2017/07/02 by Jacob T. Levy · 1 voice · 8 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Agency (philosophy) #Epistemology #Law #Moral agency #Personhood #Philosophy #Political Philosophy and Ethics #Political Theory and Influence #Political philosophy #Political science #Politics #Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought #Social contract #Sociology #Sovereignty #State (computer science) #State of nature #Teleology
paper · doi:10.1177/1474885117718371
published in European Journal of Political Theory 19(2), 162-183 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2017/07/02 · openalex created_date 2022/05/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
This article diagnoses and critiques pervasive forms of teleological thought about basic structures of political organization in modern and contemporary political thought: arguments that the sovereign state, the nation-state, or some variant of a cosmopolis both represents the unfolding of history’s moral logic and offers us full moral personhood, agency, and maturity. Despite the received wisdom that modern political thought broke with teleology, I argue that early modern social contract theory was deeply teleological. The emergence of the normatively self-contained sovereign state from the state of nature represented both decisive historical-moral progress from the medieval European non-state polities and the possibility of true moral personhood, thanks to the unity of will and judgment created by a unified authority structure. The article then argues that this overattachment to unity, both as an historical culmination and as a prerequisite to full personhood, was carried over into subsequent nationalist and cosmopolitan thought, where we see over-moralizations of historical processes, excessive claims for the teleological causal force of moral progress, and critiques of the immaturity of those persons who do not live in the recommended political form. The article closes with a sustained critique of both historical and individual-moral teleologies of these sorts.