Suchergebnisse

As the medium of democracy, the Public is a communicational trace of the missing Collective Sovereign: the People or Demos. In political life, we often refer to the People, but in reality the People does not make a community. It is instead a notion, a missing Sovereign, the one who exists as concept but does not speak for oneself. The community is yet to be established, and this can be done only by communication. The aim of such communication is to formulate norms, rules and principles which are to be implemented or encouraged in public life. On a more normative level, this can be done in the process of writing a Constitution. The other objective is to discuss the concept of public good. This is left to communicational functions of the Public. The concept of the Public is left to citizens, who communicate with other citizens, and thus create public opinion. By doing that, the Public is here to remind the government that somebody else is to be Sovereign, i.e. that there is also the People. The Public is thus a substitute for the "missing Sovereign". There can be no Democracy without this role of the Public. Adapted from the source document.

The drama of Yugoslav socialism had begun long before its final collapse, only a few years after its coming to power. It had been announced by social events which the ruling politics neither expected nor could explain; events which at first were manifested in various forms of self-willed conduct of those employed in economy, and later in increasingly pervasive and complex disturbances in the system of material reproduction and other spheres of social life. Those events faced the ruling politics with the enigma of society that posed a serious challenge to the existing model of etatist economy and monopoly power of the Party. In this article, the author focuses precisely on the above-mentioned problem, i.e. on the relation of the ruling politics of socialism towards the social world of life (society): what did it do in order to regain mastery over the social events which gradually eluded its control, and what is the significance of the methods and procedure which it applied to that effect? All that the ruling politics of Yugoslav socialism was faced with and all it resorted to is observed by the author merely as a special case of socialism in general. Adapted from the source document.

Mass media produce various communicational products in the form of messages coded in the symbolic language of writing, sound or image, which they distribute through the open public space for unknown users. Unlike the traditional theories, which directed their attention above all to the social effects of media products, the systemic theory inquires into the very process of their production, deeming that precisely the latter is the real reality of mass media: the factual operations which are performed systemically, through application of the binary code of information/non-information, and according to the internal rules of its structure. The real reality, however, is inaccessible to the observer. Consequently, he can gain knowledge of it only in such a way as to construct from the forms in which it appears to him an observed reality as his own perception thereof. The systemic theory suggests that its construction of mass media reality is most congruous with their real reality. Keeping in mind that each observer performs his construction of reality of the thing observed in accordance with his own knowledge and understanding, the author asks himself: where is the evidence of the trustworthiness of such constructions? Adapted from the source document.

The author shows modern conservative concepts of politics as a variant of normative political theory. Conservatism shows up as a reaction to enlightened rationalism. In contrast to rationalistic revolutionary constructivism, conservatism pleads for a return to a religious basis for man's spiritual & political life. Conservatism creates policies based on tradition & the family, which sustains feelings of obligation toward the community. The state is not just an instrument for special interests, but an expression of substantial cooperation in the nation & its society. Thus, conservatism leads to a demand for reforms of existing liberal institutions. Adapted from the source document.