The Political Problem

Potentia ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 78-106
Author(s):  
Sandra Leonie Field
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Problem ◽  
Early View

This chapter argues that Hobbes’s late view of human collective power, unlike the early view, is able to grasp informal and emergent collective power. Hobbes’s later works, with their new relational conception of potentia, offer both theoretical resources to conceive informal collective power distinct from the state, and also analytical reasons to expect such power to be politically troubling. The ‘political problem’ emerges: in order to achieve the concrete power sufficient to uphold its absolute authority (potestas), the state needs to harness or tame the informal collective powers within the populace. The chapter argues that the political problem explains the absence of the ‘sleeping sovereign’, so central to the radical democratic interpretation of Hobbes, from Hobbes’s later writings. But informal collective power cannot necessarily be celebrated as a welcome popular insurgency against excessive state power: for its characteristic inner structure is complex oligarchic allegiance rather than equal horizontal affiliation.

The political history of administration: Forms of the state in France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 19-42
Author(s):  
Alain Chatrtot
Keyword(s):  
Political History ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Problem ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Stark Contrast ◽  
Philosophical Debates

The few works that have focused on the history of the state in France stand in stark contrast to the vigor of the judgments made on its behalf. Thus a disparity emerged: the state as a political problem, or as a bureaucratic phenomenon, is at the heart of partisan passions and philosophical debates at the same time that it has remained a kind of ahistorical object.1

scholarly journals Ensuring the State’s Legal Liability is the Key Challenge of Legal Reform in the Modern Ukraine

2019 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-30
Author(s):  
O. S. Bakumov
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
Legal Liability ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Authorities ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Legal Personality ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
Long Time

Special attention has been paid to the fact that the doctrine of legal liability of the state to a person is increasingly affirmed in Ukraine as a theoretical basis for the functioning of state power in general and all its agencies in particular. However, despite the large number of scientific developments, the national legal science still can not boast of an unambiguous and generally recognized understanding of the essence of the phenomenon of legal liability of the state. It has been stressed that legal liability was interpreted for a long time as a kind of “continuation” of the state itself: in the context of the concept of state coercion means it was solely perceived as an instrument of state power for punishing offenders. However, such a concept denied the question about legal liability of the state itself as an equal personality of the subject of law. It has been stated that the phenomenon of legal liability of the state one can consider a certain continuation of the political and legal strategy on self-limitation of the state by law. Such liability is naturally considered a characteristic feature of the legal type of statehood, and it directly concerns only the democratic type of states. Instead, undemocratic states do not bear or acknowledge (or only declare) any real legal liability to society. Therefore, in terms of a democracy, the state is a real subject of liability to society, which is guaranteed on the normative and institutional levels. The current stage of development of the institution of legal liability of the state is characterized by the highest normative level of its institutionalization – constitutional one. This level ensures: 1) the irreversibility of the state’s course on the establishment of legal statehood; 2) fixing the starting, the main elements of the normative model of legal liability of the state; 3) completion of the registration of legal personality of the state in the modern world, which was incomplete without constitutional establishment of its legal liability; 4) the parity nature of the relations of the state with other subjects of law on the basis of a combination of dispositive and imperative, public and private components. The constitutional model of the state’s legal liability to a human being is based on the same principles in Ukraine. Such liability, in particular, is not limited to the political or moral liability of public authorities to society, but has the features of legal liability as applying measures of public and legal (constitutional or international) nature to the state and its agencies for the failure or improper performance of the duties.

scholarly journals The State in a Globalization: The Context of Transformation

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 84-90
Author(s):  
Balaklytskyi A.
Keyword(s):  
State Government ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
State Power ◽  
Specific Model ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Practical Implementation ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Public Authorities

The article on the theoretical level explores the peculiarities of the transformation of the nation state in conditions of globalization in the context of contemporary realities. It is emphasized that globalization with varying strengths and intensities, that is, has uneven effects on the state and its components. In particular, if we take the form of the state, which includes the form of government, the form of state administrative-and-territorial system and political regime, then, given the empirical material of recent decades, we can conclude that globalization has a significant impact primarily on a political regime that is increasingly transformed towards the democratization and liberalization of public life. At the same time, globalization exerts less influence on such constituent forms of the state as the form of state government and the form of state administrative-and-territorial system, which is conditioned, among other things, by the specific nature of the latter. In particular, in the conditions of globalization, the form of state government of a modern state is transformed primarily in the context of the dynamics of the functioning of the system of higher power institutions in the state, and not in the context of a specific way of existence and expression of the system of supreme bodies of state power. At the same time, globalization affects on the development of democratic foundations of the organization and functioning of the system of public authorities, contributing to ensuring the practical implementation of the rule of law, regardless of the specific model of government (monarchy or republic), whose presence in the state is associated with a certain historical tradition of its development and level of its perception in the mass consciousness in society. Influencing on the form of state administrative-and-territorial system, globalization facilitates processes of regionalization as a complex process of redistribution of administrative powers between the state and its administrative-territorial units, as a result of which new governmental and institutional forms are gradually being formed, corresponding to the new role of regional state formations in the decision-making process at national and supranational levels. In addition, in the context of globalization, the democratic model of the political regime acquires special features related to the formation and functioning of supranational institutions and associations, within which the political domination of nation-states gradually moves to a new level, the ultimate stage of which is global governance. Also, globalization not only causes the corresponding transformations of the content of the traditional functions of the state, in particular, economic, political, social, etc., but also creates the appropriate prerequisites for the rapid development of new functions, the content of which previously had no independent meaning and was considered mainly as an integral part of some other function of the state (for example, the environmental and information functions of the modern state). Thus, it is concluded that the transformation of the state in the conditions of globalization is systemic and, at the same time, contradictory, because, on the one hand, it manifests itself both at the level of all its constituent elements of its form and at the level of the dynamics of its concrete activity within certain temporal and spatial limits (functions of the state), and on the other – it intensifies the multi-vector processes and even the tendencies of development of both individual constituents of the form of the state (for example, the form of the state administrative-and-territorial system) and the functions of the state, in particular, economic and social. Keywords: state, globalization, form of the state, functions of the state, political regime, democracy, state power

Negotiating states of water: Producing illegibility, bureaucratic arbitrariness, and distributive injustices in Delhi

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 949-967 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaffa Truelove
Keyword(s):  
Water Supply ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Local Level ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
The Political ◽  
Water Politics ◽  
Urban South

State quantifications of Delhi’s water supply proclaim some of the highest levels of access in urban South Asia. However, accompanying such representations are a number of discrepancies and ambiguities, suggesting an appearance of legibility is produced in the absence of data and key calculations. This paper examines the co-production of both knowledge and ignorance with regard to the city’s water, showing how their entanglement serves to powerfully shape both urban biopolitics and diffuse modalities of state power. First, I demonstrate that the appearance of legibility is maintained through fragmented measurement and bureaucratic practices that build material ambiguity into the system. Secondly, I examine the political, discursive and material effects of such illegibility, which include outcomes that are both arbitrary in nature (inadvertently allotting more water to one area versus another) and well as more deliberate (attributing blame for water wastage and loss to the very populations and urban spaces most excluded from the grid). Rather than a lack of intelligibility diminishing the powers of the state, the material ambiguity of Delhi’s waters furthers an everyday water politics of diffuse state power by which water is politicized at the local level while larger (infra)structural fixes are left off the table.

scholarly journals The state and biopolitics: towards the origins of interrelation

2021 ◽  
pp. 39-47
Author(s):  
Aleksei Vladimirovich Iarkeev
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Political Anthropology ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Administration ◽  
Labor Camps ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Control

The subject of this research is the state as a biopolitical project founded on the principle of government intervention in life of the population. Leaning on the ideas and theoretical intentions of the “archeology of power”, economic and political anthropology, the author examines the genesis of the state from biopolitical perspective, proceeding from the hypothesis of the initial animalization of human presence pursuant to state power, which at breaking point, turns into biopolitical death machine, or thanatopolitics. In view of this, the author reveals the role of ancient state formations as the agents of forced “domestication” of the members of agricultural and cattle-raising societies based on the concentration of human resources and coercive labor as state-forming “technologies”, which allow producing surpluses appropriated by the power elites. The idea of pastoralist power, which emerged along with the first states, identifies subjects to a herd under wardship, treating them as a form of wealth similar to livestock. The main conclusion lies in explication of the biopolitical matrix of state administration, which identifies the subjects of the state with livestock, and the state territory with enclosed pasture. This leads to the parallels between cattle-raising and control over population, which paradigmatically determines the political modus operandi of state power that is implicit in the trajectory of its evolution up to the present day. At the threshold of “evolution” of such administrative paradigm emerge the modern radical topoi of the antihuman – the concentration camps (labor camps and death camps) organized by the model of cattle pens and slaughterhouses.

scholarly journals ’At overskue, tilfredsstille og lyksaliggjøre’

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (121) ◽  
pp. 115-134
Author(s):  
Tine Damsholt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Specific Nature ◽  
Reason Of State ◽  
Political Problem ◽  
Christian Understanding ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
Point Of Departure

Taking its point of departure in Foucault’s analysis of the notions of ‘reason of state’ and ‘police’ i.e. Polizeiwissenschaft in eighteenth-century Europe, the article investigates the complex understanding of happiness and bliss in a Danish parish topography from 1795. The notions of happiness and bliss are entangled with the emergence of ‘the political problem of population’ in which the population appears as an entity that must be governed according to its specific ‘nature’. Thus, the population appears as a new object of study and as purchase for interventions addressing living conditions as well as ways of acting and living. The parish topography by Nils Blicher is inscribed in this rationale that tends to increase the power of the state by making good use of its forces, to obtain the welfare of the population; to make their lives comfortable and to provide them with the things they need for their livelihood. Blicher’s description of the life and conditions of the peasantry is replete with suggested solutions to the problems described. And among the main objects to be concerned with are health and production, but also the happiness of the population. However, his understanding of happiness and bliss goes beyond the reason of the state and is completed with a Christian understanding of heavenly bliss.

The Modern and the Political Pluralist Perspectives on Political Authorities

2018 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 675-700 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yann Allard-Tremblay
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Society ◽  
Modern Perspective

AbstractI contrast two perspectives adopted to theorize political authorities. The first is the modern perspective. It conceives of political society as a civic union of free and equal citizens and regards the state as the political organization of this society. This perspective is primarily concerned with the principles that should govern the use of state power. The second is the political pluralist perspective. It recognizes a multiplicity of normative orders as equally legitimate. The focus is put on the civic processes by which a diverse citizenry should negotiate its interactions. I illustrate these perspectives by considering how they approach diversity, and more specifically the political claims of indigenous peoples. The pluralist perspective is argued to be normatively motivated by a consideration for the actual freedom of citizens to sustain diverse normative orders, to negotiate the structure of political society, and to jointly search for justice.

The history of Iberian archaeology: one archaeology for two Spains

Antiquity ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 76 (291) ◽  
pp. 184-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arturo Ruiz ◽  
Alberto Sánchez ◽  
Juan P. Bellón
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Political ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Political Problem ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Model ◽  
The 19Th Century

IntroductionIn this article we set out to analyse, from an archaeological point of view, a political problem which, as demonstrated by current debate, including acts of violence, goes well beyond archaeology. Throughout the 19th century, and especially in its latter half, a centralist political model for Spain was developed in which a political balance could not be found between the State and [lie autonomous traditions of the varions regions of the Iherian Peninsula. As a result of this failure, legitimation programmes began to be constructed towards the end of 19th century, based on the history of the peoples of these regions. This led to a search in protohistorical archaeology [Iberians, Celts, Tartessians, etc.) for a possible solution to the political problems caused by a lack of institutional agreement between states and regions.

When Does the Crime-Terror Nexus Fail to Materialize? Drug Trafficking, Militants, and the State in Russia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariya Y Omelicheva ◽  
Lawrence P Markowitz
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Drug Trafficking ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Terrorist Group ◽  
The Political ◽  
North Caucasus ◽  
Russian State ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Terrorist Violence

Abstract What are the conditions that obstruct the formation of a crime-terror nexus? To answer this question we carry out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Russia's North Caucasus (2008–2016) where no durable crime-terror nexus materialized despite the presence of conditions conducive to the emergence of linkages between criminals and militants. We demonstrate how the sheer diversity and fluidity of violent actors, with some deeply immersed in the political, economic, and security institutions of the Russian state, fragmented the elements of a crime-terror nexus to such a degree that collaboration among them proved too difficult and costly. Our argument makes several contributions to analyses of the crime-terror nexus. First, our study illuminates the various actors within a purported nexus, demonstrating how cooperation between them may not be forthcoming. Second, our framework demonstrates how a multiplicity of the centers and agents of state power, both formal and informal, is intimately interwoven into the fragmented security landscape. Third, the diversity of the so-called terrorist and militant groups that are competing for power and resources call for rethinking and reconceptualization of what we call a “terrorist group” and the data that we use to study terrorist violence.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document