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.
In the context of internationalisation the national issues regarding the restitution of nationalised immovable goods in different stages of history, the subject at hand, represents a pioneering analysis of a complex national reality. Recent practice of Romanian courts has revealed a delicate problem that is apparently the object of debate and resolve of the national and international academic environment. Through the analysis the author tackles the problem of discrimination that is committed by the national law that regulates the matter of restitution of goods that were abusively taken over by the state, from the point of view of the theoretician, as well as the practitioner, pointing out the necessity of direct cooperation with the European courts. The negative discrimination, resulting from the art. 36 of 18/1991 law, can be analysed as an objective and rational justification that would allow the direct practice of the European convention of human rights concerning the litigations about "Land Act" (Law no. 18/1991)
The two documents which are the subject of the present study, made to share property in the event of divorce, help to form an image on various aspects of daily life, poorly known from other sources: household size, land property, earnings in marriage furniture, tools, animals, prices, food, secular and religious involvement of the private life etc. In addition to legal information, both inventories, which stood at the base of documents on which the property was to be divided, reveal another perspective on social history of Arad in the late eighteenth century.
Δεν παρατίθεται περίληψη στα Ελληνικά. ; In the years 1830-1860 the formation of the newly established Greek State was based theoretically and practically on the political views of 19th century European liberalism. In accordance to the liberal beliefs, the Greek state political power was based on a small section of the adult male population. This section disposed additional economic and cultural qualifications compared to the rest of the population of the country. It is worthnoting that only to the above mentioned section of the population the state recognized full civil and political rights. In this context the term eligible citizens is used to describe those social strata which held the above mentioned special qualifications. In view of these qualifications the eligible citizens could not only exercise their electoral rights but they could be also elected or appointed as political, magisterial or administrative officials. Within the framework of the historical study of social stratification in the Greek society, during the period 1830-1860, it is worth concentrating on the analysis of historical sources relevant to the eligible citizens. These sources should supply information about the economic and cultural characteristics of these citizens. Based on this type of approach we present in this study the catalogues of candidate jurymen in the period 1849-1861 concentrating on the analysis of the year 1860. These catalogues constitute an important source of information about the characteristics of the eligible citizens. The candidate jurymen catalogues, for the year 1860, include information regarding the value of estate property, income, profession, age and place of inhabitancy for 8.337 adult men. These men amount to the 3.4% of the over 25 years old male population of the country in 1860. The quantitative analysis of the above mentioned catalogues led to the following general conclusions: In 1860 the greatest percentage of the eligible citizens derived from the middle social strata of property owners and income earners. These strata included mainly land owners, wealthy farmers and merchants. But there was also a much smaller section of social strata of wealthy men who possessed a relatively large amount of estate property and income of the country. The sharp economic inequality observed among the eligible citizens of the country permits the assumption that there was also among them a sharp social inequality. According to this we propose the continuation of the research with a more detailled study. This study will examine particular aspects of economic and social inequalities between the lower, the middle and the higher social strata. The same study will also examine in detail the regional aspect of these inequalities.
"Echun prostethei: Works of art in Greece: the Greece islands and the Dodecanese: losses and survivals in the war; T.W. French, Losses and survivals in the Dodecanese; Geōrgiu Bakalakē, Ekthesis peri akropoleōs kai tu museiu autēs; W. Kraiker, Der Kunstschutz in Griechenland, Epistolē pros Keramopullon; R. Hampe, Kritikē tu tomu Zēmiai; Anadiarthrōsē Kemenōn, Symplērōmata kai scholia"-- Title page
By analyzing the parliamentary debates of 1866-1867 on foreigners' (notably Jews) requests for naturalization and property rights, this article tries to identify the parliamentarians' answers to the following questions: On what grounds were foreigners accepted as Romanian citizens? How did the parliamentarians define the foreigner? What was required from a foreigner in order to become a citizen? The overall objective is to identify some major themes that preoccupied the representatives of the nation, circumscribed around the primordial character of the "union" and of "nationality", with a special focus on the solutions proposed by the liberals. The argument is that the Parliament, by its vote, instead of granting citizenship rights, merely established the conditions according to which one could become a Romanian. In other words, the Romanian legislators considered it to be of outmost importance to recognize the quality of being a Romanian, that is, a member of an ethnic body, and not to define citizenship as a legal membership. "To be a Romanian" was more of an ethnic belonging, a "given", than citizenship or civic loyalty, defined through political and civic rights. It seems that citizenship was crushed by the primordial character of ethnic loyalty and by the weight of the state as expression and guarantor of the Romanian nation. In engaging the parliamentary debates about naturalization, the article attempts, first, to draw more nuanced conclusions about the lately much-debated character of citizenship in Romania and Eastern Europe during the mid-19th century. And second, such an analysis may provide a better understanding of the nature of political representation during the same period.
In: Buletinul Științific al Universității de Stat B. P. Hasdeu din Cahul: The scientific journal of Cahul State University B. P. Hasdeu. Științe sociale = Social sciences, Heft 1, S. 4-30
The implementation of the principles of local democracy has proven to be one of the most complicated tasks of the political and administrative reform in the Republic of Moldova. To overcome this situation, it is important to develop and substantiate theoretically such concepts as "local power", "the subject of local power", "local territorial collectivity". A clear scientific definition of those notions would serve as a foundation for developing an appropriate legal framework and public policy in the field. In order to elucidate the notions mentioned above, the existing essential approaches in the contemporary social sciences regarding the public territorial collectivities have been analyzed. The factors affecting the formation and existence of the local territorial collectivities have also been emphasized. Two types of authorities: private and public have been briefly considered. This paper analyzes the concept of "local authority" in contrast to the term "territorial administrative unit" with which the legislator operates in the Republic of Moldova. It was concluded that the concept "local collectivity" is more acceptable because it is the appropriate expression of the phenomenon of the territorial organization of public power in general, as opposed to the concept "administrative unit" which refers only to the territorial organization of state public power. So, from this point of view, the territorial administrative units and the local territorial collectivities are two different phenomena. In a strictly legal sense, the territorial-administrative unit is an inhabited territory which has no heritage (in the territory there is the state property or another kind of heritage) and it is administered by an official appointed by the state. The local collectivity has its own heritage that is managed on its own account and in order to solve local problems. The issues belonging to state power can be delegated to local authorities by sending financial and material resources needed to achieve them. A territorial community of the residents becomes local authority if it possesses and uses democratic institutions, creates bodies of self administration on the basis of the elective principle, takes binding decisions for the community, and has its own financial and material resources in order to regulate the internal life. These indicators make public territorial collectivities to be different from the territorial administrative units, in which only administrative methods of management are used. The defining elements of the identity of a local collectivity, such as: a) name, b) territory, c) population, d) the public authority of the eligible authorities, e) the Statute, f) the distinctive insignia of the local collectivity, have been identified. These elements make the local territorial collectivity to be distinguished from other similar collectivities.
Δεν παρατίθεται περίληψη στα ελληνικά. ; Eleni Fournaraki, «Wherefore deprive her of the vote?». Universal male suffrage and the exclusion of women from politics in 19th century Greece Through study of the Greek case, this article tries to explore the exclusion of women from political rights in the context of liberal democracy as a historiographical problem. In contrast to the vast majority of representative states at the time, political circumstances prevailing in Greece led to the constitutional establishment of universal male suffrage in 1864, though not without provoking the discontent of a sizeable portion of the political scene for several years thereafter. According to «conventional» historical accounts, there can be no doubt that women's exclusion from «universal suffrage» in 1864, while not explicity articulated in the Constitution or any pertinent legislation, was regarded as self-evident. Furthermore, prior to 1910-20 the possibility of attributing the vote to women did not preoccupy party politics, while a suffragist movement did not appear before the Inter-war period. Our own approach can be summarized as follows: exploration of the meaning of women's exclusion from political rights in a democratic conjuncture that assured those rights to all adult men may reveal the full dimensions of the conflict dynamic that democratic conquests presuppose. In the first place, this dynamic applies to men themselves, or more precisely to the less privileged among them. As empirical data reveal, the question of women's political rights, even if acquiring those rights was not an existing possibility, could appear as a constructive element of the political discourse: women's exclusion could have been put forward as one of the issues in the argument against universal male suffrage. It is precisely the self-evident and trivial nature of this exclusion together with that of children which could offer a more convincing argument against the conception of suffrage as a natural right. A lack of internal coherence and consistency in the argument of the advocates of «universal suffrage», could be pointed out through the emphasis, conversely, on the irrationality of a regime that guaranteed political participation down to the very last «illiterate» or «vagrant» man, while depriving all women of the vote, especially those who had the ability to possess and administrate property. Support for suffrage for those women was not totally absent from such argumentation, which served to reveal the contradictions that women's exclusion from political rights brought to the heart of the modern system for the legitimization of sovereignty. Through examination of the arguments employed by the science of constitutional law to justify exclusion, we observe a broader process of redefinition and rationalization of the existing gender hierarchy, in modern terms. Crystallized in the last quarter of 19th century, this process appealed to the notion of the biological and psychological «specificity» of «female nature)) in order to legitimize the incompatibility of women as a whole with politics.