The Perceived Social Conflicts in Poland, 1988-2023: A Discontinuity or a Growing Trend in Popular Perception?

The study objective was to understand the character and location of social conflicts in Poland’s soundscape. The analyses were based on a review of press and Internet articles from the years 2008-2015 and reports on noise, preceded by a review of the legal framework of protection against noise in Poland. Questionnaire surveys concerning Poland’s national parks and health resorts and the city of Lublin were an additional source of information. In the case of the former, the surveys were supplemented with a general examination of the acoustic determinants of social conflicts in the Podzamcze district. An analysis shows that sound in landscape has been a source of more than 100 social conflicts which were most frequently related to unpleasant sounds (noise nuisance) and the right to peace and quiet. The public demands acoustic comfort, one of the determinants of the quality of life. Therefore, it is necessary to know the public opinion on soundscapes (survey of sound preferences). Public consultations concerning the assessment of acoustic disturbance and sound preferences will make it possible to avoid social conflicts arising from insufficient knowledge. A major role is also played by the education of the public and decision-makers through sound awareness campaigns, e.g. as p art of ecology education. The subjective assessment of noise nuisance severity and the acoustic design of public spaces should be an integral part of environmental noise control programmes and revitalisation programmes. The conducted studies demonstrated that understanding the character and location of social conflicts in soundscape is a major scientific problem. Its resolution requires combining sociological studies (questionnaire for the valuation of the subjective feelings of respondents) with field analyses (observations, acoustic measurements). It is a promising research field that has been developed to a limited extent so far.

Crushed and dimension stones, which include 33 lithological varieties among igneous rocks, metamorphic rocks and sedimentary rocks, are mainly located in the southern and south-western part of Poland. Demand for this group of minerals is continuously high, which results from conducted and planned infrastructural investments. Mining activity is associated with interference in the natural environment. Negative consequences of exploitation include, among others: Land surface deformations, and the pollution of the soil, air, and water. In many cases, the extraction of minerals also leads to the liquidation of housing and transportation infrastructure located in the mining area, as well as to reducing the value of real estate in the immediate vicinity of the deposit or to increase in the level of stress among local residents, who are exposed to noise, which causes growing social conflicts in areas designated for exploitation. Thus, the awareness of negative effects of undertaking open-cast mining leads to the conflicts between various groups of stakeholders (residents, environmental organizations, mining entrepreneurs). Through the use of multi-criteria evaluation, this article identifies the places of potential social and environmental conflicts resulting from the planned mining activity in three areas of the densest occurrence of the analysed deposits (Lower Silesia Province, Lesser Poland Province and Świętokrzyskie Province). The assessment of lands over the deposits recognized initially and in detail was proposed, determining the degree of their accessibility. Due to the proposed method, it’s possible to obtain results of the classification of each fragment of the analysed deposit, as well as the surroundings of such deposit at any distance from it, within the boundaries of analysed area. Information may be made available to users of the deposits, mining enterprises interested in exploitation of the deposits or administration responsible for issuing decisions regarding concessions for exploitations of the deposits, so that they have knowledge about conflict areas in the region, resulting from the impact of planned mining activity on life and health of the people and on the environment.

Conditions of Democracy in German Austria and Hungary, 1918–1919

Over the last few days of this conference, we have heard a great deal about the growth of inequality and its insidious impacts. Inequal- ity is a nasty disease and evidence of that nastiness mounts, year by year. And yet we must respond forcefully and effectively. Such a response is the topic of my remarks today.What do we know? First, that inequality has become an endemic feature of our capitalist economy. Even before Thomas Piketty made this argument in his magisterial book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, other colleagues in economics had been arguing that capitalist economies have a tendency to create inequality. We now know this to be the general trend of market economies. There are exceptions, with the most notable being the post-World War II period in the West. The trauma of the war, the power of labor, and the discrediting of free market economic theory led to an unusual period in which gov- ernment structuring of markets and strong institutional interventions resulted in a growing middle class and declining inequality. But we recognize this era now as unusual-almost an aberration-in a system that excels in accumulating assets and power in the hands of a few. Just this week Oxfam published a report estimating that 48 percent of all global wealth is now held by the top one percent and that by next year their share will rise to more than 50 percent. A mere eighty individuals now own the same amount of wealth as more than 3.5 bil- lion people (and the wealth of those eighty has doubled since 2009).1Second, once economic inequality begins to mount and money be- comes concentrated in the hands of a few, those few are able to amass political power. They exercise a defacto blackmail over government policy, given their control of investment funds, jobs, and economic activity. They also use their wealth to buy elected officials directly. The main political organizations controlled by the Koch brothers spent more than $100 million on the 2014 election and have bought themselves the most pro-fossil-fuel industry, climate-denying Congress in history. They have announced plans to spend $1 billion on the 2016 presidential election. We are in a vicious cycle in which economic power translates into political power, which is then used to transform laws, regulations, and budgets in order to create more wealth for the one percent. The game is rigged, and people know it. Elections mean less and less. Political democracy is eroded by plutocracy.That erosion in turn breeds cynicism and apathy. Time-honored people-powered social movements seem both unattainable and ineffectual. People rightly question the efficacy of action when government is a wholly owned subsidiary of corrupt political parties and all-powerful wealth.Given this understanding, how should we proceed? What is possible when economic and political systems themselves are corrupted? How can we act when it seems that we are living in a closed system with no way out? And if we could mount the political will to make change, what should we do? Are there viable remedies for the structural inequality that has accompanied the globalization of capital?Via its interconnections with political corruption, climate change, and other issues, inequality has become what social planners first called a problem. Wicked, not in the sense of evil, but in the sense of difficult, or resistant. These are problems with no easy solutions. They are unique, which is one reason why last century's solutions to the wicked problems of today will not work. We have a different problem of inequality today. Wicked problems have multiple complex dimensions and are interconnected in economic, political, social, and often ecological terms. Wicked problems involve changing behavior, mindsets, and institutions.Wicked problems require that we approach solutions in a new way. Older representations would suggest that we can tackle inequality as we have in the past: introduce more progressive income taxation, institute a wealth tax or a transactions tax, raise the minimum wage. …

The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified social conflicts in Korean society. Scholars saw that the increase in social conflict could be a hindrance to national economic growth and a barrier to democracy. However, in previous studies, there is a limitation in that various aspects of social conflict in modern society have not been contained by connecting citizens' satisfaction with the level of democracy and economic situation. Therefore, in this study, the effect of social conflict-related perceptions on democratic level satisfaction was examined, focusing on the effect of economic situation satisfaction. The study conducted statistical analysis using multiple regression analysis using data from the 2021 Social Integration Survey by the Korea Institute of Public Administration. As a result of the study, it was confirmed that social conflict-related perceptions had a significant effect on democratic level satisfaction, but their influence differed depending on the pattern of conflict. From this, it has the following research and policy implications. First, the conflict of material needs is found to be caused by conflicts involving economic interests, requiring fairness-oriented policies such as guaranteeing equality of opportunity. Second, the value conflict resulted from cultural differences, and policies to prevent cultural polarization should be considered in that if cultural and value conflicts are alleviated, democratic satisfaction can also be increased. Third, in the case of ideological conflict, ideological conflict can be seen as an opportunity to lead to participatory democracy in that stakeholders of ideological conflict show efforts to resolve the conflict. However, ideological conflicts appear to have more political factors than economic interests than other conflicts, so it is necessary for the government to play the role of coordinating and resolving ideological conflicts. Fourth, the government's efforts to resolve conflicts can lead to a positive evaluation of democracy. In order to solve the problem of social conflict in capitalist society, it should act as an active conflict resolution role of the government. Overall, the influence of social conflict on democratic satisfaction was revealed differently depending on the type and characteristics of the conflict. In addition, along with the economic situation satisfaction variable, it has a statistically greater influence. This proves that social conflict is strongly related to economic interests rather than simply independently caused. Therefore, rather than resolving each social conflict individually, efforts should be made to approach it from a comprehensive perspective according to the characteristics of each conflict.

1. Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham trained as economic geographers. As longtime research partners, they published under the pen name J.K. Gibson-Graham. Julie Graham passed away in 2010.

The historiography of the Reformation era, roughly 1517–1650, was long dominated by scholarship that focused on theological developments, religious debates, and major reformers, such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Ignatius Loyola. The late 20th century, however, saw an expansion in areas of scholarly inquiry, with many new works on the period’s extraordinary cultural, social, economic, and political transformations and conflicts. Scholars increasingly argued, moreover, that the era had weathered not a single, traumatic “Reformation,” but multiple and diverse “Reformations,” whose impacts had rippled throughout early modern society in a variety of ways. Part of this historiographical shift involved the exploration of new perspectives and voices, which included a growing interest in the role of women as active participants in and contributors to historical change. Scholars thus began to investigate the ways in which women had experienced the Reformation, perhaps differently from men, and how the Reformation had influenced women’s social roles, marriages, family lives, faith and religious expressions, and all other aspects of their everyday lives. In the process, there emerged what became a long-running controversy, often with confessional overtones, over whether the Reformation was “good” or “bad” for women. This has thankfully now died down, since partisans on both sides have mainly accepted that the question was not only overly simplistic, but also tended to lump together all women as an undifferentiated mass. Nevertheless, readers cannot fail to find signs of the old battle everywhere they look. To explain it briefly, therefore, the argument on the one side was that Protestants, and particularly radical reformers, had benefited women by elevating them as equal to men in spiritual worth, introducing a more egalitarian form of marriage, which they had praised as a noble institution, and freeing from their bondage the nuns previously forced into involuntary celibacy and enclosure. The argument on the other side, however, was that Protestants had, on the contrary, harmed women by toppling the Virgin Mary from her seat as Queen of Heaven and frowning on her veneration, and by discouraging women from turning to Mary or the female saints as intercessors and models of strong and influential women. By closing the monasteries and emphasizing marriage and motherhood as women’s highest calling, moreover, Protestants had limited the independence and freedom formerly enjoyed by women religious, ended the political and social power of abbesses, and removed women’s ability to choose the unmarried life.

Frequency of under- and overweight among children and adolescents during the economic transition in Poland

Medical Cultures, Therapeutic Properties, and Laws in Global History

Recent studies by economists such as Piketty (2013, 2019) and Atkinson (2015) have contested the well-established view that post-war redistribution policies have been successful in the long term at slowing down the rise of structural inequalities. In reality, the claim goes, they have dealt mostly with reducing inequalities of income through redistribution and have left inequalities of wealth and capital ownership uncontrolled. These, according to their studies, have now risen in the developed world and reached levels more typical of 19th Century Europe. To make matters worse, perceptions of and attitudes towards fighting inequalities as unjust that Rawls saw as based on a wide consensus of citizens' "considered judgments" (Rawls, 1999, p. 17), have changed, leading to them being accepted as the justified and even necessary price to pay for economic growth and as a reward for merit. Economic arguments based on the need for incentives for raising productivity and the "trickle-down effect" have become widely accepted as if the price of economic efficiency should be disconnected from the demands of equity. Meritocracy has provided ethical arguments too. As John Roemer says, "today the most important problem for the social sciences of inequality is understanding how electorates have come to acquiesce to policies which increase inequality… and to try revealing the logic of the I would like to thank the editors of the Special Issue on Rawls for inviting me to develop ideas that I first presented in a previous paper published in French in 2016, "L'état-providence face aux inégalités et la démocratie de propriétaires: une comparaison entre Meade, Rawls, Ackerman et Piketty," Tocqueville Review, 2/2016), as well as in another paper in English in 2018: « Self-development and Social Justice ». I hope to be able to develop these ideas in a future book on property-owning democracy and its philosophical justifications.

Attention is focused on the limits of political power in the context of the economic transformation in post-socialist countries. It is indicated that the question of political power's limits remains relevant and should be studied by scientists even today. The content political power's boundaries in Ukraine, as well as other post-socialist countries, has been studied. The research of political power's limits was carried out using the historical and comparative methods. The essence and content in such categories as "political power" and "transformation" are considered, as well as the emergence of political power's limits in connection with the transformational processes that took place in post-socialist systems. The interaction, relationship and interdependence between the economic transformation and limits of political power are determined. The results of the study testify the presence of negative effects that arose during the reforms at the first stages of the post-socialist transformation and affected limits of political power and search for an effective policy that would limit its role in economic processes. It was emphasized that the influence of political power had a significant impact on the development of transformational processes in Ukraine. Based on functions of political power and parameters of its limits in the system, the main characteristics of its influence on economic transformation, as well as differences between Ukraine and other post-socialist countries, are considered. Contradictions that arose as a result of changes in priorities and functions of political power are indicated, as well as how it is affected on development of the process of post-socialist transformation. The role and significance of political power's limits in conditions of post- socialist transformation are determined. Target priorities for development of political power are formulated, which should include social optimization, smoothing consequences of reforms, public and self-control. Conclusions are made regarding the need to change functions of power, based on the current state of the Ukraine's economic system and the continuation of post-socialist transformation process.

냉전은 권력정치(power politics)와 안보, 패권에 대한 문제만이 아닌, 산업발전의 여러 단계에서 경제와 사회를 어떻게 조직해야 하는가에 대한 서로 다른 이론들 간의 갈등이기도 했다. 물론 이념과 신념체계가 냉전을 형성하는 데 가장 큰 기여를 했지만, 사회 갈등 역시 광범위하게 냉전의 경과와 결과를 결정하는 데 중요한 영향을 끼쳤다. 냉전시기에는 자본주의에 대한 마르크스주의자들의 도전에서 시작해 다양한 사회적 개념이 출현했지만, 특별히 대중적으로 선호하는 모델이 부상하지는 않았다. 그러나 장기적으로 보자면, 집단주의적 중앙계획경제는 커다란 비용에도 불구하고 저개발 사회들을 근대화하는 데에는 어느 정도 강점을 보였다. 반면에 자유시장경제는 적어도 국가가 운영하는 사회복지제도와 일국적, 국제적 수준의 계획을 일정한 정도 수용한 이후에 훨씬 더 높은 생산성을 보여주었다. 정치적 자유가 생산성과 혁신에 유리하게 작용했다는 점이 20세기의 가장 중요한 교훈일 것이다.

Marx, Justice, and The Dialectic Method PHILIP J. KAIN AN INTERESTINGCONTROVERSY has recently been provoked by Allen Wood. He argues that capitalism, for Marx, "cannot be faulted as far as justice is concerned." For Marx, the concept of justice belonging to any society is rooted in, grows out of, and expresses that particular society's mode of production. Justice is not a standard by which human reason in the abstract measures actions or institutions--there is no eternal, unchanging norm of justice. Each social epoch gives rise to its own standard; each generally lives up to it; and each must be measured by this standard alone. Thus, in Wood's view, capitalism is perfectly just for Marx.' Nor does Wood think that the capitalist's appropriation of surplus value is taken to be unjust by Marx. In capitalist society, the worker is generally paid the full value of his or her labor power. The value of labor power is determined, like the value of any other commodity, by the amount of labor time required for its production, here, what it takes to keep the laborer alive and working. The exchange between capitalist and worker is assumed to be an exchange of equivalents and, as Wood says, is, in Marx's opinion, "no injustice at all" to the worker. It is true that the laborer is not paid the value of the product which is produced--a value which would be. higher than the value of the worker's labor power. The difference between these two sums is appropriated by the capitalist and is the source of surplus value. But in capitalist society, according to Wood, the worker is not due this extra sum. The capitalist purchases labor power from the worker, not finished products . The exchange between worker and capitalist is thus an exchange of t A. W. Wood, "The Marxian Critique of Justice" (hereafter "Critique")in Marx, Justice, and Histo~: A "Philosophyand Public Affairs" Reader (hereafter MJH), ed. M. Cohen, T. Nagel, and T. Scanlon(Princeton: PrincetonUniversityPress,198o), 3, 13, t5-16- A. W.Wood,"Marx on Right and Justice: A Replyto Husami"(hereafter "Reply")in MJH, Io7--109. [523] 524 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~4:4 OCTOBER 1986 equivalents, and according to Wood it is a just transaction, both for capitalism and for Marx." It follows from all of this, for Wood, that one cannot condemn a society as unjust by using the standards of a later or different society. Thus, in Wood's opinion, slavery, for Marx, must be accepted as perfectly just in the context of ancient society despite the fact that it would be unjust in a capitalist or socialist society. So also, capitalism must be accepted asjust despite the fact that socialist society would have a very different standard of justice. Socialist society would not be able to condemn capitalism as unjust because its standards would not be rationally applicable to capitalism,s There are no transcuhural or transhistorical norms of justice. Wood's views have been rejected by other writers, among them, Husami. The latter cites many passages where Marx, if he does not actually say that capitalism is unjust, certainly employs the sort of language typically used in moral condemnation. Husami also claims that Wood overlooks a crucial matter. Husami agrees that the moral standards of any epoch are, as Wood holds, determined by the given mode of production, hut they are also, and Wood does not see this, determined by class structure, i.e., by the conditions, consciousness, and interests of particular classes. Thus, while capitalism will be just for the capitalist class by capitalist standards, it will be unjust for the proletariat by proletarian standards? It is also the case, for Husami, that from the proletarian perspective the capitalist's appropriation of surplus value is unjust. Moreover, Husami finds no evidence to suggest that it is illegitimate, in Marx's view, to judge an earlier or different society by an independent moral standard. In fact, he thinks that we can find Marx doing so) The disagreement between Wood and Husami, on the surface at least, appears direct, straightforward, and clear cut. It seems that we must simply decide...

The negative effects of climate change affect community subsistence models, thus determining an increase in social conflicts, a loosening of social capital, an increase in the incidence of traumas and diseases, and a push for migration. This exploratory research compares the perception of climate change, as well as the reduction of social capital and mental health, in two groups of migrants arriving in Italy from African countries with high or extreme vulnerability to climate change. The perception of climate change and the degree of social capital were assessed with a semi-structured interview. The psychological condition was investigated through a clinical psychological interview and tests. The group of migrants coming from countries with extreme exposure to climate change perceive greater vulnerability of their country and reports a greater loss of social capital. The level of education does not seem to affect the ability to perceive climate change. In the entire sample, there is a strong correlation between the perception of change and the loss of social capital, and between the loss of social capital and emotional disorders. The study suggests that actions to preserve the social capital of a community strongly exposed to climate change can mitigate the impact of change on mental health.

The authors offer an analysis of the property reforms that accompanied economic transformation in late socialist and postsocialist Yugoslavia, as experienced and narrated by industrial workers in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia today. The property reforms carried out in these two countries between 1990 and the 2000s have profoundly influenced the narratives that workers form around their experience of economic transformation in the workplace. By analysing how industrial workers have developed a feeling of ownership towards their particular workplace, and how they now talk about that experience, the authors provide an explanation for workers’ disillusionment and dissatisfaction towards privatisation reforms in recent years, and show how they have made sense of the seismic shifts in property relations that have accompanied economic reforms since 1989.