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full range of juridico-legal, disciplinary, and security-based responses. This is because activities in the juridico-legal mode make those in the others possible. A brief example to illustrate this comes in the form of minimum alcohol pricing in Scotland. Concerned about the effect of high levels of alcohol consumption on public health and public order, the Scottish Parliament passed a piece of legislation in 2012, the Alcohol (Minimum Pricing) (Scotland) Act. This stipulates that it is a condition of any licence granted to sell alcohol that it must be sold at or
– for example, to reduce racial discrimination, reduce the suicide rate in Scotland, increase female political participation, or whatever it may be – cannot be achieved simply through a chain of commands running from treaty body to State party to domestic public authorities and private actors and, finally, to individuals. Achieving any societal goal is, it should go without saying, hardly that simple. A fire station cannot operate simply on the basis of a set of operational rules, no matter how complicated and detailed they might be, and the “putting out of unwanted
distribution of powers, Foucault’s writing on Adam Ferguson in The Birth of Biopolitics reinforces his commitment to pluralism as a normative thesis. In his final lecture, Foucault selects the model of the Scottish Enlightenment as expounded by Ferguson (1723–1816) in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1783). Foucault’s argument is that Ferguson’s approach recognized governmentality as opposed to the centralized state, differentiated government from society, was compatible concerning a pluralism of the micro-powers, and yet permitted the economy to operate in
reason to extend voting rights to them only in this particular referendum? The strongest prima facie case for a specific constitutional franchise exists if the decision would change the citizenship status and rights of those who are not included in the current legislative demos. Consider first the case of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. Would it have been required to enfranchise persons who might have become Scottish citizens in case
examples of FD and mixed constitutions. One is of course no longer talking about the mixed constitution or contrasting visions of liberty respectively defended by the noble and popular elements of ancient and Renaissance republics. Nor is this about the supposedly neutral adjudication of the contractual claims and competing interests characteristic of what some Scottish Enlightenment thinkers refer to as commercial society. Moreover, the socio-economic, political, and educational compromises undergirding the mixed corporatist constitutions and welfare states of the post
in Britain to oversee the system. It was at this point that Scottish-born John Anderson entered the picture. Before he was assigned to St Vincent, he trained in Edinburgh as a lawyer, pursued the life of a gentleman-scholar and achieved a number of publications, prior to keeping the detailed journal of his experiences in St Vincent for the years 1836 to 1838. His journal was
more clearly stated than in Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, where the Scottish ideologue asserted: Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self
matters of much broader and more aspirational scope. Among them are what the UK is doing to combat racial and religious hatred and negative stereotyping of minorities in the media, racism on the internet and in sport, and racist bullying and name-calling in schools; what it is doing to increase representation of ethnic minorities in the civil service and judiciary; what it is doing to eliminate the wage gap between men and women; what it is doing to address suicide rates, particularly in Scotland; and what it is doing to explicitly prohibit corporal punishment of
Royal Bank of Scotland was granted substantial loans in a taxpayers’ bailout. The government appointed representatives to the board of directors of the company, and conditions were set out for the repayment of public monies. Public involvement in large companies will need to become more routinely accepted and practised, even without the precipitation of a financial crisis. As companies increase in size and profitability, so public involvement and employee and government participation in business should increase. Progressive taxation should be a response to the fact
– reducing the suicide rate in Scotland, promoting the Irish language, eliminating racist bullying in UK schools, or whatever else it might be – as steps on the “path towards the full realization of the rights enshrined in international human rights law.” 86 And this is, of course, implicit in the OHCHR’s Theory of Change, which contemplates the gradual realisation of the ultimate goal of “all human rights achieved for all.” At the same time, however, there are many circumstances in which human rights are put to the resolution of felt needs in the absence of any