Social justice is a crucial ideal in contemporary political thought. Yet the concept of social justice is a recent addition to our political vocabulary, and comparatively little is known about its introduction into political debate or its early theoretical trajectory. Some important research has begun to address this issue, adding a valuable historical perspective to present-day controversies about the concept. This article uses this literature to examine two questions. First, how does the modern idea of social justice differ from previous conceptualisations of justice? Second, why and when did social justice first emerge into political discourse?
This paper argues that the analytical tools for conceptual and contextual literacy need to be made explicit in the first year curriculum especially for non graduate entry LLB programs. The paper explains rationale for the subject, the evolution of the syllabus and evaluates the experience of facilitating student learning in the subject so far. At JCU Legal Concepts subject introduces students to a broad overview of the concepts applicable to basic areas of the law. Thus the subject offers a preparatory foundation for further three years of study. Legal Concepts is one of six subjects in the foundational JCU First Year Experience program. Other subjects are Legal Research, Writing and Analysis, Legal Institutions and Processes, Law, Society and Change and Contract 1 and 2. Law, Society and Change and Legal Concepts complement each other. Law, Society and Change introduces students to social science concepts such as: ideology, discourse, social construction, power, the state, the market, kinship and family, identity, class, race, ethnicity, caste, gender, sex, sexuality, colonialism, globalization. The subject enables students to view the law through the prism of society not vice versa. They are able to critique the law in terms of the social context in which it is made and in which it operates. For instance, to ask how relevant, given the large variety of forms that intimate relationships take, are marriage laws in Australia? Or to explore how hierarchies of esteem such as race or sexuality are constructed by law as an expression of dominant ideologies? The Legal Concepts subject, the focus of this presentation, introduces the core jurisprudential concepts of a common law legal system, namely the concepts of: - Personality, - Liability, - Property, - Contract, - Fiduciary obligations, - Rights, - Sovereignty and good process such as natural justice, constitutionalism and the Rule of Law. These concepts are selected because of the importance and breadth of areas of law they underpin. The 'law jobs' that the areas of law reflecting the concept are contextualized so that each concept is critiqued in terms of its relevance and possible obsolescence in the face a dimension of technological, political, cultural, economic or ecological change. This contextualized critique exposes areas of mismatch between, for instance, western liberal notions of property and Indigenous normative schemes, classical contract law and e-commerce, the concept of Westphalian sovereignty and the new challenges to global governance posed say by climate change, and so on. The two subjects are designed to complement each other by providing a foundation jurisprudential and social science conceptual vocabulary.
Many years after its emergence in the vocabulary of comparative politics, the label of 'anti-system' is still one of the most used to describe a party or group that exerts a radical form of opposition. However, the term has been used in an increasingly idiosyncratic manner, which makes it inappropriate for comparative research. The origins of the concept reside in the writings of Sartori on party systems in the 1960s and 1970s, where it mainly referred to the totalitarian parties of the inter-war and post-war decades. Since its inception, however, the concept of an anti-system party has not only been used in party system analysis, but also in the context of empirical studies of various aspects of the life of democratic regimes, to indicate challenges to its stability, legitimacy or, more recently, consolidation. This article reconstructs the concept of 'anti-systemness' by disentangling its different empirical referents in party system theory and in the empirical analysis of democracy, and proposes a more refined typology of 'anti-system parties'.
In: Christiansen , C O 2008 , ' Conceptual History exploring new Fields: How Conceptual History might contribute to a Narrative of 20th Century Management and Organizational Ideas ' , Paper presented at Transcending Concepts: The History of Experiences, Interpretations, and Argumentation , Concepta - International Research School in Conceptual History and Political Thought; Institute of History and Civilization, University of Southern Denmark; Danish Research School in History , Denmark , 24/04/2008 - 25/04/2008 .
This paper argues that the concept of management is a key concept in the social and political vocabulary of modern western countries. Relying on Koselleck's criteria for selection of key social and political concepts that he originally put forth in the introduction to Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (GG1:p.XIV), it is argued that the concept of management fulfils four out of Kosellecks six criteria. Now, on the premise that management is indeed a key social and political concept, the paper briefly outlines some of the possible methodological strengths of conceptual history applied to the field of the history of management. In particular, I argue that a history of the management concept could provide new insights concerning: (1) first, the ability of the concept of management to connect or 'couple' with other forms of knowledge, understanding and practice, and the ability of the concept of management to 'travel' into other spheres of society than the original business or industrial setting; (2) and, second, a history of the management concept could provide new insights concerning the temporality of management. Furthermore, it is suggested that the history of the concept of management could have corrective purposes towards current history of management thought and history of management rhetoric. These are all good reasons for studying the history of the management concept. However, at the end of the paper I shall briefly mention some of my reservations towards conceptual history as a research strategy in this field. Since the purpose of the paper is mainly explorative, some of its arguments are rather sketchy.
Oili Pulkkisen valtio-opin väitöstutkimuksessa analysoidaan poliittisen ilmiötä skotlantilaisessa valistuksessa 1700-luvun jälkipuoliskolla. Näennäisen ongelmattomana pidetty politiikka-käsite paljastuu moniulotteiseksi tiedon, elämänalan ja taidon käsitekimpuksi. Työssä sovelletaan käsitehistoriallista metodologiaa uudella tavalla. Keskeinen tutkimuskohde on politiikan käsite, jota tutkittavat ajattelijat eivät pitäneet lainkaan ongelmallisena. ; Taking the polit-vocabulary – politics, polity, policy, political and a politician – as a point of departure, this study reconstructs the idea of the political in the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment. A conceptual method – a particular mode of conceptual history – plays a crucial role in this study. The political is conceptualised by reading the spontaneous use of the politconceptions, metaphors and allusions of the political. According to present interpretation, politics as knowledge was interwoven to ethics and jurisprudence as well as the political was subordinated to the social, or even synonymous with it. This study contemplates an alternative interpretation of the political as a particular sphere of human life and knowledge. Three modes of the political can be reconstructed in the Scottish texts: the political as politics, the political as a particular sphere of human life, and the political as prudent activity. The internal differentiation of moral science, especially elementary lectures on morals, reflected politics as a particular branch of moral science. The political as a sphere was reflected by the concept of a political society, which represented a particular mode of human life. The differentiation of the political sphere was constructed by histories of the origins of political societies and by revisions of contractarian theories. The political as activity, or as activityoriented prudence, was separate from politics as science. Further, there were different modes of political prudence: a philosopher, a prince, a legislator, an ambassador and a leader in the Scottish texts. Scottish philosophers reflected the political rather by revising classical vocabulary of the political rather than by inventing new concepts and conceptions. Despite this the Scottish polit-vocabulary represented a departure from the Aristotelian unity of ethics, justice and politics.
The practice of transitional justice in Poland has been closely linked to the process of democratization, but the nature & dynamics of that relationship have remained hotly contested. While both the opponents & the proponents of so-called "lustration" justified their positions in the vocabulary of liberal democracy, they tended to approach the concepts of rights & democracy from two theoretically distinct positions. The debates surrounding this issue revealed & solidified the post-communist cleavage within the group of the former dissidents in regard to their normative theorization of democracy, & a characteristic of this cleavage was polarization of the concepts of restorative justice & retributive justice. Adapted from the source document.
The achievement of gender equality in education, and of women's empowerment more generally, have recently become established amongst the highest international priorities for policy action. This paper examines the processes by which they came to be included amongst the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). It argues that the revised targets to 2015 are more practicable than earlier goals. However, it shows that rates of progress will need to be improved, and that financial support from the north is still running at less than half the required levels. Goal achievement presupposes some agreed understanding of the meaning of gender equality. The paper reveals important contradictions between the language of analysis and the vocabulary of policy. Finally, it examines some of the instruments available for monitoring progress and building pressure for policy reform. It shows that failures to meet policy undertakings are as evident – and as serious in their implications for the possibility of achieving the MDGs – amongst aid donors as they are amongst developing-country governments themselves.
This book reconsiders the dominant Western understandings of freedom through the lens of women's real-life experiences of domestic violence, welfare, and Islamic veiling. Nancy Hirschmann argues that the typical approach to freedom found in political philosophy severely reduces the concept's complexity, which is more fully revealed by taking such practical issues into account. Hirschmann begins by arguing that the dominant Western understanding of freedom does not provide a conceptual vocabulary for accurately characterizing women's experiences. Often, free choice is assumed when women are i
Spaces of Geographical Thought examines key ideas - like space and place - which inform the geographic imagination. The text: discusses the core conceptual vocabulary of human geography: agency: structure; state: society; culture: economy; space: place; black: white; man: woman; nature: culture; local: global; and time: space; explains the significance of these binaries in the constitution of geographic thought; and shows how many of these binaries have been interrogated and re-imagined in more recent geographical thinking
Summary: This article proposes that historians and political theorists should exploit parliamentary sources to move from the writing of national histories to the comparative study of the conceptual history of European political cultures. Complementing the German lexicographical approach to conceptual history, the authors argue that parliamentary debates in several European countries provide more reliable sources for the past use of the language of politics. They emphasize the possibilities for the study of political history and the rhetoric of parliamentary institutions offered by the use of parliamentary debates side by side with the study of archival sources and published literature. Rhetorical studies and historical analyses of the use of key concepts emphasize speaking as a major form of political action and the value of parliamentary debates independently of the results of the final votes. Parliamentary debates in themselves, as a part of the decision-making process and with their increasing links to extra-parliamentary publicity, promoted change in political language and culture. The debates allow us to identify precisely the actual speaking situations in which the key political concepts were used. They also show how the emerging codification of parliamentary procedure was registered in the contested parliamentary vocabulary and how parliamentary debate gradually superseded the ancient examples of deliberative rhetoric. Finally, the authors address the methodological challenges involved in the use of parliamentary sources for the study of a comparative conceptual history of politics. The examples provided focus on the British Parliament and the Swedish Diet, particularly in the eighteenth century. ; peerReviewed
This book reconsiders the dominant Western understandings of freedom through the lens of women's real-life experiences of domestic violence, welfare, and Islamic veiling. Nancy Hirschmann argues that the typical approach to freedom found in political philosophy severely reduces the concept's complexity, which is more fully revealed by taking such practical issues into account. Hirschmann begins by arguing that the dominant Western understanding of freedom does not provide a conceptual vocabulary for accurately characterizing women's experiences. Often, free choice is assumed when women are in f.