Sentientist Democracy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alasdair Cochrane
Keyword(s):  
Public Good ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Public

Chapter 3 asks what kinds of institutions are needed to protect the worth and rights of sentient creatures. The chapter’s ultimate claim is that they are best protected by democratic institutions: that is, institutions which are participative, deliberative, and representative, and underpinned by a set of entrenched rights. Crucially, the chapter further argues that those institutions should be comprised of dedicated animal representatives. The job of those representatives should be to act as trustees of the interests of ‘animal members’ of the political community. In other words, their job should be to translate the interests of animals with whom we share a ‘community of fate’ into their deliberations with other representatives over what is in the public good.

scholarly journals A New-Old Way to Explore Civic Engagement: Learning from the Past

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Student Centered ◽  
The Public ◽  
Good Citizen ◽  
Good Citizenship ◽  
The Difference

The authors propose that student-centered discussion and reflection on the attributes of good citizenship and the good citizen constitute an important way to promote civic engagement. The expectations of the Framers of the Constitution and the teachings of Western political thought both hold that active and responsible citizenship is vital to the life of the political community. In this article, the authors argue that a good citizen: (1) has a vision of what their country is and what it means; (2), is willing to sacrifice their private interests for the public good, or rather their notion of the public good; (3) is willing to participate in the public domain, especially the political realm; and (4) will maintain their right to respectfully dissent and to critique the policies of those in power, recognizing the difference between country and policy or country and a particular president. The authors maintain that political polarization can be useful in the electoral cycle, but it is not good citizenship to the extent that it interferes with governing and solving the problems of the nation. Educators must communicate the message that politics and governing should not be zero-sum and that opposing sides must be able to work together to shape public policy.

scholarly journals A New-Old Way to Explore Civic Engagement: Learning from the Past

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Student Centered ◽  
The Public ◽  
Good Citizen ◽  
Good Citizenship ◽  
The Difference

The authors propose that student-centered discussion and reflection on the attributes of good citizenship and the good citizen constitute an important way to promote civic engagement. The expectations of the Framers of the Constitution and the teachings of Western political thought both hold that active and responsible citizenship is vital to the life of the political community. In this article, the authors argue that a good citizen: (1) has a vision of what their country is and what it means; (2), is willing to sacrifice their private interests for the public good, or rather their notion of the public good; (3) is willing to participate in the public domain, especially the political realm; and (4) will maintain their right to respectfully dissent and to critique the policies of those in power, recognizing the difference between country and policy or country and a particular president. The authors maintain that political polarization can be useful in the electoral cycle, but it is not good citizenship to the extent that it interferes with governing and solving the problems of the nation. Educators must communicate the message that politics and governing should not be zero-sum and that opposing sides must be able to work together to shape public policy.

STUMBLING TOWARDS THE CONSTITUTION

2016 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Thomas Adams
Keyword(s):  
Public Good ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Political Control ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Full Membership ◽  
The Public ◽  
Statutory Power ◽  
The Individual

ONE way in which governments may exercise political control over their subjects is by removing their status as citizens. Doing so – denying the individual the political and social rights that are constitutive of full membership of their community – involves making a radical choice, and accordingly such a decision must be properly regulated. One of the ways in which UK law does so is by preventing the exercise of the broad statutory power to rescind the citizenship of a UK national because it is “conducive to the public good”, where doing so would render that person stateless (British Nationality Act 1981, s. 40(2), (4)). Individuals may only be stripped of their citizenship under this provision on the condition that they remain full members of another political community.

War without Citizens

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-38
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Rosow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Citizenship ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Public ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Advanced Technologies

Contestation over war memorialization can help democratic theory respond to the current attenuation of citizenship in war in liberal democratic states, especially the United States. As war involves more advanced technologies and fewer soldiers, the relation of citizenship to war changes. In this context war memorialization plays a particular role in refiguring the relation. Current practices of remembering and memorializing war in contemporary neoliberal states respond to a dilemma: the state needs to justify and garner support for continual wars while distancing citizenship from participation. The result is a consumer culture of memorialization that seeks to effect a unity of the political community while it fights wars with few citizens and devalues the public. Neoliberal wars fought with few soldiers and an economic logic reveals the vulnerability to otherness that leads to more active and critical democratic citizenship.

Concluding Remarks to Part 3

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Preminger
Keyword(s):  
Government Policy ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Individual Responsibility ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Sphere ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Chapter 15 summarizes the chapters which addressed the third sphere, the relationship of labor to the political community. It reiterates that since Israel was established, the labor market’s borders have become ever more porous, while the borders of the national (Jewish) political community have remained firm: the Jewish nationalism which guides government policy is as strong as ever. NGOs, drawing on a discourse of human rights, are able to assist some non-citizens but this discourse also resonates with the idea of individual responsibility: the State is no longer willing to support “non-productive” populations, who are now being shoehorned into a labor market which offers few opportunities for meaningful employment, and is saturated by cheaper labor intentionally imported by the State in response to powerful employer lobbies. These trends suggest a partial reorientation of organized labor’s “battlefront”, from a face-off with capital to an appeal to the public and state.

Harrington’s Republicanism

2019 ◽  
pp. 67-80
Author(s):  
Rachel Hammersley
Keyword(s):  
Public Good ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The Political ◽  
Publishing History ◽  
The Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Commonwealth Government ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Agrarian Law

Chapter 4 focuses on the nature of Harrington’s republicanism and the key features of his ‘equal commonwealth’. It begins by examining the complex publishing history of Oceana and the political and intellectual context in which that work was written. It then traces Harrington’s commitment to key features of commonwealth government: his use of republican models ancient and modern, his adoption of the neo-Roman understanding of liberty and his conflict with Thomas Hobbes on this issue, and his commitment to government in accordance with reason and the public good. Harrington’s understanding of, and emphasis on, the concepts of empire and authority are then explored. Finally, the central features of his equal commonwealth are set out: the agrarian law to ensure equality at the foundation, and then a bicameral legislature, rotation of office, and the Venetian ballot to secure equality and prevent corruption in the superstructure.

Regional-Cosmopolitan Constituent Power

2020 ◽  
pp. 69-86
Author(s):  
Markus Patberg
Keyword(s):  
Member State ◽  
First Principles ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
The People ◽  
We The People ◽  
The Eu

This chapter deals with the question of whether the public narrative of ‘We, the people of Europe’, which claims constituent power for a cross-border demos composed of EU citizens, can be justified in terms of a systematic model. To that end, it draws on the political theory of regional cosmopolitanism, which holds that even though the EU is not a state, it has its own political community. The literature on regional cosmopolitanism offers two possible strategies of defending the idea of an EU-wide constituent power: a first-principles approach and a reconstructive approach. The chapter argues that only the latter proves viable, and then goes on to examine the merits of the model that it gives rise to. While regional-cosmopolitan constituent power plausibly responds to the fact that the EU has created a new group of addressees and authors of the law, it neglects the continuing importance of the member state peoples and fails to explain how an EU-wide constituent power could be reconciled with the compound and dependent nature of the EU polity.

scholarly journals What Does a Constitution Expect from Immigrants?

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (7) ◽  
pp. 1641-1656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uwe Volkmann
Keyword(s):  
National Culture ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Political System ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Media ◽  
Clear Idea

It is a long-established commonplace in any debate on immigration that immigrants should integrate into their receiving society. But integrate into what precisely? Into the labor market, into the legal order, into the political system, into a national culture whatever this might comprise? The Article tries to approach the question from the legal point of view and looks for hints or clues in the constitution which might help us with the answer. For this purpose, it explores the general theory of the constitution as it has been shaped by its professional interpreters as well as by political actors, the media and the public. The main intuition is that “constitution” is not only a written document, a text with a predefined, though maybe hidden meaning; instead, it is a social practice evolving over time and thereby reflecting the shared convictions of a political community of what is just and right. Talking about constitutional expectations toward immigrants then also tells us something about ourselves: about who we are and what kind of community we want to live in. As it turns out, we may not have a very clear idea of that.

The Power of Corruption

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 558-562
Author(s):  
Sandipto Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Public Good ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Global South ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Process ◽  
The Public ◽  
Process Thinking ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Moral Economies

Abstract The central paradox of corruption in the political life of the global South is how such a widely despised phenomenon persists so untroubled by allthe negative attention. The two books under discussion—Steven Pierce's Moral Economies of Corruption and Milan Vaishnav's When Crime Pays—demonstrate that to make sense of that paradox, one needs to go beyond the dominant legal/technocratic understanding of corruption as either private acts of illegality or failures of the civic democratic process. Thinking further with the insights offered by those books, the article sugg ests that the phenomenon of corruption can only be made sense of when placed within the matrix of political and social power relations in the global South democracies. Corruptions appear not as distortions in an idealized democratic marketplace, but in the context of maneuvers of counter-democratic power to maintain existing hierarchies of dominations against tides of democratic mobilization, not merely as a subversion of the public good, but in reaction to attempts to make goods public.

Multiculturalism in the Age of Terror: Confronting the Challenges

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gurpreet Mahajan
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
Question Mark ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Clout ◽  
Cultural Legacies ◽  
Europe Today

Multiculturalism appears to be under siege in Western liberal democracies. The encounter with organised terrorism has placed a question mark against the multicultural wisdom of recognising and accommodating cultural differences in the public arena. As concerns of national security dominate the post-9/11 world, distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are surfacing in a way that has prompted some to say that the present war on terror is actually a war on Islam. Will the multicultural ethic survive in this environment? Will states be willing to accommodate cultural diversity and live with the presence of visible differences? The article explores these questions through the lens of India. India has been battling with terrorism for more than a decade now. While this has severely strained the capacity of the political community to nurture multiculturalism, it has successfully resisted the challenges posed by an assertive cultural/religious majoritarianism that surfaced in the shadow of terrorism. India has dealt with the schisms produced by terrorism by drawing upon the collective imaginary and past cultural legacies that ensued from its understanding of a ‘situated self’. This was supplemented by a functioning democracy in which significant minorities were able to shape the electoral fate of political parties and reduce the political clout of those who were insensitive to their concerns. The multicultural ethic is far from secure in India, yet it does not, and has not, faced the problems that confront multiculturalism in Western Europe today. The issues before European democracies may have been accentuated by terrorism but they are linked closely to the liberal notion of tolerance. Does a notion of the ‘situated self’ that informs tolerance in India offer a viable alternative? We cannot expect any political community to erase its historically defined identity, yet a reflection on other ways of thinking and living may assuage some of our anxieties and open us to the possibility of redefining our understanding of differences.

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