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All political argument employs political concepts. They provide the building blocks needed to construct a case for or against a given political position. Justifications of oppression in the name of liberty are no mere products of the liberal imagination, for there are notorious historical examples of their endorsement by authoritarian political leaders. This book explores two approaches to rights: the interest-based (IB) approach, and the obligation-based or Kantian view. Both are shown to offer coherent justifications that can avoid turning all political concerns into a matter of rights. The concept of social justice emerged in both at the start of the twentieth century, and justified institutions for the democratic modification for market outcomes, on utilitarian, maximin or common good grounds. The book explores whether people do in fact have good and justifiable reasons for complying with laws that go beyond mere fear of punishment, and, if so, whether they are bound or obligated by those reasons to comply. It discusses national ties and how they are supposed to act as glue that holds the state together in the eyes of its citizens. The book also explores the link between the weakening of states and this change in criminal policies, and outlines their implications for individual rights. Theorists have used the idea of social exclusion to advocate an approach to social justice that sees increased labour-market participation as the key to equal to citizenship. The contemporary understandings of the public-private distinction and feminist critiques of these are also examined.
reality of policy and was initially rather pessimistic in nature (Versluis, 2007 ; Pressman and Wildavsky, 1973 ). This chapter presents the key theories and concepts addressed in the case studies adopted to investigate the translation of EU environmental directives into action. At the centre of the theoretical framework is implementation theory. One important justification for investigating implementation theory is the importance of understanding the contribution of environmental, political and organisational factors to the complexity of the policy process. The
My previous long-term empirical research on the processes of adaptation and settling of Polish migrants in Belgium and later Vietnamese and Ukrainian migrants in Poland has provided a basis for my critical reflection on the limitations and sometimes insufficiency of the key concepts used in migration studies, especially the concept of integration (e.g. Grzymala-Kazlowska 2008a ). The political and practical usage of the latter – as well as its structural and functionalist assumptions that in order to maintain the existing socio-cultural order
7 Thompson’s concept of class: the flesh and blood of self-emancipation Nina Power Few writers have ever done as much to place the lived experience of the working class at the forefront of their work. Thompson is justly renowned for his celebration of ordinary men and women and his vivid portrayal of struggle across the ages. It may seem paradoxical, then, to try to extract something like a ‘concept’ or a ‘theory’ of class from Thompson’s work, especially bearing in mind the arguments he makes against Althusser and Althusserianism in The Poverty of Theory
In the later Middle Ages a broad intellectual background for concepts of law and justice existed based on a composite of the Bible and the tenets of Christianity, the corpus of Roman law and canon law, and (amongst others) the writings of Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas. 1 The general principles of law, government and kingship were set out and elaborated by philosophers, theologians and jurists in
Having examined the formal definitions and theoretical notions of law and justice it is important to survey some of the alternative and more ‘popular’ perceptions of them. 1 Just as there was no single authoritative or comprehensive text outlining concepts of law and justice prevailing in late medieval England so there cannot be said to have been a unified or authentic
A master category Debates about certain concepts and their naming are tired and old, and there is no benefit to us in re-opening them here. Instead, we must distinguish between the language and concepts available to historical actors and those of our own that may be useful analytical tools, even if they were unknown to the objects of our study. Nobody doubts, for example, that masculinity is a useful analytical category, even in periods of history where that word did not exist. Debates about late eighteenth-century manliness can happily find a
8 Concepts of liberty: freedom, laissez-faire and the state after Britain’s abolition of slavery Richard Huzzey1 In 1830, an article in the Monthly Repository argued that ‘the proper use of government is to teach men the true enjoyment of their liberties’. The ‘men’ in this declaration were slave-holders, and the ‘true enjoyment of their liberties’ meant ‘such a degree of restraint as is necessary to prevent them from infringing on the rights of others’ – in other words, a state-enforced abolition of slavery.2 The author hoped West Indian emancipation would
The ‘greening’ of development seems to represent a comparatively recent phase in development thought. Labels like eco-, environmentally sensitive, green, or sustainable development promise an alternative to conventional concepts of development through the integration of ecological principles. 1 A historical analysis of the idea of development
Introduction The aim of this chapter is to consider a general movement in which the collective concepts established by the early pioneers of modern sociological thought have been reconsidered in the light of both theoretical critique and empirical results. The issues raised were already evident in the divergence between the early programmatic formulations of the sociological agenda produced by Durkheim (e.g. 1982[1895]) and Weber (e.g. 1978[1920]), in the subsequent debates about their approaches, and are at the heart of the familiar opposition