Eugenics and Progressive Thought: a Study in Ideological Affinity

1979 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 645-671 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Freeden
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Central Question ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
A Minor

The issues raised by eugenics are of more than passing interest for the student of political thought. In itself a minor offshoot of turn-of-the-century socio-biological thought which never achieved ideological ‘take-off’ in terms of influence or circulation, there was certainly more in eugenics than nowadays meets the eye. The following pages propose to depart from the over-simplistic identification of eugenics, as political theory, with racism or ultra-conservatism and to offer instead two alternative modes of interpretation. On the one hand, eugenics will be portrayed as an exploratory avenue of the social-reformist tendencies of early-twentieth-century British political thought. On the other, it will serve as a case-study illustrating the complexity and overlapping which characterize most modern ideologies. While recognizing, of course, the appeal of eugenics for the ‘right’, a central question pervading the forthcoming analysis will be the attraction it had for progressives of liberal and socialist persuasions, with the ultimate aim of discovering the fundamental affinities the ‘left’ had, and may still have, with this type of thinking.

Refiguring the Language of Race

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katja Garloff
Keyword(s):  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Love Stories ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Orientations ◽  
Final Verdict ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
The One

This chapter jumps to the turn of the century, when the rise of racial antisemitism fostered a new Jewish self-awareness and rendered “interracial” love and marriage central to the public debates about German Jewish identity. It analyzes three German Jewish writers of different and paradigmatic political orientations, who used love stories to diagnose the reasons for the faltering of emancipation: the assimilationist Ludwig Jacobowski, the Zionist Max Nordau, and the mainstream liberal Georg Hermann. Their works, including Jacobowski's Werther the Jew (1892), Nordau's Doctor Kohn (1899), and Hermann's Jettchen Gebert (1906), show how love stories potentially escape the ideological constraints of increasingly racialized models of identity. On the one hand, the love plot affords an opportunity to expose the obstacles encountered by Jews seeking integration in times of rising antisemitism. On the other hand, the open endings of most love stories and the ambiguous use of racial language allow the authors to eschew a final verdict on the success or failure of integration. The chapter argues that the love plot generates a host of equivocations between the social and the biological, and the particular and the universal, creating a metaphorical surplus that opens up venues to rethink the project of Jewish emancipation and assimilation.

Political Theory and the Study of Politics: A Report of a Conference

1956 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 475-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Eckstein
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sharp Distinction ◽  
Basic Issue ◽  
Political Inquiry ◽  
The One

The issues which arose during the discussions of the conference fall fairly conveniently into three compartments.First, we obviously had to settle, with reasonable clarity, what we were talking about: what “political philosophy” is, what “political science” is, and whether they are really distinguishable. The basic issue of the conference was to determine the relevance of the one to the study of the other, and if we had decided that they were really the same thing, there would simply have been no problems for us to discuss. On the whole, we felt that a valid, if not necessarily sharp, distinction was to be made between the “philosophical” and the “scientific” approaches to the study of politics and that we were not discussing absurd or tautological issues. We agreed, however, that all types of political inquiry involve the construction of theory, implicit or explicit, and that the title “political theory” has been unjustifiably appropriated by the historians of political thought.

scholarly journals Democracy and Planetary Fragility in the Anthropocene: on William Connolly’s Political Ontology

Stasis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-155
Author(s):  
Dmitry Lebedev
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Political Ontology ◽  
Political World ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

As climate change rapidly intensifies, political theory urgently needs to respond to the shock of the Anthropocene and bring nature back to politics. William Connolly’s work is a paradigmatic example of such a theory that actively emphasizes the role nonhuman forces play in the social and political world and the discontinuity this emphasis brings to political theory. Connolly underscores fragile resonances between nature and culture and productively problematizes a human-centric vision of politics. However, while interrogating how contemporary political conjuncture catastrophically increases planetary fragility, he still insists on the continuity of his vision for democratic pluralism that this very conjuncture fundamentally puts in question. Thus, Connolly’s type of post-anthropocentric ontology remains rather inconsistently connected to explicitly political concerns. This article aims to clarify this connection. On the one hand, it shows how his brand of democratic politics that answers to the challenges of the Anthropocene presupposes a heightened degree of political negativism and universalism that used to be excluded from this politics. On the other, it demonstrates how the discontinuities in ontology must be simultaneously thought of as the discontinuities in established political theorizing and to continuously interrogate the very conjuncture that reveals the relevance of these ontological and political discontinuities.

UNESCO and the ‘right’ kind of culture: Bureaucratic production and articulation

2011 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 273-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bjarke Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
The Other ◽  
Everyday Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Institutional Authority ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Social ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right

There has been much debate on ‘culturespeak’ and the politics of culture, but the bureaucratic articulation of specific representations of culture has not received much attention. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article presents a double take on bureaucracy. On the one hand, I focus on the outcome of UNESCO’s bureaucracy: UNESCO promotes an all-inclusive culture perspective for ‘We the Peoples of the United Nations’, but there are limits to tolerance in this culture ideology. On the other hand, I focus on the social and pragmatic adaptation to the bureaucratic field and towards UNESCO’s keywords, as they are embedded with institutional authority in everyday practice. In conclusion, I briefly situate UNESCO’s culture ideology in relation to questions of recognition and redistribution.

The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary Birth Pangs of Modernity

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wokler ◽  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
Modern Nation State

This chapter's overriding objective is to explain how both the invention of our modern understanding of the social sciences, on the one hand, and the post-Enlightenment establishment of the modern nation-state, on the other, encapsulated doctrines which severed modernity from the Enlightenment philosophy which is presumed to have inspired it. It offers illustrations not so much of the unity of political theory and practice in the modern world as of their disengagement. In providing here some brief remarks on how post-Enlightenment justifications of modernity came to part company from their Enlightenment prefigurations, it hopes to sketch an account of certain links between principles and institutions which bears some relation to both Enlightenment and Hegelian conceptual history.

Writing the Social Contradiction: Rousseau’s Literary Politics

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoe Beenstock
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Conformity ◽  
General Will ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Literary Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

This chapter explores Rousseau’s account of the tension between community and individual by examining the Second Discourse and the Social Contract on the one hand, and Julie on the other. In his political theory Rousseau defines the state of nature as a mere fantasy which belongs to an optative imagined past. In leaving the state of nature, people trade basic needs for decadent desires. Rousseau introduces the general will as a practical device for managing the asociability of the private will, which is driven mainly by appetite. To safeguard the general will from its wayward members, individuals must form a social contract which transforms them into sociable beings. In Julie Rousseau explores the sacrifices that individuals make in joining the general will, as Julie is torn between personal desire on the one hand and social conformity on the other. Rousseau’s literature suggests that the two are incompatible and thus ‘judges’ his philosophy, exploring the deathly outcome of contract. Rousseau’s use of literature to critique the social contract constitutes his major legacy to British Romantic writers.

3. Liberal Equality

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Kymlicka
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Equality Of Opportunity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Free Markets ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

This chapter examines the notion of liberal equality by considering John Rawls’s alternative to utilitarianism. In his A Theory of Justice, Rawls complains that political theory was caught between two extremes: utilitarianism on the one side, and what he calls ‘intuitionism’ on the other. The chapter presents Rawls’s ideas, first by discussing the two arguments he gives for his answer to the question of justice: the intuitive equality of opportunity argument and the social contract argument. It also analyses Ronald Dworkin’s views on equality of resources, focusing on his theory that involves the use of auctions, insurance schemes, free markets, and taxation. Finally, it explores the politics of liberal equality, arguing that liberals need to think seriously about adopting more radical politics.

Some Aspects of the Procedural Situation of Minors Left Without Parental Care in Civil Proceedings

2021 ◽  
pp. 77-87
Author(s):  
E. V. Karpeeva
Keyword(s):  
Parental Care ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Formal Approach ◽  
Conflict Of Interests ◽  
Civil Proceedings ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Further Development

The presented study addresses the problems of protecting the rights and interests of minors, including children left without parental care. The author analyzes the provisions of the current family and civil procedural legislation and identifies several problems in the legal regulation of the participation of minors in the consideration of cases affecting their interests. The author notes that a formal approach to the enforcement of the right of minors to be heard in court is unacceptable, justifies the need for further development of the concept of “conflict of interests” between custodians (guardians), custody and guardianship authorities on the one hand and minors on the other. The necessity of continuous professional legal support for a minor (representation on behalf of a minor) throughout the entire proceedings on the case is justified.

scholarly journals Knowledge in Transition in Healthcare

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 733-748
Author(s):  
Maria José Sousa ◽  
Francesca Dal Mas ◽  
Alexeis Garcia-Perez ◽  
Lorenzo Cobianchi
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Translation ◽  
Knowledge Creation ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Soft Skills ◽  
The Other ◽  
Personal Knowledge ◽  
Business And Society ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right

Organizations are challenged by the need to transform Dynamic Knowledge, embedded in each worker, into Static Knowledge, rooted in factual documental information. However, innovation and knowledge creation seem to be facilitated by the personal knowledge and life experiences of people, which appear to be dynamic. The tensions between Dynamic and Static Knowledge in facilitating the transfer and sharing of knowledge arise as compelling research as well as practical topic for organizations. Our paper aims to investigate such tensions by employing a case study. We decided to deepen such dynamics in the healthcare field, given its importance for business and society. In more detail, we analyzed one Emergency Room (ER) department through a series of interviews. Our findings highlight the importance of the right balance between Static and Dynamic Knowledge. On the one hand, the healthcare organization recognized the need to incorporate knowledge into practical and tangible instruments. On the other hand, the flows of Dynamic Knowledge must be fostered through a culture of knowledge translation and sharing, and the development of soft skills.

scholarly journals Seeing the Other Side? Perspective-Taking and Reflective Political Judgements in Interpersonal Deliberation

2020 ◽  
pp. 003232172091660
Author(s):  
Lala Muradova
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Perspective Taking ◽  
The Other ◽  
Democratic Deliberation ◽  
Depth Interview ◽  
Political Reasoning ◽  
Rational Argumentation ◽  
The Right

A healthy democracy needs citizens to make reflective political judgements. Sceptics argue that reflective opinions are either nonexistent or rare. Proponents of deliberative democracy suggest that democratic deliberation is capable of prompting reflective political reasoning among people. Yet, little is known about the mechanisms underlying this relationship. This article offers a bridge between psychology and political theory and proposes a theory of perspective-taking in deliberation. It argues that under the right conditions, deliberation induces more reflective judgements by eliciting the process of perspective-taking – actively imagining others’ experiences, perspectives and feelings – in citizen deliberators. Two institutional features of deliberative forums are emphasized: the presence of a diversity of viewpoints and the interplay of fact-based rational argumentation and storytelling. I test the plausibility of this theory using a case study – the Irish Citizens’ Assembly – thereby, relying on qualitative in-depth interview data and quantitative survey data. I further substantiate my findings with a laboratory experiment.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document