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"A fine contribution to the literature on the problems of modern liberal democracy."—Choice The pace of American society has quickened exponentially since the Founding Fathers first mapped the constitution. Information travels at the speed of light; so does money. We can hop from one side of the country to the other in a matter of hours, contact our elected officials instantaneously, and share our views with thousands of people at the touch of a button. Both academia and the popular media have grappled with the consequences of this acceleration on every aspect of contemporary life. Most pressing, however, may be its impact on political life. In Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time, William Scheuerman offers a sophisticated assessment of the implications of social and technological celerity in the operation of liberal democracies. Specifically, he asks what is acceleration's main impact on the traditional liberal democratic model of the separation of powers? According to Scheuerman, high speed has created an imbalance. The executive branch was intended to react with dispatch; by contrast, legislatures and the courts were designed to be more deliberate and thoughtful. While this system of checks and balances was effective in the age of horse and buggy, Scheuerman argues that the very features that were these institutions' strengths may now be a liability. Throughout this book, Scheuerman offers a constructive critique which articulates ways in which "liberal democracy might be recalibrated in accordance with the tempo of modern society.
Hartmut Rosa advances an account of the temporal structure of society from the perspective of critical theory. He identifies in particular three categories of change in the tempo of modern social life: technological acceleration, evident in transportation, communication, and production; the acceleration of social change, reflected in cultural knowledge, social institutions, and personal relationships; and acceleration in the pace of life, which happens despite the expectation that technological change should increase an individual's free time. According to Rosa, both the structural and cultural aspects of our institutions and practices are marked by the "shrinking of the present," a decreasing time period during which expectations based on past experience reliably match future results and events. When this phenomenon combines with technological acceleration and the increasing pace of life, time seems to flow ever faster, making our relationships to each other and the world fluid and problematic. It is as if we are standing on "slipping slopes," a steep social terrain that is itself in motion and in turn demands faster lives and technology. As Rosa deftly shows, this self-reinforcing feedback loop fundamentally determines the character of modern life.
Explicates the way the Christian just war tradition shaped modernity and modernity's blindness to the interpenetration of nature and politics. This book sits uniquely at the intersection of just war thinking, environmental history, and theological ethics.
Waiting periods and deadlines are so ubiquitous that we often take them for granted. Yet they form a critical part of any democratic architecture. When a precise moment or amount of time is given political importance, we ought to understand why this is so. The Political Value of Time explores the idea of time within democratic theory and practice. Elizabeth F. Cohen demonstrates how political procedures use quantities of time to confer and deny citizenship rights. Using specific dates and deadlines, states carve boundaries around a citizenry. As time is assigned a form of political value it comes to be used to transact over rights. Cohen concludes with a normative analysis of the ways in which the devaluation of some people's political time constitutes a widely overlooked form of injustice. This book shows readers how and why they need to think about time if they want to understand politics.
Network Democracy uses the contemporary tools of ecology and network thinking to unearth the ancient, intellectual ruins of traditional conservative thought. Questioning the West’s veneration of freedom, equality, contractual citizenship, economic progress, cosmopolitanism, secular institutionalism, and reason, Jared Giesbrecht illuminates how these ideals fuel violence and insecurity in our high-speed lives. While the modern age witnesses the rise of a violent conservatism in the form of revolutionary movements enacting terror and vengeance for the interventions of the liberal West, this study reveals a different kind of conservatism - one that has emerged in direct conversation with liberal thought. Giesbrecht highlights the need for intermediate institutions and civil enterprises that form relations and traditions independent of the state in order to develop resistance to the insecurity of the liberal age. This book offers not only a poignant critique, but a constructive and peaceable alternative to the violence of both liberalism and reactionary anti-liberalism. Attuned to the new realities of globalization, advanced technology, and social acceleration, Network Democracy is a masterful hybrid of ancient and cutting-edge political philosophy that casts a new light on the values underlying western civilization.
Alessandro Ferrara explains what he terms 'the democratic horizon' and reviews the challenges under which democracies must operate.
The constitutionalization of intellectual property law is often framed as a benign and progressive integration of intellectual property with fundamental rights. Yet this is not a full or even an adequate picture of the ongoing constitutionalization processes affecting IP. This collection of essays, written by international experts and covering a range of different areas of intellectual property law, takes a broader approach to the process. Drawing on constitutional theory, and particularly on ideas of "new constitutionalism", the chapters engage with the complex array of contemporary legal constraints on intellectual property law-making. Such constraints arising in international intellectual property law, human rights law (including human rights protection for right-holders), investment treaties, and forms of private ordering. This collection aims to illuminate the complex role of this constitutional framework, by analysing the overlaps, complementarities, and conflicts between such forms of protection and seeking to establish the effects that this assemblage of global and regional norms has on legal reform projects and interpretations of IP law. Some chapters take a broad theoretical perspective on these processes. Others focus on specific situations in which the relationship between intellectual property law and broader constitutional norms is significant. These contexts range from Art 17 of the EU's Digital Single Market Directive, to the implementation of harmonized trade secrets protection, from the role of Canada's Charter of Rights to the impact of the social model of property in Brazil.
This innovative book explores the nature and function of 'sunset clauses' and experimental legislation, or temporary legislation that expires after a determined period of time, allowing legislators to test out new rules and regulations within a set time frame and on a small-scale basis.
This book provides a theoretical framework for understanding the micropolitics of speed; a rich, nuanced, and embodied account of life in an accelerating world. What does it feel like to live in an era of profound social acceleration? What kinds of affects, perceptions, and identities does an accelerating world produce? The answers to these questions mean more than simply understanding the psychology of speed; they also mean understanding issues in contemporary politics as diverse as xenophobia and anti-immigration policies, patterns of transnational identification and solidarity, social isolation and alienation, and the ability of new media to coordinate social movements. While drawing extensively on the work of contemporary theorists, Simon Glezos recognizes that social acceleration is not a purely recent phenomenon. He therefore turns to thinkers such as Nietzsche, Spinoza, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty, to ask how they sought to understand, and respond to, the rapid changes and unsettling temporalities of their eras, and how their insights can be applied to our own. Advancing theoretical understanding and offering a useful way to analytically conceptualize the nature of time, Speed and Micropolitics will be of interest to students and scholars studying affect theory, theories of the body, new materialism, phenomenology, as well as the history of political thought.
2011 was a tumultuous year in terms of social protest movements. The Occupy movement spread across the globe with unprecedented support of an enormity not seen since 1968, while revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Syria and Libya caught the attention of the global media and brought the word “revolution” back into public discussions on social justice and governance. For many people worldwide, it appears that it is time for social, political and economic change. And it is precisely time, in all its forms, which cannot be ignored in this context. As something that surrounds us and affects every aspect of our lives, time is at once a tool for control, for order, for emancipation, for understanding the future and the past, and measuring degrees of freedom and quality of life in the present. This book brings together essays from fields such as politics, cultural studies and philosophy in order to reinterpret and reorient current thinking on the possibilities for new understandings of concepts of time to bring about social change. History as the passing of time, clock time, the exchange value of time, qualitative time, and alternative or marginal notions of temporality are analysed through the lens of various theoretical thinkers and applied to a multitude of political and social case studies. Breaking away from traditional notions of time as linear, and against common socially-constructed understandings of time, these essays suggest that new conceptions of time can have a major influence on creating a more just, tolerant world.