Democracy and the limits of political realism

ABSTRACT

This article explores the recent resurgence of realism in the political sciences, questioning its relevance for democratic theory. Starting from a critical review of recent works in the field, the article calls into question the relevance of empirical investigations of political reality for normative theorizing, and contends that some of the normative conclusions advanced in this literature are not warranted. More precisely, the article questions the reliability of studies of political behavior and of political opinion as a sound basis on which to draw normative inferences about democratic legitimacy. It contends that the kind of epistemic realism their authors promote cannot deliver what it promises. The article concludes by proposing an alternative interpretation of the democratic principle as a practical postulate of political reason that reconciles empirical evidence about political behavior with the classical interpretation of democratic legitimacy.     

费正清的两岸关系论述及其台湾效应

冷战时期,以费正清为代表的美国学术界以台湾作为研究中国的基地,而费正清也积极地介入两岸关系与台湾事务。费正清的＂大陆—台湾＂论述可以分为三个时期：早期的＂亲共＂,中期的＂反共＂,与后期的＂两岸共治＂。费正清多变的面孔反映了美国不同时期基于美国国家利益而做出的对中国两岸政策的调整,而台湾对费正清体系的反应则体现了冷战时期西方同盟内部中心与边缘地区的矛盾,以及两种不同政治体制、不同文化之间的冲突。     

Sex,lies and rigged returns – the Kerry county parliamentary election of 11 June 1634 and its consequences

The 1634 Kerry county election involved the mis-return by the deputy sheriff of the Protestant father-in-law of the sheriff, rather than the Catholic John FitzGerald, a member of the local gentry. FitzGerald successfully appealed the return and was elected MP; however, the injustice of the original return rankled and, combined with a bitter existing family dispute with FitzGerald’s brother-in-law Patrick FitzMaurice, Lord Kerry and Lixnaw, led to accusations of sexual infidelity and a ruinous case in the Irish equivalent of the English Star Chamber. FitzGerald’s subsequent return in a by-election in 1640 formed part of the downfall of the Irish Lord Deputy, Sir Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. This study of the 1634 Kerry county election also forces a revision of the accepted view of Wentworth’s conduct of all the elections for that Irish parliament, with consequences for an understanding of the early stages of his deputyship.     

SPLM–NCP asymmetrical power relations jeopardise the implementation of the CPA and the future of the Sudan

ABSTRACT

The political instability that has characterised Sudanese politics since independence is attributable to political exclusion, economic neglect and marginalisation. Discrimination based on religion, language and culture has constituted the main contradictions between the masses of the Sudanese people (periphery) and the politically dominant Arabised Nubians (centre) in all the different politico-ideological hues experienced by the nation. Attempts to resolve this contradiction have left the structural imbalances inherited from the colonial administration of the Sudan intact. This explains the resurgence of war, particularly in Southern Sudan. The recent peace agreements between the National Congress Party (NCP), namely the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) with the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A); the Darfur Peace Agreement with the Sudanese Liberation Movement (SLM) (Minawi); the Cairo Agreement with the National Democratic Alliance and the Eastern Sudan Peace Agreement with the Eastern Sudan Front, have left the NCP still in firm control of the oppressive state machinery. The CPA power-sharing protocol awarded the NCP a majority which institutionalises a power asymmetry that the NCP utilises to obstruct implementation of the CPA and delay the process of democratic transformation.

This article analyses the asymmetry in the NCP–SPLM partnership and power relationship. It assumes that the tragic death of Dr. John Garang de Mabior is a major cause of the political weakness demonstrated by the SPLM since 2005. This power imbalance jeopardises the CPA implementation and the future of the Sudan as a state.     

Chapter 8: The “Citizen” in Youth Civic Engagement

SUMMARY

The concept of citizenship is a central, necessary, and defining feature of youth civic engagement. Any effort to educate young people for citizenship entails an implicit idea of what a “good citizen” is. There are a number of different and sometimes competing versions of what is a “good citizen.” This chapter reviews “standard” accounts of citizenship in political theory and offers lived citizen as a critical expansion and bridging dimension to current discourses of citizenship. We develop this idea through our readings of the three initiatives in conversation with the writing of Hannah Arendt and John Dewey. Our reading of Arendt and Dewey provides a grounded, embodied, and fluid understanding of the relationship between doing citizen activities (PA, YIG, YSC), becoming citizen (learning through interaction), and being citizen.     

The Ethiopian root of Thomas More’s Utopia

The classical utopian novels of early-modern Europe, such as Utopia, Christianopolis and City of the sun, are widely understood in mainstream academics as products of the writers’ inventive imaginations of better social organisations. Suggestions regarding the possibility that places with the social and administrative features depicted in the novels might actually have existed in medieval times, are often dismissed by Western scholars who argue that the role of non-European civilisations in the early-modern proliferation of utopian novels did not go beyond helping to inspire the writers’ creative mix of narrations. A disregard for the fact that medieval utopian novels could be modified and/or de-identified versions of earlier reports about 12^th- and 13^th-century Ethiopians (‘the Land of Prester John’) has severely distorted the mainstream understanding of utopianism and renaissance by African scholars. This article specifically focuses on More’s Utopia, to assert its Ethiopian root using historical and religious evidence.     

The Room and the Street: Gwen John’s and Jean Rhys’s Insider/Outsider Modernism

The modernist city is commonly thought of as a city of exteriors; we envision the ‘spaces of modernity’ as sites of industry or leisure, and apply the very notion of the ‘urban’—urban planning, urban studies—to the way we approach public spaces. But by reading together the paintings of Gwen John (1876–1939) and the writings of Jean Rhys (1890–1979), we discern a different modernist story than we are used to hearing—one that collapses divisions between the room and the street, the private and the public. By focusing on tropes of rooms in their works, the author seeks to nuance our understanding of John’s and Rhys’s relationship to community from within the supposed safety or isolation of their interior rooms, and argues more broadly for a women’s modernism of the city that collapses divisions between the room and the street, the private and the public. These two figures, who are usually read as ‘outsiders’ to mainstream modernist culture, produce a distinct ‘insider/outsider’ aesthetic which reveals them to be working not outside, but at the very heart of modernist experimentation.     

The sacred may not be the same as the religious: Angela Carter's ‘Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene’ and ‘Black Venus’

John Everett Millais's painting The Bridesmaid (1851) depicts a young woman, on the evening of a wedding, attempting to conjure up a vision of her own future husband. This work has been linked to a number of others by Millais dealing with marriage, and has been seen as an articulation of 'matrimonial ideology'. Brown sets the picture in the context of the widespread, though clandestine, practice of fortune-telling, through which women in particular attempted to foreknow, and thus control, the central event of their lives. One of the most frequent questions asked of fortune-tellers was 'whom shall I marry?', the question the girl in the painting has herself asked. However, drawing on recent critical work on 'proposal composition' pictures, Bown argues that men, too, faced great uncertainty on the brink of marriage, and that artists repeatedly explored this uncertainty through attempts to represent a complex female subjectivity in their works. In The Bridesmaid Millais (who was thinking about marriage in the early 1850s) depicts a woman telling her fortune, but he also seeks to represent her as full of thoughts and feelings. The artist, and the viewer of the painting, then, engages in an act of divination in which he tries to discover the mysterious secrets of female subjectivity.     

Cohen vs. Rawls on justice and equality

G.A. Cohen criticizes Rawls’s account of justice because his difference principle permits inequalities that reflect the relative scarcity of different skills and natural abilities. Instead of viewing the ‘basic structure’ as the primary subject of justice, Cohen argues that individual citizens should cultivate an egalitarian ethos, which would enable a just society to dispense with the use of incentive payments to induce individuals to use their talents in socially ideal ways. This study examines Cohen’s critique, including his rejection of ‘incentives,’ and vindicates Rawls’s approach. Ultimately, Cohen’s argument fails to grapple with the moral pluralism that characterizes modern, democratic societies, whereas Rawls’s theory is constructed to accommodate such pluralism.     

洛克自然权利理论的法治诠释简

自然权利理论作为洛克政治法律思想的逻辑推演起点在洛克的政治大厦中占据重要位置.通过厘清“自然状态—自然权利—法律权利—法治”这样一条脉络,可以清晰而逻辑地回答洛克自然权利理论对于当代中国法治实践的理论关怀.同时,洛克的财产权理论是洛克自然权利的第一要素.从自然状态到自然权利表征了人类社会权利理念的勃兴,而从自然权利尤其是财产权到法律权利的进化则为法治秩序弥散机制的生成提供了理论基础.通过现代法治理论诠释洛克的自然权利概念并厘清洛克的自然权利言说,能够为国家法治治理开辟一条更坚实的道路.