Andrew Vincent

The character of ecology

Contrary to many contemporary readings of ecological thought, the internal structure of both the political beliefs and philosophy is immensely complex and tangled. Existing typologies neither pay sufficient attention to this internal complexity, nor to the problematic and tense relationship of the philosophical ideas and political aspirations. All analyses of these questions are handicapped to some degree by a resistance to classification within the ecology movement itself. However, an analysis of the various ecological beliefs reveals a typology which both shows affinities with aspects of traditional ideologies, and also illustrates a cross cutting of familiar ideological loyalties. This typology does not offer any placebo to these dilemmas. Conversely it charts the subtle shifts in meaning and allegiance between various contributions to ecological thought. Distinctions within the typology are made for heuristic purposes; they are not hard and fast exclusive dichotomies. There is a subtle ‘shading over’ ...

The Ideological Context of Impact

This article sketches the ideological backdrop to deliberations on higher education over the last century; it then situates the concept of ‘impact’ within contemporary ideological debate. It argues, in the final analysis, that impact is an aspect of an anomalous ideological hybrid, still emerging in 2015, which remains worryingly capricious in terms of the way in which it is trying to reconfigure the character of university life. The article argues that political theorists should be critically alert to this reconfiguration.

British Conservatism and the Problem of Ideology

This essay is concerned with one key problem, namely, whether traditionalist conservatism (mainly in the British tradition) can be considered as an ideology. Some conservative theorists and commentators, have clearly been at pains to distance it from the ideological domain. They argue that conservatism is a natural disposition which embodies the historical tradition, customs and prejudices of a society and cannot, in consequence, be articulated as a body of ideas and values. In this sense, conservatism cannot be considered to be an ideology like liberalism or socialism. Despite the attraction of such a claim for many of its proponents there are a number of fatal flaws. After unpacking the argument behind the claim the paper contends that the dispositional interpretation (which is a central plank of much traditionalist conservatism) remains inchoate and unsubstantiated.

In Defence of Political Parties: A Symposium on Jonathan White and Lea Ypi’s The Meaning of Partisanship:

Over the past 10 years, the literature on the normative dimensions of partisanship and party politics has rapidly grown. Yet, however rich and diverse, this literature lacked so far a single text able to comprehensively map the contours of the existing debates and, at the same time, open up a range of future research avenues. Jonathan White and Lea Ypi’s The Meaning of Partisanship does an excellent job at fulfilling both tasks. First, it offers a wide-ranging and sustained engagement with key debates in the history of political thought, contemporary democratic theory and analytical political philosophy. Second, it opens up new areas of research ranging from partisanship across time to revolutionary and transnational partisanship. In this symposium, White and Ypi re-examine some of the book’s main themes by responding to the commentaries offered by six political theorists.

‘Here or nowhere is your America’: idealism, religion and nationalism

ABSTRACT The argument focuses on a Victorian perception of spiritual crisis and its unanticipated relation to nationalism. This issue is analyzed in the context of the British Idealist movement for whom the roots of the crisis derived largely from a misleading transcendental understanding of religion. The Idealists re-conceptualized religion as immanent within a humanized incarnational understanding of Christ, which was in turn seen to be implicit in the everyday moral conduct of all humans. This latter idea had immediate social implications. Morality is seen to be rooted within institutions aspiring to achieve the common good. In this context, a specific ‘sense’ of nationalism is seen to embody this aspiration to the common good. There is an explicit distinction between forms of nationalism which facilitate, as against those which hinder, the common good. Thus, the Idealist immanent understanding of religion - configured through the common good - forms the intrinsic value substance to a unique understanding of nationalism.

The Ambiguity of Ideology

This article responds to Rose Ganns ‘The Limits of Textbook Ideology’ in a previous issue of Politics. It acknowledges that she has performed a service in drawing our attention to the problematic character of the concept, particularly within the ordered world of the academic textbook. However this ambiguity in the concept is not limited to the academic textbook but exists across the whole range of the human and social sciences and is much deeper and more perplexing than her own discussion indicates.

The state and social purpose in idealist political philosophy

Can the state be a moral educator for its citizens? Is it justifiable to view it as a moral entity embodying the true ends or purposes of individual citizens? Such questions today would not meet with much approval or sympathy. The principle that the realm of the individual must be kept distinct from that of the state, except where an individual’s action impedes another, is still firmly rooted in liberal-democratic thought. It is closely connected with the view that the public interest, if it exists, hardly ever coincides with the a,, ooregate of individual interests in society. This is especially true in the realm of moral conduct. The function of law, as promulgated by the state, is not to enforce morality. The legal positivist tradition have, not without criticism, established this as an orthodoxy this century. However, such an idea would have sounded strange to Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, also to the mediaeval mind of St. Thomas Aquinas.’ They recognised that political institutions could either corrupt or sustain human beings, but at their best they could contribute to the perfection or salvation of individual citizens. Their function was primarily moral. In the Christian sense, as St. Paul expressed it in Romans XIII, government could represent the fatherly authority of God on earth. Such an idea became embodied in the patriarchal and divine right theories of the sixteenth century. The more contemporary grasp of the state as morally neutral is thus relatively novel in the European political vocabulary. The idea of moral neutrality has intellectual roots in the sixteenth century, specifically in thinkers like Hobbes. Hobbes discussed the state or commonwealth primarily in terms of centralising power, security and sovereignty. Moral requirements for the state and its ruler came a poor second. Hobbes thought contains the lineaments of the ninettenthand twentieth-century emphasis on legal positivism and the separation of law and morality. The most important perspective in nineteenth-and twentieth-century political thought which contributed to the separation of the realm of the individual from that of the state was ‘liberal individualism’. It is admittedly a rather general category, yet very broadly the liberal individualist understanding of the political community is simply as an area in which individuals can pursue their own selfchosen conceptions of the good life. The state acts as a neutral arbiter, which exists fundamentally to maintain a formal rule of law behind the flux and flow of individual actions. It does not exist to inculcate a moral outlook, that is the individual’s concern. Moral education smacks of paternalism. Admittedly many