Juvenile Desistance and Community Disadvantage: The Role of Appropriate Accommodations and Engagements

In recent years, juvenile justice systems have shown renewed interest in ensuring effective programming and support for young offenders as they reenter the community. These services often focus on suitable accommodations, education, work-based employment, and engagement in conventional activities. Recent studies also suggest, however, that these services may not have the desired impact in the community (i.e. desistance) if underlying community-level risk factors are not attended to. This may especially be the case for young offenders. Given the developmental literature underscoring the heightened sensitivity of youth to external conditions, this study focuses attention on the recidivism of young offenders in the United Kingdom. Data from 2005 through 2009 show that changes in appropriate accommodation and engagement offered to ex-offenders in a community are both related to a community’s rate of youth reoffending; however, the strength of this relationship differs across level of community disadvantage.     

Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation: perverse effects,protectionism and Gemeinschaft

Abstract

Drawing upon Karl Polanyi's journalistic writings and unpublished lectures from the 1920s and 1930s, this article reconstructs the lineaments of his research programme that was to assume its finished form in The Great Transformation. It identifies and corrects a common misinterpretation of the thesis of that book, and argues that Polanyi's basic theoretical framework is best conceived as Tönniesian: market society is Gesellschaft, while the ‘protective counter-movement’ of The Great Transformation is Gemeinschaft, understood dynamically. It examines the two central mechanisms by which, in Polanyi's understanding, Gesellschaft broke down in the mid-twentieth century: the ‘clash between democracy and capitalism’ and the ‘perverse effects’ whereby political intervention in markets impairs profitability and saps the vitality of the market system.     

The iron law of democratic socialism: British and Austrian influences on the young Karl Polanyi

Abstract

A central thesis of Karl Polanyi's The great transformation concerns the tensions between capitalism and democracy: the former embodies the principle of inequality, while democracy represents that of equality. This paper explores the intellectual heritage of this thesis, in the ‘functional theory’ of G.D.H. Cole and Otto Bauer and in the writings of Eduard Bernstein. It scrutinizes Polanyi's relationship with Bernstein's ‘evolutionary socialism’ and charts his ‘double movement’ vis-à-vis Marxist philosophy: in the 1910s he reacted sharply against Marxism's deterministic excesses, but he then, in the 1920s, engaged in sympathetic dialogue with Austro-Marxist thinkers. The latter, like Bernstein, disavowed economic determinism and insisted upon the importance and autonomy of ethics. Yet they simultaneously predicted a law-like expansion of democracy from the political to the economic arena. Analysis of this contradiction provides the basis for a concluding discussion that reconsiders the deterministic threads in Polanyi's oeuvre. Whereas for some Polanyi scholars these attest to his residual attraction to Marxism, I argue that matters are more complex. While Polanyi did repudiate the more rigidly deterministic of currents in Marxist philosophy, those to which he was attracted, notably Bernstein's ‘revision’ and Austro-Marxism, incorporated a deterministic fatalism of their own, in respect of democratization. Herein lies a more convincing explanation of Polanyi's incomplete escape from a deterministic philosophy of history, as exemplified in his masterwork, The great transformation.     

Health and Efficiency: Community Law and National Health Systems in the Light of Müller-Fauré

In Müller-Fauré the Court of Justice has made clear that restricting patients to receiving medical services from their domestic health systems is often contrary to EC Treaty rules on the free movement of services, particularly where the treatment is not in-patient. The patient should generally be able to go abroad for treatment at the expense of their national health authority. This has structural and financial repercussions for health care systems in several Member States, including the United Kingdom, whose systems are premised upon captive patients. It also has broader implications for welfare harmonisation and provision in the European Union. Exceptions are possible, where the implications for the national health system would be very serious, but Müller-Fauré indicates that the Court will not allow national courts or authorities to rely on these too freely.     

Commonwealth Diplomacy and the End of Apartheid

This article recounts the struggle that those fighting for an end to apartheid in South Africa faced and the role that the Commonwealth played in that struggle. The author recounts the contribution of the Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke administrations in Australia in bringing down the apartheid regime but stresses that these leaders chose the Commonwealth as their primary vehicle for change. In the author’s view, the fight against apartheid was, arguably, the finest achievement of the modern Commonwealth.