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Political Theorists (political + theorist)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences71%

Selected Abstracts

David Hume: Moral and Political Theorist , Russell Hardin

THE PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 235 2009
James A. Harris
First page of article [source]

Deliberative Democracy and International Labor Standards

GOVERNANCE, Issue 1 2003
Archon Fung
Political theorists have argued that the methods of deliberative democracy can help to meet challenges such as legitimacy, effective governance, and citizen education in local and national contexts. These basic insights can also be applied to problems of international governance such as the formulation, implementation, and monitoring of labor standards. A participatory and deliberative democratic approach to labor standards would push the labor,standards debate into the global public sphere. It would seek to create broad discussion about labor standards that would include not only firms and regulators, but also consumers, nongovernmental organizations, journalists, and others. This discussion could potentially improve (1) the quality of labor standards by incorporating considerations of economic context and firm capability, (2) their implementation by bringing to bear not only state sanctions but also political and market pressures, and (3) the education and understanding of citizens. Whereas the role of public agencies in state,centered approaches is to formulate and enforce labor standards, central authorities in the decentralized,deliberative approach would foster the transparency of workplace practices to spur an inclusive, broad, public conversation about labor standards. To the extent that a substantive consensus around acceptable behavior emerges from that conversation, public power should also enforce those minimum standards. [source]

Friedrich Albert Lange on neo-Kantianism, socialist Darwinism, and a psychology without a soul

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, Issue 3 2002
Thomas Teo associate professor of psychology
Friedrich Albert Lange was a German philosopher, political theorist, educator, and psychologist who outlined an objective psychology in the 1860s. This article shows how some of the most important worldviews of the nineteenth century (Kantianism, Marxism, and Darwinism) were combined creatively in his thought system. He was crucial in the development of neo-Kantianism and incorporated psycho-physiological research on sensation and perception in order to defend Kant's epistemological idealism. Based on a critique of phrenology and philosophical psychology of his time, Lange developed a program of a psychology without a soul. He suggested that only those phenomena that can be observed and controlled should be studied, that psychology should focus on actions and speech, and that for each psychological event the corresponding physical or physiological processes should be identified. Lange opposed introspection and subjective accounts and promoted experiments and statistics. He also promoted Darwinism for psychology while developing a socialist progressive-democratic reading of Darwin in his social theory. The implications of socialist Darwinism on Lange's conceptualization of race are discussed and his prominence in nineteenth century philosophy and psychology is summarized. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source]

Alone in the World: The Existential Socrates in the Apology and Crito

POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 3 2007
Emanuele Saccarelli
The story of Socrates' life, and in particular the circumstances of his death, has been a nearly obligatory referent for the development of Western political thought. Contemporary political theorists such as Hannah Arendt and, more recently, Gerald Mara and Dana Villa have presented Socrates as a model of political engagement for our times. Against the background of these accounts, I develop an existential interpretation of Socrates as he appears in the Apology and Crito, focusing on the singular, private, experiential and incommunicable character of Socrates' truth. In doing so, I discuss some important and contentious issues in Socratic studies, such as his disavowal of knowledge, his allegiance to the Athenian polis and the apparent tension between his defiance during the trial and his willingness to submit to the resulting death sentence. My interpretation reveals a Socrates that we should not strive to understand, let alone emulate politically, particularly if we wish to respect his own sensibilities. [source]

The Theory and Practice of Group Representation: Reflections on the Governance of Race Equality in Birmingham

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Issue 2 2005
Graham Smith
A number of political theorists have recently argued that group representation is essential to the achievement of social justice. However relatively little work exists on the institutional implications of such arguments beyond the analysis of electoral mechanisms to achieve greater representation within legislatures. This leaves unanswered one of the most difficult questions facing policy-makers , how to effectively engage the range of Black and minority ethnic (BME) communities in decision-making processes. Through a detailed analysis of the changing nature of the arrangements in place in Birmingham (UK) to engage BME communities, this paper is able to reflect on the theoretical and practical challenges of group representation in contemporary polities. [source]

ETHICAL BLIND-SPOTS: WHY SOCRATES WAS NOT A COSMOPOLITAN

RATIO, Issue 1 2010
Timothy Chappell
Though Socrates can easily look like a cosmopolitan in moral and political theory, a closer reading of the relevant texts shows that, in the most important sense of the term as we now use it, he turns out , disappointingly, perhaps , not to be. The reasons why not are instructive and important, both for readers of Plato and for political theorists; they have to do with the phenomenon that I shall call ethical blind-spots. [source]

JUST WAR AND THE SUPREME EMERGENCY EXEMPTION

THE PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 221 2005
Christopher Toner
Recently a number of liberal political theorists, including Rawls and Walzer, have argued for a ,supreme emergency exemption' from the traditional just war principle of discrimination which absolutely prohibits direct attacks against innocent civilians, claiming that a political community threatened with destruction may deliberately target innocents in order to save itself. I argue that this ,supreme emergency exemption' implies that individuals too may kill innocents in supreme emergencies. This is a significant theoretical cost. While it will not constitute a decisive refutation of all arguments for a supreme emergency exemption, my hope is that many will see this cost of endorsing the exemption as unacceptable. [source]