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The King as the Embodiment of Egotism

Karen C. Lang

in Four Illusions: Candrakirti's Advice to Travelers on the Bodhisattva Path

The Mahābharata and the Rāmāyaṇa, as well as Indian legal and political treatises, support belief in the king's divinity. Buddhists regard kingship not as divinely inspired, but as an elective ... More

The Mahābharata and the Rāmāyaṇa, as well as Indian legal and political treatises, support belief in the king's divinity. Buddhists regard kingship not as divinely inspired, but as an elective process. Legitimate moral authority and the right to govern belong only to righteous kings, who govern with generosity and compassion. Unrighteous kings, ruling in the age of discord (kali yuga), allow passion to dominate their behavior. They devastate the world through their exercise of war. Candrakiriti rejects both divine origins of kings and the notion that heaven is the reward for a royal warrior who dies in battle.Less

Dividual Advocacy

Joy Connolly

in The Life of Roman Republicanism

This chapter works toward a clearer normative but non-prescriptive, non-telic account of the play of concord and discord in the politics of a democratic republic, and an account of being a citizen ... More

This chapter works toward a clearer normative but non-prescriptive, non-telic account of the play of concord and discord in the politics of a democratic republic, and an account of being a citizen that incorporates both the will to harmony ostensibly adopted by much classical writing and the presence of experiment and self-division that characterizes all our lives. Building from the argument made in Chapter 1 about Cicero's dialogues and speeches, it sketches out the kind of citizen who can live in a world where the drive to achieve concordia or consensus thrives within a framing of politics as conflict. This citizen is a virtuosic speaker of and to an acknowledged multiplicity, and the patterns of thought and action modeled by oratory have consequences for deliberative and judicial political institutions.Less

What Concord Requires

Daniel Schwartz

in Aquinas on Friendship

Aquinas has written that ‘Concord is a union of wills, not of opinions’. This dictum is problematic because one would think that without some union of opinions, union of wills cannot be obtained. ... More

Aquinas has written that ‘Concord is a union of wills, not of opinions’. This dictum is problematic because one would think that without some union of opinions, union of wills cannot be obtained. This chapter seeks to clarify the meaning of this dictum and to show that it does not imply that shared opinions are unnecessary for concord. It is argued that working behind Aquinas's dictum is his theory about love and what love does. The proper effect of love is to unite persons. Love unites them formally: the lover aims to resemble (participate in the form) of the beloved. The lover's movement toward resemblance involves a movement toward resemblance as to his acts of will.Less

Conclusion

John Miller

in Cities Divided: Politics and Religion in English Provincial Towns 1660-1722

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. The period 1660-1722 saw political debate and discord become a normal part of English urban life. National politics impinged far more ... More

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. The period 1660-1722 saw political debate and discord become a normal part of English urban life. National politics impinged far more on townspeople's lives than in the 16th century, when few parliamentary elections were contested, so there was no need to place issues before the electors. The clear-cut division between Tories and Whigs was thrown into turmoil by James II, but it reappeared in late 1688 as Whigs and Tories jostled for power under the new king. During the 18th century, some corporations became notorious for self-seeking oligarchy and corruption but such vices were less apparent in the early part of the century.Less

The Political Stage and the Problem of Reform

David Blackbourn

in The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany

This chapter examines the political stage and the problem of reform during the bourgeois revolution in Germany during the nineteenth century. It explains that the there were major divisions with the ... More

This chapter examines the political stage and the problem of reform during the bourgeois revolution in Germany during the nineteenth century. It explains that the there were major divisions with the bourgeoisie and that the chief victim of political discord within the bourgeoisie was that part of the class that thought of itself as both liberal and national. It suggests that open political action exposed the divisions within the bourgeoisie and revealed its vulnerability in political relations with subaltern social groups.Less

The Case Of Earnst

Henry A. Murray

in Explorations in Personality

This chapter begins by describing Earnst’s physical appearance. It then tells about his family and educational background. It also explains that Earnst’s exposure to the presses like Frequent ... More

This chapter begins by describing Earnst’s physical appearance. It then tells about his family and educational background. It also explains that Earnst’s exposure to the presses like Frequent Illness, Family Poverty, and Family Discord had an effect of special significance, as shown by the reports that this study had gathered. It adds that his experiences manifested in his personality; he was outstandingly low in all affiliative variables and in the socially directed needs for Dominance and Exhibition. It discusses that Earnst, at present, is completely severed from his early life and from his family. It discusses four themas that may have affected Earnst’s manifested personality. It tells of the tests that Earnst took and his reponses to them.Less

Friends and Enemies, Slaves and Masters: Fanaticism, Wendell Phillips and the Limits of Agonism

Joel Olson

in The Politics of Radical Democracy

This chapter explores fanaticism from the perspective of radical (or agonistic) democracy. Despite its accent on conflict, radical democracy, the chapter contends, struggles to understand fanaticism ... More

This chapter explores fanaticism from the perspective of radical (or agonistic) democracy. Despite its accent on conflict, radical democracy, the chapter contends, struggles to understand fanaticism because it operates with too narrow a conception of agonism, namely as contestation within a shared liberal framework. As such it cannot see struggles over the framework itself as democratic struggles. To rectify this shortcoming, the chapter turns to the work of nineteenth-century orator and abolitionist Wendell Phillips and the latter's idea of ‘talk’. Here Phillips deploys a friend/enemy distinction, similar to that used by Mouffe. The chapter concludes that in conditions of irreconcilable discord, fanaticism may aid democratisation.Less

Introduction “Rien Faire Comme Une Bête”: Of Anonymity and Obligation

in Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession

This introductory chapter lays out the theoretical foundations of the present study, which reconsiders romanticism through the concept of anonymity in order to claim that, not only have we yet to ... More

This introductory chapter lays out the theoretical foundations of the present study, which reconsiders romanticism through the concept of anonymity in order to claim that, not only have we yet to fully account for the theoretical complexity of the period's explorations of subjectivity, but the notion of anonymity is a pervasive topic of romanticism: it provokes profound engagements with the ethics and aesthetics of alterity; it rethinks political questions and theories of action which emerge once the romantic subject loses its privileged locus as a “will to power”; and it becomes a site of discord and difference.Less

Livy, Pestilentia, and the Pathologies of Class Strife

Hunter H. Gardner

in Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature

Accounts of pestilence in the historical record help us understand those assumptions about the effects of disease that inform both the creation of the plague narrative and its reception among Roman ... More

Accounts of pestilence in the historical record help us understand those assumptions about the effects of disease that inform both the creation of the plague narrative and its reception among Roman audiences. Chapter 2 examines Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita in order to suggest that the historical experience and representation of plague in Rome was infused with resonance of civil strife by the Augustan period. Livy refines his source material to address a body politic in need of healing and thus sharpens the correlation between contagium and civil discord (discordia), especially in early episodes recounting the struggle of the orders. The historian’s narratives of contagion draw partly from the language of medical writers, but equally from a historiographic tradition that correlated a diseased body with a diseased body politic. Accounts of plague allow Livy to reflect on distinctions among members of different orders, especially the patres/patricii (highest class of citizens) and plebs (lowest class of citizens). The remedies enacted to combat plague, in forms of both cultural and political innovations, prove alternatingly salubrious and detrimental to the body politic. Livy recognizes, however, that, as a challenge to the people equivalent to strife within and war abroad, pestilentia could have a positive impact on the development of Roman hegemony and prompt coalescence among a divided citizenry.Less

Oxford, 1577 The Ice

Peter C. Mancall

in Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America

This chapter discusses Hakluyt's obsession with America, nurtured during his student days, which he tried to transform into a passion that would consume his nation. Ever keen to promote the ... More

This chapter discusses Hakluyt's obsession with America, nurtured during his student days, which he tried to transform into a passion that would consume his nation. Ever keen to promote the Protestant cause, Hakluyt would have been pleased that a survey in Oxford in 1577 revealed that virtually all Catholics, under pressure from a university still grappling with the legacy of the Protestant Reformation, had left the colleges. With religious discord at least nominally suppressed, the attention of Oxford's residents focused now instead on quotidian affairs. In the summer of 1577, shortly after Hakluyt's installation, an outbreak of a lethal epidemic rapidly killed hundreds in the town. Those deaths signaled the start of a three-year period that propelled Hakluyt from an observer of events to someone who tried to shape his nation's future.Less

The Problem of Description

Barbara Lounsberry

in Becoming Virginia Woolf: Her Early Diaries and the Diaries She Read

The many paths to apt description occupy Virginia Woolf’s mind across her 7th and 8th diary books. These diaries mark her determined march to a view, voice, and form of her own. She seeks to avoid ... More

The many paths to apt description occupy Virginia Woolf’s mind across her 7th and 8th diary books. These diaries mark her determined march to a view, voice, and form of her own. She seeks to avoid “guide book prose” in her Continental Travel Diary from 1906 to 1909 and to rid herself of Western notions of the East. She starts to “distrust description” in her 1908 Italian diary and seeks to write “not only with the eye, but with the mind; & discover real things beneath the show.” She defines herself against the still, silent beauty of a Perugino fresco, declaring that she seeks the beauty of life in motion; a world composed of “infinite discords” and “shivering fragments”; she likewise rejects the “simple truths” of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early journals, preferring complexity and multiplicity instead. She begins to seek more subtlety in her descriptions and less “definiteness” in her 1909 Florence diary—and throughout this time the diaries of Lady Elizabeth Holland, Lady Hester Stanhope’s physician (Dr. Charles Meryon), and Mary Coleridge aid her.Less

Introduction

Barbara Lounsberry

in Virginia Woolf's Modernist Path: Her Middle Diaries and the Diaries She Read

Virginia Woolf's diary is her longest, her longest sustained, and her last work to reach the public. The Introduction presents the book’s main argument, the new view that Woolf entered a secondstage ... More

Virginia Woolf's diary is her longest, her longest sustained, and her last work to reach the public. The Introduction presents the book’s main argument, the new view that Woolf entered a secondstage as a diarist (after her first experimental stage)—that of her mature, spare, modernist diaries of 1918 to 1929. Woolf deliberately curbs her number of diary entries per year in this second stage, pushing the periodic diary about as far as it can go and still convey a life. The Introduction also documents Woolf’s increasingly inward turn across the 1920s and her continued modernist experiments with form, especially with the fragment. A diary’s inherent oppositions, its “symmetry … of discords” (Woolf’s diary phrase) allowed Woolf to explore a string of paradoxes: continuity and discontinuity, motion and stasis, impersonal and personal time. The insights of the great French diary theorist Philippe Lejeune are used to undergird the book’s argument that diary-writing now becomes a way of life for Virginia Woolf, “life insurance” that brings high returns. The Introduction also previews the book’s second major insight: the heretofore unexplored role of other diaries in Woolf’s revered modernist works.Less

Original Sin: “The Only Empirically Verifiable Doctrine of the Christian Faith”

Andrew S. Finstuen

in Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety

This chapter discusses the shared conviction of Niebuhr, Graham, and Tillich regarding the empirical truth of the doctrine of original sin. For all three, the long history of humanity's inhumanity ... More

This chapter discusses the shared conviction of Niebuhr, Graham, and Tillich regarding the empirical truth of the doctrine of original sin. For all three, the long history of humanity's inhumanity supported the truth of original sin. For them, the record of human discord, while tragic, was not surprising, having arisen from a common origin. The myriad evils of the world and of history emerged from a fundamental disharmony within human beings. In short, particular evils or sins were but expressions of original sin. Beyond this shared belief, the three's interpretations of original sin both diverged and converged. Their understandings of the Genesis account of Adam and Eve, their philosophies of man, and their explanations of the chief symptoms of original sin differed in several ways. Yet their differences on these points were more in degree than in kind.Less

Apolitics and Politics¹

Laurent Dubreuil

in The Refusal of Politics

As long as social discontent exists, the most immediate, the most reasonable solution is to change certain causes, certain effects, certain agents. In the most acute cases, the recommended therapy ... More

As long as social discontent exists, the most immediate, the most reasonable solution is to change certain causes, certain effects, certain agents. In the most acute cases, the recommended therapy consists in a gigantic reorganisation of forces, a metabole of powers. ‘The world is about to change its foundation’, promises The Internationale, and, following the tradition begun by the Abbe Sieyes, the choir sings, ‘we are nothing, let us be everything’.2 However violent the alteration – and the last century has given us nearly everything, from the colonial yoke to its soft alternative, from banana dictatorship to the dictatorship of the bureaucratic proletariat, from change in continuity to fully policed societies – the foundation of the foundation remains the same, rarely questioned. That is to say: all metamorphosis remains squarely on the plane of politics; only the way we define this plane varies, ranging from popular government and representation to the insurrectionary battle, from the nation, race to lifestyles and on to revolution.Less

An Argument en famille

Randolph Paul Runyon

in The Mentelles: Mary Todd Lincoln, Henry Clay, and the Immigrant Family Who Educated Antebellum Kentucky

After the death in 1805 of Léone Mentelle, Waldemar's mother, hostility breaks out between him and his father. Edme bitterly complains of a letter from Waldemar and Charlotte he considers insulting; ... More

After the death in 1805 of Léone Mentelle, Waldemar's mother, hostility breaks out between him and his father. Edme bitterly complains of a letter from Waldemar and Charlotte he considers insulting; takes his son to task for having lacked ambition in his youth; and reveals that he has remarried, to a woman fifty years his junior. She is the illegitimate daughter of a Breton nobleman and thought Edme more wealthy than he was. In 1815, after years of silence, Edme writes his son and daughter-in-law, recounting a visit from Henry Clay, who was in Europe to negotiate the Treaty of Ghent. Having lost the financial assistance he had enjoyed from Napoleon, Edme solicits a post from Louis XVIII but does not receive it. He finally obtains the Legion of Honor he had long sought, shortly before his death on Dec. 29, 1815.Less

The Devil by the Tail

Randolph Paul Runyon

in The Mentelles: Mary Todd Lincoln, Henry Clay, and the Immigrant Family Who Educated Antebellum Kentucky

In January 1820 Charlotte writes Rosalie Saugrain of St. Louis, a friend since their years in Gallipolis, complaining of her unhappiness with a lifelong struggle "not just with fortune, but with ... More

In January 1820 Charlotte writes Rosalie Saugrain of St. Louis, a friend since their years in Gallipolis, complaining of her unhappiness with a lifelong struggle "not just with fortune, but with poverty." A visitor to Lexington in 1823 records a vivid description of the Mentelles. Charlotte "has a masculine, weather-beaten face," and dresses in the plainest fashion. He is impressed by her intelligence and knowledge, particularly of American and European politics. "She is a very fine Belles Lettres scholar and plays in a mastery manner on the violin." He finds her "gay and cheerful, sometimes playful," but far removed from normal womanly pursuits. She dresses like a man. Waldemar, "a lively little Frenchman," appears "as excessively effeminate as Madame is masculine." From 1832 to 1836, Mary Todd (born in 1818), resides at the Mentelle school except for weekends, later calling it "my early home." Her mother had died and she did not get along with her father's second wife. Charlotte Mentelle becomes a substitute mother for her, exerting a profound influence on the future Mrs. Lincoln, regaling her and other students with tales, not always true, of her escape from the French Revolution.Less

AIDS Memoirs Out of the City: Discordant Natures

Heather Houser

in Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect

This chapter offers an account of an unanalyzed mode of writing about HIV/AIDS. Pushing against the metrocentricity of U.S. AIDS literature and scholarship, a body of nonurban AIDS memoirs took the ... More

This chapter offers an account of an unanalyzed mode of writing about HIV/AIDS. Pushing against the metrocentricity of U.S. AIDS literature and scholarship, a body of nonurban AIDS memoirs took the disease out of the city in the 1990s. These stories figure the disconnection between lived experience of AIDS and consensus knowledge about it, and show how affect produces irritations that unsettle conceptual categories. Specifically, David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991) and Jan Zita Grover's North Enough: AIDS and Other Clear-Cuts (1997) stage unexpected environmental encounters that produce discord. These memoirs model how the irritations of discord generate a productive form of suspicion that confers experiential epistemic authority onto sick bodies enmeshed in their surroundings.Less

Friendship, Sovereignty and Political Discord in Coriolanus

Thomas P. Anderson

in Shakespeare's Fugitive Politics

This chapter re-orients the way that early modern political sovereignty is understood by arguing that the relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius is a friendship predicated on agonism and ... More

This chapter re-orients the way that early modern political sovereignty is understood by arguing that the relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius is a friendship predicated on agonism and discord. The chapter’s close examination of their alliance and eventual betrayal establishes the counter-politics of friendship that organizes political relationships explored throughout the book. A fragile warrior-friendship links the two men in shared estrangement. In claiming that the two rivals embody a singular type of friendship with resonant political implications, the chapter revises early modern theories of friendship from Erasmus, Bacon, and Montaigne, as well as friendship theory from their classical predecessors Cicero and Aristotle. Shakespeare’s depiction of amicitia perfecta offers a critical point of intervention in contemporary accounts by Foucault and Derrida of the political potential inherent in a friendship characterized by dissensus, not amity. Coriolanus stages the possibility of radicalizing the citizen/state binary, glimpsing the fragile grounds of a potentially new communal politics embodied in a fragile warrior friendship.Less

Factions and Friendships

in Invisible Men: The Secret Lives of Police Constables in Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham, 1900-1939

In the early twentieth century, police constables in Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool acted out contradictory patterns of internal hostilities and loyalties, not only within ranks but also up ... More

In the early twentieth century, police constables in Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool acted out contradictory patterns of internal hostilities and loyalties, not only within ranks but also up and down the police hierarchy. Both older and newer constables complained about the growing burden of duties but fought with each other over police practices and the importance of education. Those who were bypassed for promotion or harshly punished resented colleagues they believed were unfairly gaining higher rank or not being punished enough for breaches of regulations. Although constables were wary of senior officers, they also had close friends promoted into the upper ranks with whom they maintained ties. A strong sense of camaraderie coexisted with disunity and factionalism. This strange combination of discord and friendship stemmed from the nature of the police force.Less

The White House

Emily Herring Wilson

in The Three Graces: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends

FDR's election was daunting to Eleanor, who feared giving up her newly acquired independence. Marion and Nancy helped moved her personal belongings into the White House, as they had helped move her ... More

FDR's election was daunting to Eleanor, who feared giving up her newly acquired independence. Marion and Nancy helped moved her personal belongings into the White House, as they had helped move her to the NY Governor's Mansion. They were frequent visitors, perhaps unaware of the frequency of visits from Eleanor's new friend, Lorena "Hick" Hickok, who had been an AP reporter assigned to cover the First Lady until within a few months Hick realized that her friendship prevented her objectivity and she resigned. Eleanor helped her get a job traveling to report to Harry Hopkins on conditions in the worst of the small towns of America. Eleanor begins her daily "My Day" syndicated column. Eleanor continued to make friends, especially Joe Lash, a young liberal who introduced Eleanor to the Youth Division of the National Democratic Committee. Marion and Nan increasingly were outside the White House circleLess