Studia Politica, vol. X, no. 4, 2010

ARGUMENTUM

MAURO CALISE, The Personalization of Power (pp. 617-622)

Abstract

Personal power has been thus far a taboo to academic political science. It forces us to reconsider many of our basic assumptions. It shakes the very foundations of orthodox democratic theory. The new century and, for that matter, the new millennium is one where personal power will dictate new rules and new directions. Leaders of today’s democracies have access to a tremendous amount of resources: financial, communicational, institutional. They do so through legitimate democratic channels, which makes for a clear-cut difference from all sorts of dictators that political systems have experimented in the past. And they may enjoy extraordinary levels of popularity, in what often becomes a direct relationship with the electorate. The amount of personal power a democratic leader can today accumulate is thus unprecedented. Yet this rise of personal power is not the result of a deviation, a deliberate deviation from the ordinary regime. Personalization of politics, much more than an individual choice, has become a structural and systemic element of contemporary politics.

Keywords

Personal power, democracy, media, leadership, political regimes.


ARTICULI

DANIEL BARBU, Critica comunismului românesc. O lectură teologico-politică (The Critique of Romanian Communism. A Theological-Political Reading) (pp. 625-655)

Abstract

Communism has been sometimes described as a political religion. Marxism-Leninism, as the official ideology of state socialism was also qualified as a perverse form of political theology, if not as a counter-theology. The paper explores the theological-political assumptions that seem to underlie the various critiques, official, institutional and scholarly, addressed to the Romanian brand of communism after its downfall.

Keywords

Communism, totalitarianism, political theology, politics of retribution, guilt.


LETIŢIA POP, Parents and Children. Communist Mindsets Reflected in the Primary Political Socialization of Young People in Romania Today (pp. 657-708)

Abstract

The young generation today in Romania seems to prove certain disengagement towards the political field: this is the premise of the present article. We are aiming at an explanation of this observation we have already confirmed in a previous study. The article focuses on the importance of the family political socialization, more precisely on the parents-children relationship concerning the transmission and reproduction of political knowledge as well as attitudes and behaviours between the two generations. We argue that the generation of the parents, born and raised under communism and having received a political education according to the regime’s ideology, might have influenced the young generation’s political attitudes, in spite of a post-communist resocialisation that would have taken place. The primary role of the family political socialization is also a matter of interest and a hypothesis that seeks to be proven. In support of the arguments, the article mobilizes the literature mainly on socialization, political socialization and communist education, as well as a sum of interviews made with parents and children, with a comparative purpose.

Keywords

Family political socialisation, parents and children, attitudes and behaviours, Romanian communist education, post-communist resocialisation.


MICHELE PROSPERO, Il pensiero giuridico di Kelsen. Normativismo e diritto privato (Kelsen’s Juridical Thinking. Normativism and Private Law) (pp. 709-787)

Abstract

The paper takes into account a feature of Hans Kelsen’s juridical thinking that has been so far rather underestimated: the weight of normativism on his theory of private law. The author closely connects Kelsen’s critical approach to the notion of subjective right and further relates the legal norms to the institutions of the market economy. The interpretative assumptions of Kelsen are constantly confronted with the theoretical background that propelled the development of the modern constitutional state based on the rule of law.

Keywords

Juridical normativism, economy and right, private law, critique of natural law, norm and decision.


DAN NANU, Evoluţia sistemului de partide în România după decembrie 89. 1989-2009, Editura Alma Mater, Sibiu, 2009 (ALEXANDRA IONAŞCU), pp.791-794.

REINHART KOSELLECK, Conceptele si istoriile lor, trad. rom Gabriel H. Decuble, Mari Oruz, Editura Art, Bucureşti, 2009 (DAN-ALEXANDRU CHIŢĂ), pp. 794-800.

PETER KARDASH (compiled by), Genocide in Ukraine, Fortuna Publishing, Melbourne, 2007 (ALEXANDRA ILIE), pp. 800-802.

MICHAEL GEYER, SHEILA FITZPATRICK, Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge & New York, 2009 (CRISTINA MANOLACHE), pp. 802-805.

TIMOTHY SNYDER, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, Basic Books, New York, 2010 (MIHAI CHIOVEANU), pp. 805-808.

ELLEN L. FROST, Asia’s New Regionalism, Lynne Rienner Publishers, London & Boulder, CO, 2008 (ANDREEA NICUŢAR), pp. 808-810.