The Liberal Rationale of 'Rational Socialism'

This article draws attention to the ideas of an unduly neglected Belgian thinker, Hippolyte Colins. From the 1830s, Colins addressed many issues in the political theory of property, especially problems of interpersonal, intergenerational and inter-societal justice. His ideas are discussed in the first section. A critical examination of his arguments about justified property regimes enables contemporary disputes (notably in the work of Nozick and Steiner) to be placed in a fresh perspective, offered in the second section. This locates the difficulty of distinguishing between liberal and socialist commitments to particular property systems.     

视阈融合下晏殊词的思想价值探究

历来对晏殊词所体现思想价值的评价,褒贬不一。褒者重其艺术性,贬者据其内容立言。对于其词思想价值的评价也出现两个极端,褒者誉其“情思并致,圆融理性”,贬者讥其“富贵得意之余的无病呻吟”。从伽达默尔现代解释学视阈融合的角度切入,分别对这两种截然相反的观点进行梳理分析,集多维视角融合于一体,以期对晏词中所体现思想价值的理解适近真实。     

A left-libertarian proposal for egalitarian world ownership

In this paper I advocate a left-libertarian approach to egalitarian world ownership that combines common ownership of land, following Henry George (where private appropriation is subject to the payment of rent), with joint ownership of finite and exhaustible resources such as oil (where use is subject to a collective decision-making process and tax paid at the point of extraction). This rent and tax together create a common fund available for global distribution. I argue that this approach offers improvements on Hillel Steiner’s proposal for a global fund, and Thomas Pogge’s proposal for a Global Resources Dividend (GRD) since it does not penalize states for the inclusion of valuable resources within their territory that are not being used, while it also does not allow states to benefit from the use of resources elsewhere while simultaneously refusing to exploit the resources within their own borders. Moreover, joint ownership need not conflict with the libertarian commitment to self-ownership, as is often thought to be the case, and when supplementing common ownership of land it can provide an egalitarian outcome as well as greater protection for future generations and the environment.     

The Consummate Comparative Public Administrationist: A Tribute to Ferrel Heady, 1916–2006

Ferrel Heady died on August 16, 2006, at his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Together with Fred Riggs, he is widely known and respected as one of the founders of comparative public administration. In this tribute to our friend and colleague, we touch on the highlights of his distinguished career as a scholar, an academic administrator, and a person who lived up to his own high standards of honesty and integrity in every aspect of his life. We assess his body of work, attempt to summarize its significance, and reproduce comments about him sent to us by his friends and colleagues. This tribute is accompanied by reflections on Ferrel written by Fred Riggs.     

关于墨子经济思想的哲学思考

墨于是公元前五世纪未中国最具独创精神的思想家，他出于对贫苦大众的深切关怀，一生都在为改善小生产者和劳动者的物质生活、为提高他们的社会政治地位而斗争。而他的思想就是在这些社会实践中形成的。在社会生产实践中他提出了关于生产、消费、财富、管理等方面的经济理论，而在这些经济思想中又渗透着丰富的哲学内涵，本文从其生产观中运用的生产力与生产关系的矛盾论、消费观中运用的资源合理配置论，财富论中运用的生产需求与供给之间平衡性与不平衡性矛盾论、以及管理论中运用的改革与科学管理作用论等理论入手，分析墨子经济思想中的哲学元素．挖掘墨子经济哲学思想对当今社会政治经济发展，有着重要的启示意义。     

Global Justice and the Distribution of Natural Resources

What should a political theorist say about the justice of the global distribution of natural resources? One issue is whether principles of distributive justice should be applied globally, and this has been debated between nationalists and cosmopolitans. A second, though, is how the category of 'natural resources' should be conceived in relation to other distributable goods. This has not adequately been addressed even by theorists of global justice who expressly focus on natural resources. In particular, neither Charles Beitz's argument for a natural resources redistribution principle nor David Miller's argument against works with a satisfactory account of how the physical distribution of resources relates to the distribution of their economic value. A more satisfactory account can be developed from the perspective of ecological economics as inspired by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. From this perspective, global inequalities in the command of natural resources can be viewed with the clarity that a normative theory of their justice requires. If natural resources are re-conceptualised in terms of 'ecological space', Beitz's argument can be recast and vindicated. The re-conceptualisation is necessary to overcome the problems with the original version, as is shown by reference to the existing alternative formulations of Hillel Steiner and Thomas Pogge.     

Recalling Lewis Feuer

This essay examines a brief stretch of the career of the noted sociologist Lewis S. Feuer, paying particular attention to his relationship to Communism during the thirties and forties. With the aid of archival sources, it reconstructs several key episodes of his political involvement that help to explain his eventual deradicalization. This essay first considers Feuer’s geopolitical outlook at the beginning of the Second World War, demonstrating the extent to which his views accorded with the official stance of the Communist Party. It then details Feuer’s experience as an American soldier stationed in New Caledonia, highlighting his independent efforts to abolish forced labor under the French colonial regime. These previously unexamined aspects of his early life shed new light on his later struggles to define himself politically. The purpose of this essay is to complicate Feuer’s posthumous memory, which has been overshadowed by his belated neoconservatism, and to assert the continuing importance of leftist commitment to his thought even until late in his career.     

Weak and Ineffective? Reassessing the Party Political Leadership of John Major

Interpretations on the party political leadership of John Major are dominated by perceptions of weakness and ineffectiveness. This article examines his party political leadership by considering the relationship between, first, his political ambitions, and, second, his style of political leadership. When evaluating the political ambitions of Major, the article will demonstrate that he was ideologically agnostic and a political pragmatist. When examining his party political leadership style, the article will demonstrate, via an examination of his management of the European policy divide and his Cabinet management, that he was politically indecisive and an avoider of political confrontation. The article concludes, however, that perceptions of his weakness and ineffectiveness should be contextualised due to the following two factors: first, the constraints of inheriting an ideologically divided parliamentary Conservative party; and, second, the contrasting circumstances that ensured that his predecessor and successor appeared strong and effective, which have magnified perceptions of his weakness and ineffectiveness.     

Remembering Vincent Ostrom: unhorsing a dominant paradigm

This essay is a memorial piece about Vincent Ostrom (September 25, 1919–June 29, 2012). I start by reviewing his academic history and then turn to Professor Ostrom’s major intellectual legacy—his effort to overturn the dominant paradigm in public administration and political science on metropolitan government reform. The three most important contributions of his work are discussed, including the introduction of public goods theory into the study of public administration and his work on quasimarkets and the Tiebout model. Three controversies or conundrums raised by his work are then discussed. Finally, the essay considers whether Professor Ostrom was ultimately successful in his effort to overthrow the traditional approach to the production and delivery of public goods at the city government level.     

English Pluralism, Functionalism and Corporatism: The Legacy of Paul Hirst

Paul Hirst began his career as a Marxist, and in his later work he made important contributions to numerous debates, the most notorious of which was his pronounced scepticism towards the idea of globalisation. However, Hirst's principal legacy to political theory was the development of his normative theory of 'associative democracy'. This article presents a critique of Hirst's theory emphasising his indebtedness to the tradition of English political pluralism. On a preliminary analysis, Hirst's project appears to have been predicated on a normative defence of voluntarism, individualism and pluralism. However, I make the case that on closer examination this is undermined and contradicted in his work – and in the work of the earlier English pluralists – by an implicit assumption of social unity. This assumption is manifest in the functionalism and corporatism that Hirst presented as necessary components of pluralism, which in turn reflect his unwarranted presumption that industrial productivity, efficient economic governance and welfare provision represent impartial and incontestable axioms of social organisation.     

Mosca revisited

Abstract. The paper offers a favourable re-assessment of the thought of Gaetano Mosca, a most unfashionable thinker. Three elements of his thought are examined: (1) his 'historical method', (2) his 'unmasking' of the democratic ideal, and (3) his critique of Marxian socialism. It is argued that his model of an objective political science, based on empirical observation, was essentially sound, though he himself did not live up to its rigorous requirements. Whatever the flaws in his methodology, however, his analysis of the parliamentary system seems convincing enough. As for his complaints against marxism and socialism, these cannot be dismissed as the fulminations of a reactionary, for the simple reason that most of them have been echoed, in one form or another, by Marxists and socialists themselves. It is concluded that social critics could learn much from Mosca, in spite of his conservative leanings.     

Steven Lukes on the Concept of Power

Steven Lukes has recently reissued his famous book on power, Power: A Radical View . He now admits that the concept of power that he used in his original (1974) book is flawed, but he still wants to defend the position that he advanced there. I argue that he is right to regard his concept of power as flawed, but that admitting this undermines his argument. I conclude that he can rescue his argument by realising that he is not, in fact, using a concept of power at all.     

近代中英关系史上的小斯当东--《小斯当东回忆录》译后余语

小斯当东是近代中英关系史中最具代表性的人物之一，他的商人、外交使节、议员等多重身份，使得他的经历富有故事性。他于1856年完成的《小斯当东回忆录》极具史料价值。从小斯当东的履历、小斯当东与中国、小斯当东与《大清律例》的翻译、小斯当东的英国议员经历等角度出发，可以展现《小斯当东回忆录》一书的主要内容，并勾勒出小斯当东在中英交往初期所发挥的独特作用。     

Barack Hussein Obama: the use of history in the creation of an ‘American’ president

ABSTRACT

From the time of his nomination as the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential candidate onwards, Barack Obama was the target of a panoply of political attacks. Conservatives, Republicans and even some Democrats played on his alterity in a way that previous non-white political hopefuls, particularly the Reverend Jesse Jackson, had not had to endure. If the intricate twists and turns of Obama's past did not make those attacks particularly surprising, the way in which he chose to deal with them was. In what stands as a deliberate pre-emptive attack, Obama used two substantive texts, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, to create and shape a historical narrative of his own past in such a way as to present himself to the US voting public as a truly American figure, worthy of the presidency. By the time he was running for high office, therefore, Obama had already used his knowledge of the discipline of history to create a usable past with which he and his supporters could denude many of those political attacks of their potency, whether they were focused on the years of his upbringing in an Islamic state, his familial ties to Kenya, his religious background or his purported links to radicalism.     

Strong Poets and Utopia: Rorty's Liberalism, Dewey and Democracy

Richard Rorty is one of the most controversial philosophers today. He argues, among other things, that philosophy should be replaced by literary writing and that it has nothing to say to politics. Yet his own more recent writing has been more and more about political issues. This article focuses upon the inconsistency of his politics with the philosophical influence which he has consistently identified as the strongest on his writings; that of John Dewey. At the root of this incompatibility lies the failure of his theoretical project to carry over his synthesis between Deweyan pragmatism and Nietzschean poststructuralism into the realm of politics.     

Montesquieu on Federalism and Anglo-Gothic Constitutionalism

The common perception that Montesquieu is not a major theoristof federalism is due both to the peripheral nature of his accountof confederate republics and his praise of the unitary BritishConstitution in the Spirit of the Laws. This study challengesthis view by arguing that, despite his endorsement of the separationof powers, Montesquieu had serious reservations about England'shighly centralized system of parliamentary sovereignty. Moreover,his most significant reflections on federalism were not containedin his brief treatment of confederate republics, but ratherin his lengthy consideration of Gothic constitutionalism. Iconclude that Montesquieu's complex constitutional theory involvestwo distinct dimensions including both the separation of powersexemplified in England and the federal principles in the decentralizedGothic system of medieval France.     

Keep Rowing: Amitai Etzioni and History

Reflecting on the most recent stage of his career, the communitarian, Amitai Etzioni, gives three reasons for what he perceives as his loss of influence. First, the media prefers an argument between strongly opposed positions, but Etzioni is neither liberal nor conservative. Second, the media prefers specialized intellectuals, but Etzioni has refused to “stick to his knitting.” Third, Etzioni has taken an unpopular, dovish position on China. I argue that Etzioni is mistaken about the reasons for his and communitarianism’s rise and perceived fall and offer a more optimistic assessment than he does of the potential influence of his thought. I use this local problem of historical interpretation to question Etzioni’s global interpretation of modern history.     

The First MBA President: George W. Bush as Public Administrator

President Bush was praised early in his first term as a tough-minded decision maker who knows how to get things done. This essay argues that President Bush possesses formidable political skills that have helped him achieve many of his policy goals, focusing on his most important national security policies: the war in Iraq, the war on terrorism and the treatment of detainees, the use of intelligence leading up to the war, and the reorganization of the executive branch. In the end, however, President Bush's deficiencies as a public administrator have undermined his policy successes.     

Alfred Kazin and the Holocaust

The reputation of Alfred Kazin is based primarily on his criticism of American literature. But his intense Jewish consciousness was self-evident, and that identity was haunted by the horror and memory of the Holocaust. It challenged his faith in the power of language to grasp the texture of experience. The Holocaust also shattered his friendship with Elie Wiesel, whose memoir of Auschwitz and Buchenwald led Kazin the question the veracity of the Nobel laureate.     

The Theory of Universal Human Rights: A Comment on Talbott

In this analysis of William Talbott’s important book, I note with appreciation his defense of universal moral principles and of moral justification as a “social project,” his focus on the critique of oppression, and his emphasis on empathic understanding in the account of human rights. I go on to develop some criticisms regarding: 1) Talbott’s traditional understanding of human rights as holding against governments and not also applying to nonstate actors; 2) his account of the interrelations among well-being, autonomy, claims for first person authority in moral judgment, and human rights; 3) his strongly rationalist and liberal individualist interpretation of moral judgment and autonomy; and 4) the lack of a role for intercultural dialogue about human rights, which nonetheless are held to apply to all human beings across cultures. In each case, I briefly consider what an alternative approach would look like.