The Most Unique of all Unique Species

This article identifies the shortcomings of “orthodox neo-Darwinians” such as Richard Dawkins, George Williams and Daniel Dennett in their efforts to describe human nature and human pro-social behavior. As an alternative to the views of these thinkers, the efforts of Peter Richerson, Robert Boyd, and other “dual inheritance” theorists to describe the evolution of human nature are also characterized. It is argued that dual inheritance theorists have surpassed the orthodox neo-Darwinians in their explanations for very important and uniquely human features such as our extensive sociability, complex cumulative culture and morality.

When Education Research Matters

The tangled relationship between education research and policy has received little serious scrutiny, even as paeans to “scientifically based research” and “evidence-based practice” have become a staple of education policymaking in recent years. For all the attention devoted to the 5-year-old Institute of Education Sciences, to No Child Left Behind’s call for “scientifically based research,” to professional interest in data-driven decision-making, and to the refinement of sophisticated analytic tools, little effort has gone into understanding how, when, or why research affects education policy. Instead, most discussion has focused on how to identify “best practices” or “scientifically based” methods and how to encourage classroom educators to use research findings. In this article, based on the new volume, When Research Matters: How Scholarship Influences Education Policy, Frederick M. Hess examines these questions.

Symposium: Part I: Public Intellectuals Then and Now

The French political thinker Raymond Aron (1905–1983) provides the imitable model of the political philosopher as civic educator. Writing in an age of extreme ideological polarization, he aimed at a truly balanced approach to historical and political understanding. In a series of writings from the late 1930’s onward, Aron defended a principled middle way between Machiavellian cynicism and the “abstract moralism” so evident in the public engagement of modern intellectuals. Aron argued for the renewal of liberalism on the foundation of a broad-based “democratic conservatism” and displayed remarkable lucidity regarding the totalitarian temptation. This paper explores this distinctive notion of “democratic conservatism”—equally distant from revolutionary romanticism and reactionary nostalgia—that guided Aron’s public engagement over a fifty-year period and that was central to his idea of the political responsibility of intellectuals.

(The) Erasure – Mass Human Rights Violation and Denial of Responsibility: The Case of Independent Slovenia

The case of the erased residents of Slovenia – when approximately 18,000 people who were mostly of Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian ethnicity, were erased from the permanent residence registry of the Republic of Slovenia – represents one of the most severe cases of administrative ethnic/racial discrimination and human rights violations in the post-communist East and Central Europe outside the conflict area. The erasure caused “civil death” of the people who were affected by the measure, depriving them of civil, political, social, and economic rights. In 2007, 4 years after the 2003 Constitutional Court decision, declaring the 1992 erasure an unconstitutional act of the state and requiring the legislator to adopt measures to reinstate the statuses of the erased people, the problem remains unsolved and unaddressed both systemically and individually, and the situation of erasure persists. This article presents the case and analyses of the framework that made the erasure possible in terms of the preparation of the majority of Slovenes to accept and even support the violations and politicians to renounce their political responsibility to those who have lost the right to have rights. This article is based on the insights of the research project Contemporary Citizenship: Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion (2000–2003) led by Vlasta Jalušič. The analysis of the case of erased was published in Jasminka Dedić, Vlasta Jalušič, and Jelka Zorn (eds.), The Erased: Organized Innocence and the Politics of Exclusion, translated from Slovenian by Olga Vuković and Marjana Karer (Ljubljana: Peace Institute, 2003), at . The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewer for the extensive and most helpful comments.

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Women’s Right to Asylum: Protecting the Rights of Female Asylum Seekers in Europe?

Criticisms have been made against international laws and conventions on asylum and refugees, arguing that these have been based on a male model of definition, which have ignored women’s persecutions. This article will argue that recent developments in European asylum policy have the potential to deepen this discrimination and to further reduce the rights of female asylum seekers. Although there have been some positive developments in jurisprudence that have recognised that gender-specific persecution may be the basis for granting asylum, these advances remain relatively sporadic and are undermined by the operation of random and discretionary exercises of power by bureaucrats and decision makers in many cases. Further, although new developments in asylum policy are in theory “gender neutral,” differences in the material circumstances of men and women who arrive to seek asylum may mean in effect that the implications of these policies are deeply gendered.

Discount Latin American(ist) Intellectuals

Any settling of scores about the state and role of intellectuals in the west has to factor in the function of Latin American writers and the subset of pseudo-intellectuals called “Latin Americanists” of the second half of the twentieth century. The score is not even, since the university-bound misrepresent the actual development of intellectual thought in the southern hemisphere. The ideas and ubiquity of Mario Vargas Llosa are a necessary point of departure to calibrate properly the real importance of those views.

Socialist Heroes in East German Schoolbooks

Based on examples of socialist heroes from East German schoolbooks and teaching guides designed for elementary school, this essay examines the role of state ideology in primary education. It assesses the German curriculum of the now-defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR) and illuminates distinctions between civic education and political propaganda. It also shows how the curricular emphasis on socialist virtue helped to form “the socialist personality.”

The Changing Faces of Contemporary Tourism

Tourism, a domain of considerable importance in the contemporary world, has long been overlooked by social scientists, but has recently become a field attracting a growing body of research. In sociology, the relation between tourism and modernity at first constituted the issue of principal interest, the discourse focusing on the extent to which modern Western tourists seek authentic experiences on their trip. The article discusses the changes in the terms of the discourse, contingent upon the growing similarity of the world in the wake of globalization, the emergence of the “post-tourist,” and the diversification in the composition of tourists, with the growth in the number of travelers from non-Western countries. The question of the limits of the future expansion of the tourist system is raised in conclusion.

David Riesman: A Personal Appreciation

David Riesman, the Harvard sociologist, rose to eminence in the 1950s as one of America’s most influential “public intellectuals,” gaining renown as principal author of the must-read sociological classic of the time, The Lonely Crowd. In that work, Riesman accounted for something of a sea-change in American life, marked by his famous distinction between inner-directed and other-directed character-types, and in such a convincing fashion that the book became a watershed in post-war America’s understanding of itself. Beyond that, Riesman continued to carry out urbane studies of a wide-ranging array of subjects, all the while actively engaged in the major political–ideological–ethical controversies and torments of his time. As something of a principled yet reasoned “Establishmentarian” contrarian, Riesman extended the work of such incisive social thinkers as Tocqueville, Max Weber, Veblen, and George Orwell. In this personal appreciation, Michael Delaney charts his acquaintanceship with Riesman, going back to the early 1960s (Riesman acted as a kind of mentor to Delaney at a distance; the two never met in person and their association was carried on solely through letters spanning some three decades). The essay surveys Riesman’s intellectual legacy as a self-conceived ethnographer of American life, and dwells on his “exceptionalism” as a generous, caring, high-minded man of principle, discerning judgment, and exemplary character.

Death and Us

As Leon Kass has noted, the conquest of illness and death has long been “the unstated but implicit goal of modern medical science.” But it is unstated no more. Since the late 1990s, a new generation of scientists and enthusiasts has emerged to proclaim the feasibility and desirability of radical life extension. What they promise is not just longer life, better health, and heightened vitality, but a transformation of ourselves into the sort of beings we have long wished to be, but have repeatedly failed to become: beings who are completely fulfilled and living in perfect harmony with others. Despite the obvious and profound appeal of such a fantasy, attempts to realize it, even if successful scientifically, might prove to be disastrous culturally, for reasons that go beyond concerns about the alteration of existing social structures. Ultimately, as Freud argued, life might well become stagnant, “shallow and empty,” while the fear of death might become all the more crippling.

On the Other Side of the Curtain: A Reassessment of Non-Elite Human Rights Experiences and Values in Poland

In this paper, I explore the formation of human rights attitudes among what I call the “silent majority” in the post-communist countries of Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. This is the large, diverse group of people never directly confronted with harsh methods of repression under communism. I argue here that the foundations for conceptualizing human rights are based on the degree and saliency of exposure to rights violations and that, for many citizens of Central and Eastern Europe, life behind the “iron curtain” is associated with relatively fewer rights violations than life after the iron curtain’s fall. Comparative personal experiences will play a key role in explaining how these citizens conceptualize human rights. I test this argument by applying it to the cases of Poland, where I conducted a total of 68 randomly selected non-elite interviews in an effort to probe for key factors defining individuals’ conceptions of human rights.

Ideology, Telos, and the “Communist Vanguard” from Mao Zedong to Hu Jintao

This work discusses why Marxist vanguard parties require ideology in their struggle to gain and maintain political power. Despite being considered theoretically inconsistent with classical Marxism and western vernacular, I chart etymologically how “ideology” came to China and proliferated during the Mao era as a positively framed term via, in all likelihood, Japanese renderings of Leninism. After discussing ideological challenges under Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, I explore whether Hu Jintao’s scientific development and harmony concepts might be understood as ideological campaigns which—by synthesizing Maoist and Dengist approaches to ideology—effectively address what otherwise be referred to as the Party’s telos problem, and thus resolve in part the threat to the Party’s vanguard claim.

Shot by the Messenger: Partisan Cues and Public Opinion Regarding National Security and War

Research has shown that messages of intra-party harmony tend to be ignored by the news media, while internal disputes, especially within the governing party, generally receive prominent coverage. We examine how messages of party conflict and cooperation affect public opinion regarding national security, as well as whether and how the reputations of media outlets matter. We develop a typology of partisan messages in the news, determining their likely effects based on the characteristics of the speaker, listener, news outlet, and message content. We hypothesize that criticism of a Republican president by his fellow partisan elites should be exceptionally damaging (especially on a conservative media outlet), while opposition party praise of the president should be the most helpful (especially on a liberal outlet). We test our hypotheses through an experiment and a national survey on attitudes regarding the Iraq War. The results show that credible communication (i.e., “costly” rhetoric harmful to a party) is more influential than “cheap talk” in moving public opinion. Ironically, news media outlets perceived as ideologically hostile can actually enhance the credibility of certain messages relative to “friendly” news sources.

Are Science and Religion Complementary Perspectives?

Eugene Goodheart provides an eloquent defense of the non-literalist, religious imagination before the aggressive atheism of several of today’s leading neo-Darwinists. But the position that he takes—that science and religion represent “complementary perspectives” serving different, yet equally permanent needs—is undermined by two fundamental problems. First, the claim that science can only tell us how the natural world works, while religion offers meaning, value, and moral guidance, may hold true when science is understood on the model of mathematical physics, but not when evolutionary biology and its derivatives are considered. Even Stephen Jay Gould, whose famous defense of science and religion as “nonoverlappling magisteria” resembles Goodheart’s, acknowledges that the case of evolutionary biology is profoundly different. Here evolutionary fact and moral values bleed together obscuring the boundary between science and religion. Second, religion and legacy of the religious imagination embedded in our culture, lose their ability to provide meaning, morals, and consolation when core elements of religious teaching are no longer believed to be true.

Islamists in the “Rainbow” Coalition

In the 1980s, Britain’s Labour Party promoted a system of race-relations that envisioned Britain as a collection of discrete cultures with equal status. This multicultural model for organizing society conflicted with traditional British notions of a unified national culture, with an assimilationist model of immigrant incorporation. Today, the Labour Party’s relationship with Islamists is sharply dividing Labour’s “rainbow” constituency. Whereas the horrific events of 9/11 and 7/7 have led many Labour leaders to replace its defense of multiculturalism with Tory-sounding calls for immigrant assimilation, other Labour leaders are working harder than ever to accommodate their Muslim constituents.

Wie lässt sich Demokratie am besten messen? Zum Forumsbeitrag von Thomas Müller und Susanne Pickel

Ohne Zusammenfassung * Die vier Autor(inn)en arbeiten in einem gemeinsamen Forschungsprojekt des NCCR Democracy (vom Schweizerischen Nationalfonds finanziertes National Centre of Competence in Research: Challenges to Democracy in the 21^st Century) und des WZB an einem „Demokratiebarometer“ für die 30 OECD-Staaten, das die Ignoranz der 0-Varianz bei Polity und Freedom House aufkl?ren will.

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Pedagogues,Periodicals, and Paranoia

Over the past year, several published volumes have argued that American politics is careening out of control, toward a slippery slope of twenty-first century theocracy. Most of these books present tendentious interpretations of contemporary politics as matter-of-fact analysis. The reader is assumed to hold the same interpretive bias and warned of the dangers of a new and powerful American “fundamentalism.” The current article explores a historical parallel to today’s trend. Nearly a century ago, the Progressive Education movement sought to undermine the pedagogical dominance of traditional, literature-based education, preferring a more socially-conscious curriculum. The striking similarities between John Dewey’s anti-traditional approach and the present-day anti-theocracy faction are multitude—and worth our consideration. The seeds of Progressive Education are now producing weeds of anti-religious sentiment across America’s political landscape—a cultural phenomena that is constricting the growth of a much needed civil discourse.

Tackling Corruption at its Source: The National Corruption Prevention Bureau

In Spring 2007 as part of its ongoing anticorruption efforts, the PRC announced the establishment of a new organization called the “National Corruption Prevention Bureau” (NCPB). The article first examines the origins of the NCPB and its position in the current Chinese anticorruption regime. The NCPB will concentrate primarily on information collection and coordination work. Given these goals, This article examines the organization’s potential for improving work in three areas related to information collection and coordination; increased oversight of the private sector, improving information quality and dissemination, and strengthening routine anticorruption activities. The final section examines potential problems that will likely limit the ability of this new organization to improve anticorruption work, such as the possibility of increasing complexity within the anticorruption system, and the NCPB’s limited independence from the agencies it seeks to coordinate.

At Cross Purposes? Democratization and Peace Implementation Strategies in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Frozen Conflict

The case of post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) provides an interesting lens through which to reflect on the interconnected and often conflicting challenges of implementation of internationally brokered peace agreements, external support to democratic transition and consolidation, and contemporary notions of sovereignty and state building. This chapter suggests that in the case of BiH, certain contradictions and tradeoffs have been and may still be necessary to ensure a foundation for future stability and democratic consolidation. The situation in post-Dayton BiH can be described as a frozen conflict that has remained frozen in large part due to an international presence that ensures that an imperfect peace prevails while also providing a basis for incremental reform. The peace implementation process in BiH is briefly reviewed by looking at two reform strategies: the “soft” protectorate strategy used in BiH as a whole and the “hard” protectorate option exercised in the District of Brčko. The aim is to demonstrate that while a democratic end-state remains the goal in such transitions, the means toward getting there can include a number of contradictory policy options.