Suchergebnisse

The devolution of political power to local governments is taking new directions as cities begin to look beyond national borders to create economic synergies with city regions in other countries rather than continuing to look to linkages with their capital cities for economic benefits. In East Asia the search for transborder urban linkages comes at a time when secondary cities in higher income countries are confronting major social and economic transformations. These new trends include: the rise of China in the global economy, the turn toward neoliberal downsizing of government, demographic transitions toward declining, rapidly aging populations with a diminishing labor force OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAcompensated partly by the large-scale recruitment of foreign workers and foreign spouses. The combined result of the new dynamics is that just when political power is being devolved to the urban scale, the global trend of "shrinking cities" has reached them. This discussion focuses on recent initiatives by the local governments of Busan, South Korea, and Fukuoka, Japan, to build a "common living sphere" through transborder linkages to provide a culturally rich, people-centered alternative that contrasts with the high-technology industrial clusters being planned for them from their corporatized capital cities. In addition to economic issues, cities engaged in such transborder initiatives challenge the meaning of national borders and citizenship while also confronting new issues in accommodating the appearance of multicultural societies, which have all remained outside of mainstream discussions on decentralization.(Pac Aff/GIGA)

In the Social Contract, Jean‐Jacques Rousseau advanced an impassioned critique of representative sovereignty, yet it is often thought that his objections were merely pragmatic and that he did not consider the question of representation to be a matter of basic political right. This article maintains, to the contrary, that Rousseau did have a principled argument against representative sovereignty and elucidates the nature and bearing of that argument by situating it in response to Hobbesian accounts of representation. Rousseau's argument is shown to have far‐reaching implications, as it entails that the existence of representative sovereignty contravenes two principles central to the legitimacy of modern democratic states: the sovereignty of the people and the moral equality of the citizens.

AbstractMeir Kohn () argues that two methodologies, the "value paradigm" and the "exchange paradigm," dominate modern economics with the equilibrium‐focused value paradigm increasingly replaced by the more successful exchange paradigm. This article examines the question of modern economic methodologies and seeks to determine if the shift described by Kohn can be seen in the winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics (1969–2010). Trends in Nobel laureates suggest that Kohn's depiction of the two paradigms and their relationship appears accurate.

In this article I explore Montesquieu's discussion of republics and the constitution of England in order to question the extent to which he should be accorded a central place in a tradition of modern republicanism. This involves challenging Paul Rahe's recent thesis that Montesquieu thought both that monarchy was not at all suited to modernity and that England was a republic all along. By stressing the importance of honour and ambition I argue that the liberty that Montesquieu thought exemplified in the English constitution was, in large part, secured by its monarchical principle. Moreover, by eschewing the relevance of political virtue for modern commercial societies, Montesquieu set his own proposals out in opposition to the prevalent French republican discourse of his time; thus it is highly problematic to view him as having proposed a republic for the moderns. The article also serves to disentangle Montesquieu's understanding of political liberty from his analysis of republics in order to refute the idea that he provides support for a distinctively republican conception of liberty as non-domination. This undermines the republican critique of liberalism set forth by Philip Pettit, which is further challenged by considering the affinities between Montesquieu's and Constant's conceptions of liberty. Many commentators have argued that Montesquieu repudiated classical republicanism, yet on the reading advanced in this article it is equally problematic to view him as a modern republican.

This article explores how the subject and practice of Yoga is emerging in American higher education as a counter-narrative, or alternative, to mainstream opinions and views. In democratic education, alternative views are important to fueling academic debate, but new views are also resisted. This article will explore the way in which Yoga is simultaneously embraced and resisted to show how counternarratives challenge a deeply pluralistic society. Examining the inclusion of Yoga in America's higher education system asks us to critically question our assumptions of homogeneity and refashion knowledge in terms of interdependency and co-construction.