The Indian Version of First among Equals – Executive Power during the First Decade of Independence

2009 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 709-751 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. KUMARASINGHAM
Keyword(s):  
Prime Minister ◽  
Executive Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Major Event ◽  
Deputy Prime Minister ◽  
The World ◽  
New Institutions ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractWhen India gained independence in August 1947 the world watched with excitement as well as trepidation as to what would happen following this unique and major event. The political destiny of the world's largest democracy would lie in the hands of an infinitesimal portion of the population – the political executive. India's new institutions had new operators to act in new conditions. There were few precedents. Within this Westminster system, refounded in India with its emphasis on executive flexibility and ambiguity, the leading political figures often had conflicting opinions and interpretations as to their powers. The relationship between Nehru as Prime Minister and other leading political figures, such as Patel as deputy Prime Minister, Prasad as President, and their definitions of their roles, would forge a new India. This paper revisits those debates and ideas in the first decade following independence, which allow greater understanding of the workings and conventions of today's Indian executive.

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Simone
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cartesian Dualism ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Existential Perspective

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

scholarly journals O potrzebie rekonstrukcji przestrzeni badawczej w nauce o stosunkach międzynarodowych. Refleksje natury polityczno-normatywnej, systemowej i metaforycznej

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa ŁOŚ-NOWAK
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Internal State ◽  
Current Theory ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
International Environment ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
New Institutions ◽  
The Relationship

The world of the 21st century provides an intriguing space for academic reflection, offering new challenges and stimulating new concepts of international relations. In this context there emerges the significant question of the essence and direction of these concepts. They may entail deconstruction followed by a reconstruction of the research space in this field. Astrategy of resetting cannot be excluded here, either. Assuming that reconstruction is the appropriate solution there are significant issues of its scope and direction. If a total reset is considered rational we need to address the issue of what it should involve. This is a difficult question for researchers into international relations because it would mean that the hitherto achievements of this subject are being questioned. The post-positivist approach of numerous researchers, which manifests their response to the positivist methodology in the field of international relations, has not so far produced a unified methodological formula or a relatively coherent theory of international relations. Questions concerning the function of science, the nature of the social world (ontology) and the relationship between knowledge and the world (epistemology) remain open. Therefore, it may be worth going back to M. Wight’s provocative thesis that it is impossible to construct a reasonable theory of international relations, mainly owing to the dichotomy of the two fields of research that – in his opinion – cannot be overcome, namely the dichotomy of the ‘international’ (the realm of external affairs of states) and ‘internal’ (the realm of internal affairs within state), which are mutually exclusive because of their specificity; and once again ask the questions of how sensible the thesis of the dichotomy of both these environments is in a world that is strongly conditioned by the cross-border actors, interdependence and globalization. While the separateness of the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ state environments was, for Wight, an important obstacle, making it impossible to construct an academic theory explaining international relations, at the same time the current theory regarding their exclusivity in the context of the internalization of international affairs and the externalization of conditions inside states seems unsustainable. This phenomenon currently allows us to explain the imperative for combining these two environments, overlapping them …breaking down the old, established orders as a result of the now clearly visible phenomena and processes of the ‘internal state’ merging into the ‘international environment’ and vice versa, the disappearance of the traditional functions of borders, the weakening of old institutions and structures for steering the international environment as well as replacing them with entirely new institutions and structures.

scholarly journals Intolerance of uncertainty modulates brain-to-brain synchrony during politically polarized perception

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (20) ◽  
pp. e2022491118
Author(s):  
Jeroen M. van Baar ◽  
David J. Halpern ◽  
Oriel FeldmanHall
Keyword(s):  
Political Polarization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Neural Synchrony ◽  
Neural Processing ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Political Narratives ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Video Material ◽  
The Brain

Political partisans see the world through an ideologically biased lens. What drives political polarization? Although it has been posited that polarization arises because of an inability to tolerate uncertainty and a need to hold predictable beliefs about the world, evidence for this hypothesis remains elusive. We examined the relationship between uncertainty tolerance and political polarization using a combination of brain-to-brain synchrony and intersubject representational similarity analysis, which measured committed liberals’ and conservatives’ (n = 44) subjective interpretation of naturalistic political video material. Shared ideology between participants increased neural synchrony throughout the brain during a polarizing political debate filled with provocative language but not during a neutrally worded news clip on polarized topics or a nonpolitical documentary. During the political debate, neural synchrony in mentalizing and valuation networks was modulated by one’s aversion to uncertainty: Uncertainty-intolerant individuals experienced greater brain-to-brain synchrony with politically like-minded peers and lower synchrony with political opponents—an effect observed for liberals and conservatives alike. Moreover, the greater the neural synchrony between committed partisans, the more likely that two individuals formed similar, polarized attitudes about the debate. These results suggest that uncertainty attitudes gate the shared neural processing of political narratives, thereby fueling polarized attitude formation about hot-button issues.

The Political Economy of Land and Urban Development

2018 ◽  
pp. 343-359
Author(s):  
Kudzanai Bvochora ◽  
Bernard Kusena
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Natural Increase ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Infrastructure ◽  
The World ◽  
Urban Settlements ◽  
Development Processes ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

Many urban areas which have sprouted around the world owe their economic and social origins in growth points and market centers. Situated about 15 kilometers south-east of Harare, Epworth became one of Zimbabwe's largest peri-urban settlements due to the combined effect of demographic, political, and socioeconomic factors, among others. This chapter interrogates the various forces behind this unprecedented population growth. It demonstrates the relationship between Epworth's ballooning population and the various pull and push factors of urbanization. For example, immigration contributed immensely to this rise, although natural increase in births also contributed fairly significantly. This chapter examines the impact of population dynamics and other variables that were linked to the rapid expansion of Epworth on the overall development processes, arguing that economic and social infrastructure became conditioned by such dynamics.

A New Quarrel

On Universals ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 96-120
Author(s):  
Étienne Balibar
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Unity ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
To Come ◽  
Question Today ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Universe

This chapter assesses the new “quarrel of universals” that now occupies philosophy and other overlapping disciplines. In this new quarrel, the question today is not only whether one is for or against the universal; the question is also how one defines the universal—a term whose surprising equivocity has become increasingly clear. Still more fundamentally, the question is how one should articulate the relationship between three related but heterogeneous terms whose widespread use has prompted conflicting claims: the universal, universality, and universalisms. The chapter begins by situating the question of the universal and its variations within the field that seems to constitute the strategic site of intersecting domains: philosophical anthropology, understood as the analysis of the historical differences of the human and of the problem that those differences pose to their bearers. It then outlines the difficulties which can be identified in every philosophical and political usage of the universal and its “doubles” according to three aporias. The first is the aporia of the multiplicity of the “world,” or of the universe as multiversum; the second is that of Allgemeinheit or All(en)gemeinheit, in other words, the irreducible gap between the universal and the common (or community); and, finally, that of co-citizenship, the form of belonging to a political unity to come, a unity whose law of belonging (membership) would be the heterogeneity within equality or the political participation of those foreign to the community.

13. The Political Economy of Development

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Development Strategies ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Theoretical Terms ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Economy Of Development ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter focuses on the political economy of development. It first considers the different (and competing) ways of thinking about development that have emerged since the end of World War II, laying emphasis on modernization, structuralist, and underdevelopment theories, neo-liberalism and neo-statism, and ‘human development’, gender, and environmental theories. The chapter proceeds by exploring how particular understandings of development have given rise to particular kinds of development strategies at both the national and global levels. It then examines the relationship between globalization and development, in both empirical and theoretical terms. It also describes how conditions of ‘mal-development’ — or development failures — both arise from and are reinforced by globalization processes and the ways in which the world economy is governed.

scholarly journals The Relationship Between Authority and Authenticity in the Laozi: Employing Wu無 as a Philosophical Framework

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Sharon Y. Small
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Political Aspect ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Philosophical Framework ◽  
Generative Processes ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Wu 無 is one of the most prominent terms in Ancient Daoist philosophy, and perhaps the only term to appear more than Dao in both the Laozi and the Zhuangzi. However, unlike Dao, wu is generally used as an adjective modifying or describing nouns such as “names”, “desires”, “knowledge”, “action”, and so forth. Whereas Dao serves as the utmost principle in both generation and practice, wu becomes one of the central methods to achieve or emulate this ideal. As a term of negation, wu usually indicates the absence of something, as seen in its relation to the term you 有—”to have” or “presence”. From the perspective of generative processes, wu functions as an undefined and undifferentiated cosmic situation from which no beginning can begin but everything can emerge. In the political aspect, wu defines, or rather un-defines the actions (non-coercive action, wuwei 無為) that the utmost authority exerts to allow the utmost simplicity and “authenticity” (the zi 自 constructions) of the people. In this paper, I suggest an understanding of wu as a philosophical framework that places Pre-Qin Daoist thought as a system that both promotes our understanding of the way the world works and offers solutions to particular problems. Wu then is simultaneously metaphysical and concrete, general, and particular. It is what allows the world, the society, and the person to flourish on their own terms.

Democracy and Ontology

2008 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-227
Author(s):  
Bernard Flynn
Keyword(s):  
Symbolic Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Political Modernity ◽  
The World ◽  
Ontological Dimension ◽  
Modern Experience ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Universe

AbstractThis paper elaborates a conception of the relationship between Philosophy and the Political which would not be one of exteriority but one of an intertwining between them. An analogy with Rémi Brague, who presents the conditions whereby the concept of 'the world' became a thematic object of reflection (The Wisdom of the World), is proposed to show the emergence of the concept of 'the political.' Following Lefort's philosophy, we trace the emergence of modern democracy with that of the political by claiming that there is an ontological dimension of the political. As the concept of the world could not emerge within a conception of the universe that united man and world in an organic whole, so too the concept of the political cannot emerge when the discourse on power is determined theologically (premodern societies). It is argued that there is an ontological dimension to the revolutions that introduced our political modernity. Modern revolutions are not simply a change in a form of governance; they effect a mutation in the symbolic order of a society by which the political, as such, can become visible. The indetermination of modern democracy corresponds to "the disappearance of the markers of certainty" that characterize the modern experience of the world, an experience that reveals a transformed ontological dimension. This dimension of uncertainty, the experience of the place of power as an "empty place," is contrasted with the totalitarian impulse to fill this empty place with a determinate image, e.g., the Party, the Fürher.

The Social Production of Building form: Theory and Research

1984 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
A D King
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Production ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Form Theory ◽  
Building Form ◽  
The Relationship

In this paper, the relation of theory to empirical research in the broad area indicated by the title is examined. The relevance, and, in cases, the adequacy, is discussed of existing theory for ‘making sense’ of specific empirical data on one item, or segment, of the built environment, namely, the specialised dwelling form of the bungalow, which, in both name and single-storey form, as vacation house or suburban dwelling, has been introduced to many market economies around the world. After a brief consideration of the historical and cross-cultural approaches to the study of the built environment and its neglect in the new urban studies, a series of questions generated by the data and contextualised within specific theoretical spheres are addressed. These include: the relation of building form to economy, society, and culture; culture and the political economy of building form; the social production of specialised dwelling forms; the relationship between per capita income, tenure, and dwelling form, and between dwelling and settlement forms; urban and building form and the world system; counterurbanisation and the world economy; and the political economy of global urbanisation. It is concluded that, for the adequate conceptualisation of the built environment, the use of theory must be eclectic and prepared to draw on different disciplines.

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