The meaning of historical terms and concepts: New studies on begriffsgeschichte

A contribution to the liberalism-republicanism debate from a political historian's point of view, this essay focuses on Britain in the mid-Victorian period—arguably the golden age of modern liberalism. The first part argues that the writings and political ideas of the leading liberal thinkers were imbued with ‘neo-roman’ values, including participatory citizenship, civic virtue and concern for the common good. The second part discusses the dissemination of ‘neo-roman’ ideas among the rank and file of the Liberal party, focusing on popular celebrations of the right to bear arms. The essay concludes that, despite the methodological claims of some scholars, the liberalism-republicanism debate has tended to ignore the context within which ideas and traditions were developed by their leading interpreters. Moreover, it argues that if we really are interested in the context of political thought we must go beyond traditional concerns with the ‘canonical’ texts and look at its social environment.     

Refugees, repatriation and liberal citizenship

This article considers the meanings attached to refugeehood, repatriation and liberal citizenship in the twentieth century. Refugees are those who have been unjustly expelled from their political community. Their physical displacement is above all symbolic of a deeper political separation from the state and the citizenry. ‘Solving’ refugees’ exile is therefore not a question of halting refugees’ flight and reversing their movement, but requires political action restoring citizenship.All three ‘durable solutions’ developed by the international community in the twentieth century - repatriation, resettlement and local integration - are intended to restore a refugee's access to citizenship, and through citizenship the protection and expression of their fundamental human rights. Yet repatriation poses particular challenges for liberal political thought. The logic of repatriation reinforces the organization of political space into bounded nation-state territories. However, it is the exclusionary consequences of national controls over political membership - and through this of access to citizenship rights - that prompt mass refugee flows. Can a framework for repatriation be developed which balances national state order and liberal citizenship rights?This article argues that using the social contract model to consider the different obligations and pacts between citizens, societies and states can provide a theoretical framework through which the liberal idea of citizenship and national controls on membership can be reconciled.Historical evidence suggests that the connections in practice between ideas of citizenship and repatriation have been far more complex. In particular, debate between Western liberal and Soviet authoritarian/collectivist understandings of the relationship between citizen and state played a key role in shaping the refugee protection regime that emerged after World War II and remains in place today. Repatriation - or more accurately liberal resistance to non-voluntary refugee repatriation - became an important tool of Cold War politics and retains an important value for states interested in projecting and reaffirming the primacy of liberal citizenship values. Yet the contradictions in post-Cold War operational use of repatriation to ‘solve’ displacement, and a growing reliance on ‘state-building’ exercises to validate refugees’ returns demonstrates that tension remains between national state interests and the universal distribution of liberal rights, as is particularly evident when considering Western donor states’ contemporary policies on refugees and asylum. For both intellectual and humanitarian reasons there is therefore an urgent need for the political theory underpinning refugee protection to be closely examined, in order that citizenship can be placed at the centre of refugees’ ‘solutions’.     

Mably and Berne

The Swiss Cantons had no greater admirer in the eighteenth-century than the French political thinker Gabriel Bonnot de Mably. The feeling was mutual, at least to some extent, since the Bernese Patriotic Society awarded its first prize in 1763 to Mably, for his dialogue Entretiens de Phocion. The prize then led to an exchange of letters, stretching across some two decades, with Daniel Fellenberg, founder of the Patriotic society—the most important block of Mably's correspondence to have survived. This essay considers the 1763 prize and the correspondence with Fellenberg for the light they cast both on Mably and on Bernese participation in the wider currents of eighteenth-century thought.     

L'Age de l'Eloquence. Rhétorique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l'époque classique

The Swiss Cantons had no greater admirer in the eighteenth-century than the French political thinker Gabriel Bonnot de Mably. The feeling was mutual, at least to some extent, since the Bernese Patriotic Society awarded its first prize in 1763 to Mably, for his dialogue Entretiens de Phocion. The prize then led to an exchange of letters, stretching across some two decades, with Daniel Fellenberg, founder of the Patriotic society—the most important block of Mably's correspondence to have survived. This essay considers the 1763 prize and the correspondence with Fellenberg for the light they cast both on Mably and on Bernese participation in the wider currents of eighteenth-century thought.     

Brands of youth citizenship and the politics of scale: National Citizen Service in the United Kingdom

This paper explores the politics of scale in the context of youth citizenship. We propose the concept of ‘brands of youth citizenship’ to understand recent shifts in the state promotion of citizenship formations for young people, and demonstrate how scale is crucial to that agenda. As such, we push forward debates on the scaling of citizenship more broadly through an examination of the imaginative and institutional geographies of learning to be a citizen. The paper's empirical focus is a state-funded youth programme in the UK – National Citizen Service – launched in 2011 and now reaching tens of thousands of 15–17 year olds. We demonstrate the ‘branding’ of youth citizenship, cast here in terms of social action and designed to create a particular type of citizen-subject. Original research with key architects, delivery providers and young people demonstrates two key points of interest. First, that the scales of youth citizenship embedded in NCS promote engagement at the local scale, as part of a national collective, whilst the global scale is curiously absent. Second, that discourses of youth citizenship are increasingly mobilised alongside ideas of Britishness yet fractured by the geographies of devolution. Overall, the paper explores the scalar politics and performance of youth citizenship, the tensions therein, and the wider implications of this study for both political geographers and society more broadly at a time of heated debate about youthful politics in the United Kingdom and beyond.     

Designing the model European—Liberal and republican concepts of citizenship in Europe in the 1860s: The Association Internationale pour le Progrès des Sciences Sociales

The formation of citizenship as a concept to define the rights of participation in the formation processes of modern territorial states is well known. But the transnational dimensions of defining citizenship and how to combine national legislations with enlightened universal and natural law rules in the mid-19th century is not very well known. The article aims to explore the transnational discourses on the political, economic and moral rights and duties of the citizen in the pan—European liberal Association Internationale pour le Progrès des Sciences Sociales. During the 1860s, its congresses should serve as a vast commission of enquiry and should eventually lead to a general definition of citizenship in Europe which could be implemented in national legislations. The article shows how the Association Internationale tried to deduce universal moral rules from national legislations and peculiarities by the means of moral or positive social science. In combining moral unity with national and regional diversities, the Association Internationale tried to give an elastic framework for a European civil society in which national subjects should become active citizens.     

Arab uprisings and the changing frontiers of transnational citizenship: Voting from abroad in political transitions

The uprisings that swept the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region beginning in December 2010 set in motion a series of political transitions. One of the most striking elements in the post-spring 2011 experiences of the countries affected has been not only the holding of elections, but also the expansion of expatriate voting (EV) rights to include out-of-country voting (OCV). A close examination of the processes through which the right to OCV was secured and the forms of its implementation reveals an intriguing parallel with the depth of the respective country transitions. This article explores the involvement of emigrant civil society in securing OCV rights and in the process of voting from abroad, thereby expanding our understanding of the role of such rights in the critical category of countries in transition. The cases reveal how the extension of the right to vote from abroad redraws political boundaries. However, they also make clear that expanding the physical boundaries of participatory nationality does not necessarily translate into more meaningful transnational citizenship.     

The sources of communitarianism on the American left: Pluralism, republicanism, and participatory democracy

This article considers the nature of communitarian thought in late twentieth century Anglo-American political philosophy. It argues that communitarianism arose out of a critique of modernist theories of justice such as that of John Rawls shared by a group of writers committed to idealist principles that emphasised narrative approaches to the study of political thought, the importance of historical context, and popular participation in political life. It then focuses on one particular American strand of communitarian thought, exemplified by the work of Michael Walzer and Michael Sandel, which draws on a tradition of radical democracy and, in so doing, helps both to create and to transform a new American republicanism. An important connection between Walzer and Sandel is that they share the view that egalitarian politics must draw on shared traditions of social criticism rather than on the abstract individualism that they associate with Rawls. A key difference is that Walzer's vision of American life is pluralist and enthusiastic about difference, whereas Sandel's is republican and concerned above all with fostering civic virtue and identification with the state and political community.     

Poetry as Thought and Action: Mazzini's Reflections on Byron

Summary

This article opens with a brief introduction to Giuseppe Mazzini, with particular reference to his commitment to republicanism, an ideal that would be fulfilled in Italy only after considerable time and with great difficulty. It then focuses on Mazzini's critical reception of Byron. Although Giuseppe Mazzini and Percy Bysshe Shelley would have allowed a more obvious comparison, it was Byron who really attracted Mazzini's attention and criticism. Mazzini uses Byron, on the one hand, as a means to demonstrate that Italians could discuss European poetry without putting at risk their national identity, or, as the classicists maintained, that fragile and fragmented profile of a nation that contemporary Italy offered to the minds and hearts of thousands of young people. On the other hand, however, Mazzini questions Byron's authority by subverting and converting his value, in a very personal way: he gradually substitutes Byron's with a different authority and credits him with new values. Mazzini could not accept Byron as the emblem of elitism and isolation: Byron's solipsism needed to be purified, and his renowned cynical attitude tempered; eventually Byron's myth needed to be connected to the destiny of peoples and nations.     

Facing the future,surviving the present: strategies for women graduate students in geography

Abstract

Women graduate students in geography programs in US universities face a variety of constraints and opportunities as they work towards advanced degrees and struggle to find a place for themselves in academia. The themes discussed in this paper concern understanding and challenging power relationships, networking, developing communication skills and effective mentoring. The paper concludes with suggestions for positive action and change.     

Liberal Education and the Study of Politics in a Catholic University

Abstract

Rousseau seems to exemplify an understanding of the philosophic life in general and the quest for self-knowledge in particular as a solitary enterprise. An examination of the Confessions, however, reveals that Rousseau holds that the most important discoveries about ourselves are made not in solitude, but with others. It is furthermore the case that, for Rousseau, the philosophic quest to truly know oneself entails the public articulation of one's self-understanding as a part of a comprehensive account of human things, a social activity fraught with political implications. Therefore, the problem of self-knowledge in Rousseau's thought should be understood as a social and political problem (albeit not a problem with a political solution). That this is so even for the famously solitary Rousseau tells us something important both about the thought of that philosopher and about the quest for self-knowledge as such.     

Republicanism and political economy in Pagnerre's Dictionnaire politique (1842)

In 1842, the Parisian editor Louis-Antoine Pagnerre published the Dictionnaire politique. This large volume was the manifesto of the French Republicans in opposition to the conservative governments of King Louis-Philippe under the July Monarchy. One of the most original aspects of the Dictionnaire resides in the attempt to link the doctrine of republicanism to political economy. It is the purpose of this paper to analyse the republican political economy presented in Pagnerre's dictionary. First, we detail the historical context in which it appeared, stressing on Pagnerre's biography and on the composition of the group of young republicans who wrote the main economic entries of the book. Second, we focus on the economic ideas about the political regulation of industrial phenomena and the solutions these Republicans imagined to solve the social question. Third, we conclude by attempting to summarize the main characteristics of this republican political economy and to appreciate its originality.     

Mapping race and gender in the academy: the experiences of women of colour faculty and graduate students in Britain,the US and Canada

This paper examines the experiences of women of colour in geography. An analysis of qualitative, open‐ended questionnaires with women of colour geography faculty and graduate students in North America and Britain suggests that policies and practices within geography departments continue to reflect a pervasive persistence of racialized and gendered inequities in the workplace. There has been relatively little application of theoretical work on race and gender to the minority experience within geography. Some strategies suggested to challenge racialized and gendered barriers that limit women of colour's full participation in geography include a proactive recruitment programme, diversification of the curriculum and development of mentoring.