Sustainable citizenship for a technological world: negotiating deliberative dialectics

Incorporating the notion of sustainability is the biggest challenge for citizenship in a technological era. Existing conceptions of citizenship have not been able to grapple with compounded ecological, economic, cultural, and moral threats facing modern technology-infused societies. Nor has increased public participation, engagement, and dialogue resolved polarized positions on issues such as what constitutes quality of life or what is meant by the integrity of nature. This paper draws on the scholarship of both sustainability and citizenship to propose a framework of sustainable citizenship that seeks to emphasize shared values through a deliberated clash of ideas. Such a framework involves a negotiation of the dialectics of rights and responsibilities, state and non-state, public and private, human and non-human nature, universal and particular, and democracy and capitalism. The paper illustrates how sustainable citizenship can be applied to deal with contentious political and policy issues of new and emerging technologies.     

Competence in caring in legal practice

This article is concerned with the stories of female solicitors working in Queensland, Australia, and their account of ethics in practice. These narratives were sought and made in the context of our project investigating complaints received against practitioners in this jurisdiction. Our interviews with female lawyers were intended to provide more insight into complaints matters. Yet this discussion revealed broader insights into ethical questions about the nature of lawyer–client relationships and legal professionalism. This article considers these accounts by reflecting on the concept of ‘care’ and its fit with legal practice requirements today. In doing so, we consider the difficult gendered question of the relationship between caring and ‘women's’ practice. We do not assert a true woman's working style; we seek to contextualise our empirical research by tracing the complex effect of gender on lawyering roles. Finally, we suggest that the adoption of caring practice is a valid approach to lawyering and call for a caring approach to be re-valued in the legal professional context as an ethical proposition.     

Reviews

R. W. Davies, The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia 1. The Soviet Offensive: The Collectivisation of Soviet Agriculture, 1929–1930. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1980, xxi+491 pp., twenty tables. £20.00.

The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia 2. The Soviet Collective Farm, 1929–1930. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1980. x + 216 pp., nine tables. £20.00.

Zdeně'k Mlynár, Night Frost in Prague. The End of Humane Socialism. London: C. Hurst & Co., 1980. 300 pp. £9.50.

Alistair McAuley, Economic Welfare in the Soviet Union: Poverty, Living Standards and Inequality. Hemel Hempstead: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1979 and Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979. xix + 389pp. £15.00.

Nicolas Spulber, Organizational Alternatives in Soviet‐type Economies. London: C.U.P., 1979, x + 290 pp, index. £15.00.

J. H. Moore, Growth with Self‐Management: Yugoslav Industrialization 1952–1975. Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press, 1980. xvi + 334 pp. $17.95.

Richard K. Ashley, The Political Economy of War and Peace. The Sino‐Soviet‐American Triangle and the Modern Security Problematique. London: Frances Pinter (Publishers) Ltd., New York: Nichols Publishing Company, 1980. xv + 384 pp. £15.

Boris Komarov (pseud.), The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union. Foreword by Marshall I. Goldman. White Plains, New York: M. E. Sharpe,* 1980. x+150pp. $15.00.

George Katkov, The Kornilov Affair: Kerensky and the Break‐up of the Russian Army. London and New York: Longman, 1980. xiv + 210 pp. £4.95 paper.     

Aristotle's Introduction to the Problem of Happiness: On Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics

The study of Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics is useful today in part because it deals with a question—the nature of human happiness—whose relevance is obvious. But in dealing with that question, Book I compels us to raise difficulties for ourselves that, far from being obvious, are in danger of being forgotten. Chief among these difficulties are, first, the true character of our hope for happiness and, ultimately, the necessity of there being a kind of divine providence if that hope is to be realized. Inasmuch as we still long for happiness, we must still undergo the pull of that necessity, however distant it may appear to us to be. In bringing out our deepest concern in this way, the study of the first book of the Ethics also prepares us to become serious students of Aristotle's "philosophy of human matters" as a whole, which is concerned with the reality of providence because it is concerned with the possibility of philosophy as a way of life.     

Leadership and standards in American universities

This was the final address on education given by A. Bartlett Giamatti prior to his untimely death in 1989. It was delivered at the Gannett School of Journalism of Columbia University. Before becoming commissioner of major league baseball, he was president of Yale University from 1978 to 1986. His most recent book is A Free and Ordered Space.