Search results
This book is a history of an illusion. It is also a history of the dream that preceded the illusion. The book discusses statistics as the field of tension between the scientific claims of neutrality and universality on the one hand and the political and economic reality of the conflicting interests of nation-states on the other. The various paths of state- and nation-building that European countries traversed in the nineteenth century are recognisable in the objectives of government statistics and are reflected in the topics selected for statistical study and in the categories used in the research. Each congress was clearly dominated by the specific interests of the country in which the statisticians convened. The book shows in each case how the organisation of government statistics and national concerns influenced the international agenda. It describes the perceptions, goals and dilemmas of the protagonists and their contact with each other, and in so doing unravels the complex relationships between science, government and society, wherever possible from their point of view. The genesis of international statistics was inspired by a desire for reform. Belgium's pioneering role in the European statistical movement was informed both by its liberal polity and the special status of statistics within it, and by Adolphe Quetelet's key position as an intellectual. The consolidation of the Grand Duchy of Baden, a new medium-sized state in the Rhine Confederation and later in the German Confederation, offered great opportunities for the development of official statistics.
subject, but we will see that other, seemingly neutral topics of statistical research were no less thorny. Belgians as trailblazers Belgium’s pioneering role in the European statistical movement was informed both by its liberal polity and the special status of statistics within it, and by Quetelet’s key position as an intellectual. By the mid-nineteenth century, under Quetelet’s leadership a learning process had had an impact on government statistics in Belgium and many practical problems had been resolved. In 1846 a general census of population, industry and
This book focuses on the paradoxical character of law and specifically concerns the structural violence of law as the political imposition of normative order onto a "lawless" condition. The paradox of law which grounds and motivates Christoph Menke's intervention is that law is both the opposite of violence and, at the same time, a form of violence. The book develops its engagement with the paradox of law in two stages. The first shows why, and in what precise sense, the law is irreducibly characterized by structural violence. The second explores the possibility of law becoming self-reflectively aware of its own violence and, hence, of the form of a self-critique of law in view of its own violence. The Book's philosophical claims are developed through analyses of works of drama: two classical tragedies in the first part and two modern dramas in the second part. It attempts to illuminate the paradoxical nature of law by way of a philosophical interpretation of literature. There are at least two normative orders within the European ethical horizon that should be called "legal orders" even though they forego the use of coercion and are thus potentially nonviolent. These are international law and Jewish law. Understanding the relationship between law and violence is one of the most urgent challenges a postmodern critical legal theory faces today. Self-reflection, the philosophical concept that plays a key role in the essay, stands opposed to all forms of spontaneity.
, Poland, and Slovakia all constructed liberal polities domestically, and adjusted their foreign and defense policies to liberal internationalist frameworks, there is no question a policy convergence occurred among the V4 post-1989 which persists to this day. However, not until the Ukrainian Crisis exploded in 2014 were V4 countries exposed to a security threat, the geographical proximity of which highlighted their truly divergent
. Decoupled from an obsession with ethnic descent, multiculturalism supports a politics in which men and women come together to take control of the production of their public social world. Conclusion: a republican multiculturalism I have argued in this chapter that (1) multiculturalism must be central not peripheral to any adequate theory of principles to inform the liberal polity; (2) that culture is a process not a
’ relations is underexplored, and that this results in the reproduction of the dominant dualistic grammars of the Western liberal polity and of the social theories born of this context (Singh 2011, 2014). As I discussed in Chapter 1, prominent liberal framings of campus politics define ‘freedom’ in relation to official, juridical regulation and converge ‘good relations’ with harmonious consensus. This discourse is contiguous with a growing assumption, shared by policymakers and disheartened academics, that the current generation of undergraduate students are liberal
essential concerns of liberalism, Howarth pointed out that: ‘The central characteristic of core liberal thought is that ultimately it refers all questions back to the political: in each case the question is what course of action would best help to create and maintain the conditions for a liberal polity?’ From that perspective, together with ‘the realisation that rights are empty without the material conditions for putting them into operation’, could be viewed ‘practically all of the Liberal Democrats’ key positions of principle and policy’, including
–19. 2 On this debate see R. Audi and N. Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997); and the chapters by J. Stout, C. Eberle and R. Mouw, in T. Cuneo (ed.), Religion in the Liberal Polity (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2005), pp. 157–216. 3 S. Bruce, ‘Did Protestantism create democracy?’, in J. Anderson (ed.), Religion, Democracy and Democratization (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 3–20. 4 S. Huntington
this account. The first is the assumption that, because minority groups have historically been badly treated by ‘liberals’ within a ‘liberal’ political system, they will always be treated badly by liberals within a liberal polity. The second problem, related to the first, is the selective account of liberalism that these theorists choose to adopt. Liberalism is, most philosophers agree, an extremely
both the contest of reasons and an egalitarian respect for the other. Virtue theory, as Schneewind suggests, is ultimately inimical to a liberal polity for it must treat disagreement with the virtuous agent as showing a flaw of character, it discourages parties to a moral dispute from according even prima facie