Imagining the street in post-war Britain

Urban History ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOE MORAN
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Post War ◽  
Planning Concept

ABSTRACT:This article discusses the changing ways in which the residential street has been imagined in post-war Britain. From the ethnographers and street photographers who emerged in Bethnal Green in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to the planning concept of ‘streets in the air’, to modern geodemographics, the street has been a way of thinking through shifting ideas about civil society and collective social life. Imagined as a space of spontaneous community when set against the rational, contractual operations of both the market and the state, the street has been a means of articulating hopes for and anxieties about social change.

The Atomic Theory of Society

1930 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 628-637
Author(s):  
William Orton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
The State ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Atomic Theory ◽  
The Public ◽  
House Of Lords

In few affairs is political wisdom so put to the test as in the treatment of institutions that are growing old. Age in these cases has little to do with mere antiquity: the forms of social life are subject to no set term of years. It is a matter of continuing adaptability. Some institutions, like the British monarchy, possess this attribute in an astounding degree. Others, like the House of Lords, betray a hardening of the arteries that bodes ill for their survival in times of rapid change. For the speed of social change affects not only their physical and conceptual environment; it acts also upon, and through, the temper of the politicians and the public. In such periods society will sometimes administer a sudden coup de grâce to its more recalcitrant institutions, abolishing at one stroke both the abuses they have inflicted and the garnered wisdom they enshrine. The loss involved in these moments is seldom evident until long after, when it has to be made good ab ovo.To such moods the Gallic genius is peculiarly liable; and it was in one of them that the French crashed open the gates of the nineteenth century and nailed the atomic theory of society to the lintel. “There are no longer any guilds in the state, but only the private interest of each individual and the general interest. No one may arouse in the citizens any intermediate interest, or separate them from the public weal by corporate sentiment.”

scholarly journals Nazione e Stato nella storia d'Italia

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandro Rogari
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
First World War ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
First World ◽  
The Way

The book delineates the emergence of a unitary state from the bedrock of a nation formed over centuries. It retraces the major advances in the integration between the state and civil society achieved in the first fifty years after unification, and the disastrous consequences wrought by the First World War and by Fascism. It underscores the way in which the post-war democratic revival rewound the virtuous process of construction of a state capable of expressing the Italian "plural nation". Despite this, it also stresses the way in which the ethical deterioration and the corruption of the political and administrative class that came to a head during the last twenty years of the twentieth century have again brought to the fore the problem of the construction of shared institutions.

Civil society

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean L. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Critical Force ◽  
The State ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Formal Economy ◽  
Role Of The State

In modern social and political philosophy civil society has come to refer to a sphere of human activity and a set of institutions outside state or government. It embraces families, churches, voluntary associations and social movements. The contrast between civil society and state was first drawn by eighteenth-century liberals for the purpose of attacking absolutism. Originally the term civil society (in Aristotelian Greek, politike koinonia) referred to a political community of equal citizens who participate in ruling and being ruled. In the twentieth century the separation of philosophy from social sciences, and the greatly expanded role of the state in economic and social life, have seemed to deprive the concept of both its intellectual home and its critical force. Yet, approaching the end of the century, the discourse of civil society is now enormously influential. What explains the concept’s revival? Does it have any application in societies that are not constitutional democracies? From a normative point of view, what distinguishes civil society from both the state and the formal economy?

Power, Peasants and Political Development: Reconsidering State Construction in Africa

1996 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Munro
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
State Control ◽  
Economic Decline ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
State Construction

Recent writing on political development in Africa has shown a marked tendency to de-privilege the state. We might discern three broad, related, reasons for this trend. The first is the deepening political crisis involving what Crawford Young has described as “shrinkage in the competence, credibility and probity of the state.” The second is the growing dissatisfaction among scholars with the narrow analytical focus of state-centered scholarship on state structures and elites. The third is the re-emergence of civil society as an analytical concept (sparked by political crises in Eastern Europe) and a renewed emphasis on market institutions as appropriate arbiters of social provision.Many scholars, despairing of the political and economic decline of African countries and seeking more compelling explanations, have moved the state out of the explanatory spotlight. They have stressed the fragmentation of politics, processes of economic disengagement from the realm of state control, and expanding areas of social life that fall outside of the ambit of state authority. For some, the relationship between the state and civil society has offered a more appealing focus for analysis.2 Society-centered research has even suggested that the state is not (or is no longer) the main organising principle of politics in Africa.

Alcohol in the Countries in Transition: The Polish Experience and the Wider Context

2000 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 561-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacek Moskalewicz
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
State Control ◽  
Rapid Reduction ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Polish Experience ◽  
Countries In Transition ◽  
Temperance Movements

The Eastern European transitions of the 1990s from centrally planned economy toward market economy and from monoparty political system to multiparty democracy strongly affected the alcohol field. Rapid reduction of the State's powers and weak or nonexistent civil society led to domination of the market in both economy and social life. The alcohol supply from licit and illicit sources increased dramatically, its consumption soared, and problems related to alcohol contributed remarkably to the health crisis present in a majority of countries in transition. In countries where civil society reemerged relatively soon and the State regained its regulatory power over the market, the mortality crisis was less severe and much shorter. Partial reintroduction of State control over the alcohol market and revival of the temperance movements reduced illicit supply and led to either stabilization or decline of alcohol consumption, which, however, still exceeds the pretransition levels. Appropriation of the alcohol sector by multinational companies diminished again the influence of the State and civil society and may lead to a new high in consumption and related problems.

The Consensus on Defense and Weimar Prussia's Civil Service

2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-203
Author(s):  
Rüdiger Bergien
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
The State ◽  
National Defense ◽  
Post War ◽  
Autonomous State ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Local Levels ◽  
Interpretation Model

The impact of the Reichswehr's program of clandestine armament on Weimar Germany's civil society is a phenomenon largely overlooked by post-war historiography. Not only did it fail to identify the wide support enjoyed by the illegal preparations for a general mobilization on the national and local levels, but it also failed to address the question why the officials collaborated with the Reichswehr under the aegis of “national defense” at all. The reasons for both omissions are easy to find. While the role played by civilians within the militarization of society has been largely ignored (due to the historiographical dominance of the interpretation model of the army as an autonomous “state within the state”), the few authors who recognized its importance considered a more detailed analysis of civilian dispositions to be dispensable in view of the well-known nationwide anti-Versailles sentiment.

Affirmative Action and the Demands of Justice

1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Scott Arnold
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
The United States ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Theories Of Justice ◽  
Political Justification

This essay is about the moral and political justification of affirmative action programs in the United States. Both legally and politically, many of these programs are under attack, though they remain ubiquitous. The concern of this essay, however, is not with what the law says but with what it should say. The main argument advanced in this essay concludes that most of the controversial affirmative action programs are unjustified. It proceeds in a way that avoids dependence on controversial theories of justice or morality. My intention is to produce an argument that is persuasive across a broad ideological spectrum, extending even to those who believe that justice requires these very programs. Though the main focus of the essay is on affirmative action, in the course of making the case that these programs are illegitimate, I shall defend some principles about the conditions under which it is appropriate for the state to impose on civil society the demands of justice. These principles have broader implications for a normative theory of social change in democratic societies.

Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik Olin Wright, London: Verso, 2010

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 219-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
David F. Ruccio
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Class Analysis ◽  
World Today ◽  
State Economy ◽  
The World ◽  
Relative Neglect ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract In this review, I argue that Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias is necessary reading for anyone interested in thinking through the possibilities of creating noncapitalist ways of organising economic and social life in the world today. However, I also raise questions about Wright’s deterministic interpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy, his relative neglect of class-analysis, and his non-Gramscian conception of the relationship between the state, economy, and civil society.

Opening Public Space: The Peace Arbitrator and Rural Politicization, 1861-1864

Slavic Review ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 707-731 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roxanne Easley
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Public Space ◽  
The State ◽  
Public Interests ◽  
Dialogue Process ◽  
Initial Shock ◽  
Point Of Intersection ◽  
Formal Communication

The peace arbitrator was created in 1861 to be the main administrative autiiority in the countryside during die implementation of emancipation. In this article Roxanne Easley examines the institution of peace arbitrator and its role in mediating interests and fostering communication between landlord and peasant and as a potential generative agent of civil society in the postemancipation countryside. After the initial shock of confrontation between landowners and peasants, coercion, arbitrariness, and custom began to share public space with dialogue, process, and law in the solution of public disputes. The peace arbitrator, as die point of intersection for each group’s ideology(ies) and as instructor in formal communication, was at the heart of this change. But a permanent, fully institutionalized vehicle for mediating public interests did not fit with the autocracy’s vision of orderly social change nor with its habitual compartmentalization of die social estates. In response to this threat, the state first neutralized the unusual public principles that underlay the institution of peace arbitrator and then eliminated it in 1874. Easley explores the unintended growth of public politicization in rural Russia as a consequence of emancipation and the boundaries of autocratic reformism.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document