The Old Testament epigraphs used by Leo Strauss for his study Natural Right and History tend invariably to vex his readers. In the book itself and in other of his writings, Strauss explicitly states that the Old Testament tradition does not know ‘nature’ in the philosophical sense, and hence the concept of ‘natural right’ is unknown or alien to that tradition. Another, more obvious problem they present has been seemingly universally passed over by commentators: neither epigraph tells the reader anything (...) explicitly about right, natural or otherwise. One cannot claim them to contain lessons about right, because such lessons are not directly extractable from the epigraphs as they stand. Here I wish to argue that Strauss's choice of epigraph does two things: first, it points to the fact that Old Testament stories can be given a political reading, or used to illustrate political lessons. In implying this, Strauss is following Machiavelli, who is the most important figure in Natural Right and History. Second, the epigraphs point to the deeply problematic nature of the concept of natural right, primarily the equivocal nature of the term, a difficulty never made explicit by Strauss but the awareness of which permeates his study. (shrink)

Conservative ideology in its moderate form is inspired by opposition to belief in radical political and social change on the ground that it rests on several mistaken assumptions, of which the most important are that human nature is highly malleable; that human will can refashion history in whatever ways human ideals may require; that society is the artificial product of a contract between autonomous individuals; and that evil is an eliminable feature of human existence. The unifying theme of conservative ideology, (...) by contrast, is a defence of limited politics, although different schools of conservatism have theorized the concept of limit in ways that are incompatible and even incoherent. Of these, the four principal schools are the reactionary, the radical, the moderate, and, more recently, the New Right. This chapter examines the degree of coherence achieved by each of these schools of thought. (shrink)

This paper examines the possibilities for peripheral localities to achieve upward mobility in the world-system by “hooking on” to larger processes of world-system accumulation. In particular, is it possible for economies that are dependent on foreign investment to receive a flow of investments that is high enough to overcome the negative impacts of a high stock of foreign investment, thus enabling them to cross a threshold and achieve upward mobility in the world-system? An analysis of the recent experience of the (...) southern Irish “Celtic Tiger” economy during 1990-2000 indicates that such an upward movement is possible on the basis of massive foreign investment inflows. On closer examination, however, the Irish-type model appears to be highly deficient, because a high proportion of growth is illusionary and also on grounds of social desirability and lack of generalizability. (shrink)

There is a huge number of publications devoted to civil society. Nevertheless this theme is inexhaustible, because the very subject of it is multidimensional and changing along with the evolution of society. Alongside this, one of the key problems of the civil society theory is a problem of its perception in our mind. Answering these questions, the author, at first, stresses the necessity to differ three historical types of civil society: ancient classical polis, civil communities of the Modern History and (...) contemporary civil society. They all are substantially different inter se from the axiological point of view. That is a reason not to use the ideological and methodological curves developed for historically previous types of civil society for the analysis of contemporary one. Secondly, the author focuses attention upon epistemological aspect of the civil society theory, in particular he proposes to rethink the concept of “totality” not in a formal logic way but in the “logic” of living systems in order to be able by means of this concept to express the unity of the diversity of social system. Thirdly, the author treats the concept of “citizen” in informal sense, stresses its existential, personal content and contemplates it through the dialectical relation of “totality-peculiarity-individuality.” Fourthly, the author researches the phenomenon of contemporary civil society as a counterpart of a state in the complex society the main features of which are the diversity and individuality. He comes to the conclusion that the civil society is not a society in common sense, but rather is some kind of “soil structure,” so called “social mycelium” that fertilizes social system with new opportunities. In the final part of the article author gives the example of one of the approaches to estimate the degree of maturation of civil society, proposed by the world-wide international organization “Civicus.” He stresses that the logic of power distribution in contemporary society presupposes cooperation of different actors, and one of the most influential of them is the civil society. (shrink)

The analysis of historical literature allows to consider profoundly the development of national culture and science of the 18th-first half of the 20th centuries and the formation and change of different historical concepts. With the analysis of historical periods that are highlighted in the research, general trends in the changing of paradigms about Russian historical development were concluded, which were translated to mass historical consciousness from the beginning of the 18th century up to 1917. The periods were closely connected with (...) the specific political, historical and economic changes in Russian Empire and with the dominance of certain textbooks during this time. The books were selected because of a number of factors: their inclusion to the school curriculum, the number of publications, the equal number of textbooks devoted to different historical periods. For the analysis were used 19 textbooks, schoolbooks for different courses of secondary schools and primary schools. All the sources of educational literature were grouped into two concepts - officially-state and the liberal. Each publication was highlighted the dominant concept as a base for the whole textbook. There is also a characteristic of the concepts that are presented chronologically. The analysis represents school history books as an important source for the formation of state policy in the representing of Russian history, and, that is more important, for creation of the concept of the state of Russian history. (shrink)