Theoria

In this article, I explore the meaning and function of Lycurgus in Machiavelli's thought. While the exemplarity of the mythical Spartan legislator progressively fades in Machiavelli's thought in favour of the Roman model, Lycurgus’ reforms are central in Machiavelli's works on two issues of primary importance: wealth and land distribution. First, I analyse Machiavelli's use of the ancient sources on both Lycurgus and other Spartan legislators to show how the former builds a selective and strategically balanced reading of the ancient sources to build an image of the latter as a pro-popular ruler and of the subsequent Spartan reformers as followers not only of the mythical legislator generally, but also of his most controversial and popularly oriented attempts to reform property ownership in ancient Sparta. Lycurgus reveals how Machiavelli, far from seeing mixed government as the best form of government, promotes a strongly anti-aristocratic model. Second, I show that in Machiavelli's thought the Spartan question can largely be seen as a background for his reading of Roman history, particularly its most crucial, conflictual and controversial period – that in which the Gracchi brothers’ attempted to achieve agrarian reform.

While aligned with John Neville Figgis’ pluralism and Marxist socialism, Harold Laski endorsed liberal and democratic values. However, he synthesised several elements from older liberal theories in a way that diluted the division to which these theories had adhered, namely that between the private and the political spheres. The resulting combination preserves privacy's status as the realm where individuals are free to pursue their separate ends, but enables essentially private activities based in voluntary social spaces to infuse the space of politics. From this emerged a vision of liberal democracy, in which freedom plays out in multiple private spaces that do not require an autonomous civic arena to complement them. The combination was reached within the contexts of mid-century thinking about the welfare state and a broader project of reformulating democracy by reducing its equation with representation.

As a population is subject to necropolitics, what are the ways in which they resist the exposure to this systematic, deliberately inflicted death? Encompassing the case of India-administered Kashmir region, this article seeks to understand and examine this question. As the Indian state continues to enact insidious and expansive forms of necropolitics in Kashmir, the population has also turned death into a form of counter-conduct – a necroresistance to subvert the state's necropolitics. Exploring this enactment of necroresistance, this article seeks to reveal the forms that it takes in India-administered Kashmir as well as the transformations that it brings to the socio-political milieu. Conversely, it also looks at how necroresistance in Kashmir acquires a contextual sacred dimension.

This article provides an analysis of the way in which contemporary forms of intelligence discourse (Jean Baudrillard), in similar fashion to political art (Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse), function by delimiting critical thought. The intelligence discourse critiqued is extolled through things such as progressive intelligence acquisition (Flynn effect) and the supposed indispensability of Democratic reason (Hélène Landemore), amongst other qualities. In support of its argument, the article focusses specifically on Baudrillard's analysis of the notion of the intelligence of evil, as well as on the Frankfurt School's critique of massification. However, the article also notes limitations in these thinkers’ recovery and defence of critical thought in response to the delimitation posed by intelligence and massification, and argues for Rosi Braidotti's evaluation of thought as nomadic as a necessary corrective.

Douglas L. Berger, Indian and Intercultural Philosophy: Personhood, Consciousness and Causality. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, 240 pp.

Joseph C. A. Agbakoba, Development and Modernity in Africa: An Intercultural Philosophical Perspective, Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2019, 405 pp.

Adekeye Adebajo (ed.), The Pan-African Pantheon: Prophets, Poets and Philosophers, Auckland Park, South Africa: Jacana Media, 2020. 655 pp.