The Loving State

The American Journal of Jurisprudence, 2021

This article considers the relationship between the state and its people, reflecting on Nick Barber’s principles of constitutionalism. The joint intention of the people is central to the social reality of the good state, which is an institutionally ordered people. Other forms of political order, including empire, are possible, but there is good reason for a people to form a state and to exercise political agency. While under some conditions non-democratic rule is legitimate, there is good reason for authority to be shared widely and for rulers to foster close connections with the ruled, which makes self-government possible. Barber’s account of subsidiarity risks neglecting social solidarity in general, and nationality in particular, which would undermine the joint intention of the people. The sovereign state is the means by which a people participates in the international realm, but sovereignty may be misused to alienate a people from the state.

Global Social Sciences Review

Every political ideology has a distinct conception of various aspects of human life such as reason, purpose of life, free-will, liberty, freedom, autonomy, democracy, sovereignty and moral rights and obligations of the citizen. But the fundamental purpose of a political ideology is to define the purpose of the state and its role in providing a political system to its citizen in which individuals can live their social and political life according to the moral values and ethical principles of that political ideology. This paper only elucidates the purpose of the state according to ancient, Liberal, Marxist and Feminist standpoints. To understand the viewpoint of each political ideology, it is necessary to understand the political thought of its founders. It is pertinent to mention that all political thinkers have one ultimate aim in describing the purpose of the state which is the "ultimate good" of the citizen though they may differ with each other. The viewpoint of one ide...

A discussion of Martha Nussbaum's thesis in Political Emotions that a liberal conception of justice needs to be sustained by particularistic love. It is argued that Nussbaum's defence of this thesis is unduly hampered by a commitment to Rawlsian political liberalism.

Battler, Alex. On Love, Family, and the State: Philosophical-sociological Essay. , 2021

The problems of love, family, and state are topics that are widely discussed both in the West and in Russia. This essay, however, differs from all previous research work in that Alex Battler elevated the well-known words “love,” “family” and “marriage” to the level of concepts. This enabled the author to correlate them to the conception of force and progress he had substantiated in the book Dialectics of Force: Ontóbia, and ultimately to define the regular connection between the destruction of marriage and the collapse of a state within the context of the law of entropy growth, or “the law of death.”

Journal of International Relations and …, 2011

Journal of Social and Political Philosophy, 2023

organising this symposium so soon after the appearance of my book on The State (2023). And I deeply appreciate the careful attention given to the work by my other symposiasts. I propose to respond to them in the order in which they treat topics in the book. Those topics are all covered in the first four chapters of the book. Thus, the symposium neglects the questions covered in the final two: whether the state is limited normatively by pre-political, natural rights; and whether it is limited empirically by the need for the economy to be self-regulating. Before replying to my commentators in turn, a general comment may be useful. Some of them assume that the claims I make about the function of the state, and about what that function supports, are designed to reflect my commitment to a neo-republican theory of the ideal or just polity (Pettit 1997; 2012; 2014). This is mistaken. My claims about the function of the state, and the functional desiderata that apply to the state, are meant to be independent of normative theory and, like a prolegomenon, to constrain what such a theory can argue about the requirements of justice. The constraints identified apply to neo-republican as well as other theories, though I think that republicans can readily endorse them; hence, as I say in this book, I plan a companion volume, From State to Republic. Kazutaka Inamura Inamura offers a very clear account of the argument in the first chapter, that the issue of whether the state has a defining function is well addressed by looking at a counterfactual question of genealogy. The question is whether something deserving of the name of state would be robustly likely to emerge among creatures of our kind, living in conditions of the sort that have prevailed since the agricultural revolution, and enjoying a qualified equality. To explain the terms of the question, such an institution would be robustly likely to emerge, if its appearance did not depend on a fortuitous occurrence: say, on the good luck of someone proposing the idea and organising an assembly to implement it. And the humanoids would enjoy a qualified equality just to the extent that at least one privileged class of individuals is large enough for only some of them to occupy ruling positions and equal enough in power for no one individual or family or clique to be able to take over unilaterally. The claim in the first chapter, as Inamura clearly charts, is that the humanoids in the relatively equal class-I often assume for convenience that this includes allwould be robustly likely to evolve conventions and norms and to give those regularities the status of proper laws with the acceptance of measuresif you like, decision-maker lawsfor clarifying and changing the regularities, and for identifying and penalising offences: this story is familiar from the classic work of H. L. A. Hart in the 1960s (2012). But, so the argument goes, the emergence of such a legal system would introduce legislative authorities for ruling on what exactly the norms require, and judicial and executive authorities Pettit, The State 225

Theoretical Criminology, 2017

The aim of this special issue is to examine the constitutive relationship between the state and penal orders-that is, the uses and structures of criminal law and punishment. 1 It investigates how various criminal justice tools-its staff, sanctions, and symbolic resources-help to produce and reproduce particular political entities and how particular political configurations lead to specific penal outcomes. Just as the early modern state depended upon and claimed a monopoly of violence against rule violators to establish its political authority and legitimacy (Garland, 1996; Weber, 1919), 21st-century democratic states continue to use penal power to produce social order. As our contributors show, building on foundational work, policing practices, criminal law, and penal sanctions have been used to shore up political power, define political communities, reflect economic inequalities, and reproduce social, gendered, and racial hierarchies. But they seek to go further, to develop new ways of thinking, mapping, and conceptualizing this mutually constitutive relationship, and to challenge taken for granted concepts of the state and its relationship to punishment. Contributors analyze under-explored sites of penal power, and by doing so recast our understanding of its forms and functions. Over the past few decades, changes in migration, global economic arrangements, and patterns of violence, have posed new challenges for modern states, and new forms of punishment have emerged that are directly tied to state sovereignty, degrees of citizenship, and national identity. These developments have pushed scholars to reconsider extant theories, which often treat state form as exogeneous to penal orders. Many of these new punishment forms and practices-particularly with respect to national borders, immigrants, and marginalized populations-pose challenges to the legitimacy of the state, in particular around principles of equality, citizenship, and territory. Mass migration due to civil conflict and economic devastation, for example, has put pressure on Europe's most robust welfare states (e.g. Sweden), resulting in the deployment of routine criminal justice processes and procedures to national borders. And violent conflict and criminal activity pose particularly difficult challenges for countries transitioning 724909T CR0010.