bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Gibbon, Edward (1737–94)
Authors: Danford John W.
Published: August 2023

Edward Gibbon, eighteenth‐century man of letters, achieved international fame with his monumental six‐volume
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(the first volume appeared in 1776). He is important in the history of political thought because his work appeared during an extended debate, on both sides of the Atlantic, about the proper size and structure of republics, part of a larger controversy (the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns), the central issue of eighteenth‐century political thought, encompassing subsidiary debates about luxury, social contract theory, individualism, commerce, and the ends of political life itself.
Goldman, Emma (1869–1940)
Authors: Ferguson Kathy E.
Published: August 2023

Arriving in the United States from Russia in 1885, during the first great wave of Jewish immigration from eastern Europe, Emma Goldman soon became the best known anarchist in the United States. With her comrade Alexander Berkman, she worked for over 50 years toward the anarchist goal of a decentralized, self‐governing society voluntarily organized by free and creative individuals. Goldman spoke, wrote, and organized on behalf of labor, free speech, free love, free schools, birth control, radical drama, political prisoners, prostitutes, the general strike, antimilitarism, and revolutions in Russia, Spain, and Mexico. Her monthly journalMother Earthenjoyed substantial circulation from 1906 to its closure by the US government in 1918, reaching as many as 10,000 readers annually. She published four books:Anarchism and Other Essays(1910) compiled some of her best known speeches and articles;The Social Significance of the Modern Drama(1914) collected her summaries and interpretations of progressive European plays for American audiences;My Disillusionment in Russia(1923) voiced her early and unforgiving criticism of the Bolsheviks for strangling the nascent Russian Revolution; and her autobiography,Living My Life(1934), crafted her life as an exemplary rebel for a global audience. She also wrote many thousands of letters, creating the needed energy for sustained political struggle in the face of uneven achievements, persistent state persecution, and the loneliness of exile.
Governance
Authors: Sirianni Carmen
Published: August 2023

While not a new term, “governance” has been increasingly used to capture a set of problems that have to do with the tendencies of state organizations to encompass less of the direct work of governing (regulation, service delivery, representation) and their increasing need to facilitate, catalyze, and collaborate with a broad range of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and market actors to accomplish tasks valued by multiple publics that configure around diverse policy arenas. Governance is now seen as a challenge for formal state institutions at all levels (local, state/province, national), as well as for international collaboration among national and subnational governments, international NGOs, economic development agencies, and global corporations.
Harrington, Michael (1928–89)
Authors: Barrow Clyde W.
Published: August 2023

Michael Harrington was the most visible spokesman for democratic socialism in the United States during most of the Cold War. He was the author of 16 books on Marxism and socialism and a professor of political science at Queens College (New York) from 1972 to 1989.
Hayek, Friedrich August von (1899–1992)
Authors: Spieker Jörg
Published: August 2023

Friedrich August von Hayek was an Austrian‐born British economist, political theorist, and public intellectual who exerted profound influence on the revival of liberal theory and policy in the late twentieth century. Following the completion of two doctorates (in law and in political science) at the University of Vienna, he held professorships at the London School of Economics, the University of Chicago, and the University of Freiburg. In 1974 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, and in 1991 he received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. Hayek is best known for his critique of all forms of socialism and collectivism, which is most forcefully stated in his first major political work,The Road to Serfdom(1944). His later work – notablyThe Constitution of Liberty(1960) and the trilogyLaw, Legislation and Liberty(1973–9) – complements this critique by providing an elaborate and innovative, though not uncontroversial, account of liberal order.
Hegemony
Authors: Simons Jon
Published: August 2023

In Marxist political theory hegemony is a concept according to which power operates not only as coercion and domination by a ruling class but also ideologically and culturally. Beyond the field of political thought, following the term's ancient usage in the context of Greek city‐states, hegemony has referred since the nineteenth century in history and international relations to the predominance of one state over other states, including imperialist domination of other countries. The Marxist concept of hegemony differs from this broader meaning of domination as it understands political rule to entail an accommodation with those ruled.
Hermeneutics
Authors: Loriaux Michael
Published: August 2023

The term “hermeneutics” signifies interpretation, whether conceived as a method of understanding texts or as a more broadly philosophical portrayal of how humanity acquires understanding of the world. The term is derived from the Greekhermēneuō, meaning to “interpret” or to “translate from a foreign language.” Conventional periodizations of the development of hermeneutics describe a progression: from hermeneutics as a method of scriptural exegesis in antiquity and the Middle Ages, to the universal hermeneutics or historicism of the nineteenth century, and finally to its participation in the ontological turn of twentieth‐century phenomenology. This entry respects convention, but recalls where appropriate the dynamic tension that is forever present in hermeneutic scholarship. That tension was no more nor less present in antiquity than it has been in recent times.
Historicism
Authors: McPartland Thomas J.
Published: August 2023

“Historicism” is the English translation of the German “Historismus,” which first came into notable use in the late nineteenth century as a derogatory term for a kind of historical reductionism in debates over political economy. In the 1920s and 1930s the term gained a positive tone in the writings of Troeltsch, Mannheim, Meinecke, and Croce and applied well beyond the confines of political economy to all methods investigating the human world and indeed to the very idea of humanity itself. The ideas associated with it, however, had gained currency for at least a century or more in western thought. No matter how complicated or even contradictory the different claims of historicism might be, these claims almost universally undermined the legitimacy of political thought as an independent field of inquiry.
Homer (ca. 8th century BCE)
Authors: Dolgert Stefan
Published: August 2023

Homer has long been considered a fountainhead of “western” civilization, though it is only more recently that the epic poems attributed to him, theIliadand theOdyssey, have been evaluated as important works of political theory. These epics depict the events surrounding the Trojan War between the Greeks and Trojans, a war caused by the abduction of Helen, wife of the Spartan king Menelaus. Homer's importance for political thought can be seen in three primary fields. (1) As the pedagogical source for classical (fifth‐centurybce) Greece, Homeric texts are considered exemplary of the warrior ethos and as educators of Pericles’ democratic, imperial Athens. (2) Homeric texts are also, and as such, treated as the key antagonists against whom Plato's political philosophy pivots, leading, indeed, to the “quarrel between poetry and philosophy.” (3) Finally, Homer is seen as one of the founding figures in “agonistic” and “tragic” democratic political theory, particularly as this has been articulated by Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Simone Weil.
Honig, Bonnie (1959–)
Authors: Maxwell Lida
Published: August 2023

Bonnie Honig is a leading contemporary advocate of agonistic democracy, which she defends in a diverse set of writings on xenophobia, cosmopolitanism, emergency politics, genres of reading, and tragedy. Honig's continually growing corpus forms a relentless critique of justificatory modes of political theorizing and an affirmation of agonistic democracy. Her first book,
Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics
(1993) sounds a clarion call in both respects. The book criticizes theorists such as John Rawls and Michael Sandel for focusing on the justification of appropriate liberal or communitarian norms to govern politics.
Honneth, Axel (1949–)
Authors: Ingram James D.
Published: August 2023

Axel Honneth is a German social and political philosopher. Since 1996 he has worked at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt, where, as director of the Institute for Social Research, he has presided over the legacy of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Honneth's theory of recognition endeavors to renew this tradition by developing a comprehensive moral, psychological, and social‐theoretical framework for social criticism.
Independence
Authors: Walker Kathryn
Published: August 2023

In its most basic conceptual sense independence refers to a relation between two entities, which is defined by a lack of influence of each on the other. We say, for example, that
x
is independent of
y
if
y
does not bear on or affect
x
. Politically speaking, independence belongs to a family of terms –emancipation, freedom, liberty, liberation, self‐determination, sovereignty, and autonomy – which make normative and descriptive assertions about the way power operates on and through a given entity. For this reason, in its political use independence connotes a hierarchical ordering of entities, and, significantly, a challenge to the domination imposed by such an ordering. The identified terms – emancipation, freedom, liberty, liberation, self‐determination, sovereignty, and autonomy – can be mapped along a spectrum of relationality; at one end terms such as emancipation and liberation are highly relational speaking of a connection or a rejection of a connection between two entities. Hence, for example, in the American Civil War, blacks were emancipated from a relationship to slave owners. At the other end of this continuum, terms such as sovereignty and self‐determination are less relational, articulating the nature of the power that a given entity has in and of itself. Along this line, independence has a stronger relational significance than autonomy and self‐determination on the one hand, and on the other hand may be used in a way that involves less specified relationality than terms such as emancipation and liberation.
Indirect Democracy
Authors: Hoffman Aaron D.
Published: August 2023

Indirect democracy is the political concept used to denote the organization of a government based on a democratic foundation, but with the actual decisions about government being made by representatives of the people. Indirect democracy is in contrast to the practice of “direct democracy,” where the people not only form the basis of the government but also actually make, administer, and judge the laws, the typical example given of direct democracy being the practice of ancient Athens, although Swiss cantons and New England town hall meetings are often held up as examples of almost pure direct democracies. In contrast, “indirect democracy” is representative democracy or rule by the people through their representatives.
Interest Groups
Authors: Weymouth Stephen
Published: August 2023

An interest group is an association of individuals or organizations with similar preferences over one or more issues that attempts to influence policy in ways consistent with those preferences.
International Institutions
Authors: Isiksel Turkuler
Published: August 2023

International institutions are broadly defined as bodies of rules that have been designed or have evolved to facilitate cooperation among states. Typically, international institutions are called into being by interstate agreements that specify the aims of cooperation and the principles and rules that signatories must observe in order to achieve them. Newer international institutions often feature governance organs charged with further norm production and interpretation, compliance monitoring, and dispute resolution. Some international institutions focus on a particular policy area, while others provide a general framework for tackling a wide range of issues. Although most international institutions aim at looser forms of coordination or cooperation among states, a smaller number seek to realize partial transfers of sovereignty.
International Regimes
Authors: Vanderheiden Steven
Published: August 2023

In international politics, regimes reflect cooperation among states and between states and other actors in an otherwise anarchic arena, and they have in some cases generated powerful institutions capable of influencing the behavior of states and their subjects. Regimes can originate through multilateral treaties, in which they are vested with power by the ratifying states and carry out their functions at the behest of states; but they can also form through the efforts of NGOs and other nonstate actors.
International Relations Theory
Authors: Spieker Jörg
Published: August 2023

International relations emerged as a discipline in its own right toward the end of World War I as scholars and practitioners of international politics sought to study the causes of war and the prospects for peace in a systematic fashion. Early academic IR was dominated by a group of liberal thinkers who have been pejoratively known as “idealists” or “utopians.” While not nearly as naive in their assumptions or as uniform in their outlook as these labels suggest, these thinkers tended to believe that war is futile and that peaceful change is possible, given the right domestic and international institutional structures. When liberal hopes for a more peaceful and just world order faded in the face of the failure of the League of Nations and the looming prospect of a second world war, liberal internationalism came under attack by realists, such as the British historian E. H. Carr. In his influential bookThe Twenty Years’ Crisis(1939), Carr criticized liberal internationalism, or “utopianism” as he called it, for its failure to explain and predict international politics and its inability to provide effective practical measures for controlling them. Rather than concentrating on normative assumptions of how the world should be, as he accused liberals of doing, his realist approach takes the realities of power in international politics as a starting point for analysis. After World War II, realism became the dominant way of thinking about international relations among scholars and policy‐makers.
Invisible Hand
Authors: Hoffman Aaron D.
Published: August 2023

The Invisible Hand as a political and economic term is fundamental for understanding a modern economic society, specifically how such a society functions without a central political and economic authority controlling the allocation of resources among its inhabitants. More elemental is Edna Ullman‐Margalit's definition that “An invisible‐hand explanation explains a well‐structured social pattern or institution. It typically replaces an easily forthcoming and initially plausible explanation according to which the explanandum phenomenon is the product of intentional design with a rival account according to which it is brought about through a process involving the separate actions of many individuals who are supposed to be minding their own business unaware of and
a fortiori
not intending to produce the ultimate overall outcome.” The Scottish moral philosopher and political economist Adam Smith (1723–90) formulated the idea of the Invisible Hand in his book of moral philosophy
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759), although the general idea can also be attributed to Adam Ferguson, David Hume, and Bernard Mandeville. Smith later and more famously used the term in his political economy text
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). The Invisible Hand is one of those terms that, besides being a basic concept in politics and economics, has also gained popular usage outside the specialized academic literature to describe how a market economy functions.
Iron Curtain
Authors: Beede Benjamin R.
Published: August 2023

The phrase “Iron Curtain” was used to describe a self‐imposed isolation on the part of the Soviet Union and its allies that was viewed as a screen intended to mask internal oppression, concealing it from the outside world. It became a striking metaphor in western anticommunist rhetoric.
John of Salisbury (ca. 1115/20–80)
Authors: Lee Daniel
Published: August 2023

John of Salisbury was born in Old Sarum, England, some time between 1115 and 1120. He was educated in Paris at Mont‐Saint‐Geneviève, starting in 1136; there he studied with leading Scholastic masters of the High Middle Ages such as Peter of Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers. John's works include the
Entheticus Major
, the
Metalogicon
, the
Historia Pontificalis
, as well as numerous letters composed throughout his career. But his most important work was the
Policraticus
.
Judgment
Authors: Zerilli Linda M. G.
Published: August 2023

Judgment as a crucial issue for political theory is longstanding. What it means to have good political judgment is a topic debated by ancient to modern and contemporary thinkers as they attempt to answer that which most take to be the premier question of politics, namely, who should rule? If good judgment is equated with superior theoretical knowledge and the ability to reason based on the grasp of universals, then an argument for Plato's “philosopher‐kings” or their modern equivalents can be made. But if the power to judge is viewed more as the ability to know when concepts apply than to know the concepts themselves or, further, to create concepts where they are lacking altogether, then it is not clear that knowing and acting appropriately are connected in the way Plato assumed.
Kautsky, Karl (1854–1938)
Authors: Boggs Carl
Published: August 2023

An important political and intellectual figure in the history of the European left, Karl Kautsky dominated the early theoretical development of Marxism during the period between the late 1880s and World War I, when the Second International held sway. He was the chief architect of what came to be known as “orthodox Marxism,” which was associated with European social democratic parties from the 1890s on.
Kristeva, Julia (1942–)
Authors: Keltner S. K.
Published: August 2023

Bulgarian‐born linguist, psychoanalyst, social and cultural theorist, and novelist, Julia Kristeva has lived and worked in France since 1966. She remains a leading figure of structuralist and poststructuralist thought and has inspired research across the humanities and social sciences. In 2004, she received the first Holberg International Memorial Prize.
Kropotkin, Peter Alekseevich (1842–1921)
Authors: Ferguson Kathy E.
Published: August 2023

Peter Kropotkin was born into an aristocratic Russian family, received a military education, and became a respected geographer. Horrified by poverty and injustice, he became convinced that the government was unable as well as unwilling to make meaningful change in the lives of peasants and workers. Kropotkin turned toward anarchism to find a viable path to social change. He worked with the Jura workers’ federation in Switzerland, smuggled forbidden radical literature back to Russia, and joined a workers’ circle in Russia, leading eventually to two years’ imprisonment followed by a dramatic escape from the infamous Peter and Paul Fortress. Thereafter, he lived primarily in England and France, where he helped found the journalFreedom. Returning to Russia after the 1917 Revolution, he was honored by the new government but soon came to see the Bolsheviks as the murderers of the revolution. His funeral was the occasion of the last mass gathering of anarchists in Russia.
Kuhn, Thomas (1922–96)
Authors: Fuller Steve
Published: August 2023

Thomas Kuhn (1922–96) was a US historian and philosopher of science; he was perhaps the most influential theorist of science in the second half of the twentieth century. Like many of his generation who were trained in physics but experienced first hand the role that its expertise played in World War II, Kuhn left the field shortly after receiving his PhD in 1946. He then joined the new “General Education in Science” program established by Harvard President James Bryant Conant. It was there that Kuhn developed the general theory of scientific change for which he is best known, according to which a science's theories and methods are dictated by a “paradigm,” which is replaced only once it accumulates too many unsolved problems. At that point, it enters a “crisis” phase that eventuates in a “revolution,” resulting in a successor paradigm.
Kulturkampf
Authors: Beede Benjamin R.
Published: August 2023

Kulturkampf
, a German word meaning a struggle between cultures or civilizations, usually refers to a specific campaign by the German government, primarily between 1871 and 1887, to extend its control over the Catholic church in order to unify the newly established empire still further. This kind of conflict was hardly confined to Germany. The many European countries consisting largely of at least nominal Catholics or having significant Catholic minorities were roiled by church–state confrontations during the second half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, these struggles became internationalized as Catholics and their opponents looked abroad for ideas and encouragement.
La Mettrie, Julien Offray de (1709–51)
Authors: Williams David Lay
Published: August 2023

Julien Offray de La Mettrie was among the most prominent and notorious of the French materialists of the mid‐eighteenth century.
Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus, ca. 94–ca. 55/51 BCE)
Authors: Nichols James H.
Published: August 2023

Lucretius, a Roman poet, set forth a complete account of the Epicurean philosophy in epic verse, in a poem entitled
De rerum natura
(
On the Nature of Things
). With the loss of Epicurus’ longer writings, Lucretius’ poem is the most comprehensive and extensive exposition of Epicurean philosophy available to us from antiquity. The Epicurean philosophy, and especially Lucretius’ poetic exposition of it, has been widely and continuously influential on later thinkers, perhaps most of all in the early modern period through the eighteenth century, as an alternative ancient view of the human being and the world, different from the more dominant Platonic, Aristotelian, and Ciceronian positions.
Luhmann, Niklas (1927–98)
Authors: Thornhill Christopher
Published: August 2023

Niklas Luhmann (1927–98) was, with Jürgen Habermas, the leading sociologist of postwar Germany. Influenced by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Talcott Parsons, he proposed a theory of societal modernity based on a postontological understanding of social meaning.
Lukács, György/Georg (1885–1971)
Authors: Boggs Carl
Published: August 2023

Georg Lukács was a Marxist philosopher, literary critic, a leading figure in the development of western Marxism, and for brief periods of his life a political activist. He was a prolific writer who, throughout most of his life, sought to connect the realms of politics and culture, grounding his work in philosophical discourses inherited from such figures as Kant, Hegel, and the Hungarian intellectual Ervin Szabo.
Mandeville, Bernard (1670–1733)
Authors: Clark Henry C.
Published: August 2023

Mandeville was a Dutchman trained in medicine who moved to London in the 1690 s and wrote both medical and literary works in English. His most important book was
The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits
.
Marxism
Authors: Edwards Jason
Published: August 2023

There are a wide variety of thinkers, ideas, and texts that can be understood as constituting a Marxist tradition of political thought. No comprehensive agreement about which thinkers, ideas, and texts should be included in that tradition exists, though of course it is recognized that it originates in the work of Karl Marx and draws upon the body of work he authored. One very important aspect of Marx's writing is that it is intended to inform the revolutionary transformation of existing, capitalist societies. This is particularly the case in his “political” works. Yet these texts range in type from the more programmatic statements associated with Marx's involvement with the revolutionary movement, most famously
The Manifesto of the Communist Party
of 1848, to more analytical approaches to particular events of political importance, such as
The Civil War in France
of 1871. Insofar as there is a “political theory” in Marx's work, it has a twofold character. It is, first, a general theorization of the relationship between the economic organization of a society and its formal political institutions and practices (or “the state”), and secondly, an approach to the understanding of political events as the unfolding of struggles centered on class relations that attributes considerable significance to instances of political conflict in shaping the course of human history.
Memory
Authors: Halpern Cynthia
Published: August 2023

Memory has always been the primary mode for the transmission of human knowledge and culture for human communities over the vast ages of human evolution, up to and including the development of written history. Oral and Indigenous peoples matched their images and speech to the contours and shapes of the places they shared with other natural, more‐than‐human, inhabitants, and they recounted events in poems and songs, sagas and epics, stories and legends, myths and rituals, which they remembered and retold for countless generations. Even written history comes directly from memory, to be written and codified, rationalized and abstracted into alphabetic languages that reference human singularity and consciousness, all first registered in some particular mind, some particular document.
Minority Rights
Authors: Mookherjee Monica
Published: August 2023

The idea of minority rights is deeply contested in contemporary political theory. The core controversy arising from the development of such rights in both theory and practice is whether the moral, legal, and political existence of groups may be truly recognized within the individualistic framework ofhumanrights. The concern is that the modern human rights regime, with its characteristic liberal reluctance to impose fixed group identities on individuals, inevitably struggles to respond fully to minority conflicts today, which often involve tense relations within and between groups, rather than simply relations between the individual and the state.
Mythology
Authors: Richey Mason
Published: August 2023

In general mythology refers to several things. At its base are myths, and therefore mythology first means the received corpus of
muthoi
(legendary stories of superhuman/supernatural deeds, usually ancient) believed to be true by a people, and often considered to explain the world's phenomena. Second, mythology means the study of myths, the application of reasoning (
logos
) to the
muthoi
in order to comprehend them. This general conceptual differentiation is also valid for mythology in the specific domain of politics and political thought. Accordingly, examples of the meaning of political mythology
qua
mythemes include Greek deities’ interference in wars, Rome's founding by Romulus and Remus, biblical accounts of the divine bestowing of law on humans, or Korea's founding by the quasi‐divine Tangun. Alternatively, political mythology construed as study of political myths goes back at least to classical Greek philosophy. The defining characteristic of this type of political thought vis‐à‐vis mythology is that it is reflective, taking mythology as material to be explained both in terms of the descriptive or normative meaning/interpretation of the content of the myths themselves and in terms of the political function that myths have when intervening in political affairs. Lastly, political mythology also refers to the set of more or less intentionally or naturally propagated narratives – usually mistaken – underpinning the beliefs of members of a political entity regarding themselves or events associated with them or that entity.
Nature
Authors: Arias‐Maldonado Manuel
Published: August 2023

Ever since Raymond Williams wrote that nature is one of the most complex words in language, nothing has become simpler than beginning an exploration of this concept, namely by making Williams's statement a triumphant opening line. Yet reflecting upon nature in the twenty‐first century involves the recognition that it is not just the concept that is remarkably complex, but also the reality that it struggles to grasp. Naturally, the ambiguities and paradoxes of the word have always reflected those of the world. In fact, human history can be seen as the history of our relationship, or relationships, with nature. It is no wonder then that the latter is a changing concept, one in which the many different dimensions of the human – the real and the ideal, the empirical and the normative, the factual and the legal – are contained, thus showing the scientific limits of our understanding as well as the different possibilities opened up by human existence. In more than one way, the continuous search for explanations and meanings in nature, which runs parallel to the gradual discovery of its inner makings by scientists, embodies human self‐reflection itself. We cannot understand ourselves without resorting to the notion of nature.
Occam (Ockham),William of (1280–1349)
Authors: Scott Joanna Vecchiarelli
Published: August 2023

William of Occam, born in Occam, Surrey, England, was a renowned nominalist and voluntarist philosopher working in the wake of his controversial predecessor Duns Scotus and at the same time as another publicly controversial writer, Marsilius of Padua. The effect of all three was to challenge the authority of the Aquinan consensus in philosophy, and in political theory to question the basis of absolutist claims of popes, monarchs, and emperors over the European citizen – faithful as he was at the end of the Middle Ages.
Olson, Mancur (1932–98)
Authors: Blake Charles H.
Published: August 2023

Mancur Olson, economist, wrote three influential books addressing concentric circles of increasing magnitude. Why do some latent interest groups organize successfully while others fail? What are the implications of interest group activity for government decisions and for economic growth? How does the interaction of governmental power and civil society shape economic performance?
Owen, Robert (1771–1858)
Authors: Glover Robert W.
Published: August 2023

Robert Owen was a British industrialist and social reformer who has been dubbed the father of British socialism.
Paine, Thomas (1737–1809)
Authors: Fruchtman, Jack
Published: August 2023

English‐born propagandist and activist Thomas Paine advocated political and social revolution and democratic reform in late eighteenth‐century America, Britain, and France. Known for his plain style and vivid imagery, Paine was one of the most popular writers of his age, whose works, which sold thousands in both official and pirated versions, supported the American cause during the Revolutionary War. He later responded to Edmund Burke's 1790 attack on the French Revolution. Paine believed that economic prosperity for all citizens had to accompany democratic reforms, which required the government to promote the financial welfare of the poor, the young, and the elderly.
Philosophy of History
Authors: Hutchings Kimberly
Published: August 2023

There is a standard distinction drawn in the philosophy of history betweenspeculativephilosophy of history andanalyticalphilosophy of history. The former makes substantive philosophical claims about the overarching nature of historical development. The latter is concerned with the epistemological status of claims made by historians about the past, and how they are legitimated. Both of these types of philosophy of history are important in political thought: first, because philosophical ideas about history play a substantive role in political theories, in particular from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; second, because students of the history of political thought are doing a kind of history, and have therefore been obliged to reflect on the epistemological and methodological assumptions underpinning that historical work. We will look first at the role of speculative philosophy of history in political thought and then at debates about what kind of knowledge is possible in the history of political thought, and what difference this makes to how we understand the canon of western political theory.
Political Romanticism
Authors: Kompridis Nikolas
Published: August 2023

For most of the recent century, romanticism has been much maligned and much misunderstood. It has been variously identified with repressive forms of communitarianism and nationalism, with kitsch and cultural conservatism, and with the dangerous aestheticization of politics. Antimodern, antidemocratic, quietistic, narcissistic, masculinist, and effeminate – the list of romanticism's purported sins is very long indeed. Given these various sins, what can explain the resurgent interest in romanticism today? What does it signal?
Politics and Culture
Authors: Leitch David G.
Published: August 2023

The interrelationship between culture and politics has been a focal topic for western political thinkers since the classical era. While earlier thinkers concentrated their attention on articulating how cultural practices could sustain or undermine different political forms, since World War II debate has centered on multiculturalism and on how the state can grapple with political boundaries that are no longer coterminous with cultural ones. Part of this challenge has been a decreasing consensus on just what culture is and how it can be defined; recent scholarship has inverted the traditional focus of culture and politics, to introduce important new questions about the politics behind characterizing culture.
Politics and Film
Authors: Shapiro Michael J.
Published: August 2023

In traditional approaches to film in the political studies disciplines, it has been ordinarily assumed that films are political when they explore the relationship between persons and recognized political institutions. However, those who have advanced film (or, more recently, “cinema studies”) in a wide variety of disciplines have approached political thinking with close attention to film form. Emphases have been on image juxtaposition (montage) and on various aspects of the camera work – the structure of the gaze, the deployment of bodies (which are either choreographically complicit or disruptive to a film's narrative), and a variety of kinds of shots (depth of focus, close‐ups, etc.).
Politics and Poetry
Authors: Destrée Pierre
Published: August 2023

Poetry can have a privileged bond with politics, perhaps even more than any other art form. What work of art could have as clear and strong a political resonance as, say, Walt Whitman's “America” or “American Foliage,” Paul Éluard's “Liberty,” or Osip Mandelstam's sarcastic “Stalin Epigram”?
Poverty
Authors: Bush Sasha Breger
Published: August 2023

Poverty is a complex concept and experts debate how to define it. Two key questions inform the debate: What exactly is a poor person lacking? And, is poverty an “absolute” concept or a “relative” one?
Property
Authors: Ince Onur Ulas
Published: August 2023

The term “property” denotes the complex relations between people that regulate access to things and ideas that a society considers to be useful, valuable, or desirable. While most people agree that property relations form the backbone of any social formation, ranging from small village communities to vast global financial networks, there is considerable disagreement overhowto define, interpret, and regulate them.
Prudence
Authors: Gould Harry D.
Published: August 2023

While it is a commonplace that our leaders should act prudently and should promulgate and follow prudent policies, what this actually means has varied over time. Prudence has undergone numerous changes both in conceptualization and in valence. It has been treated as a virtue (in both Christian and pagan senses), and in some circles it remains enumerated among the virtues; however, others have treated prudence as a skill, or as a faculty. In correlation with its changes in valence, prudence has had a shifting relationship with morality: at some points it was understood as a defining feature of moral behavior, while for many twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century authors it represents an alternative to morality, a calculus of decision that might yield results inimical to the dictates of morality.
Public Morality
Authors: Surprenant Chris W.
Published: August 2023

Public morality involves (1) the set of norms or principles determined by a society to be good; (2) the actions that society determines to be consistent with the promotion of these norms or principles; and (3) the laws or cultural practices established to encourage individuals to perform these actions. Frequently public morality is associated with issues relating to sex, drugs, and public decency. But, because how an individual determines what objectively good goals (s)he should pursue will likely be influenced by the society (s)he lives in, the conceptual underpinnings of public morality lie in political philosophy and in the appropriate role of the state in regulating the behavior of its citizens.
Public Opinion
Authors: West Chris
Published: August 2023

“Public opinion” refers to any preferences, beliefs, mores, values, or other characteristics of individual or group thought that are consequential to politics and the conduct of government. As regimes may vary in type and cultural context, the extent to which public opinion generally, and the opinions of various publics or individuals within the general population, may be taken into account by government will vary as well. Though political actors often use the term in reference to very large numbers of people holding a collective opinion, it is most often the case that the “public” is comprised of many diverse “publics” that hold countervailing opinions, or even no opinions on any given subject of consequence to government.
Qutb, Sayyid (1906–66)
Authors: Shepard William
Published: August 2023

Sayyid Qutb is one of the leading ideologues of the Islamist movements throughout the modern Muslim world. He has been called “the intellectual father of modern Islamist terrorism” but his influence is not limited to this extreme end of the spectrum.
Receptivity to Political Cues
Authors: Malka Ariel
Published: August 2023

Receptivity to political cues refers to the responsiveness of citizens to signals in political messages. These signals often associate a political viewpoint with a candidate, political party, or ideology or associate a candidate with a political party, ideological label, or interest group. As a way of reaching a political opinion, receptivity to political cues is often contrasted with systematic processing of substantive political information. Similarly, political cues are distinguishable from policy frames, which are the arguments and phrases that impact the lens through which a policy message is interpreted. Although cues and policy frames can be manipulated independently within experiments, they often co‐occur in the real world (e.g., “Republicans oppose expanding unemployment insurance because doing so would discourage work”).
Ressentiment
Authors: Abbas Asma
Published: August 2023

Ressentiment is the feeling of being wounded repeatedly by an injury: a sufferer internalizes the injury, relies upon it for meaning, and seeks a cause for it outside of herself, keeping the hurt current and valid. The search for a cause, just like the wounding, is enacted repeatedly, always terminating on another entity – an individual or a group – that is both the cause of the wound and the rightful target of hurt feelings. In the longevity of the wound is rooted an identity for the injured, who are called upon to react to the cause of the hurt, even to negate it, in order to seek redress and justice. In this process, new political and moral values are generated. This feeling's potential to mediate, often even encapsulate, moments within an individual's ethical and political experience accounts for its status as a political concept.
Sex/Gender Relationship
Authors: Boryczka Jocelyn M.
Published: August 2023

“One is not born, but rather becomes, woman,” Simone de Beauvoir asserts in
The Second Sex
. This claim captures how sex, the biological differentiation of male from female based on reproductive capacity, relates to gender, the socially constructed meanings of masculine and feminine identity assigned to men and women. Society or culture, not nature or biology, then creates the norms, rules, and laws for people's behavior, which grants them more freedom in determining their destiny. Establishing what gender means conceptually and interrogating its relationship to sex alters the terrain of twentieth‐century political thought. Initially, it provided another set of analytic tools for engaging two critical questions: what is a woman, and why have women generally been oppressed across cultures throughout history? Feminist political theory emerges as a field of study during the 1960s and 1970s by responding to these questions in ways that liberate women from the traditional sex roles of mother and wife used to secure their subordination to men and deny them access to public life.
Shakespeare, William (1564–1616)
Authors: Miller Char Roone
Published: August 2023

William Shakespeare, widely regarded as the greatest English playwright and poet, exerted an unmatched influence on the English language; his unfailing ear for human interaction and strong hand for constructing scenes of personal and social exploration make his work an unmatched source of political thought. He staged dramatic late medieval examinations of kingship in the presence of kings and queens. He examined the contradictions and complexity of evolving notions of sovereignty; explored new developments in monetary debt; critically examined gender, sex, and race; and gave subtle portrayals of an increasingly democratic social world that delighted princes and peasants. Thirty‐eight plays, 154 sonnets, two long poems, and several other poems have survived to the present day. Two plays are considered lost.
Sidney, Algernon(1623–83)
Authors: Robinson M. Scott
Published: August 2023

Algernon Sidney (1623–83) was a British parliament member and early modern republican political theorist who used the influences of classical political philosophy to develop a resistance theory that became integral to the Glorious and American Revolutions.
Sorel, Georges (1847–1922)
Authors: Jennings Jeremy
Published: August 2023

Georges Sorel was educated in Paris and for many years worked as an engineer for the French government. In 1889 he published his first two books. One was devoted to the trial of Socrates, the other to biblical exegesis. It was in the early 1890s that Sorel began what was to be a lengthy engagement with Marxism. He also read, and was heavily influenced by, the work of Giambattista Vico.
Structuralism
Authors: Caverly Matthew M.
Published: August 2023

Structuralism is an intellectual movement which claims that underlying sets of structures are the guiding forces for human behavior. This view has developed in an interdisciplinary fashion encapsulating philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, history, sociology, and political theory by its notion that largely unconscious structures determine the ethics, language, worldviews, literature, politics, and cultural predilections of all peoples. Structuralism originated in the works of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) and became associated principally with French philosophy during the 1950s and 1960s. The paradigm's primary developer was the anthropologist Claude Lévi‐Strauss (1908–2009), who applied Saussure's structuralist framework to the analysis of kinship systems.
Sun Yat‐sen (1866–1925)
Authors: Lee Theresa Man Ling
Published: August 2023

Sun Yat‐sen (1866–1925) is regarded as the founding father of modern China by both the People's Republic of China and Taiwan. As such Sun holds a unique place in Chinese history by transcending what was once an irreconcilable ideological and political divide between the two. This seemingly paradoxical point of convergence remains a useful gauge to Sun's significance.
Theater and Politics
Authors: Barrett Richard A.
Published: August 2023

There exists a longstanding tension between politics and theater, with politics at times limiting theater to being a tool to reshape the human world for the ends of a particular regime, and theater threatening to dominate the political realm. Socrates accused Aristophanes’ comedy of mis‐portraying him in a way that ultimately led to his trial and death. Rousseau thought theater could corrupt a society. Nietzsche, on the other hand, held out hope that theater might provide the impetus for a transfiguration that would bring about a healthier civilization.
Truth Commissions
Authors: Bakiner Onur
Published: August 2023

Truth commissions are ad hoc panels established to investigate past human rights violations, identify the patterns and causes of violence, and make recommendations for political‐institutional, legal, and social reform. Forty countries launched truth commissions between 1974 and 2009. Typically governments and/or intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations create truth commissions during transitions from authoritarian rule or internal conflict, but recently consolidated democracies have also established them. Scholars, policy‐makers, and human rights activists advocate truth commissions to discover the facts of human rights violations, to devise a reparations program for the victims, to raise the public's awareness about human rights, and to promote reconciliation across social and political actors.
Universalism/Universalization
Authors: Ingram James D.
Published: August 2023

Universalisms are theories or doctrines that claim to be valid for or of everyone. What they hold to be universal, what aspects of people they are meant to apply to and in what way, varies enormously. There is a multitude of often competing universalisms in metaphysics, epistemology, natural science, anthropology, social theory, and religion, and an even greater number of challenges to their claims to universality. Even within moral and political philosophy, there has been little agreement among universalists about what qualities, values, or principles are universal, or how they are universal. Contemporary political theory has tended to focus its discussion of universalism on the nature and scope of moral and political principles, norms, or values, such as human rights or justice.
Violence
Authors: Shapiro Kam
Published: August 2023

Violence is typically defined as the deliberate infliction of bodily harm. Many theories of politics are centrally concerned with the organization and containment of violence so understood. However, critical theories of political violence variously conceptualize the nature and significance of violence as a dimension of politics. They extend the nature of harm defined as violence (which can be social, psychological, or discursive). Further, some challenge the view that violence is exclusively destructive. As they contend, it can also play a constitutive role in political organization, law, and identity.