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to modernity which can steer a course between the increasingly powerful claims of science, and the cultural needs of the life-world. Karl Ameriks has talked in this respect of the contemporary failure to ‘bridge the gap between private idealistic visions and an analytically rigorous but narrow focus on the latest scientific developments’ (Ameriks 2000 p. 268). Why bridging this gap matters can begin to be made clear by the following, and will concern us in the rest of the Conclusion. One of the consequences to be drawn from the Romantic heritage is that claims that
In regard to the essential kind of change at which critical theory aims, there can be no … conception of it until it actually comes about. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the eating here is still in the future. Max Horkheimer, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ (1937) Integration and the European rupture This book elucidates the origins, development, and future of one of the most interesting and important political innovations of the twentieth century: the European Union. My basic thesis is that the EU’s foundation as an autonomous
’ and its distinctiveness. Necessarily, this has meant that the primary case under discussion has been the USA, notwithstanding the commonly overestimated but real role European fascism played in the Institute's work. This US focus is not merely a matter of happenstance resulting from the Institute's exile; the USA's role was pivotal to the development of ‘modern demagogy’. It so stands in contrast to other paradigmatic historical instances put forward in recent scholarship, notably Argentina's proposed role as a crucible of ‘modern populism’ discussed in Chapter 3
historicizing it and injecting it with an overarching spiritual significance in relation to progressive development. Influenced by the experience of the French Revolution, as well as the philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 5 and Sir James Steuart, 6 Hegel claimed to detect a suprahistorical process of reason whereby such disintegrations were reconciled, preserving the unity of totality overall. Foucault comments in The Hermeneutics of the Subject that Hegel was characteristic of much of nineteenth-century thought (Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, and
) The end of the European dream? The project of European unification is one of the most important and theoretically interesting political developments since 1945. 1 Despite its humble origins in the ECSC in 1952, at the beginning of the twenty-first century the influence of the EU can be felt in the everyday lives of Europeans in a myriad of ways, including the creation of the CM, the euro, and the Schengen border free zone. Even though the EU is officially still composed of independent, sovereign nation-states who act as the proverbial ‘Masters of the Treaties
– Schelling uses the metaphor of the eddies in a stream which are filled by different water but retain their shape. Science now tells us that once the ‘idea’ of an organism is in existence it is transmitted chemically in the form of DNA, but DNA does not explain the emergence of organisms in the first instance, and it is precisely the emergence and development of an articulated nature which then develops into living organisms that makes sense of the idea of nature as a ‘productivity’. Schelling’s idea is, then, to link the intelligibility of the matter in nature, which can
assumption that nation-states are the most fundamental and important political actors in international politics, the development of the ‘Euro-polity’ has significant implications for existing theories of the state, sovereignty, social welfare, democracy, and citizenship, all of which are plagued by an inherent ‘methodological nationalism.’ Building on collective memories of a nightmarish past to create a better future, the EU has served as ‘the theoretical proving-ground of contemporary liberalism.’ 2 Despite its many achievements – a list that includes the fact that
at the start of the twenty-first century will require Europeans to expand their conception of the politically possible once more, just as their leaders were able to do at the beginning of the postwar era by drawing on the cognitive, motivational, and justificatory resources of the rupture of 1945. However, whereas in earlier periods such moves were supported by a ‘permissive consensus’ among the citizens of Europe, the recent development of a ‘constraining dissensus’ has increased the danger that this will occur as an elite-driven project. 5 This chapter begins
[R]ights are public goods: Taxpayer-funded and government-managed social services designed to improve collective and individual well-being. All rights are positive rights. (Holmes and Sunstein, The Cost of Rights ) 1 Introduction Providing an explanation for the development and an account of the consequences of human rights in its managerial mode is the project of this book. First of all, however, the phenomenon requires definition and description. In this chapter I give that definition and description, showing how it has become not only
’s theoretical development, there is a moment that is especially promising and epistemologically prominent: they are credited with placing science within society. Bhaskar’s critical realism reaches three main epistemological outcomes: (a) the transfactual law of science, which is owing to its own character considered as universal law; (b) the multiplicity of method, which reaches scientific tendencies of transduction beyond the moments of induction and abduction; and (c) dialectics, which is maintained as a manifestation of the potential for scientific ontology. Bhaskar