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5 Anti-state political opportunities Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners. (Edward Abbey) States and context This chapter challenges the assumption that the state is a strategic location of opportunity from the perspective of radical, anti-state movements. Routine social movement behaviors that petition, protest, or lobby governments to change or adopt certain laws or
appeals to some notion of proceduralism (see below) where what is important is common adherence to just rules rather than the manipulation of outcomes, yet without the prominence that market libertarians give to entitlement, since reciprocity preserves the notion of moral desert (cf. Gauthier, 1986). Procedural justice Here, the most convincing account remains that of Nozick (1974) who contrasts procedural theory with ‘end-state’ theories of justice. Procedural- TZP2 4/25/2005 36 4:50 PM Page 36 After the new social democracy ism is concerned with the means that
This book is a history of Britain's travelling communities in the twentieth century, drawing together detailed archival research at local and national levels to explore the impact of state and legislative developments on Travellers, as well as their experience of missions, education, war and welfare. It also covers legal developments affecting Travellers, whose history, it argues, must not be dealt with in isolation but as part of a wider history of British minorities. The book will be of interest to scholars and students concerned with minority groups, the welfare state and the expansion of government.
On the Saturday after Ireland’s bank guarantee was announced, Seán FitzPatrick, the chairman of Anglo Irish Bank (Anglo), agreed to participate on Marian Finnucane , a weekend radio programme. Questioned about the guarantee and the state of the Irish banks, he laid the blame for the banks’ troubles on the global crisis but acceded that a ‘thank you’ was appropriate, ‘because we owe our lives to the Government and what they did’ (cited in Carswell, 2011 :223). Later that evening he gave a speech at an event at a golf club in which he urged the government
From British rule the independent Irish state inherited an effectively denominational system of university education and a complementary set of science and arts institutions. Under independent rule denominational influence increased and resource starvation prevailed until the end of the 1950s. Then, as the formation of human capital, education began to be treated as an input into economic growth and American initiatives stimulated new research activity. These changes played a vital role in the rebalancing of power between the Catholic Church and the state. Social science, where the Catholic Church had been a monopoly provider, supplies a dramatic case study of the interlinking of this power shift with the process of knowledge generation.
6 Travellers and the welfare state In this chapter I explore how the post-war welfare state changed the ideological context in which Travellers existed. I consider how the ethos of citizenship was deployed in relation to the idea of a modern, reconstructing Britain, and how this fed into the establishment of the welfare state.1 While Travellers saw participation in the war effort as the ‘qualifier’ for full inclusion in the new benefits, bureaucrats saw citizenship as consisting of a wider set of responsibilities. This attitude combined with old prejudices
persistent number of Labour-held councils was to actively struggle against central government on behalf of the residents they represented. Far from simply refusing to set legal budgets, itself a radical act in excess of anything seen today, left councillors back then articulated and sought (albeit unsuccessfully) to create a coalition around a vision of municipal socialism beyond the Keynesian Welfare State and against the emergent New Right. In contrast, since 2010, London Councils have sought to smoothly manage budget cuts and procure consent for a new normal of
173 6 Social research and state planning Introduction The First Programme for Economic Expansion was launched in 1958. By the early 1960s the scope of programming was widening as the stagnation prevailing for most of the 1950s gave way to a period of continuous economic growth. Initial crisis conditions had enabled increased social spending to be left off the programmers’ agenda. The changed politics of increasing prosperity, as well as their own expanding ambitions, meant that this could no longer be sustained. This chapter begins by sketching Ireland’s social
Gas and oil are pivotal to the functioning of modern societies, yet the ownership, control, production and consumption of hydrocarbons often provokes intense disputes with serious social, economic, and political ramifications. In Gas, Oil and the Irish State, Amanda Slevin examines the dynamics and conflicts of state hydrocarbon management and provides the first comprehensive study of the Irish model. Interpreting the Corrib gas conflict as a microcosm of the Irish state’s approach to hydrocarbon management, Slevin articulates environmental, health and safety concerns which underpin community resistance to the project. She emphasises how the dispute exposed broader issues, such as the privatisation of Irish hydrocarbons in exchange for one of the lowest rates of government take in the world, and served to problematise how the state functions, its close relationship with capital, and its deployment of coercive force to repress dissent. Analysis of these issues occurs within an original account of decision-making and policy formation around Irish hydrocarbons from 1957 to 2014. Slevin traces the development of the state’s approach in tandem with occurrences in Irish political economy and examines the impact of global trends on different approaches to hydrocarbon management. A detailed case study of Norway reveals ideological, political, social and economic forces which influence how states manage their hydrocarbons and the author uses those factors as the basis for a rigorous critique of the Irish model. Examining subjects that are simultaneously empirical and ideological, historical and current, the focus of this book extends beyond decision-making processes within the state system to their impacts on people’s lives in communities. Slevin uncovers the social, environmental, economic, and political consequences of current policies and offers a blueprint for an alternative framework for hydrocarbon management.
15 Uncertainty and undecidability in the contemporary state: the dualist and complex role of the state in Spanish labour and employment relations in an age of ‘flexibility’ Miguel Martínez Lucio Introduction When discussing the state and labour regulations, the debate tends to focus on the role of the law. From a sociological, or politico-sociological, perspective it is often the case that we like to complement such an approach with a greater sensitivity to other forms of representation at the level of the state, such as the role of ‘social dialogue’ and the