Suchergebnisse

Distributive justice in its modern sense calls on the state to guarantee that everyone is supplied with a certain level of material means. Samuel Fleischacker argues that guaranteeing aid to the poor is a modern idea, developed only in the last two centuries. Earlier notions of justice, including Aristotle's, were concerned with the distribution of political office, not of property. It was only in the eighteenth century, in the work of philosophers such as Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant, that justice began to be applied to the problem of poverty. To attribute a longer pedigree to distributive justice is to fail to distinguish between justice and charity. Fleischacker explains how confusing these principles has created misconceptions about the historical development of the welfare state. Socialists, for instance, often claim that modern economics obliterated ancient ideals of equality and social justice. Free-market promoters agree but applaud the apparent triumph of skepticism and social-scientific rigor. Both interpretations overlook the gradual changes in thinking that yielded our current assumption that justice calls for everyone, if possible, to be lifted out of poverty. By examining major writings in ancient, medieval, and modern political philosophy, Fleischacker shows how we arrived at the contemporary meaning of distributive justice

This personal reflection of more than 40 years' work on the supply of labour in a household context discusses the relationship between social science history (the application to historical phenomena of the tools developed by social scientists) and local population studies. The paper concludes that historians working on local source materials can give something new back to social scientists and social science historians, urging them to remake their tools.

D. Hume's political science was a turning point in the history of political thought. It was a structured attempt to form an experience-based political science along the lines tried by the philosophers of antiquity. Its discussion of forms of government, the mixed government of Great Britain, the role of the legislature, influence of the government on social conduct, sources of military power, the wisdom of colonial acquisition, merits of the policies of Greece & Rome in antiquity, & its conception of a perfect republic, are all a systematic response to the works of Machiavelli, Harrington, Bolingbroke, & others. Hume's concept of constitutional government is derived from a consistent application of experimental reason to the political domain. Therefore, his political science offers a new theory of republican government which has deeply influenced United States thinkers, eg Hamilton & Madison, who found it applicable to great mercantile societies. Modified HA.

From the Middle Ages to the present, intercultural exchange has shaped knowledge and scholarship in Central Europe. While nationalism, practical and methodological, as well as memory practices created a clear-cut vision of German-Polish scholarly contacts, this volume proposes interconnectedness, entanglement and circulation as new modes of inquiry. Based on examples ranging from architectural knowledge to philosophy and from archaeology to physical chemistry, contributions to this volume seek for alternative ways to tell the stories of scholarly relations in the space shaped not only by multilinguality, but also by power inequalities, imperialism and nationalisms. In particular, they counter the widespread center-periphery dependence by concentrating on encounters and sites "in between" as privileged places of inquiry. Last but not least, they put to the test the prevailing categories of historical research of the space in question, highlighting the variety of identifications and ways they impacted scholarly communication.

AbstractThe simplistic, but still influential, idea of a clear-cut boundary between science and politics does not capture the complexities of the ongoing "dialogue between science and politics." Neither do political scientists live in an ivory tower, nor do they breathe the air of a separate world. However, the relation between political science practitioners and the rest of the world remains knotty. In this contribution we outline the value of a focus on "practical reflexivity" to assist in the dialogue with political practice. Based on proposals from social theory we evaluate six strategies of coping with the dilemmas of engaging with practice. The strategies provide a menu of choice for political scientists, as well as systematization of furthering the discussion on practical reflexivity.