Christopher R Brooke

Rousseau’s political philosophy: Stoic and Augustinian origins

It is well established that the philosophical writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau were significantly shaped by his critical engagement with themes and arguments from the Stoic and the Augustinian traditions. Although Alasdair Maclntyre could write in 1983 that a “general blindness to the importance of the continuing influence of Augustinianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” had meant that “books of the highest importance about Rousseau tend with few exceptions to ignore the importance of any reference to Augustine,” the situation is considerably changed today. Maclntyres words served to introduce Ann Hartles study of Rousseaus Confessions, in which she systematically compared the autobiographical techniques Rousseau used with those in Augustines work of the same name; Patrick Rileys volume, The General Will before Rousseau, showed how the most important concept in Rousseaus political theory had first been elaborated for use in the theological arguments of the previous century by French Augustinian writers - including the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld (who may have coined the term), the Oratorian Nicolas Malebranche, and the Calvinist Pierre Bayle - as they sought to elucidate the Pauline claim that “God wills all men to be saved.”

‘Affection in Education’: Edward Carpenter, John Addington Symonds and the politics of Greek love

The paper examines Edward Carpenter’s 1899 essay on education that defended the value of powerful same-sex attachments, either between older and younger boys or between teachers and pupils, in the context of Victorian ideologies of same-sex affection. Linda Dowling has described how ‘a homosexual counterdiscourse able to justify male love in ideal or transcendental terms’ was fashioned out of the discourse of Greek studies in 19th-century Oxford by Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and the Uranian poets. We argue that Carpenter’s position in both ‘Affection in Education’ and his pamphlet on Homogenic love is best interpreted not in terms of this particular counterdiscourse so much as in light of John Addington Symonds’ sharp political reaction against it, a reaction that was grounded in recent historical scholarship on the ancient Greeks and which rejected the idealisation of intellectualised, aristocratic boy-love in favour of a vision of egalitarian sexual relationships between men, and which was, in Carpenter’s own case, very closely associated with his own ideals of social and political progress.

Arsehole aristocracy (or: Montesquieu on honour, revisited):

The 18th-century French political theorist the Baron de Montesquieu described honour as the ‘principle’ – or animating force – of a well-functioning monarchy, which he thought the appropriate regime type for an economically unequal society extended over a broad territory. Existing literature often presents this honour in terms of lofty ambition, the desire for preference and distinction, a spring for political agency or a spur to the most admirable kind of conduct in public life and the performance of great deeds. Perhaps so. But it also seems to involve quite a bit of what the contemporary philosopher Aaron James calls ‘being an asshole’, and the article will explore what happens to Montesquieu’s political theory of monarchy – which is foundational for an understanding of modern politics – when we reverse the usual perspective and consider it through the lens of the arsehole aristocracy.

Introduction: ‘István Hont as political theorist’:

István Hont understood his work excavating the structure of 18th century debates as a contribution to contemporary political thinking. This special issue begins to explore some of the avenues he opened.

Introduction: Political and philosophical perspectives on education. Part 2

This is the second of two special issues of the Oxford Review of Education, covering a series of political philosophical theories of education from Plato to the end of the nineteenth century. Part 1 (vol. 36, no. 5, October 2010) had papers on Plato and Socrates, Aristotle, the Roman Stoics, the Scholastics Hugh of St Victor and John of Salisbury, Erasmus and More, Hobbes, and Locke. It also included a short framing introduction by the guest editors—from which the paragraphs here are taken. This volume has papers on Rousseau, the Scottish Enlightenment, Macaulay and Wollstonecraft, Utopian Socialists, Martineau, Mill, Victorian British Feminists, and Carpenter. Contributions aim to put accounts of pedagogy, curriculum, socialisation, schooling, university and scholarship into the context of political and social philosophy and theory. For us, the initial intellectual impetus for the project was the observation that political and social theories and philosophies inevitably are imbricated with some theory of, or, more modestly, ideas about education. Contributors were invited to consider a prominent thinker or group of thinkers, and to write about the relationship between education and concerns about public and private life, political and personal power. The papers published in these issues are not encyclopaedic, either in their approach or format. We have asked contributors to consider the nature of educational ideas as well as their place in the broader context of the individual or group in question’s theory and philosophy, and to consider, where appropriate, the educational legacy or continuing salience of the work. But we also asked for independent views of the theme and treatments of the subject. The results are gratifyingly non-standard, although we have tried to achieve a certain uniformity in the provision of dates, references, allusions to critical disputes, and to changes in the reception of the theories in question, in order to help interested readers who wish to pursue their study further.

‘In Roman costume and with Roman phrases': Skinner, Pettit and Hobbes on republican liberty

The paper presents a critical discussion of Pettit and Skinners recent treatments of Hobbes on republican freedom, in particular situating Hobbess attack on the republican politicians from The Elements of Law in the contexts, first, of other contemporary suspicion directed against those politicians who struck a distinctively “Roman” pose, and, second, of Hobbess wider psychology of politics, before concluding with some reflections on the relationship between Hobbess political theory and the project of egalitarian republicanism.

What is Religious History

‘Religious history’ was not, until recently, an expression much used, and it has not been as fully institutionalised, academically and pedagogically, as ‘Ecclesiastical History’, which for generations was an examinable subject for ordinands and other students of Theology. A subject known as ‘The History of Religions’ turns out, upon examination, to resemble what used to be called ‘Comparative Religion’, not particularly historical at all. So we may begin by defining Ecclesiastical History. This is clearly the parent discipline. The editor of a recent volume of essays called Religion and the People 800–1700 (James Obelkevich) was making, as it were, an adolescent and generational protest when he announced: ‘the authors have broken with the related discipline of ecclesiastical history and have abandoned its confines and conventions’.