Socialism as the Extension of Democracy

1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-171
Author(s):  
Richard J. Arneson

Are socialists best regarded as those who are most truly and consistently committed to democracy, under modern industrial conditions? Is the underlying issue that divides liberals from socialists the degree of their wholeheartedness in affirming the ideal of a democratic society? On the liberal side, Friedrich Hayek has remarked: “It is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible that a democracy governs with a total lack of liberalism. My personal preference is for a liberal dictator and not for a democratic government lacking in liberalism.” No doubt many socialists would wish to quibble with Hayek's free-market oriented conception of liberalism. But I am wondering whether the conceptual map implicit in Hayek's remark is apt. Hayek appears to assume that there are two independent lines of division, one marking greater and lesser commitment to liberal values, the other marking greater and lesser commitment to democratic procedures. According to the conception of socialism as democracy that I wish to examine, a better picture of the political landscape would show one line of division with gradations indicating greater and lesser commitment to democracy. On this continuum, socialists are located at the extreme pro-democratic end, those who favor autocracy at the other end, and liberals somewhere in the middle. The analyst who finds this latter conceptual picture the more illuminating of the two will say that Hayek reveals his rejection of socialism by being less than wholehearted in his support of democracy.

Author(s):  
Edward Bellamy

‘No person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.’ Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in fin-de-siècle Boston, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. America has been turned into a rigorously centralized democratic society in which everything is controlled by a humane and efficient state. In little more than a hundred years the horrors of nineteenth-century capitalism have been all but forgotten. The squalid slums of Boston have been replaced by broad streets, and technological inventions have transformed people’s everyday lives. Exiled from the past, West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveller. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) is a thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and a resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia. Matthew Beaumont’s lively edition explores the political and psychological peculiarities of this celebrated utopian fiction.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 483-488
Author(s):  
Sara Cipolla

The research work concerns the development in the Italian literature of the French theme of Neuf Preux, and Particularly Took into account a crown of sonnets of nine famous men linked to an alleged cycle of paintings attributed to Giotto's in the palace of Castel Nuovo in Naples. The survey highlighted how in medieval Italian literature, beyond the more or less explicit recovery of the French literary tradition, occupies a prominent place the function that these poems take in the view of the literature of the time. The survey actually shows the two faces of the series of famous heroes, which on one hand is the mouthpiece of the political ideals and civil inspired by the courteous and Roman antiquities, on the other hand appears to be ripe fruit of a didactic poem in which the adherence to the motto of "ut pictura poesis" become as a kind of surface projection of images.


2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 361-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Hein

In Myanmar, hostilities between the majority Burmese and the minority Rakhine people on one side and the minority Rohingya on the other side have been common, but violence has persisted and even increased during the unstable transition away from an authoritarian regime. Most Burmese citizens appear to be united behind the ruling elites on the Rohingya issue. Why is the violence assumed to be of ethnic origin and whose interests are served by the acceptance of such violent acts as routine events? The article attempts to seek answers by following Brass’s framework on Hindu–Muslim violence in India. Its purpose is to examine which actors, mechanisms and institutional developments have been dominant and significant in the re-ethnicisation of the political landscape in Myanmar and how this has consolidated the formation of a contentious and contested specific Rohingya group identity among many Arakanese Muslims.


1992 ◽  
Vol 8 (29) ◽  
pp. 48-58
Author(s):  
Paul Allain

Appropriately, this feature on the Polish theatre group Gardzienice is something of a cultural mix, in which the impressions of an English visitor may be contrasted with the voice of a Polish admirer – and the beliefs of the group itself, expressed in the words of its director, Wlodzimierz Staniewski. In the winter of 1989–90, Paul Allain, a graduate student at Goldsmiths' College, University of London, visited the company at its ‘headquarters’ – which is also, in effect, the small and remote Polish village from which Gardzienice takes its name. This was at a time when the new. Solidarity-led government had yet to be fully felt. Here, Allain describes the training methods and disciplines of the company which, within the context of its physical environment, have come to constitute a lifestyle as much as an approach to theatre. Janusz Majcherek writes rather of the significance of Gardzienice in relation to the ancient and fundamental need for a homeland – a need which, in Staniewski's writings, is related to the company's own hopes and plans. All this material was in our hands well before the upsurge in nationalist feeling which has succeeded the political changes in eastern Europe: and it may be felt to reflect ironically upon alternative ways of ‘returning home’ – on the one hand through the actuality or threat of civil war and the struggle for an elusive slice of the ‘free market’, on the other in that quest for a lost history and inheritance, for healing connections with one's environment, which is reflected theatrically in the work of Gardzienice.


KÜLÖNBSÉG ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikoletta Hendrik

The paper investigates changing ideals of stoicism from the perspective of political philosophy. In the early stoa, the sage was idealized, while in the middle and late period, the ideal of the prokopton became the centre of philosophical attention. In the argument I distinguish between two political models. In one of the models, sages have an actual role, while in the other they do not. In the second model it is only the ideal of the sage that helps create and maintain the political system most in harmony with natural law.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Mandl Stangl

The COVID-19 pandemic has put enormous pressure on countries around the world, exposing long-standing gaps in public health and exacerbating chronic structural inequalities that, coupled with fragile health systems, have disrupted lives and radically altered the political landscape, especially for vulnerable groups. On the other hand, measures taken to mitigate its impact have highlighted the links between public health and the quality of our environment, our income and work, transport choices, how our children learn, air quality and social justice.


Author(s):  
Gopal Krishna

When the european war ended in November 1918 the fate of the defeated Turkish Empire was no longer in doubt. The other fallen empire, Austria-Hungary, had been dismembered, and the Ottoman Turks could not hope to escape the consequences of allying themselves with Germany. For Indian Muslims this raised grave issues of the political power of Islam. They had provided a large number of recruits in the war and had contributed materially towards the defeat of Turkey. Their political leaders had regretted Turkey's entry into the war on the side of Britain's enemies; their sympathies, however, were with the Turks, for the Turkish Sultan was looked upon as the Khalifa, the temporal and spiritual leader of the Islamic community, and—still more important for Indian Muslims—the Khalifa stood for the unity of the Islamic people, and the Turkish Empire, by then the only surviving Islamic Empire, was the symbol of Islam's worldly power. Muslims in India fervently believed in the ideal of Islamic brotherhood. This had always been an integral part of the religious outlook of Islam, but Pan-Islamism appealed especially to Muslims in India because of their minority status. Their interest in the Khalifate was largely due to the fact that it was the one centre of authority to which they could look for protection. The spread of nationalism threatened to submerge them and made them anxious to preserve and strengthen the Khalifate as an institution which might provide them with a rallying point and mobilize in their defence the united forces of the Islamic world.


2021 ◽  
pp. 003232922199990
Author(s):  
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury

Knowledge is inextricably bound to power in the context of settler colonialism where apprehension of the Other is a tool of domination. Tracing the development of the “settler colonial” paradigm, this article deconstructs Zionist and Israeli dispossession of Palestinian land and sovereignty, applying the sociology of knowledge production to the study of the Israeli-Palestinian case. The settler colonial paradigm, linked to Israeli critical sociology, post-Zionism, and postcolonialism, reemerged following changes in the political landscape from the mid-1990s that reframed the history of the Nakba as enduring, challenged the Jewish definition of the state, and legitimated Palestinians as agents of history. Palestinian scholars in Israel lead the paradigm’s reformulation. This article offers a phenomenology of Palestinian positionality, a critical potential for decolonizing the settler colonial structure and exclusive Jewish sovereignty, to consolidate a field of study that shapes not only research into the Israeli-Palestinian case but approaches to decolonization and liberation.


Author(s):  
Andrea Gamberini

The introduction gives a critical rereading of the historiographical debate regarding the processes of state building at the end of the Middle Ages, highlighting its limitations in the lack of interest shown in the ideal reasons for the political conflict. This then gives rise to the interpretative proposal that forms the basis of the present work, which aims to shed light on the many conflicts that, in relation to legitimacy of power, tore medieval society apart. With this in mind, the introduction focuses on an analysis of the sources that are potentially useful for the study of these particular aspects, on the risks underlying their use, and on the expected results. The last part discusses the structure of the work and justifies the decision to divide it into two, clearly divided parts, dedicated to the communal age on the one hand and the post-communal era on the other.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hrishikesh Joshi

The American political landscape exhibits significant polarization. People’s political beliefs cluster around two main camps. However, many of the issues with respect to which these two camps disagree seem to be rationally orthogonal. This feature raises an epistemic challenge for the political partisan. If she is justified in consistently adopting the party line, it must be true that her side is reliable on the issues that are the subject of disagreements. It would then follow that the other side is anti-reliable with respect to a host of orthogonal political issues. Yet, it is difficult to find a psychologically plausible explanation for why one side would get things reliably wrong with respect to a wide range of orthogonal issues. While this project’s empirical discussion focuses on the US context, the argument generalizes to any situation where political polarization exists on a sufficiently large number of orthogonal claims.


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