and Subalternized Third World Expatriate-Marxist-Feminists in the First and Second Worlds: A Derivative Discourse Decoded.”The debt that Rukun Advani owes to Professor Spewhack is clear from the sheer number of his references to books and articles by her. These include, on the subject of toileting, Master Disgusted, Native Disgusting: a Perspective on Peasants from 250,000 Dollars per Annum, “On the Symbolic Hegemony of Subsection Numbers in a Gendered and Subalternized Post-Colonial Context: A Derivative Discourse Decoded” (in The Phenomenology of Praxis and the Praxis of Phenomenology in a Postmodern Residential Colony), “The Violence of Steam and the Episteme of Violence: Foucault’s Views on Hot Air Balloons” (in Obscurata), and even parts of her autobiography: The Larger than Life of Lavatri Lavatory [End Page 199] Spewhack (chapter titled “My Collected Phonecalls and Faxes”). While some... (shrink)

In order to consider the question of whether empire is a subject for philosophy, I do three things. I sketch an original typology of three types of state, which I call polis, imperium and cosmopolis, in order to show that the second is an important philosophical conception which lies behind the terminology of empire and imperialism. I also consider modern theories of empire and imperialism in order to indicate some of their limitations as theories. And finally I (...) indicate that it is important even for philosophers to recognise that all imperial terminology emerges out of a very complicated history in which the concept of imperium has been extended and distorted in meaning, so that, at best, any good theory of empire or imperialism can only be some sort of recapitulation of that history. Neither the second nor the third of these claims undermines the claim of imperium to be a concept of the state which is of great political and philosophical significance. (shrink)

Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works roots the danger of undermining propaganda in an ideology based account of politics, treating individuals’ beliefs and social belief systems as the primary target and mechanism of undermining propaganda. In this paper I suggest a theoretical alternative to the role ideology plays in Stanley’s theory and theories like it, which I call practice first. A practice first account instead treats public behavior as the primary target of propaganda, and analyzes undermining propaganda as altering the incentive (...) structure that sets the terms for public behavior. (shrink)

The 1870s is a key decade in the evolution of British thinking about the nature, purpose, and future of empire. Increasing economic competition began to disturb the complacent assumption about Britain's leadership in technology and in the world economy. The growth of other countries, most notably the United States and Germany, put in question Britain's survival as a great power. These changes set in motion a reappraisal of Britain's empire and its importance to the motherland, and a heated (...) debated as to whether colonialism and imperialism were a burden rather than a benefit to Britain. The discussion of the 1870s set the agenda for the debates of the next half-century. This volume documents the writing central to the debate; it includes contributions by such leading British thinkers and statesmen as J. A. Froude, Robert Lowe, Edward Dicey, Frederic Seebohm, Lord Carnarvon, Gladstone, Julius Vogel, and Lord Blachford. (shrink)

Considerable attention has been paid to the ideas of critics of the British Empire in the period of its most rapid expansion and rather less to the views of those who supported it strongly. This article investigates the arguments of what are called, showing how they used the language of character, stiffened by elements from earlier languages of virtue, to justify the possession of empire. They argued that character had been critical in making Britain an imperial power and (...) also claimed that, without the stimulus to action and duty provided by the defence and the governance of empire, character would atrophy, and the nation would suffer catastrophic and irreversible decline. The article ends by comparing the position with that of, firstly, the larger body of more pragmatic supporters of empire and, secondly, the small group of radical anti-imperialists who feared that empire was destructive of character. (shrink)

After the United States invaded Puerto Rico in 1898, the new unincorporated territory sought to define its future. Seeking to shape the next generation and generate popular support for colonial rule, U.S. officials looked to education as a key venue for promoting the benefits of Americanization. At the same time, public schools became a site where Puerto Rican teachers, parents, and students could formulate and advance their own projects for building citizenship. In _Negotiating Empire_, Solsiree del Moral demonstrates how these (...) colonial intermediaries aimed for regeneration and progress through education. Rather than seeing U.S. empire in Puerto Rico during this period as a contest between two sharply polarized groups, del Moral views their interaction as a process of negotiation. Although educators and families rejected some tenets of Americanization, such as English-language instruction, they also redefined and appropriated others to their benefit to increase literacy and skills required for better occupations and social mobility. Pushing their citizenship-building vision through the schools, Puerto Ricans negotiated a different school project—one that was reformist yet radical, modern yet traditional, colonial yet nationalist. (shrink)

Post-11 September Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire has found mass popularity. In this article I discuss the text's relationship to postmodern capitalism, attempt to understand its appeal after the attacks on New York and Washington, and consider its political message. To this end, the first part of the paper aims to situate Empire against the background of the global economy and the 11 September attacks. Beyond this formal critique of Hardt and Negri's book, the second part of (...) the article undertakes a psychoanalytic critique of the text itself. The role of this section is to show how the formal situation ofEmpire is written into the fabric of the book. The conclusion of the article assesses Hardt and Negri's political position in relation to Derrida's critique of globalization in Specters of Marx. (shrink)

Title descriptionLike Roland Barthes' well-known book, L’Empire des signes, from which the title of the present collection is taken, this volume contains essays dealing with certain aspects of Japanese culture.

From Machiavellian city officials to big-time mobsters, corrupt beat cops, and overzealous G-men, Boardwalk Empire is replete with philosophically compelling characters who find themselves in philosophically interesting situations. This book is directed at thoughtful fans of the show. Here, readers discover parallels between the events in Boardwalk Empire and contemporary political events. Twenty philosophers address issues in political philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, feminism, and metaphysics. Is Nucky Thomson a Machiavellian prince or a Nietzschean superman? Is Jimmy's resentment towards Nucky (...) justified, given that Jimmy would never have come into existence had his parents not met? What can be said about the ethics of lying in the seedy world of bootlegging? Agent Van Alden’s unique religious attitudes bring a warped sense of morality to the Boardwalk universe. One chapter brings to light the moral character of Van Alden’s God. Other chapters explores the roles that storytelling, deception, and gender play in the show. (shrink)

This article argues thatPanegyricus LatinusXII(9), a speech performed before Constantine in Trier in 313c.e.following his defeat of Maxentius the previous year, acted as a crucial localized act of communication to the emperor. Through a series of allusions and the careful presentation of his narrative, the orator made a case for the continued political and cultural importance of Trier within the newly expanded Constantinian empire.

In 1872, there were more than 300,000 slaves in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Though the Spanish government had passed a law for gradual abolition in 1870, slaveowners, particularly in Cuba, clung tenaciously to their slaves as unfree labor was at the core of the colonial economies. Nonetheless, people throughout the Spanish empire fought to abolish slavery, including the Antillean and Spanish liberals and republicans who founded the Spanish Abolitionist Society in 1865. This book is an extensive study of the (...) origins of the Abolitionist Society and its role in the destruction of Cuban and Puerto Rican slavery and the reshaping of colonial politics. (shrink)

This essay reconsiders David Hume’s thinking on the fate of the British Empire and the future of established religion. It provides a detailed reconstruction of the development of Hume’s views on Britain’s successive attempts to impose or regain its authority over its North American colonies and compares these views with the stance taken during the American Crisis by Adam Smith and Josiah Tucker. Fresh light is shed on this area of Hume’s later political thought by a new letter, appended (...) to the essay, which at the same time provides an illuminating glimpse of his abiding preoccupation with the future of established religion. It is argued that this evidence of Hume’s privately held views belies the notion that his thinking on political and religious matters was fundamentally opposed to that of his friends among the philosophes. It is consequently misleading to regard Hume as an opponent of the more radical wing of the Enlightenment. (shrink)

Drawing insights from queer theory, this essay argues for making sex a more central category in political theorists’ interpretations of Diderot’s Supplement, and also of his contributions to History of the Two Indies. The Supplement has sometimes been considered a “libertine” text for depicting Tahiti as a society where sex is open, and indeed where foreign guests are treated to sexual hospitality. This essay reconstructs how and why Diderot’s Tahitians make promiscuity public policy and why Diderot makes miscegenation central to (...) his views on how to improve colonialism morally and politically. In the end, though, the Supplement is beset by asymmetric sexual logics that erode its apparent affirmation of egalitarianism, consent, hospitality, and non-egocentric interest. Although the presentation of sexual hospitality serves to critique French imperialism, its heterosexuality is compulsory and patriarchal. Nevertheless the text unwittingly offers a glimpse of a more radical, queer model of sociability. (shrink)

This paper maps Hardt and Negri’s use of Deleuze philosophical commitment to the control society as a temporal phenomena in the context of education. Education is important because it is pushed and pulled by those vectors that Hardt and Negri see as central tensions in late capitalism: localism vs globalisation, discipline vs control, codes vs axioms, metrics vs expertise and so on. In Empire, Hardt and Negri represent Empire as a form of governance that responds to the passing (...) from disciplinary societies to societies of control. The societies of control are central to their concept of Empire defined “as a regime of the production of identity and difference, or really of homogenization and heterogenization”. Empire, then, is a macropolitics that produces, or infiltrates, subjectivation as a means to affect the self within globalising and localising regimes. This paper takes up Hardt and Negri’s challenge in two areas. First concerns what appears to be the collapse of the ideal of publicness within public school systems. The second provocation concerns the digital, or presumptive, economy of online and adaptive learning systems. (shrink)

In the final section of their work Empire, Hardt and Negri discuss the coming into being of the multitude, the unified force that overthrows the system of ‘Empire’. Absent from the account of this unification of the multitude is the influence of religion. I endeavor to show that contrary to Hardt’s and Negri’s assumption, religion is not dissipating among the multitude and that its impact will be contrary to the creation of a unified multitude. Thus the creation of (...) the unified multitude requires an absence of religion, but the creation of the multitude under the system of Empire entails a creation of more theists, leading to a seeming contradiction in the process of creating a unified multitude. In order for the creation of the multitude envisioned by Hardt and Negri to be complete, the issue of religion must be addressed, it cannot simply be assumed away as unimportant or non-existent. (shrink)

Is the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri compatible with critical realism? In this article I argue that their book Empire is not, whereas Multitude is. Critical realists should be interested in this question because the passage from Empire to Multitude can be reconstructed as a case of critical realist underlabouring and, as such, exemplifies an openness to critique and changing political circumstances that critical realists prescribe for themselves but unfortunately tend in practice to ignore. Highlighting the (...) concepts and practice of underlabouring, of judgemental rationality and epistemological relativism, I argue that Hardt and Negri can also underlabour for critical realists, in that their work demonstrates the need for underlabouring to proceed in a non-philosophical as well as philosophical vein. Thus, striving for a new science and human emancipation in critical realism can assume a theoretically as well as an empirically informed content, and a historically situated commitment. (shrink)

This article situates the work of East India Company servant Alexander Dow (1735–1779), principally his writings on the history and future state of India, in contemporary debates about empire, religion and enlightened government. To do so it offers a sustained analysis of his 1772 essay ‘A Dissertation Concerning the Origin and Nature of Despotism in Hindostan’, as well as his proposals for the restoration of Bengal, both of which played an influential part in shaping the preoccupations with Mughal history (...) that dominated the contemporary crisis in the Company’s legitimacy. By linking these texts to his earlier work on ‘Hindoo’ religion, it will argue that Dow’s analysis of the relationship between certain religious cultures and their civic qualities was rooted in a deist perspective. It doing so it restores the enlightenment components of Dow’s thought, and their impact on the ideology of empire, in a crucial period of British expansion in India. (shrink)

Exploring Law's Empire is a collection of essays by leading legal theorists and philosophers who have been invited to develop, defend, or critique Ronald Dworkin's controversial and exciting jurisprudence. The volume explores Dworkin's critique of legal positivism, his theory of law as integrity, and his writings on constitutional jurisprudence. Each essay is a cutting-edge contribution to its field of inquiry, the highlights of which include an introduction by Justice Stephen Breyer of the United States Supreme Court, and a concluding (...) essay by Dworkin himself. This final chapter responds to the preceding essays and lays out Dworkin's own vision for the future of jurisprdence over the coming years. (shrink)