Razi on Reason and Political Authority: A Study in Medieval Persian Political Thought

The Philosopher of Rey, Mohammad-e Zakariya-ye Razi and his Ismaili adversaries, Abu Hatam-e Razi and Naser-e Khosrow, share a political understanding of religion according to which religion is a theologico-political system of domination. However, they are at odds over the political philosophy appraisal of religion qua a system of authority. The paper explicates the latter disagreement in part based on Razi's and his opponents' conflicting ideas about the nature of the faculty of Reason and its distribution among men. Consequently, the paper underlines a democratic implication of Razi's thesis on the makeup of the human intellect.     

Beyond Ideological Conflict: Political Incorporation of Buddhist Youth in the Early PRC

This essay explores the impact of governance on the Chinese religious landscape during the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) through a case study of the Young Buddhist Association (YBA) of Shanghai. Despite the official atheist ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, during this era of New Democracy the YBA experienced Communist governance in practice as a process of political incorporation rather than coercive eradication. As its Buddhist youth movement not only survived the Communist takeover in 1949 but gained momentum well into the 1950s, the YBA was propelled to the forefront of the Buddhist community in Shanghai and became the most active and influential grassroots Buddhist organization in the early PRC. The case of the YBA demonstrates that incorporation into the new political order of the 1950s had transformative effects on the spatial construction, identity formation, and social dynamics of religious communities that cannot be reduced to steps toward their eventual elimination during the Cultural Revolution.     

Law,Culture and Access to Justice under the Palestinian National Authority

It has been widely claimed that the Palestinian National Authority has failed to provide adequate access to the law for many Palestinians. Whilst impediments to legal access are often treated as a technical questions of procedure, or as an issue of the cultural appropriateness of legal regimes, this article takes a third approach, which stresses political and historical factors. In order to understand obstacles to legal access it is necessary to discover the ways in which legal practices are understood, used and abandoned in particular contexts. Through an examination of labour disputes, the article argues that in the context of the West Bank, legal claims have no absolute moral value, but are attractive for the substantive claims that can be made through them, opening up legal avenues for political manipulation. In this context, legal entitlements are distributed according to political resources, rather than legal procedures. The article concludes by arguing that promotion of effective access to legal processes in the West Bank should not be seen as a short‐cut to a stable political regime, since accountable legal processes require a centralized, strong and stable coercive support, based in a measure of organizational cohesion and territorial sovereignty.     

On Authority and Political Destination: Michael Polanyi and the Threshold of Postmodernism

ABSTRACT

This study challenges a prevalent view that Aquinas's political thought develops over time on the question of legitimate resistance to tyranny. Many scholars argue that Aquinas gradually restricts the scope of legitimate political resistance and morally permissible tyrannicide. On this view Aquinas defends tyrannicide in his early Commentary on the Sentences, adds strong qualifications in the Summa Theologiae, and finally repudiates tyrannicide in De Regno. This study finds the evidence for such a development lacking and seeks to rehabilitate a long and diverse Thomistic tradition of legitimate resistance including tyrannicide. Indeed, a close reading of De Regno shows that Aquinas upholds a doctrine of political resistance and defends the legitimacy of tyrannicide under certain circumstances. Moreover, Aquinas's doctrine of political resistance is wide open and underdeveloped. Later attempts to clarify and qualify Aquinas's doctrine of political resistance, therefore, are appropriate and even necessary.     

从西方化到本土化:英国的殖民统治与马来西亚的政治发展

马来西亚是政治发展较为成功的发展中国家。马来西亚政治发展的成功,在很大程度上是由于对殖民时期的政治遗产进行了适当的本土化改造,使民主与权威同时为政治稳定提供支撑,形成了介于民主与权威之问的政治体制。马来西亚政治发展的经验说明,发展中国家只有根据本国国情对继承而来的政治遗产进行本土化的改造,才能建立适合本国社会与历史特点的稳定的政治体制。西方的政治发展模式并不是普适性的真理,发展中国家在探寻政治发展道路过程中也可以形成自己的政治发展模式,从而使人类文明的发展变得更加丰富多彩。     

Law, Patronage and Municipal Authority in Seventeenth-Century France: The Aftermath of the Lanturelu Revolt in Dijon

Popular uprisings have attracted the interest of early modernhistorians but the efforts of local elites to manage their consequencesremain largely unexplored. This article examines how Dijon’smunicipality negotiated the aftermath of the 1630 Lanturelurevolt. Following the uprising, Louis XIII curtailed Dijon’sprivileges, reorganized its municipality, and ordered it toindemnify the revolt’s victims. Over time, however, theavocats of Dijon’s municipal government successfully manipulatedthe Ancien Régime’s power networks—law, localinstitutions and clientage networks—to win a restorationof Dijon’s traditional city government, the reductionof damage claims, acknowledgement of the municipality’sinnocence and reaffirmation of its contested authority. Lanturelu’saftermath, often interpreted as an example of the early Bourbons’growing control over French cities, thus reveals that the lattercould remain dynamic political centres in the early seventeenthcentury and that the state’s expanding apparatus couldbe used to contest royal authority, as well as extend it.     

Ideology, Discourse, and the Geography of Hegemony: From Socialist to Neoliberal Development in Postapartheid South Africa

The African National Congress (ANC) has long stood for a development policy committed to improving living conditions for black people in South Africa. Assuming power in 1994, the ANC adopted a leftist, basic-needs-oriented Reconstruction and Development Programme as the popular foundation for its economic policy. Within two years, the ANC had switched to a rightist, neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy stressing privatization, deregulation, and trade liberalization. This article critically examines the displacement of economic policy from socialism to neoliberalism. My thesis is that ANC policy was disciplined by a neoliberal economic discourse formulated by an academic-institutional-media complex with linked centers of persuasion inside and outside the country. The article combines ideas about hegemony from Gramsci with notions of discourse derived from Foucault in constructing a geographic theory of globally hegemonic discursive formations colonizing alternative, counterhegemonic discourses.