State Power versus Individual Freedom: Japan’s Constitutional Past, Present, and Possible Future

Japan ◽  
1953 ◽  
pp. 304-328
Author(s):  
Lawrence Repeta ◽  
Colin P. A. Jones
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
Individual Freedom

Contesting Democracy

2020 ◽  
pp. 255-293
Author(s):  
Martin Conway
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
State Power ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Democratic Culture ◽  
Political Critique ◽  
European Democracy ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter assesses the different discourses about Western European democracy that developed during the 1960s—some of which contributed to the radicalism of 1968, while others emphatically did not. The dissenting voices of the 1960s focused on the perceived failings of the existing political structures, questioning whether the vertical hierarchies of representation through parliaments, parties, and interest groups were the best means of achieving the goals of individual freedom, social justice, and a participatory democratic culture. But debates about means also became debates about ends. In particular, a radical cultural and political critique emerged that questioned the forms of authority—explicit and implicit—within modern societies. This also challenged the nature of the post-war settlement. Far from creating a new democratic culture, the changes after 1945, these critics argued, had dismantled the authoritarian regimes while retaining the edifice of state power, and a society of regimented and limited freedoms.

The Political Philosophy of Quantification

2020 ◽  
pp. 73-86
Author(s):  
Theodore M. Porter
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
State Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Karl Popper ◽  
Individual Freedom

This chapter investigates the political philosophy of quantification. The intellectualist defense of quantification bears on the ethical issues. A system of demonstrably false or untestable dogmas, the product of state power and not of free persuasion, has obvious moral implications to anyone concerned about individual freedom. This point, indeed, has been at the heart of some of the most influential philosophical defenses of science in this century. John Dewey considered science an ally of democracy, and argued that scientific method means nothing more than the subjection of beliefs to skeptical inquiry. Karl Popper held it up as antidote to the century's totalitarianisms. While Popper did not stress quantification in his political philosophy of science, his terms could easily be applied to it. Although it is of course possible to use numbers casually and informally, quantification for public as well as scientific purposes has generally been allied to a spirit of rigor. The chapter then explores objectivity and objectification, as well as French statistics.

Liberalisms in India

2019 ◽  
pp. 484-503
Author(s):  
Rochana Bajpai
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Principal Agent ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Strong Belief ◽  
Liberal Reform

Liberal ideas in India are relatively understudied as liberalism, although these have been examined as part of other ideologies, such as nationalism, socialism, and secularism.This chapter offers an exploratory sketch of strands of liberalism in India in theory and practice. Arguing that liberal ideas have historically had a significant presence in the Indian polity, I distinguish three strands of liberalism that have been influential in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India: colonial, nationalist, and radical. Whereas politically, these traditions have been antagonistic, in terms of ideology, all share a strong belief in the state as the principal agent of liberal reform and an acceptance of group-differentiated rights. This in turn has meant that strong liberalism remains weakly articulated in India: the need for protecting individuals from state power has rarely been elaborated. Its Indian itineraries, however, serve also as a reminder of the limits of liberalism and the significance of other moral horizons for the pursuit of individual freedom.

Haiti and the False Promise of State Power

1969 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 67
Author(s):  
Daniel Troup
Keyword(s):  
State Power

essay

The Anarchist Press in Egypt before World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Gorman
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Public Education ◽  
World War I ◽  
State Power ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War

This chapter traces the development of the radical secular press in Egypt from its first brief emergence in the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I. First active in the 1860s, the anarchist movement gradually expanded its membership and influence over subsequent decades to articulate a general social emancipation and syndicalism for all workers in the country. In the decade and a half before 1914, its press collectively propagated a critique of state power and capitalism, called for social justice and the organisation of labour, and promoted the values of science and public education in both a local context and as part of an international movement. In seeking to promote a programme at odds with both nationalism and colonial rule, it incurred the hostility of the authorities in addition to facing the practical problems of managing and financing an oppositional newspaper.

Immanuel Kant

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Brophy
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Scientific Discovery ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Philosophical Foundation ◽  
Advanced Capitalism ◽  
Moral Feeling ◽  
Transcendental Idealist

Agamben’s complicated engagement with Immanuel Kant celebrates the brilliance of the German idealist’s thought by disclosing its condemnatory weight in Western philosophy. Kant was writing in the midst of burgeoning industrial capitalism, when each new scientific discovery seemed to push back the fog of religion in favour of science and reason; meanwhile Agamben’s work develops in concert with the crises of advanced capitalism and borrows significantly from those philosophers who endured the most demoralising upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. Whatever lanugo Kant was eager for us to shed in the name of individual freedom,1 Agamben sees in this crusade for civic maturity a surprising prescience: ‘[I]t is truly astounding how Kant, almost two centuries ago and under the heading of a sublime “moral feeling,” was able to describe the very condition that was to become familiar to the mass societies and great totalitarian states of our time’ (HS 52). To a remarkable extent, Agamben finds that Kant’s transcendental idealist frame of thought lays the philosophical foundation for the state of exception.

Reforms and transformation paths in comparative perspective: challenging comparative views on East European and Chinese reforms

2005 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mária Csanádi
Keyword(s):  
Power Distribution ◽  
State Power ◽  
State Model ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Dynamic Background ◽  
East European ◽  
Structural Context ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Party State ◽  
Chinese Reforms

Reforms, in view of a comparative party-state model, become the instruments of self-reproduction and self-destruction of party-state power. The specific patterns of power distribution imply different development and transformation paths through different instruments of self-reproduction. This approach also points to the structural and dynamic background of the differences in the location, sequence, speed and political conditions of reforms during the operation and transformation of party-states. In view of the model the paper points to the inconsistencies that emerge in the comparative reform literature concerning the evaluation and strategies of reforms disconnected from their systemic-structural context.

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