Search

This essay argues that Ernst Cassirer’s thinking about the spontaneity of form-giving in the creation of art, which he allies to the ethical dimension of Judaism, informs his critique of fascism in The Myth of the State. Aesthetics, for Cassirer, is not divorced from politics but one of its conditions of possibility.

This chapter explores the tension in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain’d, and Samson Agonistes between the work of poetry and the work of faith. In Paradise Losts Milton conceives of faith on the analogy of poetry, insofar as both require a work of interpretation and construction, one aligned with the theological and legal notion of equity. But Milton’s 1671 volume, including Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes, is the poet’s most powerful meditation on the dilemmas of faith. These poems question the notion of sacred truth precisely because they privilege the activity of interpreting the biblical text over the text itself. One implication of this argument is that God himself might be an artifact or construct of the human imagination.

This book argues that the literature of the English Reformation marks a turning point in Western thinking about literature and literariness. But instead of arguing that the Reformation fostered English literature, as scholars have often done, I claim that literature helped undo the Reformation, with implications for both poetry and belief. Ultimately, literature in the Reformation is one vehicle by which religious belief was itself transformed into a human artifact, whether we understand this as a poetic artifact or a mental fiction. This transformation in turn helped produce the eighteenth-century discipline of aesthetics, with its emphasis on our experience of non-cognitive pleasure in the work of art, and the modern formalist definition of literature, according to which—in the words of one critic—“literature solves no problems and saves no souls.” This modern definition of literature, in short, has a history, this history is intertwined with the problem of belief, and by returning to the fraught years of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, we can come to a new understanding of how the trouble with literature has shaped our discipline. The first chapter contrasts modern and early modern understandings of literature and literariness. The second and third chapters focus on Thomas Hobbes and John Milton. The fourth chapter treats the work of Kant, Kierkegaard, and J. M. Coetzee.

This chapter argues that in Leviathan Hobbes draws on the classical rhetorical tradition to make his case for maker’s knowledge, or the idea that we can only know what we make ourselves. In particular, it explores the role of fiction, narrative, and persuasion in the argument of the text. I demonstrate that one of Hobbes’s goals is to disarm the revolutionary potential of religious belief by arguing that such belief is an artifact created by the sovereign. Hobbes’s emphasis on maker’s knowledge or construction anticipates the emergence of the discipline of aesthetics in the eighteenth century.

This chapter explores the meaning of literariness in the aftermath of Kantian aesthetics. It focuses on the work of Søren Kierkegaard and J. M. Coetzee. It argues that, despite the strong formal differences between the texts of Kant, Kierkegaard, and Coetzee, all are engaged in a conversation about the kinds of belief we address to things that we make, and all three contribute to the construction of a specifically modern, formalist idea of literariness. This modern idea of literariness represents a declension from the heroic idea of poetic making characteristic of the early modern period.

This chapter argues that literariness in the Western tradition has been defined by a tension between making and believing, between an emphasis on poiesis as construction and the various attitudes of belief the reader or audience brings to a text or performance. It traces this tension from the work of Plato and Aristotle to the early modern period, when the centrality of rhetoric and maker’s knowledge (the idea that we can only know what we make ourselves) fundamentally shaped the conception of the literary work. It argues that modern concepts of literariness represent a declension from the heroic conception of poetic making characteristic of the early modern period.

This article traces Machiavelli's indebtedness to Sallust in his discussion of Agathocles the Sicilian in chapter 9 of The Prince. In distinguishing between virtù and glory, Machiavelli was influenced by Sallust's discussion of Catiline and Caesar, and of true and false glory, in the Bellum Catilinae. Writing to Caesar at the height of his power, Sallust needed to negotiate a delicate political situation that was in some ways analogous to Machiavelli's own difficult position vis-à-vis the Medici. Just as, in addressing Caesar, Sallust points up the difference between Caesar as he was and as he might have been, so in the example of Agathocles Machiavelli presents the Medici with a choice between mere virtù and the glory achieved by the really excellent men. It was the prospect of this glory that Machiavelli held out to the Medici in the concluding chapter of The Prince.

This essay argues that Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies is intended as a contribution to twentieth-century debates about political theology and that modern students of political theology can learn from Kantorowicz's association of political theology with legal fiction.

Milton scholars have accepted at face value Milton's linking of the Son in Paradise Regained with patient or longsuffering Job. This article argues that Milton's representation of the Son is equally indebted to the Job who questions God's justice in the central dialogue of the book of Job. Job's rhetoric also is a model for the Son's ironic mode of speaking and for Milton's own literary relationship to Scripture.

Este artículo reconsidera los debates del siglo diecisiete inglés sobre el deber político, analizando el diálogo implícito entre el Leviatán de Hobbes y el Paraíso Perdido de Milton. En contraste con los historiadores del pensamiento político que interpretaron los debates del siglo diecisiete en términos de una enervada concepción protoliberal del sujeto político autónomo, este trabajo plantea que el intercambio entre Milton y Hobbes realza la dimensión poética y afectiva de las tempranas narraciones modernas del deber político. Una vez que empezamos a leer las primeras narraciones modernas a través del lente de la poética y de las pasiones, en lugar del de la razón y de los intereses individuales, podemos preciar también lo que este período moderno temprano tiene que ofrecer a los debates contemporáneos entre liberales y comunitarios.

This essay explores the importance of the early modern period for the work of the German jurist Carl Schmitt. It argues that Schmitt' s misreading of Shakespeare and Hobbes can in turn shed light on Schmitt' s own aestheticizing of politics. / Representations 83. Summer 2003 q The Regents of the

This study argues that English royalist prose romance of the 1650s should he read as a contribution to seventeenth-century debates about the role of the passions in forging political obligation. Taken together, Percy Herbert'sPrincess Cloria(1653-61), Richard Brathwaite's Panthalia (1659), and William Sales’ unfinishedTheophania(1655), chart a trajectory from a politics of narrow self-interest — which contemporaries identified with Hobbes — to a politics of aesthetic interest. In response to Hobbes’ critique of vainglory, they extend an invitation to imaginative identification. In doing so, they anticipate the eighteenth-century cult of sentimentality and the emerging discipline of aesthetics.

It is worthy the observing that there is no passion in the mind of man so weak but it mates and masters the fear of death.... Revenge triumphs over death, love slights it, honour aspireth to it, grief flieth to it, fear preoccupateth it. Francis Bacon, “Of Death” This fight being the more cruel, since both Love and Hatred conspired to sharpen their humours, that hard it was to say whether Love with one trumpet, or Hatred with another, gave the louder alarum to their courages. Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia

Article-at-a-Glance Background The purpose of this article is to help clinicians expand their use of data to improve medical practice performance and to do improvement research. Clinical practices can be viewed as small, complex organizations (microsystems) that produce services for specific patient populations. These services can be greatly improved by embedding measurement into the flow of daily work in the practice. Why do it? Four good reasons to build measures into daily medical practice are to (1) diagnose strengths and weaknesses in practice performance; (2) improve and innovate in providing care and services using improvement research; (3) manage patients and the practice; and (4) evaluate changes in results over time. It is helpful to have a "physiological" model of a medical practice to analyze the practice, to manage it, and to improve it. One model views clinical practices as microsystems that are designed to generate desired health outcomes for specific subsets of patients and to use resources efficiently. This article provides case study examples to show what an office-based practice might look like if it were using front-line measurement to improve care and services most of the time and to conduct clinical improvement research some of the time. What are the principles for using data to improve processes and outcomes of care? Principles reflected in the case study examples—such as "Keep Measurement Simple. Think Big and Start Small" and "More Data Is Not Necessarily Better Data. Seek Usefulness, Not Perfection, in Your Measures"—may help guide the development of data to study and improve practice. How can a practice start to use data to improve care and conduct improvement research? Practical challenges are involved in starting to use data for enhancing care and improvement research. To increase the odds for success, it would be wise to use a change management strategy to launch the startup plan. Other recommendations include "Establish a Sense of Urgency. (Survival Is Not Mandatory)" and "Create the Guiding Coalition. (A Small, Devoted Group of People Can Change the World)." Summary Over the long term, we must transform thousands of local practice cultures so that useful data are used every day in countless ways to assist clinicians, support staff, patients, families, and communities.

IT IS A WELL-KNOWN TOPOS OF the history of political theory that the seventeenth century saw the development of a distinctively modern language of natural rights and social contract. In contrast to medieval and neoscholastic notions of obligation, theorists such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and Thomas Hobbes predicated their accounts of political association first and foremost on a secular account of human nature, including our natural desire for selfpreservation, rather than on divine law.1 Some combination of the rational deduction of the laws of nature, the rational calculation of self-interest, and the natural right of self-preservation then dictated the social contract as the best way to guarantee life and long-term security. Once we rationally deliberate about the insecurity of the state of nature-so the argument ran we will consent to set up a sovereign: we will consent, that is, to political contract. Consent is what authorizes the sovereign and thus what distinguishes legitimate from illegitimate power, sovereignty from coercion. Easily said. But here we confront the dilemma of early modern theories of contractual obligation. Once individuals are imagined as the prepolitical matter of society or as in Hobbes's metaphor mushrooms sprung up out of the earth, with no ties of status or lineage, it becomes necessary to provide an account of the motives that induce them to join together.2 Grotius posited a principle of natural human sociability, while Hobbes emphasized rational self-interest. Yet if these were sufficient if individuals could already cooperate in the state of nature the state of nature would already be one of society. For logical as well as empirical reasons, sociability and rational calculation are not enough; hence the necessity of a variety of supplementary motives, what one seventeenth-century critic of Hobbes called supplementary "laws of fear."3 In the following pages I argue that the full story of the subject of contractthe subject of rights cannot be told without attending to the supplementary role of the passions in forging political obligation.4 In so doing, I build on and revise three strains in the secondary literature on early modern theories of political contract. The first and most prominent sees contract as more rationalistic and/or more voluntaristic than earlier accounts of obligation and basically ignores the role of

All things by war are in a Chaos hurl'dBut love alone first made,And still preserves the world.— Alexander BromeI have heard [William Cavendish] say several times, that his love to his gracious master King Charles the Second was above the love he bore to his wife, children, and all his posterity, nay, to his own life: and when, since his return into England, I answered him that I observed his gracious master did not love him so well as he loved him; he replied, that he cared not whether his Majesty loved him again or not; for he was resolved to love him.— The Life of William, Duke of Newcastle

L'A. analyse le commentaire de Gentillet sur Machiavel a la Renaissance («Discours contre Machiavel») pour montrer qu'il faut lire Machiavel sous l'angle de la rhetorique pour comprendre les rapports entre celle-ci et la politique

We should be careful since not all indifferent things which appear indifferent are. Florentines can disguise and color any thing; and it is now adays the common exercise of the greatest wits of the world to transform good into evil, evil into good, and both into indifferent; so that in these days scant any thing is as it appears, or appears as it is.In linking the rhetorical machinations of the “Florentine” or stereotypical Machiavel with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theological and political debate concerning the doctrine of “things indifferent,” this quotation from William Bradshaw invites us to reconsider the usual histories of Machiavellism in Renaissance England. In particular, it suggests that the association of Machiavelli with rhetoric in the English Renaissance is more complicated than it might first appear.