scholarly journals Slavic national minorities in the political thought of the peasant movement in the interwar period

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-210
Author(s):  
Ewelina Podgajna

The peasant movement presented various positions towards the national minorities living in Poland in the interwar period. The attitude towards the Slavic minorities was different, the attitude towards the Jewish minority and the other national groups. In the 1920s, a favorable position towards Slavic minorities was represented by PSL Wyzwolenie, SCh and PSL Lewica, while PSL Piast remained unfavorable. In the 1930s, after the reunification in the SL, politicians and leaders of the party proclaimed the need to make far-reaching changes and reforms in the Eastern Borderlands. The agrarians emphasized that the care for favorable relations with the Slavic minorities was primarily due to the concern for the interests of the Polish state, so that minorities would not be the cause of unrest and internal disputes. According to the peasantry, it was necessary to cooperate in the field of peasant interests, to change social awareness and to strive to create the union of Slavic states. In the harmonious coexistence of all citizens of the Polish state, regardless of their nationality, they saw the source of integration and the strength of the state.

Author(s):  
Javier Ruipérez Alamilo

The preoccupation about the conciliation between Freedom and Democracy has always been present in the political thought along History. Is for this reason why this antinomy is been tried to be solved from several approaches from classical Greece to our days. It was the rise of the liberal Constitutional State which made real both premises but from an approach in which both concepts act like characteristic of two very different frames: the one of the civil society and the one of the State, so that Freedom that acts in the first one, conditions absolutely to the second. But certainly Freedom and Democracy are, in essence, complementary and inseparable terms, because none of them can be understood without the other, and their independent fulfilment would be impossible at all.


Author(s):  
Anatolii Petrovich Mykolaiets

It is noted that from the standpoint of sociology, “management — a function of organized systems of various nature — (technical, biological, social), which ensures the preservation of their structure, maintaining a certain state or transfer to another state, in accordance with the objective laws of the existence of this system, which implemented by a program or deliberately set aside”. Management is carried out through the influence of one subsystem-controlling, on the other-controlled, on the processes taking place in it with the help of information signals or administrative actions. It is proved that self-government allows all members of society or a separate association to fully express their will and interests, overcome alienation, effectively combat bureaucracy, and promote public self-realization of the individual. At the same time, wide direct participation in the management of insufficiently competent participants who are not responsible for their decisions, contradicts the social division of labor, reduces the effectiveness of management, complicates the rationalization of production. This can lead to the dominance of short-term interests over promising interests. Therefore, it is always important for society to find the optimal measure of a combination of self-management and professional management. It is determined that social representation acts, on the one hand, as the most important intermediary between the state and the population, the protection of social interests in a politically heterogeneous environment. On the other hand, it ensures the operation of a mechanism for correcting the political system, which makes it possible to correct previously adopted decisions in a legitimate way, without resorting to violence. It is proved that the system of social representation influences the most important political relations, promotes social integration, that is, the inclusion of various social groups and public associations in the political system. It is proposed to use the term “self-government” in relation to several levels of people’s association: the whole community — public self-government or self-government of the people, to individual regions or communities — local, to production management — production self-government. Traditionally, self-government is seen as an alternative to public administration. Ideology and practice of selfgovernment originate from the primitive, communal-tribal democracy. It is established that, in practice, centralization has become a “natural form of government”. In its pure form, centralization does not recognize the autonomy of places and even local life. It is characteristic of authoritarian regimes, but it is also widely used by democratic regimes, where they believe that political freedoms should be fixed only at the national level. It is determined that since the state has achieved certain sizes, it is impossible to abandon the admission of the existence of local authorities. Thus, deconcentration appears as one of the forms of centralization and as a cure for the excesses of the latter. Deconcentration assumes the presence of local bodies, which depend on the government functionally and in the order of subordination of their officials. The dependency of officials means that the leadership of local authorities is appointed by the central government and may be displaced.


Author(s):  
Nikita V. Averin

We examine the provisions situation in the early 1918 in the producing regions of Russia using materials from the Tambov Governorate. Published documents indicate a strong rise in prices for consumer goods, the population was concerned about high prices for food. The provisions problem was clearly taking on political overtones. The Bolsheviks who came to power did not only impose power, proceeding from their political and economic preferences, starting socialist transformations and fighting the remnants of the old organs of power. All this is shown in pub-lished sources on the peasant movement that swept the province, as well as in memoirs, witnesses of all those problems associated with food and the deterioration of the political and economic situation in the city and the governorate as a whole. In particular, the Soviet power immediately faced huge provisions problems, both inherited and generated by their own requisitions, as well as with the peasant protest movement. The peasant movement itself, caused by hunger and chaos, in the future will play a huge role in the policies pursued by the Bolsheviks. Documents and memoirs can serve in the study of the state of the population in the specified period.


Other Others ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Sergey Dolgopolski

The “Introduction” formulates the question of the political, and in particular of the emergence and erasure of the political from the horizon of currently predominant political thought in political theology and political ontology. The “Introduction” further attunes the readers to the dynamic key of “effacement” as both emergence and erasure, thereby defining the main register in which the book is proceeding -- as distinct from the keys of chronological periodisation, linear history, paradigm shifts, or other stabilizing approaches. The “Introduction” further draws a distinction between politics and the political, and advances the question of the political in relation to the Talmud as both a text and a discipline of thinking able to shed a new, contrasting, light on the paradox driven modern political notions of a singularizing and even singling out notion of a “Jew,” and a universalizing notion of the “human being.” The “Introduction” concludes by gesturing towards a much closer connection between the question of the political in the Talmud, the notions of the Jews and of the human beings in modernity, and the question of earth and territory as a part of political equation these concepts spell out.


Vivarium ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 22-50
Author(s):  
Peter Adamson

AbstractGiles of Rome’s On Ecclesiastical Power (De ecclesiastica potestate), a polemical work arguing for the political supremacy of the pope, claims that the papacy holds a ‘plenitude of power’ and has direct or indirect authority over all aspects of human life. This paper shows how Giles uses themes from natural philosophy in developing his argument. He compares cosmic and human ordering and draws an analogy between the relations of soul to body and of Church to state. He also understands the pope’s power to be ‘universal’ in nature, another idea taken from Aristotelian physics. Further, Giles views the pope’s right to intervene arbitrarily in the affairs of the Christian community as mirroring God’s ability to work miracles. We thus see that Giles, no less than intellectuals on the other side of this debate such as Dante and Marsilius of Padua, believed that Aristotelian natural philosophy could be enlisted in the service of political thought.


Méthexis ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-46
Author(s):  
Étienne Helmer

The presence of slavery in Plato’s political and ethical thought is marked by two contrary tendencies: one signals the conventional character of statutory slavery and tends to reduce the moral boundary between free people and servile people; the other one, going in the opposite direction, strongly reaffirms the functional frontier between these two categories, and makes it impassable. What does this double gesture of integration and exclusion of slavery mean with respect to Plato’s political thought? My claim, based on the analysis of a passage in Book vi of the Laws and some excerpts from the Statesman, is the following: for Plato, the statutory slavery fulfills the function of drawing the inner civic boundary on which the political field must be built if it is to have a true conceptual autonomy, by contrast with what contributes to its construction but without being fully political.


2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-244
Author(s):  
Espen Hammer

Hegel's philosophy of religion is characterized by what seems to be a deep tension. On the one hand, Hegel claims to be a Christian thinker, viewing religion, and in particular Christianity, as a manifestation of the absolute. On the other hand, however, he seems to view modernity as largely secular, devoid of authoritative claims to transcendence. Modernity is secular in the political sense of requiring the state to be neutral when it comes to matters of religion. However, it is also secular in the sense of there being no recourse to authoritative representations of a transcendent God. Drawing on Charles Taylor's view of secularization, the article focuses on the second strand of his religious thinking, exploring how Hegel can be thought of as a theorist of secularization. It is claimed that his dialectic of religious development describes a process of secularization. Ultimately, Hegel's system offers a view of the absolute as immanent, suggesting that an adequate account of religion will necessarily have to accept secularization as the end-point of spirit's development. This is how the tension between religion and secularization can be resolved.


1995 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Minogue

LIKE MANY PEOPLE, I FIND KARL POPPER BOTH FASCINATING and irritating. His vigour and lucidity are irresistible, and no one could complain that he fails to engage with the big questions. The problems begin when we consider his political thought. Some think him one of the great liberal philosophers of the century. I on the other hand, while being fascinated by The Open Society and its Enemies, am repelled by the grossness of its caricaturing of most of the thinkers it touches. The Poverty of Historicism is a marvellous text in the philosophy of the social sciences, but the idea of historicism is a straw man. The paradox seems to be that while there is a lot that refers to the political questions of the day, there is virtually nothing which takes up issues of political philosophy directly. The result is that he seems to me always to be on the wrong foot, and my problem is to discover why.


2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Fleming

There is an important but underappreciated ambiguity in Hobbes’ concept of personhood. In one sense, persons are representatives or actors. In the other sense, persons are representees or characters. An estate agent is a person in the first sense; her client is a person in the second. This ambiguity is crucial for understanding Hobbes’ claim that the state is a person. Most scholars follow the first sense of ‘person’, which suggests that the state is a kind of actor – in modern terms, a ‘corporate agent’. I argue that Hobbes’ state is a person only in the second sense: a character rather than an actor. If there are any primitive corporate agents in Hobbes’ political thought, they are representative assemblies, not states or corporations. Contemporary political theorists and philosophers tend to miss what is unique and valuable about Hobbes’ idea of state personality because they project the idea of corporate agency onto it.


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