Theoria

The rise of non-Western societies, especially in Asia, to greater global influence demands greater scrutiny of how they engage the rest of the world. To date, every society with high levels of immigration is in Europe or a product of the European empires. The erosion of ethnically and racially inflected understandings of citizenship has also gone much further in the modern West than in East Asia or the Gulf States. Notably, however, liberal political theorists who make the case for a cosmopolitan opening of borders remain silent on such non-Western patterns of racial exclusion. Non-Western societies often claim that, because they are 'not an immigrant country', they should not be held to the same standards of openness and non-discrimination. International law, a product of the postcolonial moment, also has a blind spot on these issues. This article challenges such double standards. It suggests that the implicit normative argument for greater Western openness – collective guilt over the colonial experience and resulting racial stratification – leads in unexpected directions, implicating Asian societies in ways that they do not yet recognise.

My aim in this article is to move the problematic of violence and its role in politics to a historico-ontological plane. I propose a perspective that breaks with the dominant subjectivist concept of human violence and its metaphysical foundations, which fail to distinguish this concept from that of aggression. According to this perspective, we are already in the field of violence in our everyday social existence, regardless of our personal choices or intentions, the sources of which are systemic. The ontological essence of this systemic violence lies in the fact that it is not external to human subjects but is engraved in their very social being by penetrating into the discourses, practices and frames of mind that make up their historical disposition, which makes it in many instances harder to escape than subjective violence. What I call from this ontological perspective the 'violence of closure' has the effect ultimately of suppressing the possibilities of social being open to human beings in their given historical situation, by normalising the existing way of social and political existence, and closing them off to alternatives. I argue that to this violence of closure must be opposed the violence of dis-closure, which, in its various particular intellectual and practical forms, can open up human social existence to its repressed possibilities.

The debate as to whether the humanities is in decline is almost over. Statistics on declining enrolments, shrinking job prospects, dwindling funding and growing condescension from society add up to show that all is not well. Humanities scholars have, in the recent past, tried to discover what is wrong as well as do something to demonstrate that the humanities is still relevant to society. In this regard, many have suggested that the humanities should change to accommodate the needs of the marketplace, while others have argued that to do so will change the humanities so drastically as to render it unrecognizable. This article is about the current state of affairs in the humanities and the different views that have been expressed on it. It argues that rather than the humanities, it is actually society that is in decline, and as such changing the humanities to suit the needs of the marketplace would be a disservice to our long humanistic tradition. It acknowledges that humanities scholars need to engage more with society even as they continue in activities that have defined the humanities through the years and argues for humanities therapy as a way for the humanities to engage with a world that is increasingly enamoured with technê.

This article analyses the way in which the life and works of Niccolò Machiavelli are misunderstood and misconstrued by writers and scholars, in the fields of management, personality research and primate studies. While adjectives like 'Machiavellian' and nouns like 'Machiavellianism' have become part of the vernacular, these scholarly usages trade on, perpetuate and reinforce stereotypes of Machiavelli in (1) a host of books and articles in management, (2) an instrument to assess personality that has been administered to thousands of subjects around the world, and (3) authoritative studies of primate behaviours from the Netherlands to Japan. The distorted Machiavelli depicted in these fields is but a shadow of the deft, insightful and elusive Machiavelli of The Prince, The Discourses, Mandragola, The Art of War, The Florentine Histories and more. We suggest that colleagues should recognise and rebut these shadowy Machiavellis in teaching, scholarship and research. If specialists in history and political science ignore them, they will continue to obscure the reality.

Violence in/and the Great Lakes: The Thought of V-Y Mudimbe and Beyond by Grant Farred, Kasereka Kavwahirehi and Leonhard Praeg (eds.) Tendayi Sithole

Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today: The Biopolitics of the Multitude versus the Hegemony of the People by Alexandros Kioupkiolis and Giorgos Katsambekis (eds.) Paolo Cossarini