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The Scale of Virtues

Dominic J. O’Meara

in Platonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity

The path to divinization involves the ascent of the soul through a scale of virtues. The Neoplatonic theory of a scale of virtues, as a path to divinization, is traced here in its evolution from ... More

The path to divinization involves the ascent of the soul through a scale of virtues. The Neoplatonic theory of a scale of virtues, as a path to divinization, is traced here in its evolution from Plotinus to its more elaborate versions in later Neoplatonism, with particular reference to the conception and level of ‘political virtue’.Less

The Two Functions of Political Philosophy

Dominic J. O’Meara

in Platonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity

This chapter sets out the reasons why it is often thought that the Platonist philosophers of late Antiquity have no political philosophy. A preliminary definition is given of ‘political philosophy’ ... More

This chapter sets out the reasons why it is often thought that the Platonist philosophers of late Antiquity have no political philosophy. A preliminary definition is given of ‘political philosophy’ and it is shown that ‘political virtue’ can have two functions with regard to the goal of Late Antique Platonism (the divinization of the soul): preparing, as a preliminary stage, the divinization of the soul; and divinizing the state as a context providing this preparation. These two functions will be elaborated in Parts I and II of this book.Less

In Search of a Lost Archipelago

Aurelian Craiutu

in A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought, 1748-1830

This chapter examines different visions of moderation in the history of French political thought. It first considers the reluctance to theorize about moderation, in part because moderation has often ... More

This chapter examines different visions of moderation in the history of French political thought. It first considers the reluctance to theorize about moderation, in part because moderation has often been understood as a vague virtue. It then discusses moderation in the classical and Christian traditions, focusing on the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, followed by an analysis of the writings of sixteenth-century political thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Claude de Seyssel, Louis Le Roy, Étienne Pasquier, Michel de Montaigne, Blaise Pascal, and French moralists such as La Bruyère and François de La Rochefoucauld. It also describes the transformation of moderation from a predominantly ethical concept into a prominent political virtue. Finally, it explores the views of authors such as David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on fanaticism in relation to moderation.Less

Why Moderation?

Aurelian Craiutu

in A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought, 1748-1830

This book explores moderation in French political thought during the period 1748–1830 by focusing on a wide range of political, historical, sociological, and philosophical writings related to the ... More

This book explores moderation in French political thought during the period 1748–1830 by focusing on a wide range of political, historical, sociological, and philosophical writings related to the French Revolution. Arguing that moderation is the quintessential political virtue, the book discusses two main themes: moderation under the Old Regime, when moderate agendas were used as means of criticizing a rigid and inefficient hierarchical structure and proposing concrete blueprints for political reform; and various attempts at institutionalizing moderation during the revolution and its aftermath, when it was primarily interpreted and used as a means of “ending” the revolution. It suggests that moderation has intrinsic substantive political orientations and values of its own and is related to constitutionalism, a politics of skepticism as opposed to a “politics of faith” and of absolute ends. This prologue provides an overview of the chapters that follow.Less

Pagan Virtue: Perfect, Unified, and True

David Decosimo

in Ethics as a Work of Charity: Thomas Aquinas and Pagan Virtue

This chapter explicates Thomas’s conception of virtue. Virtues are good habits that incline one to use them – and all other habits – well. What this means and that this is his view is the chapter’s ... More

This chapter explicates Thomas’s conception of virtue. Virtues are good habits that incline one to use them – and all other habits – well. What this means and that this is his view is the chapter’s focus. Inherent in this conception of virtue is the notion that the virtues are unified. While many read Thomas to hold that pagans can obtain only disconnected, highly imperfect “virtues” – loosely held dispositions for good in some limited domain – this chapter show such a perspective to be incoherent from Thomas’s perspective. Virtues cause the good to be done well, and this adverbial character, rooted in prudence, entails their unity. The chapter concludes with the initial case that Thomas regards those without charity as capable of attaining such virtues, virtues justly called perfect, simple, and true. It also shows how his conception represents a transformative synthesis of Augustinian and Aristotelian accounts.Less

The Rule of Law and Its Limits

Andrei Marmor

in Law in the Age of Pluralism

This chapter focuses on the rule of law. It presents a comprehensive analysis of the rule of law, articulating the conditions that the law has to meet in order to be able to fulfill its pivotal ... More

This chapter focuses on the rule of law. It presents a comprehensive analysis of the rule of law, articulating the conditions that the law has to meet in order to be able to fulfill its pivotal functions in guiding human conduct. It advances two main theses about these conditions of the rule of law. First, although the virtues of the rule of law are essentially functional, they are also moral-political virtues, enhancing a range of goods valued in a pluralistic society, in addition to their functional merit. Second, the chapter comprises detailed arguments purporting to show how legalism can be excessive and demonstrating that upholding the rule of law virtues is never costless, morally, politically, and otherwise.Less

States of Character: Toward a Theory of Political Vice

Mark E. Button

in Political Vices

The concept of political vice has been a missing category within the history of political thought. This chapter develops a new theoretical approach to address this gap. Political vice is a distinct ... More

The concept of political vice has been a missing category within the history of political thought. This chapter develops a new theoretical approach to address this gap. Political vice is a distinct class of injustice bound up with the erasure of the intersubjective and communicative dimensions of democratic politics. The political vices include hubris, moral blindness, and political recalcitrance. Hubris corresponds to the tyranny of excessive and one-dimensional voice; moral blindness and the willful denial of moral “blind spots” correspond to deficient vision born from naïve “realism”; and political recalcitrance corresponds to deficiencies in listening and weighing the morally valid claims of others. This chapter argues for the benefits of a socio-epistemic approach to the study of virtue and vice and shows why an adequate response to the unjust effects of our political vices requires going beyond realist, liberal, and agonistic approaches to political theory.Less

‘How the Face of Things has Changed!’

Marisa Linton

in Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution

This chapter discusses the development of a new kind of political identity during the early months of the revolution. The revolution transformed the prevailing political culture from the enclosed and ... More

This chapter discusses the development of a new kind of political identity during the early months of the revolution. The revolution transformed the prevailing political culture from the enclosed and private world of old regime politics into the new and transparent culture of revolutionary politics. Men who wanted to succeed in this new culture carved out a space for themselves by identifying with the ideology of political virtue. Political leaders would not be answerable to the king, but to public opinion: they therefore submitted their identities to the judgement of the public, to the issue being whether or not their virtue was authentic. The ideology of virtue provided the necessary justification for turning rebels into revolutionaries. It gave revolutionaries moral legitimacy from which sprang their claim to authority.Less

New Men for New Politics: The First Jacobin Leaders

Marisa Linton

in Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution

This chapter discusses the emergence of the first Jacobin leaders. The co-founders and first leaders of the Jacobins — Barnave, the Lameths, and Duport — supported the constitutional monarchy, and ... More

This chapter discusses the emergence of the first Jacobin leaders. The co-founders and first leaders of the Jacobins — Barnave, the Lameths, and Duport — supported the constitutional monarchy, and manoeuvred tactically to become powerful figures in the new regime. In order to dominate the Jacobin Club and appeal to radical public opinion, they adopted the identity of men of virtue. They used this rhetoric to denounce their political opponents and personal rivals, above all Mirabeau, as men without virtue, and therefore secret enemies of the Revolution.Less

The Ethical Dimensions of Aristotle's Metaphysics

in Confronting Aristotle's Ethics: Ancient and Modern Morality

This chapter shows the profound metaphysical character of the idea that the moral virtues are political virtues, since we are forced to think about human nature and activity, and the place of humans ... More

This chapter shows the profound metaphysical character of the idea that the moral virtues are political virtues, since we are forced to think about human nature and activity, and the place of humans in the cosmos. Happiness and virtue create their own enabling conditions, the conditions under which they can be successful. Since virtues become second natures, we need to know about their mode of reproduction. The virtuous person replicates himself through political activity, through developing conditions in which virtues can flourish. Leading a good life therefore depends on knowing the place of people in the universe. A sign of the distance between Aristotle's world and ours is that readers today impute to Aristotle such anachronisms as natural law or metaphysical biology. Instead, the examples of perfect activity at Metaphysics IX.6.1048b23–25—seeing, understanding, thinking, living well, and being happy—are all either uniquely human or shared between people and gods. Human practical activity completes the Metaphysics and the cosmos.Less

Pure Mountain, Corruptive Swamp

Mary Ashburn Miller

in A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789-1794

This chapter analyzes the meaning of the term “mountain” during the French Revolution. The genesis of the term refers to the radicals' seating position in the Convention, near the rafters of the ... More

This chapter analyzes the meaning of the term “mountain” during the French Revolution. The genesis of the term refers to the radicals' seating position in the Convention, near the rafters of the assembly hall. However, what began as a partially mocking term for the radical faction was embraced as an appellation to signify all emissaries of the true Revolution: bastions of incorruptibility and political virtue. The mountain came to be deployed by individuals in power as a means of aligning the work of the Revolution—and, specifically, the Jacobin Revolution—with the operations of nature, or of “return[ing] nature to itself.” As a result, it nullified opposition to the radical revolution, making enemies of the Mountain enemies of nature.Less

Casting Models: Female Exempla of the Ancient Near East in Seventeenth-Century French Drama and Gallery Books (1642–62)

Derval Conroy

in Beyond Greece and Rome: Reading the Ancient Near East in Early Modern Europe

This chapter examines the representation of the women rulers Tomyris, Zenobia, and Artemisia II in the gallery books and dramas produced during Anne of Austria’s regency in seventeenth-century ... More

This chapter examines the representation of the women rulers Tomyris, Zenobia, and Artemisia II in the gallery books and dramas produced during Anne of Austria’s regency in seventeenth-century France. It examines the ways in which the dynamic of gender and sovereign virtue is varyingly cast, and the construction of exemplarity diversely negotiated, in the reception of the three rulers. While Artemisia is aligned with a gendered female virtue, Zenobia is cast as the morally androgynous ‘complete prince’, and Du Bosc’s Tomyris subverts the very concept of a binary sexual ethics. Furthermore, their reception demonstrates the ways in which the rhetoric of exemplarity at the time hinges on the erosion of distance and difference, as ancient and modern examples are merged in the instruction and glorification of contemporary women, not least the rulers Anne of Austria and Christina of France, duchess of Savoy.Less

Being Cincinnatus: The Jacobins in Power

Marisa Linton

in Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution

The shift from opposition to ruling group brought about a decisive change for the leading Jacobins. Like the triumvirs and the Girondin leaders before them, the Jacobin leaders were faced by a ... More

The shift from opposition to ruling group brought about a decisive change for the leading Jacobins. Like the triumvirs and the Girondin leaders before them, the Jacobin leaders were faced by a conflict between the ideology of political virtue, and the realities of power. This chapter explores how the Jacobins presented their own identity in the new context of revolutionary government, and how the need to maintain this identity led some of them to choose terror.Less

How not to go there: 1 Henry VI as prequel and alternative ending

Peter Lake

in How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays

This chapter focuses on 1 Henry VI. Some critics see it as the first part of a trilogy. Others have identified it as a sort of prequel, written after the success of the plays that have become known ... More

This chapter focuses on 1 Henry VI. Some critics see it as the first part of a trilogy. Others have identified it as a sort of prequel, written after the success of the plays that have become known as 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI had rendered a return to the same subject a profitable prospect. Ultimately, 1 Henry VI reshuffles the pack of narrative tropes and ideological materials it inherited from parts II and III. It relocates the threat of female political agency outside England and organises it under the sign not merely of witchcraft but of popery. It similarly displaces the locus of ancient political virtue from civil to military affairs, and downgrades the role of the king. Still central is the topos of noble faction, but that faction is centred not on the succession but rather on the conduct of the war.Less

The Design of Public Space

Albert Borgmann

in Real American Ethics: Taking Responsibility for Our Country

This chapter asks if we as a society take an active role in shaping public space. And if we do, does the shape of public space give moral direction to our conduct? In short, while there is a need for ... More

This chapter asks if we as a society take an active role in shaping public space. And if we do, does the shape of public space give moral direction to our conduct? In short, while there is a need for the personal virtue of economy, is there a place for the political virtue of design? The chapter first looks at the historical setting of Churchill's principle, then at the imprint of the principle on the boonies of the northern Rockies, and finally at the impact the principle has recently had on the most metropolitan of cities, New York City, and on the focal point of Ground Zero.Less