Delegitimation provided by the constitutional pact in the First Republic

Abstract

Far from being a value shared by the country’s political parties, republican Italy’s constitution has given rise to confrontation depending on the interpretations given to it in the main phases of transition of the country’s political system. Antifascism as a fundamental statute of public life, on the one hand, and the great parliamentary system framework, on the other, established the boundaries of democratic legitimacy. Although this process contributed to strengthening the country’s democratic foundations, particularly with regard to the risk of a possible authoritarian swing in the aftermath of World War II, it also affected a political dialectic strongly conditioned by the delegitimizing element underlying the constitutional charter. Attempts at institutional reform as well as opposition to any understanding between the two parties that benefited the most from a literal interpretation of the constitution, that is, the Christian Democratic Party and the Italian Communist Party, often ran the risk of being demonized. This led to a kind of short-circuit which, in the long run, eroded the democratic fabric itself, feeding the spiral of mutual delegitimation that marked the political life of the country in these republican years.     

‘Barons’ Wars,under Other Names’: Feudalism,Royalism and the American Founding

SUMMARY

The Machiavellian Moment was largely responsible for establishing what remains the dominant understanding of American Revolutionary ideology. Patriots, on this account, were radical whigs; their great preoccupation was a terror of crown power and executive corruption. This essay proposes to test the whig reading of patriot political thought in a manner suggested by Professor Pocock's pioneering first book, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. The whig tradition, as he taught us, located in the remote Saxon past an ‘ancient constitution’ of liberty, in which elected monarchs merely executed laws approved by their free subjects in a primeval parliament. This republican idyll, whigs believed, was then tragically interrupted by the Norman Conquest of 1066, which introduced feudal tenures and monarchical tyranny. Did patriot theorists accept this narrative? The answer, I shall argue, is strikingly mixed. By the early 1770s, appeals to the ‘ancient constitution’ had become less common in patriot writing. And by the end of the 1770s, many patriots had absorbed a completely different understanding of the feudal past—one pioneered by Royalist historians of the seventeenth century and then adapted by Scottish historians of the eighteenth. This shift reflects a broader transformation in patriot political and constitutional theory.     

“生态环境”用语产生的特殊时代背景

本文随着地理学家黄秉维院士的回顾,对1980-1982年五届全国人大宪法修改过程中,将草案中的“生态平衡”改为“生态环境”一词、并写入宪法的过程,再现出来予以分析讨论,认为“生态环境”概念提出的背景是全球和中国谋求环境保护事业发展的时代潮流,侧重的是人民生存于其中的自然环境的生态质量,具有积极的社会昭示作用和教育意义,不宜仅从学理上认为“生态环境”的提法有错,因为真实的世界往往比学者头脑中的理论思维更精彩。学术界于2005年5月展开的对“生态环境”、“生态环境建设”概念的研讨,贡献了许多真知灼见,然而,从“生态环境”一词在人大常委会产生过程的基本事实判断,它属于具有相对独立性的政府用语(法定名词),而非严格的科技名词,主要使用于国家行政管理层面,而学术研究中则主要是尊重学者自己的理解和创作。至于如何健全政府用语、消除政府不当用语在国家社会生活中可能带来的负面影响,正是学术界应该积极探讨的问题。     

澳门民间财神信仰旅游资源研究

民间财神信仰是中国财文化的重要组成部分,是澳门地区最具特色的民间信仰之一,近年来已成为澳门主要的旅游资源之一。财神又是博彩业的行业神,但是由于中国大多数地区禁止博彩,因此关于此类信仰的研究甚少。本文从澳门民间财神信仰出发,分析了澳门民间主要祭祀的财神的功能与形象,并探讨了澳门博彩行业神信仰的神灵系统构成及其具备的特点。     

Adjustment and Integration: The Scottish Representation in the British House of Commons, 1707–14*

The small minority of Scots who entered the house of commons in 1707 were slow to make their mark. Besides lack of numbers, they suffered several significant disadvantages. The Westminster scene was strange, and the style and tone of debate more vigorous and informal. Moreover, the aristocracy had dominated the unicameral Scottish parliament, and commoners found it difficult to emancipate themselves from noble tutelage. Most importantly, Scottish politics did not yet reflect the two‐party system dominant in England. Thus in the first sessions the Scots were unable to make headway in the essential business of parliament, legislation. Scotland suffered in comparison with the English provinces, and even the Irish, who were able to muster a more effective lobby. Soon, however, a new generation of debaters appeared, able to use their wit to discomfit English antagonists, and a new class of ‘men of business’ who grasped the rules of the legislative game. The fortuitous deaths of leading magnates and the polarisation of sectarian antagonisms in Scotland permitted the coalescence of the Scottish representation into two broad factions allied with the English parties. It was with English tory support that bills were passed to benefit the sectional concerns of Scottish episcopalians, accompanied by other measures of a more general nature. The combined attempt by Scottish peers and MPs in 1713 to secure the repeal of the union does not point to a lasting breakdown in Anglo‐Scottish relations, since it was also a manifestation of political opportunism by English whigs and discontented tories, and their Scottish allies. But the dawn of a party system in Scotland was dispelled by the death of Queen Anne and the ensuing jacobite rebellion. The complicity of tories in the Fifteen resulted in the destruction of the party in Scotland, and the construction of a whig hegemony.     

‘These new rights’: social security in the postwar Italian debate

At the end of World War II the Italian welfare system, which had taken shape under Fascism, was in need of a radical overhaul. Nevertheless, the wait for organic, structural reform dragged on for over two decades without arriving, even in the Sixties, at an efficient framework for the welfare state capable of dismantling the corporatist, familist one inherited from Fascism. This article reconstructs the debates on social security and social rights after World War II. Beginning with the interest that was sparked, even in Italy, by the Beveridge Report, I will investigate the meaning given to the expressions “social security” and “social rights” by politicians and technocrats engaged in trying to reform the Italian Welfare State.     

‘A Beautiful Fiction of Law’: Rhetorical Engagements with Terra Nullius in the British Periodical Press in the 1840s

This paper analyses two critiques of the jurisprudential basis of settler colonialism in Australia published in the early Victorian periodical press. Review articles in the North British Review and Fraser's Magazine in the 1840s deployed claims of legal sophistry to dispute the fiction that Australian colonies were settled, rather than conquered, and that the country was a terra nullius. By examining the politics and rhetoric of each article, the significance of legal ideology for both literature promoting colonization and humanitarian critiques of colonial policy is assessed. Through a combination of discourse analysis and intellectual history, the North British Review article is read as fusing Scottish Enlightenment concepts of social evolution with the rhetoric of sensibility to defend the existence of Indigenous rights to land and to argue for the degenerative implications of colonial social practices. Similarly, the Fraser's Magazine article offers an epitome of the place of law in colonial policy-making by invoking utilitarian and pragmatic approaches to law to rationalize doctrines of sovereignty and jurisdiction, minimizing legal protections for Aborigines while maximizing the legal powers of colonists. By tracing the use of jurisprudential rhetoric in reviews published in two leading metropolitan journals, the paper offers evidence that the literary sphere contributed to the emergent culture of colonial legality.     

Constitution‐writing,nationalism and the Turkish experience

Until recently there has been relatively little attention paid to the question of how the relationship between the state, its citizens and the nation is articulated in constitutional texts. This paper seeks to address this gap through an examination of how the rules of belonging to the nation are discussed by the political elite and how these discussions find their final formulation in the constitutional texts. The analysis focuses on the Turkish case at two constitution‐writing moments (1924 and 1961). While such moments have conventionally been assumed to be ‘revolutionary’, the data on Turkey highlights continuities rather than radical changes over time. More particularly, it underscores the resilience and salience of the principle of nationalism over time.     

The Formation of the Qing State in Global Perspective: A Geopolitical and Fiscal Analysis

This article re-examines the formation of the Qing state and its nature from a global perspective. It underscores the key roles of geopolitical setting and fiscal constitution in shaping the course of frontier expeditions and territorial expansions, unlike past studies that have centered on the dynasty’s administrative institutions and the ruling elites’ ideologies or lifestyles to defend or question the thesis of “Sinicization” in Qing historiography. This study demonstrates the different motivations and varying strategies behind the Qing dynasty’s two waves of military conquests, which lasted until the 1750s, and explains how the Qing state’s peculiar geopolitical interests and the low-level equilibrium in its fiscal constitution shaped the “cycles” in its military operations and frontier building. The article ends by comparing the Qing with early modern European states and the Ottoman empire to discuss its vulnerability as well as resilience in the transition to modern sovereign statehood in the nineteenth century.     

国民党六届二中全会研究

国民党六届二中全会是第二次国共合作由巅峰走向破裂的转折点。在此次会议上 ,国民党内部各派系就政协宪草原则和东北问题发生激烈争论 ,蒋介石亦表现出政治动摇。各种矛盾冲突最终形成巨大的政治破坏力 ,使蒋介石、国民党从政协会议全面倒退 ,由此构成国共两军四平决战的政治背景