Artikler

Indhold : Nummer 1 : Årgang 6 : 2003

Artikler

Introduktion: Idéer om idéer

Hvad er idéhistorie

af Hans-Jørgen Schanz

Hvorfor idéhistorie - og hvordan?

af Per Mouritsen

Om den tyske begrebshistorie

af Jan Ifversen

En revision af Rawls

af Lars Tønder

Political Thought and Political Forms

af Noel Parker

Asiatiske værdier - mellem vestlig og østlig idéhistorie

af Søren Christensen

Political Theory and International Relations - An Interview on the Nature of A Troubled Partnership

med Howard Williams af Vibeke Schou Pedersen

Politologiens pionerer - en samtale med Erling Bjøl

af Rebecca Adler-Nissen

Hinsides bæredygtig udvikling - Lomborg og etableringen af en ny miljøpolitisk dagsorden

af Olaf Corry

Bøger

 

Vil man vide, hvilke idéer der bærer nutidens samfund oppe, er det ikke nok at følge igangværende debatter om fx liberalisme versus socialisme, den tredje vej og globalisering.

 

Alle steder, hvor idéer brydes, bygger de på et solidt historisk fundament. Idéer, der har én betydning i dag, havde en anden i går, og vil man begribe disse idéer, må man studere dem i deres historiske kontekst.

 

Med dette nummer ønsker Politologiske Studier (nuværende Tidsskriftet Politik) at støtte og fremme studiet af politiske idéers historie, fordi man derigennem bliver klogere på den virkning og betydning, idéerne har i dag.

 

Gennem en række artikler og interviews behandler vi emnets betydning for samfundsvidenskaben. Med dette nummer giver vi et bud på, hvad feltet idéhistorie er, hvad det kan bruges til, og hvor det kommer til kort.

 

 

 

Abstracts:

 

History of political ideas – how and why?<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Per Mouritsen

 

Several legitimate ways of doing history of political ideas as an academic discipline exist, each offering different answers to ‘how’ and ‘why’. An historical approach emphasises conceptual context and remains sceptical of inserting old questions into new debates. A philosophical approach is more interested in internal coherence and originality of (great) works and remains committed to great’ issues linking Kant and Rawls or Nietzsche and Arendt. A political science approach emphasises a fact-value distinction, treating classics as repositories of causal theories and hypotheses. While each view has much to contribute a fourth approach which draws on all is suggested: A ‘political’ history of ideas, focussing on practice, on normative relevance of causal concerns, and on historical feasibility of value projects.

 

 

Conceptual History

Jan Ifversen

 

This article explores the key dimensions of the German tradition of conceptual history known as Begriffsgeschichte and whose central figure is Reinhart Koselleck. Through a close reading of Koselleck’s theoretical and methodological contributions to Begriffsgeschichte, the article point to the three main elements that differentiate this German tradition from other linguistically oriented approaches to the history of ideas. They are first the strong emphasis on the relation between concepts, experience and time directly inspired by the the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. The second element is a strongly contextualist approach where the use of concepts is seen in relation to a social history inspired by Marxist structural history The final and most important element consists of the linguistic theory that explains the relation between words and concepts. Although Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte has been criticised from many sides, the article contends that it stands as a unique effort to tackle the many problems involved in doing a constructivist history of ideas.

 

 

Political Thought and Political Forms

Noel Parker

 

This article asserts that a beneficial relationship should be established between the classics of ‘political thought’ and the ‘forms’ studied in historical sociology.  The benefit of this from the point of view of political theory is that it provides better grounds for studying classic writers, dispensing with the feeling that they constitute a self-justifying canon of authorities.  The classics are classic because they consider both their present and alternative possibilities behind it.  Historical sociology uses a comparative method to cover the same tension between political orders and what they might alternatively have been.  A sketch of the recurring issues that map out the field of possibilities for political orders is used to illustrate how issues repeatedly surface according to conditions definable in historical sociological terms, and are then subject to innovative solutions in political theorists’ analyses of the deeper dynamics of political orders. 

 

 

I øst og vest - ’Asiatiske værdier’ mellem vestlig og østlig idéhistorie

Søren Christensen

 

The article is a discussion of the notion of ’Asian values’. Instead of discussing this notion on an abstract level, the article writes a genealogy of Asian values by focusing on the case of Singapore. The article argues that Asian values have emerged from confrontations in a global field of political ideas and are thus not an offspring of Asian civilization(s). Asian values are specific ways of learning from the political experience of Western modernity – not least the welfare state. This, however, also means that Asian values should be taken seriously, not as something inherently ‘Asian’, but as an attempt to design a non-liberal, selectively traditionalist form of modernity.

 

 

Liberalism and its critiques

Mikkel Thorup

 

This article explores the philosophical and political

confrontations between liberalism and its various critics. The main thesis

is that these confrontations are structured around an opposition between

two conflicting views of the political and its relation to the social,

namely liberalism’s strategy of pacification of the social through

depoliticization and the insistence of the liberalism critiques on the

permance of the political. Liberalism tries to expel the political

understood as conflict, power and coercion in a Enlightenment vision of

the post-political and that is post-conflictual society. The critiques,

then, attacks liberalism through a strategy of repoliticization and a

strategy of unmasking the political nature of liberalism’s

depoliticizations.

 

 

Beyond Sustainable Development – Bjørn Lomborg and the Creation of a New Agenda for Environmental Policy 

Olaf Corry

 

Bjørn Lomborgs book The Skeptical Environmentalist  was portrayed as a scientific intervention into environmental politics depicting ”the true state of the world”. This article analyses how Lomborg did much more than this. Using a discourse analytic approach it is shown how the historic compromise of sustainable development is challenged by Lomborgs discourse of scepticism. The narrative of The Litany establishes the identities of Lomborg himself, the corrupt alarmists and the public. By reframing ‘the environment’ as human welfare and by appealing to scientific legitimation Lomborg advances a new anthropocentric political agenda where the story-line of ‘sustainable development’ is rendered meaningless.