How to Do Things With Words

All these premises having, as I think, been clearly made out, it is impossible that the rulers now on earth should make any benefit, or derive any the least shadow of authority from that, which is held to be the fountain of all power, Adam's private dominion and paternal jurisdiction; so that he that will not give just occasion to think that all government in the world is the product only of force and violence, and that men live together by no other rules but that of beasts, where the strongest carries it, and so lay a foundation for perpetual disorder and mischief, tumult, sedition and rebellion, (things that the followers of that hypothesis so loudly cry out against) must of necessity find out another rise of government, another original of political power, and another way of designing and knowing the persons that have it, than what Sir Robert Filmer hath taught us.

Two Treatises of Government.

This study examines the role of community integration and mass and interpersonal communication in predicting two types of local political participation; more conventional, "institutionalized" acts of participation and less traditional acts of participating and speaking out in a forum. An analysis of survey data (N = 389) showed a strong role of newspaper readership and a somewhat lower impact of interpersonal discussion on institutionalized participation. Different patterns emerged for participation in a civic forum, with interpersonal discussion having the strongest impact of the three communication variables. Television news use had no direct impact on either type of participation, but it did have a modest indirect impact on institutionalized participation. The data also showed direct effects of dimensions of community integration for participation in a forum only. Orientations toward the larger community rather than the local neighborhood were positively related to participating in a civic forum.

Community, Communication, and Participation: The Role of Mass Media and Interpersonal Discussion in Local Political Participation

Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics

This book challenges the conventional wisdom that improving democratic politics requires keeping emotion out of it. Marcus advances the provocative claim that the tradition in democratic theory of treating emotion and reason as hostile opposites is misguided and leads contemporary theorists to misdiagnose the current state of American democracy. Instead of viewing the presence of emotion in politics as a failure of rationality and therefore as a failure of citizenship, Marcus argues, democratic theorists need to understand that emotions are in fact a prerequisite for the exercise of reason and thus essential for rational democratic deliberation and political judgment. Attempts to purge emotion from public life not only are destined to fail, but ultimately would rob democracies of a key source of revitalization and change. Drawing on recent research in neuroscience, Marcus shows how emotion functions generally and what role it plays in politics. In contrast to the traditional view of emotion as a form of agitation associated with belief, neuroscience reveals it to be generated by brain systems that operate largely outside of awareness. Two of these systems, "disposition" and "surveillance," are especially important in enabling emotions to produce habits, which often serve a positive function in democratic societies. But anxiety, also a preconscious emotion, is crucial to democratic politics as well because it can inhibit or disable habits and thus clear a space for the conscious use of reason and deliberation. If we acknowledge how emotion facilitates reason and is "cooperatively entangled" with it, Marcus concludes, then we should recognize sentimental citizens as the only citizens really capable of exercising political judgment and of putting their decisions into action.

The Sentimental Citizen: Emotion in Democratic Politics

What is good political judgement? Is it a science subject to strict standards of logic and inference, or is it something more like an art, the product of intuition, feeling, or even chance? Peter J. Steinberger shows how the seemingly contradictory claims of inference and intuition are reconciled in the concept of political judgement. Resting his argument on the larger notion of judgement itself, Steinberger develops an original model of how political judgements are made and how we justify calling some of them "good." He lays the groundwork with a discussion of the ideas of Machiavelli, de Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Arendt, and Oakeshott on the nature of politics. Turning to the philosophic arguments of Kant, Gadamer, Grice, and Wittgenstein, he formulates a model of judgement as "intelligent performance," incorporating both intuition and rational reconstruction. Steinberger's conclusion - that a coherent political society must also be a judgmental one - is opposed to much contemporary thinking.

The Concept of Political Judgment

Part I. The Basic Idea: 1. The state as a structure of intelligibility Part II. Philosophical Foundations of the State: 2. Politics, prudence and philosophy 3. The post-Kantian convergence Part III. The Idea of the State: 4. The omnicompetent state: toleration and limited government 5. The absolute state: authority and resistance 6. The organic state: democracy and freedom Index.

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The Idea of the State

This paper examines Hannah Arendt's views on judgment as they emerge from her account of political action. The first section outlines certain conceptual presuppositions that pertain to political life. The second section describes the role of judgment as it relates to, and is distinguished from, a variety of other mental faculties. The third and final section offers some critical and evaluative comments and suggests that Arendt's account ultimately fails to answer the most central questions about judgment.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2111399.pdf

Hannah Arendt on Judgment

Obvious and numberless differences between the principal political writings of Hobbes and Rousseau—differences of language and style, of descriptive focus and prescriptive detail, of cultural and historical context—should not blind us to certain profound agreements of doctrine. If Hobbes's great triumph is to have unearthed and delineated a conception of the state that is implicit in and underwritten by modern notions of individualism, I will argue that Rousseau, as another modern individualist, embraced a conception of the state that is, at the most basic structural level, deeply and decisively similar. In the first half of the essay, I examine exactly what it is that the social contract is thought to have created and propose in that context a fundamental distinction, shared by Hobbes and Rousseau, between an authorizing entity that constitutes the legitimate foundation of the state and an instrumental entity the activity of which has been legitimated by the former. The second half considers the question...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1017/S002238160808064X

Peter J. Steinberger

Papers

The Concept of Political Judgment

The Idea of the State

Hannah Arendt on Judgment

Hobbes, Rousseau and the Modern Conception of the State

Social Context and Political Efficacy.