Na tentativa de tornar compreensível o processo vintista nas suas componentes ideológicas ao nível das estruturas orgânicas da Nação, analisamos um caso – o do município do Horta. Utilizando as categorias do liberalismo historicista, de matriz inglesa, e as do radicalismo libe­ral, de coloração racionalista à francesa, procuramos demonstrar como o liberalismo vintista se estabelece entre o balanceamento dos dois modelos. A teoria do municipalismo, levada a cabo por Alexandre Herculano, mais não faz do que elevar ao nível da conceptualização (...) uma consciência que os "corpos intermédios" manifestaram na adesão ao vintismo, quando a ideia da "soberania da Nação" tendia a afirmar-se como absoluta. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 58-83 [Access article in PDF] Imagi-Nation: The Imagined Community and the Aesthetics of Mourning Marc Redfield Of the many relics of the Romantic era that continue to shape our (post)modernity, the nation-state surely ranks among the most significant. Two decades ago Benedict Anderson commented that "'the end of the era of nationalism,' so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight" [IC 3], and the (...) intervening years have made it increasingly clear that the developments and processes we summarize as "globalization" operate in mingled synchrony and tension with the political form of the nation-state. 1 That the nation-state should remain the premier vehicle of political and economic legitimation in an era dominated by American imperialism and international capital--forces that, of course, regularly and flagrantly violate the sovereignty of disadvantaged nations--is unsurprising if one accepts the continuing pertinency and power of a Western master-narrative of modernity, according to which the nation represents the emergence of a people into history and prefigures the global achievement of universal human concord. As the proper subject of history, the nation-state can prefigure history's end because, as David Lloyd writes, "the particularism of [nationalism's] contents, potentially in contradiction with the universalism of modernity, is subsumed in the formal congruence between its own narratives of identity, directed at one people, and the narrative of identity that universal history represents for humanity in general" ["Nationalisms" 178]. Lloyd goes on to note that the nation's intermediate status in this narrative--halfway between primitive tribalism and modernity's ever-deferred perpetual peace--accounts for nationalism's irreducibly double association with modernization and atavism. In consequence, the modernist paradigm continues to rule many skeptical or hostile accounts of nationalism, for so long as the nation-state is taken to supersede other political or social formations, the cosmopolitan critique fails to challenge "the fundamental philosophy of universal history that underwrites nationalism's inscription in modernity" ["Nationalisms" 177]. Indeed, both in the corporate media and in mainstream Western political discourse generally, nations and nationalisms are commonly treated as atavistic or progressive depending on the degree to which their behavior harmonizes with globalizing imperatives. That these imperatives emanate quite blatantly from Wall Street in no way seriously troubles the effectiveness of modernity as a narrative paradigm. 2Seeking to discredit universalizing narrative, much cultural criticism in recent years has exchanged cosmopolitanism and the abstract question of "nationalism" for an emphasis [End Page 58] on the contextual construction of national movements or identities. 3 This valuable body of work has sought to recover the particularity of cultural and socioeconomic circumstance, stressed the fundamental role of racism in colonialist contexts, and noted ways in which nationalist movements draw on or unleash forms of resistance that challenge representationalist politics. The pages that follow, however, remain focused on the nationalist fantasy proper to the discourse of modernity. Cultural critique can only profit from knowing as much as possible about the favored turns of the universal-historicist model, particularly since, as Lloyd and others have emphasized, this model is an aesthetic one that grants a world-historical role to "culture." The state, in a tradition that in its main lines runs from Schiller through Hegel and Matthew Arnold and is still very much alive today, represents the community to itself, thereby giving the community form and in a certain sense giving it an ethical imperative and a future: the state represents "our best self" [Arnold 99, passim], "the archetype of a human being" [Schiller 17], because it signifies the formal unification both of the citizen with the community and of the community with universal humanity. Because this unification is ideal rather than actual, it can be projected as the ethical terminus of history (that is, as the ideal of an accomplished modernity). The state's core mission thus becomes pedagogical: its job is to acculturate its subjects into citizens. The production of a docile citizenry thereby obtains an ethical aura and an aesthetic character, insofar as the artwork and the domain of aesthetic or "cultural" experience generally become... (shrink)

Using the Western tradition of metaphysical and political thought as a backdrop, Critique of Sovereignty (a work in 4 volumes) re-examines the concept of sovereignty in order to better understand why our ethical values and technical capacities often seem so divorced from our lived realities. On the one hand, ostensibly self-enclosed entities like the nation-state and the person are rhetorically bolstered as sites of technical agency and/or moral responsibility. On the other hand, these same entities appear fragile -- if (...) not purely fictional -- in relation to ever ongoing tidal processes such as the migration, diffusion, and conglomeration of bodies, capital, ideas, etc. While some of our institutions might work some of the time, they always seem to work differently than we like to think they do. Accordingly, the forging of more humane institutions might very well entail if not require ways of thinking that strive to undo the self-imagined binds, exceptions, and sureties of thought for the sake of embracing a continuity with all that withers, decays, and falls away. Book I, "Contemporary Theories of Sovereignty," compares the varied interpretations of sovereignty given by a range of 20th-century political theorists (Maritain, Foucault, Derrida, Schmitt, Agamben, Hardt, and Negri) with Jean Bodin's initial outline of the concept, rendered at the outset of modern political thought in the 16th century. The analytic framework of sovereignty encountered in these comparative readings provides an initial point of departure for unfolding a method of critique appropriate to the concept of sovereignty. Sovereignty is an ideal starting point for a critique of the deadlocks between thought and reality for a simple reason: it doesn't actually exist. When it serves as a guide to action, sovereignty may be regarded as a particularly captivating fantasy. The closer it appears, the further it recedes, and, too often, the more vigorously it is pursued. (shrink)

Sovereignty and non-interference principles are trademarks of the Association of South-East Asian Nations regional approach. Starting from 1993, ASEAN has been developing a process aimed at creating a human rights system. This process reached its acme in August 2013 when the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration was formally launched. In the frame of the tension between sovereignty and human rights, the paper firstly analyzes the roots of the ASEAN path towards the creation of the regional human rights system grounded on the (...) Vienna World Conference debate. Next comes an analysis of the political commitments assumed by ASEAN in the last 20 years in the process of creating a human rights body in the region. Furthermore, the paper presents an in-depth analysis of the most problematic issues connected with the nature, functions, mandate, and purposes of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Human Rights Commission. This is followed by an analysis of the AHRD. (shrink)

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). (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This paper takes as its queer object a serialized podcast. With its story about John B. McLemore, a clockmaker from Woodstock, Alabama, S-Town is a blockbuster success from the producers of Serial and This American Life. Against both affirmative and negative reception of S-Town – responses that tend to position the podcast either as transcending or as reproducing the idea of a backwards or lagging South – this paper argues that S-Town is an intermedial narrative incorporating various media that themselves (...) comprise competing temporalities. Indexing these alternative temporalities are the intricate designs of clocks and sundials that tell of mythological time and seasonal and diurnal rhythms. There are also tattoos and other inscriptions that mark both bodies and sundials. My argument attends to the animate and inanimate forms narratively contained within the podcast, touching on Rebecca Schneider’s idea of “interanimation” and Elizabeth Freeman’s challenges to “chrononormativity” in the process. From within this intermedial structure, John emerges as an intermediary whose engagement in processes of self-objectification and historical re-enactment complicates a normative timeframe and confounds conventional subject/object relations. Through a consideration of what I call the queerly intermedial form of the S-Town podcast, the essay looks beyond both discrete forms and regional/national concerns to gesture toward the significance of broader networks and spheres for thinking about time, space and being. (shrink)

Recovering a marginal body of pluralist political thought from early twentieth-century India, this article explores how the question of popular sovereignty shaped the federalist reconfiguration of the anticolonial democratic project. The turn to federalism was facilitated by the Indian reckoning with Hegel in the late nineteenth century, which led to the diagnosis that the universality ascribed to monist sovereignty relies on a “unilinear” theory of development. Through a sustained engagement with British pluralist and American progressive thought, Indian federalist thinkers eventually (...) developed a many-willed conception of the people. In so doing, they hoped to overcome the denial of Indian peoplehood on the ground of its lack of national unity and historical backwardness. However, the alternative source of sovereignty the federalists pointed to—plural and many-willed—stood in tension with their simultaneous pursuit of a people speaking in one voice. In this way, the constitutive tension of the pluralist conception of sovereignty came strikingly alive in the colonial world. (shrink)

A growing body of research on culturally and linguistically responsive social studies instruction continues to identify essential understandings regarding the teaching and learning of social studies among multilingual students. Yet a preponderance of these studies utilize ethnographic and other highly contextualized qualitative methods. In order to make this growing body of knowledge more accessible to a larger audience of researchers and educators, the present study examined pedagogical approaches and areas of curricular emphasis that social studies teachers reported using in the (...) landmark Survey on the Status of Social Studies. The results of the present study deepen insights into the differentiation that social studies teachers of emergent bilingual students employ. Data analysis reveals that teachers with beginning emergent bilingual students, teachers with intermediate emergent bilingual students, and teachers without emergent bilingual students reported using instructional strategies and engaging curricular topics with different frequencies. The findings align common social studies approaches to the scholarship on culturally and linguistically responsive social studies instruction to provide a typology that extends the literature for social studies educators. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to identify the main factors of the current crisis of the nation-state and to demonstrate how many of the voids left by this crisis are filled by religions. The main characteristic of the nation-state is the principle of sovereignty. The apogee of the nation-state is the political form of industrialization. National identity is possible only when the state proves to its citizens that the fact of being a member of it carries (...) benefits and privileges and will always bring more. Today, the majority of nation-states, in particular the oldest great powers, no longer have this capability. The weakening of the nation-state began at the end of the 19th century. The first wave of globalization multiplied the cases of reciprocal interferences and trespassed on the theoretical impermeability of the sovereign states. The outcome of the First World War, with the creation of the first supranational body, and much more the outcome of the Second World War, were two important steps of this crisis. The birth of the United Nations, and of other supranational bodies, as well as the creation of the first court called to judge an entire political class, were an assault on the principle of sovereignty. The second wave of globalization, characterized by the free circulation of goods, money, people and cultures, did the rest. Moreover, the countries that ‘invented’ the principle of sovereignty are today in relative decline as new powers are emerging. The nation-state is no longer able to keep its promises. The less effective states become at offering their citizens both meaning and social services, the more do religions tend to reoccupy the public stage. The less national and political legitimacy they have, the more powers use the religious tool against one another. (shrink)

Increased melting of Arctic sea ice due to climate change attracts interests of national states who sense the potential that opening northern waters will enhance access of the Northwest Passage (NWP) and subsoil resources. Claims for Arctic sovereignty include conflicts around the status of the NWP, ownership of resources, but also attempts of Inuit to decolonize through the establishment of self-government in their respective countries that receive a new urgency due to the effects of climate change. From a review of (...) different existing institutional and organizational bodies and mechanisms that serve as intervention tools in the sovereignty disputes in the Arctic (the UN, the Arctic Council and the Inuit Circumpolar Council) it emerges that such actors can ultimately only provide a non-binding platform for orientation and exchange and eventually leave nation-states as ultimate power-holders which reinforces and is in accordance with realist theory and its understanding of the international system as anarchic (i.e. as lacking a decision-making and binding overarching authority beyond the state-level). Despite their good intentions, external general acceptance and partial success, the potential of the organizations and institutions analyzed here is also ultimately challenged by nation states, who seem to prefer circumventing such intervention tools to be able to interact instead with each other via officialdiplomacy or by making singular and autonomous decisions to maximize their power and sovereignty. (shrink)

In its enunciation of “We the people,” the Constitution of the United States of America becomes a constitution of the flesh as it simultaneously invokes a constitution, a nation and a people. Correspondingly, its amendments as a list of rights pertaining to sex and race discrimination, and freedoms of bodily movement and action, assert the Constitution’s authority through the evocation of “natural” human bodies. In this article, I explore the way in which a sovereignty of the United States’ Constitution (...) is realised in the particularlised bodies of its citizens. The fundamental and foundational laws of the United States, and the narratives and myths used to interpret them, are in part rendered legitimate by the Constitution’s embodiment, which extends from its physical manifestation in written documents into the flesh of its citizens. In order to make this argument, I turn to the film The Matrix (1999), the success of which relies on an investment in bodies and the United States’ Constitution as matter through its interwoven narrative themes of human slavery and emancipation, reality and computer-generated simulation. At the same time, The Matrix extends its ideological play into the bodies of its audience, who experience the film’s thrillingly sensorial fantasies of constitutional rights while enjoying its affective special effects. Thus, the sovereign authority of United States constitutional law is experienced as “natural” through the phenomenological experience of cinema. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine the relationality between life and water in the context of its intercorporeal manifestations. Drawing on key aspects of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, my concern is to reflect on water’s enfleshment of life and its complex ecologies of intercorporeity. These Merleau-Pontian key aspects, I note, are in close dialogue with a number of Indigenous cosmo-epistemologies that envisage the world as constituted by profound ecologies of intercorporeal relationality. The loci of my analysis are the Sonoran Desert and the lands (...) of the Tohono O’odham people, all situated within the ongoing violent relations of power unleashed by the forces of settler colonialism, including the partitioning of Indigenous nations by the Mexico–US border, the ecological devastation left in the wake of the construction of the Trump border wall and the increasingly fraught situation of undocumented migrants attempting to cross the US border. The bodies of water that I discuss in this essay disclose the cycles of life and death that turn on the presence and absence of water. These cycles are increasingly ensnared in aquapolitical regimes of governmentality that, in settler colonial contexts, unleash lethal effects that kill both bodies of water and the entities that depend on them for life. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to identify the main factors of the current crisis of the nation-state and to demonstrate how many of the voids left by this crisis are filled by religions. The main characteristic of the nation-state is the principle of sovereignty. The apogee of the nation-state is the political form of industrialization. National identity is possible only when the state proves to its citizens that the fact of being a member of it carries (...) benefits and privileges and will always bring more. Today, the majority of nation-states, in particular the oldest great powers, no longer have this capability. The weakening of the nation-state began at the end of the 19th century. The first wave of globalization multiplied the cases of reciprocal interferences and trespassed on the theoretical impermeability of the sovereign states. The outcome of the First World War, with the creation of the first supranational body, and much more the outcome of the Second World War, were two important steps of this crisis. The birth of the United Nations, and of other supranational bodies, as well as the creation of the first court called to judge an entire political class, were an assault on the principle of sovereignty. The second wave of globalization, characterized by the free circulation of goods, money, people and cultures, did the rest. Moreover, the countries that ‘invented’ the principle of sovereignty are today in relative decline as new powers are emerging. The nation-state is no longer able to keep its promises. The less effective states become at offering their citizens both meaning and social services, the more do religions tend to reoccupy the public stage. The less national and political legitimacy they have, the more powers use the religious tool against one another. (shrink)

Proceedings of the National Seminar on the Philosophy of Ramanuja, sponsored by ICPR, New Delhi during 4-6 April, 2016.

Commercial companies are increasingly being recognized as agents of societal governance operating alongside the public authorities in their traditional role as governance bodies. In addition, companies are claiming to be ‘corporate citizens’ in the way they deal with their environmental, employment and social/ethical responsibilities. Given the fact that large corporations are now heavily internationalized in their operational characteristics – with branches, subsidiaries, affiliates and extended supply chains operating in multiple jurisdictions – can such organizations be brought into a democratic register? (...) Citizenship and democracy are conventionally associated with a territorial state, national sovereignty and jurisdictional independence. So, how can internationalized companies be subject to democratic forms of governance? An added problem arises with platform companies and blockchain organized digital currency providers whose operations transcend national borders from the start. This contribution discusses the issues of and provides a way for considering corporate democracy afresh in these rapidly evolving contexts. (shrink)

On the level of the administrative power of the municipalities, the amalgamations did not lead to an increase of their authority.In addition, the distance between the citizen and the administration has increased in three ways : the increased distances between the centres and the outlying residential zones raised the problem of intramunicipal service provision ; the social distance also increased because of the increase of the influence of and the importance attached to the municipal executive body; the expansion of the (...) tasks of the administrators led to an organisational distance. The political policy structures have also been profoundly changed after the amalgamations : the national parties have gained in influence; political instability has increased; the structures were adapted to the new situation; the operation of the local policy organs has changed ; the municipal councils acquired a more intellectually oriented professional composition. (shrink)

The Eurozone Crisis is not just a monetary and economic challenge. It is as well the first tremendous challenge of the European Community and as well the national institutions and constitutions of the member states not only within the Eurozone. On one side the European Commission, the European Parliament and the ECB with its endeavours to safeguard and stabilize the single currency EURO within the Eurozone, to support the suffering countries in the south with its struggle against speculative hedge funds, (...) to render financial relief measures to those countries and its financial industry. Irrespective the fact governments and citizens within that countries, less appear to appreciate or honor that measures as efficient help to stabilize but condemn as form of European paternalism and patronage. On the other hand the countries and its citizenship especially in the north of the Eurozone to set a stop sign to the EU and the ECB. Therefore they stress the Maastricht criteria and cite the Art 125 of the TEU, which prohibits one nation to stand for or to be liable for the Government debts of another nation. Especially in the German perspective the demarcation line appears to run along between the European Commission, European Central Bank and European Court on the European side and the Bundesverfassungsgericht, the Bundesbank on the national German side. Each of the institutions feels to be bound to its origin functions and principles and save the respective constitution and the task rendered by that constitution. For a better understanding it is essential to get aware of and to reinforce the constitutional role which the Grundgesetz awarded to the Bundesverfassungsgericht and the Bundesbank and the German citizenship placing their confidence in these institutions. Es soll konkret das Verhältnis zur Nichtbeistandsklausel No-Bail-out Klausel Art 125 AEUVertrag, den Europäischen Fiskalpakt / dem ESFS, ESM / dem OMT-Programm der EZB, möglichen Entwicklung des EU zur Haftungs- und Transferunion mit einem zukünftigen Haftungsautomatismus der Mitglieder, der Unterscheidung von gemeinsamer Währungspolitik und nationaler Wirtschaftspolitik, der drohenden Vergemeinschaftung von Staatsschulden einzelner EU-Länder, die Budgethoheit des nationalen Parlaments als freie Entscheidung über die Verwendung des nationalen Haushaltes untersucht werden. Mit allen diesen Fragen mussten sich das höchste Deutsche und Europäische Gericht in jüngster Vergangenheit intensiv beschäftigen. (shrink)

Despite the unprecedented freedoms that decolonization has brought for many Black1 people – especially in specific regions of the African Diaspora – freedom and its fulfilment, adequate signs and contested meanings remain a preoccupation within Black cultural discourses and practices. At the same time, while political and cultural nationalisms have led to greater political and civil rights, racism has not been eradicated. Furthermore, the new postcolonial globalizations of capital, people and cultures have destabilized the collective identities that framed twentieth-century struggles (...) for national sovereignty and equal citizenship, without necessarily erasing them. Instead, they remain, no longer securely anchored in their old homogenous appearances, but re-configured through the inner differences and contradictions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and religion. This article addresses these internal differences and the ways in which they produce new contestations over race, the meaning of Black representation and postcolonial freedom, negotiations that are increasingly traced on the intimate contours of the body and the self, through practices of personal consumption, erotic hedonism and style as key performances of freedom. It achieves this through examining two localized moments in the transnational and diasporic circulation of Jamaican dancehall culture, understood as a privileged public space for the performance of Black identifications and personal freedom. It argues that the eroticized discourses of ethnicity, race and gender found in dancehall culture articulate the dominance of neo-liberal conceptions of freedom at the same time as they express, resist and comment on new cultural hegemonies not reducible to racism or the power of the West; that is how dancehall expresses the new problematizations of postcoloniality. 1Except when quoting other writers, I will capitalise the word Black, in order to recognise Black identity as a historically and politically constituted experience and representational category, and not solely denoting skin colour. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the growing reliance on discourses of autochthony in nationalisms throughout the world. Native-ness is increasingly being made a key criterion for claiming national sovereignty over territory, as well as the more amorphous – but no less consequential – claim to national membership. By examining the crucial colonial genealogy of autochthonous discursive practices, I argue that claims to autochthony are metaphysical and, as such, deeply depoliticizing of the exclusions they produce. Drawing upon historical studies showing how (...) imperial-states deployed autocthonous discourses to divide those they categorized as Natives and Migrants from one another in an effort to maintain their imperial rule, I show the continuities of such practices in the Postcolonial New World Order of nation-states. Despite their rhetoric, I argue that contemporary, nationalist discourses of autochthonies have not – and cannot – succeed in realizing decolonization, precisely because of their reliance on modes of political, economic, and social exclusion based on the separation of people categorized as either Native-Nationals or as Migrants. The material force of ideas of Native-Nationalism, because they are premised on territorial sovereignty and not on the end of practices of expropriation and exploitation across the planet, are part of the worldwide relations of ruling and not threats to it. (shrink)

Interrogating the relationship of the sovereign power of the nation state to the scientist's expert knowledge as a legitimating--and sometimes challenging- ...

In this article, the notion of broken bodies is explored in relation to the African body and the history of colonialism in South Africa. This exploration will be rooted in a retelling of the story of the woman, Saartjie Baartman. In this retelling, the product of colonialism comes to the fore in a haunting. Jacques Derrida’s use of the concept of Hauntology is employed to investigate the ethical demand the spectre makes of us. With the help of the African concept (...) of ubuntu and African women’s theologies, we then seek to find healing and restoration for the broken bodies. (shrink)

Legal studies and consequently legal history focus on constitutional documents, believing in a nominalist autonomy of constitutional semantics.Reconsidering Constitutional Formation in the late 18th and 19th century, kept historic constitutions from being simply log-books for political experts through a functional approach to the interdependencies between constitution and public discourse. Sovereignty had to be 'believed' by the subjects and the political élites. Such a communicative orientation of constitutional processesbecame palpable in the 'religious' affinities of the constitutional preambles. They were held as (...) 'creeds' of a new order, not only due to their occasional recourse to divine authority, but rather due to the claim for eternal validity contexts of constitutional guarantees. The communication dependency of constitutions was of less concern in terms of the preamble than the constituents' big worries about government organisation. Their indecisiveness between monarchical and popular sovereignty was established through the discrediting of the Republic in the Jacobean reign of terror and the 'renaissance' of the monarchy in the military resistance against the French revolutionary and later Napoleonic campaigns. The constitutional formation as a legal act of constituting could therefore defend the monarchy from the threat of the people (Albertine Statute 1848), could be a legal decision of a national constituent assembly (Belgian Constitution 1831), could borrow from the old liberties (Polish May Constitution 1791) or try to remain in between by referring to the Nation as sovereign (French September Constitution 1791, Cádiz Constitution 1812). Common to all contexts is the use of national sovereignty as a legal starting point. The consequent differentiation between constituent and constituted power manages to justify the self-commitment of political power in legal terms. National sovereignty is the synonym for the juridification of sovereignty by means of the constitution. The novelty of the constitutions of the late 18th and 19th century is the normativity, the positivity of the constitutional law as one unified law, to be the measure for the legality of all other law. Therefore ReConFort will continue with the precedence of constitution. (www.reconfort.eu). (shrink)

Libertarians tend to noninterventionists on moral grounds, for which the simplest argument is national sovereignty. Yet, as some have argued, national sovereignty sits uncomfortably with libertarians’ moral individualism. I affirm the interventionists’ rejection of national sovereignty, but offer several reasons for why applying libertarians’ moral individualism to actual wars requires noninterventionism. The first is collateral damage that cannot be justified given interventions’ consistently low probability of success. The second is that creating war zones imposes terror and harm on everyone within (...) a given area, regardless of whether they actually get killed or injured themselves. The third is that a general policy of intervention, and the standing army it requires, has recurring perverse effects on both the intervening country’s population and the world more generally. I then argue that the points raised here against intervention apply to all war, not just interventions, albeit weakened, and distinguish the resulting anti-war position from pacifism. (shrink)

The present study is an interrogation of theories of culture and nation in the context of spectacular sports. It proposes a view of nationalism as discourses that articulate and produce nations through narrative acts. A wide array of concepts and tools are drawn from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and contrasted with methods and notions from discursive and semiotic analysis to interrogate a national-sports nexus in which sports are vehicles to embody nations, their matrices of thought and perception, and (...) their dominant order of masculinity and heteronormativity in the national subject, so that this order appears natural and commonsensical. Particular attention is given to the case of South Africa’s participation in the 1998 World Cup, and the way the epic genre was employed to frame the event and produce a particular kind of national body. -/- Spectacular sports events provide nations with opportunities to disseminate narratives that regulate desire and conjure a particular kind of national fantasy – what Bourdieu referred to as illusio – in subjects. This work makes a distinction between an epic body of nationalism, a body enmeshed in "the natural and authentic," and an excessive body. However, mediations of sports are never merely reflections of social events but themselves participate in producing these events as meaningful and anchor them as national. Furthermore, an actively interpreting subject is required for the production of meaning, and in this regard the thesis offers a critique of Bourdieu’s limited view on what it entails for a recipient of nationalist discourse to be active. The questions addressed by this study is twofold: how and what kind of national order of the body and desire is manufactured through spectacular sports events, and how are mediations of such events made meaningful in subjects? -/- The open-ended character of signification means that beneath the level of nationalist anchorage of spectacular sports events other articulations are possible. Drawing on Bourdieu’s view of sports as forms of silent dressage, the thesis suggests that there is a potential excess of meaning that enables such events to become potential sites of subjective truth: as viewers realise the fantasmatic character of such mediations they may come to question the notion that spectacular sports are something more than just a game. (shrink)

The changes in technology applied by industry, whose rhythm has been ever accelerating in the course of the last decades, have destabilized institutions in western societies: they change the meaning of these institutions, and modify their efficacity, without our collective awareness, and without our jettisoning the ballast of inertia and social anachronism. The techniques of industrialization which incomparably endow the great nations and national empires, and which the infant nations desire with a sure instinct, give rise to profound contradictions in (...) the traditional doctrine and practice of national sovereignty. (shrink)

On the contribution of Akalaṅkadeva, 8th cent, Jaina logician; reserach papers presented in national seminar.

This book is about higher yoga, as practiced by the sages who composed the ancient scriptures of India. Learn to achieve, eternally, liberation from the limitations of time and space; unlimited divine powers; and an immortal, physically perfect divine body. Surrender the body and mind to the spontaneous workings of the awakened life force (prana), and practice pure conscious living.

Jurisprudence is the prudence of jus, law's consciousness and conscience. Throughout history, when thinkers wanted to contemplate the organisation of society or the relationship between authority and the subject, they turned to law. All great philosophers, from Plato to Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Weber had either studied the law or had a deep understanding of legal operations. But jurisprudence is also the conscience of law, the exploration of law's justice and of an ideal law or equity at the bar (...) of which state law is always judged. Jurisprudence brings together 'is' and 'ought', the positive and the normative, law and justice. But after a long process of decay, legal theory is today characterised by cognitive and moral poverty. Jurisprudence has become restricted and academically peripheral, a guidebook to technocratic legalism and a legitimation of the existent. Critical jurisprudence returns to the classical tradition of a general philosophy of law and adopts a much wider concept of legality. It is concerned both with posited law and with the law of the law. All legal aspects of the economic, political, emotional and physical modes of production and reproduction of society are part of critical jurisprudence. This widening of scope allows a radical rethinking of the nature of rights, justice, sovereignty and judgement. A political philosophy of justice today must examine the political economy of law; transitions from Empire to nation; ideological and imaginary constructions through which we understand ourselves and relate to others; ways in which gender, race or sexuality create forms of identity that both discipline bodies and offer sites of resistance. Law's complicity with political oppression, violence and racism has to be faced before it is possible to speak of a new beginning for legal thought, which in turn is the necessary precondition for a theory of justice. Critical Jurisprudence offers an ethics of law against the nihilism of power and an aesthetics of existence for the melancholic lawyer. (shrink)

Das menschliche Leben vollzieht sich in der Spannung von "Natürlichkeit und Künstlichkeit". Jede Epoche definiert ihre Lebensvollzüge in dieser Spannung neu. Die Gegenwart verzeichnet in ihrem technisch zivilisierten Ambiente neue Schübe von "Künstlichkeit", denen kompensatorisch neue Ideen von "Natürlichkeit" entgegentreten. Der Sport ist davon zentral betroffen. Diese Tagung versucht, von unterschiedlichen philosophischen Fragestellungen her sich dem Problem der Künstlichkeit unseres gegenwärtigen Lebens (und des Sports) zu nähern und das Postulat der "Natürlichkeit" in seiner regulativen Funktion zu begreifen. Die nun in (...) Schriftfassung vorgelegten Vorträge dieser Tagung bieten Diskussionsgrundlagen für notwendige Überlegungen, wenn es darum geht, Konzepte von Bewegung, Spiel und Sport kulturell-historisch zu verstehen und moralisch-ethisch zu kritisieren und zu würdigen. (shrink)

On March 8, 1987, the Sandinista Liberation Front published its statement on the relation of women's struggles to the Nicaraguan revolution. The author argues that this official statement is consistent with the views of modern feminists on some key points relating to the need to eliminate women's double day, promote women's self-organization, and wage an ideological struggle against sexism if women's subordination is to be eliminated. The author believes that the Sandinista Front's emphasis on ideological struggle and political organization represents (...) an important break with more economistic, orthodox Marxist approaches to analyzing the condition of women and has important implications for Marxist feminism. (shrink)

This article analyzes computer security rhetoric, particularly in the United States, arguing that dominant cultural understandings of immunology, sexuality, legality, citizenship, and capitalism powerfully shape the way computer viruses are construed and combated. Drawing on popular and technical handbooks, articles, and Web sites, as well as on e-mail interviews with security professionals, the author explores how discussions of computer viruses lean on analogies from immunology and in the process often encode popular anxieties about AIDS. Computer security rhetoric about compromised networks (...) also uses language reminiscent of that used to describe the “bodies” of nation-states under military threat from without and within. Such language portrays viruses using images of foreignness, illegality, and otherness. The security response to viruses advocates the virtues of the flexible and adaptive response—a rhetoric that depends on evolutionary language but also on the ideological idiom of advanced capitalism. (shrink)

Aboriginal claims for self-government in the Americas and Australasia are distinctive for being less about secession—at least so far—than about demanding an innovative rethinking of the regulative norms and institutions within and between already established nation-states. Recent cases in Australia (and Canada) provide an opportunity to consider the nature of such claims, and some of the theoretical implications for regulative conceptions of sovereignty and the rule of law. A general question informing the entire discussion here is: how do particular (...) conceptions of the rule of law affect Aboriginal claims? Can a distinctive body of Aboriginal law survive in a liberal constitutional state already constituted in part by regulative ideals of the rule of law? (shrink)

For more than forty years Jacques Derrida has attempted to unsettle and disturb the presumptions underlying many of our most fundamental philosophical, political, and ethical conventions. In The Philosophy of Derrida, Mark Dooley examines Derrida's large body of work to provide an overview of his core philosophical ideas and a balanced appraisal of their lasting impact. One of the author's primary aims is to make accessible Derrida's writings by discussing them in a vernacular that renders them less opaque and nebulous. (...) Derrida's unusual writing style, which mixes literary and philosophical vocabularies, is shown to have hindered their interpretation and translation. Dooley situates Derrida squarely in the tradition of historicist, hermeneutic and linguistic thought, and Derrida's objectives and those of "deconstruction" are rendered considerably more convincing. While Derrida's works are ostensibly diverse, Dooley reveals an underlying cohesion to his writings. From his early work on Husserl, Hegel and de Saussure, to his most recent writings on justice, hospitality and cosmopolitanism, Derrida is shown to have been grappling with the vexed question of national, cultural and personal identity and asking to what extent the notion of a "pure" identity has any real efficacy. Viewed from this perspective Derrida appears less as a wanton iconoclast, for whom deconstruction equals destruction, but as a sincere and sensitive writer who encourages us to shed light on out historical constructions so as to reveal that there is much about ourselves that we do not know. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Contributed articles on Nimbarka Sect and the contribution of Swami Dhanañjayadāsa, Hindu philosopher and scholar belonging to the sect; papers presented at the seminar, held in Uttara Cabbiśa Paragaṇā, India in 2001 and organized by Sukhchar Kathiababa Ashram; centenary commemorative volume in honor of Swami Dhanañjayadāsa.

For more than forty years Jacques Derrida has attempted to unsettle and disturb the presumptions underlying many of our most fundamental philosophical, political, and ethical conventions. In The Philosophy of Derrida, Mark Dooley examines Derrida's large body of work to provide an overview of his core philosophical ideas and a balanced appraisal of their lasting impact. One of the author's primary aims is to make accessible Derrida's writings by discussing them in a vernacular that renders them less opaque and nebulous. (...) Derrida's unusual writing style, which mixes literary and philosophical vocabularies, is shown to have hindered their interpretation and translation. Dooley situates Derrida squarely in the tradition of historicist, hermeneutic and linguistic thought, and Derrida's objectives and those of "deconstruction" are rendered considerably more convincing. While Derrida's works are ostensibly diverse, Dooley reveals an underlying cohesion to his writings. From his early work on Husserl, Hegel and de Saussure, to his most recent writings on justice, hospitality and cosmopolitanism, Derrida is shown to have been grappling with the vexed question of national, cultural and personal identity and asking to what extent the notion of a "pure" identity has any real efficacy. Viewed from this perspective Derrida appears less as a wanton iconoclast, for whom deconstruction equals destruction, but as a sincere and sensitive writer who encourages us to shed light on out historical constructions so as to reveal that there is much about ourselves that we do not know. (shrink)

Desde su origen en el siglo V a.C., la democracia como régimen político ha mantenido cierto núcleo normativo constante, la igualdad y la libertad entre sus miembros, y fuertes discontinuidades en la organización interna de sus instituciones. Las democracias modernas son igualmente deudoras de dos tradiciones: por un lado la de la soberanía popular, sea bajo la forma de una democracia directa o bajo la forma de una constitución mixta republicana; y, por otro lado, la de los derechos subjetivos innatos. (...) La democracia resolvió los dilemas que le presentaban los intereses contrapuestos por medio de dos recursos: el de la representación -que permitía incorporarlos en un cuerpo colegiado reducido dentro del cual era posible la deliberación y el acuerdo- y el de la elección universal de los representantes y mandatarios por períodos acotados. Este esquema institucional amenaza quebrarse bajo la tensión insostenible de las exigencias domésticas de cada nación, por una parte, y las potentes constricciones provenientes de una economía globalizada, por la otra. From its very beginning during the fifth century B.C. democracy, as a politi-cal regime, has maintained a constant normative nucleus; equality and freedom among its members. But it also presents notorious discontinuities in the institu-tional internal organization. Modern democracies are equally indebted to two traditions; on the one hand popular sovereignty, under the form of either direct democracy or republican mixed constitution, and innate subjective rights on the other. Democracy resolved the dilemmas that emerged from opposed interests through two ways: representation, which enables it to incorporate them in a reduced collegiate body, within which deliberation and consensus is possible, and also through the universal election of representatives and governors by pre-established periods of time. This institutional schema is dangerously falling apart due to domestic tensions within each nation, on the one hand, and the constriction coming from the globalized economy on the other. (shrink)