Theoria

The Portuguese animal rights movement has been extremely active in campaigning against bullfighting. Indeed, from 2002 to 2014, this was their main priority in terms of campaigns. In this article, I assess how these campaigns have been carried out, arguing that the animal rights movement in Portugal has been othering supporters and practitioners of bullfights in their campaigns. In other words, their campaigns have consisted of drawing a sharp contrast between bullfight supporters and practitioners and the rest of the population. I argue that a consequence of this is that the speciesist practices of the majority of Portuguese have become normalised; consequently, leading to the reinforcement of some speciesist norms.

In outlining a model of sovereignty, this article makes constructive reference to the ideas of Machiavelli and Hobbes concerning the fundamental structures of modern statehood, and ultimately argues for a sovereignty without morality – but not without restraints. A central element is the idea that in terms of legal theory, limitations on sovereignty should not come from some other context, but should instead be developed solely in reference to itself and its inherent contradictions: this could be the future of sovereignty.

Politics usually takes the form of brawls ranging from the verbal and civilised, to the physical and savage, if not deadly encounters. These public engagements are political spectacles projecting narratives that are attractive to people who share the sentiments made public in these spectacles, and a following of spectators that, in sustaining their spectatorship, keeps the spectacle in its status. I note that spectators are attached and concerned with the narratives (i.e.from the causes and actors involved to the eventual results) behind and projected by such spectacles, and that this attachment in turn defines and sustains their spectatorship. Political alienation is a condition shared by both the apathetic and spectators. However the case of spectators is more complex and merits closer analysis in order to attain an encompassing understanding of political alienation. In this article, I will argue and illustrate that political alienation must be understood as a sustainable process constituted and driven by sustained spectatorship (i.e.sustained relationship between spectators and a political spectacle) made possible by a habitus of disempowerment in everyday life.

Although Hannah Arendt is often described as a radical thinker, this article argues that such a characterisation has occluded the question of what 'radicality' might mean within the particular horizon of Arendt's thought. While the battle over Arendt's legacy is fought on terms that oppose the radical to the conservative, Arendt herself is engaged in a different struggle, namely the opposition of the radical and the banal as it emerges in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). This article will investigate this tension and Arendt's response to its emergence. Beginning with an account of radicality in relation to Arendt's work on crisis in Between Past and Future (1961) before turning towards the interruption of Eichmann and 'the banality of evil', this article will end by articulating a trajectory towards The Life of the Mind, Arendt's unfinished attempt, demanded by the particular crisis of Eichmann, to think unradicality radically.

Edward Royce. Classical Social Theory and Modern Society: Marx, Durkheim, Weber Reviewed by Carmen Grillo