Suchergebnisse

Views the assassination of the Serbian Prime Minister on Mar. 12, 2003 as a landmark in Serbian and Balkan history.

President George W. Bush, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, & Secretary of State Colin Powell claim that their ideology is "the new realism," The authors note several problems with this. First, the ideology of realism itself is shown not to work. Realism is the idea that military power is the driving force in the world. Experience has shown that other factors -- such as economic globalization, political democratization, particular belief systems, & international law & institutions -- impact global politics. Therefore realism is a simplistic model. Bush's use of the realism title may be an attempt to give the administration an image of truth & honesty, in contrast to the previous administration. Another theory for the use of the title is that more military emphasis is actually needed in certain cases, such as the unwillingness of the US to mediate in the Middle East. The "new realism" title may continue, but what is needed more then a label is a sensible foreign policy. R. Larsen

In this article, we argue that reflective realism offers a plausible methodology that takes nonparticipatory attitudes and beliefs seriously as candidates for legitimacy while simultaneously offering tools through which a critical distance on these attitudes and beliefs can be obtained. Against unmediated realism, according to which non-participatory attitudes warrant the conclusion that democracy ought to be non-participatory, we emphasize that they cannot serve as inputs for bottom-up legitimacy reconstructions when they are conditional upon detrimental features of the political system. In this context, we distinguish between two types of conditionality, unknown and known, and show how they necessitate two forms of critical engagement: ideology critique and a method of elicitation. Finally, we argue that Landemore's open democracy paradigm, with some important modifications, offers a solution to the ambiguity (some citizens want to participate, some will be reluctant) that realists may encounter in their bottom-up legitimacy reconstructions since it accommodates participatory and nonparticipatory attitudes alike.

Using animals in food and food production systems is one of many drivers of novel zoonoses. Moving toward less dependence on animal proteins is a possible avenue for reducing pandemic risk, but we think that Wiebers & Feigin's proposed change to food policy (phasing out animal meat production) is unrealistic in its political achievability and its current capacity to feed the world in a cost-effective and sustainable manner. We suggest that improvements in communication strategies, precipitated by developments in computational cognitive neuroscience, can lead the way to a safer future and are feasible now.

For the leaders in Beijing, the People's Republic of China has no eternal allies or perpetual enemies; only its interests are permanent. This principle has guided China's external relations in the past three decades and has shaped its alignments with the USSR, the United States, and other major powers. Foreign policy of the People's Republic will be influenced by these objectives: containment of Soviet expansionism; acquisition of foreign capital and technology to accelerate China's program of modernization; and Taiwan's reunification with the mainland. The United States is a crucial factor in each of these national objectives; hence Beijing seeks good relations with Washington. For domestic reasons, Beijing has inflated the importance of Taiwan in Sino-U.S. relations, but an agreement in August 1982 has provided a framework to manage Sino-U.S. disagreement about Taiwan. Sino-U.S. relations have improved markedly, as attested by the Zhao-Reagan exchange of visits and increasing economic cooperation.

"Analyzing the multifaceted receptions of Machiavelli from early modernity to the present history of Northeast Asia, this book explores a better East-West dialogue through which Machiavelli's political philosophy can be appropriated properly in Northeast Asian practices. This book will be attractive to scholars in political philosophy, history, political theory, comparative philosophy, and area studies focused on East Asia, as well as scholars working in the field of comparative literature"--

The Myth of Writer's Block takes the prominent postwar cultural myth of the "blocked" writer and reexamines it as an objective historical phenomenon. Modern literary texts often emerge from psychological crises, or seek to capture fictional crises, but once a writer's reputation is marked by a block myth--a negative formulation that a writer has somehow failed to live up to popular or critical standards of production--literary and philosophical problems can take on the appearance of psychological calamity. Block myths take flight because they are marketable; an established author's work increases in cultural value when it is perceived to be scarce. Such myths rarely represent reality, however, and most American authors who are perceived to have encountered a significant block, including Joseph Mitchell, Henry Roth, and Ralph Ellison, published a considerable amount of influential work in their lifetimes. These writers moreover shared an uncanny interest in documenting precarious matters of social and political morality, often disregarding conventions of craft and narrative coherence. This is no thematic coincidence. While all of these writers struggled independently through personal and intellectual crises, explaining the complex works they produced as specimens of mounting, monolithic block evades the unresolved moral questions--especially of race, ethnicity, class, and progress--they each confronted, however incompletely, in boldly realistic fictions and other accounts. A block myth represents a transfer of the burden of social and political morality from society to the individual writer in crisis. This study identifies this phenomenon as a modern critical problem, resists it where necessary, and documents the specific American moral emergencies that block myths conceal. Part One tracks the history of block as a philosophical placeholder, tracing the concept in American literary history from William James's The Principles of Psychology (1890) through the midcentury psychoanalytic vogue and the rise of psychological realism as a dominant genre. Part Two provides a series of case studies or production profiles of three writers who have supposedly been blocked, Mitchell, Roth, and Ellison, examining how block myths frequently conceal or evade morally realistic literary gestures.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: "Si la philosophie politique aspire à la justice, s'interdit-elle de penser l'histoire, les individus en chair et en os ? En bâtissant des châteaux en Espagne, n'a-t-elle pas peuplé la théorie politique d'artefacts imaginaires ou de « zombies raisonnables » ? Le mythe rationaliste en philosophie politique semble être le comble de l'aveuglement théorique. La théorie politique devient ipso facto aveugle à la violence – violence réelle des rapports sociaux, violence des rapports de genre, violence des guerres et des crimes de masse. La philosophie semble sourde à l'agonisme de la scène politique, incapable de prendre la mesure des situations réelles d'oppression et d'aliénation."

The publication of the new programme for government brought fewsurprises. It astonished nobody that two of its most significant components were ending the housing shortage and homelessness, and boosting jobs and rural development. The document weighs in at a hefty 155 pages, which averages out at 2.67 pages per government member and supporter. It seems as though every idea from every corner, no matter how unrealistic, was included to garner support. There were positives. It broadly identifies many pertinent issues, including the need for political leadership, tackling homelessness and promoting tenants' rights. It aims to review building standards and says it will set targets for delivery (although it does not assign responsibility). It will maintain tax reliefs for landlords who accept social tenants.

Neoclassical economics is often criticised for being deterministic and disconnected from social reality. A related criticism is that neoclassical economic theory is instrumentalist. This article argues that neoclassical economics, if properly understood, can be given a realist interpretation. The origins of classical and neoclassical economics are briefly discussed and the scholarly shift away from political economy is located in the marginal utility revolution in economic thought in the 1870s. It is argued that the core assumptions of neoclassical economics capture essential aspects of social reality and are not merely convenient, fictitious abstractions; that the charge of instrumentalismis not entirely justified, and that neoclassical economic theory does not imply that social processes are deterministic or mechanistic in reality.