scholarly journals Housing and Citizenship: Building Social Rights in Twentieth-Century Portugal

2009 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
PEDRO RAMOS PINTO

AbstractThis article investigates the origins of modern citizenship in Portugal through the example of the historical construction of housing as a social right. It argues this process owes much to the centralisation and strengthening of the state undertaken by Salazar's ‘New State’ (1933–74), whose transformative project changed the nature of the relationship between the governing and the governed, making political claims based on social rights plausible. The ensuing political dynamic changed the nature of the social contract in Portugal, tying the legitimacy of the state to the provision of social rights, a factor which eventually contributed to the dictatorship's demise.

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-166
Author(s):  
Eric Nsuh Zuhmboshi

Abstract The relationship that exists between the state and her citizens has been described by Jean Jacques Rousseau as “a social contract.” In this contractual agreement, citizens are bound to respect state authority while the state, in turn, has the bounden duty to protect her citizens and guide them in their aspirations. In fact, any state that does not perform this duty is guilty of violating the fundamental rights of her citizens. This, however, is not the case in most postcolonial societies where the citizens see the state as an aggressive apparatus against their wellbeing because the state is not fulfilling its own part of the social contract, which requires them to protect the citizens and guide them in their aspirations. This unfortunate situation has laid the foundation for protest and anti-establishment writings in post-colonial societies – especially in Africa. Since literature, as a semiotic resource, is coterminous with its socio-political context, this attitude of the state has drawn inimical criticism from key postcolonial African writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mongo Beti, and Nadine Gordimer. Using Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel and John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo, this essay shows the relationship between state-terrorism and the traumatic conditions of the citizens in contemporary Africa. From the perspective of trauma theory, the essay defends the premise that the postcolonial subjects/characters, in the novels under study, are traumatized and depressed because of their continuous victimization by the state. Due to this state-imposed terror and hardship, the citizens are forced to indulge in political agitation, radicalism and violence in response to their destitute and impoverished conditions.


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2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 254-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Power

This article examines the relationship between feminism, queer theory and the rise of popular debate over maternity and anti-maternity that has arisen in recent years in France. Through the image of ‘queer maternity’, that is to say, of women who question motherhood from the position of already having had children, the article tries to rethink the way in which feminism, queer theory and motherhood could be placed in relation to one another such that by questioning maternity, the symbolic order that places motherhood on the side of the state and futurity can itself be questioned as a whole. This has particular resonances in the French context where a discourse of ‘natural’ motherhood has come to dominate: the ‘queer’ mother who questions her maternal status is thus argued to represent a threat to the futurity of the family, the social contract and the existing order.


2019 ◽  
pp. 201-229
Author(s):  
Katie Jarvis

From 1791 to 1793 and again from 1795 to 1798, the deputies taxed work through occupational licenses called the patente. This chapter reveals how the revolutionaries refracted the relationship among work, property, and autonomous citizenship through this tax. To replace the revenue generated by guild fees, the deputies created graduated tax brackets to target the wealth generated by an individual’s occupation. By exchanging fees for permissions, the patente created a fiscal contract between citizens and the state that mirrored the social contract. Legislators assessed the patente according to criteria for full citizenship including independence and immobile property. From 1796 to 1798, the patente fashioned a type of economic citizenship not predicated on gender and enabled the Dames to form a fiscal contract with the nation, unlike all male wage laborers. In patente hearings before justices of the peace, the Dames articulated their trade as autonomous work. When the deputies reorganized taxes by familial unit and exempted food retailers in 1798, the Dames lost their licenses and fiscal autonomy. The Directory simultaneously reconsolidated political authority into male heads of households.


2011 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-631 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Hall

AbstractEdmund Burke's emphasis on emotional phenomena is often seen as a rejection of reason. The relationship between reason and the emotions in Burke's work is paralleled by the relationships between the individual and society and between rights and duties. Emotions support duties because they bind us to social life and a particular social location. Burke filters rights claims through our emotional attachment to specific circumstances, thus creating social rights of man in contrast to the individualistic, abstract rights of men of the social contract theorists. Prejudice is presented as an example of a Burkean filter for rights that moderates rights claims by binding individuals to society. Thus, Burke sees reason and emotion as interconnected phenomena that support the balancing of the claims of both individual and the community.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Egdūnas Račius

Muslim presence in Lithuania, though already addressed from many angles, has not hitherto been approached from either the perspective of the social contract theories or of the compliance with Muslim jurisprudence. The author argues that through choice of non-Muslim Grand Duchy of Lithuania as their adopted Motherland, Muslim Tatars effectively entered into a unique (yet, from the point of Hanafi fiqh, arguably Islamically valid) social contract with the non-Muslim state and society. The article follows the development of this social contract since its inception in the fourteenth century all the way into the nation-state of Lithuania that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century and continues until the present. The epitome of the social contract under investigation is the official granting in 1995 to Muslim Tatars of a status of one of the nine traditional faiths in Lithuania with all the ensuing political, legal and social consequences for both the Muslim minority and the state.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex McKeown ◽  
Miranda Mourby ◽  
Paul Harrison ◽  
Sophie Walker ◽  
Mark Sheehan ◽  
...  

AbstractData platforms represent a new paradigm for carrying out health research. In the platform model, datasets are pooled for remote access and analysis, so novel insights for developing better stratified and/or personalised medicine approaches can be derived from their integration. If the integration of diverse datasets enables development of more accurate risk indicators, prognostic factors, or better treatments and interventions, this obviates the need for the sharing and reuse of data; and a platform-based approach is an appropriate model for facilitating this. Platform-based approaches thus require new thinking about consent. Here we defend an approach to meeting this challenge within the data platform model, grounded in: the notion of ‘reasonable expectations’ for the reuse of data; Waldron’s account of ‘integrity’ as a heuristic for managing disagreement about the ethical permissibility of the approach; and the element of the social contract that emphasises the importance of public engagement in embedding new norms of research consistent with changing technological realities. While a social contract approach may sound appealing, however, it is incoherent in the context at hand. We defend a way forward guided by that part of the social contract which requires public approval for the proposal and argue that we have moral reasons to endorse a wider presumption of data reuse. However, we show that the relationship in question is not recognisably contractual and that the social contract approach is therefore misleading in this context. We conclude stating four requirements on which the legitimacy of our proposal rests.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
MANISHA SETHI

Abstract A bitter debate broke out in the Digambar Jain community in the middle of the twentieth century following the passage of the Bombay Harijan Temple Entry Act in 1947, which continued until well after the promulgation of the Untouchability (Offences) Act 1955. These laws included Jains in the definition of ‘Hindu’, and thus threw open the doors of Jain temples to formerly Untouchable castes. In the eyes of its Jain opponents, this was a frontal and terrible assault on the integrity and sanctity of the Jain dharma. Those who called themselves reformists, on the other hand, insisted on the closeness between Jainism and Hinduism. Temple entry laws and the public debates over caste became occasions for the Jains not only to examine their distance—or closeness—to Hinduism, but also the relationship between their community and the state, which came to be imagined as predominantly Hindu. This article, by focusing on the Jains and this forgotten episode, hopes to illuminate the civilizational categories underlying state practices and the fraught relationship between nationalism and minorities.


2021 ◽  

This volume examines Arnold Gehlen’s theory of the state from his philosophy of the state in the 1920s via his political and cultural anthropology to his impressive critique of the post-war welfare state. The systematic analyses the book contains by leading scholars in the social sciences and the humanities examine the interplay between the theory and history of the state with reference to the broader context of the history of ideas. Students and researchers as well as other readers interested in this subject will find this book offers an informative overview of how one of the most wide-ranging and profound thinkers of the twentieth century understands the state. With contributions by Oliver Agard, Heike Delitz, Joachim Fischer, Andreas Höntsch, Tim Huyeng, Rastko Jovanov, Frank Kannetzky, Christine Magerski, Zeljko Radinkovic, Karl-Siegbert Rehberg and Christian Steuerwald.


2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rutger Claassen

There has been a remarkable shift in the relationship between market and state responsibilities for public services like health care and education. While these services continue to be financed publicly, they are now often provided through the market. The main argument for this new institutional division of labor is economic: while (public) ends stay the same, (private) means are more efficient. Markets function as ‘mere means’ under the continued responsibility of the state. This article investigates and rejects currently existing egalitarian liberal theories about this division of labor and it presents and defends a new theory of marketization, in which social rights and democratic decision-making occupy center-stage.


2020 ◽  
pp. 31-35
Author(s):  
Maria Kudryavtseva

The article examines the relationship between the social policy of the state and the Institute of social work. Some foreign and domestic approaches to defi ning the essence of social work as a specifi c type of activity are presented. It is noted that at a specifi c historical stage, the prevailing directions of social work, models of social assistance and support are determined by the socio-economic situation in the country, the level of social development, and the socio-cultural context. It is emphasized that in the conditions of modern reality, there is a need to develop the Institute of social work and realize its potential.


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