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.
This paper has two objectives. Firstly, I would like to introduce the conceptual framework for foreign policy analysis: the so-called role theory. In order for us to explain & understand the foreign policies of nation-states, the role theory focuses on the reasoning of national political elites, their understanding of the international system & the perceived role of their own states within this larger system. I will introduce the concepts of the role theory, its epistemological underpinning & the most important analytical applications of it. Secondly, I intend to make a contribution to the discussions about the application of social constructivism (as an IR theory) to foreign policy analysis. Thanks to its metatheoretical assumptions & conceptual outfit, the role theory is an appropriate candidate for bridging the gap between constructivist IR theory & FPA. Adapted from the source document.
The author outlines the chief features of the constructivist moral conception in its Kantian variant & argues that such a moral conception had been unjustifiably looked over in relation to the traditional moral conceptions such as utilitariarism, intuitionism & perfectionism. The central idea of Kantian constructivism is linking certain notions of the person & principles of justice that should regulate basic social institutions by means of the constructivist procedure. The author's starting point is the conception of moral persons as free & equal. He claims that an appropriate connection among thus perceived persons & the first principles of justice is established in such a way that the first principles are chosen under reasonable conditions in which individuals possess solely such qualities. The reasonable conditions consist of the symmetrical situatedness of the "choosers," the veil of ignorance (which obscures the morally irrelevant features of persons' attributes) & the publicity condition. The author's goal is to reach a proper viewpoint on the basis of which citizens are to judge their fundamental social institutions & in that way achieve consensus on the need for & the direction of their reform. Adapted from the source document.
The author describes the spiritual climate at the time of the publication of Rawis' A Theory of Justice (1971) & describes its huge impact on the political philosophy of the 20th century. Then he analyses Rawls' acknowledgement of Kant. First he depicts Rawls' formulation of his original position along the lines of Kant's idea of the autonomy of the individual & the categorical imperative. There might be some problems with the possible convergence of Rawls' economism & Kant's moral position. According to Rawis, the original position parties may express their nature, but at the same time they belong to the intelligible world. Raws has tried to overcome this divergence from Kant's concept in his paper Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory by means of distinguishing between the rational & the full autonomy, from which the author concludes that Rawis was inclined to adopt a certain version of utilitarianism. According to the author, Rawis' attempt to bridge Kant's rigorous distinction between the law & the morality by means of his sense of justice is entirely alien to Kant. Hence there is an unbridgable chasm between Kant & Rawis, which does not mean that Rawis' attempt at using Kant's categories in the design of democratic societies is insufficiently legitimate. 71 References. Adapted from the source document.
In this paper, the author focuses on the work of Bernard Mandeville as predecessor of Scottish Enlightenment and liberal tradition of thought. Starting from the social, political and economic context of the all-embracing crisis of the society in transition of his time, special attention is devoted to his moral, social and economic views based on methodological individualism. The author argues that Mandeville's controversial thought resists one-sided labeling and unambiguous fitting into mutually opposed camps of mercantilism and market liberalism, i.e. constructivism and evolutionism. This is the reason behind the variety of interpretations, and sometimes even completely opposite readings of his work. He was a satirist, social critic, physician, philosopher and economist, who effectuated a shift and a turn with regard to the habitual perceptions of the age in all those segments of his reflection and activity, and he launched a sort of "revolution in thought", which will be given its definitive formulation and elaboration in the second half of the 18th century by the Scottish moral philosophers. The author concludes that Mandeville was, first and foremost, a man of his time and responded to the acute problems of his age. It would thus be inappropriate and wrong to apply his ideas from the beginning of the 18th century to the present time with a clearer precising of intellectual and political projects, and declare him either a mercantilist or an interventionist, or else an advocate of laissez-faire. Nonetheless, Mandeville came up with answers that would later be incorporated in the liberal tradition. One may therefore say that he greatly influenced the Scottish Enlightenment and contributed to the birth of liberalism, although he was not a consistent economic liberal himself, of the type that was familiar to the late 18th century. Adapted from the source document.