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Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgements -- List of abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1 Child sexual abuse as a problem of governance -- PART I Conceptual frameworks -- 2 Dilemmas of liberalism: child, family and state through the public/private distinction -- 3 From liberal to Critical Theory: child, family and state through the system/lifeworld distinction -- 4 Reproblematising the governance of child sexual abuse: Foucault's practice of social criticism -- PART II Examining the governance of child sexual abuse

In contrast to those who trace civil society to "community" per se, Foucault is keen to locate this concept as it emerges at a particular moment in respect of specific exigencies of government. He suggests that civil society is a novel way of thinking about a problem, a particular problematization of government that emerges in the eighteenth century and which combines incommensurable conceptions of the subject as simultaneously a subject of right and of interests. This article takes up Foucault's discussion of the Scottish Enlightenment in The Birth of Biopolitics to trace the distinctiveness of his discussion of civil society, but also in order to suggest that we ought to pay closer attention to the tensions between commercial-civilizational and civic republican themes in the literature of the late eighteenth century than does Foucault. It is my tentative suggestion that Foucault's account leaves out significant aspects of these debates that offer counter-valences to the dominant models of the subject available to contemporary political discourse.

Habermas does not rule out the possibility of violence in language. In fact his account explicitly licenses a broad conception of violence as 'systematically distorted communication'. Yet he does rule out the possibility that language simultaneously imposes as it discloses. That is, his argument precludes the possibility of recognizing that there is an antinomy at the heart of language and philosophical reason. This occlusion of the simultaneously world-disclosing and world-imposing character of language feeds and sustains Habermas's legal and political arguments, where he states that in order to achieve consensus rational deliberation must eliminate force. In this paper, I claim that this argument operates through a manoeuvre that leaves Habermas's position curiously blind to its own predicament. To explain why, I turn to Kant's treatment of the problem of evil in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Here, as in the Western philosophical tradition more generally, evil has no separate existence: it is folded back into Kant's philosophical scheme. Arendt notes that as soon as Kant identifies the problem of evil he rationalizes it into comprehensible motives. I will show how, through a move that is structurally similar to Kant's rationalization of evil, Habermas rationalizes and attempts to eliminate violence from his consideration of law and language. In Habermas's work, law and language appear as ciphers for reason. The case to be made here is that Habermas's inability to recognize the paradoxical character of language and reason makes his work blind to the violence in which it is unavoidably implicated.

Remembers Paul Hirst, professor of social theory at Birkbeck College, U London, died on 16 June 2003 following a brain hemorrhage. He was fifty-seven.

Explores representations of civil society & the modern welfare state expounded by Michel Foucault & Jurgen Habermas to demonstrate how they offer different ways of thinking politically about today's challenges, particularly in terms of resistance. The historical context & current usage of the concept of civil society are examined, along with how Habermas links civil society to an understanding of criticism by viewing it as a privileged locus of criticism outside of governance. Conversely, Foucault's civil society only emerges in the context of a governable domain of the social. Further, Habermas's notion of reconstructive criticism encompasses the idea of civil society in service of emancipatory social science, while Foucault uses genealogies in which concepts are to be interrogated regarding their use in practical systems. It is contended that an alternative framework based on the concept of civil society does not adequately address problems of welfare state relations. While Habermas elaborates on the terms of contemporary political reason, Foucault's more productive approach questions concepts & challenges individuals to reconsider their limits. 54 References. J. Lindroth

Traces the historical relation of gender to sociology & argues that the postmodern challenge has worked to alter the fundamental terms of debate. It is shown that traditional sociology's effort to incorporate gender into theories of stratification or inequality ended in ignoring the full power of gender as a category of social life. Feminist standpoint epistemology has informed a more explicitly feminist sociology, but a discussion of the work of Sandra Harding (1987) & Nancy Hartsock (1983) indicates that this framework simply replaces the masculine with a feminine viewpoint without troubling the basic totalizing framework of traditional sociology. Postmodern sociology is favored as an approach to gender because it destabilizes monolithic categories to ask how differentiations are produced by particular strategies & movements of power within the social field. By remaining close to the constitution of gender categories, it is argued that postmodern sociology opens the possibility of examining the relation of the actual & potential in the production of politics. 76 References. D. M. Smith

The essays collected in Between Utopia and Realism reflect on and refract Judith N. Shklar's major preoccupations throughout a lifetime of thinking and demonstrate the ways in which her work illuminates contemporary debates across political theory, international relations, and law.