The Communal Basis of Swiss Liberty

This article examines the relationship between liberty and itscommunal basis in Switzerland. The author identifies the basiccultural values shared by the Swiss that have served to guaranteea republican form of government. These values are an expectationof "nonpersonalized" government and a preference for small-scaleorganization. These, together with the multilingual compositionof the country, have combined to produce Swiss republicanismfrom which liberty is a byproduct. More recently, the Swissnotion of liberty has evolved from communal liberty into onethat is oriented toward individual rights, which has also certainnegative implications.     

A Public-Choice View of Swiss Liberty

This article compares the provisions of the American and Swissconstitutions from a public-choice perspective. Accordingly,the Swiss Constitution is seen as one designed to bring abouta transmission of citizens' desires into political action, whereasthe U.S. Constitution is designed to prevent the misuse of grantedpower. The specific level of analysis employed here is the principal-agentmodel, which is used to examine collective decisionmaking atthe constitutional, legislative, and para-constitutional levels.The article then considers the role of the courts as arbiterof constitutional questions and conflicts.     

席勒美学的政治自由思想及其现实困境

席勒美学不仅是对艺术的审美理论,更是对法国大革命的政治哲学反应,后者是常被忽视的问题。作为政治哲学,他以审美作为政治自由的前提,批判康德在观念上导致了纯粹实践理性与感性的对立,并指出法国大革命的政治自由理想与实践的矛盾是政治自由目的化。他用和解原则化解康德在观念上的对立,并将美育实践视为实现整体性政治自由的理路。他以感伤原则批判卢梭的自然状态是对政治自由的叛逃,并扬弃政治自由实践中当下与未来的对立,为政治自由赋予历史性维度。在此意义上,席勒政治自由思想构成通向黑格尔政治哲学的重要环节。     

One Concept of Liberty

In this paper I argue in favour of a single conception of liberty, that picked out by Berlin as negative liberty. However, Berlin's defence of liberty so understood seems to rest on a view not open to the moral realist.
The first half of the paper explains this and suggests an alternative defence compatible with such a moral position. The defence rests on an account of why we value freedom. In the second half of the paper this negative conception is defended against recent criticism from Charles Taylor. His appeal to qualitative distinctions within freedom is queried, as is the conception of the self that seems required for his outlook.     

How Terrorism Upsets Liberty

As terrorism increasingly penetrates Western democracies, liberals and libertarians are obliged to ask themselves whether contending with it justifies restricting civil liberty and, if so, to what extent. Neither personal security nor individual liberty is ever fully realised – both are a matter of degree – and they are often perceived as being at odds with each other. Hence it has been suggested that we reconsider the existing trade-off between them, or reassess their 'rate of exchange'. While such questions are sometimes raised by left-leaning liberals, they are in fact particularly acute for liberals on the right, or libertarians, who would normally resist any increase in government intervention. Right-wingers who advocate 'hands off' policies on all other occasions now call for an increase in government intervention as regards security measures. Many left-liberals, on the other hand, are reluctant to concede any further power to the state in order to combat terrorism.     

Hobbes's Liberty and Skinner's Discontent

This article questions the plausibility of the interpretation of Hobbes's liberty that Quentin Skinner articulates in Hobbes and Republican Liberty . It argues that Skinner's book fails to prove two of the three claims it must uphold: the 'textual accuracy claim' and his 'methodological claim'. This article maintains that understanding Hobbes's use of liberty in Leviathan according to his definition of 'corporall liberty', as Skinner does, ignores many of Hobbes's claims that invoke liberty outside the beginning of chapter 21, resulting in a one-dimensional reading of Hobbes.     

The Virtuous Polity, The Accountable Polity: Liberty and Responsibility in The Federalist

The Federalist claims to present a republican response to thetypical political problems faced by republics. That solutionrequired a departure from all models of republics known at thattime, and in particular a break with Anti-Federalist modelsthat posited heavy reliance on responsibility, understood aseither political accountability or as moral and political virtue.The Federalist challenges the Anti-Federalist notion that a"no-gap polity" is the means to safe and effective republicanism.It also challenges those who believe that virtue of people orrulers is the precondition of a republican polity. Publius doesrequire quasi-virlues of certain sorts—and thus does notrely entirely on calculating selfinterest—but these aresignificantly different from the virtues posited by earlierrepublican theorists or certain contemporary interpreters ofThe Federalist.     

Mill, Liberty and the Facts of Life

This paper examines John Stuart Mill's discussion of economic liberty and individual liberty, and his view of the relationship between the two. It explores how, and how effectively, Mill developed his arguments about the two liberties; reveals the lineages of thought from which they derived; and considers how his arguments were altered by political economists not long after his death. It is argued that the distinction Mill drew between the two liberties provided him with a framework of concepts which legitimized significant government intervention in economic matters without restricting individual liberty.     

Swiss worlds of welfare

Are there different worlds of welfare in Swiss cantons, analogous to different national welfare state regimes? Are the welfare regimes made up of functionally related sub-regimes in the field of employment, education, taxation and social security, as argued in recent analyses of ‘varieties of capitalism’? And can the variations between such cantonal welfare regimes be explained by the same politico-institutional variables that account for the development of national welfare states? These are the guiding questions of this article. We find strong empirical evidence for large inter-cantonal variation in welfare state policies. The sub-regimes are not functionally connected, however. Their variation is related to different sets of variables, indicating a weak functional link between them. Developments and causal structures are specific to the various subregimes. In addition, it is socio-economic and not politicoinstitutional variables that have had the strongest imprint on the overall structure of cantonal welfare regimes.     

论完善行政自由裁量权的司法控制

<行政诉讼法>第五十四条中关于对行政自由裁量权司法控制的规定,已不能满足加强对行政自由裁量权司法控制的现实要求.因此,必须完善对行政自由裁量权的司法控制.