The Post-Colonial Constitutional Order of the Commonwealth Caribbean: The Endurance of the Crown and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council

ABSTRACT

Amongst Britain's former colonies the independent countries of the Commonwealth Caribbean represent something of an anomaly in so far as the majority of them remain constitutional monarchies and continue to retain the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) as their final appellate court, even though the region has had its own final appellate court – the Caribbean Court of Justice – since 2006. This is in marked contrast to Britain's former colonies in Africa and South Asia, the majority of which switched to republicanism soon after independence and at the same time abolished rights of appeal to the JCPC. This paper seeks to uncover the reasons for this anomaly by examining how the path that led to independence was shaped by a particular conception of Dominion status and by the willingness of nationalist leaders to embrace a dual identity: equal parts West Indian nationalist and Empire loyalist. It will also examine the phenomenon of the ‘postcolony’; being the persistence of the colonial order following the acquisition of constitutional independence. The paper has three aims. Firstly, to contribute to a better understanding of the impact of Dominion status and all that it symbolised in a region which is often overlooked in the scholarly literature on this topic. Secondly, better to understand the competing political forces that led three countries in the region to adopt republicanism, but inhibited its adoption elsewhere in the region. Thirdly, and finally, to enhance discussion of the complex nexus between republicanism and the abolition of rights of appeal to the JCPC where political and juridical considerations do not neatly align.     

《春琴抄》人物关系解读——以春琴与佐助为中心

谷崎润一郎是日本唯美主义文学流派的主要代表人物,在日本文学史上占有重要地位。他是一位多产作家,写过许多长中短篇小说。在他的众多作品中,《春琴抄》极具代表性。他将西洋式的内容与东洋式的表现融为一体,包罗了谷崎写作风格的主要部分。作品描写了具有嗜虐性的失明少女春琴和对春琴顶礼膜拜的佣人佐助之间非常的情感世界。作者运用巧妙的构思,采用精湛的古典技法和优美典雅的文体,将贯穿其文学作品主题的女性形象淋漓尽致地展现出来。     

Pocock,Machiavelli and Political Contingency in Foreign Affairs: Republican Existentialism Outside (and Within) the City

SUMMARY

In this essay, inspired by J.G.A. Pocock's appropriation of Machiavelli's theory of political contingency, and building upon my previous engagements with Pocock's ‘republican existentialism’, I focus on the role played by ‘accidents’ in Machiavelli's analysis of war and foreign affairs within The Prince and the Discourses. In so doing, I consider the following issues: the ways through which a potential imperial hegemon might consolidate control over nearby lesser powers—and, conversely, how such less powerful polities might resist imperial encroachments on their autonomy; the contrasting military modes and orders characteristic of ancient and modern republics; and the extent to which Machiavelli actually thought that accidents in foreign affairs were ever truly ‘accidental’ in light of his determinations concerning well- versus badly ordered domestic institutions.     

The Concept of Corruption in J.G.A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment

SUMMARY

In the scholarship on the concept of political corruption, one frequently encounters the lamentation that the manner in which the concept is deployed in liberal modernity is insufficiently attuned to the richer sense in which the term was employed in the ‘civic humanist’ tradition. In these lamentations, the usual point of reference is J.G.A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment, a work that made corruption the central term of art in a political language stretching from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century and beyond. Certainly there is something quite attractive today about the ‘Machiavellian’ inflection of the term—our era is replete with the very things the protagonists of Pocock's story decried: debt, dependency, oligarchy, standing armies and the diminution of civic duties. But to what extent is Pocock's classic text a reliable guide for those studying the concept of corruption? This article suggests that Pocock uses the term in an excessively capacious manner, which both weakens his book's utility for understanding eighteenth-century political thought and undermines its power as a foundation for political critique by civic-minded anti-corruption reformers.     

Nudging Bentham: indirect legislation and (neo-)liberal politics

SUMMARY

The debates over Sunstein and Thaler’s Nudge oppose libertarianism and paternalism, or defend the authors’ proposed manipulation of individuals’ ‘choice architectures’ as a consistent system of libertarian paternalism. My essay looks beyond the terms of this debate and revisits Bentham’s ‘Indirect Legislation’ in order to excavate the issues raised by the deployment of technologies of behavioural economics in schemes of government. On the one hand, nudging is nothing other than a mild and carefully considered mode of indirect legislation, and the authors are right to join Bentham in pointing out that the landscape they seek to improve is always with us; we are always already governed and governing others, and we might as well govern and be governed better than we do/are. On the other hand, nudge-like innovations reveal the extent to which Bentham’s insights have been captured by a disciplinary orientation that removes its subjects from political space. Put differently, the issue with this kind of government is not that it interferes with our liberty so much as that it presumes our lack of political orientation and efficacy. Bentham’s liberal subjects inhabit a public and even republican space that Sunstein and Thaler’s neo-liberal subjects have long since abandoned.     

A civilisation at peril: Goethe's representation of Europe during the Sattelzeit

The importance of the concept of Europe as a source of meaning and object of contested discursive battles during the fundamental transition towards modernity of the Sattelzeit (1750–1850) can hardly be overstated. The Weimar Classics (Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland) made important contributions both to Enlightenment debates about Europe before the French Revolution and to the discursive battles about the continent taking place in the aftermath of the French Revolution in a context of heightened epistemic uncertainty and ideological confrontation. The paper aims to investigate Goethe's representation of Europe as an almost millenarian civilisation endangered at the end of the eighteenth century by a double process of economic and political modernisation. Particular attention is paid to how Goethe rooted his perception of Europe as a civilisation in geographic and climatic assumptions and how he compared the continent to other civilisational entities such as America, China, India or Persia. Finally, the political implications Goethe derived from his perception of Europe as an ailing civilisation shall be contrasted with democratic, romantic and conservative discourses about the continent in the aftermath of the French Revolution.     

古典时期雅典城邦对贫富差距的制度调适

古典时期(600-338BC.),雅典城邦通过施行解负令、公民兵制、公职津贴制、征收非常财产税和公益捐等制度,抑制最富有的阶层,扶持最贫困的阶层,强化中等阶层,从而缓解了因贫富差距增大而引发的社会矛盾与激烈冲突,保证了雅典城邦的社会安定与发展.     

苏州古典园林旅游者空间意象特征分析

本文以苏州古典园林为案例,基于意象地图调查,探讨旅游者空间意象的基本要素构成、意象要素感知频率的空间分布特征及其形成机制。研究表明：（1）古典园林旅游者空间意象中共包含五个基本要素,五要素在总体样本中出现的频率基本均衡,在不同园林的样本之间有一定差异;（2）五要素均具有较高的可识别性,其中节点与边界要素的可识别性及可意象性最高,是遗产保护的核心要素;（3）五要素的感知频率在空间分布上呈现从景区核心向周边逐渐衰减的规律性特征,即“核心一边缘”空间模式,该模式的形成是旅游者行为特征与园林空间格局共同作用的结果。     

Memory,history and the classical tradition

‘Memory’ is often confused and mistaken for myth; this is in turn connected with the widespread use of mistaking collective mythology and common myth for the idea of a ‘collective memory’. This essay discusses memory and history terminology in the context of the generic concept ‘classical tradition’. The case study explored here – the nineteenth-century Walhalla ‘temple’ near Regensburg in Southern Germany – is an attempt to discuss the classical tradition, focusing on archaeology and architecture rather than philology), within the parameters of the memory and history debate in contemporary historiography. The essay aims to develop the position of the iconic and symbolic importance of antiquity and the classical tradition in the memory and history debate as well as in historical writing. The concluding remarks emphasise the necessity of historicising tradition and its genealogies, conceptualised here as a tradition of legacies.