PEOPLE AS A COLELCTIVE POLITICAL ACTOR (ON THE EXAMPLE OF TUNISIA)

The article discusses the role of people as a collective actor in the Jasmine Revolution, which occurred in Tunisia at the beginning of 2011. The Tunisian revolution, that had aris-en from collective national sense of dignity and justice, was marked by its spontaneous character. It is shown, that this revolution was related neither to parties nor movements, preparing politically revolutionary renewing of the society. The revolution was guided neither by leaders nor authoritative persons. The program of country transformation also lacked. Taking into account positions of Tunisian scholars, the content of notion “people” and its changeable character, as well as its liberating function, manifesting during political reforms is revealed. Peculiarities of political transit during first months of its post-revolutionary development are analyzed.

Publicistic Reflection Of Russian Entrepreneurship in Second Half of 19th — early 20th Centuries in Context of History of Russian Journalism

An attempt to outline the contours of a new research field within the framework of the history of Russian journalism — the history of entrepreneurial journalism of the mid — second half of the 19th — early 20th centuries is presented. The publicistic work of Russian entrepreneurs of this time is interpreted by the authors as the forerunner of modern business journalism. It is shown that the key role in its constitution was played by the Great Reforms of the 1860s — 1870s, during which entrepreneurship became a collective actor in the emerging public (media) space and showed the ability to express and defend its interests, including through the printed word. It is noted that even then an array of non-professional entrepreneurial publications of various genres began to take shape, which subsequently evolved into an independent branch of journalistic creativity. It is pointed out that entrepreneurs-publicists remained primarily practitioners, people of action, which determined the special pragmatism of their texts, closely related to the “guild” and personal business interests. The authors come to the conclusion that when studying the journalistic creativity of entrepreneurs, not only logical coherence should be taken into account, but also the synchronicity of all forms of the author’s verbal creativity and his business activity.

Protecting Basic Legal Freedoms: International Legal Complexes, Accountability Devices, and the Deviant Case of China

With a focus on legal and other organizational actors beyond the state, this article seeks to expand the theory of conditions under which legal occupations will mobilize to fight for basic legal freedoms within states. It elaborates the line of scholarship on legal complexes and political liberalism within states since the 17th century. First, we catalog harms that international organizations (IOs) of many kinds seek to protect in the more than 190 states in the world. Second, we elaborate the concept of an international legal complex (ILC) as a collective actor in the global struggle for basic legal freedoms. We illustrate these two steps with new data on China drawn from a wider project. We show what harms mobilize the ILC, international human rights organizations (IHROs) and an international governmental organization, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). We focus on accountability devices as tools differentially deployed by the ILC, IOs, and UNHRC in their efforts to influence the institutionalization of basic legal freedoms, an open civil society, and a moderate state in China. The illustrative case of China provides a framework for research and theory on all other countries. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Volume 17 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Tocqueville’s Religious Terror

One of the central ironies of Alexis de Tocqueville’s political thought was that the democratic era that promised to bring conscious human agency to an equal mankind, freeing human beings from their bondage to tradition and their submission to the sacred, actually threatened them with unprecedented forms of domination. Tocqueville’s sense of “religious terror” is engendered from the spectacle of everyone being “driven willy-nilly along the same road” and having “joined the common cause, some despite themselves, others unwittingly, like blind instruments in the hands of God.” “Religious terror” is both a symptom and a diagnosis of his concern with the deflated status of individual agency in democratic contexts, and with the related eclipse of the political by the social question. This chapter explores this dimension of Tocqueville’s thought and its relation to his denial of such agency to any collective actor, to deny heroism, and its associated grandeur, to the popular will.

Popular Manifestation

While contemporary democratic theory has explored the paradoxes of peoplehood and the dilemmas of authorization and legality that follow from them, this chapter focuses on a related but conceptually distinct problem: the question of how popular sovereignty’s authorizing entity, the people, publicly appears, how it makes itself tangible to the senses, how the people takes shape as a collective actor when no formal rules and procedures for identifying popular will exist, or when these rules and procedures are so deeply contested as to be effectively deauthorized. This chapter examines how this issue emerges in the work of two seminal theorists of modern democracy who have written extensively on the French Revolution—Carl Schmitt and Claude Lefort—only to be redirected from the aesthetic-political problem of manifestation to the political theological problem of incarnation.

The Democratic Sublime

The transition from royal to popular sovereignty during the age of democratic revolutions—from 1776 to 1848—entailed not only the reorganization of institutions of governance and norms of political legitimacy, but also a dramatic transformation in the iconography and symbolism of political power. The representational difficulties posed by the replacement of the personal and external rule of the king, whose body was the tangible locus of authority, with the impersonal and immanent self-rule of the people, whose power could not be incontestably embodied, went beyond questions of institutionalization and law into the aesthetic realm of visualization, composition, and form. How to make the people’s sovereign will tangible to popular judgment was—and is—a crucial problem of democratic political aesthetics. This book explores how the revolutionary proliferation of popular assemblies—crowds, demonstrations, gatherings of the “people out of doors”—mediated and gave tangibility to the people manifesting itself as a collective actor capable of enacting dramatic political reforms and change. During the age of democratic revolutions, popular assemblies became privileged sites of democratic representation because they at once claim to represent the people while also signaling the material plenitude beyond any representational claim. They retain this power in part because popular assemblies make manifest that which escapes representational capture; they rend a tear in the established representational space of appearance and draw their power from tarrying with the ineffability and resistant materiality of the people’s will. During the age of democratic revolutions, popular assemblies became the locus of the democratic sublime.

Precarity among Tertiary Educated Civil Servants

Precarious working conditions are spreading among highly qualified workers. The Chilean civil service employs many university graduates, the honorarios, on a temporary basis. Torres explores the question of what follows objectively and subjectively from this special status of non-recognition of the honorarios’ de facto dependent employment relationship for these workers, and whether commonalities in experiences and self-understanding arise on this basis, which in turn form the starting point for a conscious stance as a collective actor. Her answers are guided by Honneth's recognition theory and Paugam's theory on strategies for dealing with precarity. In this way, Torres enriches insights into possible identity constructions among precarious workers.

Multiculturalism backlash and anti-establishment politics

Chapter 6 focuses on a collective actor that has played a crucial role in migration and identity politics across Europe, at least since the early 1990s: the contemporary far right. Relying on frame analysis of web portals, social media pages, blogs, and websites of far-right collective actors in France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, we investigate the narrative they constructed on Charlie Hebdo and uncover the patterns of interaction existing between them and other actors, within and across national settings. The empirical analysis shows that the European far right effectively mobilized as a collective actor in the shadow of the January attacks. On the one hand, the Charlie Hebdo juncture brought forth issues that are deeply intertwined with far-right politics, and highly embedded in their agendas. On the other, the far right recognized itself in the collective struggle of opposing multiculturalism and Islamization, and of representing the will of the people against corrupt political elites, at the national and transnational levels.