Opposition (politics)

Abstract: Abstract The Pharsalia, Lucan's epic on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, is a document of fundamental importance for students of the history and literature of Rome in the early imperial period. Whether one is a historian of the Republican opposition to Nero, or a literary critic teasing out the ideological implications of intertextuality, it is impossible to ignore this poem. Taking as his guiding theme the unusual prominence of spectacle and spectators in the Pharsalia - the tendency of either the narrator to represent complicity with or apathy towards the action of various charactyers as that of one who watches and does not engage, or of individual characters to celebrate the actions which they undertake by turning them into theatrical displays for others to watch - Dr Leigh demonstrates the importance of this phenomenon for narrative, and intertextual concerns as well as for history and socio-political matters. He shows how Lucan can take devices characteristic of Virgilian narrative and transform them to launch an attack on the Augustan ideology of the Aeneid and produce a savagely Republican anti-Aeneid which represents the civil wars as the death of Rome. By studying the tension between the narrator's impassioned interventions and his characters' often manic zeal to transform civil war into performance, this work discovers a Lucan who is as funny as he is serious, as reflective as he is committed.

Abstract: Public support for planning programs and initiatives are an important component of its success but opposition can be a powerful impediment. When siting unwanted land uses such as affordable housing, neighborhood opposition can be a particularly effective barrier. Understanding the factors that influence opposition is a necessary precursor to successful planning initiatives. This review discusses how attitudes toward affordable housing are likely shaped by factors that influence other social policy attitudes— particularly ideology and stereotyping. The author concludes with recommendations and methods that planners can use to manage public opposition and influence attitudes toward affordable housing.

Abstract: In his essay on Politics and the Arts Rousseau proclaims that "never has a people perished from an excess of wine; all perish from the disorder of women." Rousseau states that drunkenness is usually the sole failing of otherwise upright, decent men; only the immoral fear the indiscretion that wine will promote. Drunkenness is not the worst of the vices since it makes men stupid rather than evil, and wine turns men away from the other vices so it poses no danger to the polity. In contrast, the "disorder of women" engenders all the vices and can bring the state to ruin.1 Rousseau is not the only social or political theorist to regard women as a permanently subversive force within the political order. Freud (to whose arguments I shall also refer) argues in chapter 4 of Civilization and Its Discontents that women are "hostile to" and "in opposition to" civilization. In a similar vein, Hegel writes that the community "creates its enemy for itself within its own gates" in "womankind in general." Women are "the everlasting irony in the life of the community," and when "women hold the helm of government, the state is at once in jeopardy."2 These arguments are by no means of only historical interest. Although women have now been granted citizenship in the liberal democracies, it is still widely believed that they are unfitted for political life and that it would be dangerous if the state were in their hands. This belief is very complex. One of its central dimensions, which I shall begin to explore in this paper, is the conviction that women lack, and cannot develop, a sense of justice. * I am grateful to Anna Yeatman for discussing the questions raised in this paper. 1. J.-J. Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: A Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theatre, trans. A. Bloom (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 109. Rousseau also notes that wine attracts old men because youth have other desires; beliefs about the subversiveness of youth are outside the scope of this paper. 2. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Ballie (London: Allen & Unwin, 1949), p. 496; Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), addition to par. 166. N. 0. Keohane ("Female Citizenship: 'The Monstrous Regiment of Women"' [paper presented at the annual meeting of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought, New York, April 6-8, 1979]) discusses various aspects of the belief that women should not enter the political sphere, with particular reference to ancient Greece and Bodin's theory.