Nineteenth-century natural history societies sought to address the concerns of a scientific and a local public. Focusing on natural history societies in late Victorian Scotland, this paper concentrates on the relations between associational natural history and local civic culture. By examining the recruitment rhetoric used by leading members and by exploring the public meetings organized by the societies, the paper signals a number of ways in which members worked to make their societies important public bodies in Scottish towns. In addition, (...) by narrating a number of disputes between members over how natural history societies should operate, the paper shows how civic science could occasion social discord rather than harmony. Overall, by investigating the presence of field clubs in different urban settings, and describing members' attempts to portray natural historical pursuits as a significant cultural endeavour, the paper seeks to map an important part of the historical geography of Scottish civic science. (shrink)

History, Geography and Civics provides an in-depth and engaging introduction to teaching and learning socio-environmental education from F-6 in Australia and New Zealand. It explores the centrality of socio-environmental issues to all aspects of life and education and makes explicit links between pedagogical theories and classroom activities. Part I introduces readers to teaching and learning history, geography and environmental studies, and civics and citizenship, as well as issues in intercultural and global education. Part II explores the use of (...) media and sources, values and attitudes, assessment and creative teaching. Each chapter provides links to the Australian Curriculum, including cross-curriculum priorities: sustainability, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education, and Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia. History, Geography and Civics encourages the reader to consider their own beliefs, values and attitudes in relation to their teaching and includes provocations and reflective questions to foster discussion and engagement. (shrink)

This commentary response presents two concepts that may address legal-political issues arising in the civics pillar of digital civics: the history of data and nomos. It suggests that we can draw from the history of data to supplement our understanding of datafication and formulate responses to surveillance capitalism. It then forwards the utility of the ancient concept of nomos as a means of approaching cultural and jurisdictional challenges arising in the infosphere.

On Civic Republicanism explores the enduring relevance of the ancient concepts of republicanism and civic virtue to modern questions about political engagement and identity.".

In this paper based on original fieldwork, I seek to contribute to critical scholarship in international law by providing an investigation into the engagement with international law by actors in civil society working against son preference primarily in Tirupati, India. I suggest that the turn to the international legal order by civic actors should be theorized as something else than as merely coming ‘from above’, ‘from below’ or as a ‘translation’ of ‘global’ law to ‘local’ conditions. Instead, I propose that (...) the mobilization of international law within Tirupati’s civil society should be seen as an emancipatory undertaking, an act of resistance with the overarching ambition to reclaim the zenana. In that, I argue, the strategies within Tirupati’s civil society are more appropriately understood as critical international law put into practice. (shrink)

"This volume in Religion and Public Life, a series on religion and public affairs, provides a wide-ranging forum for differing views on religious and ethical considerations. The contributions address the decline of social capital-those patterns of behavior which are conducive to self-governance and the spirit of self-reliance-and its relation to the demise of the civic-humanist tradition in American education. The unifying theme, is that classical studies do not merely result in individual mastery over a particular technique or body of knowledge, (...) but also link the individual to the polity and even to the whole of the cosmic order. At the same time, American republicanism, in its exaltation of the common man from the Jeffersonian agrarian soldier to the apotheosis of Lincoln tempers the classical ideal into something less exalted, if more democratic. The effects on the contemporary state of the liberal arts curriculum are demonstrated in articles critical of the market-model university. Two essays explore the historical and philosophical significance of the discipline of rhetoric, that has suffered under the hegemony of rationalistic philosophy. A concluding contribution, invokes Giambattista Vico as an eloquent defender of the humanities. Humanities and Civic Life includes: "Rome, Florence, and Philadelphia: Using the History of the Humanities to Renew Our Civic Life" by Robert E. Proctor; "The Dark Fields of the Republic: The Persistence of Republican Thought in American History" by David Brown; "Unleashing the Humanities" by Robert Weisbuch; "Liberal Arts: Listening to Faculty" by Dennis O'Brien; "Historical Consciousness in Antiquity" by Paul Gottfried; "Taking the Measure of Relativism and the Civic Virtue of Rhetoric" by Gabriel R. Ricci; "The River: A Vichian Dialogue on Humanistic Education" by Randall E. Auxier."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In discussing the origins of the antievolution movement in American high schools within the framework of science and religion, much is overlooked about the influence of educational trends in shaping this phenomenon. This was especially true in the years before the 1925 Scopes trial, the beginnings of the school antievolution movement. There was no sudden realization in the 1920's – sixty years after the "Origin of Species" was published – that Darwinism conflicted with the Bible, but until evolution was being (...) taught in the high schools, there was no impetus to outlaw it. The creation of "civic biology" curricula in the late 1910's and early 20's, spearheaded by a close-knit community of textbook authors, brought evolution into the high school classroom as part of a complete reshaping of "biology" as a school subject. It also incorporated progressive ideologies about the purposes of compulsory public education in shaping society, and civic biology was fundamentally focused on the applications of the life sciences to human life. Antievolution legislation was part of a broader response to the ideologies of the new biology field, and was a reaction not only to the content of the new subject, but to the increasingly centralized control and regulation of education. Viewing the early school antievolution movement through the science-religion conflict is an artifact of the Scopes trial's re-creation of its origins. What largely caused support for the school antievolution movement in the South and particularly Tennessee were concerns over public education, which biology came to epitomize. (shrink)

Liberal political theory is widely believed to be an inadequate source of civic commitment and thus of civic education primarily because of its commitment to what is perceived as a pervasive individualism. In this paper, I explore the possibility that John Rawls’s later political philosophy may provide a response to this belief. I first articulate a conception of liberal politics derived from Rawls’s idea of reflective equilibrium that generates an overlapping consensus about political principles among those who hold a wide (...) variety of cultural and personal conceptions of the good. Next I develop the aims for civic education in a society that employs such a politics. Then I suggest the elements of the public school curriculum appropriate for such a civic education, including a robust multicultural education, intellectual reflection on the society’s history, and philosophical training that enables children to understand the events and policies of their nation as following from general political principles. I also consider the kinds of classroom practice that seem necessary to provide the motivation to engage in the process of the emergence of an overlapping consensus, including opportunities to develop and to reflect on the principles that may be included in the current consensus and to understand the way in which those principles relate to children’s developing conceptions of the good. Finally, I compare this conception of civic education to those of other liberal theorists. (shrink)

What makes public history more than just another hill to fight over in culture war politics? In this paper I propose a novel way of understanding the political significance of how public history creates and shapes identities: a contractarian one. I argue that public history can be sensibly understood as representing groups as a society’s contracting parties. One particular value of the contractarian approach is that it helps to elucidate the phenomenon of “signing on,” where a marginalized or oppressed group (...) is offered membership in a society without the social order being meaningfully changed. (shrink)

This article revisits the question of the modernity of the Renaissance by examining the political language of Florentine civic humanism and by critically analyzing the debate over Hans Baron’s interpretation of the movement. It engages two debates that are usually conducted separately: one concerning the originality of civic humanism in comparison to medieval thought, and the other concerning the political and social function of the civic humanists’ political republicanism in fifteenth-century Florence. The article’s main contention is that humanist political discourse (...) rejected the perception of social and political reality as being part of, or reflecting, a metaphysical and divine order or things, and thus undermined the traditional justifications for political hierarchies and power relations. This created the conditions of possibility for the distinctively modern aspiration for a social and political order based on liberty and equality. It also resulted in the birth of a distinctively modern form of ideology, one that legitimizes the social order by disguising its inequalities and structures of domination. Humanism, like modern political thought generally, thus simultaneously constructs and reflects the dialectic of emancipation and domination so central to modernity itself. (shrink)

Richard Harvey Brown's pioneering explorations in the philosophy of social science and the theory of rhetoric reach a culmination in Social Science as Civic Discourse. In his earlier works, he argued for a logic of discovery and explanation in social science by showing that science and art both depend on metaphoric thinking, and he has applied that logic to society as a narrative text in which significant action by moral agents is possible. This new work is at once a philosophical (...) critique of social theory and a social-theoretical critique of politics. Brown proposes to redirect the language and the mission of the social sciences toward a new discourse for a humane civic practice. (shrink)

There have been numerous attempts to understand the role and importance of the Great Dionysia in Athens, and it is a festival that has been made crucial to varied and important characterizations of Greek culture as well as the history of drama or literature. Recent scholarship, however, has greatly extended our understanding of the formation of fifth-century Athenian ideology—in the sense of the structure of attitudes and norms of behaviour—and this developing interest in what might be called a ‘civic discourse’ (...) requires a reconsideration of the Great Dionysia as a city festival. For while there have been several fascinating readings of particular plays with regard to thepolisand its ideology, there is still a considerable need to place the festival itself in terms of the ideology of thepolis. Indeed, recent critics in a justifiable reaction away from writers such as Gilbert Murray have tended rather to emphasize on the one hand that the festival is a place of entertainment rather than religious ritual, and on the other hand that the plays should be approached primarily asdramaticperformances. (shrink)

The connections between science and civic culture in the Victorian period have been extensively, and intensively, investigated over the past several decades. Limited attention, however, has been paid to Irish urban contexts. Roman Catholic attitudes towards science in the nineteenth century have also been neglected beyond a rather restricted set of thinkers and topics. This paper is offered as a contribution to addressing these lacunae, and examines in detail the complexities involved in Catholic engagement with science in Victorian Belfast. The (...) political and civic geographies of Catholic involvement in scientific discussions in a divided town are uncovered through an examination of five episodes in the unfolding history of Belfast's intellectual culture. The paper stresses the importance of attending to the particularities of local politics and scientific debate for understanding the complex realities of Catholic appropriations of science in a period and urban context profoundly shaped by competing political and religious factions. It also reflects more generally on how the Belfast story supplements and challenges scholarship on the historical relations between Catholicism and science. (shrink)

In Solidarity, Hauke Brunkhorst brings a powerful combination of theoretical perspectives to bear on the concept of "democratic solidarity," the bond among free and equal citizens. Drawing on the disciplines of history, political philosophy, and political sociology, Brunkhorst traces the historical development of the idea of universal, egalitarian citizenship and analyzes the prospects for democratic solidarity at the international level, within a global community under law. His historical account of the concept outlines its development out of, and its departure from, (...) the less egalitarian notions of civic friendship in the Greco-Roman world and brotherliness in the Judeo-Christian tradition. He then analyzes the modernization of Western societies and the destruction of the older, hierarchical solidarities. The problems of exclusion that subsequently arose -- which stemmed from growing individualization in society as well as from the exclusion of certain groups from the benefits of society -- could be solved only with democratic solidarity in the form of its "institutional embodiment," the democratic constitution. Finally, Brunkhorst examines the return of these exclusion problems as a result of economic globalization. Analyzing the possibilities for democratic self-governance at a global level, Brunkhorst finds in recent global protest movements the beginnings of a transnational civic solidarity. Brunkhorst's normative and sociological account, mediating between these two perspectives, demonstrates the necessity of keeping normative requirements systematically attuned with conditions of social reality. (shrink)

This paper articulates Aquinas’s account of the duties citizens have toward the nation, focused specifically on the virtues of piety and observance. In the first section, I discuss justice as the foundation of good citizenship. In the second, I delineate the acts of justice which primarily orient citizens toward serving the nation, focusing specifically on piety and observance. Finally, in the third section I reflect on how religion, or the virtue by which humans render proper worship to God, has a (...) moderating effect on what we owe to the nation. Reverence for political authorities easily becomes state idolatry unless a strong religious commitment to loving God first and neighbor second is present among the citizenry. Thus, religion is shown to be a bulwark of freedom from tyranny. (shrink)

Because a thorough investigation of Machiavelli's thought and the thought of those who explicitly drew on it can be achieved only through the kind of Herculean labours displayed by Pocock in his Machiavellian Moment, I propose here to examine only two works by admirers of Machiavelli: Harrington's Oceana, which imports the Italian Renaissance to England's shores, and John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon's Cato's Letters, which prepares its departure for America. I argue that a re-examination of these critical links in the (...) civic humanist chain does not bear out the civic humanist interpretation of Machiavelli's influence. Further, because Pocock, at times, asserts that what is crucial for establishing Machiavelli's participation in this tradition is not, in fact, what Machiavelli said, but how others read him, I believe that this examination begins to raise significant questions about the validity of Pocock's portrait of a Machiavellian civic humanist tradition. (shrink)

This paper explores how civic engagement as an important dimension of public engagement in higher education has been slow to develop in the UK, despite an important history dating from the ‘civic universities' in the ninetheenth century. I specifically consider the development of ' service learning ' as an important way in which the values and practices of democratic citizenship can be embedded in the curriculum of higher education. Finally, I examine how the decline of the ideal of ‘public service' (...) in the UK provides some significant barriers to the re-development of the civic university. (shrink)

"By nearly every measure, Americans are less engaged in their communities and political activity than generations past.” So write the editors of this volume, who survey the current practices and history of citizenship education in the United States. They argue that the current period of “creative destruction”—when schools are closing and opening in response to reform mandates—is an ideal time to take an in-depth look at how successful strategies and programs promote civic education and good citizenship. _Making Civics Count_ (...) offers research-based insights into what diverse students and teachers know and do as civic actors, and proposes a blueprint for civic education for a new generation that is both practical and visionary. (shrink)

The heroes and villains of the Star Wars saga are probably the most widely recognized fictional characters in the Western world. In particular, the saga is a celebration of friendship and family bonds. Though it is a story of conflict and warfare, grand political concerns about the fate of the galaxy are kept in the background, as the story focuses more on action and the relationships among the main characters. The overwhelming loyalty that the heroes of Star Wars feel for (...) friends and family is a traditional feature of heroes, from ancient history to today. Weighing the actions of fictional characters like Luke and his pals can help us reflect on how we should act in the real world. In some ways, the moral views of early philosophers move us too far toward civic duty and away from the traditional values of loyalty to friends and family. (shrink)

The article concerns the question of civic virtues, the aim being to present and argue for the personalist conception of citizenship. It consists of four parts. Inthe first part, following Will Kymlicka, I argue for the need of active citizenship; my claim is that personalism offers an attractive concept of such attitude. In thesecond part I make an outline of the personalist idea of authentic community, including the idea of authentic political community, and thus set the necessaryconceptual context for further (...) considerations. In the third, central part I focus on characterizing authentic civic attitudes that constitute a true political community.In the fourth part I supplement the outline of civic attitudes with the characterization of unauthentic attitudes. In the conclusion, I briefly point out in what waythe personalist concept of authentic citizenship presented here may find a fruitful application to the contemporary debates in political philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Learning from Examples of Civic Responsibility:What Community-Based Art Centers Teach Us about Arts EducationJessica Hoffmann Davis (bio)Introduction/QuestionThroughout the United States, beyond school walls, there struggles and soars a sprawling field of community art centers dedicated to education.1 Most frequently clustered on either coast in bustling urban communities, these centers provide arts training that enriches or exceeds what is offered in schools. They serve artists who need space for work (...) or performance, students who crave instruction and direction, and the broader community that enjoys attendant cultural enrichment. At the core, they create safe havens for arts learning that has been marginalized elsewhere.Unfettered by the demands and constraints of school administrations, these self-designed centers have been of considerable interest to arts education researchers over the last twenty years.2 Largely conceived and staffed by artists, they demonstrate artful alternatives to mainstream education: creative visions of teaching, learning, and assessment. Moreover, the positive impact these centers have had on students considered at risk across a number of variables has caught the attention of researchers looking for better ways to serve our youth.3The location of these centers beyond school walls, like their operation beyond the hours of the school day, would naturally seem to cast them as positive opportunities for extending arts learning that goes on in school. But with school art curricula scarce or in danger of elimination, supplementary options can seem threatening to school arts specialists. Administrators have regarded the opportunities that outside artists and centers provide as sufficient substitutes for a school-based course of sequential instruction in the arts. While vital funding sources encourage and sustain collaboration, a tension persists between the autonomy of outsider arts centers and the integrity [End Page 82] of insider school arts programs. For students disenfranchised from schools, the "otherness" of centers has a certain cachet. For centers unable to afford their own space, school classrooms in after-school hours offer a home base for their offerings and easy access for students. The back and forth across school walls raises opportunities and concerns that have resulted in a range of creative solutions.4 But my interest here is not in the cross-wall meeting of services, but rather in the differences in arts learning on either side of school walls. In the pages that follow, I pose the question, What can schools learn from the arts education provided in the community?In addressing this question, I first mark the differences between arts learning in schools and in the community as a need for justification versus an opportunity for demonstration. I then describe the research from which my thinking and discussion draw and offer a brief overview of the history of community art centers as inspired by and illustrative of civic responsibility. With an eye to what educators and advocates can learn from these community-based efforts, I focus next on three common objections to prioritizing the arts in our schools: value, measurement, and autonomy. Each objection is introduced from a school-based perspective and then reconsidered in light of community-based attitudes and activities.5 In conclusion, I delineate the insights derived from a consideration of community arts education as stimulus for the redirection of educational objectives and advocacy rationales for arts learning in schools.Justification vs. DemonstrationIn its struggle for recognition and place in school settings, arts education has sought justification in terms of its potential to serve the broader educational scene. We ask of classes that provide mounting skills in visual arts, music, or theater, "Yes, but what else does arts learning do? Can it improve student skills in reading, mathematics, or any other subjects that are more traditionally valued?" Such demands may seem unfair. When has math ever been defended for its ability to improve arts performance? Beyond a sense of injustice, claims for arts learning's causal impact on measurable extraneous outcomes (such as improvements in test scores in nonarts academic subjects) are at best most difficult to prove.6In community centers where art is the chosen heart of the matter, students come specifically to study the arts and to benefit from their enhancement of more generalized experience... (shrink)

This article rereads Benedict de Spinoza and recent interpretations of him as an epistemic democrat through the prism of contemporary debate on the conditions for deliberation in a democracy. Through a reconstruction of Spinoza's arguments and theories of deliberation and its preconditions, we argue that, for deliberation to produce the benefits Spinoza recognizes, the process must be inclusive, and those deliberating must be both intellectually humble and autonomous. This interpretation is new and diverges from those recently advanced by Justin Steinberg (...) and Sandra Leonie Field. In particular, on our reading, Spinoza's critique of humility does not extend to intellectual humility as it is understood today in political theory. Both autonomy and humility, as epistemologically conceived by political theorists today, can therefore be considered Spinozian civic virtues. (shrink)

Macau, as a society, is a crossroads where East–West encounters have been taking place for centuries. This paper examines some of the contemporary issues and implications for moral education. After a brief introduction to the social background of Macau, the paper describes the characteristics of Macau's education in general and the development of its moral education in particular. This has taken place in the context of the strong influences on morality of both Catholicism and Confucianism. An outline of the current (...) curriculum of moral and civic education is followed by a critical appraisal of its implementation over the last few years. By means of this case study of Macau, the paper argues that a communitarian‐oriented morality in Macau is justified, and it also suggests how, by turning attention to its history, a minimal set of values can be constructed for Macau's particular social setting. Finally, some further educational challenges for Macau's future moral and civic education are reviewed. (shrink)

This paper examines the discursive transformation of the historic American public market from that of a municipally regulated institution intended to ensure fair trade and equitable food distribution to “a public place” that emphasizes community identity and sociability. Using a semiotic analysis of interviews with 31 market managers of 30 historic and contemporary American public markets, data from historic documents, and multiple site visits, we compare the social construction of the contemporary public market to farmers markets, supermarkets, and the early (...) twentieth century public market. We analyze the meanings managers create in the contemporary public market to understand the administrative rationalities within which the public market operates. Our analysis reveals evidence of competing imaginaries active in the public market, organized around broad notions of “public benefit,” “community culture” and “institutional viability.” We propose that these tensions are embedded in the public market as an institution historically implicated in regimes of food distribution. In the contemporary context, we conclude, public markets largely substitute the spectacle of community and the image of an historic public life for a legally instated commitment to the just governance of food systems. (shrink)

This semester-long research project examined the use of social studies trade books to thematically teach about six individuals who served as change agents in the United States during the late 19th century and early 20th century. Three of the individuals were African American men, Robert Smalls, Frederick Douglass, and John Roy Lynch, who took civic action to address racial discrimination faced by the Black community in the half century following the U.S. Civil War. The other three indivduals were women women, (...) Ida B. Wells, Clara Lemlich, and Jane Addams, who challenged social inequities and injustices within their communities. Over the course of the semester-long research project, sixth-grade U.S. history students read selected trade books, examined primary sources, completed graphic organizers, and crafted writing assessments about each of the six individuals. Students demonstrated complex historical thinking, integrated economic and civic thinking, and communicated thematic ideas of systemic oppression of minorities, women, and the poor. They struggled to make connections between examples of historic oppression and contemporary examples of societal oppression. (shrink)

The article is an attempt to indicate the presence of the ethics of civic virtues in Polish ethics, both old and modern, which is worth in-depth attention. Problems of civic morality have constantly accompanied ethics and morality in Poland since the Renaissance. Its content was usually a reflection of critical reflection on the defects of civic morality, especially of the nobility, and over time of the bourgeoisie, and at the same time it was normatively constructive as historical and political changes (...) and the scope of civil society expanded, formulating “the ideal of the citizen in a democratic system”. The author of the article selects from the history of Polish ethics the most important figures who address the issue of virtue ethics, showing its constant presence in history, using the prism of civic ethos as a key element for the ethics of public life. It was difficult to prove the existence of a specialized section of civic ethics, but the normative civic ethos can be reconstructed from the perspective of the ethics of virtue and social ethics in a broader sense. From the historical perspective, this ethos appears both as a certain set of practices, which was only outlined in the context of the article, and as an ordered product of normative thought. (shrink)

Although it is frequently overlooked, J.S. Mill's political philosophy has a significant civic component; he is a committed believer in the value of active and disinterested participation in public affairs by the citizens of liberal democracies, and he advocates a programme of civic education intended to cultivate public spirit. In the first half of this essay I present a brief but systematic exploration of his thought's civic dimension. In the second half I defend Mill's civic liberalism against various critics who (...) have explicitly or implicitly charged that the civic and liberal components of his political philosophy are inconsistent. (shrink)

Vice crimes, crimes prohibited in part because they are viewed as morally corrupting, engage legal theorists because they reveal importantly contrasting views between liberals and virtue-centered theorists on the very limits of legitimate state action. Yet advocates and opponents alike focus on the role law can play in suppressing personal vice; the role of law is seen as suppressing licentiousness, sloth, greed etc. The most powerful advocates of the position that the law must nurture good character often draw on Aristotelian (...) theories of virtue to ground the connection between law and virtue. While Aristotle believed that law and character were linked, it is ironic to note that he did not argue for the position evidenced in our vice laws that law was likely to succeed in instilling virtue. Indeed, Aristotle thought the project of using law to instill private virtue was nearly certain to fail. Aristotle’s deep concern was not for the way law protected private virtue within each person but the way law had to protect civic virtue between citizens. This article argues that even from its foundations, the project of vice crimes as moral instruction is misconceived. The use of law for overly instrumental or narrow reasons opens law and legal institutions to abuse and factionalism. Lawyers, judges and others specially connected to law must first and foremost aim at addressing “legal vices,” vices internal to the institutions of law. Particularly, increasing factionalism and instrumentalism which disconnects law from the pursuit of the common good threatens our civic bonds. Most importantly, where civic bonds are disrupted, citizens have no reason to remain law abiding. The striking lesson, captured both in ancient philosophy and modern history, is that when legal vices grow unchecked and factions use the law to pursue narrow interests, ultimately law abidingness is corrupted and interest groups harm themselves as much as others. (shrink)

Alisdair ManIntyre's well-known criticism of modern moral philosophy contrasts what he sees as the moral vacuity of modern culture with a ‘classical tradition' in ethical thought depicted as restoring cohesion and coherence to social striving and ethical life. MacIntyre's stress on the culturally specific circumstances within which ethical imperatives derive their force provides a corrective to unworldly tendancies within post-Kantian moral philosophy, yet his ‘classical’ ethical landscape possesses an equally striking kind of unworldliness. His image of a life lived as (...) an unbroken moral narrative is dependent on a picture of classical social existence viewed as an integrated whole, as opposed to the ethical ‘segmentation’ of modern social life. Here I question this image of a moral life without boundaries by reference to perhaps the most influential of all classical ethical texts, Cicero's De Officiis. I argue that Cicero's discussion of the virtues is marked by a strong sense of the demarcation of ethical spheres and statuses, and that what MacIntyre takes as the appropriate end-product of ethical ascesis is instead a highly exceptional heroic limit-case. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Between April 1820 and April 1822, stimulated by the restoration of the Cádiz Constitution, Bentham devoted himself to writing a number of works on the constitutional reform and colonial rule of Spain, which have been sources of a scholarly debate over Bentham's views on colony. By examining those works, this essay aims to supplement the scholarly debate by drawing attention to a thesis that Bentham developed in his criticism and evaluation of the Cádiz Constitution: a thesis concerning the irreconcilable (...) incompatibilities of liberal constitution and colonisation. I focus on Bentham's critical analyses of the Constitution, and indicate that Spain's colonial rule of Ultramaria not only intensified the weaknesses of the Constitution, but also rendered its merits useless, if not harmful, to the public in both hemispheres. Moreover, I explore the tension that Bentham detected between liberal constitutionalism and colonialism. I maintain that, in Bentham's observation, the civil rights granted by the Cádiz Constitution to the Ultramarians stood to facilitate the enlightenment of citizens and the formation of civil society. As a consequence, the delusion of the Spanish ruling few would be exposed, and the Ultramarians’ discontent with exploitation by such foreign rulers would sow the seeds of disobedience and resistance. (shrink)

This article seeks to make some general points about the changing nature of constitutionalism by looking critically at the constitutional architecture of the Northern Ireland Act 1998. It argues that despite their sophistication the structures of settlement in Northern Ireland do not address fully the fundamental issues of the changing nature of power and the ethical character of constitutional transformation. The argument draws upon the governmentality approach associated with work developing the later writings of Michel Foucault to consider the nature (...) of government and of multi‐level and multi‐form governance. In particular, the account reviews briefly the settlement structures and suggests that the role of government may have changed since last there was devolution in Northern Ireland. Next the history of involvement of the voluntary sector in governance in the Northern Ireland context is outlined to indicate its particular potential for development. Finally, the positive advantages of opening up a new democratic space through developing the role of civil society in the processes of governance are reviewed and the value of a constitutional renewal project is considered. (shrink)

Urban studies understandably dominate the historiography and our comprehension of the French Wars of Religion. Social, religious and, more recently, political issues have all been in vogue in studies of the wars and, therefore, in the histories of towns. Confessional conflict and coexistence, relations between royal and municipal authorities, affiliation to Protestantism or the Catholic League, have all exercised urban histories. Key moments during the wars highlight the importance of the towns and the trauma they experienced. Yet, despite tension and (...) division, urban communities had a shared concern in the maintenance of civic order and the defence of local integrity. (shrink)

How are we to understand the nature and value of higher education's public purposes, mission, and work in a democratic society? How do-and how should-academic professionals contribute to and participate in civic life in their practices as scholars, scientists, and educators? Democracy and Higher Education addresses these questions by combining an examination of several normative traditions of civic engagement in American higher education with the presentation and interpretation of a dozen oral history profiles of contemporary practitioners. In his analysis of (...) these profiles, Scott Peters reveals and interprets a democratic-minded civic professionalism that includes and interweaves expert, social critic, responsive service, and proactive leadership roles. Democracy and Higher Education contributes to a new line of research on the critically important task of strengthening and defending higher education's positive roles in and for a democratic society. (shrink)

Zionist national identity in Israel is today challenged by two mutuallyantagonistic alternatives: a liberal, secular, Post-Zionist civic identity, on the one hand, and ethnic, religious, Neo-Zionist nationalistic identity, on the other. The other, Zionist, hegemony contains an unsolvable tension between the national and the democratic facets of the state. The Post-Zionist trend seeks a relief of this tension by bracketing the nationalcharacter of the state, i.e., by separation of state and cultural community/ies; the Neo-Zionist trend seeks a relief of the (...) same tension by bracketing the democratic nature of the state, i.e., by consolidating the Jewish ethno-national character of the state. The focus of the study is upon two dimensions of this unfolding cultural-political strife: the conflicting perceptions of time and space, and the ways they affect the perceptions of the boundaries of the collectivity, either in an inclusionary manner (the ``post'') or in an exclusionary manner (the ``neo''). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal CommunityPaul HendricksonThe University of South Carolina. Hauke Brunkhorst. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Pp. xxv + 262. $42.50, hardcover.Public appeals to solidarity have been pervasive throughout the storied history of political dissent and democratic politics. From the French Revolution and the European revolutions of 1848 to decolonization, Polish Solidarność, and the antiglobalization movement, solidarity has been invoked as a means of (...) reinventing citizenship, rights, and community. Yet political theorists have not generally accorded the concept of solidarity a degree of attention comparable to that afforded other core political concepts, such as freedom, equality, and deliberation. In Solidarity, Hauke Brunkhorst seeks to remedy this neglect, arguing that the concept of solidarity should be deemed fundamental to democratic theory and practice: "In modern societies, solidarity coincides with the concept of democracy" (xxiii). Brunkhorst presents this thesis as a corrective to current theory, but he also develops it—in the spirit of much Frankfurt School theorizing—as a Zeitdiagnose, as a timely diagnosis, regarding the threats globalization poses to democratic self-governance: "Power, law, and money are globalized [today] at the expense of democratic solidarity" (7).Solidarity, as Brunkhorst understands it, is a thoroughly modern concept. The "ideas of 1789"—in particular, the fraternité of the French Revolution—provided the historical foundation for an egalitarian and democratic model of solidarity. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the concept of solidarity [End Page 343] gradually replaced that of fraternity in the wake of industrialization. Drawing on Marx, Brunkhorst argues that what promoted working-class solidarity was "not the local sympathy of communal relations or the friendly affection... of a tightly structured polis," but rather the railway, the steamship, and the telegraph (60). Brunkhorst's historiography is woven into a broad social-theoretic framework. Following Durkheim, he reasons that the modern division of labor is not founded on the mechanical solidarity of Gemeinschaft, on a shared sense of affinity, ritual, and communal belonging, but on the organic solidarity of Gesellschaft, on the integration of an individualized, pluralist, and functionally differentiated society.To readers acquainted with contemporary German appropriations of the sociological tradition, many of Brunkhorst's conceptual moves will seem familiar. But his unique fusion of social-theoretic and historical argumentation yields a fascinating and novel characterization of solidarity. For Brunkhorst, solidarity is not a form of sentiment or emotional bond; it is not premised on compassion for "tormentable bodies" (Brecht) or on a "flexible feeling of sympathy" (Rorty); rather, "it is nothing but the democratic realization of individual freedom" (3). This normative model of solidarity is guided by the regulative ideal of a political association without domination; it envisages a polity in which the individual is neither servant nor master to her compatriots. As modes of governance become increasingly globalized, democratic forms of solidarity must reach beyond the rights traditions of particular nation-states to include a "human-rights patriotism."Brunkhorst traces this ideal back to Greco-Roman antiquity and the Judeo-Christian tradition. Drawing principally on the writings of Greek and Roman philosophers, he argues that civic friendship (philia) provided a space for mutual freedom, emancipated individuals from the bonds of kinship, generalized friendship into a form of patriotism (philia politike), and realized the universal essence of man as a political being. But this civic-republican model remained profoundly elitist, excluding the many on the basis of gender, class, and citizenship status. More suggestive and original is Brunkhorst's treatment of Jewish and Christian thought. The intersection between rhetoric and philosophy is central to his interpretation of the Exodus story and covenant theology as a form of collective countermemory and as a prophetic practice of critique. Through his reading of the Jotham fable and other biblical narratives, he argues that the Jewish prophets and the Christian New Testament avowed "the equal proximity of all humans to God" and contributed to a "prophetic project of egalitarian solidarity" (33, 36). [End Page 344]Brunkhorst's historical reconstructions culminate in the French Revolution. On his view, the otherworldly universalism of the Judeo-Christian tradition was secularized and institutionalized in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) and the first French... (shrink)

This essay traces the recent history of 3D satellite animation from its military origins to its visibility in the civic sphere. Specifically, technologies unveiled in 2004 as Google Earth first received widespread public visibility in the television coverage of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The essay first maps the political economy of the “military-media-geotech” complex, focusing mainly on the coverage of the Iraq War as an nexus of interests. Second, the essay analyzes the aesthetic uses of 3D satellite animation (...) on the news during this period, including how these imaging practices meshed with existing discourses such as the clean war, the weaponization of the civic gaze, and others. The essay concludes with thoughts regarding what these practices mean for the efficacy of the deliberative citizen, public life, and the meaning of war. (shrink)