The State, Modernity, and the Fate of Liberalism in Prewar Japan

1992 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Germaine A. Hoston
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Final Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Laissez Faire

The Political Histories of Western Europe and the United States over the past three hundred years illustrate powerfully how the evolution of fully functioning liberal democratic politics has been linked intimately to the presence of vigorous thinkers and activists dedicated to the pursuit of a liberal polity. The social contract theory of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the constitutionalism of Baron Charles de Montesquieu, the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith, and the reflections of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton on the challenges of competitive politics all helped to lay the groundwork for the achievement of liberal democratic politics in France, England, and the United States. Particular strains of political thought found in these and other thinkers help to account for the similarities and differences among the world's historic experiments in bourgeois democracy. French liberalism, which had no Thomas Hobbes seeking eloquently to defend monarchical absolutism, ultimately could not accommodate royal prerogative to democratic politics; and, lacking an Adam Smith to assert the primacy of economic laissez-faire, it showed no fundamental antipathy to the centralized state in its political practice. A more dramatic contrast is afforded by the fragile and short-lived democracy of Weimar Germany, nurtured in soil where G. W. F. Hegel's organic conception of the state and the doctrines of state sovereignty that legitimated the regime of Otto von Bismarck overwhelmed the contributions of Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt to liberal theory. In the final analysis, to be sure, the presence or absence of absolutism and its defenders, of laissez-faire economics and its rationalizers is attributable to other factors deep in the history and culture of each society. Yet, in all these cases, the historical relationship between thought and politics is clear and striking.

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.

Mirror Images: Political Structure and Early Railroad Policy in the United States and Prussia

1991 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen A. Dunlavy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cumulative Effect ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
State Governments ◽  
Weak State ◽  
Strong State ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
The 19Th Century

As conventional thinking once had it, Vormärz Prussia and the antebellum United States mapped out opposite ends of a “strong-state, weak-state” spectrum. But several decades of research have rendered both images increasingly untenable. Revisions began on the American side in the 1940s when a group of scholars set out to re-evaluate the state governments' role in antebellum American industrialization. These studies of state legislation and political rhetoric—the first to take federalism seriously, one might say—collectively laid to rest the myth of laissez-faire during the antebellum period. Since then scholars of the antebellum political economy have examined the American state from another angle, shifting attention to the role of the state and federal courts in economic growth. Others, mean-while, have taken a closer look at the federal government's role before the Civil War and discerned interventionist tendencies in the federal legislature and executive as well. The cumulative effect is clear: it has become impossible to speak of laissez-faire in the antebellum American context. On the Prussian side, too, historians have begun to rethink the state's role in industrialization as mounting evidence has undermined the conventional image. Initially, few historians questioned the extent of the state's involvement in economic activity during the first half of the 19th century; instead, they debated its consequences—beneficial or not, intended or not. On balance the first round of revisions judged Vormdrz Prussian policies to have been rather contradictory in nature, some encouraging industrialization but others either hampering economic change or proving irrelevant.5 Historian Clive Trebilcock has gone a step further, however, debunking what he labels “myths of the directed economy” in nineteenth-century Germany.

Making the State Pay

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa L. Miller
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Institutional Dynamics ◽  
Insufficient Attention ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Mass Publics

This chapter argues that the literature on the politics of punishment generally, and on US exceptionalism specifically, suffers from insufficient attention to serious violence. It complicates conventional assumptions about democratic politics, mass publics, and crime. Drawing on three cases—the United Kingdom, the United States, and the state of Pennsylvania—this chapter illustrates that rates of violence matter for political attention to crime. It also shows that the politicization of crime does not always lead to a singular focus on punishment and that this politicization in the United States is shaped by both high rates of violence and distinctive institutional dynamics that decouple crime from related social and economic insecurities. The consequence is an (exceptional) political process in the United States that makes it difficult for the polity to make the state pay for high rates of violence and the criminogenic conditions that give rise to them.

Is This the Care We Need?: An Examination of Childcare Policy in Pennsylvania

Commonwealth ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennie Sweet-Cushman ◽  
Ashley Harden
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Child Care ◽  
Current System ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Federal State ◽  
Women And Politics ◽  
Richard Nixon ◽  
State And Local ◽  
Childcare Policy

For many families across Pennsylvania, child care is an ever-present concern. Since the 1970s, when Richard Nixon vetoed a national childcare program, child care has received little time in the policy spotlight. Instead, funding for child care in the United States now comes from a mixture of federal, state, and local programs that do not help all families. This article explores childcare options available to families in the state of Pennsylvania and highlights gaps in the current system. Specifically, we examine the state of child care available to families in the Commonwealth in terms of quality, accessibility, flexibility, and affordability. We also incorporate survey data from a nonrepresentative sample of registered Pennsylvania voters conducted by the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics. As these results support the need for improvements in the current childcare system, we discuss recommendations for the future.

Liberal Internationalism from George W. Bush to Barack Obama

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Barack Obama ◽  
Democratic Peace ◽  
War On Terrorism ◽  
Global War On Terrorism ◽  
Liberal Internationalism ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Global War

This chapter examines the United States' liberal democratic internationalism from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. It first considers the Bush administration's self-ordained mission to win the “global war on terrorism” by reconstructing the Middle East and Afghanistan before discussing the two time-honored notions of Wilsonianism espoused by Democrats to make sure that the United States remained the leader in world affairs: multilateralism and nation-building. It then explores the liberal agenda under Obama, whose first months in office seemed to herald a break with neoliberalism, and his apparent disinterest in the rhetoric of democratic peace theory, along with his discourse on the subject of an American “responsibility to protect” through the promotion of democracy abroad. The chapter also analyzes the Obama administration's economic globalization and concludes by comparing the liberal internationalism of Bush and Obama.

Development of the Concepts for Providing Close Air Support

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-74
Author(s):  
Hristov Manush
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Air Force ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The State ◽  
World War ◽  
Present Stage ◽  
Combat Experience ◽  
Second World

AbstractThe main objective of the study is to trace the perceptions of the task of an aviation component to provide direct aviation support to both ground and naval forces. Part of the study is devoted to tracing the combat experience gained during the assignment by the Bulgarian Air Force in the final combat operations against the Wehrmacht during the Second World War 1944-1945. The state of the conceptions at the present stage regarding the accomplishment of the task in conducting defensive and offensive battles and operations is also considered. Emphasis is also placed on the development of the perceptions of the task in the armies of the United States and Russia.

Studies of Islam, Economics, and Governance

1994 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-70
Author(s):  
Florence Eid
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Ford Foundation ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
The Subject ◽  
State Of Research ◽  
Traditional Approaches ◽  
Islamic Values

IntroductionThis paper is a report on the state of research in two areas of Islamicstudies: Islam and economics and Islam and governance. I researched andwrote it as part of my internship at the Ford Foundation during the summerof 1992. On Discourse. The study of Islam in the United States has moved far beyondthe traditional historical and philological methods. This is perhapsbest explained by the development of analytically rigorous social sciencemethods that have contributed to a better balance between the humanisticconcerns of the more traditional approaches and efforts at systematizingthe study of Islam and classifying it across boundaries of communities,religions, even epochs. This is said to have s t a d with the developmentof irenic attitudes towards Islam, which changed the direction of westemorientalist writings from indifference (at best) and often open hostility toand contempt of Islamic values (however they were understood) to phenomenologicalworks by scholars who saw the study of Islam as somethingto be taken seriously and for its own sake, which is best exemplifiedby Clifford Geertz's Islam Observed.The work of Edward Said contested this evolution, and the publicationof his Orientalism has been described as "a stick of dynamite"' that,despite its impact in mobilizing a reevaluation of the field, was unwarrantedin its pessimism. In any case, the field has continued to evolve,with the most powerful force moving it being the subject itself. Thephenomenological/orientalist approach, if we can point to one today, ...

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