Polity articles from December 1998

Polity archives from December 1998

J. S. Mill on Freedom and Power(*).
December 22, 1998... John Stuart Mill is justly famous for his account of how oppressive social and political power limit individual freedom. Yet he also powerfully challenges the equating of freedom with an absence of external constraints and offers an important...

Reason in Politics: Arendt and Gadamer on the Role of the Eide.
December 22, 1998... Plato's doctrine of the ideas (eide) is often construed as the basis for a foundationalist, "two- world" epistemology which underwrites an authoritarian, undemocratic politics as well as various forms of domination and bias in public life. This...

The Practical Problems of Bridging Civil Society and the State: A Study of Round Tables in Eastern Germany(*).
December 22, 1998... Normative theories of civil society and of deliberative democracy face a common theoretical and practical dilemma: how to connect the informal deliberation among citizens in civil society to the formal politics of the public sphere in a way...

The Conservation Policy Network, 1890-1910: The Development and Implementation of "Practical" Forestry(*).
December 22, 1998... The economic elite theory of American politics offers a better understanding of the development of the U.S. Forest Service, and its precursors, than the more recent state autonomy theory. During the Progressive Era a policy network composed of...

Interrogating the Identities of Excellence: Liberal Education and Democratic Culture in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics(*).
December 22, 1998... Postmodern liberalism's concern with the relationship between culture and identity has intensified the long-running debate within liberalism about the relationship between successful political institutions and the development of civic virtue or...

Politeia kai Nomoi: On the Coherence of Plato's Political Philosophy(*).
December 22, 1998... Plato's Republic and Laws are conventionally understood to offer rival and incompatible views of the best political regime, with the former championing the a-legal rule of philosophy and the latter the rule of law. Against this view, this...

Requiem for Modern Politics: The Tragedy of the Enlightenment and the Challenge of the New Millennium.(Review)
December 22, 1998... William Ophuls, Requiem for Modern Politics: The Tragedy of the Enlightenment and the Challenge of the New Millennium (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997). It is occasionally possible to fix the coordinates of one's age by comparing books of...

The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must.(Review)
December 22, 1998... Robert Zubrin, with Richard Wagner, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). It is occasionally possible to fix the coordinates of one's age by comparing books of radically...