Modern State (modern + state)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Globalization and the Boundaries of the State: A Framework for Analyzing the Changing Practice of Sovereignty

GOVERNANCE, Issue 1 2001
Edward S. Cohen
The impact of globalization on the sovereignty of the modern state has been a source of great controversy among political scientists. In this article, I offer a framework for understanding the state as a boundary-setting institution, which changes shape and role over time and place. I argue that, rather than undermining the state, globalization is a product of a rearrangement of the purposes, boundaries, and sovereign authority of the state. Focusing on the United States, the article traces the changing shape of state sovereignty through a study of the patterns of immigration policy and politics over the past three decades. Immigration policy, I argue, provides a unique insight into the continuities and changes in the role of the state in an era of globalization. [source]


The Modern State and its Adversaries

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 1 2006
Helen Thompson
The modern state would be a crisis if consent to long-established sites of authoritative rule were breaking down, previously capable states were unable to command coercive power, and if the demands of international and supra-national institutions had enforceable claims against historically sovereign states. There is no general crisis of the modern state. The states of most developed countries are secure as sites of authoritative rule, and the military power commanded by the American state is unprecedented. However, the external sovereignty of many poor and small states is diminishing. The cause is not ,globalization' but the policies of the world's dominant state. [source]


The Changing View of Rome in the Long Eighteenth Century

JOURNAL FOR EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES, Issue 2 2010
ROSEMARY SWEET
Abstract This article surveys the responses of British travellers to Rome in the long eighteenth century, as expressed in topographical literature, correspondence and diaries, and considers how these were shaped by changing domestic preoccupations. British depictions of the city in its ancient and modern state are compared with the accounts that they would have encountered in the topographical literature and prints available in Rome and in the information offered to them by the local ciceroni. This comparison highlights revealing differences between the Rome that the Romans sought to project and the one the British wished to see. [source]


,It Takes Two Hands to Clap': How Gaddi Shepherds in the Indian Himalayas Negotiate Access to Grazing

JOURNAL OF AGRARIAN CHANGE, Issue 1 2007
RICHARD AXELBY
This article examines the effects of state intervention on the workings of informal institutions that coordinate the communal use and management of natural resources. Specifically it focuses on the case of the nomadic Gaddi shepherds and official attempts to regulate their access to grazing pastures in the Indian Himalayas. It is often predicted that the increased presence of the modern state critically undermines locally appropriate and community-based resource management arrangements. Drawing on the work of Pauline Peters and Francis Cleaver, I identify key instances of socially embedded ,common' management institutions and explain the evolution of these arrangements through dynamic interactions between individuals, communities and the agents of the state. Through describing the ,living space' of Gaddi shepherds across the annual cycle of nomadic migration with their flocks I explore the ways in which they have been able to creatively reinterpret external interventions, and suggest how contemporary arrangements for accessing pasture at different moments of the annual cycle involve complex combinations of the formal and the informal, the ,traditional' and the ,modern'. [source]


Law, Patriarchies, and State Formation in England and Post-Colonial Hong Kong

JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 2 2001
Carol A. G. Jones
The rise of the modern state is often associated with the demise of particularistic ties and authoritarian patriarchy. Classically, particularism gives way to universalism, patronage, hierarchy, and deference to the ,equalities' of contract. But history is not a one-way street nor is patriarchy all of one kind. Society's legal arrangements, structure, custom, power, affect, and sex swing back and forth between values of distance, deference, and patronage and those stressing greater egalitarianism in personal and political relations. Though they vary in type, patriarchy and particularism as cultural systems do not disappear but ebb, flow, and are revived, their oscillation driven by particular economic goals and political insecurities. [source]


Alasdair MacIntyre on Education: In Dialogue with Joseph Dunne

JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION, Issue 1 2002
Alasdair Macintyre
This discussion begins from the dilemma, posed in some earlier writing by Alasdair MacIntyre, that education is essential but also, in current economic and cultural conditions, impossible. The potential for resolving this dilemma through appeal to ,practice', ,narrative unity', and ,tradition'(three core concepts in After Virtue and later writings) is then examined. The discussion also explores the relationship of education to the modern state and the power of a liberal education to create an ,educated public' very different in character from the electorates of contemporary democratic regimes. It concludes with some remarks on the role of education in combating prejudice against certain kinds of human difference. [source]


Virtuous Viragos: Female Heroism and Ethical Action in Shakespearean Drama

LITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2010
Unhae Langis
Virtue, from the Latin vir for manly courage and strength, was the mark of male excellence in Renaissance culture. Embodying both physical and moral strength through the famous figure of Hercules, virtue took on other values of courtly gentility and political prudence as the medieval warrior society was gradually transformed into the modern state. In inverse proportion to the expansion of male virtue, the conception of the virago underwent a corresponding constriction and decline from a manlike, heroic woman to a scold. Encompassing both physical and moral excellence (OED 2a, 7), male virtue came to appropriate the heroic definition of virago, and female virtue, by Shakespeare's time, became confined to chastity (OED 2c). Challenging the traditions of male virtue and female monstrosity in Renaissance drama, this essay examines the virtuous viragos populating the Shakespearean canon, who present themselves as better models of ethical action than men, with whom virtue is etymologically and historically associated. This study examines two nuanced conceptions of female heroism and ethical action centering on the erotic and politic Cleopatra and the chaste, self-affirming Desdemona as virtuous viragos. Moreover, the notion of heroism, traditionally associated with tragedy, translates to the less exalted but more prudentially successful ethical action of viragos in Shakespeare's comedies such as The Taming of the Shrew. I argue that virtuous viragos attain their ethical stature against this male-inflected standard of tragic heroism even while calling for its dismantling and replacement with the more discerning framework of neo-Aristotelian virtue grounded on practical wisdom. [source]


MODERN SOVEREIGNTY IN QUESTION: THEOLOGY, DEMOCRACY AND CAPITALISM

MODERN THEOLOGY, Issue 4 2010
ADRIAN PABST
This essay argues that modern sovereignty is not simply a legal or political concept that is coterminous with the modern nation-state. Rather, at the theoretical level modern sovereign power is inscribed into a wider theological dialectic between "the one" and "the many". Modernity fuses juridical-constitutional models of supreme state authority with a new, "biopolitical" account of power whereby natural life and the living body of the individual are the object of politics and are subject to state control (section 1). The origins of this dialectic go back to changes within Christian theology in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. In particular, these changes can be traced to Ockham's denial of the universal Good in things, Suárez's priority of the political community over the ecclesial body and Hobbes's "biopolitical" definition of power as state dominion over life (section 2). At the practical level, modern sovereignty has involved both the national state and the transnational market. The "revolutions in sovereignty" that gave rise to the modern state and the modern market were to some considerable extent shaped by theological concepts and changes in religious institutions and practices: first, the supremacy of the modern national state over the transnational papacy and national churches; second, the increasing priority of individuality over collectivity; third, a growing focus on contractual proprietary relations at the expense of covenantal ties and communal bonds (section 3). By subjecting both people and property to uniform standards of formal natural rights and abstract monetary value, financial capitalism and liberal secular democracy are part of the "biopolitical" logic that subordinates the sanctity of life and land to the secular sacrality of the state and the market. In Pope Benedict's theology, we can find the contours of a post-secular political economy that challenges the monopoly of modern sovereignty (sections 4,5). [source]


Patriotism, nationalism and modernity: the patriotic societies in the Danish conglomerate state, 1769,1814

NATIONS AND NATIONALISM, Issue 2 2007
JULIANE ENGELHARDT
ABSTRACT. This article investigates sixty-three patriotic societies established in the Danish conglomerate state during the Age of Enlightenment, since they can throw light on the pre-national collective identities. It explains how the patriotic societies had both an external function in regard to society and an internal function among their members. It analyses how the members comprehended patriotism and how they propagated ideas of solidarity and good citizenship to a wider audience. The patriotism of the eighteenth century is also compared with the nationalism of the nineteenth century, and the way they reflect two different understandings of core concepts such as state, language and folk culture is explained. However, both ideologies correlate to modernity, since they reflect the same dialectic tension in the relationship between the individual, the social community and the modern state. [source]


Liberal nationalism and the sovereign territorial ideal1

NATIONS AND NATIONALISM, Issue 1 2006
GENEVIČVE NOOTENS
ABSTRACT. Even if most liberals nowadays recognise that liberalism depends on some nationalist justification of popular sovereignty and state boundaries, they still underestimate the consequences of the fact that the sovereign territorial ideal is at the heart of the modern state. Therefore, their normative stance either oscillates between fairness and stability requirements (Kymlicka) or is built on a distinction between self-rule and self-determination that contradicts the normative import of the modern idea of the nation (Tamir). However, there exist counter-traditions that may be helpful in challenging the assumption on behalf of the sovereign territorial state. National cultural autonomy is one of these; it is used here to show how starting from different premises, one may escape the ,statist assumption' and work out a political framework which would be fairer to minorities. [source]


Paradise Lost and the Question of Legitimacy

RATIO, Issue 1 2004
Wendy C. Hamblet
This paper reconstructs the deficiencies of formal democracies to explain the internal injustices of the modern state, the self-righteous swaggering foreign policy of Western powers, and the dangerously over-simplified, polar logic characterizing the war rhetoric of the modern era. In a brief tour through the non-liberal tradition of democratic thought, drawing connections between the tragic mythological origins of Western understandings of self and world, the paper attempts to demonstrate that a failure to find alternate, healthier means of value-creation has caused Westerners, in their constructive identity work, to adhere themselves to their systems with a ritualized, ,religious' fervour. Legitimacy in the world becomes, in the final analysis, a simple matter of might. The possession of firearms and bread render self-sanctifying myths legitimating aggressions on the argument of ,good' powers fighting the battle against ,evil' contaminants. [source]