Corruption and Partisanship
Rousseau, Ferguson and Two Competing Models of Republican Revival
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6236736 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Robert Sparling (0000-0003-1629-7585, University of Ottawa, corresponding author), Robert A Sparling |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 107-127 |
| Publication date | 2016-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Journal of Political Science (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0008-4239 • E-ISSN: 1744-9324 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0008423916000032 |
| OpenAlex | W2368884475 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 23 |
Partisanship inspires a degree of ambivalence. There is a widespread tendency—which has a long history in republican political thought—to decry division and partisanship as corrupting, undermining individual judgment, and promoting clientelism, dependencies and loyalties antithetical to the common good. Yet there is an equally widespread intuition that excessive unity is corrupting, undermining the vigour of civic life. Contemporary political theory remains divided on the normative implications of division and unity—witness the battles between agonistic and consensus-oriented schools of democratic theory. In this article I examine the thought of two eighteenth-century writers who, while often treated as contributing to a common intellectual project of reinvigorating classical civic virtue, took opposite positions on the desirability of division. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Ferguson offered competing accounts of what corrupts civic virtue, one decrying party divisions and the other lauding them. The article examines the underlying philosophical presuppositions of Rousseau and Ferguson's competing claims and suggests, ultimately, that both positions suffer from neglecting to attend to an important distinction between salutary and harmful divisions
Ambivalence · Civic virtue · Democracy · Epistemology · Intuition · Law and economics · Normative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Virtue · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Political Theory and Influence · Rousseau and Enlightenment Thought · Social Psychology
Parties and party systems
The origins of totalitarian democracy
The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics
Machiavellian Democracy
Wealth and Virtue
Before the Deluge
On the Side of the Angels
An essay on the history of civil society (1767)
The Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson
Philosophical History and the Science of Man in Scotland
Partisanship and independence
Men and Citizens
The Social and Political Thought of Adam Ferguson
Democracy's discontent
Between past and future
Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau on Civil Religion
Voting the General Will
Political Writings
Ideological Consistency as a Collective Phenomenon
Democratic Theory and the Public Interest
Rousseau's General Will
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,25 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |