Islamic Constitutionalism Before Sovereignty: Two Defenses of the Tunisian Constitution of 1861

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Andrew March
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Political Judgment ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
The Public ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
Constitutional Thought

This article focuses on the Tunisian constitutional moment of 1857-1861. Its goal is to explore an important moment in Islamic modernity for the purposes of drawing a contrast with twentieth-century, post-caliphal Islamist thought. The primary themes visible in nineteenth-century Islamic constitutional thought are a “descending” conception of sovereign constituent power with a strong emphasis on the pre-political existence of a divine law that is both binding and guiding but not necessarily the exclusive source of lawmaking. The debates of the 1860s and Ottoman constitutionalism more generally do not lead directly to a non-sovereigntist political vision. But they are representative of a pre-colonial (and thus, to a certain extent, pre-apologetic) Islamic thought that centralizes the public interest, the varieties of political judgment, and the compatibility of distinct kinds of expertise with a desacralized centralized authority. This period may hold relevance for our present moment when twentieth-century ideals of both divine and popular sovereignty seem to no longer dominate Islamic (and Islamist) approaches to political life.

Guarding the Public Interest: England's Coroners and Organ Transplants, 1960–1975

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 926-946 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Spare Part ◽  
Organ Transplants ◽  
Legal Requirement ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Law ◽  
Do So

AbstractFrom the mid-twentieth century, England's coroners were crucial to the supply of organs to transplant, as much of this material was gleaned from the bodies of people who had been involved in accidents. In such situations the law required that a coroner's consent first be obtained lest removing the organs destroy evidence about the cause of the person's death. Surgeons challenged the legal requirement that they seek consent before taking organs, arguing that doing so hampered their quick access to bodies. Some coroners willingly cooperated with surgeons while others refused to do so, coming into conflict with particular transplanters whom they considered untrustworthy. This article examines how the phenomenon of “spare part” surgery challenged long-held conceptions of the coroner's role.

Destituent Power

2020 ◽  
pp. 123-138
Author(s):  
Markus Patberg
Keyword(s):  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional Change ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
Public Authorities ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Eu

This chapter takes up the public narrative of ‘We, the multitude of Europe’, which suggests that the only hope for progressive change in the EU lies in a politics of disruption, and asks whether this idea can be defended based on a systematic model. To that end, it resorts to the political theory of destituent power, according to which opposition to or withdrawal from public authority can function as a legitimate trigger for constitutional change. Distinguishing between anti-juridical and juridical conceptions of destituent power, the chapter discusses to what extent the disruptive political strategies put forward by protest movements in the EU can be regarded as justifiable. Focusing on the juridical strand as the more plausible one, it argues that ideas of destituent power as ‘state civil disobedience’ run into a problem of authorization. By contrast, popular sovereignty-based approaches illuminate a neglected dimension of constituent power: the right to dismantle public authorities without the intention to create new ones. While such a model of destituent power in part captures the actions and demands of EU protest movements, it can only complement, not replace, the constructive side of constituent power.

The Principle of Proportionality

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takis Tridimas
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Fundamental Principle ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
The Public ◽  
Principle Of Proportionality ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Constitutional Adjudication ◽  
Freedom Of Action

The principle of proportionality is the most oft-invoked and, in terms of its role in constitutional adjudication, the most influential principle of EU law. The principle was developed in continental legal systems, especially in Germany and France, in the twentieth century. Even at an early stage in the development of EEC law, proportionality had already been pronounced by the Court of Justice to be a fundamental principle deriving from the rule of law and requiring in particular that ‘the individual should not have his freedom of action limited beyond the degree necessary in the public interest’.

scholarly journals NEW HISTORIES OF AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (5) ◽  
pp. 1390-1400
Author(s):  
TOM ARNOLD-FORSTER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Civic Education ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Professional Attitude ◽  
Economic Survival ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
Yellow Journalism

Will Irwin worked as a reporter and muckraker for ten years before he wrote The American newspaper (1911). Published by Collier's magazine over fifteen issues, it was a pioneering study of ‘journalism in its relation to the public’, and it has been much cited by historians. Irwin argued that American newspapers in the early twentieth century had come to possess enormous power; indeed, ‘no other extrajudicial force, except religion, is half so powerful’. Newspapers had been significant influences on public opinion since the early nineteenth century and had become even more important and popular with the rise of ‘yellow journalism’ in the 1890s. But Irwin worried about conflicts between ‘the business attitude’, which insisted that newspapers were commercial products above all, and ‘the professional attitude’, which identified journalism with civic education and the public interest. He was especially anxious about ‘the advertising influence’, on which newspapers depended for economic survival, and which necessarily damaged their journalism. For when advertisers wanted stories spiked or editorials altered, they generally had their way. And when publishers courted businessmen over drinks and dinner, they grew fat and corrupt. So ‘the perplexity of free journalism’ was that ‘so long as our American capitalism retains its insolence and its ruthlessness of method, commercial publishers of million-dollar newspapers must recognize this [advertising] influence whether they like it or no. And many of them do like it.’ Irwin's sense that newspapers claimed to be the people's tribunes but often served their owner's interests made him think that ‘the system is dishonest to its marrow’. Thus his study raised some enduring questions for historians: why were newspapers so powerful? How important were their publishers? Is free journalism ever possible?

The Machinery of Government

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Heath
Keyword(s):  
Public Interest ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Elected Officials ◽  
Public Servants ◽  
The Public ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic Polity ◽  
State Employees ◽  
Rule Making

Political theorists are aware that the old-fashioned model of state power, according to which elected officials make policy decisions, which are then faithfully enacted by a loyal cadre of public servants, is hopelessly outdated. The complexity of the modern state, not to mention the difficulty of the economic and social problems it confronts, is such that a great deal of rule-making power is delegated to public servants. Yet if public servants are not merely in the business of administration, but are also deciding questions of policy, how are they making these decisions, and what normative principles inform their judgments? The Machinery of Government attempts to answer this question. The central challenge involves reconciling the tension between the traditional commitment to political neutrality on the part of the civil service with the fact that administrative discretion inevitably involves making normative judgments. State employees are in many cases unable to do their jobs effectively without some conception of where the public interest lies. It seems inevitable that this will conflict with the commitment to political neutrality, since this conception of the public interest may be tension with that of elected officials. The solution to the dilemma lies in an understanding of the constraints that liberalism imposes on popular sovereignty in a liberal-democratic polity. Not only do courts play an important role in checking the power of democratic publics, the executive branch is also the custodian of certain fundamental liberal principles.

Memorial mania: remembering and forgetting Sir Robert Peel

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry Wyke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Public Statement ◽  
The Public ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Political Symbolism

The transformations which took place in the urban environment during the Victorian period gave the public space of towns and cities new meanings, and Terry Wyke’s essay on Sir Robert Peel, examines how political lives and reputations were shaped by the commemorative culture of public portrait statues and busts. Peel's death in 1850 and his subsequent memorializatiom marked the start of a significant trend in public life, expressed in the commissioning of outdoor portrait statues to celebrate prominent local and national figures. Peel's image, 'forged' by the contemporary press, was absorbed by a broader Liberal bourgeois narrative in cities like Manchester, as a public statement of the reputation and achievements of the Anti-Corn Law League, with which Peel was so strongly associated. Such portraiture, replete with political symbolism, played an important part in defining a new civic landscape in the Victorian period, a material narrative of political life that had been largely forgotten by the second half of the twentieth century, although it remains a rich source of evidence deserving of greater attention.

Social Security Policy and the Working Class in Twentieth-Century Brazil

1977 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Malloy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Federal Budget ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Social Insurance System ◽  
The Public ◽  
Role Of The State

A crucial feature of political life in twentieth-century Brazil has been the growing role of the state as the central regulator of social, economic, and political life. One aspect of the expansion of the public sector in Brazil, as elsewhere, has been the accumulation by the state of a number of important social and economic functions previously exercised outside the public domain. One important function adopted by the state in Brazil is that of social protection, in the form of an elaborate and complex social insurance system. Presently some form of social protection reaches almost the entire rural population and some 78 percent of the urban population. The main social protection organization—Instituto Nacional da Previdência Social (INPS)— boasts the second largest budget in the nation (in 1975 CR $43 billion in contrast to the federal budget of Cr $113 billion) and a bureaucracy of over 102,700 employees.

scholarly journals UKRAINIAN PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS OF CANADA AS SUPPORTERS OF THE GREEK CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE 1930es

2020 ◽  
pp. 83-87
Author(s):  
Olesia Dzyra
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Summer Camps ◽  
The Public ◽  
Catholic Faith ◽  
Political Events ◽  
The Social ◽  
Youth Centers ◽  
Cultural Sphere

In the interwar period of the twentieth century, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Canada tried to expand its influence on the public life in the diaspora. To accomplish this task, it enlisted the support of the conservative Canadian Sitch association (reorganized into the United hetman organization in 1934). In its turn, it helped the Sitch in every possible way and provided the permission for the legal functioning of their organization from the Canadian authorities. The monarchists published the articles about their activities and tasks of the society in the pages of Greek Catholic newspapers, such as "Canadian Ukrainian", "Ukrainian News". However, in the 30s of the twentieth century Greek Catholics and monarchists have broken off their relations. Coming of the new bishop, Vasyl Ladyka, instead of Nikita Budka, who began to distance himself from the society in the 1930s, resulted in the creation of the Greek Catholic own organization, the Ukrainian Catholic brotherhood, in 1932. Now UCB had to defend their views before the public. In the religious sphere, the society spread the Catholic faith in the Ukrainian rite, together with priests created parishes, built churches, supported church institutions, organizations, and so on. In the cultural sphere, it founded and financed Ukrainian schools, evening courses and lectures on Ukrainian studies, held concerts, sports competitions, drama performances, built people`s homes, and so on. In the public field it organized orphanages, shelters, hospitals, summer camps for young people, youth centers and so on. Not so actively, but still the fraternity reacted on the political events in Ukraine and joined the general actions of the national patriotic bloc of the Ukrainian public associations in Canada in support of compatriots. As a result, Greek Catholics became more actively involved in the social and political life of the diaspora on equally with Orthodox and communists.

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