Exemplary Lives and the Normative Theory of Culture

This article defends an essentialist account of culture against the recent turn toward nonessentialism in contemporary liberal multiculturalism. It does so by drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche's early period and argues that Nietzsche provides an alternative to the dominant tradition of Volk conceptions of culture that derive from J. G. Herder. Nietzsche's alternative—what I call the “Exemplar Account” of culture—defines culture in terms of the patterns of human excellence that constitute it. This alternative overcomes standard concerns about essentialism by embracing the nonessentialist insight into the fluidity and variability of any culture's beliefs, values, and practices, yet holds that exemplary lives transcend the flux of culture and individuate one culture from another. I suggest in conclusion a practical benefit of this conception of culture for contemporary multiculturalism—namely, it fares better than other conceptions in fostering integration among diverse cultures, a pressing worry facing the current project of multiculturalism.     

社会记忆研究:从“集体记忆”到记忆实践的历史社会学

尽管有多个学科和不同背景的学术研究领域做了大量的工作,社会记忆研究仍然是一个缺乏固定范式的、没有中心的、跨学科的事业。要纠正这种相对混乱的局面,我们有必要推进多项工作,将社会记忆视为一个有用的传统和一个可加工的范围,为将来的工作奠定基础。我们需要追溯这项事业的家世,回顾围绕社会记忆之基本定义产生的争论,勾勒出历史的视角,并评价与社会记忆静力学和动力学有关的社会学理论。     

Lessons learnt from two decades of international environmental agreements: law

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - As Patricia Birnie cautiously and prophetically put it in the inaugural issue of this journal (INEA 1, January 2001, p. 74),...     

Asserting EU cohesion: Common foreign and security policy and the relaunch of Europe

The end of the Cold War and its fall‐out throughout the 1990s have created an atmosphere of pessimism about the prospects for the continued development of the integrative structures and processes of the European Union. Exclusionary criteria for monetary union and insufficient democratic institutional structures coupled with a neo‐realist critique of the integrationist project seem to have taken their toll. However, in the historical context of European integration, trade‐offs between the imperatives of deepening cooperation among the member‐states, and widening the community by including new members is, in fact, the norm. Thus, the problems inherent in the drive towards monetary union contain the seeds of cooperation in other areas. Specifically, the European Union will come to emphasize second‐pillar issues of foreign and defense policy both as a method to extend the integrative process in a functional manner, but also to attend to the vital supernational interests of community members.     

Beyond COVID-19: Five commentaries on expert knowledge,executive action,and accountability in governance and public administration

Several Canadian and international scholars offer commentaries on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for governments and public service institutions, and fruitful directions for public administration research and practice. This first suite of commentaries focuses on the executive branch, variously considering: the challenge for governments to balance demands for accountability and learning while rethinking policy mixes as social solidarity and expert knowledge increasingly get challenged; how the policy-advisory systems of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and United Kingdom were structured and performed in response to the COVID-19 crisis; whether there are better ways to suspend the accountability repertoires of Parliamentary systems than the multiparty agreement struck by the minority Liberal government with several opposition parties; comparing the Canadian government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Global Financial Crisis and how each has brought the challenge of inequality to the fore; and whether the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated or disrupted digital government initiatives, reinforced traditional public administration values or more open government.