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This book offers a conception of citizenship that is independent of any specific form of political organisation, while being compatible with multiple levels of political institutionalisation. Its de-contextualised account of citizenship differs from both cosmopolitan and nation-statist accounts. Using that conception, the book addresses topical and normative debates in one particular transnational political association: the European Union. Bringing political theory together with debates in international relations and in citizenship studies, the author argues that citizenship should be understood as an institutional role through which persons might exercise their political agency: their capacities to shape the contexts of their lives and promote the freedom and well-being of themselves and, importantly, fulfil their duties to others within and outside of the polity. The work draws on the rights-based philosophy of Alan Gewirth.
1 ‘Open the eyes of England’: female unionism and conservatism, 1886–19141 Diane Urquhart Women were often active agents of change. Their involvement in elections, political protests and petitioning pre-dated the establishment of formal women’s political associations in the 1880s and partial female enfranchisement in 1918. Women could, and did, influence the voting practices of men and female political writings were commonplace, although they frequently obscured their identity by the means of pseudonyms or anonymity which raises the question of gendered
who used the theme of violence, and sensation more generally, to increase the popularity of their products. Some of these men abandoned radical pamphlets altogether in favour of violent stories. Violent entertainments had the potential to unite audiences characterised by such great diversity, to bridge both vertical and horizontal divisions, while providing merriment and fun in the process. Unlike political associations, the theme of violence in popular culture was much more malleable, the entertainments flexible enough to serve particular interests while also
these links by surveying the four themes that form the essence of this book. First, it considers men’s ‘spectacular bodies’; that is, the idealised emotionalised bodies encountered in entertainment and advertising, along with their more sinister political associations and uses. Secondly, the imaginative conjunction of emotions, bodies, and material culture in formulations of military masculinity are explored, whether deployed in recruitment drives, featured in the often romanticised and politicised tropes of servicemen’s damaged bodies and minds, or in the creative
If honour and principle were the watchwords for Caesars of the nineteenth century, and totalitarianism the core of twentieth, the word which ghosts twenty-first-century productions most clearly is 'spin'. This book traces this evolutionary journey, and discusses productions because they somehow speak to ideas about the play which characterise their period of production, or they have significant features in their own right. It first gives an account of productions of the play prior to the Second World War, right from the stagings at the Globe Theatre's in 1599 to William Bridges-Adams's productions till 1934. The 1937 Orson Welles's production of Julius Caesar, staged at New York's Mercury Theatre was decked out with all the trappings and scenic theatricality of contemporary European Fascism. Shakespeare's play becomes a forum for a consideration of an ethics of American identity with John Houseman's 1953 film. The book discusses three modernist productions of Lindsay Anderson, John Barton and Trevor Nunn, and the new versions of the play for the British TV. The productions under Thatcher's Britain are also focused as well as the unknown accents, especially the Indian and African ones. The productions of Italy, Austria and Germany productions have eschewed direct political association with past or present regimes. The book also presents a detailed study of two productions by a single company, Georgia Shakespeare. In the new millennium, the play's back-and-forth exchange between its long past and the shrill and vibrant insistence of its present, have taken centre stage.
This essay examines Robinson’s imagination of American church history and her interventions into current church politics. In her view, recent American church history is defined by the tension between the Protestant mainline and evangelicalism. The two key essays for the expression of this view – “Onward Christian Liberals” and “Credo” – are both defences of liberal Protestantism, with its spirituality of uncertainty and its political emphasis on social justice, and critical of the evangelical focus on personal conversion and neoliberal political associations. In The Death of Adam and, more recently, The Givenness of Things, Robinson worries over ‘the effect of marginalising the liberal churches and elevating fundamentalism to the status of essential Christianity’, curiously blaming the Protestant mainline for the decline of the mainline itself. This essay therefore foregrounds Robinson’s questioning of the relationship between liberal churches and their congregation, asking questions about the history and politics of the American church to shed light on its centrality to Robinson’s political imagination.
The main aim of the chapter is to put the theoretical framework of the previous chapters to use and provide the ‘big picture’ about the political-ethical experience of living in illiberal regimes. The chapter starts with the operationalization of the neo-Aristotelian regime theory by translating its general characterization of illiberal regimes into five (egalitarian, competitive, authoritarian, oligarchic, and self-preservative) principles of action that will appear in the everyday considerations of people living in illiberal regimes. The goal is to make the ethics of politics as playing hardball (a constitutive experience of living in illiberal regimes) more accessible to the readers. Then the chapter proceeds with the explication of some important metaethical implications of political realism that are also relevant to the problem of playing hardball, notably: value pluralism, the dirty hands problem, moral dilemmas, and political compromise. The next part of the chapter turns to the question of how various normative contexts (among which political regimes stand out as especially important) shape political agency: after explaining why neither abstract individualism nor social constructivism is a good starting point for understanding the political-ethical experience of actual people in normative political theoretical terms, the chapter examines five types of primary normative contexts that shape political agency and will play an important role in the analysis of the political-ethical experience of living in illiberal regimes in the second part of the book: ad hoc and general reasons for action, political rule, membership in various political associations, political regimes, and political offices, and political virtues.
association or grouping. Yet these results do not offend against the argument of the book that from mayoral local government emanates a more fluid and uncertain form (at least as far as party dominance goes) of local politics and local election campaign. A fluid system flows in more than one direction. At certain points in time, in individual localities, as issues, events and political circumstances emerge and develop, and as local campaigns and small local parties or political associations arise as a result of those issues and events, the mayoral office remains a far more
or appropriateness of thinking about politics in terms of consensus, agreement, or universal endorsement. The realist vision of politics challenges liberalism by conceptualising politics as an activity that takes place in conditions of ubiquitous, perennial, and ineradicable political disagreements and conflicts, including about the very fundamental terms of the political association itself, and hence accuses liberals of being too sanguine about the possibility of achieving either normative or practical consensus.4 Realism takes pluralism to extend beyond moral and
-party political organisations (called here ‘political associations’ – see below) to enter and exit the political system as issues and circumstances demand, thus providing an outlet for political activity focused on salient local concerns, rather than on party interest. Elected mayors potentially interfere with the usual mechanism for the transference of political views from the citizen to the political leader: the party. Parties have a well and long established dominance over the 48 Local political leadership 49 conduct of local politics, a dominance partly secured by the