Interpretazioni del terrorismo: il primo dibattito scientifico italiano (1977-1984)

2009 ◽  
pp. 49-106
Author(s):  
Giovanni Mario Ceci
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Scientific Debate ◽  
Youth Identity ◽  
Consistent Trend ◽  
Political Interpretation ◽  
Sociological Interpretation

- Giovanni Mario Ceci The aim of the essay is to reconstruct the first scientific debate on Italian terrorism which took place in Italy from 1977 to 1984. The author singles out two main trends in this debate. The first, more consistent trend was made up of the analysis of social scientists, which fundamentally aimed at answering the question "why terrorism had exploded in Italy". The author singles out two main groups of hypothesis, under which he collects the most important shared interpretations in this debate. To the first group, concerned with the description of terrorist individuals, the author ascribes: various psychological-psychiatric explanations (terrorism as a phenomenon related to «youth identity», terrorism as «fantasmatic war», terrorism as a «fruit of the equilibrium of terror», terrorism as a «result of radical and extremist behaviour»); a political interpretation of terrorism as an expression of extremism; a sociological interpretation of terrorism (and more in general of violence) as a production of marginal social strata; and, finally, a philosophical explanation of terrorism as expression of «human conditions» repressed in their desiring vitality. To the second group of hypothesis, focused on the "crisis of the system", the author, instead, relates both the interpretation of terrorism as a response to the crisis of traditional values and the explanation of terrorism as a response to (or an outcome of) a stalemated political system. The second, minority trend of the debate was represented by the historiographical analyses, which aimed at elaborating a complex and articulate research on the «historical problem of Italian terrorism».

ISAAK RUBIN: HISTORIAN OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT DURING THE STALINIZATION OF SOCIAL SCIENCES IN SOVIET RUSSIA

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Boldyrev ◽  
Martin Kragh
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Political System ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fundamental Uncertainty ◽  
Soviet Russia

Research within the history of economic thought has focused only little on the development of economics under dictatorship. This paper attempts to show how a country with a relatively large and internationally established community of social scientists in the 1920s, the Soviet Union, was subjected to repression. We tell this story through the case of Isaak Il’ich Rubin, a prominent Russian economist and historian of economic thought, who in the late 1920s was denounced by rival scholars and repressed by the political system. By focusing not only on his life and work, but also on that of his opponents and institutional clashes, we show how the decline of a social science tradition in Russia and the USSR as well as the Stalinization of Soviet social sciences emerged as a process over time. We analyze the complex interplay of ideas, scholars, and their institutional context, and conclude that subsequent repression was arbitrary, suggesting that no clear survival or career strategy existed in the Stalinist system, due to a situation of fundamental uncertainty.

The “Populist” Films of Frank Capra

1979 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glenn Alan Phelps
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
General Will ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Professional Literature ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Group Competition ◽  
Original Question ◽  
Great Passion ◽  
Distribution Of Power ◽  
American Society

What is the nature and distribution of power in American society? This question, as much as any other single issue, has been the source of wideranging debates among American social scientists throughout the last twenty-five years. The question is tantalizingly simple. In fact, the titles of two notable contributions to the debate, Who Rules America? and Who Governs?, put the issue even more succinctly while losing little of the flavor of the original question. The controversy is more than just a basis for scholarly esoterica politely parried back and forth in the professional literature for a limited audience. Indeed, the debate has been carried on with great passion and commitment because how one answers this question will largely determine one's perceptions about American politics.For example, if one were to reply by saying that power is basically noncumulative and that it is widely distributed among many groups and individuals, then certain other conclusions would follow: the Constitution is essentially a democratic document which institutionalizes this broad distribution of power; elections are the means by which power is transferred among competing groups; public policy represents an accurate reflection of the general will through this inter-group competition; and the American political system is essentially democratic because opportunities for participation, and thus power, are open to all.

Strangers and Local Government in Kumasi

1970 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enid Schildkrout
Keyword(s):  
Local Government ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Rural Community ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Political System ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
African Politics ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Political Status

The political status of strangers in African societies, particularly in urban areas, has been insufficiently analysed.1 This may be partly because studies of African politics and political development have been dominated by a conceptual framework which contrasts two types of society, the ‘traditional’ or ‘tribal’ and the ‘modern’ or ‘developed’. The former usually implies a rural community with a relatively self- sufficient political system.2 In such a society, the traditional leaders are usually associated with a particular ethnic group and territory; and their authority may be derived from sacred sources, such as tradition itself, ties to land, or genealogical links to ancestors. In the ‘modern’ society, leadership is assumed to be ‘rational’ and ‘secular’, oriented towards western rather than traditional values.3 Political development has often been somewhat vaguely conceived as the transformation of a society from the traditional to the modern type.

scholarly journals Social Science and Social Struggle: Understanding the Necessary Confluence of Scholarship and Political Commitment

2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Clow
Keyword(s):  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Scientific Debate ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Orientations ◽  
Generative Processes ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Political Commitments ◽  
Human Purpose

<p>Social scientists and historians are wary to acknowledge that political commitments play a part in their explanations of society. But we all know they do. Are we poor scientists? Not according to the Edinburgh School, which argues all successful scientific theories are but practical knowledge, shaped by the encounter of human purpose and empirical world. Practical knowledge always involves the uncertain, trial and error application of the intellectual resources drawn from exemplary solutions to new situations. Praxis <em>is</em> the only valid path to knowledge. But no matter how successful, practical knowledge is a theoretically and empirically limited ‘working knowledge' which cannot produce sure understanding of the generative processes producing what we see. What distinguishes studies of society from those of Nature is that the political purposes of conflicting scholarly traditions are so deeply and manifestly divergent. </p> <p> </p> <p>Implications? Above all we should be skeptical about any strong claims to theoretical certainty, on our part or by others. Dogmatism and sectarianism are epistemologically untenable in the Edinburgh view. Scientific debate would be advanced if we were as open about our political orientations as we are enjoined to be about research design and methodology. And demanded the same of others. This may be possible across ‘camps' in the same tradition and even ideological barriers, where goodwill prevails.  In the public sphere the Edinburgh perspective suggests the shifting of the grounds of debate and the framing/reframing of issues requires a tacit recognition that social knowledge is shaped by its political purposes and cannot simply be ‘the facts m'am, just the facts.'</p>

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.

The Post-Mao Reforms in Historical Perspective

1988 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 518-540 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul A. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Structural Change ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Political System ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Reform Process ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Chinese Case ◽  
Chinese Reforms

Academic writing on the post-Mao reforms—as indeed on almost every other aspect of China since 1949—has been largely in the hands of social scientists. Much of this writing, moreover, has been done either explicitly or implicitly from a systemic perspective. That is, it seeks to understand the reform process as unfolding within a particular kind of social, economic, and political system and to infer from other reform attempts in comparable systems something about the course the Chinese reforms are likely to take. When Chalmers Johnson (1982) applies the “Leninist government paradigm” to the Chinese case and makes certain observations about the potential for “peaceful structural change” within societies that conform to this paradigm, he is operating from the systemic perspective.

Implicit Political Knowledge

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (03) ◽  
pp. 553-555
Author(s):  
Aleksander Ksiazkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Political System ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Political Information ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Voting Decisions

Political knowledge today is studied primarily at the explicit level. Measures of political knowledge often rely on testing whether voters are aware of various “facts” about political life, such as the names and offices of prominent political actors, the institutional structures of the political system, and the ideological or policy differences between the major political parties (e.g., Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). These various kinds of political information are considered to be important by political scientists and other social scientists because they facilitate the informed voting decisions that are needed to hold elected leaders accountable (e.g., Lau and Redlawsk 2006; Pande 2011).

Mrs Gandhi's Emergency, The Indian Elections of 1977, Pluralism and Marxism: Problems with Paradigms

1980 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry W. Blair
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Political System ◽  
Analysis Approach ◽  
Parliamentary Democracy ◽  
Class Analysis ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Economy Model ◽  
Indian Politics ◽  
American Case ◽  
Pluralist Approach

ABSTRACTGiven the system of parliamentary democracy that India developed after its independence in 1947, it is understandable that pluralism came to be the major paradigm used to explain Indian politics. But just as the persistence of economic inequality was instrumental in calling pluralism into question as an appropriate model for explaining the American political system, so the continuation and even increase of inequality in India led social scientists to question the pluralist approach for India. And, as in the American case, a number of scholars turned to a Marxist class analysis to explain the Indian situation; by the mid-1970s a political economy model had begun to take shape that did offer a reason able explanation of the pervasive inequality in India. Also, Mrs Gandhi's Emergency of 1975–1977 fits very easily into this class analysis approach. But then came the elections of 1977 and the ouster of Mrs Gandhi at the polls, an event not explicable in terms of the Marxist model, but which fits very well into the pluralist framework. Which model, then, is more appropriate to employ in accounting for the Indian system ? The best answer seems to be to try to fit the pluralist approach within the Marxist one, with the latter carrying most of the explanatory load.

scholarly journals Demokratisk journalistik mellem politisk magt og afmagt

1970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jørn Loftager
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Political System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Symbolic Politics ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Public Reasoning ◽  
The One ◽  
Political Steering ◽  
Sociological Interpretation

The tactical game of power positions rather than political substance is given priority in today’s news media to an extent that weakens the democratic role of democratic public reasoning. At the same time the need of such reasoning is critical as ever before. The article outlines a sociological interpretation of this dilemma. The basic argument is that an overall development of a society dominated by horizontal differentiations of function rather than hierarchic differentiations of class has generated new conditions for the exercise of political power. On the one hand, the possibility of direct political steering fades away. On the other hand: due to blurred political identities the logic of the political system forces political actors to make themselves visible in the eyes of the voters by showing power and determination. As a result there is a growth in symbolic politics, tactics and spin which challenge the democratic role and responsibility of journalism.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document