This article calls for a possibility of virtue ethical theory of politics in contemporary political theory by locating its key sources in normative virtue ethics. First, it evaluates the growing literature on politics and virtue ethics and evaluates their promises. The following sections briefly account for two versions of virtue ethics and two key concepts, character traits and justice, to draw a framework for developing a theory of virtue politics. The last section discusses the modern nation-state as the most critical setback in articulating a virtue-based political act.

Policraticus, which was completed by a leading English thinker and cleric John of Salisbury in 1159, is precisely one of the outstanding works of medieval political thought. This work mainly discusses how a good ruler should act to establish better and just governance by eliminating the corruption in the court through examples from history. However, the use of the examples from English history to justify the basic message of Policraticus has not been adequately analysed as compared to the studies referring to John of Salisbury’s interest in Antiquity and history of Christianity. The purpose of this article is to analyse the narrative of John of Salisbury in the Policraticus on the Welsh Expedition of Harold, the Earl of Wessex, in 1062/1063 regarding the lack of interest in the analysis of examples from English history. In this context, it will be revealed with its political and religious dimensions that negative language about the Welsh employed in John’s narrative directly stems from the rise of English expansionism in the twelfth century. Accordingly, this article will contribute to better understanding of how historical examples can have functions in the texts of political thought.

In recent years, Pierre Bourdieu’s views on social structure and order, consisting of reproduction, competition, and struggle in education and various cultural fields, attracted the attention of modern researchers in understanding the socio-intellectual life of the Mamluks. Bourdieu’s methodology, which usually involved criticisms of existing assumptions, was based on investigating each subject in its context. His explanations for determining the social order among complex social relations played an essential role in understanding the data in the Mamluk texts. This paper benefits from Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural capital and reproduction to understand the production of knowledge in the so- ciointellectual life of the Mamluk and tries to base the textual reproduction in the intellectual circles of the Mamluk on the mukhtasar.