What Authority Is Not

1959 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian De Grazia
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
New Words ◽  
Positive Side ◽  
Legitimate Power ◽  
Original Thinking ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Original Concept

Authority is a subject indispensable to politics. No other word carries its basic sense of legitimate power, power exercised over those who have willed its exercise. Cut off from the vocabulary of political theorists it comes back in other guises. Playing hide-and-seek with words would not in itself be so important were it not that it takes time merely to recognize that a game is being played and to realign the new words, each bearing a fraction of the old meaning, into the framework of facts and ideas with which the original concept was associated. It can be urged, on the positive side, that a re-shuffling of words, breaking them up and giving them slightly different connotations, might stir up not only clouds of dust but also some original thinking. This has not happened with the principle of authority. Rather it has been forgotten and is now remembered. The interval has seen little gain. Perhaps “power” has profited in attention, but at the expense of being confused with authority and thus of giving new life to the Thrasymachian conception of politics and its study. Instead, the subject matter of the political scientist is earthly authority and its relation to the divine.

IV. The Use of Visual Aids in Political Science Teaching

1947 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 517-527
Author(s):  
John D. Millett
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Matter Content ◽  
The Political ◽  
Teaching Methodology ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Visual Aids ◽  
Teachers Colleges ◽  
Teacher Student ◽  
The Subject

Like his colleagues generally in the social sciences, the political scientist has prided himself upon the subject-matter content of his teaching. His responsibility has been to enlarge the understanding of the dynamic process by which men govern and are governed. Teaching and research have been coördinate elements of that responsibility. Constantly seeking to find better techniques for observation and measurement of political phenomena, ever trying to define more exactly the field of interest and knowledge, the political scientist has always focused attention upon the subject-matter of his specialization. He has had little time to devote to the problems of teaching methodology.The very fact that higher education has been selective is another possible explanation for our seeming indifference to improvements in teacher-student communication. From necessity, teachers' colleges and the educational profession have given considerable attention to teaching techniques. Primary and secondary schools are intended for mass education. If they fulfill their purpose, they reach virtually all of the population from six to sixteen years of age. The college teacher has had no such mass obligation. Traditionally, only some ten per cent of our high school population continue with higher education, and they are usually divided among the various fields of learning represented in colleges and universities. Selectivity and a limited audience have encouraged the college instructor to concentrate upon subject-matter and to ignore methodology.Political scientists certainly have no reason to offer any apologies for their primary interest.

Rhetoric and Human Separateness

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan Garsten
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Relationship ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Separateness Of Persons ◽  
Deliberative Rhetoric

In his account of how each of us deliberates about what to do, Aristotle remarks that we do not always trust ourselves on important matters and so sometimes take counsel from others. Taking counsel from others is, in some ways, merely an expansion of the internal activity of deliberation; the suggestions come from other people rather than from our ownminds, but the judgment about them remains our own. In other ways, however, taking counsel is quite different from deliberating with oneself. These differences are the subject matter of the art of rhetoric, as Aristotle understands it. The paper compares the political relationship at work in deliberative rhetoric with slavery, which collapses the separateness of persons, and with friendship, which preserves it. And suggests that the importance of anger in Aristotle’s treatment of rhetoric can be understood as a reflection on the implications of human separateness.

scholarly journals Theoretical Approaches to the Concept of Responsibility of Members of Political Parties and its Correlation with Legal Responsibility

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-62
Author(s):  
V. Е. Mamedova
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Social Responsibility ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Legal Responsibility ◽  
The Political ◽  
Basic Properties ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Legal Responsibilities

The paper proposes the author’s understanding of responsibility of members of political parties provided by the political parties’ constitutions and other intraparty documents (intraparty responsibility). Also, the paper demarcates intraparty responsibility, legal and other types of social responsibility. It is concluded that the responsibility of members of political parties is a subspecies of social and statutory responsibility. The study has determined the tendency of convergence (diffusion) of internal party and legal responsibilities; the analysis has been carried out concerning perspectives of treating the responsibility of members of political parties as positive; the author substantiates the conclusion about the need to study intraparty responsibility exclusively in retrospective aspect. The author elucidates the thesis concerning expediency of enforcement of intra-party penalties as the subject matter of responsibility of members of political parties. Also, the basic properties of intra-party responsibility are revealed and analyzed. The study has investigated the influence of ambivalent nature of political parties and peculiarities of intra-party relations regarding the properties of responsibility of members of political parties.

ἐλάχɩστον … ἐν τοῖς ἄρσεσι κλέος: Thucydides, Women, and the Limits of Rational Analysis

1983 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas E. J. Wiedemann
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Rational Analysis ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Town ◽  
Possible Cause

The comparative infrequency of references to women in Thucydides' history has often been remarked upon, and explained as due in part to the choice of warfare as his theme, and in part to the success of the Greek republics in excluding women from the political arena. As Pericles says in his funeral speech, women ought to give their menfolk the least possible cause to have to take note of them (2.45.2). But the exclusion of women from the subject-matter of historical discourse is peculiarly Thucydidean. Powell's Lexicon tells us that Thucydides' contemporary Herodotus uses γ⋯νηs 373 times, while the number of references to women/wives, mothers, priestesses etc. in Thucydides is less than fifty. This does not mean of course that Thucydides has no interest in, or sympathy for, women: frequently he mentions them as the passive objects of military circumstances precisely in order to underline the tragic effects of warfare. But some of the references to women are decidedly curious. There is a clear example in the account of the unsuccessful Theban attack on Plataea in 431 B.C., with which active hostilities began. Thucydides tells us that some of the Thebans who were locked into the town escaped by breaking open a deserted gate without being noticed (2.4.4). Why does he gratuitously mention that it was a women – presumably a Plataean – who gave her enemies an axe: γυναικ⋯ς δο⋯σης π⋯λɛκυν Clearly, it is an overimplification to say that Thucydides ignores women.

Specialization and Prestige in the Legal Profession: The Structure of Deference

1977 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward O. Laumann ◽  
John P. Heinz
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Strong Relationship ◽  
The Political ◽  
Surprising Result ◽  
Substantial Correlation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Large Random Sample ◽  
Professional Power ◽  
Intellectual Challenge

The process of specialization is now well advanced within the legal profession, and the specialties have acquired clearly varying levels of prestige among the practicing bar. What are the characteristics of the specialties, or of the lawyers who practice in them, that might account for these variations in prestige? In describing the prestige differences and several of the variables that might be thought to account for them, the authors analyze the results of a survey of a large random sample of Chicago lawyers. Among the findings are a strong relationship between prestige within the legal profession and the type of clients that the specialty serves, a substantial correlation between prestige and the degree of intellectual challenge presented by the subject matter of the specialty, and the perhaps surprising result that prestige is not significantly associated with the income earned by lawyers practicing in the specialty. The authors conclude that legal specialties that regularly confront personal suffering lose social standing as a result, that prestige within the profession is directly proportional to the degree to which the specialty facilitates the conduct of corporate enterprise, and that the varying prestige of the specialties is likely to affect the political and professional power of the lawyers who practice in them and to influence the patterns of recruitment of lawyers into law practice.

scholarly journals O is for Orientalism: the dynamics of the sexual tourist gaze in Laurent Cantet’s Vers le sud/Heading South (2005)

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-47
Author(s):  
Charlotte Hammond ◽  
Andrew McGregor
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Political Repression ◽  
Spatial Politics ◽  
Tourist Gaze ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Sexual Tourism

This article explores the Orientalist dynamics of North/South sexual tourism in Laurent Cantet’s Vers le sud/Heading South (2005). The narrative of the film is structured around the self-interested motivations of three white middle-aged bourgeois Western women who travel from North America to Haiti in the late 1970s in order to explore their sexuality in what they perceive as an island paradise, effectively exiling themselves from the codified social behavior expected of them in their homeland. The women avail themselves of the pleasures offered by young black Haitian men, often in exchange for money or goods, and fuel one-sided fantasies of romantic love with their local hosts, seemingly oblivious to the Orientalist nature of such an imbalance of social and economic power. The article explores the historical context of the political repression and violence of late-1970s Haiti under the Duvalier regime, as well as the manifestations of spatial politics represented in the film. In its Haitian setting, Vers le sud sheds light on a relatively unfamiliar cultural and social milieu for the Western/Northern audience, with the director keenly aware of the exoticism of the subject matter and the impossibility of the film to maintain its neutrality in a problematic engagement with the Orient/South. The article argues that the privileged position of the film’s protagonists is matched not only by Cantet’s directorial gaze, but also by the intellectual detachment of postcolonial scholars such as the article’s authors, who acknowledge that their engagement with the subject matter risks re-enacting the Orientalist dynamics they seek to expose.

PLATO AND ARISTOPHANES ON (WANT OF) EDUCATION: SHAME AND EROS IN THE GORGIAS AND IN THE CLOUDS

Ramus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-147
Author(s):  
Marina Marren
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
The Political ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Mental Picture ◽  
Cultural Ideals ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Objective Sense ◽  
The Subject ◽  
New Education

Plato's Gorgias might as well have been named On Shame. The word appears sixty-nine times in the course of the dialogue with a lion's share of references to shame being made by Socrates’ character. Callicles comes in second in his use of the term. Cairns notes that in the corpus of the lyric poet Theognis of Megara (sixth century BC) we have ‘the first instance of the noun aischunē.’ Cairns goes on to comment on Theognis’ use of αἰσχύνη and says that ‘[h]ere it appears in the objective sense, but later it will also be found in a subjective sense, as the reaction to or mental picture of disgrace and so as equivalent of aidōs.’ Although it is important to differentiate αἰσχύνη and αἰδώς, the terms, as Cairns suggests, are capable of expressing interchangeable meanings. Hence, in our comparative study of shame in the Gorgias and in the Clouds, we pay close attention to and examine the context in which a given term appears. The central role that shame plays in the Gorgias is the subject matter of analyses by Race, Bensen Cain, McKim, and Dodds. Race is confident that ‘of all the motifs running through the work, the most insistent is that of shame, for the word aischyne (along with verbal forms of aischynomai and the adjective aischros) occurs over 75 times.’ In line with the view that shame is central in the Gorgias, we offer a further contribution, which focuses on the affinity between the treatment of shame in that dialogue and in Aristophanes’ Clouds. We argue that either the ostensible subject of the Gorgias, which is usually identified as rhetoric, is not the dialogue's true concern or the explicit subject matter cannot be understood without its accompanying element, which is shame. To support this thesis, we undertake a comparative analysis of the thematic, heuristic, and conceptual use of shame in the Gorgias in view of Aristophanes’ play. We argue that the characters in the Clouds portray the same perennial attitudes to life as do the interlocutors in the Gorgias and, what is more, the characters in both works evoke with more than incidental clarity certain historical figures (Alcibiades and Pericles). Thus, both works, as we claim, are commenting on and, even though the Clouds is a comedy, serve as the ground for our philosophical reflection on the political, educational, and cultural ideals of ancient Greece. Moreover, the Clouds makes light of, instead of endorsing, such distinctions as shameful/laudable, natural/conventional, old/new, education/didacticism, and moral/prudish. We draw on the humor of the Clouds, which allows us to withhold immediate judgment about these dichotomies in order to then examine these same notions which are problematized in the Gorgias.

Lulu

Berg ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 317-366
Author(s):  
Simms Bryan
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Twelve Tone ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
The Subject ◽  
A Performance ◽  
Musical Forms

Berg had several early ideas for a text for his second opera, and his choice finally fell on Frank Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. Berg adapted the plays into a single three-act structure and made other changes in the names of characters and their attributes, and he titled his opera Lulu, after the central figure. The subject matter of the opera was highly controversial, with a perverse eroticism and sordid violence. Given the political climate of the early 1930s, prospects for a performance of the work were dim. The chronology by which Berg created the libretto for Lulu and its music reveals many delays that suggest a struggle on the composer’s part in grappling with the subject and with his relatively new twelve-tone method of composing. Berg completed the basic compositional work for the opera in spring 1934, and he then created a concert suite from the work, much as he had done with Wozzeck, which he titled Symphonic Pieces from the Opera “Lulu.” The necessary revisions to the opera that Berg foresaw and most of the orchestration of Act 3 remained incomplete at the time of his death in December 1935, and the opera was performed in its entirety only in 1979. In Lulu Berg fully developed his own distinctive twelve-tone method of composing but continued to invoke traditional musical forms.

The New Politics of European Integration

1971 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 417-421
Author(s):  
Ghiţa Ionescu
Keyword(s):  
European Integration ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
The Political ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Previous Issue ◽  
Present Issue ◽  
New Politics ◽  
British Labour ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Near Future

EXACTLY FIVE YEARS AGO THIS JOURNAL PUBLISHED A SPECIAL ISSUE devoted to ‘The Politics of European Integration’. British-European relations were then at one of their lowest ebbs and our endeavour might have seemed singularly untimely. Yet the issue has been exhausted, and the demand for it continues. But, when faced with the decision to reprint, we thought that the subject matter had evolved so much that we preferred to prepare a new collection of studies. Hence this issue on the new politics of European integration.But there is continuity between the two numbers of the journal. Our subscribers will not fail to notice that many of the articles which appeared in 1966 on basic historical and political aspects of European integration have not been superseded. Indeed the historical articles from the previous issue, together with the political articles of the present issue, supplemented by two historical surveys of British, and British Labour attitudes to the EEC, by Stephen Holt and Michael Wheaton respectively, are to be published in book form in the near future by Messrs Macmillan.

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