Suchergebnisse

The essay gives a brief summery of Michel Foucault?s 1978-1979 lectures which offers an important point of reference for a deeper understanding of the shift from liberal to neo-liberal ideas. Here he points out that neo-liberalism is an art of government that seeks to enforce competition: ?it is a historical task for an art of government and not due to the natural order of things?. But Foucault?s lectures have not resulted in any empirical analyses so far. The second part of the essay undertakes what I have just said has been lacking thus far in this context, namely empirical analysis. It offers insight into a major comparative research project led by Jacques Donzelot. The preferred focus of the research project is contemporary European metropolises and the policies involved in ?rebuilding the city?. This essay deals with the case of Denmark with regard to: a) the nature of the urban crisis, with a specific focus on Copenhagen; b) the neo-liberal inflexion of urban, social and safety policies; and c) the consequences of this neo-liberal inflexion that has been given to citizenship

How does society form its perception of urban danger? The essay points to the importance of intermediary bodies of social movements, their codes of morals and ideas about solutions to civil conflict. In the history of modern welfare society the new professions, the labour movement and the co-operative movement have provided individuals with frameworks, points of reference and oaths of solidarity in the struggle to come to terms with modernity. These movements have left their fingerprints on leading ideas about preventive criminology. Moreover, in decisive periods in the making of the modern welfare state, architects have been of service to strong social forces. Far from acting in isolation from the main social actors on the political scene, architectural design has had an influence on the visions and ideas of strong social movements. At its best, architecture has aided in staging a playground ? or a laboratory ? for sights and visions about straightening out characters. This essay therefore focuses on measures of preventive criminology in three periods of Danish history, namely the 1850s, the 1930s and the 1970s. It seeks to form a backdrop to the study of present-day ideas about urban dangers. With a focus on the 1990s and the 2000s, the closing section discusses contemporary changes in penal policies in a welfare society in transition.

The first part of the paper unfolds the idea of sanctuary. It is a broad and yet quiet delimited concept; broad in the sense that it includes more than a religious sanctuary in an orthodox sense of the term, and delimited because it is defined with a point of departure in the religious sanctuary: It shares qualities with, or can be deprived of, the orthodoxy of the religious sanctuary. Secondly, they function as sanctuaries in two historical contexts. They can be studied either as an integral part of the political regime or alongside the public realm of the political elite. My focus is the latter. Thirdly, they are not perceived of as pockets of resistance; however, the sanctuaries studied have offered possibilities for acquiring a social etiquette, aesthetic skills and a social morality which point beyond the local community or the lodge formations, irregular intrigues and power plays of the national power elite. The second part of the paper has its focus upon religious sanctuaries of the utopian early phase of modernism, more precisely Edo-Tokyo during the Tokugawa era (1600-1863). Today, it is acknowledged that citizens of post industrial societies attach themselves to religions in response to, and in conditions of, social change and unrest. We see a revival of religions in modern urban societies, or the birth of 'The Post Secular City' (Beaumont 2008). Less attention has been paid to similar mechanisms in the era of early modernism. The paper points to ways by which religious sanctuaries were reinvented during Tokugawa. In this historical period Buddhism and Shinto were thoroughly intertwined (Reader 2005). People of Edo 'picked and mixed' from both religions. The focus is on issues of practice and on levels of engagement in a variety of events as indices of religiosity.

Discusses the relevance of Emile Durkheim for contemporary debates about citizenship & democracy. If the concepts of social bonds & solidarity that have existed since the classical period of the welfare state are under revision, the question is whether the thought of Durkheim has lost relevance too? Talcott Parsons's (1965) interpretation of Durkheim as a theorist of social order is criticized, arguing that Durkheim did not look for a functional order of the Parsonian type. More likely, he was preoccupied with the paradoxes & problems of the liberal state, ie, the search for a type of authority compatible with modern individual rights. Durkheim's focal interest in intermediary institutions is analyzed & related to the neoliberal view of the welfare state as having too much influence over the individual. Forgetting that intermediary bodies are important preconditions for the construction of citizenship & modern democracies, the communitarian vision of modern intermediary bodies in the 1990s is criticized for being too local. 41 References. Adapted from the source document.