Suchergebnisse

1. The sun and the ash : civic virtue in uncertain times -- 2. The two faces of public morality -- 3. The politics of aspiration -- 4. The sovereignty of evil -- 5. Prevention as virtue : the austerity ethic -- 6. Anarchy and justice -- 7. Sacrifice and mutuality -- 8. Despair and hope -- 9. Concordia discors.

The last decade has witnessed a growing perception of ethical crisis in public life. Circumstances of political uncertainty, fueled by the rise of international terror and global financial crisis, have placed the practice of civic virtue under severe strain. Our turbulent times have prompted many people to think less about the ""good life"" and the ""good society"" and more about their basic needs for safety and reassurance. Consequently, while prominent public commentators call for the reassertion of civic virtue in the public square, it is very hard to see what basis there can be for its.

Rather than undermining it, this book argues that moral conflict is necessary for a liberal political community. It develops a new philosophical basis for political association based on an innovative account of the way journey narratives in literature shed light on the possibilities for solidarity in modern democratic societies

By way of an engagement with the thought of Stuart Hampshire and his account of the 'normality of conflict', this article articulates a novel distinction between two models of value pluralism. The first model identifies social and political conflict as the consequence of pluralism, whereas the second identifies pluralism as the consequence of social and political conflict. Failure to recognise this distinction leads to confusion about the implications of value pluralism for contemporary public ethics. The article illustrates this by considering the case of toleration. It contends that Hampshire's model of pluralism offers a new perspective on the problem of toleration and illuminates a new way of thinking about the accommodation of diversity as 'civility within conflict'.

The revival of interest in realism in political theory is comprehensively explored in Politics Recovered, a major new volume of 14 original essays edited by Matt Sleat. Wide-ranging and engaging throughout, the book takes in both supporters and critics of the realist turn and addresses neglected questions of the political application of realism and of the connection between contemporary political realism and the classical IR tradition of realist thought. But I argue that the book also prompts some troubling questions about the ultimate coherence of the realist orientation and about the way in which realists interpret the limits of political theory and of political theorists.

State attempts to legislate for civility, such as the UK's Injunctions to Prevent Nuisance and Annoyance, are usually challenged on libertarian grounds. This article develops a novel democratic challenge to such legislation, arguing that un-civil behaviours sometimes constitute masked expressions of dissent. It first elaborates a conceptual analysis, linking the forms of annoying behaviour targeted by legislation with the practice of incivility. It then articulates a structural association between incivility and dissent and develops on that basis a substantive normative case for the democratic value of incivility. In this way, the article highlights the role of bad behaviour in sustaining liberal democratic institutions and the ways in which the tradition of political thought about civil disobedience can obscure the possibilities of democratic dissent. It thereby informs public debates about the 'crisis of civility' in modern society and offers a new perspective on scholarly debates about the ethics of resistance.

This article challenges and clarifies everyday thought about the idea of civility in society and politics by subjecting it to theoretical analysis. It contributes to research on citizenship, toleration and social cohesion by developing a new synthesis of the presently fragmented literature in contemporary political theory on the concept of civility and its place in liberal democratic politics. It first considers the meaning of civility, identifying some difficulties of definition and elaborating a distinction between civility in conduct and civility in attitude. It then assesses the most prominent debates around civility's value by contrasting arguments that civility serves a vital function in the moderation of democratic conflict with arguments that it threatens the basic values upon which democracy is founded. The article finds that the debate about civility is misconceived and that the literature is diminished by its failure to engage directly with the problem of incivility. In so doing, it establishes the parameters for a new agenda of civility research.

The author explains the main categories and arguments introduced in his forthcoming book Civic Virtue and the Sovereignty of Evil: Political Ethics in Uncertain Times. He offers a dualist account of public morality, contrasting aspirational with preventive politics and suggesting that the latter is often not given enough weight in contemporary political theory. He continues with introducing the idea of sovereignty of evil and clarifying its role in constituting preventive civic virtues. The author concludes by arguing that making sense of practices of civic virtue in conditions of conflict and insecurity should be in terms of the preventive austerity ethic. ; Autor pojašnjava glavne kategorije i argumente koje zagovara u svojoj knjizi Civic Virtue and the Sovereignty of Evil: Political Ethics in Uncertain Times (knjiga izlazi u drugoj polovici 2012). Autor nudi dvojno razumijevanje javnog moraliteta, uspoređujući aspiracijsku s preventivnom politikom i argumentirajući da je preventivna politika često zanemarivana u suvremenoj političkoj teoriji. Nastavlja uvodeći ideju suvereniteta zla i pojašnjavajući njenu ulogu u konstituiranju preventivnih građanskih vrlina. Autor zaključuje tvrdeći kako se smisleno prakticiranje građanskih vrlina u uvjetima sukoba i nesigurnosti treba voditi preventivnom etikom.

The recent revival of popular interest in the idea of public morality has involved a striking divergence of opinion: there is widespread agreement that we must recover a language of civic virtue, but disagreement about the point of so doing. Some suppose that public morality should promote the good society, while others suppose that it should facilitate the prevention of catastrophe. While on the face of it this disagreement constitutes nothing more remarkable than a difference of temperament between optimists and pessimists, it reflects in fact a fundamental rift in the structure of political action, the denial of which has led to considerable confusion. The denial of a rift depends on the assumption of symmetry between the positive and negative political agendas of individuals and groups. This assumption in turn presupposes a dubious monistic model of political action that is unable to make sense of certain forms of tragic disappointment that are a familiar feature of political experience. Better sense can be made of these experiences by adopting instead a dualistic model of political action which conceives of the positive-negative distinction as being cut across by a more fundamental distinction between aspirational politics and preventive politics. Acknowledging this distinction illuminates debates about 'non-ideal' political theory and about the possibilities for a politics of hope in conditions of democratic pluralism. It also highlights an essential ambivalence as to the point of a public morality, which may undermine the enterprise of salvaging civic virtue as conventionally understood. Adapted from the source document.