Suchergebnisse

The international academic community is currently exploring the development of the intelligence studies domain as a social science project. The current position paper argues for a project to connect, in content terms, the Romanian political science with the domain of intelligence studies. It takes into account the international and local context, and presents some of the benefits to be generated by the intersection of these two domains.

This article is following the evolution of the understanding of the concept of "property" in the Catholic Church's social doctrine, during a period of 120 years, starting with the pontificate of Leo XIII and ending with the one of Pope Benedict XVI. Being about the various understandings related to the concept of "property" in the Church's social doctrine, only the official discourse of the popes will be followed (magisterium) together with the input brought by the Second Vatican Council in interpreting and defining the concept.

The article surveys the various stances taken in interwar Romania towards the contemporary international - particularly French - trends of legal and political theory meant at counteracting the shortcomings manifested by the legislative patterns of Napoleonic provenance when confronted with the exigencies of expanding associational life and the need of growing state intervention in the sphere of the relations between economic factors. The crisscrossing visions of federalist syndicalism and, respectively, juridical socialism - exposed most conspicuously by the legal philosophers Léon Duguit and Emmanuel Lévy - are shown to receive various evaluations in the local milieu, from the part of authors connected with the leading journal of the Romanian Social Institute and otherwise (and always by reference to the predicament of social reform in the national space). It is highlighted that the impact of the ideas involved in the debate was broader and more diffuse than one could assume when taking into consideration only the outspoken - and partly obsolete - objectives and premises of the argumentations in question.

The present article brings to the fore several details, which had been either unknown, or only partially familiar to the Romanian historiographers. The author refers to academic trajectories of the 14 young Romanians (almost half originating from Bucharest or Iaşi), who obtained their PhD in political and administrative sciences at the Free University of Brussels between 1885 and 1899. Over a third of them were also doctors in law. Of the 92 PhDs in political science awarded in Brussels between 1885-1899, the Romanians were on the second position in a formal hierarchy of the students who were not of Belgian descent. The foreigners counted 51 students, and the list was dominated by the Bulgarians, who had obtained 21 diplomas, while the Japanese held a distant third place with merely 4 PhD degrees.

The article presents the prison in terms of symbols: how it shows space, as time is divided and how spatial and time management architecture affects social relationships between prison inmates, staff and others.

The study catches a glimpse of the different faces of "communist death", imagined as "assumed death", "egalitarian death", or exemplary (i.e., heroic) death. In fact, this was really the death of individuality. The goal of this study was achieved through transdisciplinary methodologies, which involve the specific tools of social investigation, interconnected disciplines (see political history, political, cultural and funerary anthropology, social psychology, art and architecture history), through convergent usage of historical sources specific to recent history (official documents, newspapers of the Stalinist period, memory literature, ethnographic sources, funerary inscriptions, interviews). The aim is to present the operations involved in the ideologization of death, a process demanded by "the hunger for legitimacy" of the communist system.

Thanks to theoretical advances in the natural sciences and the decreased cost of computer technology, computational modeling is becoming an increasingly popular tool in the social sciences. Due to its relative novelty and somewhat marginal position in most disciplines, however, research of this kind has primarily focused on methodological challenges posed by applications to social phenomena. By contrast, the method's theoretical foundations are still relatively poorly understood and many theoretical possibilities remain unexplored by computational scholars. At the same time, social theorists, following in the footsteps of Georg Simmel's pioneering contributions a century ago, have developed a process-based research tradition that anticipates the scientific practices of today's computer-based research. In short, if the sociological process theorists have been computational modelers avant la lettre, the latter can be seen as process theorists "après la lettre".

The author tackles the controversial problem of the relation between theory and ideology in Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels' political writings. The article is structured into two main parts: the first one is focused on Marx's vision of a revolutionary intellectual as a base for the development of both theory and ideology. The second one deals with Marx's posterity, as it was established by the contribution of Friedrich Engels.

The article takes issue with the deeply entrenched historical conception about the shaping of social policies in pre-communist Romania, which indicates socialist politics and socialist-enlisted worker trade-unionism as the only significant agents of change, also depicting the non-socialist political forces of the time as participating to the process by merely employing the strategy of stern resistance and piecemeal concessions. The alternative view offered stresses the pivotal roles performed in the context by the ideological trend of socially-minded liberalism, by the movements of professional representation with petty entrepreneurial and white-collar constituencies and by the corporatist design for the representation of professional interests. The successive stages of the inquiry leading to the formulation of such interpretative theses - and inaugurated as a research on the relation between fascist modernism and the corporatist vision of rapid economic growth under an authoritarian political cover in the local milieu - are disclosed all throughout.

The legal architecture of the EU is considered to be sui generis and like any other hybrid system, the process of integration and interaction with the older instruments of the member-states can sometimes become difficult. This article investigates the interventionist tendencies of the Bundesverfassungsgericht in EU development and the reactions of the EU Court of Justice. The main finding is that the German Court often acts as a balance setter in the process of EU integration. The research introduces the debate of the national states' legal resistance to integration and highlights the changes brought in this respect by the Treaties of Maastricht and Lisbon.

During the first half of the 19th century, social public care was organized along two directions: commitment of professional beggars, without a family, in specialized institutions, and home assistance of beggars with families (by a monthly pension and by an annual change of clothes). The article relies on archive documents, such as potential beneficiaries' help requests, administrative documents issued by the authorities, lists of help beneficiaries, inquiries, etc. It presents aspects related to the practical functioning of the social assistance: types of beneficiaries, pension distribution procedures, abuses and frauds. The legal limitations of the administrative rigidity of the pension system were strictly defined, even before the assessment of the real needs in society. This is the reason the efficiency of the pension system was lower than expected both by the authorities and the beneficiaries.

The article presents the way the first Associations and Foundations are set up in Romania, focusing on the tight circle of people dedicated to the domain and specialized on the road, staying forever in the NGO sector, moving from one organization to another or working for more than one at the same time. From lack of legislation to unclear regulations, NGOs struggle on their path with logistical issues which influenced their performance, public image, their projects and mostly their results. The author identifies the outcome as determined by the struggle to access grants, the NGO agenda versus financer's agenda, the absence of grants for a specific type of issues, the shortage of the professionalized staff, the challenge of working with volunteers, the compulsory annual reports and financial reports to the Government authorities.

The article presents rituals frequently encountered in the world of prisons, from the initiation (baptism) in the adaptation of rebellion. Each type of ritual is described based on observation and interviews with various inmates, employees or specialists.