Either seen as a “new spirit” (Blondiaux and Sintomer 2002) – following Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s “new spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999) – or as a “new instrument” (Lascoumes and Le Galès 2004) of public action and public policy making, modern democracies are more and more resorting to public discussion and deliberation to accompany decision making processes. Legitima...

William Walker is professor of international relations at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He is the co-author with David Albright and Frans Berkhout of SIPRI’s Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium: World Inventories, Capabilities and Policies (forthcoming, 1996). There have been many recent cases of states reversing course. Russia has embraced capitalism and democracy, China has thr...

The relationship between democracy and environment has always been controversial. Some scientists found that democracy had a positive impact on reducing environmental disruption. Other scholars claimed that democracy tends to accelerate environmental degradation. Ther are many studies focusing on main determinants of environmental degradation. More recently, democracy is considered to be one of...

Is economics a science or a theology? Nelson sensibly argues that economists are a priestly class; they issue authoritative (scientific) blessings upon the marketplace. The bishops of this class are the mathematicians, who convert ideology into “science”. This essay, in contrast, argues that mathematics has more to do with internal competition between economists than with politics or religion. ...

Agents of participatory democracy or purveyors of consumer capitalism? Guardians of the public sphere or lap dogs of the power elite? Much of the debate about media’s role in the “democratization” of various societies around the world demands an examination of the implications of such questions. For starters we might consider if mass media engender, as Marshall McLuhan once envisioned, a “globa...

Much has been written about the seeming inexorable march of globalization and the power of global capitalism to mold state policies according to its requirements. Yet the nation-state remains the center of political action and social solidarity. Notwithstanding the transformational power accorded to globalization, any given country's public institutions remain more tied to the specific politica...

For most Marxian theorists Britain’s parliamentary system has little to do with the politics of democratic representation. Instead, parliament, as a formal institution, is argued to be inextricably tied to the wider, subtly constraining forces of “omnipresent capitalism”. Eric Hobsbawm, for example, has argued that by gradually institutionalising representation under the rubric of parliamentary...

Modern science means that which has a solid conceptual framework, and which considers experimental results as the ultimate litmus test against which to validate any theoretical construct. Its birth can be traced back to the 16th and 17th Centuries. The work of people like Nicholaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, William Harvey, Vesalius, and others was seminal to this development...

This article explores how New Labour has attempted to implement its ideas about a ‘third way’ foreign policy in sub-Saharan Africa. Through an examination of British foreign policy practices, we explore whether New Labour has succeeded in finding a ‘third way’ between traditional views of socialism and capitalism in Africa. In particular, the article focuses on New Labour’s attempts to build pe...