The Individual, the State, and Ethnic Communities in Political Theory

1977 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vernon Van Dyke
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Moral Rights ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Common View ◽  
Moral Claims ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual

Liberal political theory and contemporary expositions of human rights focus largely on the individual. Some liberal theorists even deny that ethnic communities and other groups, as collective entities, can have moral rights at all. The outlook is narrow and unfortunate. It reflects a preoccupation with domestic politics and a model of domestic politics that neglects the common fact of heterogeneity. It ignores widespread practices and urgent problems, for in many countries groups identified by race, language, or religion make moral claims, and their claims are sometimes conceded. It ignores the common view that nations or “peoples” have a (moral) right of self-determination, and it even leaves the state itself without justification. If theory is to give adequate guidance, its focus must be broadened. The question of group rights needs to be explored, and interrelationships between the rights of individuals, of groups, and of the state need to be clarified.

scholarly journals The Concept of Feasibility: A Multivocal Account

Res Publica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Guillery
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Common View ◽  
The World ◽  
Common Objection ◽  
The Common

AbstractA common objection to a proposal or theory in political philosophy is that it is not feasible to realise what it calls for. This is commonly taken to be sufficient to reject a proposal or theory: feasibility, on this common view, operates as a straightforward constraint on moral and political theory, whatever is not feasible is simply ruled out. This paper seeks to understand what we mean when we say that some proposal or outcome is or is not feasible. It will argue that no single binary definition can be given. Rather, there is a whole range of possible specifications of the term ‘feasible’, each of which selects a range of facts of the world to hold fixed. No single one of these possible specifications, though, is obviously privileged as giving the appropriate understanding of ‘feasibility’ tout court. The upshot of my account of feasibility, then, will be that the common view of feasibility as a straightforward constraint cannot be maintained: in order to reject a moral theory, it will not be sufficient simply to say that it is not feasible.

The Muslim Tradition of Political Philosophy

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shahrough Akhavi
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Epistemological Foundation ◽  
The Individual

The doctrine of salvation in Islam centers on the community of believers. Contemporary Muslim political philosophy (or, preferably, political theory) covers a broad expanse that brings under its rubric at least two diverse tendencies: an approach that stresses the integration of religion and politics, and an approach that insists on their separation. Advocates of the first approach seem united in their desire for the “Islamization of knowledge,” meaning that the epistemological foundation of understanding and explanation in all areas of life, including all areas of political life, must be “Islamic.” Thus, one needs to speak of an “Islamic anthropology,” an “Islamic sociology,” an “Islamic political science,” and so on. But there is also a distinction that one may make among advocates of this first approach. Moreover, one can say about many, perhaps most, advocates of the first approach that they feel an urgency to apply Islamic law throughout all arenas of society. This article focuses on the Muslim tradition of political philosophy and considers the following themes: the individual and society, the state, and democracy.

Foreign Policy and the Social Construction of State Identity

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul A. Kowert
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
State Level ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
The State ◽  
Foreign Policy Analysis ◽  
State Identity ◽  
Psychological Theories ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual

Foreign policy analysis benefits from careful attention to state identity. After all, identity defines the field itself by making it possible to speak both of policies and of a domain that is foreign. For some scholars, identity has proven useful as a guide to agency and, in particular, to agent preferences. For others, identity has served as a guide to social or institutional structure. Theories of state identity can be divided into three categories: conditions internal to agents, social interactions among agents, and “ecological” encounters with a broader environment. Internal conditions refer to either processes or constraints that operate within the agent under consideration. In the case of the state, these may include domestic politics, the individual characteristics of citizens or other internal actors, and the collective attributes of these citizens or other actors. Although internal causes are not social at the state level, they nevertheless have social implications if they give rise to state identity, and they may themselves be social at a lower level. The social interactions of states themselves constitute a second source of identity, one that treats states as capable of interacting like persons. This approach essentially writes large social and psychological theories, replacing individuals with the state. Finally, the ecological setting or broader environment is a third possible source of identity. The environment may be material, ideational, or discursive, and treated as an objective or a subjective influence.

scholarly journals Justifying Limitations on the Freedom of Expression

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gehan Gunatilleke
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
National Security ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
The State ◽  
Public Order ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
Proportionality Test ◽  
The Individual

Abstract The freedom of expression is vital to our ability to convey opinions, convictions, and beliefs, and to meaningfully participate in democracy. The state may, however, ‘limit’ the freedom of expression on certain grounds, such as national security, public order, public health, and public morals. Examples from around the world show that the freedom of individuals to express their opinions, convictions, and beliefs is often imperilled when states are not required to meet a substantial justificatory burden when limiting such freedom. This article critiques one of the common justificatory approaches employed in a number of jurisdictions to frame the state’s burden to justify limitations on the freedom of expression—the proportionality test. It presents a case for an alternative approach that builds on the merits and addresses some of the weaknesses of a typical proportionality test. This alternative may be called a ‘duty-based’ justificatory approach because it requires the state to demonstrate—through the presentation of publicly justifiable reasons—that the individual concerned owes others a duty of justice to refrain from the expressive conduct in question. The article explains how this approach is more normatively compelling than a typical proportionality test. It also illustrates how such an approach can better constrain the state’s ability to advance majoritarian interests or offload its positive obligations by limiting the freedom of expression of minorities and dissenting voices.

The Individual, The State, and The Common Good

1996 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Haldane
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Common Good ◽  
The State ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Common ◽  
Political Deliberation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Civil Order

Let me begin with what should be a reassuring thought, and one that may serve as a corrective to presumptions that sometimes characterize political philosophy. The possibility, which Aquinas and Madison are both concerned with, of wise and virtuous political deliberation resulting in beneficial and stable civil order, no more depends upon possession of aphilosophical theory of the state and of the virtues proper to it, than does the possibility of making good paintings depend upon possession of an aesthetic theory of the nature and value of art.

The lives of subjects

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annabel S. Brett
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the relationship of the state to its subjects as necessarily physically embodied beings. The primary way in which the commonwealth commands its subjects is through the medium of its law. The law is for the common good and obliges the community as a whole, and thus the ontological status of the law—as distinct from any particular command of a superior to an individual—is intimately tied to that of the body politic. The question, then, concerning the relationship of the state to the natural body of the individual can be framed in terms of the extent of the obligation of the civil law.

Beyond Origins

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angelica Maria Bernal
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Common View ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
The Common

From classical stories of divine lawgivers to contemporary ones of Founding Fathers and constitutional beginnings, foundings have long been synonymous with singular, extraordinary moments of political origin and creation. In constitutional democracies, this common view is particularly attractive, with original founding events, actors, and ideals invoked time and again in everyday politics as well as in times of crisis to remake the state and unify citizens. Beyond Origins challenges this view of foundings, explaining how it is ultimately dangerous, misguided, and unsustainable. Engaging with cases of founding through a series of “travels” across political traditions and historical time, this book evaluates the uses and abuses of this view to expose in its links among foundings, origins, and authority a troubling political foundationalism. It argues that by ascribing to foundings a universally binding, unifying, and transcendent authority, the common view works to obscure the fraught political struggles involved in actual foundings and refoundings. In the wake of this challenge, the book develops an alternate approach. Centered on a political view of foundings, this framework recasts foundations as far from authoritatively settled or grounded and redefines foundings as contentious, uncertain, and incomplete. It looks to actors whose complicated relations to pure origins both reveal and capitalize on the underauthorized and contingent nature of foundations to enact foundational change. By examining such actors—from Haitian revolutionaries to Latin American presidents and social movements—the book prods a reconsideration of foundings on different terms: as a contestatory, ongoing dimension of political life.

Liberty and the Common Law

1945 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lord Wright
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Case System ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right

In preparing the few and elementary observations which I am about to make to you tonight I have wondered if the title I chose was apt or suitable. The Common Law is generally described as the law of liberty, of freedom and of free peoples. It was a home-made product. In the eighteenth century, foreign lawyers called it an insular and barbarous system; they compared it to their own system of law, developed on the basis of Roman and Civil Law. Many centuries before, and long after Bracton's day, when other civilised European nations ‘received’ the Roman Law, England held back and stood aloof from the Reception. It must have been a near thing. It seems there could have been a Reception here if the Judges had been ecclesiastics, steeped in the Civil Law. But as it turned out they were laymen, and were content as they travelled the country, and in London as well, to adopt what we now know as the Case System, instead of the rules and categories of the Civil Law. Hence the method of threshing out problems by debate in Court, and later on the basis of written pleadings which we find in the Year Books. For present purposes, all I need observe is that the Civil Lawyer had a different idea of the relation of the state or the monarch to the individual from that of the Common Lawyer. To the Civil or Roman Lawyer, the dominant maxim was ‘quod placuit principi legis habet vigorem’; law was the will of the princeps. With this may be compared the rule expressed in Magna Carta in 1215: No freeman, it was there said, was to be taken or imprisoned or exiled or in any way destroyed save by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land. Whatever the exact application of that phrase in 1215, it became a text for fixing the relations between the subject and the State. Holdsworth quotes from the Year Book of 1441; the law is the highest English inheritance the King hath, for by the law he and all his subjects are ruled. That was the old medieval doctrine that all things are governed by law, either human or divine. That is the old doctrine of the supremacy of the law, which runs through the whole of English history, and which in the seventeenth century won the day against the un-English doctrine of the divine right of Kings and of their autocratic power over the persons and property of their subjects. The more detailed definition of what all that involved took time to work out. I need scarcely refer to the great cases in the eighteenth century in which the Judges asserted the right of subjects to freedom from arbitrary arrest as against the ministers of state and against the validity of a warrant to seize the papers of a person accused of publishing a seditious libel; in particular Leach v. Money (1765) 19 St. Tr. 1001; Entick v. Carrington (1765) 19 St. Tr. 1029; Wilkes v. Halifax (1769) 19 St. Tr. 1406. In this connexion may be noted Fox's Libel Act, 1792, which dealt with procedure, but fixed a substantive right to a trial by jury of the main issue in the cases it referred to.

Lesser Evil and Responsibility: Comments on Jeff McMahan's Analysis of the Morality of War

2007 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 712-729 ◽  
Author(s):  
Re'em Segev
Keyword(s):  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
Main Claim ◽  
Common View ◽  
Interpersonal Conflicts ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Morality Of War ◽  
Universal Application

The main aim of Jeff McMahan's manuscriptThe Morality and Law of Waris to answer the question: why and accordingly when, is it justified or permissible, to kill people in war? However, McMahan argues that the same principles apply to individual actions and to war. His main claim is that “a state of war… does not call forth a different set of principles, but merely complicates the application of moral principles that are of universal application.” In other words, “…in war, people have the same rights, immunities, and liabilities that they have in other contexts.” McMahan rejects “all doctrines of collective responsibility” and “liability” according to which “individuals can share in responsibility… or liabilitysimply by virtue of membershipin a collective.” His claim is that every individual is liable for what he has done and not for the actions of others—even if both are part of the same collective. Accordingly, McMahan challenges the common view that it is much easier to justify killing in war compared to killing in other contexts. Therefore, the scope of his project exceeds the context of war and extends to interpersonal conflicts between individuals that do not qualify as war. Indeed, McMahan has argued in the past for a similar account of self-defense in the individual context.

scholarly journals Commons and the nature of modernity: towards a cosmopolitical view on craft guilds

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bert De Munck
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
The State ◽  
Allocation Of Resources ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Commons ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Nature And Society ◽  
Craft Guilds

AbstractThis paper argues that historical research on late medieval and early modern craft guilds fails to escape teleological and anachronistic views, including when they are addressed as commons or ‘institutions for collective action’. These present-day conceptual lenses do not only create idealized views on guilds, but also of the contexts in which they operated, especially the state and the market. This is especially the case with neo-institutional views on the commons, which fall back on a transhistorical rational actor, who can choose between three options for the allocation of resources and surpluses, namely the state, the market and the common. The paper shows that guilds were fundamentally entangled with both the state and the market and that their ethic implied a less utilitarian and instrumental attitude towards natural resources. The consequence of this is that the history of the guilds offers different lessons to present-day commoners than those implied by present-day research. With an eye at launching a reflection on that, I argue in favour of a cosmopolitical perspective, which invites to take fundamentally different worldviews seriously. This includes questioning our own conceptual and analytical abstractions like the state, the market and the individual, up to and including the very distinction between nature and society or nature and politics, which are at the very basis of modern science itself.

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