Rousseau's General Will: Freedom of a Particular Kind

Had Rousseau not been centrally concerned with freedom, some of the structural features of his political thought would be unaccountable. Above all, the notion of general will would not have become the core of his political philosophy. Rousseau's reasons for using 'general will' as his central political concept were essentially philosophical. The two terms of general will - 'will' and 'generality' - represent two main strands in his thought. 'Generality' stands for the rule of law, for civic education that draws us out of ourselves and towards the general (or common) good. 'Will' stands for Rousseau's conviction that civil association is 'the most voluntary act in the world', that 'to deprive your will of all freedom is to deprive your actions of all morality'. And if one could 'generalize' the will, so that it 'elects' only law, citizenship, and the common good, and avoids 'willful' self-love, then one would have a general will in Rousseau's particular sense. The distinctiveness of Rousseau's general will is further brought out through a comparison with Kant's 'good will' about which Rousseau would have felt severe doubts.     

Windows of Opportunity: Window Subseries Empirical Variance Estimators in International Relations

We show that temporal, spatial, and dyadic dependencies amongobservations complicate the estimation of covariance structuresin panel databases. Ignoring these dependencies results in covarianceestimates that are often too small and inferences that may bemore confident about empirical patterns than is justified bythe data. In this article, we detail the development of a nonparametricapproach, window subseries empirical variance estimators (WSEV),that can more fully capture the impact of these dependencieson the covariance structure. We illustrate this approach ina simulation as well as with a statistical model of internationalconflict similar to many applications in the international relationsliterature.     

Gender, citizenship and human reproduction in contemporary Italy

This article examines how the recently introduced law on assisted reproduction in Italy, which gives symbolic legal recognition to the embryo, came about, and how a referendum, which would have repealed large sections of it, failed. The occupation of the legal space by the embryo is the outcome of a crusade by a well-organised alliance of theo-conservatives. These groups see in reproductive medicine an uncontrolled interference with their notion of the natural order of things. Such a worldview requires a total ban on stem cell research, limitation of access to reproductive technologies and repressive laws to govern the area. This conservative dream scenario has come closer to being realised by the introduction of a law doing all of these things in the name of the protection of “Life”. In the case of this law, the “life” to be protected is the embryo. In the name of “Life”, scientific advances and individual liberty have been curbed. The politics of embryo citizenship is a politics which values the yet to come over the here and now, purgation over pleasure, and the transcendent over the material.     

Interweaving Aboriginal/Indigenous Rights with Urban Citizenship: A View from the Winnipeg Low-Cost Housing Sector,Canada

State-society relations around low-cost housing in Canada changed from a period of strong federal leadership centred on social rights to a period of state retrenchment. A coalition of housing stakeholders from the public, private, and voluntary sectors self-organized in Winnipeg to create new low-cost housing following the 1993 discontinuation of federal social housing programs. This move toward urban citizenship was not received in the same way by Aboriginal peoples pursuing a distinctive set of rights centred on self-determination alongside common social (housing) goals. While Aboriginal rights are given regard at the federal level, they were not embedded in localized citizenship processes. Expanding the theorization of urban citizenship, the empirical results in this article reveal that discourses of democratic racism and cultural neutrality permeate mainstream views, running counter to Aboriginal citizenship pursuits.     

Mapping Public Participation in Policy Choices

In an era of democratic discontent, more and better participation in policy making has become a standard expectation. Yet it is rarely clear what counts as participation, and how the many practices loosely bundled under the label should be understood. This paper has a modest undergrowth‐clearing objective: to examine assumptions behind competing typologies of participation, and to propose a classification framework less laden by idealist notions of democracy.