Haig Patapan

The Democratic Leader: How Democracy Defines, Empowers, and Limits its Leaders

The Democratic Leader argues that leaders occupy an anomalous place in democracies. The foundational principle of democracy -- popular sovereignty -- implies that the people must rule, yet the people can rule only by granting a trust of authority to individual leaders. This produces a tension that results in a unique type of leadership. The democratic leader must perpetually navigate powerful and contending forces of public cynicism, founded on the suspicion that all leaders are self-interested power-seekers, and of public idealism, founded on the perennial hope that good leaders will act nobly in serving the people. The Democratic Leader suggests that the inherent difficulty of this form of leadership cannot be resolved, and indeed is necessary for securing the strength and stability of democracy.

The Artless Art: Leadership and the Limits of Democratic Rhetoric

Persuasion is vital to the practice of democratic leadership, making speech and communication of fundamental importance. Yet, democratic citizens habitually suspect political rhetoric as being either deceitfully empty or dangerously subversive. Rhetoric is thus central in democracy while paradoxically appearing either useless or pernicious. A consequence of this paradox for democratic leaders is that they are forced to avoid fine oratory in favour of a rhetorical style that sounds un-rhetorical, seeming to be plain factually-informative speech. This unique democratic form of rhetoric, which we have called an artless art, seeks to instil trust and to avoid appearing to talk down to the sovereign people. It is both helped and rendered problematic by the media, the essential communicative means in modern society, whose current dominance presents ever-new challenges and opportunities to democratic leaders.

Love and the Leviathan : Thomas Hobbes's Critique of Platonic Eros

Hobbess understanding of love, and its significance for his political thought, has received insufficient attention. This essay contends that Hobbes has a consistent and comprehensive teaching on love that directly repudiates what he regards as the Platonic teaching on eros. In attacking the Platonic idea of eros, Hobbes undermines a pillar of classical political philosophy and articulates a significant aspect of his new understanding of the passions in terms of power, which is itself a critical part of his new political science most famously presented in Leviathan.

Separation of Powers in Australia

This article argues that the nature and character of separation of powers in Australia has been fundamentally shaped and defined by the High Court, which chose a Blackstonian, common law conception of separation of judicial powers in preference to the principles elaborated in The Federalist and articulated in the American Constitution. But the Courts recent jurisprudence, including its admission that it makes the law, has presented unprecedented theoretical and political challenges to the concept of separation of judicial power in Australia, including a transformation in the role of the attorneygeneral, the creation of new institutions and a move towards an American conception of checks and balances. Thus this article suggests that the Court continues to exercise a profound influence on the formulation of separation of powers in Australia.

I Capitoli: Machiavelli's New Theogony

The article considers Machiavellis terza rima poems on Ingratitude, Ambition, Fortune and Occasion, generally called I Capitoli, in the context of Renaissance hermeticism, cabbala, erotic magic, and astrology. It argues that these poems, taken together and read as a whole, reveal Machiavellis playful yet subversive cosmology that ousts the old gods by instituting a new theogony. At the same time, I Capitoli, addressed and dedicated to his friends, discloses Machiavellis own ambitions and desires, delineating the subtle link between Niccolo the poet and Niccolo the prophet and benefactor.

Melancholy and Amnesia: Tocqueville's Influence on Australian Democratic Theory

The paper looks at the influence of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America on Australian democracy. It argues that the way Tocqueville approached democracy in America — the questions he posed, the problems he saw, the predictions he made — were influential for subsequent thinkers who examined the newer democracies such as Australia. To bring to light this Tocquevillian influence the paper examines two major works that have Democracy in America as their implicit or acknowledged theoretical starting point: Bryce’s Modern Democracies and Hancock’s Australia.

The theory and practice of e-democracy: Agency, Trusteeship and Participation on the Web

The paper argues that tensions in democratic theory, especially concerning representative and direct democracy, can be seen in the practice of e-democracy. It examines two sites, the e-democracy program of the UK Hansard Society and an Australian e-democracy experiment, Mark Latham’s Direct Democracy in Werriwa, to explore the way in which the democratic dynamic is likely to play itself out in an era of technological innovation.

High Court Review 2001: Politics, Legalism and the Gleeson Court

This article provides a general political review of recent High Court decisions that have significant implications for Australian constitutionalism. In examining the Courts judgments on issues such as cross-vesting schemes, immigration and Native Title, it seeks to articulate major themes in the Courts jurisprudence and delineate the important and changing role of the High Court in Australian politics. The article is the first in what this journal intends to be an annual review of the High Court from a political-science perspective.

Rewriting Australian Liberalism: The High Court's Jurisprudence of Rights

The High Courts recent rights jurisprudence has been unusually controversial. This paper argues that it is possible to evaluate the important developments in the Courts jurisprudence by examining the philosophical foundations of its understanding of rights. Relying on the distinction between utilitarian rights and natural and human rights, the paper discerns in the Courts traditional legalism as well as its more recent jurisprudence of implied rights a consistent commitment to a utilitarian conception of rights. In contrast, the paper argues that the Courts human rights jurisprudence represents a fundamental shift in its view of rights and judicial review, with far-reaching consequences for Australian constitutionalism and liberalism.

The Glorious Sovereign: Thomas Hobbes on Leadership and International Relations

Thomas Hobbes lived to the ripe old age of 91, an impressive achievement for one who lived in the most dangerous of times.1 His long and eventful life coincided with one of the most turbulent and perilous periods in English history, marked by the execution of Charles I, the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, and finally the Stuart Restoration. It is perhaps this fact, above all, that explains Hobbes’s abiding interest in securing the stability of the state, even to the neglect of international relations. From his very first writing, a translation of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars, to his major political works, such as Elements of Law (1640), De Cive (1642), and Leviathan (1651), to the posthumously published Dialogues (1681) and Behemoth (1682), his overriding concern was overcoming civil war and internal instability. This view gains some support from Hobbes himself. At the very end of his most well-known work, Leviathan, Hobbes states that having completed his “Discourse of Civill and Ecclesiasticall Government, occassioned by the disorders of the present time,” he will “return to my interrupted Speculation of Bodies Naturall; wherein (if God give me health to finish it,) I hope the Novelty will as much please, as in the Doctrine of this Artificiall Body it useth to offend.”2 From this account, it seems that Hobbes is primarily a political philosopher of domestic politics and only incidentally and indirectly a student of international relations.3