Edgar Morin - a marginalitás életelve

Author(s): Sándor Kálai,Anna Keszeg / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 10/2016

The aim of this paper is to present the scientific journey of Edgar Morin, a French philosopher and sociologist. The central feature of his work is a certain sense of marginality, which is present in five major fields. First of all, Morin considered himself as an outsider in the French academic field, secondly, in the disciplines of social science as an academic, thirdly, as a cultural critic, and finally, under an ideological and an ethnical perspective, as an intellectual and French citizen. As a conclusion, the authors consider that this marginality is due to a specific global perspective and overall vision about the place that science can play nowadays, according to Morin.

Dejiny, polis a vznik politiky v okcidentálnej tradícii

Author(s): Ľuboš Olejník / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 1/2012

The aim of the present article is, especially on the political philosophy of Jan Patočka, demonstrate and describe how relate politics, history and philosophy with the rise of polis and how they are signed under the current form of our Western civilization and political identity.

JACQUES RANCIÈRE – FOR LOVE OF DEMOCRACY

Author(s): Viorella Manolache / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2016

Following the form and substance content of any encyclopedic endeavor (a first formulation already anticipating the item dedicated to Jacques Rancière in The Encyclopedia of the Fundamental Political Philosophy Works – a fundamental project of the Institute of Political Sciences and International Relations “Ion I. Brătianu”, Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania – a project which will be finished in 2017 – the present study follows the method of Rancierian dissension in order to point out, in close proximity to the La haine de la démocratie text, the state of democracy. Within the influx of works, studies and commentaries regarding the fate of democracy, any focusing upon Rancière’s perspective would consist in a way of avoiding the categorization or theorization of democratic crises, considering that political metaphors still have politically adequate instruments for denominating “the actual state of democracy”.

A politika élő húsa

Author(s): Zsolt Kapelner / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 11/2018

Platon - géniteur du totalitarisme dans la conception de Karl Popper

Author(s): Adriana Neacşu / Language(s): French Issue: 09+10/2006

Popper's criticism of Plato's doctrine overwhelms us by virtue of its force and seen to be so destructive that a less vigilant reader tends to believe not only that Plato's political ideas are out-dated and dangerous but, moreover, that his philosophy, built only in order to impose then of the public conscience, is a minor philosophy, which was given an unjustified attention till now. But we do not have to forget Popper's testimony, who considers Plato, in spite of his severe criticism, the greatest, the most profound and the most genial of all philosophers, and we also have to take into account that this criticism refers to a single level of Plato's philosophy and it does not contest its immense value.

Locke értekezése a polgári kormányzatról: egy megfontolt felforgató

Author(s): László Kontler / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 08/2019

Locke is often characterised as an emblematic figure of the moderate or “magisterial” Enlightenment. Not contesting the general thrust of this interpretation, this essay still reminds that all of Locke’s mature political thought, chiefly recorded in the Two Treatises of Government, was formulated from the vantage point of a political dissident, which involved taking a considerable amount of personal risk. After outlining the polemical context in which the work was written, an analytical overview of its argument is presented. Special emphasis is laid on Locke’s distinctive contribution to the understanding of natural and political liberty; his analysis of property as not merely crucial to his theory of political legitimacy but to a discourse of civilization and progress; the multilayered significance of “trust”; and his peculiar account of the “dissolution of government”. Revolution for the sake of maintaining order is not a contradiction of terms in his thought.

Justification of the Subject of Cognition Problem in Modern Social and Legal Sciences Methodology

Author(s): Valentina V. DUDCHENKO,Yuliia V. Tsurkan-Saifulina,Konstiantyn M. VITMAN / Language(s): English Issue: 37/2018

The article is devoted to the study of the essential characteristics of the subject of cognition. The process of cognition, being one of the oldest issues in the history of humankind, has always been and remains highly relevant today. This is due to the irrepressible desire of a person to know the world around her/him and herself/himself. If the study of the surrounding world is basically the prerogative of the natural sciences, then self-cognition is the object of study in the humanities. The process of cognitive activity is considered by a number of the humanities and social sciences: philosophy (in a generalized sense), history, psychology, pedagogy, sociology, etc., but it begins to occupy a separate place in the philosophy of law. Modern human needs to know the measure, opportunity, freedom and responsibility of the process of cognition. In the article, from the point of view of critical realism, the current state of the methodology of cognition is analyzed and the necessary tendencies in changing the worldview and defining the new methodology of the humanities are substantiated. The experience of the post-Soviet countries with dogmatic ideology and destructive methodology was used as an illustrative material. It has been established that only a free-thinking subject and a methodology developed on the principles of the supremacy of spiritual values can improve the reverent approach to the person and the world as a whole and come closer to the cognition of absolute truth.

LEFTIST CRITIQUE OR FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY? CONTIMPORANUL COVERING THE TRIAL FROM DEALUL SPIRII

Author(s): Emilia Faur / Language(s): English Issue: Sp.Issue/2019

Leftist Critique or Fight for Democracy? Contimporanul Covering the Trial from Dealul Spirii. The general knowledge about the political dimension of the Romanian historical avant-garde places the groups on the left of the political spectrum. However, there is little work on what this means precisely when it comes to the concrete historical situations. It may well be that Contimporanul, the main press organ of the avant-garde “supported a political agenda of socialist origin”, but what does it mean specifically? In order to give a complete historical-intellectual picture of the Romanian avant-garde, specifically of Contimporanul, one must also account for the first couple of years of its appearance, when it published a large number of political opinion articles, written mainly by the same authors that would become central for the artistic movement as well. We aim to fill this gap in the scholarship by giving a detailed account of the reactions from Contimporanul’s pages to the political events of the time, notably those that involved the socialist movement. The case in point is the Trial from Dealul Spirii and the alleged political assassinations against socialist leaders committed or condoned by the state authorities. The overall image of the political ‘ideology’ of Contimporanul from those years shows rather a marked democratic attitude towards the events, and a great deal of journalistic objectivity behind the attacks against the liberal establishment.

SOCIÉTÉ DE CLASSE ET PSYCHANALYSE

Author(s): Claudiu Gaiu / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2019

Class Society and Psychoanalysis. Despite being sidelined, Michel Clouscard was a prolific writer and taught sociology at the Université de Poitiers from 1975 to 1990. Clouscard focused on describing the peculiar discourse of emancipation that resulted from the marriage of psychoanalysis and Marxism, which was then termed Freudo-Marxism, and was gaining currency in the aftermath of May ’68. For Clouscard, the emancipation of desire and productivity upheld by the Freudo-Marxists went hand-in-hand with the emergence of new markets and techno-structures which defined the development of social democracy in France. Two of his works, The Treatise of Mad Love and the Capitalism of Seduction are telling us the story of the birth of class society at the very dawn of Middle Age and his postmodern transformation. The first work is an interpretation of Tristan and Iseul myth. The second describe how the capitalism gave birth to a new category with veritable ferocity: parasitic non-productive jobs (a large category extending from the false artists of “modern art” to the intellectual sell-outs to the system, passing through publicists and other dealers).

The Structure of the Concept of Political Freedom in Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy

Author(s): Katarzyna Eliasz / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

This paper is devoted to clarifying Hannah Arendt’s concept of political freedom (which, at certain points, is markedly obscure) by the means of analysing its structure. My analysis proceeds in three steps. Firstly, I distinguish a pre-political concept of freedom as exercising spontaneity, which is at the root of Arendt’s understanding of political freedom. Secondly, I analyse her account of freedom as exercising action and indicate its relationship to the elementary freedom of spontaneity. Arendt endowed action with a distinguished importance, since she assumed that it is the only activity within the vita activa (the other two being labour and work), which has a special anthropological and axiological significance. According to Arendt, only action allows one to truly experience the fundamental aspect of the human condition, which is the fact of human plurality; it is also the only activity which allows one to exercise specifically public principles, such as solidarity, equality, or justice. Thirdly, I indicate how these two accounts of freedom translate into Arendt’s concept of political freedom. This analysis reveals that the Arendtian concept of political freedom is markedly original. She did not define it in a usual manner, i.e. through indicating bundles of legal and political rights which determine the accepted scope of participation in the public affairs. The inherent part of her concept of political freedom is a specific account of how it must be exercised (i.e. through action). Political freedom understood as the participation in governance exercised through action is not merely an activity of instrumental, but also anthropological and axiological importance, which is due to the special anthropological and axiological meaning of action. In the final section, I discuss the practical dimension of Arendt’s theory. She doubted whether the traditional representative democracy is capable of accommodating her ‘rich’ ideal of political freedom, therefore she proposed an alternative account of political system based on councils. I formulate objections against this proposition and demonstrate that councils would presumably fail to accommodate Arendt’s exacting account of political freedom.

Shaping the Modern Discourse on Liberty: French Intellectual Debates from Revolution to Dreyfus

Author(s): Anna Teresa Budzanowska,Tomasz Pietrzykowski / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

The age of intellectual debates in France between the Revolution in 1789 and the Dreyfus Affair at the turn of the centuries is one of the key sources that enable the understanding of the modern political culture. It concerns, in particular, the modern concept of liberty that became one of the defining values shaping the European political discourse. Thus, the post-revolutionary France remains an extremely valuable source of inspiration when revisiting the essence of many contemporary debates in political philosophy and public discourse. Most of the ideas and arguments in circulation today echo the debates over the liberty, reason, and society that dominated the intellectual climate of that period in the French political history or, at least, heavily depend on the foundational ideas formulated then and there. Thus, they are worth reconsidering.

Freedom of Speech in Modern Political Culture

Author(s): Justyna Miklaszewska / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

In the philosophy of liberalism, freedom of speech is one of the fundamental rights of the individual, one that is guaranteed by the constitution of a liberal democratic state. Con-temporary Western democracies are based on the political culture in which human rights, including the right to free speech, play an important role. This right, however, can be vio-lated by demagogic propaganda both in totalitarian regimes and in democracies. The prop-aganda mechanism, reaching into the sphere of community values and concepts, presently operates also through the Internet, in which expressions of anger and hatred are dissemi-nated and can lead to the destruction of democracy. I will argue that, in today’s world, restrictions on the freedom of speech through legal norms are necessary, because the threat comes not only in the form of censorship, but also the manipulation techniques used by politicians in democratic regimes. Advances in modern technology can be of service to dictatorship when the media and the Internet are used for propaganda or surveillance pur-poses, but they also provide a support to freedom and democracy when they serve as the means of the transmission of reliable information, initiating public discussions. As such, they establish a framework for rational debates and peaceful activities that contribute to the maintenance of the democratic political culture. The basic elements of this culture, i.e. legal rules, pluralist media, and education systems are all necessary for the defence of its core value, namely the freedom of speech.

Engagement and political institutions: the case of ombudsman

Author(s): Luka Glušac / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2019

In this article, I examine the relationship between engagement and political institutions by using the example of the creation and development of the ombudsman institution. The article starts with the short introduction to key theoretical views about institutions, political institutions and institutionalization. Then, I concentrate on how political institutions change, i.e. whether they can be changed through social engagement and whether and when we can actually say that they are originally created by an engagement. By using the case of ombudsman, I explore if political institutions can engage themselves and under what conditions, that is, whether are institutions characterized by in-built permanent reflexivity possible.

ПОСТМАТЕРИЈАЛИЗАМ У СРБИЈИ

Author(s): Nina M. Pavlović / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 3/2019

Ronald Inglhart's modernization theory provides a model of global value change, with affirmation of specific national paths of change. The paper considered the importance of the index of postmaterialism as a key element of the self-expression dimension. The distribution of (post)materialistic values in Serbia is presented based on data from the European Values Study and World Values Study from 2001, 2005 and 2008. The data indicate the presence of a stable structure in which the mixed and materialistic type predominates.The influence of sociodemographic factors on postmaterialism was examined by applying the regression analysis to the data from 2008. The results indicate a significant influence of the age, level of education and size of the city, while the impact of the amount of income is not statistically significant. The obtained results support Inglhart's theory of values, but do not exclude the effect of the life cycle.

Империјата преку Делезовото сфаќање на капитализмот

Author(s): Peter Klepec / Language(s): Macedonian Issue: 3/2008

Klepec: Institute of Philosophy of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, 2004

Bibó István láthatatlan alkotmánya

Author(s): István Kukorelli / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 1/2019

Politikai szofisztikáltság a demokráciaelméletben. Állampolgári kogníciók az episztemikus–schumpeteri skála tükrében

Author(s): András Szántó / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 1/2019

The article explores the role of political sophistication in deliberative-participatory, aggregative-pluralist, and leader democracies. The study intends to surpass the assumption that citizen incompetence is an immanent feature of democracy. Instead, it argues that the failure of democracy justifies the diversification of the democratic modes of operation in addition to fostering citizens’ scientific thinking on politics, rather than the exclusion of the uninformed strata of the electorate (Brennan, 2016; Caplan, 2009). The approach prevalent in the study is the inductive and the holistic interpretation of democratic theories. The inductive approach assumes that democratic theories can be constructed on the basis of citizens’ cognitive capacities. The holistic approach maintains that the various elements of democracy are mutually interrelated. One of the innovations of the study is that it contrasts Schumpeterian democracy with epistemic democracy and by means of this contrast it creates a scale on which citizens’ political knowledge can be placed. Thus, the epistemicSchumpeterian scale simultaneously depicts cognitively distinct citizens and democratic theories based on these cognitive premises. After the placement of the three major democratic theories on the scale, the article elaborates the different levels and features of sophistication as regards all three democratic theories.

Realizmus, mérséklet, tragédia

Author(s): Gábos Illés / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 1/2019

Szűcs Zoltán Gábor: A politika lelke. A politikai realizmus elméleti és eszmetörténeti nézőpontból. Budapest, MTA Társadalomtudományi Kutatóközpont, 2018.

Ítélni tekintély híján – az elköteleződés mint a politikum próbája Claude Lefort gondolkodásában

Author(s): Miklós Merényi / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 1/2018

Engaged political thinking, as it appeared at the birth of modern democracies, is now under suspicion. Doubt is cast on its democratic pedigree contesting its relation to the public interest, and accusing it of hidden partisanship, as if the ideas it fights for would only mask ulterior motives. In situations of justification, engaged thinking is disarmed by this charge. Its gestures seeking for intelligence cannot break through the granite hard shells of new ideologies. Focusing on Claude Lefort’s theory of democracy, this study points out that in our post-totalitarian age, democracy poses fundamentally new challenges for engaged political thinking. Lefort conjoins the historical and the social theoretical perspective to revitalize the reflection on the ultimate questions of the political by democratic engagement with the conditions of our present. By the advent of democracy, we came to a situation, where we must find our way without external markers of certainty. Since the social space is less and less intelligible, engaging ourselves with the underlying questions of the social relations, we face the lack of any ultimate authority. Still, we shall continue to make judgements, now deprived of authorities. In order to do so, engaged political thinking has to reconsider its approach toward the great works of the past and the ideologies of its context. The interrogation of Lefort’s oeuvre allows us to contribute a new, engaged art of writing, that explores the inseparable conditions of our freedom of thinking and the development of social freedom.

Az EU mint „puha birodalom” (Az Európai Unió és Oroszország viszonya az új Eurázsia-koncepció tükrében)

Author(s): Tibor Pap / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 1/2018

An unfortunate current aspect to our lecture is that Ulrich Beck, a definitive figure of the second generation of post-war German social theory, passed away on January 1, 2015. His life’s work, focusing on Europeanisation, presents one of the most usable – revolutionary – descriptions of the globalised world: he also shares the opinion that ‘understanding’ reality is, in and of itself, a revolutionary act. Reflexive modernity prompts us to reconsider our narrower subject matter as well: the relation of West-Balkan and Europeanisation. A recurring notion of Beck’s books is that greater action space can only be attained through a partial relinquishment of sovereignty. The German example demonstrates this. His works contain fine arguments for the foundation of self-governance: for the mutual acceptance of a bottom-up and democratic procedural order. The action potential of the players is optimised by the recognition of the new situation. – he claims. In the Europe of differences and acknowledged particularities, diversity brings about not a multitude of problems but opportunities of solution. This is the essence of cosmopolitan integration. The “upstream” principle leads to the root of the challenges. It is also the way to the connection between majority-principled decision making and the automatic exclusion of minority communities. The social success of Europeanisation partly depends on the revision of elements of ‘democracy’. This cannot be envisioned without reinterpreting the role of communities at Europe’s periphery, including the relation between nation state and its neighbours and between nation state and the EU as well. We intend to elaborate on the relationship of Beck’s ‘soft empire’ and peripheral states According to this theorem, the EU is a non-homogeneous and non-hegemonic empire.) The starting point of a new approach is that the main problem is not any nation building program, just as Beck and others of the normative school claims. In our view, the reasons for the ever recurring, persistent problems with the issues of nation/state and environment/neighbours are: the majority-principled decision-making and regional segmentation (state), and the fixed nature of borders (unchangeable by democratic means).