Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction: The Calling of Transformative Knowledge
- Part I Nurturing the Garden of Transformational Knowledge: Roots and Variants
- 1 Knowledge and Human Liberation: Jürgen Habermas, Sri Aurobindo and Beyond
- 2 Beyond West and East: Co-evolution and the Calling of a New Enlightenment and Non-duality
- 3 The Modern Prince and the Modern Sage: Transforming Power and Freedom
- 4 Kant and Anthropology
- 5 Tocqueville as an Ethnographer of American Prison Systems and Democratic Practice
- Part II Rethinking Knowledge
- Part III Aspirations and Struggles for Liberation: Towards Planetary Realizations
- Afterword
- Advance Praise
3 - The Modern Prince and the Modern Sage: Transforming Power and Freedom
from Part I - Nurturing the Garden of Transformational Knowledge: Roots and Variants
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction: The Calling of Transformative Knowledge
- Part I Nurturing the Garden of Transformational Knowledge: Roots and Variants
- 1 Knowledge and Human Liberation: Jürgen Habermas, Sri Aurobindo and Beyond
- 2 Beyond West and East: Co-evolution and the Calling of a New Enlightenment and Non-duality
- 3 The Modern Prince and the Modern Sage: Transforming Power and Freedom
- 4 Kant and Anthropology
- 5 Tocqueville as an Ethnographer of American Prison Systems and Democratic Practice
- Part II Rethinking Knowledge
- Part III Aspirations and Struggles for Liberation: Towards Planetary Realizations
- Afterword
- Advance Praise
Summary
The entire tradition of political theory seems to agree on one basic principle: only “the one” can rule, whether that one be conceived as the monarch, the state, the nation, the people, or the party. The three traditional forms of government that form the basis of ancient and modern political thought – monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy – reduce, from this perspective, to one single form. aristocracy may be the rule of the few, but only in so far as these few are united in one single body or voice. democracy, similarly, can be conceived as the rule of the many or all, but only insofar as they are unified as “the people” or some such single subject. It should be clear, however, that this mandate of political thought that only the one can rule undermines and negates the concept of democracy. Democracy, along with aristocracy in this respect, is merely a façade because power is de facto monarchical.
—Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004, 328–9, emphasis added)when my powers clash with the powers of another man they are reduced to nothing; and this is due to the fact the other is, as it were, another me – a creature belonging to the same species that I do and thus endowed with capacities and means that are essentially equal to my own.
—Poitr hoffman, The Quest for Power: Hobbes, Descartes and the Emergence of Modernity (1996, 5)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Knowledge and Human LiberationTowards Planetary Realizations, pp. 71 - 92Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2013