Archive | Vol. 2/2009 | No. 3. Contested orders

Pates, Rebecca [Publishing editor]

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Content

Scientific article

Editorial

Pates, Rebecca

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Pages: 1-4

Scientific article

The abolition of man

Hacking, Ian

Abstract:

Scepticism and fear about biotechnology is widespread. It takes two important literary forms, namely dystopias and jeremiads. Neither is compelling in itself, but together they provide a strong collection of arguments for great caution. The dystopias examined here range from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to o two recent novels by Margaret Atwood. The Jeremiads range from C. S. Lewis in 1942 to Habermas and Fukuyama.

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Pages: 5-23

Scientific article

"Uncertainty makes us free". Liberalism, risk and individual security

O'Malley, Pat

Abstract:

Security associated with ‘the state’ easily is imagined only in terms of a ‘Hobbesian’ problematic of the transfer of rights to a sovereign. Yet internal to liberal government is a ‘Benthamite’ concern with security as the provision of a calculable environment in which rational actors may plan. A central dilemma arises within liberalism over what are optimal levels and forms of calculability. Modernist government demands scientific predictability, universality and rationality. This clash with traditional liberal visions of individual freedom is envisaged as fundamentally incompatible with a future that is ‘excessively’ calculable and thus not open to enterprise. Through an historical analysis of insurance, the paper traces the contours of this struggle over security-calculability, and how this genealogy has shaped the current tension between risk and uncertainty in ways not readily grasped by the idea of a ‘risk society’.

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Pages: 24-38

Scientific article

Riskante Autonomie. Das Ideal der Selbstgesetzgebung jenseits von Bürgerkriegsszenarien und institutioneller EinhegungThe Risk of Autonomy. The ideal of self-legislation beyond the fear of civil war and its institutional containment / Schmidt, Christian [Autor:in] – 2009

Schmidt, Christian

Abstract:

The modern understanding of autonomy (at least in its strong version) often includes the idea of selflegislation. As was paradigmatically the case for the French Revolution, self-legislation was considered as ideally neither bound by tradition nor by existing institutions. But some contemporary political theorists of the bourgeois revolutions (including Hobbes and Burke) felt uneasy about the loss of order and therefore tried to dispense with the concept of autonomy altogether. This article reconstructs this unease and its relation to Habermas’ proposal of staging the desire for autonomy within an institutional setting. Habermas’ suggestion privileges the existing institutional order over the desire for autonomy. Against Habermas I stress the importance of the desire for autonomy with its consequences for threatening the authority of law. Against this threat, I advocate that we recognize an existing institutional order actively and explicitly.

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Pages: 39-62

Scientific article

The concept of ethnic minorities. international law and the German-Austrian response

Salzborn, Samuel

Abstract:

Following World War I, the League of Nations promoted a liberal system of minority rights conceived on the basis of individual rights and designed to provide human rights protection against discrimination. In reaction to this conception of minorities as deserving democratic protection, an alternate, ethnicallyoriented concept was developed in German-speaking territories, particularly in Germany and Austria, which was based on collective rights and whose goal was ethnically-based legislation (called “Volksgruppenrecht” or “ethnic-group law”). This political concept was gradually developed into a system of international standards. Supporters hoped that ethnically based law would replace international liberal-democratic law. This paper examines how the political paradigm of collective rights was redefined during the 1920s to produce a conceptual system of legal standards, and how successful efforts were in providing a legal foundation for the sociotheoretical concept of “Volksgruppe” (“ethnic group”).

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Pages: 63-79

Review