Origins, originality, and the privileges of nature

Author(s):  
Thomas Docherty

The prevailing cult and culture of managerial audit and measurement systemically translates qualities into quantities. Further, it requires that those measurements be inserted into a form of warfare that we normalise as ‘league-table competitiveness’. The system as a whole then operates in a neo-Hobbesian state of war of all against all, which serves the interests of none and which damages the world’s intellectual and natural ecologies. Ecology is subsumed under economics. This chapter considers what must be done to construct a new model of the institution that will help not only to shape the good society but, even more fundamentally, will help to preserve and sustain the society itself in a time of ecological disaster. What should be the university’s proper relation to the state of nature? The chapter argues that the contemporary institution must reject all forms of political fundamentalism – including especially the dominant prevailing modes of market fundamentalism – if it is to work against any and all forms of political terror. The chapter situates the question of the survival of the university within the abiding question of the survival of the species and of our social existence.

2000 ◽  
pp. 20-25
Author(s):  
O. O. Romanovsky

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the nature of the national policy of Russia is significantly changing. After the events of 1863 in Poland (the Second Polish uprising), the government of Alexander II gradually abandoned the dominant idea of ​​anathematizing, whose essence is expressed in the domination of the principle of serving the state, the greatness of the empire. The tsar-reformer deliberately changes the policy of etatamism into the policy of state ethnocentrism. The manifestation of such a change is a ban on teaching in Polish (1869) and the temporary closure of the University of Warsaw. At the end of the 60s, the state's policy towards a five million Russian Jewry was radically revised. The process of abolition of restrictions on travel, education, place of residence initiated by Nicholas I, was provided reverse.


Author(s):  
Karl Widerquist ◽  
Grant S. McCall

Earlier chapters of this book found that the Hobbesian hypothesis is false; the Lockean proviso is unfulfilled; contemporary states and property rights systems fail to meet the standard that social contract and natural property rights theories require for their justification. This chapter assesses the implications of those findings for the two theories. Section 1 argues that, whether contractarians accept or reject these findings, they need to clarify their argument to remove equivocation. Section 2 invites efforts to refute this book’s empirical findings. Section 3 discusses a response open only to property rights theorists: concede this book’s empirical findings and blame government failure. Section 4 considers the argument that this book misidentifies the state of nature. Section 5 considers a “bracketing strategy,” which admits that observed stateless societies fit the definition of the state of nature, but argues that they are not the relevant forms of statelessness today. Section 6 discusses the implications of accepting both the truth and relevance of the book’s findings, concluding that the best response is to fulfil the Lockean proviso by taking action to improve the lives of disadvantaged people.


Politeia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Johnson

As members of the secret Afrikaner organisation, the Broederbond, two of the apartheid-era rectors at the University of Fort Hare were responsible for leading an institution that was supposed to spearhead the modernisation of ethnically defined homelands and their transition to independent states, whilst disseminating apartheid values among the black students. Based on unsorted and unarchived documents located in the personal files of the apartheid-era rectors, which included secret correspondence and memoranda of clandestine meetings, this paper illustrates the attempted exercise of hegemony by the apartheid state through its linked network with the university administration during the period 1960 to 1990. This is achieved by demonstrating the interaction between the state, Broederbond rectors and the black students at Fort Hare, who were subjected to persuasion and coercion as dictated by the state’s apartheid vision of a racially defined and separated society.


Author(s):  
Liubov Melnychuk

The author investigates and analyzes the state Chernivtsi National University during the Romanian period in Bukovina’s history. During that period in the field of education was held a radical change in the direction of intensive Romanization. In period of rigid occupation regime in the province, the government of Romania laid its hopes on the University. The Chernivtsi National University had become a hotbed of Romanization ideas, to ongoing training for church and state apparatus, to educate students in the spirit of devotion Romania. Keywords: Chernivtsi National University, Romania, Romanization, higher education, Bukovina


Author(s):  
Thomas Sinclair

The Kantian account of political authority holds that the state is a necessary and sufficient condition of our freedom. We cannot be free outside the state, Kantians argue, because any attempt to have the “acquired rights” necessary for our freedom implicates us in objectionable relations of dependence on private judgment. Only in the state can this problem be overcome. But it is not clear how mere institutions could make the necessary difference, and contemporary Kantians have not offered compelling explanations. A detailed analysis is presented of the problems Kantians identify with the state of nature and the objections they face in claiming that the state overcomes them. A response is sketched on behalf of Kantians. The key idea is that under state institutions, a person can make claims of acquired right without presupposing that she is by nature exceptional in her capacity to bind others.


Author(s):  
Christine Cheng

After war, rebuilding the state’s presence—or building it up for the first time—is both a physical and social endeavor requiring new norms of compliance and cooperation. Local authority is deeply contested and the state typically has minimal presence. These conditions are akin to those described in the state of nature. To escape these conditions, Hobbes and Locke argued for the necessity of a sovereign to impose order and impartial justice to form what I call the kernel of the state. Extralegal groups orient societies in that direction by performing a set of visible and hidden functions in contemporary post-conflict environments. But they are not intentionally state-making. Rather, extralegal groups are driven by the need to create a stable trading environment and state-making is a by-product of this imperative. In the contemporary era, the motivation that drives extralegal groups to begin state-making is trade, not war.


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