A Vision of the Good Society in Stone: The Nebraska Capitol as Aspirational Memory Node

Artificial Intelligence and the 'Good Society': The US, EU, and UK Approach

In October 2016, the White House, the European Parliament, and the UK House of Commons each issued a report outlining their visions on how to prepare society for the widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI). In this article, we provide a comparative assessment of these three reports in order to facilitate the design of policies favourable to the development of a 'good AI society'. To do so, we examine how each report addresses the following three topics: (a) the development of a 'good AI society'; (b) the role and responsibility of the government, the private sector, and the research community (including academia) in pursuing such a development; and (c) where the recommendations to support such a development may be in need of improvement. Our analysis concludes that the reports address adequately various ethical, social, and economic topics, but come short of providing an overarching political vision and long-term strategy for the development of a 'good AI society'. In order to contribute to fill this gap, in the conclusion we suggest a two-pronged approach.

Editor's Introduction

This article shows that studying the views of future Russian lawyers on the projective future of society is a relevant development, since this particular socio-professional group does not only put forward certain demands in regards to projective subjective social wellbeing, but also possesses the lawmaking potential necessary for the transformation and normative engineering of Russian society. The article analyzes the results of the author’s own research, conducted in 2016 in 12 cities of Russia (based on All- Russian State University of Justice and its subsidiaries). According to the author, the results of research in the field reveal a relatively high level of subjective wellbeing registered among the respondents, with their core values being justice, freedom, upholding law and order, public initiative. In order to measure normative expectations, those surveyed were offered to characterize three models of a supposed society using an array of parameters: “the best society” (utopian), “a bad society” (dystopian) and “a good society” (one that’s attainable and suitable for life and personal growth). As a result, certain projective requirement indexes were obtained for implementing these models in a future society. It came as somewhat of a surprise that, in spite of the widespread belief that the value orientations of modern youth have a “consumer” nature to them, material wellbeing turned out to be far from the most significant parameter. The highest values were shown by indexes which correlated with such virtues as justice, equality and lawfulness, which speaks to their considerable influence on the respondents’ evaluation of their subjective wellbeing. The authors also noticed a fundamental difference when it comes to future Russian lawyers’ thoughts on the paths towards attaining justice. The indexes for a society constantly subject to reform and a conservative society were practically on the same level. This indirectly points to the existence of a deeply rooted divide when it comes to values, indicating that people are looking into the future with uncertainty, which is proven by a multitude of studies done by other authors.

This article explores notions of the good society in relation to recent debates in cultural citizenship. Criticising Kantian approaches to citizenship, the article urges scholars to discuss competing notions of the good. In this respect, I critically outline the work of Hannah Arendt and her ideas concerning the importance of a sense of responsibility for the maintenance of the public realm. In particular I focus on her ideas related to education and the importance of political traditions. However, the argument suggests that Arendt fails to outline an idea of a common citizenship where all citizens might flourish. At this point I turn to the work of Raymond Williams and his idea of the long revolution. This notion does indeed outline an idea of the good society that seeks to describe the gradual evolution of an educated and participatory democracy. The long revolution links ideas of education, political participation and the construction of a culture in common. However, Williams' vision cannot simply be returned to given the rise of multiculturalism, globalisation and the dominance of neoliberalism. In the final sections of the article I look at more cosmopolitan answers to the idea of the good society, but suggest that they need to be reconnected to the traditions of ethical socialism. Cultural citizenship then becomes redefined as a future society where citizens have access to a genuinely democratic education, a pluralistic public sphere and a social state that would guarantee their welfare.

Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life: Politics and Ethics at the Intersection of North Atlantic and African Philosophy

Polycentric Governance and the Good Society: A Normative and Philosophical Investigationoffers an examination of the idea of polycentric governance as one of the pillars of a flourishing human society. Rather than following the conventional path of suppressing complexity and diversity for the sake of reaching agreement on justice and political stability, David Thunder and Pablo Paniagua see complexity and diversity as assets that should be leveraged to make the "Open Society" a more prosperous, resilient, and flourishing place to live.Polycentric Governance and the Good Societyprovides valuable food for thought for academics and students looking for a probing, cross-disciplinary discussion of the ethos and institutions of liberal democracy under conditions of social pluralism. Although the volume includes diverse disciplinary lenses, such as public choice theory, MacIntyrean social theory, and constitutional law, the driving concern is to exhibit the potential advantages of polycentric approaches to governance and social coordination for constructing a feasible and morally attractive social order. This is the first extended academic work to explore in depth the advantages, not only from an economic and organizational standpoint but also from a broader ethical, sociological, and anthropological perspective, of polycentric governance arrangements.

What happens between the most visible aspects of social movements? When protestors put down their signs, petitioners hang up their clipboards, and movement organizations contract, there are several theories about what happens to the social and political currents that made them possible in the first place. Theories of social movements often rely on an understanding of political cycles, resource availability, or social strain. Often, movement actors are portrayed as “activated” for a given campaign, only to return to inactivity after it concludes. Beyond those observations lie permanent communities of activists whose forms of political engagement are not inherently ties to shifting winds of political opportunity and are deeply embedded in the everyday practices of lifestyle. This dissertation profiles one such group, Dancing Rabbit ecovillage, as a social movement "node," containing hallmarks of cultural, lifestyle, and social movements. Members of a node, like the one portrayed in this work, follow a different path towards being activated that offers a different account of how political work is drawn from personal consciousness. The concept of the social movement node is developed as an alternative explanation for the persistence of activism, one which helps to develop and elaborate a long-developing understanding of personal and political spheres are overlapping and immutably connected rather than separate and opposed. I detail the village's claim to the nature and future of society through an ethnographic explanation that moves through its own cycles based on a seasonal metaphor, rather than on the terms of national trends.

The central claim in this article is simple: aesthetic activities make society better. They are essential for the so-called good society. Specifically it is argued that aesthetic reflection contributes to what Maeve Cooke calls ‘human flourishing’. Vocabularies from the two dominant discourses in social analysis are surveyed: (1) Applied Social Science, which is, generally speaking, empirically grounded and sits within a tradition of Positivism in relation to social analysis and (2) Critical Theory, which is more theoretical, speculative and sits within a Marxian tradition of social theory. First, I introduce the instrumental use of aesthetic practices and vocabularies that I want to oppose. This is done through a brief account of some ways in which creative practice can be used in forms of neo-liberal governance. Second, I survey and compare the use of aesthetics in Applied Social Science and Critical Theory. As I discuss, despite their differences both employ an understanding of the good society based on human flourishing. I conclude by offering three ways in which aesthetic practices contribute to human flourishing: (1) through fostering individual flourishing; (2) as a form of political imagination; and (3) as a model of discourse not regulated by truth.

Collective Dreams: Political Imagination and Community, Keally D. McBride, University Park PA: Penn State University Press, 2005, pp. 157.Political imagination is greatly underrated, not least because there is so little of it in what passes for “official” politics these days. But it is also understudied by political theorists whose domain encompasses the many imagined but rarely realized versions of the “good society” handed down from the past. And yet political imagination is arguably central to every vision of an alternative political order. Plato never lived in his Republic; Hobbes never wandered through the state of nature; and Marx never knew the rule of the “associated producers.” But, all of them may have felt that they had glimpsed elements of these alternate futures in their own time. Hobbes, after all, lived through the English Revolution which he may have thought resembled a “war of all against all” and Marx witnessed the heady days of the Paris Commune. This is surely as true today. Social conservatives may espy the glimmerings of a heavenly utopia in their local church group. Progressive social activists may see a new social order prefigured in their food co-op or trade union. Political imagination, in other words, is just as much a part of the world we inhabit as it is of those we dream of inhabiting. However, as Keally McBride observes, “Imagination itself, as opposed to its products, is generally not studied in political science. But it is our best tool for changing the world” (1).

This chapter focuses on the nature of 'politics' and how religious groups are crucial to the very possibility of political life in the contemporary context. It examines whether the vision of politics is distinctively postsecular or not. The chapter explores that the recent resurgence of religion in public life, and in particular in urban life, far from being a threat or even an alternative to politics, represents the 'salvation' of politics. This 'salvation' is realized most explicitly in forms of inter-faith political alliances as exemplified in the work of London Citizens and other forms of broad-based community organizing. Finally, religions are the bearers of moral notions of the person and the good society and traditions of practice that enable resistance to process of commodification and instrumentalization. Keywords: commodification; instrumentalization; London citizens; religious groups; urban politics

In Conservatism and Southern Intellectuals, 1789 1861, Adam L. Tate discusses the nature of southern conservative thought between 1789 and 1861 by examining six conservatives whose lives and careers spanned the antebellum period: John Randolph of Roanoke, John Taylor of Caroline, Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, William Gilmore Simms, Joseph Glover Baldwin, and Johnson Jones Hooper. Tate contends that southern conservatism derived its distinctive characteristics from its acceptance of aspects of John Locke s political theory as it was articulated during the American Revolution.Locke argued that the state and society were two entities that could be reformed and manipulated by men. Showing that most southern conservative intellectuals accepted Locke s premise regarding separation of state and society, Tate examines both the political views and social vision of the six conservatives surveyed. He pays special attention to how these conservatives dealt with states rights, republicanism, slavery, sectionalism, and religion, as well as western expansion and migration.Tate maintains that while southern conservatives forged a common political tradition based on Old Republican interpretations of the Constitution, they did not create a unified tradition of social thought. Even though most of them desired a cohesive southern intellectual movement, as well as a homogenous southern culture, their disagreements over the good society prevented them from creating a common southern social vision to accompany their states rights political tradition.

In the last two decades Europe witnessed a despairing zeitgeist. Neo-liberalism lived its golden age and dictated its iron laws. Right-wing populism had come to stay. What had gone wrong with left-wing politics? At one with Chantal Mouffe, we claim that the programmatic turn of social democracy towards the Third Way has been fateful. We theoretically query the Third Way by analyzing the work of its perhaps foremost intellectual, Anthony Giddens. We trace the evolution of Giddens' thought from his theory of structuration over his vision of modernity to the formulation of the politics of the Third Way and disclose a tight connection between social theory and political project. While in Giddens' view human agency functions as the major source of social change, he disregards collective forms of contestation as unrealistic. This holds even more under modern conditions, where immanent possibilities of emancipation have been rendered possible and where the task of politics consists in ameliorating the individual's self-fulfillment by governing the almost unsteerable modern world. From here it is but a small step to Third Way politics. Giddens regards the latter as the form of rational governance which is due to replace the outdated quarrels over the good society. Whereas in our article we come to terms with some of Giddens' insights, it is on the whole at odds with both his theoretical and political endeavors. In this vein, in our discussion we flesh out an alternative vision of power and politics, utterly committed to radical democracy. Albeit the utopian moment is not to be found in this framework either, at least it remains an ever-present horizon.

This short reflection paper emphasises the need for contemporary society to focus on the positive, the beneficial and the humane. There are considerable challenges to peace in the 21st century. People are increasingly concentrating on war and violence. To counter this preoccupation with the negative, the authors explore a number of avenues that may – from a psycho- logical, sociological or societal perspective – help human beings to think and act in a more peaceful, non-violent manner. The ideas covered are contained within an overall framework that focuses on the need to work together towards a Good Information and Communication Society. The focus is on action, education and study that have an international orientation rather than simply being undertaken on the local or national levels.

An ambiguous monolith – The Swedish drug issue as a political battleground 1965–1981