Suchergebnisse

As the fiftieth anniversary of Israeli statehood approaches, along with the commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the World Zionist Organization, the question of what is meant by a "Jewish" state is particularly timely. Alan Dowty takes on that question in a book that is admirable for its clarity and its comprehensive interpretation of the historical roots and contemporary functioning of Israel.Israeli nationhood, democracy, and politics did not unfold in a social or political vacuum, but developed from power-sharing practices in pre-state Jewish communities in Palestine and in Eastern Europe. Dowty elucidates the broad cluster of cultural, historical, and ideological tenets which came to comprise Israel's contemporary political system. He demonstrates that such tenets were not arbitrary but in fact developed logically from Jewish political habits and the circumstances of time. Dowty illustrates how these traditions are balanced with those of ideology and modernization, and he provides an integrated, sophisticated analysis of the Israeli nation's formation and present state.Dowty also proposes thoughtful answers to puzzles regarding the strengths and weaknesses of Israeli democracy in responding to the challenges of communal divisions, religious contention, the country's non-Jewish minority, and accommodation with the Palestinians. The Jewish State will be invaluable for anyone looking for that one book that gives an intelligent overview of both Israel today and of its origins

AbstractThis article analyses the relationship between income, wealth, wealth‐adjusted income and age in Australia using a 2009–10 cross‐sectional data set. The main findings are: (i) wealth and wealth‐adjusted income generally rise with age, while income is constant across the life cycle; (ii) both income inequality and wealth inequality rise until mid‐life and fall thereafter, while wealth‐adjusted income inequality depends on the method of calculation used, one showing a fall in later life and another showing no fall; and (iii) after income, wealth and wealth‐adjusted income inequalities are adjusted for age, underlying inequality is lower in all three cases.

AbstractEconomic well‐being and economic inequality are usually quantified using income measurements of various sorts. Such analyses overlook the contribution of wealth – a potentially very significant factor. In this article, we integrate wealth and income data to provide a more comprehensive accounting of economic well‐being and economic inequality in Australia. Using the Australian Bureau of Statistics Household Expenditure Survey microdata for 2009–2010, we present a cross‐sectional analysis of wealth‐adjusted income. We examine the relative contributions of income and wealth to wealth‐adjusted income and compare the distribution of wealth‐adjusted income to the distribution of income and the distribution of wealth. Wealth, we find, makes up between one‐fifth and two‐fifths of wealth‐adjusted income; the incorporation of wealth increases the inequality already present in the income distribution (as measured using final incomes) by about 25 per cent.

It has been widely claimed that Foucault's 1980 lecture course at the Collège de France, On the Government of the Living (GL), constituted an important turning point in his thinking. That course would begin a series of lecture courses at the Collège that would end in March 1984, just before his death, all devoted to core issues arising in Hellenistic philosophy and Christian theology. While Christian practices of penance and confession are a focus of GL, as Mark Jordan has claimed, throughout what has been termed his "Greco-Roman" trip Foucault always emphasized "the historical importance of pastoral power for modern subjectivity." There is, then, a definite link between what is often described as the "final Foucault," with his interest in Patristic Christianity and its own governmental practices, on one hand, and, on the other, the broader question of "government," both of the self and of others, as well as the historical modes of subject formation, all concerns that characterized the whole of Foucault's oeuvre. Indeed, as Foucault says in his conclusion to GL, the obligation "to tell the truth about oneself" has shaped not just Christianity, but Western modernity too; indeed "the whole social system to which we belong" (312).