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The history of the word politicus in early-modern Europe
Abstract
This volume studies the concept of a political 'language', of a discourse composed of shared vocabularies, idioms and rhetorical strategies, which has been widely influential on recent work in the history of political thought. The collection brings together a number of essays by a distinguished group of international scholars, on the four dominant languages in use in Europe between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. They are: the language of political Aristotelianism and the natural law; the language of classical republicanism; the language of commerce and the commercial society; and the language of a science of politics. Each author has chosen a single aspect of his or her language, sometimes the work of a single author, in one case the history of a single team, and shown how it determined the shape and development of that language, and the extent to which each language was a response to the challenge of other modes of discourse.
... Rhetorically, the vocabulary of politics forms a major part of the European intellectual heritage (see Meier 1980;Palonen 1985Palonen , 2006Rubinstein 1987;Meier, Weinacht & Vollrath 1989;Meier, Papenheim & Steinmetz 2012;Steinmetz et al. 2013;Claussen 2021). ...
Whether politics is a separate sphere or an aspect of human action is a subject of academic controversy. I focus here on the political aspect of action, which is not exclusive of other aspects. There are no ‘naturally political’ issues nor is there anything completely devoid of a political aspect. I am now taking a step backwards to discuss the seemingly simple ‘political or not’ question, as compared to the ‘political in which sense’ question, which I have discussed elsewhere. In this article, I stay on the ideal–typical level, as I want to discuss alternative ways of marking the criteria for the political aspect, without discussing the views of other scholars in detail. I call the procedure for judging and naming this aspect political literacy, a way of making explicit the presence of the political aspect in some phenomena or questions. What is political at a certain time can, in other words, be judged as the result of a politicising reading of the phenomena in question. Here I shall construct a repertoire of certain ideal–typical criteria for marking the political aspects and making sense of actual disputes regarding the political. The repertoire includes the criteria of political action under such headings as expediency, partisanship, controversy and contingency. I regard the view of politics as belonging to a separate sphere as a zero option. All of the paradigms can be regarded as different facets of politics as a contingent activity.
... Yet Bodin realized something, the rise of the new Machiavelli state with its offer of the possibility of successful civic or political rule and required either a change of political speech, which at the time spoke of princely rule and the princely body -his body and his territorial body, or a whole new political language (Viroli, 1992a;Viroli, 1992b;Rubinstein, 1987;compare Rahe, 1992 andRahe, 2008). Also, given the negative reaction to Machiavelli's even minor revolution, any perceived radical break with the political concepts and language of the past would not be successful. ...
This paper suggests that the trajectory that Machiavelli's concept of the state took by later political thinkers, active in reshaping the character of the political order they were working with, fundamentally shaped and altered the direction of the political development of Early Modern Europe. Looking at how later thinkers used Machiavelli's concept and reframed it in their given political traditions and contexts often leads to how the concept evolved over time. This paper argues that there was a clear arch of how Machiavelli's concept of the state was reformulated and repackaged by key legal and political thinkers such as Gentili, Bodin, Grotius, and finally Hobbes. Their reformation of Machiavelli's state fundamentally altered the concept radically from what Machiavelli coined as an outcome of the given prince's new modes and orders to Hobbes's depersonalized Leviathan.
... Esta es una expresión que diversos traductores han vertido al lenguaje de su tiempo, sin lograr transmitir toda su carga semántica, o que, al intentar hacerlo, han tenido que agregarle cualificaciones adicionales 12 . El punto es que esta noción solo tiene sentido a la sombra de otra: la idea aristotélica según la cual la realización de las capacidades del ser humano involucra la participación en los asuntos de su comunidad (Rubinstein, 1990;Viroli, 1992). ...
La crisis económica desatada por la pandemia del covid-19 puede dar lugar a fenómenos de regresión colectiva que, a su turno, pueden ser aprovechados por líderes que promuevan la ruptura de las reglas de juego y la concentración de poder. No obstante, la misma crisis puede ser una oportunidad para la emergencia de un nuevo tipo de liderazgo que logre canalizar creativa y constructivamente las tensio- nes causadas por la pérdida y la humillación experimentadas por muchos individuos. El psicoanalista Vamik Volkan denomina este tipo de liderazgo reparativo. Sin embargo, la metáfora que usa para darle contenido a este concepto revela que permanece anclado en la misma dinámica regresiva que procura superar. Por tal razón, propongo un nuevo concepto de liderazgo sin líderes que, basado en el carácter colectivo, la rotación y el sorteo, permitiría recuperar la concepción de la política como servicio público.
I have extracted the interpretative sections of the long and densely researched book to make it easier for any readers to engage with the proposed reinterpretation.
The only detailed study on French government and politics 1720-1745, constructed almost entirely from archival sources, given the paucity of secondary work. It was written s two volumes, published as a two part single volume, with wide conclusions on the nature or power and the state.
Why devote a Companion to the "mirrors for princes", whose very existence is debated? These texts offer key insights into political thoughts of the past. Their ambiguous, problematic status further enhances their interest. And although recent research has fundamentally challenged established views of these texts, until now there has been no critical introduction to the genre.
This volume therefore fills this important gap, while promoting a global historical perspective of different “mirrors for princes” traditions from antiquity to humanism, via Byzantium, Persia, Islam, and the medieval West. This Companion also proposes new avenues of reflection on the anchoring of these texts in their historical realities.
Contributors are Makram Abbès, Denise Aigle, Olivier Biaggini, Hugo Bizzarri, Charles F. Briggs, Sylvène Edouard, Jean-Philippe Genet, John R. Lenz, Louise Marlow, Cary J. Nederman, Corinne Peneau, Stéphane Péquignot, Noëlle-Laetitia Perret, Günter Prinzing, Volker Reinhardt, Hans-Joachim Schmidt, Tom Stevenson, Karl Ubl, and Steven J. Williams.
richard II was unusual, indeed unique, among medieval English monarchs in making two visits to Ireland in the course of his reign. Within Ireland, the results of royal intervention were disappointing. Before the end of 1399 the acting chief governor of Ireland reported to the English administration that the ‘Irish enemies’ were ‘strong and arrogant and of great power’, that they were aided in their assaults on the king’s loyal subjects by ‘English rebels’ with the result that ‘the law cannot be executed and no officer dares to attempt to execute it’; for there were no soldiers and no resources to pay soldiers to protect the king’s subjects against these attacks.
Ultimately, the king’s expeditions achieved little, but Richard II had at least attempted to go beyond the normal objective of military containment and to formulate proposals for a more lasting political settlement. He could not but be aware of the ethnic division within Ireland which, as we have seen, could lead the administration in Dublin to categorise even its foes on the basis of their real or supposed descent as ‘English rebels’ (opponents of English stock) or ‘Irish enemies’ (hostile Gaelic Irish).
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