TAXATION, THE STATE, AND THE COMMUNITY

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-234
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Schoenblum
Keyword(s):  
Public Finance ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Tax Revenues ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So

The paper is concerned with the relationship of taxation to conceptions of the state and the community. The paper contends that public finance theorists have focused little attention on what, precisely, the state is and the role of subnational and supranational communities, even though understanding the state and these communities is essential for grasping how tax revenues are really distributed. The failure of public finance to do so is explainable by the powerful faith in the expertise of theorists and bureaucrats and abstract models for social welfare, whether or not they work or would be agreed upon and implemented via the political process.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

Trade Unions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Whiting
Keyword(s):  
Trade Unions ◽  
Political System ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Critical Moments

In assessing the relationship between trade unions and British politics, this chapter has two focuses. First, it examines the role of trade unions as significant intermediate associations within the political system. They have been significant as the means for the development of citizenship and involvement in society, as well as a restraint upon the power of the state. Their power has also raised questions about the relationship between the role of associations and the freedom of the individual. Second, the chapter considers critical moments when the trade unions challenged the authority of governments, especially in the periods 1918–26 and 1979–85. Both of these lines of inquiry underline the importance of conservatism in the achievement of stability in modern Britain.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Teo Ballvé
Keyword(s):  
Political Influence ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
Violent Conflicts ◽  
Do So

This introductory chapter briefly explores the ways in which imaginaries of statelessness have structured the political life of Urabá, Colombia. It argues that Colombia's violent conflicts have produced surprisingly coherent and resilient regimes of accumulation and rule—yet this is not to say they are benevolent. In order to do so, this chapter approaches the state as a dynamic ensemble of relations that is both an effect and an instrument of competing political strategies and relations of power. In Urabá, groups from across the political spectrum, armed and otherwise, all end up trying to give concrete coherence to the inherently unwieldy abstraction of the state in a space where it supposedly does not exist. The way this absence exerts a generative political influence is what this chapter establishes as the “frontier effect.” The frontier effect describes how the imaginary of statelessness in these spaces compels all kinds of actors to get into the business of state formation; it thrusts groups into the role of would-be state builders.

Concluding Remarks to Part 3

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Preminger
Keyword(s):  
Government Policy ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Individual Responsibility ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Sphere ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Chapter 15 summarizes the chapters which addressed the third sphere, the relationship of labor to the political community. It reiterates that since Israel was established, the labor market’s borders have become ever more porous, while the borders of the national (Jewish) political community have remained firm: the Jewish nationalism which guides government policy is as strong as ever. NGOs, drawing on a discourse of human rights, are able to assist some non-citizens but this discourse also resonates with the idea of individual responsibility: the State is no longer willing to support “non-productive” populations, who are now being shoehorned into a labor market which offers few opportunities for meaningful employment, and is saturated by cheaper labor intentionally imported by the State in response to powerful employer lobbies. These trends suggest a partial reorientation of organized labor’s “battlefront”, from a face-off with capital to an appeal to the public and state.

Hope, or On Theology

2020 ◽  
pp. 170-197
Author(s):  
Ryan Patrick Hanley
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Universal Order ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Theological Virtue

Chapter 6 turns to Fénelon’s theology, focusing on his treatment of hope and its significance for his political philosophy. It argues that he regarded hope not just as a key theological virtue, but also as a key virtue of political rulers and political reformers. Its discussion of the political implications of Fénelon’s theology proceeds in three parts. It first examines the role of hope in Telemachus. It then turns to the treatment of hope in Fénelon’s theology, focusing on three particular discussions: the place of hope in love, the relationship of hope to self-interest, and the place of hope in prayer. The final section turns to two aspects of Fénelon’s theology beyond hope which also have significant implications for his political philosophy: his understanding of the relationship of human being to divine being, and his arguments for the existence of God and their implications for universal order.

Commentary on the New Charity Undertakings Law

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Catá Backer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
National Development ◽  
The Political ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
Political Policy ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Theoretical Considerations

Abstract China’s new Charity Law represents the culmination of over a decade of planning for the appropriate development of the productive forces of the charity sector in aid of socialist modernization. Together with the related Foreign ngo Management Law, it represents an important advance in the organization of the civil society sector within emerging structures of Socialist Rule of Law principles. While both Charity and Foreign ngo Management Laws could profitably be considered as parts of a whole, each merits discussion for its own unique contribution to national development. Moreover, while analysis tends to focus on legal conformity of the Charity Law to the state constitution, little work has been done to analyze the relationship of the Charity Law to the political constitution of China. This essay seeks to fill that gap by considering the role of the Charity Law through the lens of the Constitution of the Communist Party of China. More specifically, the essay examines the extent to which the provisions of the Charity Law, and its underlying policies, contribute to the implementation and realization of the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) Basic Line and in the context of the overall political policy of “socialist modernization which has served as the core of the political line of the ccp since the last decades of the 20th century. The essay is organized as follows: Section ii considers the specific provisions of the Charity Law, with some reference to changes between the first draft and the final version of the Charity Law. Section iii then considers some of the more theoretical considerations that suggest a framework for understanding the great contribution of the Charity Law as well as the challenges that remain for the development of the productive forces of the civil society sector at this historical stage of China’s development.

Reading Hobbes’s Sovereign into a Burmese Narrative of Police Torture

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-211
Author(s):  
Nick Cheesman
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Order ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Throughout February 2012, a court sitting at Myanmar’s central prison recorded a defendant’s narrative of torture by policemen to have him confess to a bombing two years prior. How was this record made possible? What does the narrative reveal about the relationship of police torturers to the political community giving them authority to act? Working from Agamben’s intuition that in the moment of violence the policeman occupies an area symmetrical to the sovereign, inasmuch as his use of violence is justified in the name of public order, I suggest the account of police torture in this case can be explained in terms of Hobbes’s theory of attributed action. Like Hobbes’s sovereign, the Burmese policemen had the prerogative to decide when and how to use violence against the detained subject on behalf of the state. That the defendant could later recount to a judge the torture done to him was only because he lacked standing to lay claims against sovereign police, who he himself, as a member of the political community, had authorised. Ironically, the record of his narrative was possible precisely because his claims were without efficacy.

The Myth of Judicial Independence

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike McConville ◽  
Luke Marsh
Keyword(s):  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Material Point ◽  
The State ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Home Office ◽  
Democratic Polity ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This book on the criminal justice system is uniquely positioned to examine judicial claims to independence, the politics of the judiciary, the rule of law, and the role of the executive in the context of a democratic polity. The authors have mined the British government’s archival vaults to assemble records including official (previously classified) Home Office files and present a ground-breaking narrative. By tracking the relationship between senior judges and the Home Office from the end of the nineteenth century to the modern day, revelations concerning the politics of the judiciary and the separation of powers are unearthed. The book argues that the claims of the senior judiciary to be independent of the executive are invalidated by historical records and the theory and practice of the separation of powers (the ‘Westminster Model’) deeply flawed. Rather, at every material point, civil servants compromised the role of the senior judiciary’s decision-making. Moreover, with the passive endorsement of senior judges, the executive repeatedly misled Parliament as to the authorship and provenance of fundamental rules governing the relationship of the individual to the state in relation to police powers of arrest, detention, and questioning. The book also explores the past and continuing impact of all this to former colonial territories and traces the close liaison between key members of the senior judiciary and the state in reconfiguring the modern criminal process in a way which weakens defence lawyers, pressurizes defendants into pleading guilty, and undermines cardinal adversarial protections.

Two Conceptions of State: Antonio Gramsci and Michael Mann

Politics ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 159-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Moran
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Economic Base ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Michael Mann

Gramsci revised classical Marxist accounts of the role of the state in society, culture and ideology, and stressed the autonomy of the political process from the economic base. Sociologists often labelled neoWeberian also focus on social change, the state and the political process. Michael Mann, whilst remaining discrete from Marxism has nevertheless moved away from classical Weberian sociology, engaging deeply with materialism in analysing the state. This article compares the work of Gramsci and Mann regarding the state, to examine whether a genuine synthesis is possible between Gramsci (perhaps the first ‘neo-Marxist’) and Mann, a neoWeberian.

The Pursuit of Social Welfare

2017 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
The State ◽  
Citizen Action ◽  
Indian Context ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Original Survey ◽  
Do So

Who makes claims on the state for social welfare, and how and why do they do so? This article examines these dynamics in the rural Indian context, observing that citizens living in the same local communities differ dramatically in their approaches to the state. The author develops a theory to explain these varied patterns of action and inaction, arguing that citizen claim-making is best understood as a product of exposure to people and places beyond the immediate community and locality. This social and spatial exposure builds citizens’ encounters with, knowledge of, and linkages to the state. This in turn develops their aspirations toward the state and their capabilities for state-targeted action. The author tests the theory in rural Rajasthan, drawing on a combination of original survey data and qualitative interviews. She finds that those who traverse boundaries of caste, neighborhood, and village are more likely to make claims on the state, and that they do so through broader repertoires of action than those who are more constrained by the same boundaries. The article concludes by considering the extensions and limitations of the theory and the role of the state itself in establishing the terrain for citizen action.

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