Suchergebnisse

Sustainability is a permanent concern of humankind. It requires attention to environmental issues such as reducing pollution, limiting resource use, and protecting biodiversity. It requires concern for future generations and is the responsibility of every person on earth. Its requirements for multi‐dimensional cooperation, shared values and goals, participation and empowerment, and learning, represent a greater challenge for communitarianism than most other social issues. To span geography, political systems, cultures, and many generations of time, it is argued that supra‐communitarianism is needed. This article contains several recommendations to foster the evolution of supracommunitarianism to support sustainability.

Inclusive communitarianism focuses on the feeling of home as the source of personal identity and individual well-being. The feeling of home can be disrupted by moving to a new dwelling, community or nation, or by experiencing changes to one's dwelling or community while remaining in place. Immigration can cause both a disruption to the feeling of home for immigrants and for those living in the community immigrants settle in. Traditional communitarianism seeks to protect current members from changes resulting from immigration. Inclusive communitarianism seeks the construction of an inclusive narrative community identity in which all residents can feel at home.

Many have criticized liberalism for being too individualistic, but few have offered an alternative that goes beyond a vague affirmation of the need for community. In this entertaining book, written in dialogue form, Daniel Bell fills this gap, presenting and defending a distinctively communitarian theory against the objections of a liberal critic. Drawing on the works of such thinkers as Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, and Alasdair MacIntyre, Bell attacks liberalism's individualistic view of the person by pointing to our social embeddedness. He develops Michael Walzer's idea that political thinking involves the interpretation of shared meanings emerging from the political life of a community, and intelligently rebuts criticism that this approach damages his case by being conservative and relativistic. Communitarianism and Its Critics is a provocative defense of a distinctly communitarian theory which will stimulate interest and debate among scholars and students of political theory as well as those approaching the subject for the first time.

ALTHOUGH ROBERTO UNGER IS SOMETIMES DESCRIBED AS A COMMUNITARIAN CRITIC OF LIBERALISM, HIS RECENT THREE-VOLUME WORK ON POLITICS DISAVOWS THE MAJOR TENETS OF CONTEMPORARY COMMUNITARIANISM - FOR EXAMPLE, THE 'EMBEDDED SELF,' THE CRITIQUE OF RIGHTS, THE REJECTION OF UNIVERSALIZING THEORY. INSTEAD, UNGER'S AIM IS TO CRITICIZE LIBERALISM FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A 'SUPERLIBERALISM' - A PERSPECTIVE WHICH TAKES THE ORIGINAL LIBERAL DESIRE TO EMANCIPATE INDIVIDUALS FROM THE CHAINS OF SOCIAL CUSTOM AND HIERARCHY AND RIDS IT OF THE STULTIFYING ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS WITHIN WHICH LIBERALS HAVE SOUGHT TO CONTAIN IT. THREE MAIN COMPONENTS OF UNGER'S THEORY ARE ANALYZED: THE IDEA OF 'NEGATIVE CAPABILITY,' OR THE POWER OF INDIVIDUALS TO REVISE AND TRANSCEND THEIR SOCIAL CONTEXTS; THE IDEA OF AN 'EMPOWERED DEMOCRACY,' WHICH SEEKS TO OPEN UP ALL ASPECTS OS SOCIETY TO THE COLLECTIVE EXERCISE OF NEGATIVE CAPABILITY; AND THE IDEA OF 'IMMUNITY RIGHTS,' WHICH SEEK TO PROTECT INDIVIDUALS FROM THE POTENTIAL RISKS OF RADICAL DEMOCRACY. THE AUTHOR ARGUES THAT ALL THREE UNDERESTIMATE THE RISKS TO INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY OF THE OVER-POLITICIZATION OF SOCIAL LIFE.

Abstract This article investigates the power/knowledge relations between contemporary penal government and criminological theory. Based on an analysis of the strategic case of the Netherlands, the emergence of what can be called neoliberal communitarianism is discussed. In relation to the 'penal welfarism' it succeeds, neoliberal communitarianism provides a rationale of governing that allows a greater amount of complexity precisely because it consists of a paradoxical set of doctrines, discourses and techniques. This involves an emphasis on both 'individual responsibility' and 'community', protecting market and community by tightening social control, law and order and the production of rational self-controlling individuals while excluding the cultural and biological 'risk citizen'. The article illustrates the incorporation of criminological theories as policy underpinnings, and it explicates how criminological theories can be placed in the discursive space of neoliberal communitarianism. Keywords neoliberalism – communitarianism – prevention – punishment – genealogy