Mónica Brito Vieira
Biographic Data
| ID | 300575 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mónica Brito Vieira |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mónica Brito |
| FAMILY NAME | Vieira |
| SIGNATURE | VIEIRA M B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of York |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7714-9047 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 106 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes Three Decades On
An Introduction to the special issue on Reason and Rhetoric after thirty years.
Neutralising the “Specious Name of Libertie”: Hobbes on Freedom as the Silence of the Law
Hobbes uses the most powerful tools of rhetoric to undercut the republican understanding of freedom and the associated ideal of the citizen as a free man. His claim that the greatest freedom of subjects lies in the silence of the law plays a key role in this attack. For all is polemical vigour, Hobbes’s notion of freedom as the silence of the law has, however, received scant attention in the scholarly literature. While discussions of Hobbesian fr…
Editor’s Introduction
Embedding Silence into Politics: Book Roundtable Discussion
How silence relates to politics has traditionally been connected to the dismissal of silence from politics. However, there is a growing recognition that this representation of silence as absence is harmful to our ability to think through the integral and productive role that silences play in political life. This book exchange contributes to this shift in theorising that emerges from the field of ‘silence studies’. To this end, the following excha…
Ecological Personhood: A Bridging Approach
Aotearoa New Zealand’s recognition of the Whanganui River as a legal person in 2017 has generated a lively debate. While advocates argue that ascribing personhood to natural entities is a powerful tool for redressing historical injustices against Indigenous peoples and for protecting the environment, critics argue that it is incompatible with Western legal and political systems. In this article, we use Thomas Hobbes’s theory of personhood to deve…
Amílcar Cabral, Colonial Soil and the Politics of Insubmission
This article discusses the concept of 'insubmission'. This concept is the cornerstone of Amílcar Cabral's critical theory. Introduced in his early agronomic writings, it refers to the human species' refusal to submit to the nature of which we are always a part. The context is the anticolonial critique of traditional European humanism. Insubmission is Cabral's response to the dehumanizing effects of colonialism and the environmental impact of anth…
Race and Populism. A Comparative Study of Thatcherism, Peronism and the American Populists
This article re-examines the race-populism nexus. It asks: Does populist political construction of the figure of "the people" necessarily involve processes of racial othering? We answer this question by revisiting three emblematic cases of populism. Each historical case illustrates a basic type of identity formation that can have an i) exclusionary, ii) ambivalent or iii) positive impact on racial justice. The first case is Thatcherism, whose "au…
History and theory in Gregory Conti's Parliament Mirror of the Nation
From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics, written by Skinner, Quentin
Making up and making real
In recent years, the role of fiction in Hobbes’s system of philosophy has come under growing pressure. This is most clearly reflected in various attempts to dismiss the characterization of Hobbes’s state as a person by fiction or even as a person at all. This paper argues against this trend by demonstrating that Hobbes employs fiction in a more consistent and more fundamental way than has been previously recognized. In particular, the paper argue…
The great wall of silence: Voice–silence dynamics in authoritarian regimes
How does the voice–silence dynamics affect the durability of authoritarian regimes? This article reformulates Hirschman’s voice, loyalty, exit model to answer this question. It demonstrates that the model’s heuristic value is significantly hampered by conceptual imprecision around the category of voice, a narrow understanding of exit, and – in particular – the neglect of the category of silence. Once these categories are conceptually reworked, an…
Silence in political theory and practice
Western political philosophy has been dominated by the idea of speech as the locus of subjectivity constitution, individual and collective. This has led to a neglect of silence and silent forms of political being. Taken for the absence of speech acts, silence has come to stand for the want or failure of agency. This special issue reconsiders silence in relation to both speech acts and other forms of political action. Equipped with new understandi…
Representing Silence in Politics
Democratic representation focuses onvoice: it conceives voice as that which is represented and as the prime mode of representing. This article argues that this focus is problematic and turns instead tosilenceto ask a fundamental question: Can representation empower citizens from their silent positions? I approach the question in three parts. First, I offer a new conceptualization of silence, arguing that silence is best understood as the site of …
Rethinking the time's arrow: Beginnings and the sociology of the future
This article asks: What is, sociologically speaking, a beginning? And why has sociology so relatively little to say about beginnings, that point of discontinuity between past meaning and future meaning? We answer these questions in four successive steps. First, we suggest that the existing literature on beginnings can be organized in light of Lévi-Strauss' distinction between the irreversible time of social practices and the reversible time of an…
Books that Matter. The Case of Tocqueville's Democracy in America
This article addresses a puzzle in the history of academic disciplines: Why is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, once considered a sociological classic, nowadays mostly praised as a classic in political philosophy? Existing approaches emphasize either aspects internal to the text or to the figure of the author, or external factors such as historical contexts and disciplinary dynamics. Our explanation questions the assumption that text…
The Nature of Silence and Its Democratic Possibilities
Populism as a logic of political action
This article offers a new understanding of populism. The argument unfolds as follows: first, the populist literature is reviewed and two main approaches are identified: ontic and logic-oriented, the more important of which is the Schmitt-Laclau logic of enmity. While the authors broadly agree with Laclau's criticism of ontic approaches, they endorse neither his ontological understanding of enmity, nor his claim that populism is politics, and enmi…
Revisiting Hobbes on Representation
RE-Imagi(n)ing Leviathan
Over the years great care has been lavished by scholars of Hobbes on decoding the image produced for Leviathan by Abraham Bosse with the creative input of Thomas Hobbes. This article focusses instead on the reception and remaking of this image, arguably the most iconic image in the statist imaginary. Attention turns here, in particular, to two contemporary artworks, Do Ho Suh’s Some/One (2005) and Ernesto Neto’s Leviathan Thot (2006). Both of the…
Populism and the politics of redemption
This article re-examines current definitions of populism, which portray it as either a powerful corrective to or the nemesis of liberal democracy. It does so by exploring a crucial but often neglected dimension of populism: its redemptive character. Populism is here understood to function according to the logic of resentment, which involves both socio-political indignation at injustice and envy or ressentiment. Populism promises redemption throug…
Waiting for Godot? Welfare Attitudes in Portugal before and after the Financial Crisis
Do attitudes towards the welfare state change in response to economic crises? Addressing this question is sometimes difficult because of the lack of longitudinal data. This article deals with this empirical challenge using survey data from the 2008 European Social Survey and from our own follow-up survey of Spring 2013 to track welfare attitudes at the brink and at the peak of the socio-economic crisis in one of the hardest hit countries: Portuga…
Founders and Re‐founders: Struggles of Self‐authorized Representation
In this article my argument is twofold. First, I maintain that it is not possible to either understand or practically initiate democratic foundlings except through self-authorized claims of representation appealing to an extra-legal source of authority, that is, a prefigured people, constructed around a particular claim to what should be common. Second, I contend that self-authorized claims to a prefigured people that are performed to and retroac…
Leviathan Contra Leviathan
This article offers a comparative discussion of the two versions of Hobbes's masterpiece-the 1651 English Leviathan and the 1668 Latin Leviathan, with a view to examining the significance of some of the main continuities and differences between the two works
Democracia deliberativa hoje: Desafios E Perspectivas
Desde meados da década de 1990, o ideal deliberativo tem vindo a assumir um papel central na teoria democrática contemporânea. Mais recentemente, outra tendência tem vindo a registrar-se: a democracia deliberativa está a deixar de ser uma proposta puramente teórica e a tornar-se num modelo regulador de soluções institucionais concretas. É por essa razão que os principais problemas com que a democracia deliberativa se confronta hoje em dia são, po…
Understanding the New Politics of Welfare Reform: Preface
For some time, a sense of crisis has surrounded welfare states. Deregulatory pressures, sluggish economic growth, deindustrialisation of labour markets, rising unemployment, demographic ageing, declining birth rates and family restructuring are commonly listed among the most pressing challenges facing mature welfare regimes.Together, such challenges contribute to an explosive mix by simultaneously exerting pressure for increases in social welfare…
Populism as a logic of political action
This article offers a new understanding of populism. The argument unfolds as follows: first, the populist literature is reviewed and two main approaches are identified: ontic and logic-oriented, the more important of which is the Schmitt-Laclau logic of enmity. While the authors broadly agree with Laclau's criticism of ontic approaches, they endorse neither his ontological understanding of enmity, nor his claim that populism is politics, and enmi…
Representing Silence in Politics
Democratic representation focuses onvoice: it conceives voice as that which is represented and as the prime mode of representing. This article argues that this focus is problematic and turns instead tosilenceto ask a fundamental question: Can representation empower citizens from their silent positions? I approach the question in three parts. First, I offer a new conceptualization of silence, arguing that silence is best understood as the site of …
Founders and Re‐founders: Struggles of Self‐authorized Representation
In this article my argument is twofold. First, I maintain that it is not possible to either understand or practically initiate democratic foundlings except through self-authorized claims of representation appealing to an extra-legal source of authority, that is, a prefigured people, constructed around a particular claim to what should be common. Second, I contend that self-authorized claims to a prefigured people that are performed to and retroac…
Books and canon building in sociology: The case of Mind, Self, and Society
This paper discusses the canonization process of George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) in sociology through a recounting of the history of the book Mind, Self, and Society (1934). The relation between Mead and this particular work has no parallel in the history of sociological theory. Although the book was not written by Mead, or even organized under his direction, it has been through it that generations of academics and students have come in contact w…
Populism and the politics of redemption
This article re-examines current definitions of populism, which portray it as either a powerful corrective to or the nemesis of liberal democracy. It does so by exploring a crucial but often neglected dimension of populism: its redemptive character. Populism is here understood to function according to the logic of resentment, which involves both socio-political indignation at injustice and envy or ressentiment. Populism promises redemption throug…
The Nature of Silence and Its Democratic Possibilities
Democracia deliberativa hoje: Desafios E Perspectivas
Desde meados da década de 1990, o ideal deliberativo tem vindo a assumir um papel central na teoria democrática contemporânea. Mais recentemente, outra tendência tem vindo a registrar-se: a democracia deliberativa está a deixar de ser uma proposta puramente teórica e a tornar-se num modelo regulador de soluções institucionais concretas. É por essa razão que os principais problemas com que a democracia deliberativa se confronta hoje em dia são, po…
Waiting for Godot? Welfare Attitudes in Portugal before and after the Financial Crisis
Do attitudes towards the welfare state change in response to economic crises? Addressing this question is sometimes difficult because of the lack of longitudinal data. This article deals with this empirical challenge using survey data from the 2008 European Social Survey and from our own follow-up survey of Spring 2013 to track welfare attitudes at the brink and at the peak of the socio-economic crisis in one of the hardest hit countries: Portuga…
Amílcar Cabral, Colonial Soil and the Politics of Insubmission
This article discusses the concept of 'insubmission'. This concept is the cornerstone of Amílcar Cabral's critical theory. Introduced in his early agronomic writings, it refers to the human species' refusal to submit to the nature of which we are always a part. The context is the anticolonial critique of traditional European humanism. Insubmission is Cabral's response to the dehumanizing effects of colonialism and the environmental impact of anth…
Making up and making real
In recent years, the role of fiction in Hobbes’s system of philosophy has come under growing pressure. This is most clearly reflected in various attempts to dismiss the characterization of Hobbes’s state as a person by fiction or even as a person at all. This paper argues against this trend by demonstrating that Hobbes employs fiction in a more consistent and more fundamental way than has been previously recognized. In particular, the paper argue…
The great wall of silence: Voice–silence dynamics in authoritarian regimes
How does the voice–silence dynamics affect the durability of authoritarian regimes? This article reformulates Hirschman’s voice, loyalty, exit model to answer this question. It demonstrates that the model’s heuristic value is significantly hampered by conceptual imprecision around the category of voice, a narrow understanding of exit, and – in particular – the neglect of the category of silence. Once these categories are conceptually reworked, an…
Silence in political theory and practice
Western political philosophy has been dominated by the idea of speech as the locus of subjectivity constitution, individual and collective. This has led to a neglect of silence and silent forms of political being. Taken for the absence of speech acts, silence has come to stand for the want or failure of agency. This special issue reconsiders silence in relation to both speech acts and other forms of political action. Equipped with new understandi…
Leviathan Contra Leviathan
This article offers a comparative discussion of the two versions of Hobbes's masterpiece-the 1651 English Leviathan and the 1668 Latin Leviathan, with a view to examining the significance of some of the main continuities and differences between the two works
Mare Liberum vs. Mare Clausum: Grotius, Freitas, and Selden's Debate on Dominion over the Seas
Sixteen years after the publication of Grotius’s Mare Liberum (1609), Serafim de Freitas, a Portuguese friar, published a reply to Grotius’s attack upon the foundations of the Iberian overseas empire. Freitas’s vindication of the Portuguese dominion over the high seas has, however, been consigned to obscurity, as the Anglophone literature concentrated on John Selden’s Mare Clausum (1636). This neglect is unjustified. Not only is Freitas’s treatis…
The Elements of Representation in Hobbes: Aesthetics, Theatre, Law, and Theology in the Construction of Hobbes's Theory of the State
Books and canon building in sociology: The case of Mind, Self, and Society
This paper discusses the canonization process of George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) in sociology through a recounting of the history of the book Mind, Self, and Society (1934). The relation between Mead and this particular work has no parallel in the history of sociological theory. Although the book was not written by Mead, or even organized under his direction, it has been through it that generations of academics and students have come in contact w…
Understanding the New Politics of Welfare Reform: Preface
For some time, a sense of crisis has surrounded welfare states. Deregulatory pressures, sluggish economic growth, deindustrialisation of labour markets, rising unemployment, demographic ageing, declining birth rates and family restructuring are commonly listed among the most pressing challenges facing mature welfare regimes.Together, such challenges contribute to an explosive mix by simultaneously exerting pressure for increases in social welfare…
Democracia deliberativa hoje: Desafios E Perspectivas
Desde meados da década de 1990, o ideal deliberativo tem vindo a assumir um papel central na teoria democrática contemporânea. Mais recentemente, outra tendência tem vindo a registrar-se: a democracia deliberativa está a deixar de ser uma proposta puramente teórica e a tornar-se num modelo regulador de soluções institucionais concretas. É por essa razão que os principais problemas com que a democracia deliberativa se confronta hoje em dia são, po…
Founders and Re‐founders: Struggles of Self‐authorized Representation
In this article my argument is twofold. First, I maintain that it is not possible to either understand or practically initiate democratic foundlings except through self-authorized claims of representation appealing to an extra-legal source of authority, that is, a prefigured people, constructed around a particular claim to what should be common. Second, I contend that self-authorized claims to a prefigured people that are performed to and retroac…
Leviathan Contra Leviathan
This article offers a comparative discussion of the two versions of Hobbes's masterpiece-the 1651 English Leviathan and the 1668 Latin Leviathan, with a view to examining the significance of some of the main continuities and differences between the two works
Waiting for Godot? Welfare Attitudes in Portugal before and after the Financial Crisis
Do attitudes towards the welfare state change in response to economic crises? Addressing this question is sometimes difficult because of the lack of longitudinal data. This article deals with this empirical challenge using survey data from the 2008 European Social Survey and from our own follow-up survey of Spring 2013 to track welfare attitudes at the brink and at the peak of the socio-economic crisis in one of the hardest hit countries: Portuga…
Revisiting Hobbes on Representation
RE-Imagi(n)ing Leviathan
Over the years great care has been lavished by scholars of Hobbes on decoding the image produced for Leviathan by Abraham Bosse with the creative input of Thomas Hobbes. This article focusses instead on the reception and remaking of this image, arguably the most iconic image in the statist imaginary. Attention turns here, in particular, to two contemporary artworks, Do Ho Suh’s Some/One (2005) and Ernesto Neto’s Leviathan Thot (2006). Both of the…
Populism and the politics of redemption
This article re-examines current definitions of populism, which portray it as either a powerful corrective to or the nemesis of liberal democracy. It does so by exploring a crucial but often neglected dimension of populism: its redemptive character. Populism is here understood to function according to the logic of resentment, which involves both socio-political indignation at injustice and envy or ressentiment. Populism promises redemption throug…
The Nature of Silence and Its Democratic Possibilities
Populism as a logic of political action
This article offers a new understanding of populism. The argument unfolds as follows: first, the populist literature is reviewed and two main approaches are identified: ontic and logic-oriented, the more important of which is the Schmitt-Laclau logic of enmity. While the authors broadly agree with Laclau's criticism of ontic approaches, they endorse neither his ontological understanding of enmity, nor his claim that populism is politics, and enmi…
From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics, written by Skinner, Quentin
Making up and making real
In recent years, the role of fiction in Hobbes’s system of philosophy has come under growing pressure. This is most clearly reflected in various attempts to dismiss the characterization of Hobbes’s state as a person by fiction or even as a person at all. This paper argues against this trend by demonstrating that Hobbes employs fiction in a more consistent and more fundamental way than has been previously recognized. In particular, the paper argue…
The great wall of silence: Voice–silence dynamics in authoritarian regimes
How does the voice–silence dynamics affect the durability of authoritarian regimes? This article reformulates Hirschman’s voice, loyalty, exit model to answer this question. It demonstrates that the model’s heuristic value is significantly hampered by conceptual imprecision around the category of voice, a narrow understanding of exit, and – in particular – the neglect of the category of silence. Once these categories are conceptually reworked, an…
Silence in political theory and practice
Western political philosophy has been dominated by the idea of speech as the locus of subjectivity constitution, individual and collective. This has led to a neglect of silence and silent forms of political being. Taken for the absence of speech acts, silence has come to stand for the want or failure of agency. This special issue reconsiders silence in relation to both speech acts and other forms of political action. Equipped with new understandi…
Representing Silence in Politics
Democratic representation focuses onvoice: it conceives voice as that which is represented and as the prime mode of representing. This article argues that this focus is problematic and turns instead tosilenceto ask a fundamental question: Can representation empower citizens from their silent positions? I approach the question in three parts. First, I offer a new conceptualization of silence, arguing that silence is best understood as the site of …
Rethinking the time's arrow: Beginnings and the sociology of the future
This article asks: What is, sociologically speaking, a beginning? And why has sociology so relatively little to say about beginnings, that point of discontinuity between past meaning and future meaning? We answer these questions in four successive steps. First, we suggest that the existing literature on beginnings can be organized in light of Lévi-Strauss' distinction between the irreversible time of social practices and the reversible time of an…
Books that Matter. The Case of Tocqueville's Democracy in America
This article addresses a puzzle in the history of academic disciplines: Why is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, once considered a sociological classic, nowadays mostly praised as a classic in political philosophy? Existing approaches emphasize either aspects internal to the text or to the figure of the author, or external factors such as historical contexts and disciplinary dynamics. Our explanation questions the assumption that text…
History and theory in Gregory Conti's Parliament Mirror of the Nation
Race and Populism. A Comparative Study of Thatcherism, Peronism and the American Populists
This article re-examines the race-populism nexus. It asks: Does populist political construction of the figure of "the people" necessarily involve processes of racial othering? We answer this question by revisiting three emblematic cases of populism. Each historical case illustrates a basic type of identity formation that can have an i) exclusionary, ii) ambivalent or iii) positive impact on racial justice. The first case is Thatcherism, whose "au…
Embedding Silence into Politics: Book Roundtable Discussion
How silence relates to politics has traditionally been connected to the dismissal of silence from politics. However, there is a growing recognition that this representation of silence as absence is harmful to our ability to think through the integral and productive role that silences play in political life. This book exchange contributes to this shift in theorising that emerges from the field of ‘silence studies’. To this end, the following excha…
Ecological Personhood: A Bridging Approach
Aotearoa New Zealand’s recognition of the Whanganui River as a legal person in 2017 has generated a lively debate. While advocates argue that ascribing personhood to natural entities is a powerful tool for redressing historical injustices against Indigenous peoples and for protecting the environment, critics argue that it is incompatible with Western legal and political systems. In this article, we use Thomas Hobbes’s theory of personhood to deve…
Amílcar Cabral, Colonial Soil and the Politics of Insubmission
This article discusses the concept of 'insubmission'. This concept is the cornerstone of Amílcar Cabral's critical theory. Introduced in his early agronomic writings, it refers to the human species' refusal to submit to the nature of which we are always a part. The context is the anticolonial critique of traditional European humanism. Insubmission is Cabral's response to the dehumanizing effects of colonialism and the environmental impact of anth…
Philosophy (18 works) · Political science (17 works) · Politics (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Democracy (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works)