Hannah Arendt on Kant, Truth and Politics

Hannah Arendt is right to give prominence to Kant's Critique of Judgment—for that work contains Kant's fullest treatment of 'ends' and purposes, and Kantian politics (embracing universal republicanism and eternal peace) is meant to be a 'legal' realization of moral ends (when 'good will' alone is too weak to produce what ought to be). But Arendt is wrong to try to extract a 'new' Kantian politics from Judgment's aesthetic ideas: Kantian politics is already 'there', and need not be squeezed out of his theory of art. She has chosen the right work, but given it a bizarre reading.     

Process matters: petitions systems in Britain’s legislatures

Over the past 15 years petitions systems have become embedded in the Scottish Parliament and the National Assembly for Wales, and more recently the House of Commons. This article uses the concept of procedural justice, with its emphasis on the fairness of the process by which decisions are made, as an analytical tool to explore four case studies of petitions systems in British legislatures, considering, in particular, the extent to which they enable voice, decision-making and transparency. It illustrates that the application of ideas of procedural justice not only provides us with a useful tool for analysing petitions systems in representative political institutions, but also potentially provides a framework of ideas from which petitions systems, and perhaps other participatory initiatives, may learn.     

Reviews

Archie Brown and Michael Kaser, (eds.) Soviet Policy for the 1980s, London: Macmillan/ St Antony's, 1982. 282 pp. £20.00 (hardback) £7–95 (paperback).

David Holloway and Jane M. O. Sharp, (eds.) The Warsaw Pact: Alliance in Transition? London: Macmillan, 1984, 290 pp. £25.00.

Daniel N. Nelson, (ed.) Soviet Allies: the Warsaw Pact and the Issue of Reliability. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1984—UK suppliers, Bowker Publishing Company, xiii + 273 pp. £22.50.

Bohdan Harasymiw, Political Elite Recruitment in the Soviet Union. London: Macmillan, 1984, xviii + 277 pp. £25.00.

Rex A. Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984, ix + 391 pp. $32.50.

Joachim Hoffmann, Die Geschichte der Wlassow‐Armee. Einzelschriften zur militärischen Geschichte des Zweiten Weltkrieges. Band 27. Verlag Rombach, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1984, xviii + 468 pp. DM. 32.00 (paperback).

Michal Mirski, The mixed economy: NEP and its lot. Translated from Polish by Roger A. Clarke. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1984, 295 pp. DKr. 125.

Jean‐Charles Asselain, Planning and Profits in Socialist Economies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984, xii + 269 pp. £12.50.

Roger Skurski, Soviet Marketing and Economic Development. London: Macmillan, 1983, 190 pp. £20.00.

Borys Lewytzkyj, Politics and Society in Soviet Ukraine 1953–80. Edmonton: Alberta: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1984, 219 pp.

Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity 1980–82. London: 1983, George Sanford, Polish Communism in Crisis. London‐New York: 1983.

Jack Bielasiak and Maurice D. Simon, (eds.) Polish Politics: Edge of the Abyss. New York: Praeger, 1984, xv + 366 pp.

Kari Möttölä, O. N. Bykov and I. S. Korolev, (eds.) Finnish‐Soviet Economic Relations, London: Macmillan (in association with the Finnish Institute of International Affairs), 1983, xxi + 358 pp. £30.00

John Dunn, The Politics of Socialism, An Essay in Political Theory Cambridge University Press. 1984, xviii + 107pp. £15 (hardback) £4.95 (paperback).     

How are companies paying for university research licenses? Empirical evidence from university-firm technology transfer

The Journal of Technology Transfer - The knowledge economy has put the triple helix cooperation at the heart of economic growth. In this current paradigm, innovation is vital to firm survival, and...