Fairness to Idleness is There A Right Not to Work?

1995 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Levine

It is universally agreed that involuntary unemployment is an evil for unemployed individuals, who lose both income and the non-pecuniary benefits of paid employment, and for society, which loses the productive labor that the unemployed are unable to expend. It is nearly as widely agreed that there is at least a prima-facie case for alleviating this evil – for reasons of justice and/or benevolence and/or social order. Finally, there is little doubt that the evils of involuntary unemployment cannot be adequately addressed in contemporary societies without state intervention – whether through monetary or fiscal policies, cash payments or other subsidies to the unemployed, direct provision of employment by the state, or some combination of these measures.

2021 ◽  
pp. 317-323
Author(s):  
O. O. Skrypniuk

The article is devoted to the establishment of the principles of a democratic political regime. The realization of the constitutional process is given by the state-building and law-making chance for the modernization of the constitutional order, which opens a perspective for the development of civil society-oriented civil society-oriented civil society. The process of democratization at the present stage is associated with a significant improvement in the system of organization and interaction of certain elements of the branches of government and the improvement of the form of government. Today, it is a recognized fact that there is a close connection between the form of government and the democratic political regime. The article maintains the idea that a democratic political regime is unthinkable outside the interaction between the state and civil society. Civil society is becoming a positive, constructive force, which can limit the state with its independence, and therefore is extremely important for the development of democracy, because it is able to limit the arbitrariness of the state and retranslate the relations to the public. Under a democratic political regime, the parameters and limits of state intervention are determined by the needs of civil society. In this context, constitutional changes should relate to changes in the constitutional system – a category that includes the basics of state and social order of Ukraine. Keywords: Ukraine, democracy, democratic political regime, constitutional process, form of government, civil society, state.


1995 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. J. D. Roberts

ABSTRACTVictorian feminists faced a dilemma in their dealings with the state. This dilemma intensified in the years following the 1867 Reform Act. Radical feminist leaders (Josephine Butler, Lydia Becker, Elizabeth Wolstenholme) eagerly adopted an ‘equality before the law’ stance in order to link women's credentials for citizenship with conventional principles of liberal individualism. Yet the same leaders were recurrently angered and frightened by the sex-insensitive uses to which male politicians were prepared to put state power, even while claiming to be defending and improving a liberal social order. This article traces feminist responses to the dilemma from the high point of libertarian individualism accompanying the 1870s campaigns against the Contagious Diseases Acts to the more complicated appraisals of the potential of state agency made during following decades. The democratization of English political life, it is argued, may ultimately have persuaded feminists of the worth of the state as a sponsor of social change; but the half-democratized form of politics characteristic of the later Victorian period left key feminists with an ideologically entrenched suspicion of state intervention which even mid-eighties repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts and ‘maiden tribute’ child prostitution revelations could not efface.


Author(s):  
Leonardo Cardoso

This book is an ethnographic study of controversial sounds and noise control debates in Latin America’s most populous city. It discusses the politics of collective living by following several threads linking sound-making practices to governance issues. Rather than discussing sound within a self-enclosed “cultural” field, I examine it as a point of entry for analyzing the state. At the same time, rather than portraying the state as a self-enclosed “apparatus” with seemingly inexhaustible homogeneous power, I describe it as a collection of unstable (and often contradictory) sectors, personnel, strategies, discourses, documents, and agencies. My goal is to approach sound as an analytical category that allows us to access citizenship issues. As I show, environmental noise in São Paulo has been entangled in a wide range of debates, including public health, religious intolerance, crime control, urban planning, cultural rights, and economic growth. The book’s guiding question can be summarized as follows: how do sounds enter and leave the sphere of state control? I answer this question by examining a multifaceted process I define as “sound-politics.” The term refers to sounds as objects that are susceptible to state intervention through specific regulatory, disciplinary, and punishment mechanisms. Both “sound” and “politics” in “sound-politics” are nouns, with the hyphen serving as a bridge that expresses the instability that each concept inserts into the other.


Author(s):  
Eugenia Roldán Vera ◽  
Susana Quintanilla

The Mexican policy of state provision of standardized textbooks for all was instituted in 1959 and still ongoing. This is an overview of the previous history of state intervention in the production and distribution of school textbooks, an examination of the particular circumstances in which the 1959 policy was figured and implemented, and a description of the characteristics of the different generations of textbooks that have since been published, corresponding with several educational reforms. The arguments for and against standardized textbooks mobilized by different sectors of society throughout sixty years are discussed in their historical context. Far from this being a debate about the authoritarian intervention of the state in education, issues of social equality and teaching quality have been central.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0739456X2199466
Author(s):  
Siu Wai Wong ◽  
Xingguang Chen ◽  
Bo-sin Tang ◽  
Jinlong Liu

A key theme in urban governance research is how neoliberalism reshapes the state–society relationship. Our study on Guangzhou, where urban regeneration through massive redevelopment of “villages-in-the-city” uncovered interactions between the state, market, and community in local governance, contributes to this debate. Based on intensive field research to analyze three projects, we find that what really controls neoliberal growth in China is not simply the authoritarian tradition of the socialist state but also the power of the indigenous village communities. Our findings suggest that state intervention for community building is vital for rebalancing power relations between the state, market, and community.


1983 ◽  
Vol 31 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 60-76
Author(s):  
Patricia A. Morgan

Patricia Morgan's paper describes what happens when the state intervenes in the social problem of wife-battering. Her analysis refers to the United States, but there are clear implications for other countries, including Britain. The author argues that the state, through its social problem apparatus, manages the image of the problem by a process of bureaucratization, professionalization and individualization. This serves to narrow the definition of the problem, and to depoliticize it by removing it from its class context and viewing it in terms of individual pathology rather than structure. Thus refuges were initially run by small feminist collectives which had a dual objective of providing a service and promoting among the women an understanding of their structural position in society. The need for funds forced the groups to turn to the state for financial aid. This was given, but at the cost to the refuges of losing their political aims. Many refuges became larger, much more service-orientated and more diversified in providing therapy for the batterers and dealing with other problems such as alcoholism and drug abuse. This transformed not only the refuges but also the image of the problem of wife-battering.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 188
Author(s):  
Rafał Śpiewak ◽  
Wiktor Widera

The essence of the Catholic Church implemented in the modern world is of crucial importance for the understanding its mission towards the state, especially when developing appropriate civil attitudes. One sources of cognition is the historical reflection made on an analytical basis of Catholic media content. This article presents the discourse analysis of Gość Niedzielny (i.e., Sunday Guest), which was one of the most important Catholic publications in Poland, during the reconstruction of the Polish statehood. The pro-state mission of the Catholic Church was an expression of responsibility for common good, was nonpartisan and was connected with the promotion of values that condition the social order. It was believed that the condition of the state is determined by the moral form of its citizens and their level of involvement in social life. Christian values were though to secure and protect also the good of non-Catholic citizens. Here, the research and discourse analysis allows us to define the conclusions regarding contemporary relations between Church and the state in Poland. The key thoughts included in the publications of Sunday Guest, have contemporary application and their message is extremely up-to-date.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Olumide Olusegun Olaoye ◽  
Ukafor Ukafor Okorie ◽  
Oluwatosin Odunayo Eluwole ◽  
Mahmood Butt Fawwad

PurposeThis study examines the asymmetric effect of government spending on economic growth in Nigeria over the period 1980–2017. Specifically, this study investigates whether the response of economic growth to government spending shocks differs according to the nature of shocks on them. In addition, the authors examine whether the stabilizing effects of fiscal policies are dependent on the state of the business cycle.Design/methodology/approachThe study adopts the linear fiscal reaction function in addition to the nonlinear regression model of Hatemi-J (2011, 2012), Granger and Yoon (2002), which allows us to separate negative shocks from positive shocks to government spending. Similarly, the authors adopt the generalized method of moments (GMM) techniques of Hansen (1982) to account for simultaneity and endogeneity problems inherent in dynamic model.FindingsThe authors’ findings reveal that there is evidence of asymmetry in the government spending–economic growth nexus in Nigeria over the period of study. Specifically, the authors find that the response of economic growth to government spending shocks differs according to the nature of shocks on them. More specifically, the study established that the stabilizing effects of fiscal policies are dependent on the state of the business cycle.Originality/valueUnlike the traditional method of modeling asymmetry, which adopts the simple inclusion of a squared government spending term or by the inclusion of a cubic government spending term, the model adopted in this study allows us to model shocks and show how the responses of economic growth to government expenditure differ according to the nature of shocks on them.


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