scholarly journals Drought in the sertão as a natural or social phenomenon: establishing the Inspetoria Federal de Obras Contra as Secas, 1909-1923

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eve Elizabeth Buckley
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Factors ◽  
The Political ◽  
Failure To Rescue ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Political Will ◽  
The Social ◽  
First Republic ◽  
Ultimate Failure ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Climatic Phenomenon

This paper examines interpretations of the drought problem in Brazil's northeast sertão during the First Republic. It compares analysis of drought as primarily a natural or climatic phenomenon - embraced by civil engineers working for the Inspetoria [Federal] de Obras Contra as Secas (IFOCS) - with analyses emphasizing social and political conditions that made drought a crisis for the sertanejo poor. The latter are evident in the report of doctors Belisário Penna and Artur Neiva describing their expedition through the sertão sponsored by IFOCS in 1912. This comparison allows for consideration of the intersection between natural (geographic, climatic) and social (political, cultural) factors that produced the region's periodic crisis. The analysis is informed by the work of social scientists who highlight the multi-dimensional causes underlying natural disasters in politically marginal communities. Technocrats' faith in the context-independent utility of their expertise lay at the heart of IFOCS's ultimate failure to rescue sertanejos from famine, migration and poverty. Because the drought agency's technical personnel never had the political will or muscle to confront the social organization underlying the sertão's recurrent calamity, their ability to alleviate the human suffering that droughts precipitated was severely limited.

Legal Reform and Social Construction: Violence, Gender, and the Law

1994 ◽  
Vol 19 (04) ◽  
pp. 829-852 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Frohmann ◽  
Elizabeth Mertz
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Legal Reforms ◽  
The Past ◽  
Multiple Dimensions ◽  
The Social

As scholars and activists have addressed the problem of violence against women in the past 25 years, their efforts have increasingly attuned us to the multiple dimensions of the issue. Early activists hoped to change the structure of power relations in our society, as well as the political ideology that tolerated violence against women, through legislation, education, direct action, and direct services. This activism resulted in a plethora of changes to the legal codes and protocols relating to rape and battering. Today, social scientists and legal scholars are evaluating the effects of these reforms, questioning anew the ability of law by itself to redress societal inequalities. As they uncover the limitations of legal reforms enacted in the past two decades, scholars are turning—or returning—to ask about the social and cultural contexts within which laws are formulated, enforced, and interpreted.

The Political Theory of German Fascism

1934 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick L. Schuman
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Surface Phenomena ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Social ◽  
Changing Patterns

In dealing with the evolution of political thought, most historians and social scientists, until recently at least, have tended to view political behavior and the changing patterns of power in society as rational implementations of dynamic ideas. They have accordingly concerned themselves more with the development of abstract philosophical systems than with the social-psychological contexts conditioning this development. To other observers, more Marxian than Hegelian in their outlook, all political ideas are but reflections of the economic interests and class ideologies of the various strata of society. This school therefore probes for the secrets of political and social change, not in the surface phenomena of ideas, but in the progress of technology and in the shifting economic relations of groups and classes within the social hierarchy. Still others, few in number as yet, have adopted Freud as their guide.

“The Burdens of Urban History”: Comment

1989 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 30-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Katznelson
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social History ◽  
Urban History ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
State And Society ◽  
The City

How, if at all, can studies of the city help us understand the distinctive qualities of the American regime? In “The Burdens of Urban History,” which refines and elaborates his earlier paper “The Problem of the Political in Recent American Urban History,” Terrence McDonald, a historian who has written on urban fiscal policy and conflict, argues that students of the city have focused their work too narrowly on bosses and machines, patronage and pluralism. In so doing, they have obscured other bases of politics and conflict, and, trapped by liberal categories of analysis, they have perpetuated a self-satisfied, even celebratory, portrait of American politics and society. This unfortunate directionality to urban research in some measure has been unwitting because historians and social scientists have been unreflective about the genealogies, and mutual borrowings, of their disciplines. Even recent critical scholarship in the new social history and in the social sciences under the banner of “bringing the state back in” suffers from these defects. As a result, these treatments of state and society relationships, and of the themes that appear under the rubric of American “exceptionalism,” are characterized by an epistemological mish-mash, a contraction of analytical vision, and an unintended acquiescence in the self-satisfied cheerleading of the academy that began in the postwar years.

Towards a New International Technological Order

1979 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan Galtung
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Political Will ◽  
Alternative Technologies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
Linear Movement ◽  
To Come ◽  
Capital Intensive ◽  
Mode Of Production

The main thesis of the paper is that technology is not merely a mode of production and therefore neutral; it carries within it a code of structures - economic, social, cultural, and also cognitive. The economic code that inheres in Western Technology demands that industries be capital-intensive, research-intensive, organization-intensive and labour-extensive. On the social plane, the code creates a ‘centre’ and a ‘periphery’, thus perpetuating a structure of inequality. In the cultural arena, it sees the West as entrusted by destiny with the mission of casting the rest of the world in its own mould. In the cognitive field, it sees man as the master of nature, the vertical and individualistic relations between human beings as the normal and natural, and history as a linear movement of progress. The transfer of Western technology is thus a structural-cultural invasion, which is not clearly seen as such parly because it is not accompanied by the West's physical presence (as in the days of colonialism), and partly because the fragmentation inherent in Western technology fragments the perception of the total picture. For techniques that create different structures to come into their own, a very clear perception of the interlocking of technology and structures is needed. Also needed is the political will to use alternative technologies as an instrument to bring about a structural change.

scholarly journals “DOES DEMOCRACY END IN TERROR?” TRANSFORMATIONS OF ANTITOTALITARIANISM IN POSTWAR FRANCE

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 537-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
KEVIN DUONG
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
French History ◽  
Political Will ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
The Social ◽  
May 1968

Does democracy end in terror? This essay examines how this question acquired urgency in postwar French political thought by evaluating the critique of totalitarianism after the 1970s, its antecedents, and the shifting conceptual idioms that connected them. It argues that beginning in the 1970s, the critique of totalitarianism was reorganized around notions of “the political” and “the social” to bring into view totalitarianism's democratic provenance. This conceptual mutation displaced earlier denunciations of the bureaucratic nature of totalitarianism by foregrounding anxieties over its voluntarist, democratic sources. Moreover, it projected totalitarianism's origins back to the Jacobin discourse of political will to implicate its postwar inheritors like French communism and May 1968. In so doing, antitotalitarian thinkers stoked a reassessment of liberalism and a reassertion of “the social” as a barrier against excessive democratic voluntarism, the latter embodied no longer by Bolshevism but by a totalitarian Jacobin political tradition haunting modern French history.

scholarly journals Ferdinand Tönnies és a korai társadalomtudományok, I. rész

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (21) ◽  
pp. 232-241
Author(s):  
Endre Kiss
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
Community Theory ◽  
Open Relationship ◽  
Clear Idea ◽  
Relationship Structure ◽  
The Right

The theory of society-community stands in the centre of the „social” life. It however also stands in the centre of Tönnies’s positive work itself. This potentiation gives this theory a vitality that is looking for its equivalent and to which little is changed if its presence is not perceived accordingly in every corresponding context. Tönnies is one of the first most important social scientists, who was primarily concerned with being able to investigate society with a strictly scientific character. So he was already therefore much more interested in the optimal way of knowledge than in the diverse concrete results or even in the theoretical possibility of generalization of these results. The society-community theory is an epochal achievement, its result one of the bases of the social existence. It is certainly there, that the rare „open relationship structure” of both these categories is playing. Like many others, we decide to campaign against the political instrumentalization of the society-community theory, there is by no means any denying the fact, that it has extremely deeply secured this dichotomy in the structure-building principles of the political discourse. We see the force of the debate on the ideal level: diabolization and idealization are alternating in symmetrical order obvious. The first social scientists were in multiple paradoxical situations. The first paradox consisted in the fact, that had a very clear idea of a „science” of the society. Because however, such a „science” was not yet existing, they were constrained to make „philosophically” the first steps, but of course not how the „right” philosophers would have done them. The other paradox and eternally opened question are why the „society” as the object remained temporally so much behind the „nature” as an object. It is also hardly less interesting, why the new social sciences did not already emerge in Marx’s environment. The historically belated social science experiences in the medium of this situation a vocation to become a pioneer. Simmel also adheres consistently to his often formulated youth insight that a „new science” will emerge in any case around the society.

scholarly journals Political will is a required condition effective combating corruption.

2020 ◽  
pp. 359-365
Author(s):  
Kvasha Oksana
Keyword(s):  
Political Influence ◽  
The State ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Leader ◽  
Political Will ◽  
Head Of State ◽  
The Will ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
The Government

Effective counteraction to corruption at all levels is not possible without the symbiosis of such components as influencing the causes and conditions of corruption, creating systemic anti-corruption legislation, its effective application to all without exception manifestations of corruption in all levels of state power. However, such a symbiosis can only produce a positive result if the political will of the state leadership is available. I would call it a "conditio sine qua non" (a condition without which there is) overcoming corruption in the country, because in Latin "conditio sine qua non" means "a necessary condition", a necessary condition for the result. Political will in combating corruption is not only the will of the political leader (head of state) as an individual, but also the will of individuals from his immediate environment. Only political will is capable of ensuring the effectiveness of all other necessary components of counteracting corruption. The political will of the leadership of the state is a conditio sine qua non of minimizing corruption in the country, that is, a condition without which effective counteraction to corruption and corruption crime in Ukraine is impossible. The presence of political will is a prerequisite in the chain of others who are not capable of effectively preventing the spread of corruption in the absence of political will of the government. No other political conditions, economic, social or legislative levers will succeed in reducing corruption. Therefore, a promising direction for further research on this issue is the development of a scientifically sound mechanism for political influence of the government on the effectiveness of anti-corruption measures in Ukraine.

Political Decay and the European Revolutions, 1789–1848

1970 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 344-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Gillis
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political System ◽  
Social Process ◽  
The Political ◽  
Total System ◽  
Causative Role ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Social ◽  
Revolutionary Situation ◽  
Dynamic Element

Until very recently social interpretations of revolution have enjoyed a position of virtual orthodoxy among both historians and social scientists. Sociologists and political scientists concerned with the problem of revolution have been mainly of the structural-functional school. They describe a revolutionary situation as one of “multiple dysfunction” in the relations between the political system and the society it serves. Revolution thus interpreted is a violent redress of imbalance among functionally interrelated and historically synchronous social and political parts of one total system. It is commonly assumed that it is the social process, including economic change, that is the dynamic element in any revolutionary event, and that political institutions play a causative role only in so far as they fail to provide mechanisms for resolving the state of disequilibrium. Historians of revolution, many of them strongly if not consciously influenced by Marxist traditions of interpretation, have taken much the same position. If they tend to think more in terms of trends than of equilibrium systems, nevertheless they agree with the social scientists that revolution is primarily the result of accumulating social and economic pressures, with politics playing only a secondary role in shaping the course of events.

Partisans and Nationalists

2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-196
Author(s):  
Patrick Hossay
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Popular Appeal ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Political Scene

The author provides a critical response to the social scientific literature that cast political interest and cleavages as the projection of sociocultural dynamics onto the political scene. Sociopolitical cleavages in general, and nationalism in particular, are thus viewed as having taken form outside the partisan arena, and only subsequent to their societal formation do they take on political importance. Through a comparison of the development of political nationalism in interwar Scotland and Flanders, the author argues for the importance of political forces in defining and shaping the political and social meaning and significance of nationalism. In Scotland, despite the potential popular appeal of nationalism, it does not emerge as a significant and autonomous political cleavage, principally due to configurations of partisan programs and alliances, and a politically unfavorable “demographic geometry.” In Flanders, on the other hand, markedly different political conditions fostered the development and societal significance of nationalism. Hence, political nationalism did not emerge as a necessary concomitant to societal and cultural change; it was in part the result of political conditions and institutions that could foster or constrain the sociopolitical significance and meaning of nationalism.

scholarly journals Polityka wyznaniowa w myśli austriackiej Partii Chrześcijańsko-Społecznej w latach 1918−1934

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 35-51
Author(s):  
Piotr Bukowczyk
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Policy ◽  
Italian Fascism ◽  
The Social ◽  
First Republic ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Impact

Religious policy in the thought of the Austrian Christian Social Party 1918−1934In the paper I present the vision of a relation between the state and religious denominations and the status of atheists and free-thinkers delineated in the political thought of the Christian Social Party Christlichsoziale Partei, active in Austria-Hungary and the First Republic of Austria, Christian-democratic, after 1931 influenced by Italian fascism and inclining towards authoritarianism. I infer it from its propaganda materials books, brochures, press articles, leaflets, posters and legislation enacted under its governmentI also show the impact of the social, cultural and political context on the postulates of the Christian Social Party with regard to religious policy.

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