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Recent years have witnessed a burgeoning international literature which seeks to analyse the construction of health and health policy through an analytical lens drawn from post-Foucauldian ideas of governmentality. This book is the first to apply the theoretical lens of post-Foucauldian governmentality to an analysis of health problems, practices, and policy in Ireland. Drawing on empirical examples related to childhood, obesity, mental health, smoking, ageing and others, it explores how specific health issues have been constructed as problematic and in need of intervention in the Irish State. The book focuses specifically on how Jean Jacques Rousseau's critical social theory and normative political theory meet as a conception of childhood. The 'biosocial' apparatus has recently been reconfigured through a policy framework called Healthy Ireland, the purpose of which is to 'reduce health inequalities' by 'empowering people and communities'. Child fatness continues to be framed as a pervasive and urgent issue in Irish society. In a novel departure in Irish public health promotion, the Stop the Spread (STS) campaign, free measuring tapes were distributed throughout Ireland to encourage people to measure their waists. A number of key characteristics of neoliberal governmentality, including the shift towards a market-based model of health; the distribution of power across a range of agents and agencies; and the increasing individualisation of health are discussed. One of the defining features of the Irish health system is the Universal Health Insurance and the Disability Act 2005.
crucially on the ultimate order of primary goods. It is essential to the moral justification of political power β institutionalised and legitimated as political authority β and thus to the EUβs standing as a political project. Citizenship, it will be argued, is a project of political justification. 6 SUPRANATIONAL CITIZENSHIP Method: normative political theory The political philosophical concepts relevant to citizenship in the EU (including the concept of citizenship itself) are all normative concepts. To prevent misunderstanding, let me clarify what normative
figure of the child, this was assembled at the intersection of the biological and the social, the medical and the moral, and to this day remains a way of acting through and upon life with a view to governing the future. This chapter begins by examining the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, focusing specifically on how his critical social theory and his normative political theory meet as a conception of childhood that would come into sharper focus during the nineteenth century, largely through the efforts of 26 Constructing health problems educationalists and
Barnes, Peter Morriss and John Searle), wider sociological theory (especially Jeffrey Alexander, Pierre Bourdieu, Γmile Durkheim, Ernest Gellner, Anthony Giddens, Norbert Elias and Max Weber), philosophy (including J. L. Austin, William James, Thomas Kuhn, John Searle and Ludwig Wittgenstein), psychology (especially Erik Erikson and Stanley Milgram) and normative political theory (among others Rainer Forst, Jurgen Habermas, Phillip Pettit, Richard Rorty and John Rawls). To this I have added many years of my own musings upon the subject. As a result, the four dimensions
This book addresses the question of political legitimacy in the European Union from the much-neglected angle of political responsibility. It develops an original communitarian approach to legitimacy based on Alasdair MacIntyre's ethics of virtues and practices, that can be contrasted with prevalent liberal-egalitarian and neo-republican approaches. The book argues that a βresponsibility deficitβ, quite distinct from the often discussed βdemocratic deficitβ, can be diagnosed in the EU. This is documented in chapters that provide in-depth analysis of accountability, transparency and the difficulties associated with identifying responsibility in European governance. Closing this gap requires going beyond institutional engineering. It calls for gradual convergence towards certain core social and political practices and for the flourishing of the virtues of political responsibility in Europe's nascent political community. Throughout the book, normative political theory is brought to bear on concrete dilemmas of institutional choice faced by the EU during the recent constitutional debates.
This chapter articulates the concept of recognition beyond its anthropocentric core. The prevailing conceptualization of recognition in International Relations (IR) relates to the collective endowment with a legal status as a legitimate participant on the world stage. This understanding draws on normative political theories of justice premised on a binary distinction between acts of acknowledgement (βresponsive model of recognitionβ) and acts of declaration (βgenerative model of recognitionβ). Thus, the mutual collective recognition of and by states becomes the mechanism through which oneβs participation in the international domain is validated. However, this conceptualization seems to offer little of value when it comes to IRβs recent strive to offer an inclusive account not just for the human, but also for the non-human interactions in global life. At stake is not simply the need to extend the concept of recognition beyond the agency of the state, but rather the requirement for its radical reframing βbeyond-the-humanβ into a non-anthropocentric notion. This chapter considers critically the potential for a more inclusive and encompassing understanding of recognition embedded in the reciprocity principle. The suggestion is that if the study of IR is to address meaningfully the challenges of climate change through the conceptualization of recognition, it will have to confront and reframe its anthropocentric premise.
) Hers is a normative political theory, even though she once thought such a theory no longer feasible. And she believes that there are at least two alternatives now for normative political thought. The βbest political theoryβ has been, she concludes, βeither skeptical, as in the case of Michael Oakshott and Isaiah Berlin, or devoted to setting up normative models of the just stateβ (Shklar 1998 [nd1], p. 189). Shklar is pointing up two possible ways in which to engage in normative political thought in the last two decades of the twentieth century
Introduction Rainer BaubΓΆck's βDemocratic Inclusion: A Pluralistic Theory of Citizenshipβ is characteristically incisive. In this essay and elsewhere (e.g. BaubΓΆck 2003, 2007 ), he has liberated normative political theory from the girdle of territorial boundary conditions. If ever it was, it is obviously no longer possible to posit a world of perfectly segmented national communities. For normative theory to remain
here, the aim is to assure them that there is a real problem, or maybe set of problems, that liberals need to pay more attention to than they hitherto have. Before setting out, it would be useful to briefly discuss three aspects of the way I understand and employ realist theory in this monograph, which will hopefully explain in a little more detail what I take realism to be (or not to be) as well as why my line of inquiry takes the particular form it does: the relationship between realism and normative political theory, realism and the ideal/non-ideal theory debate
are different and correspond to its specific historical experience. Introduction 5 One of the concluding ACCEPT reports noted also that there is often a gulf between current sociological analysis of diversity in specific contexts β from which the analysis of normative values and principles are often absent β and normative political theory, which has often tended to overlook specific sociological realities and political debates. The authors suggested that these should be brought together: βit is necessary to consider normative modalities of acceptance or non