Browsing by Author "Alexander, James"
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Item Open Access The atheistic metaphysics of cosmopolitanism(New Europe College, 2011-10) Alexander, JamesItem Open Access A Conjectural history of Liberalism(Burnaby B.C.: Simon Fraser University, 2020) Alexander, JamesI want to argue that liberalism has an essence. I do not want to do this silently, or by taking it for granted, but by stating it plainly. Liberalism has an essence, even though it emerged contingently and perhaps even unexpectedly out of history: for the reason that once it emerged it was soon understood to be a decisive novelty, not without difficulties and contradictions, but magnificent in the scale of its revision of human possibilities. In particular, I want to assert what is sometimes, though not often, asserted, that liberalism is best understood as—and the crisis of liberalism now best understood as a consequence of—an extension of a pre-political disposition of liberality (liberalitas) into politics, therefore not as a political ideal of liberty or consent. I do this neither by writing pure philosophy nor by writing pure history—since I think the former is a mistake, and the latter is sometimes a bit uncritical—but by writing what historians of eighteenth-century political thought called ‘conjectural history’: a style of imaginative writing which is for a philosophical purpose but which is written as if in historical terms. It is, in fact, a sort of philosophy of history.Item Open Access Empire as a subject for philosophy (polis, imperium, cosmopolis)(Cambridge University Press, 2019) Alexander, JamesIn order to consider the question of whether empire is a subject for philosophy, I do three things. I sketch an original typology of three types of state, which I call polis, imperium and cosmopolis, in order to show that the second is an important philosophical conception which lies behind the terminology of empire and imperialism. I also consider modern theories of empire and imperialism in order to indicate some of their limitations as theories. And finally I indicate that it is important even for philosophers to recognise that all imperial terminology emerges out of a very complicated history in which the concept of imperium has been extended and distorted in meaning, so that, at best, any good theory of empire or imperialism can only be some sort of recapitulation of that history. Neither the second nor the third of these claims undermines the claim of imperium to be a concept of the state which is of great political and philosophical significance.Item Open Access A genealogy of political theory: A polemic(Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) Alexander, JamesHere is a sketch of a genealogy of political theory for the last century. This is a genealogy in Nietzsche’s sense: therefore, neither unhistorical taxonomy, nor a history of political theory as it is written by historians, but a typology in time. Four types of modern political theory are distinguished. These are called, with some justification, positive, normative, third way and sceptical political theory. Seen from the vantage of the twenty-first century, they form an instructive sequence, emerging as a series of reactions to the canonical political theory that was established in the universities in the late nineteenth century. None of the four should be excluded from our conception of what political theory has been, though most of them, when seen genealogically, reveal their defects more clearly than they do when treated purely theoretically. Since this is a sceptical finding, the genealogy is a polemic against the first three types of modern political theory in favour of the last.Item Open Access The history of political philosophy(Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) Alexander, James; Fiala, A.Item Open Access Imitatio Pilati et Christi in modern historical drama(Edinburgh University Press, 2014) Alexander, James; Prickett, S.Item Open Access Item Open Access Radical, sceptical and liberal enlightenment(Brill, 2020) Alexander, JamesWe still ask the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Every generation seems to offer new and contradictory answers to the question. In the last thirty or so years, the most interesting characterisations of Enlightenment have been by historians. They have told us that there is one Enlightenment, that there are two Enlightenments, that there are many Enlightenments. This has thrown up a second question, ‘How Many Enlightenments?’ In the spirit of collaboration and criticism, I answer both questions by arguing in this article that there are in fact three Enlightenments: Radical, Sceptical and Liberal. These are abstracted from the rival theories of Enlightenment found in the writings of the historians Jonathan Israel, John Robertson and J.G.A. Pocock. Each form of Enlightenment is political; each involves an attitude to history; each takes a view of religion. They are arranged in a sequence of increasing sensitivity to history, as it is this which makes it possible to relate them to each other and indeed propose a composite definition of Enlightenment. The argument should be of interest to anyone concerned with ‘the Enlightenment’ as a historical phenomenon or with ‘Enlightenment’ as a philosophical abstraction.Item Open Access Reaction in politics(Brill, 2020) Alexander, JamesReaction is a subject usually avoided by political theorists, since it raises awkward historical, philosophical and political questions. Perhaps philosophers of history might make better sense of it. In this article I claim that reaction has to be understood in relation to the concepts of revolution, tradition, progress and conservatism. I argue that the specific meaning of reaction is a response to the specific action that establishes the principle that order should be established only on enlightened principles. The few theorists who have dealt with reaction have disagreed about whether it is the same as conservatism or not. I show that reaction is not an element in what I call a status quo conservatism, though it is an element in any conservatism conceived more broadly. I characterise reaction in full as the attempt to reverse the establishment of the principle that only enlightened principles shall be the basis of political order, the attempt to resist the further establishment of those enlightened principles, and also the attempt to criticise contemporary enlightened politics in terms of the unenlightened standards which existed before the revolution.Item Open Access The relevance of the eighteenth century to modern political theory(SAGE, 2022) Alexander, JamesThe eighteenth century is still the bottleneck of the history of political theory: the century that separates pre-economic theorists such as Machiavelli, Bodin and Hobbes from post-economic theorists such as Hegel, Mill and Marx. Political thinking became immeasurably much more complicated in the eighteenth century: and yet historians, after at least half a century of extremely judicious scholarship, still have difficulty explaining its significance for contemporary theory. Sagar’s Adam Smith Reconsidered is an important contribution to the attempt to clarify just how modern political theorists should look backward – without hastening back to the abstractions of the seventeenth century or remaining confined to particular involutions of the nineteenth century. Its specific originality is in drawing attention to two important ideas of Adam Smith, seldom seen clearly or at all, ‘the quirk of rationality’ and ‘the conspiracy of merchants’. Political theorists as well as historians of political thought will benefit from familiarising themselves with these ideas.Item Open Access Socialism(Cambridge University Press, 2015) Alexander, James; Kent, B.Socialism is one of the three great ideologies of modern times, along with liberalism and conservatism. All three demand that politics should not be founded on tradition, authority, or religion but on reason. However, liberals, socialists, and conservatives have disagreed for two centuries about what can be derived from reason. To put it simply, liberalism is the view that reason is found in the individual human, who should be emancipated so he or she can carry out his or her own reasonably chosen activities. Socialism is a development of this thought, since it is the view that the human should be emancipated, although collectively rather than individually, for the reason that each human is constituted by his existence in society. And conservatism – odd as it may sound – is a further development of this thought, since it is the view that emancipation is impossible either individually or collectively without a reasoned recovery of the very traditions, authorities, and religions from which reason seems to have emancipated us. Socialists tend not to take conservatives seriously: they were, and are, concerned more to criticise liberals. Either they extend liberalism until it includes socialist recognitions or they dismiss liberalism because it excludes them. These two different attitudes constitute the ambivalence of socialism, which has half the time been for reform and half the time been for revolution. They also constitute the ambivalence of Shaw's socialism. Shaw is perhaps the greatest socialist that England (or Ireland) has ever produced. Henry Mayers Hyndman and William Morris, the founders of two of the great socialist parties in England, considered him their equal; and he was responsible, along with Sidney Webb, for much of the success of the third, the Fabian Society. He edited the first classic work of socialism in English, Fabian Essays in Socialism, in 1889. His telegraphic address in the 1890s was simply ‘Socialist, London’. He argued for more than sixty-five years that a socialist sensibility was fundamental. Until at least the 1960s there is no question that he was the most read socialist in the English language. He was far more influential than Marx. Yet he was not an originator. He was not of the First International, which under Marx had attempted to establish socialism as a cause, but of the Second International, which expected it to triumph in the modern state.Item Open Access Three arguments relevant to the history and theory of monarchy(Taylor & Francis, 2021-04-15) Alexander, JamesThis article states a claim about the fundamental nature of monarchy as something which in antiquity and medievality straddled the immanent and transcendent worlds but which is only half understood in a modernity where the world which is wholly immanent and so has a politics which must be theorised in wholly consistent terms. It draws on theories of antique monarchy, medieval monarchy, constitutional monarchy and popular sovereignty, and asserts three distinctive arguments: that politics is always fundamentally torn between law and power, that the philosophy of political history requires us to see that our resources for attempting to resolve the two have been narrowed in the last two hundred years, and that monarchy, theoretically considered, is best understood as something which has a transconsistent political logic.Item Open Access Three ideas of the university(Routledge, 2019) Alexander, JamesWhat is a university? In the nineteenth century John Henry Newman famously spoke of “the idea of a university.” This phrase has dominated all discussions of the nature of the university since. Most contemporary writers are against any attempt to theorise the university in terms of a single idea. But against the now standard view that universities should only be characterised empirically as institutions that perform many different activities, I attempt to defend the idea of the university, not by reviving a single idea of the university but by suggesting that there are, at root, three ideas of the university. These are rival ideas, and strictly incommensurable, though they often exist together in a state of tension in actual universities. I call them the eternal, the immortal, and the immediate ideas of the university.