Polity articles from September 1998

Polity archives from September 1998

De-facing power. (social authority)
September 22, 1998... Political scientists tend to conceptualize power as a phenomenon that wears a "face," that is, as an instrument powerful agents use to alter the independent action of the powerless. This definition introduces into empirical analysis a series of...

Australia's judicial revolution: Aboriginal land rights and the transformation of liberalism.
September 22, 1998... The recognition of Aboriginal land rights in Australia over the last few decades marks a political and legal shift from classical to "expressivist" or "neo-romantic" liberalism. Classical liberalism's emphasis on order, economic progress, and...

Hobbes's bourgeois moderation.
September 22, 1998... Arendt, Macpherson, and Strauss have correctly identified Hobbes as a bourgeois theorist, but wrongly treat him as a theorist of narrow self-interest and unbridled competition. All three, for different reasons, fail to recognize his main...

The savage pattern: the unity of Rousseau's thought revisited.
September 22, 1998... Attempts to explain the unity of Rousseau's thought have left intact his claim in Emile that producing men and producing citizens are "necessarily opposed objects." I argue that this claim is merely provisional. After examining two prominent...

The public square and citizen queer: toward a new political geography.
September 22, 1998... If the concept of citizen is to be fully meaningful, it must be founded upon free and unstigmatized access to the public square. Many groups--women, racial minorities, the homeless, immigrants, and sexual minorities--have all suffered literal,...

The Internet and political transformation: populism, community, and accelerated pluralism.
September 22, 1998... The swift development of the Internet has inspired two sorts of claims that large-scale transformations in the structure of political influence in the U.S. are under way: the populist claim that the Internet will erode the influence of organized...

Lessons learned: explaining the political behavior of business.
September 22, 1998... The political strategies of firms vary in response to changes in the political environment. Yet firms are not always quick to identify these changes even when they have clearly defined political preferences and these preferences remain constant...