A Common Good in Doctrinal and Legal Terms. An Attempt at a Holistic Approach

Author(s): Paweł Sydor / Language(s): English / Issue: 9.1/2018

The aim of the article is to present two opposing visions of the common good (value) in the history of political and legal doctrines. Such outline of extreme positions allows the author to assess the wide range of doctrinal differences in particular epochs and to impose the principles of the rule of law expressed in art. 2 of the Constitution in the historical tradition derived from the ancient republicanism and political and legal thought of the Middle Ages and which absorbs the postulates of modern liberalism, republicanism and conservatism, based on the democratic model.

A Conceptual History of Political Regimes: Democracy, Dictatorship, and Authoritarianism

Author(s): Adam Przeworski / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2017

The labels we attach today to distinguish political regimes have histories. Applying them without understanding these histories is sometimes anachronistic and ethnocentric. I have little new to say about “democracy” and “dictatorship”, so that the discussion of these concepts is just a reminder. “Authoritarianism”, however, is a dubious neologism. I advance two claims: (1) In all regimes the power to command and be obeyed entails some dose of reason-giving, (2) What distinguishes regimes is the form and the extent to which the authority of rulers is monopolised by physical force. I conclude that the concept of “authoritarianism” adds little to the distinction between democracy and dictatorship.

A diaszpóra politikai dimenziói

Author(s): Dániel Gazsó / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 2/2020

The main aim of this paper is to give a general overview of diaspora policies with an emphasis on kin-state activism in Central and Eastern Europe, especially as it relates to Hungary. The fi rst section of the paper examines why and under what circumstances diaspora policies have developed in this part of Europe; as well as whether or not diaspora policies in this region show common characteristics, and if they do, how these commonalities among different kin-states can be justified. The second section of the paper will turn to Hungarian diaspora engagement practices with special regards to the period from 2010 to our present time. I will analyze this expanding political sector at four different levels: (1) at the level of legislation; (2) at the level of decisionmaking bodies and consultative forums; (3) at the level of programs; and (4) at the level of aid policy.

A Historical Development of Neo-liberalism

Author(s): Davor Pauković / Language(s): English / Publication Year: 0

Neo-liberalism is, undoubtedly, today’s dominant economical and political ideology. This paper is an attempt to give a general outline of where it derived from, what was it based on, and how it became the leading driving force in the field of economy and politics.

A középosztály mint akarat és képzet. A középosztály normatív és leíró koncepciójának kritikája

Author(s): Márk Áron Éber / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 1/2021

The concept of the middle class contains both descriptive and normative elements. Commenting the paper of Ákos Huszár and Viktor Berger “The new middle class?”, this article criticizes both the descriptive and normative elements of the middle class. The gradational concept of the middle class is a heterogeneous ensemble of the “people somewhere in the middle” in a structural-relational sense. The paper identifies the source of normative elements in the universalization and generalization of particular historical-social experiences. It proposes to replace the concept of the middle class with a conceptual tool of intermediate and intermediary classes.

A liberális rendet „megbuherálták”

Author(s): Judit Pethő-Szirmai / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 3/2017

Colgan, Jeff D. & Keohane, Robert O.: The Liberal Order is Rigged = Foreign Affairs, May – June 2017, 36-44. p.

A politikatudomány és a történelem visszatérése

Author(s): Milán Pap / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 2/2018

Csizmadia Ervin: A magyar politikai fejlődés logikája. Összehasonlítható-e a jelen a múlttal, s ha igen, hogyan? Budapest, Gondolat, 2017

A populizmus vizsgálata demokráciaelméleti perspektívában

Author(s): Attila Antal / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 2/2017

Our thinking about democracy has been fundamentally reshaped by populism, and the relationship between populism and democracy has become one of the key questions in the academic literature. This study aims to provide an overview of key features of the political literature that foregrounds populism in the context of democracy. It is important to stress that this is only one part of the literature on populism: many consider populism as a distinct ideology or as a technique of political communication; this review will only consider research that connects populism directly with democracy, which I consider to be important to bring us to a fuller understanding of the phenomenon. This study will highlight in particular two streams of thinking, one characterizing populism as a ‘pathology’ of democracy, the other theorizing it as a subtype of democracy.

A PRUDENTIAL PERSONALIST ETHICAL APPRAISAL OF HUMAN CLONING

Author(s): Peter O.O. Ottuh / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2021

Numerous uncertainties are hanging over the biotechnology of human cloning which has prompted medical ethicists and religious organizations to ask questions that bordered on its ethical and religious considerations. In cloning humans, ethical and religious issues arise both in its clinical and laboratory settings hence, the morality of manipulating human genes is the foremost ethical issue among scientists and religious scholars. Therefore, this paper evaluated the human cloning technology using the personalism and prudential personalism ethical-religious models to arrive at a workable moral paradigm. To achieve this objective, the paper employed the phenomenological and critical-literary literature review methods. The paper argued that previous ethical and religious researches have not adequately employed the ‘ideal’ ethical models to appraise the morality of human cloning hence; using the personalism and prudential personalism ethical-religious models were appropriate to reveal that every human life has worth and its commodification is an aberration. The paper concluded that based on the paradigm of prudential personalist ethics, cloning humans (especially, human reproductive cloning) negates respect for human life, human dignity, and communal goods hence it should not be practiced.

About reform in the work of Ștefan Zeletin

Author(s): Mihaela Rădoi / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2016

Ştefan Zeletin (1882- 1934) – a philosopher, an economist and a sociologist – is one of the household names of Romanian interwar liberalism. He graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy and Classical Philology in Iaşi, and in 1914 he defended his doctoral thesis (and was granted magna cum laude) at the University of Berlin. After finalizing his studies, Zeletin taught at the University of Iaşi. Concerning his work, Ştefan Zeletin did not have the same attitude towards the two aspects of his thought: philosophy and sociology. He considered himself a philosopher who failed to complete his system of thought only because of the tough circumstances. Persuaded that there is an organic connection – yet to be discovered – between the economic life of a country, on one hand, and the political, legal and cultural institutions, on the other, (Claudian 1935) Ștefan Zeletin began his sociological writings, which marked the political and cultural life of those times. The sociological and political works, which had made him known in several settings, were viewed by Zeletin as an episode within his activity, which he would have wanted to be focused on purely philosophical works. The author explains the approach to the practical aspects of social reality by the fact that he was determined to attend various events, which he felt the need to understand. An event that marked him deeply was the War of 1916-1918, to which he took part as an infantry officer; this event drew him closer to the often-disappointing reality of the Romanian society in an ongoing process of construction. “Hence, I decided to make the ultimate sacrifice: to renounce, for now, to any philosophical activity, to get to know our society just like it is and to try to give back to it something that may be in its interest. This also helped me fulfil an ardent desire I had felt on the front where, the carbine on my shoulder, I saw our society collapse like a cardboard castle.” (Zeletin 1927 p. 276) This article aims at unravelling several aspects regarding the life, the work and the sociological view of the author.

Acting Together: The Art of Collective Improvisation in Theatre and Politics

Author(s): Sonja Vilč / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2017

The paper analyzes the concept of collective improvisation and draws out its potentials for social and political theory. Translating the ideas of collective improvisation from their original context in the theatre into the field of political thought, I argue that they offer a new understanding of political action by reevaluating the concepts of dissensus (Rancière) and community (Nancy), as well as the ways in which politics as a system needs to produce collectively binding decisions (Luhmann). I conclude that the ideas inherent in the practice of collective improvisation, as it has been developed within the tradition of modern theatre improvisation, subvert our intuitive ways of thinking about politics and thereby offer an alternative model of being and acting together.

Adam Smith on migration

Author(s): Daniel Rauhut / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2010

Adam Smith considered poverty and unemployment as push factors for migration and wages high enough to provide for a worker and his family as a pull factor. Migration as a free mobility of labour leads to an optimal allocation of the factor commodity labour as well as changes of employment which necessary to equalise wages between different geographical entities. The consequences are not only promoting economic growth and prosperity, but also reducing poverty. Smith has no contemporary empirical support for his theory.

Against coercive paternalism: A case for soft paternalism and the preservation of autonomy

Author(s): Peter Wedekind / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2020

The article opposes the rejection of autonomy in favor of coercive paternalism. Based on the thought of especially John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, and Joel Feinberg, it suggests that autonomy as an ideal, a moral capacity, and a foundational principle in liberal democracies must not be surrendered for a doctrine of benevolent coercion. The arguments are equally concerned with the justifications for coercion, the value of autonomy and moral agency, and the dangers of paternalism (e.g. infantilization). The article concludes that Mill’s soft paternalism based on the harm principle could serve as a reasonable middle-ground allowing for the most severe types of self-harming behavior to be avoided without surrendering autonomy altogether.

Agamben'in Siyasal Kuramı ve Türkiye'deki Suriyelilerin Hukuksal Statüleri

Author(s): Esin Hamdi Dinçer / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: 2/2019

Syria’s civil war, started in 2011, has caused over 6 million people flee abroad. This process forced around 3,6 million refugees to live in Turkey, leading significant changes in Turkish legal structure. The EU-Turkey Readmission Agreement and the Law on Foreigners and International Protection that is added into domestic law as a result of this agreement, are two main legislations in this regard. Such legal norms can be evaluated around the framework on social change as well as in accordance with concepts such as “subject”, “discrimination” and “exclusion”. This article, discusses these two legislations based on Giorgio Agamben’s thought, who has succeeded in putting these concepts at the center of political theory. The article argues that, this Italian political theorist well-known with his catogeries of “homo sacer”, “state of exception” and “bare life”, provides significant opportunities in interpreting the goals of contemporary legal regimes.

Alexei’aus Yurchako politiškumo samprata ir vėlyvojo Sovietmečio paradoksai

Author(s): Jūratė Kavaliauskaitė / Language(s): Lithuanian / Issue: 02/2014

The article examines the concept of the political, and it’s relationship to the Late Soviet Socialism, adressed in the Sovietology oeuvre of Proffesor Alexei Yurchak. The question is raised whether the claim about inner paradoxes of the late Soviet system as a single discursive formation can be substantiated without addressing the probability of more fundamental discursive divisions, splits and multiplicities structuring life of the post-Stalinist epoch. The critical analysis of such concepts as „authoritative discourse“ and discursive „performative shift“ reveals contradictions of author‘s conceptual attempt to explain the legitimacy of the late Soviet system, as well as elucidates why the issue of the Soviet as the political remains suspended in the analytical shema of Yurchak.

Alexis de Tocqueville. Kritiker und Verteidiger der Demokratie

Author(s): Ludwig Bergsträsser / Language(s): German / Issue: 018/1950

Ali Abdurazik i teorija odvojenosti islama i politike: kritičko vrednovanje

Author(s): Seid Halilović / Language(s): Serbian / Issue: 1/2018

A year after Atatürk abolished the institution of the caliphate, Ali Abdel Razek, an Islamic scholar from the traditional al­Azhar University, published a not-too-thick volume entitled Islam and the Foundations of Political Power and initiated a new and dynamic discussion of completely unexpected proportions about the relationship between Islam and politics. Distinguished professors of al-­Azhar had an urgent meeting and made a decision that Abdel Razek should be stripped of his title of an Islamic cleric because of the views he had expounded in his book. However, despite this, in the following decades his book became one of the most popular texts among the contemporary Muslim thinkers in the Egyptian scientific and political circles and beyond. On the basis of a detailed analysis of the contents of this book we notice that Abdel Razek persistently attempts to show that the caliphate did not have any benefit for the Muslims, and that it even was a source of permanent injustice and evil. He concludes that the political power, the state and even the judiciary should not be connected with religion, because they are exclusively political phenomena. He also insists that the Prophet Muhammad was a purely spiritual leader and that he had never contemplated the concepts of political authority or the state. For this reason he explicitly claims that politics and religion are mutually incompatible and warns Muslims that they must follow the latest results of human reason in the field of political science if they wish to consolidate the foundations and structure of the political power in their societies. However, we notice that, due to his frequent and generally objective criticism of the Caliphs and their policies in various historical periods, Abdel Razek ignores the fact that in the Quran and the Islamic tradition there are frequent references to the political power, the judiciary, defense issues, economic control, and the organization of internal and international politics, that is, that both the Quran and the Islamic tradition contain teachings about a different policy that leads one toward eternal bliss. Such policy, the ultimate purpose of which is the enlightenment of man and society, was written about extensively by the representatives of a brilliant political philosophy and political jurisprudence in Islam, who relied on the cognitive credibility of the religious texts and the various categories of theoretical and practical reason.

American and European Leftist Academia through the Prism of Paul Berman’s A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968

Author(s): Alexandar Gungov / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2019

In his book, Paul Berman outlines a productive framework for a further interpretation of ideas of the leftist thinkers in North America and Europe. This article tries to follow Berman’s approach and to provide a critical stance towards the views of a number of Western social and political philosophers who write after 1968 and even after 1989. My findings confirm Berman’s light irony to this trend of thought but emphasize that some of the works discussed seem to be realistic in avoiding unjustified optimism concerning the leftist position.

American Political Spectrum

Author(s): Jarosław Szczepański / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2018

The text is aimed at tracing the evolution of the American political spectrum. It presents major historical and contemporary political parties of the United States of America. The article has been structured in such a way so as to serve primarily as a teaching aid for classes on the US poltical system.

An audience with … the public, the representative, the sovereign

Author(s): Niccolò Milanese / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2017

The right of audience, in common law, is the right of a lawyer to represent a client in a court. Royalty, the Pope and some Presidents grant audiences. What does the power to grant an audience consist in? And what does it mean to demand an audience (with)? Through a reading of the way in which the vocabulary of theatre, acting and audience is involved in the generation of a theory of state by Hobbes and Rousseau, this paper looks to reopen these questions as a political resource for us to re-imagine and refigure our ways of being together. Through readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, it looks at the ways in which the performance of politics creates the public, the representative and the sovereign and the ways these figures interact. It proposes an alternative role for theatre as places of affective learning and a civic ethics of playfulness, in which the auto-institution of the state as an imagined collectivity is fully assumed.