Nietzsche on Autonomy and Morality: the Challenge to Political Theory

Nietzsche's challenge to political theory can be located in his claim that autonomy and morality are mutually exclusive. In this paper an examination of Kant's attempt to ground a notion of autonomy through constructing a metaphysic of morals is followed by a consideration of Nietzsche's understanding of autonomy in terms of a notion of supra-moral sovereign individuality. A genealogy of morals represents an attempt to historicize the key notions of moral and political theory. Nietzsche's aristocratic conception of sovereign individuality is seen in terms of the value-basis on which sovereign individuals are to construct a common ethical and political identity and enter into social relationships. Foucaultian and feminist attempts to construct an ethics and politics of difference and a recent attempt to construct a post-modern conception of agency based on a synthesis of Nietzsche's philosophy of power and Kant's ethics are examined.     

The Politics of Reading Nietzsche

Over recent years, an extraordinary number of interpretations of Nietzsche's work has appeared. I ask why he has become such an important figure in contemporary political debate and whether any dominant concerns can be elicited from the diverse readings of his texts. My response to both questions is that because Nietzsche has been identified, by Habermas among others, as the founding father of poststructuralism, this is where debate between postmodernists and their critics is being staged. I distinguish between recent philosophical and political interpretations but argue that in both cases, what is at stake are political questions regarding authority, legitimacy and consensus. In the latter part of the article I consider attempts at reconstructing a postmodern politics out of Nietzsche's philosophy, but express some doubts about such a project.     

Of Revelatory Histories and Hatchet Jobs: Propaganda and Method in Intelligence History

This article explores a number of issues in the contemporary study of intelligence. These issues are methodological (relating to engagement with ‘primary’ sources), epistemological (concerned with notions of ‘bias’ and objectivity), and presentational (dealing with how scholars locate their work within existing debates). The article will contend that the study of intelligence, largely because of its ambiguous positioning on the borderland between political science and history, has been somewhat isolated from the debates over theory and method that have flourished in the wider historical discipline in recent decades, and that an engagement with such literature will yield commensurate benefits. Finally, the article will explore the place of intelligence history within the wider discourse of ‘popular’ history. Given its potentially sensational content, some intelligence literature is targeted at a ‘popular’ readership, but many of the claims made in authoring, promoting and reviewing such books are highly problematic. Since this is inimical to scholarly rigour, and is unlikely to facilitate wider public understanding of major historical issues, such matters need to be addressed.     

城市功能及其服务转型趋势分析

21世纪是城市的世纪，城市发展对中国经济发展将起决定性作用。而城市功能是城市发展的重要课题，其发展转型决定着城市的盛衰存亡。本文以城市功能的辞意剖析为切入点，透视城市发展的历史天际线，概括历史中的城市功能类型．探寻其变化、演进特征属性，并进一步提出创造和使用城市的人调控城市功能转型的必然与可能路径。     

后形而上学与后现代主义

"现代性"以"元叙事"为其特征,后现代性是对元叙事的颠覆."客观化假定"和"决定论假定"是现代性的两个最基本的哲学原理,黑格尔哲学的叙事是现代性的典型叙事.尼采以一种既"野蛮"又"学术"的方式,通过对真理信念和禁欲理想的谱系考察,拨去了长久以来笼罩在现代思想上的神圣光圈.海德格尔通过对西方形而上学的内在摧毁,将尼采审美理想实现的契机成功地从神话学领域转移至哲学领域.这一切表明,尼采、海德格尔及其后继者力图建构的,是一种新形态的形而上学.由这种形而上学支撑的社会思潮,就叫作后现代主义.     

Philosophy and the History of Art

Abstract

Schelling’s philosophy of art between 1801 and 1807 can be defined as metaphysics of art. The object of that metaphysics is to deploy the absolute as the being of art and of the arts. Schelling has been criticized on the basis that this metaphysics of art represses the infinite diversity of existing works of art, while overlooking concrete aesthetic experience. Based on Schelling’s definition of the “philosophical construction” of art as an inseparably speculative and historical construction, the aim of this paper is to challenge such assertions. It will show that “historical construction” has to be understood in a twofold manner: first, as a transcendental history of the absolute’s artistic individuation and second, as a cultural history of both the ancient and modern worlds of art. Working within this twofold setting the paper argues that Schelling’s systematic approach, while exhibiting a unifying force, still remains open to the otherness of the real.     

Deleuze and Guattari's Historiophilosophy: Philosophical Thought and its Historical Milieu

Abstract

This paper will examine the relation between philosophical thought and the various milieus in which such thought takes place using the late work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It will argue that Deleuze and Guattari's assessment of this relation involves a rearticulation of philosophy as an historiophilosophy. To claim that Deleuze and Guattari promote such a form of philosophy is contentious, as their work is often noted for implementing an ontological distinction between becoming and history, whereby the former is associated with the act of creation and the latter with retrospective representations of this creative process. Furthermore, when elaborating on the creative nature of philosophical thought, Deleuze and Guattari explicitly refer to philosophy as a geophilosophy that is in contrast to history. Nevertheless, this paper will demonstrate that far from abandoning the category of history, Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of the relations between philosophical thought and relative milieus suggests to us an historical ontology and methodology that is a critical part of philosophy's nature.     

Of “other” histories and identities: partition novels from the Indian subcontinent

Ever since the Partition, novelists on either side of the India–Pakistan border have used fictional space imaginatively to formulate discourses on a humanistically-centred, multiplistically-defined Other identity, which writes itself into existence through the prism of the novelists’ contextual present. In this article, I will focus on three partition narratives: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's children (1980), Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice candy man (1988) and Amitav Ghosh's The shadow lines (1988). By employing different modes of knowledge, the novelists draw out the micro-history embedded within the historical event, and resonate the voice of the Other, a creation of partisan politics. Bapsi Sidhwa appears as a social historian who perceives the event through the eyes of an eight-year-old Parsi girl Lenny; Amitav Ghosh, akin to a modern historian, focuses on rigid and illusory territorial divisions from Thamma's (grandmother's) perspective; while Salman Rushdie emerges as a postmodern historian who draws attention to the ambiguity and opacity of both historical and fictional knowledge through Saleem Sinai, born on the day India won her independence. History, as it is perceived by the Other – each belonging to a different generation – is a palimpsest: it is always in a state of becoming, of being lived, evaluated and rewritten. Fiction, as it interprets the historical knowledge, fills in the fissures and absences between the history of the past and that of the present. The article will eventually study how fiction and history inform each other, and how the rhetoric of fiction and history together constitute a dialectical discourse on identity – mapped by borders – which sees a convergence of private and collective memories.     

MPP programs emerging around the world19

This paper examines public policy and management programs in Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, and makes comparisons with similar programs in the United States. Our study of public policy programs shows that there are many challenges ahead in terms of making good decisions on the form and content of programs that will add value to governments and citizens. Appropriate choices in terms of program design and pedagogy will reflect different economic, social, environmental, and cultural influences and will be shaped by history, values, and the roles of public policy and management professionals within a particular governmental context.     

Becoming flesh: refugee hunger strike and embodiments of refusal in German necropolitical spaces

The securitization of the EU’s external borders and repressive asylum policies biopolitically control and discipline the bodies of refugees. In Germany, these developments hark back to a longer colonial history of racialization that the state collectively disavows. To approach this continuity of racialized citizenship, I will analyse a series of hunger strikes that were staged by refugees from 2012 till 2014 in Germany. By asking which possibilities lie in staging the hunger strike, I will argue that Germany’s necropolitical geography of detention, asylum, and deportation marks the racialized refugees’ bodies as disposable within the logics of citizenship. I propose that hunger strike is a form of becoming flesh, which makes visible how racialized violence is enacted on the refugees’ bodies. Becoming flesh articulates a politics of refusal that subverts the logics of recognition, empathy and suffering liberal rights discourses rely on and, instead, performs an embrace of the refugees’ abjection.     

Understanding micro-processes of institutionalization: stewardship contracting and national forest management

This paper examines micro-processes of institutionalization, using the case of stewardship contracting within the US Forest Service. Our basic premise is that, until a new policy becomes an everyday practice among local actors, it will not become institutionalized at the macro-scale. We find that micro-processes of institutionalization are driven by a mixture of large-scale institutional dynamics and how frontline decision-makers understand and interpret these dynamics, given the local social and ecological context in which they operate. For example, this paper suggests that a new policy may become institutionalized when it is understood to solve problems that old institutions at once create and demand to be solved. Agency actors cannot be conceptualized as untethered from the institutions in which they operate. Yet, within larger institutional dynamics, field personnel make key choices about whether to adopt a new policy, making them important players in the micro-processes of policy institutionalization. The interplay of actors and institutions turns agencies, such as the Forest Service, into complex systems that cannot be understood as artifacts of their own history or as a sum of the decisions of individual actors. This dynamic also implies that macro-level institutional change will be uneven, incomplete, and gradual, mirroring uneven, contingent micro-level processes.     

When Doves Cry: International Rivalry, Unreciprocated Cooperation, and Leadership Turnover

Varied research traditions suggest that dovish leaders will be thrown out of office under harsh external circumstances. Below, I elaborate a model of rivalry maintenance that draws on and refines the insight from studies of leadership tenure and foreign policy. Specifically, I expect a leader who offers unreciprocated cooperation to a rival (a dove) to be more likely to be deselected from power than a leader that takes a harder line vis-à-vis the rival (a hawk). I test this expectation using event history techniques and data spanning the 1950–1990 time period and find strong evidence that dovish leaders pay an electoral price within a rivalry context. The findings suggest an internationally contingent domestic incentive to maintain rivalry and conflict over time .     

从历史维度看尼采生命哲学——以《悲剧的诞生》为例

尼采的生命哲学在历史上产生了重大影响,但学者大都从尼采中期和晚期的著作中研究尼采的生命哲学。通过对形而上学历史的分析,再以尼采《悲剧的诞生》这部早期著作为例可以说明尼采的哲学是依照历史发展而来的,他一生的生命哲学思想具有统一性。尼采哲学的首要贡献是实现了存在哲学向价值哲学的影响。     

New ways of thinking: The intelligence function and strategic calculations in the admiralty, 1882–1889

Intelligence analysis is often viewed as a distant relative of the policy deliberations within military and naval organisations. This is especially apparent in contemporary settings, where policymaking is rigid and highly compartmentalised by the firewalls that exist between intelligence producers and consumers. The purpose of this article is to examine an overlooked case from intelligence history, when the creation of an intelligence function within the Admiralty had a profound impact upon the formulation and conduct of British naval policy in the 1880s. This inevitably encouraged new ways of thinking about how the Admiralty organised and prepared for war.     

The Executive Budget in the Federal Government: The First Century and Beyond

This article reviews the history of executive budgeting in the United States a century after President William Howard Taft's Economy and Efficiency Commission proposed an executive budget. This history, the authors argue, does not suggest that giving more budget power to the president will improve budget outcomes. Instead, what is needed is more cooperation between the branches of government and a better‐educated public—goals that were shared by budget reformers when the Taft report was published.     

Iraq’s Political Turmoil

Motivated by the government's patronage and corruption, massive political protests in Iraq have mobilised the majority Shia population and weakened Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. He is caught between an intensely disgruntled population and an equally stubborn ruling elite. In a heavily armed population with a recent history of civil war, there is a salient risk that popular demands will be pursued through violence.     

CUTBACK MANAGEMENT IN CANADA*

Abstract: Although since 1975 the Government of Canada has been successful in containing its expenditure growth — partly as a result of the demands for value for money in government and the political implications of the large deficit — the drive for efficiency and economy has a long history. The Budget reforms of the 1970s (such as MBO, PPB and OPMS) have been joined at the Federal level by a new Policy and Expenditure Management System based on resource "envelopes". This involves the preparation of a five-year fiscal plan setting out projected revenue and total expenditure with a division of expenditure into ten "envelopes" for ten policy sectors. Expenditure priorities are determined by the Priorities and Planning Committee chaired by the Prime Minister, and five Cabinet Committees are responsible for managing the various policy sectors within the funds available. The intention is that "X-budgets", or across-the-board percentage cuts which were the earlier means of cutting back, will be replaced by the more sophisticated "envelope" system. In various ways all Provincial governments — even resource-rich Alberta — have also cutback their expenditures. Ontario has used two blunt instruments in its cutbacks; an arbitrary growth target below the level of inflation and the limitation of public service manpower through the device of "person-years". The lesson from Ontario's experience is the importance of political will in cutback management.     

New Labour in Power: Five Problems of Contemporary History

The history of New Labour is highly politicised, deployed either for its policy lessons (good or bad) or as a weapon in Labour's factional struggles. But, just as historians in the 1990s reassessed the premierships of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, so the distance of time and the opening of archives offers an opportunity to reappraise New Labour as history. Such work raises five methodological challenges: the lack of sufficient distance from the subject to tell whether policy innovations will remain popular and permanent; the long shadow the Iraq war casts over this whole period; the deluge of data and sources available; the continuing and controversial part that key actors, such as Tony Blair, are still playing; and the lack of expertise any one author will inevitably face in some policy areas. This article addresses each of those difficulties in turn.     

Neo-liberal Citizenship

The government of populations within states and the government of states themselves within the international arena are intimately connected. Thus, in order to understand the character of citizenship in the modern world, it is necessary to locate it as part of a supra-national governmental regime in which the system of states, international agencies and multinational corporations play a fundamental role. A brief history of the modern system of states is followed first by an account of liberalism as a project of government emerging within that system, and secondly by an examination of how twentieth-century changes in the system of states have impacted on that liberal project. Where the liberal government of non-Western populations was once predicated on a denial of citizenship it is now channelled through the promotion of citizenship in states that are themselves increasingly subject to the rigours of the market.     

Qatar and its neighbours

Qatar’s ruling family has a long history of struggle with rival Gulf dynasties. Qatar’s neighbours have increasingly seen in Doha’s determination to forge an independent path an alarming affinity to the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran. This perception contributed to their embargo of Qatar in June 2017. The embargo has failed to isolate or break Qatar, however, and there is little indication that the dispute will be resolved soon.