The growing appreciation of the global environmental crisis has generated what should have been a predictable response: those with power are using it to appropriate for themselves the world’s diminishing resources, augmenting their power to do so while further undermining the power of the weak to oppose them. In taking this path, they are at the same time blocking efforts to create forms of society that would be ecologically sustainable. If there is one word that could bring into focus what (...) is wrong with this response it is ‘democracy’. Democracy means power in the hands of the people, which, by definition, means opposition to the concentration of power. It is inconceivable that if we had genuine democracy, where people were fully informed of the issues, they would not choose to share the burdens of scarcity and organize to live in accordance with the limits of their environment. Yet the notion of democracy is problematic. Those striving to concentrate power are pursuing this in the name of democracy. They have identified democracy with the imposition of free markets and the freedom of people to use their wealth to dominate others. In this paper I will show how process philosophy provides the basis for justifying and further developing the traditional notion of democracy to counter this reformed notion, providing a vision of a democratic form of society that could address environmental problems. To achieve this, I will argue, it is necessary to reformulate the grand narrative of civilization on the basis of human ecology, a science which, construing humans as participants in a creative nature, can replace economics as the master science for formulating public policy. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the “spillover thesis” which constitutes a pillar of much of contemporary participatory democratic theory; specifically, we assess the claim that workplace democratization leads to a higher degree of political participation amongst labourers. The paper analyses the thesis as formulated by Carole Pateman, including its later revisions triggered by ambiguous results of empirical studies aiming to (dis)prove it. The spillover thesis is then confronted with important methodological and theoretical critiques, the upshot being that in order to be (...) able to arrive at determinate conclusions, more carefully designed empirical studies are needed. Normatively speaking, however, blame can always be laid on the wider environment of market economy and/or representative democracy, to the effect that the spillover thesis is both difficult to disprove and radically subversive. Given the recent dominance of deliberative democratic theory which incorporates a strong participatory element, we finally discuss whether a recent innovation – namely, the concept of deliberative systems – could be fruitfully employed as a flexible umbrella-type framework for the spillover thesis and the participatory ideals related to it. (shrink)

Disentangling Privacy and Intimacy: Intimate Citizenship, Private Boundaries and Public Transgressions Recent theorisations of transformations of intimacy—like Ken Plummer's (2003) Intimate Citizenship project—concentrate on social and cultural transformations that erode the containment of intimacy within the private sphere. They have less to say about the character of and oppositions to that erosion, and specifically how far the idea of the private stands in opposition to intimacy transgressing into the public. In this essay, the private is explored through its constitutive features—liberal (...) codifications of rights, liberty and property, medico-moral discourses and conservative values and legal and political regulation—to give a more political and critical reading. This reading suggests that an explicit disentangling of the private and the intimate is necessary if tendencies toward public and emancipated intimacies are to become meaningful transformations, and this involves a dissembling of and critical engagement with the powerful historically entrenched idea of privacy in western societies. (shrink)

Holding unlimited economic freedom to be nearly as dangerous as physical violence, Karl Popper advocated “piecemeanl” economic intervention by the state. Jeremy Shearmur's recent book on Popper contends that as the philosopher aged, his views grew closer to classical liberalism than those expressed in The Open Society—consistently with what Shearmur sees as the logic of Popper's arguments. But Popper's philosophy, while recognizing that any project aimed at bringing about social change must be immensely complex and fraught with difficulty, retains grounds (...) for hope about the purposeful use of government to bring about desirable social results. (shrink)

Center for Humans and Nature, 109 West 77th Street, Suite 2, New York, NY 10024, USA. Tel.: 212 362 7170; Fax: 212 362 9592; Email: brucejennings{at}humansandnature.org ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> . Abstract A fundamental question for the ethical foundations of public health concerns the moral justification for limiting or overriding individual liberty. What might justify overriding the individual moral claim to non-interference or to self-realization? This paper argues that the libertarian justification for limiting individual (...) liberty known as the ‘harm principle’ or the ‘Millian paradigm’ is inadequate as a basis of public health ethics and policy. But simply pitting some collectivist value or utilitarian criterion over against individual liberty is not theoretically satisfactory, either. John Stuart Mill himself was not a Millian, in this sense, and his utilitarianism does not pit itself against individual liberty as a situation of balancing conflicting values. A reconsideration of Mill, particularly in light of the later work of Berlin on liberty, points toward a conception of relational liberty that is crucial for public health ethics because it contains within itself the basis for its own moral limitation. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

ABSTRACT Different concepts of democracy are considered as they reflect deep problems in modem democratic societies such as the lack of participation by citizens, the loss of a sense of community, and excessive individualism. Three models of teaching, the executive, the therapist, and the liberationist, are then explored with regard to what students may learn about being a member of a democratic society when they are treated differently by such teachers. It is argued that while each model has its positive (...) and negative influences, the liberationist approach has the best potential for meeting some of the deficiencies of participatory forms of democratic life. (shrink)

This work studies the issue of political representation from the perspective of a specific legal culture, the exercise of political rights in the context of the occidental democratic system, a concept that has undergone a profound evolution to the present day. The essential aspects for an analysis of this progression are voting, decision making, and the relationship between representatives and their constituents. Overall, the phenomena making up the crisis of representation have been explained as a result of changes that have (...) affected the operation and structure of modern states constituted as representative democracies. The idea is that a well-functioning representative system comes primarily from the form of government and electoral system in which it develops. (shrink)

This article explores Hannah Arendt's insights into the forms of social control operating especially in democracies, together with the possibility of resistance to such control. Since the way in which one defines freedom informs one's understanding of the techniques that suppress, regulate, and modify behaviour, the article begins by sketching Arendt's notion of freedom, and compares this to its liberal counterpart. That discussion leads to Arendt's conception of power, whose corollary is freedom, and whose suppression amounts to control. The institutional (...) and ideological infrastructure that accompanies the encroachment of ?the social? ? which Arendt links to the hegemony of liberalism ? is conceived as rendering the individual both powerless and apathetic. The article concludes with suggestions regarding resistance to modern forms of control, viewing Arendt's ontology as a source of tenable strategies for the deepening of democracy. (shrink)

Roth argues that much of the current discourse on the diffusion of democratic norms is misleading and that only a realistic assessment of the progress of societies in transition will focus attention on the problems that remain to be solved.

Pragmatist Conception of Participatory Democracy1 The paper considers the issue of participatory democracy which has recently got high in the European integration agenda. In the history of ideas, however, it has been a controversial as well as neglected idea associated mostly with Rousseauian and Leftist models of democracy. The autor points to the key features of participatory democracy such as the idea of self-mastery. The philosophical idea of participation lies at the heart of the pragmatist conception of democracy as developed (...) by J. Dewey. Its functioning may be illustrated by the concept of "democratic normative community". This conception of participatory democracy as a broad social rather than a narow political phenomenon provides the framework that makes it both a vital ideal and a creative task for current global as well as local efforts to bring about the sociopolitical change. (shrink)