Citizenship and Paternalism*

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-27
Author(s):  
Luara Ferracioli
Keyword(s):  
Prima Facie ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
Philosophical Literature ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
The Right

Do states have a right to exclude prospective immigrants as they see fit? According to statists, the answer is a qualified yes. For these authors, self-determining political communities have a prima facie right to exclude, which can be overridden by the claims of vulnerable individuals. However, there is a concern in the philosophical literature that statists have not yet developed a theory that can protect children born in the territory from being excluded from the political community. For if the self-determining political community has the right to decide who should form the self in the first place, then that right should count against both newcomers by immigration and newcomers by birth. Or so the concern goes. This chapter defends statism against this line of criticism and defends a new account of the value of citizenship for children.

scholarly journals Progressive Eras, Periods of Reaction, and Constitutional Change

2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danny Nicol
Keyword(s):  
Social Influence ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional Change ◽  
General Phenomenon ◽  
Labour Government ◽  
Liberal Government ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
The Right

This article argues that “political herding” plays a crucial role in driving and shaping constitutional change. It links the prevalence of political herding to a psychological phenomenon, “social influence.” It goes on to argue that constitutional change is often driven by the desire for certain substantive policies, which in turn are determined by whether, in a particular epoch, the political community is herding in a progressive or reactionary direction. Contending that the general phenomenon whereby political communities go through recurrent swings to the left or to the right has been neglected by scholars, this essay aims to give this phenomenon the centrality it merits in relation to the evolution of the British constitution. Accordingly it considers the 1906 Liberal government, the 1945 Labour government and the lengthy succession of post-1979 neoliberal governments, analyzing how substantive progressive and reactionary programs led to constitutional change. Finally this article considers the legitimacy both of political herding itself, and of political herding's impact on constitutional change.

Contract Law Beyond the State

2019 ◽  
pp. 199-230
Author(s):  
Prince Saprai
Keyword(s):  
Contract Law ◽  
Regional Level ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Primary Motivation ◽  
European Context ◽  
General Law ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
The Right

This chapter reflects on the increasing emergence of transnational efforts at both the global and regional level to bring about the greater convergence of national contract law regimes. The divergences between contract law regimes are seen as major obstacles to free trade, and removing these barriers is the primary motivation behind these initiatives. This chapter argues, using European Union (‘EU’) efforts to harmonize contract law in Europe as an illustration, that such efforts face a significant legitimacy burden, because on the republican view of contract law the principle of state sovereignty protects the freedom of states to interpret and balance the values that shape contract law in ways that reflect local needs, beliefs, customs, and so forth. That freedom protects the right to self-determination and is both constitutive and expressive of the political communities that nation states embody and represent. In the European context, there is no similar political community that legitimates the EU’s efforts to bring about the harmonization of the general law of contract. Furthermore, even if the issue of legitimacy could be overcome, it’s unclear that harmonization in the European context could be justified. The economic case made by the European Commission for convergence is based on questionable empirical assumptions, and attempts to bring about convergence face serious efficacy constraints due to the fact of ‘normative pluralism’.

The centrality of politeia for Aristotle’s Politics: Aristotle’s continuing significance for social and political science

2014 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifford Angell Bates
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Global Concern ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
Regime Analysis

Political theorists today are addressing issues of global concern confronting state systems and in so doing are often forced to confront the concept of Homo sapiens as a ‘political animal’. Thus theorists considering Aristotle’s Politics attempt to transcend his polis-centric focus and make the case that Aristotle offers ways to address these global concerns by focusing on Empire. This article, contra Dietz et al., argues that Aristotle’s political science is first and foremost a science of politeia and that this approach to the operation and working of political systems is far superior to recent attempts at regime analysis in comparative politics. Thus Aristotle’s mode of examining political systems offers much fruit for those interested in approaching political phenomena with precision and depth as diverse manifestations of the political communities formed by the species Aristotle called the ‘political animal’. From this perspective, focusing on the politeia constituting each political community permits an analysis of contemporary transformations of political life without distorting what is being analyzed.

Do territorial rights include the right to exclude?

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 307-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cara Nine
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Property Right ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Public ◽  
Hard Time ◽  
Territorial Rights ◽  
The Right

Do territorial rights include the right to exclude? This claim is often assumed to be true in territorial rights theory. And if this claim is justified, a state may have a prima facie right to unilaterally exclude aliens from state territory. But is this claim justifiable? I examine the version of territorial rights that has the most compelling story to support the right to exclude: territorial rights as a kind of property right, where ‘territory’ refers to the public and common spaces included in the domain of state jurisdiction. I analyse the work of A. J. Simmons, who develops the political theory of John Locke into one of the most well-articulated and defended theories of territorial rights as a kind of property right. My main argument is that Simmons’ justification for rights of exclusion, which are derived from individual rights of self-government, does not apply to many kinds of public spaces. An upshot of this analysis is that most Lockean-based theories of territorial rights will have a hard time justifying the right to exclude as a prima facie right held by states against aliens.

Hegel's Idealism: Prospects

1989 ◽  
Vol 10 (01) ◽  
pp. 28-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Pippin
Keyword(s):  
Category Theory ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
The Self ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Full Theory ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Right ◽  
Conceptual Possibility

First of all, I am very grateful to both commentators for the attention they have devoted to Hegel's Idealism; I am heartened by the kind words and humbled by the magnitude of the problems introduced by their criticisms. These criticisms both rightly refer to what is the heart of my interpretation, the Kant-Hegel relation, and, interestingly enough, raise objections from roughly opposite directions. Professor Pinkard, in effect, charges that I have made too much of that relation and thereby confused transcendental and speculative concerns. He argues here, as he does at greater length in his recent book (Hegel's Dialectic: The Explanation of Possibility), that the philosophically valuable core of Hegel is a ‘category theory’ limited to an ‘explanation’ of the conceptual ‘possibility’ of various judgments, practices, institutions, etc. Professor Harris charges, on the other hand (and with some irony), that I have made too little of the Kant-Hegel relation, or have construed it too narrowly, that the interpretation of Hegel's idealism which I provide thus either unfairly neglects, or does not have the resources to deal with, Hegel's full theory of the ‘whole’, or of Absolute Spirit, his account of the modern community's reconciliation with itself in time. I am thus alleged to have provided an interpretation that is at once too ambitious, and not ambitious enough, and I hope that such responses, at least for the Aristotelians in the audience, count as prima facie evidence that I must have said just the right thing. My claim in Hegel's Idealism is that the well-known Hegel Renaissance, in post-war Western Europe especially, has still failed to produce a contemporary reconstruction of Hegel's fundamental position, his ‘identity theory’, his identifying the ‘self-actualization’ of the Notion with ‘actuality’, or his theory of the reality of the Absolute Idea.

scholarly journals AESTHETIC INSTRUMENTATION FOR FORMING IMAGINED COMMUNITIES: THE PHENOMENON OF THE NATIONAL ANTHEM

2021 ◽  
pp. 212-231
Author(s):  
O.Y. Khoroshylov
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Method ◽  
Social Engineering ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Anthem ◽  
Critical Content ◽  
Building Process ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Right

The article is devoted to the study of the experience of using aesthetic tools in the formation of national groups. The object of the research is the state anthems, as a concentrated manifestation of the self-interpretation of the political community. The methodology of this article is based on constructivism, which interprets nations as imaginary communities and focuses the attention of the researcher on the practice of using soft technologies of collective integration. It`s addressed to the problem of using literary texts in the processes of collective integration made it possible to include not only representatives of political, but also creative elites in the list of subjects of social engineering. It has been proved that the political significance of the national anthem is manifested through "texts` violence". It`s the ability of the ruling circles to transmit group values to the subordinate array, which is achieved due to the legislative consolidation of a generally binding status for a certain text and due to the aesthetic impact on the consciousness of members of the community. The research methodology is presented by the using the procedures of the comparative method. It was carried out in such clusters as: justification of the right to exist (source of legitimation), "We are the image" of the commonality, common heroes, imaginary geography. It was achieved the identification of statistical patterns and features of the studied text arrays with analytical procedures for critical content analysis of the national anthems of European states. The results of the study confirmed the effectiveness of the procedures and tools of social engineering as one of the scenarios for the creation of national collectives in the European cultural area, substantiated the expediency of using the approved methodology to identify the cultural means of the nation-building process within the borders of Europe, and revealed the prospects of its application in relation to countries of the non-European cultural area.

Just Hierarchy between Citizens

2020 ◽  
pp. 66-105
Author(s):  
Daniel A. Bell ◽  
Wang Pei
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
Political System ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
Willingness To Serve ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
Political Meritocracy ◽  
China Today

This chapter turns to just hierarchies between citizens—mainly strangers to one another—in modern large-scale political communities. It argues that hierarchies between rulers and ruled in such communities are justified if the political system selects and promotes public officials with above-average ability and a willingness to serve the political community over and above their own private and family interests. The chapter demonstrates that this kind of ideal—the “political meritocracy”—helped to inspire the imperial political system in China's past and Chinese political reformers in the early twentieth century, and may help to justify the political system in China today. However, the meritocratic system needs to be accompanied by democratic mechanisms short of competitive elections at the top that allow citizens to show that they trust their rulers and provide a measure of accountability at different levels of government. In the Chinese context, however, there is a large gap between the ideal and the reality. Thus, this chapter recommends that a judicious mixture of Confucian-style “soft power” combined with democratic openness, Maoist-style mass line, and Daoist-style skepticism about the whole political system can help to reinvigorate political meritocracy in China.

Irregular migrants, neoliberal geographies and spatial frontiers of ‘the political’

2007 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 655-674 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNE McNEVIN
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Multidimensional Approach ◽  
Irregular Migration ◽  
Irregular Migrants ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Us ◽  
Migration Flows ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
The Right ◽  
Economic Zones

AbstractIn this article I argue that the demands of irregular migrants to belong to political communities constitute key contemporary sites of ‘the political’. I also argue that geographies associated with neoliberal globalisation (transnational production circuits, special economic zones and global cities) are implicated in irregular migration flows and in new conceptions of political belonging. In relation to these claims, I reflect upon recent mobilisations in the US context, in which hundreds of thousands of irregular migrants and their supporters asserted the right to belong. I suggest that similar claims to belong are likely to proliferate and that neoliberal geographies may provide some clues as to where and how these contemporary frontiers of the political might proceed. I conclude by suggesting that a multidimensional approach to political belonging provides a sound conceptual starting point for the analytical and normative challenges raised by both the claims of non-status migrants and the sovereign practices of contemporary states.

Price Fixing and the Political Community, 1778–1779

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Owen
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Regulation ◽  
State Constitution ◽  
The People ◽  
The Right

In 1779, Pennsylvanians undertook a bold experiment in economic regulation—forming price-fixing committees to reverse wartime inflation. This chapter analyzes the committees’ structure and the context in which they were created. Winter 1778 saw great political turbulence: the evacuation of Philadelphia, treason trials, and an attempt to rewrite the state constitution. By 1779, defenders of the constitution were using price-fixing committees as a means of defending a Constitutionalist vision of government in which the people held the reins of power and the right to shape that government. Though the committees struggled to establish universal legitimacy, they helped legitimate a robust participatory political culture based upon popular sovereignty. This culture, though, remained turbulent, as in the Fort Wilson Incident of October 1779, in which militiamen surrounded the house of Republican politician James Wilson. This chapter investigates how Constitutionalists defended their vision of political culture even during periods of great upheaval.

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