Pub Date : 2023-05-15DOI: 10.1017/S0034670523000220
Bryan M. Santin
For scholars of American political history, the 2016 election was a moment of methodological reassessment. After Donald Trump eviscerated his seemingly “respectable” GOP challengers in the Republican presidential primary and went on to win the general election, historians and theorists of the American Right rethought the reigning “ostracization thesis,” a memorable phrase Edward H. Miller uses to describe a historiographical narrative grounded in the theory that American conservatives, led by Ronald Reagan, had prevailed in the 1980s by systematically purging their movement of extremists in the 1960s and 1970s (258). In 2017, Rick Perlstein, one of the most celebrated popular historians of the conservative movement, published an essay in the New York Times memorably titled “I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.” In it, he expressed regret for helping to forge this narrative in his first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Hill and Wang, 2001). Cory Robin updated his influential book The Reactionary Mind (Oxford University Press, 2011; 2018) to account for Trump's ascendance. “Like most observers of American politics,” Robin wrote in the preface to the second edition, “I was shocked by Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election.” But if the 2016 election prompted a critical reassessment, then the 2020 election and its chaotic coda (i.e., the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021) prompted a scholarly reckoning not only with modern American conservatism, but also with the broader narrative arc of twentieth-century American politics. The four recent books under review here, which were all published after the 2020 election, represent some of the first revisionist fruits of this reckoning.
对于研究美国政治史的学者来说，2016年大选是重新评估方法论的时刻。在唐纳德·特朗普(Donald Trump)在共和党总统初选中痛击看似“可敬”的共和党挑战者，并继续赢得大选后，美国右翼的历史学家和理论家重新思考了当时盛行的“排斥论”。爱德华·h·米勒(Edward H. Miller)用这个令人难忘的短语来描述一种基于罗纳德·里根(Ronald Reagan)领导的美国保守派在20世纪60年代和70年代通过系统地清洗他们的极端主义运动，在20世纪80年代取得了胜利的理论的历史叙事(258)。2017年，保守主义运动最著名的通俗历史学家之一里克·珀尔斯坦(Rick Perlstein)在《纽约时报》上发表了一篇令人难忘的文章，题为《我以为我了解美国权利》。特朗普证明了我错了。”在这篇文章中，他对在他的第一本书《风暴之前:巴里·戈德华特和美国共识的瓦解》(希尔和王，2001年)中帮助形成这种叙事表示遗憾。科里·罗宾更新了他颇具影响力的著作《反动思想》(牛津大学出版社，2011年);2018年)来解释特朗普的优势。“像大多数美国政治观察家一样，”罗宾在第二版的序言中写道，“我对特朗普在2016年总统大选中的胜利感到震惊。”但如果说2016年的大选引发了一场批判性的重新评估，那么2020年的大选及其混乱的结局(即2021年1月6日对美国国会大厦的袭击)则引发了一场学术清算，不仅是对现代美国保守主义的清算，也是对20世纪美国政治更广泛叙事弧线的清算。本文评论的四本书都是在2020年大选之后出版的，它们代表了这种反思的首批修正主义成果。
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Pub Date : 2023-05-15DOI: 10.1017/s0034670523000189
Maria-Alina Asavei
{"title":"Mihaela Mihai: Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022. Pp. ix, 283.)","authors":"Maria-Alina Asavei","doi":"10.1017/s0034670523000189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034670523000189","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52549,"journal":{"name":"Review of Politics","volume":"85 1","pages":"416 - 418"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47602544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-17DOI: 10.1017/s003467052200119x
C. Orwin
Renowned as a historian, Flavius Josephus enjoys little reputation as a political thinker. As heir to the classical historical tradition of Thucydides, however, considerations of the regime remained primary for him. All the more so given his most important task not inherited from them: the defense of the Jewish law and people against their pagan detractors. Josephus defended the law as having specified the best political regime (which he called “theocracy” but by which he meant a rigorous natural aristocracy). He defended the people as faithful to that law and as innocent of the terrible excesses of the great uprising of 66 CE. In so doing he was compelled to confront a phenomenon unknown to his classical predecessors: a politics not of class divisions but of sectarian ones. His response to it uncannily anticipated features of the modern (post-Machiavellian) reinterpretation of politics in terms of “peoples” and “elites.”
{"title":"God's Brigands: People, Party, and Sect in Flavius Josephus's Bellum Judaicum","authors":"C. Orwin","doi":"10.1017/s003467052200119x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s003467052200119x","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Renowned as a historian, Flavius Josephus enjoys little reputation as a political thinker. As heir to the classical historical tradition of Thucydides, however, considerations of the regime remained primary for him. All the more so given his most important task not inherited from them: the defense of the Jewish law and people against their pagan detractors. Josephus defended the law as having specified the best political regime (which he called “theocracy” but by which he meant a rigorous natural aristocracy). He defended the people as faithful to that law and as innocent of the terrible excesses of the great uprising of 66 CE. In so doing he was compelled to confront a phenomenon unknown to his classical predecessors: a politics not of class divisions but of sectarian ones. His response to it uncannily anticipated features of the modern (post-Machiavellian) reinterpretation of politics in terms of “peoples” and “elites.”","PeriodicalId":52549,"journal":{"name":"Review of Politics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44646872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-16DOI: 10.1017/s0034670522001231
S. Jaffe
Modern discussions of freedom focus on negative liberty or nondomination. In his portrait of the Athenian democracy, Thucydides thematizes the psychology of ancient freedom. By focusing on the psychology of the demos, Thucydides shows how democratic imperialism unfolds from the experience of freedom as a kind of felt power. His analysis offers us a way to think about contemporary populism. In representative democracy, the connection between power and freedom has been severed by representation and the modern state, but an experience of power nonetheless remains part of what we mean by freedom today. Modern citizens frequently feel powerless and so unfree, ensnared by impersonal forces. One lure of populism is that it satisfies the longing for freedom as a form of felt power, for a measure of control over one's life.
{"title":"Vast Personal Forces: Thucydides, Populism, and the Liberty of the Ancients","authors":"S. Jaffe","doi":"10.1017/s0034670522001231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034670522001231","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Modern discussions of freedom focus on negative liberty or nondomination. In his portrait of the Athenian democracy, Thucydides thematizes the psychology of ancient freedom. By focusing on the psychology of the demos, Thucydides shows how democratic imperialism unfolds from the experience of freedom as a kind of felt power. His analysis offers us a way to think about contemporary populism. In representative democracy, the connection between power and freedom has been severed by representation and the modern state, but an experience of power nonetheless remains part of what we mean by freedom today. Modern citizens frequently feel powerless and so unfree, ensnared by impersonal forces. One lure of populism is that it satisfies the longing for freedom as a form of felt power, for a measure of control over one's life.","PeriodicalId":52549,"journal":{"name":"Review of Politics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42295567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-16DOI: 10.1017/s003467052200122x
S. Jaffe, Guillermo Graíño Ferrer
The article introduces a symposium, “The Crowd in the History of Political Thought,” which is being published as a two-part special issue. The articles are by American and European scholars with disparate interests and approaches to the history of political thought. Some engage contemporary questions, while others offer interpretive analyses. Today, commentators, scholars, and pundits alike ignore the history of political thought to the detriment of their understanding of populism. Many thinkers have reflected on democratic health and sickness. The articles here furnish a partial catalog of the quarrels associated with this inherited vocabulary. The tradition itself is best conceived of as an unfinished Socratic conversation. In this issue, articles on Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, and Aristotle orbit the original democracy at Athens, the backdrop for reflections on popular rule of so many thinkers. The final article on Josephus moves away from the experience of the Greek polis toward the more contemporary preoccupations of the second issue.
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Pub Date : 2023-02-10DOI: 10.1017/s0034670522001188
David Polansky
Populism has lately become a matter of concern in both popular and academic circles. Yet contemporary writers have had difficulty parsing populism's relationship to democracy, partly because they are universally committed to the latter. It is worth turning to a thinker like Aristotle, who—despite not explicitly addressing populism itself—is able to reflect clearly on various democratic phenomena that we tend to consider populist, because he does not share our normative or analytical assumptions about democracy. Aristotle's discussions in books 3 and 4 of the Politics allow us to see that what we call populism is a function of a broader problem of class conflict in democracies. In light of this analysis, we can see populist movements not as an external challenge to the democratic regime, but rather as a characteristic expression of a recurring dispute over the contours and prerogatives of the people.
{"title":"Populism and Democratic Conflict: An Aristotelian View","authors":"David Polansky","doi":"10.1017/s0034670522001188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034670522001188","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Populism has lately become a matter of concern in both popular and academic circles. Yet contemporary writers have had difficulty parsing populism's relationship to democracy, partly because they are universally committed to the latter. It is worth turning to a thinker like Aristotle, who—despite not explicitly addressing populism itself—is able to reflect clearly on various democratic phenomena that we tend to consider populist, because he does not share our normative or analytical assumptions about democracy. Aristotle's discussions in books 3 and 4 of the Politics allow us to see that what we call populism is a function of a broader problem of class conflict in democracies. In light of this analysis, we can see populist movements not as an external challenge to the democratic regime, but rather as a characteristic expression of a recurring dispute over the contours and prerogatives of the people.","PeriodicalId":52549,"journal":{"name":"Review of Politics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48657013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-10DOI: 10.1017/s0034670522001206
Tae-Yeoun Keum
Plato's antipathy to crowds is a commonplace that reinforces a prevailing portrait of the Socratic method as a practice that centers on individuals, to the exclusion of crowds and the many. This canonical view, however, comes into tension with the tendency of Plato's Socrates to conduct his dialogues in the presence of collective audiences. I argue that Plato's position on crowds is at once more complex and more ambivalent than has been commonly accepted. I distinguish between two distinct lines of critique that Plato develops against crowds: the argument that the incentive structures that move crowds are unconducive to philosophy; and a more ambiguous argument that crowds tend not to be as amenable to control as their portrayal in the Athenian democratic imaginary seems to promise. Plato's depiction of Socratic practice can be understood as an effort to explore an alternative vision of crowd control.
{"title":"Crowds and Crowd-Pleasing in Plato","authors":"Tae-Yeoun Keum","doi":"10.1017/s0034670522001206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034670522001206","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Plato's antipathy to crowds is a commonplace that reinforces a prevailing portrait of the Socratic method as a practice that centers on individuals, to the exclusion of crowds and the many. This canonical view, however, comes into tension with the tendency of Plato's Socrates to conduct his dialogues in the presence of collective audiences. I argue that Plato's position on crowds is at once more complex and more ambivalent than has been commonly accepted. I distinguish between two distinct lines of critique that Plato develops against crowds: the argument that the incentive structures that move crowds are unconducive to philosophy; and a more ambiguous argument that crowds tend not to be as amenable to control as their portrayal in the Athenian democratic imaginary seems to promise. Plato's depiction of Socratic practice can be understood as an effort to explore an alternative vision of crowd control.","PeriodicalId":52549,"journal":{"name":"Review of Politics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46024718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-10DOI: 10.1017/s0034670522001218
Arlene W. Saxonhouse
Aristophanes in his comedy the Acharnians educates the crowd that he creates as a character on stage, as well as the crowd gathered to watch his comedy, about what is truly in their interest: the peace that allows them to be happy by satisfying their longings for good food and frequent sex. I suggest, invoking the medieval language of vox populi vox dei, that Aristophanes (like the politicians and demagogues of today) competes to become the one who gives the people their voice. His comedy imagines that both the crowd in the play and the audience in the theater learn through the action of the comedy the value of peace for private happiness. The crowd so educated will give voice to Aristophanes's wisdom when they vote in their democratic assemblies about what seems best to the people.
阿里斯托芬在他的喜剧《阿迦尼人》中教育他在舞台上塑造的观众，以及聚集在一起观看他的喜剧的观众，什么才是真正符合他们兴趣的：和平，让他们通过满足对美食和频繁性生活的渴望而快乐。我引用中世纪的vox populi vox dei语言，建议阿里斯托芬（像今天的政治家和煽动家一样）竞争成为为人民发声的人。他的喜剧想象剧中的观众和剧院的观众都通过喜剧的动作学习到和平对私人幸福的价值。受过如此教育的人群在他们的民主议会中投票决定什么对人民来说是最好的时，会表达阿里斯托芬的智慧。
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Pub Date : 2023-01-30DOI: 10.1017/s0034670522001048
Emanuela Ceva, M. Ferretti
{"title":"Introduction - Emanuela Ceva and Maria Paola Ferretti: Political Corruption: The Internal Enemy of Public Institutions. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 232.)","authors":"Emanuela Ceva, M. Ferretti","doi":"10.1017/s0034670522001048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034670522001048","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52549,"journal":{"name":"Review of Politics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47832566","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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