Claims of Need in Property Law and Politics

Both courts of law and political theorists have grappled with the problem of giving the concept of ‘need’ a place in our reasoning about the rights and wrongs of property regimes. But in the U.K., legal changes in the last fifteen years have eroded the legal possibilities for striking some compromise between the claims of the needy and the rights of property owners. Against this backdrop this article compares three theoretical accounts of how the fact of human need should impact upon our thinking about property rights: the rights-based arguments of Jeremy Waldron, the radical democratic theory of Lawrence Hamilton and the anarchist commentary of Colin Ward. While ‘theories’ of need have paid much attention to the nature of need ‘itself’, the article argues that this comparison reveals another issue that is just as important: where and how should claims of need be registered in legal and political processes

The Rhythm of Justice: On Temporal Indeterminacy in Normative Reasoning

This article considers how political actors committed to a moral value like equality can cause havoc with our lives if they choose to apply those values in ways that are temporally absurd or arbitrary. The central claim is that without considering the temporal structures of our political commitments our political theorising will remain indeterminate with respect to social practice. This claim is developed in two steps. First, debates on ‘indeterminacy’ in normative theorising are examined to develop a sceptical argument showing that a lack of temporal reference points can lead to a lack of certainty in the meaning of normative principles. Second, debates on time and social justice are used to illustrate how temporal reference points can link normative principles to the existential time of human lives in meaningful and important ways. To ignore these lessons about the place of temporality in normative reasoning is to ignore the indeterminacy of many of our political commitments and misunderstand the extent of our normative disagreements with others

Global Journalist: Middle East matrix and the role U.S. plays

In this June 19, 2003 episode of Global Journalist, host Byron Scott and four journalists from Iraq, Egypt, Turkey and Palestine discuss about the Middle East matrix from these countries' perspectives, the role the U.S. is playing and potential solutions that can improve international relations. Host: Byron Scott. Guests: Patrick Cockburn, Amir Ahmed, Semih Idiz, Khaled Abu Aker. Producers: Yusef Kalyango, Sarah Cayton. Directors: Pat Akers

Migration and demos in the democratic firm: an extension of the firm-state analogy

Debates around the state-firm analogy as a route to justifying workplace democracy tend towards a static view of both state and firm, and position workplace democracy as the objective. We contend, however, that states and firms are connected to one another in ways that should alter the terms of the debate, and that the achievement of workplace democracy raises a new set of political issues about the demos in the democratic firm and ‘worker migration’ at the boundaries of the firm. Our argument thus contains two key steps: First, drawing on an empirical case study of a worker-owned firm, we enrich the state-firm analogy by developing a more dynamic view of both, focussing on the creation of workplace democracies; worker movement in and out of them; the dynamic meanings of ‘citizenship’ within them; and the status of the unemployed in a world of democratic workplaces. We then argue that in moving to a more sociological view of the state, the things we were comparing begin to show their real-world connections to one another. By going beyond the idealised view of states that has distorted the state-firm analogy debates, we arrive at a more robust view of how widespread workplace democracy might reconfigure basic political relationships in society