RISULTATI RICERCA

This article considers the quality of the evidence that marriage confers unique benefits, and that, as such, social policies should be enacted to encourage couples, particularly those with few economic resources, to get married and stay together. Public concern about the future of marriage in the United States, we show, is rooted in demographic changes that reflect not so much a turning away from marriage, but an increasing openness to postponing marriage, living together and out of wedlock, or divorcing. We examine why people who are motivated to marry hold back from doing so when they see the warning signs of future problems, and what happens when they marry despite them. We argue that marriages are fashioned in the images of the partners and are shaped by the opportunities and constraints of the ecological settings in which they are situated. As such, the promotion of family health and stability will require an approach that attends to couples’ psychological, social, and economic needs.

This essay explores the recent efforts to shape “social Europe” into a frame that is functional to economic development and social cohesion. Current processes are analyzed, with the aim of understanding whether Europe is marching toward a unified model of social policy or only a loose convergence among welfare programs. A process of convergence is identified that tends to establish an “active” european welfare state mainly targeted at supporting women-mothers and their children. This “mother-friendly” model has the goal to maximize resources for the European economic development. However, it results in making family invisible, thereby fueling the very problems it wants to solve. The welfare state is supposed to “defamilise” society. As a result of this, such ambivalent and contradictory processes arise as selective inclusion through employment, workfare creation, individualization and contractualization of social ties, homologation and a social disciplinary effect. The paradoxical result is to engender those very problems the European welfare system is supposed to be solving, and to stick family into latency, although to Europeans it remains the source of social ties.

The essay starts with a crucial epistemological question: how can we try to define family life? The author puts forwards three possible definitions: a current, a conventional, and a hypothetical one. This distinction allows to reinterpret such phenomena as the so-called démariage, and the pluralizing of family forms; it also updates the debate on family solidarity, and on the tendency to blur the borders among the concepts of family, nuclear family, and household. This approach results in an apparently paradoxical renewal of sociological interest for kinship, in an attempt to produce a more adequate definition of family life, that fits in the complex framework of European citizenship.

This article explores the relationship of historical research to contemporary family studies. Family history was influenced greatly by field such as sociology and anthropology, leading it to make several contributions to those fields in turn. The continuing collaboration of these disciplines can significantly enrich current family research, practice, and policy making. History’s specific contribution lies in its attention to context. Although historical research confirms sociologic and ethnographic findings on the diversity of family forms, for example, it also reveals that all families are not created equal. The advantage of any particular type of family at any particular time is constructed out of contingent and historically variable social relationships. Historical research allows researchers to deepen their analysis of family diversity and family change by challenging widespread assumptions about what is and what is not truly new in family life. Such research complicates generalizations about the impact of family change and raises several methodological cautions about what can be compared and controlled for in analyzing family variations and outcomes.

In a report to the 1951 Lo (Swedish Tuc) Congress entitled The Trade Union Movement and Full Employment Gösta Rehn and Rudolf Meidner recommended a restrained general economic policy in combination with a wage policy of solidarity and an active labour market policy combining low inflation with full employment, fair wages and high economic growth. The model represented a third way between monetarism and keynesianism (the latter favoured in Sweden during the early post-war years) and was identified by many with Swedish model. This article focuses on the destiny of Rehn-Meidner’s proposal from the end of the 1950s to the present day, when Sweden has to face the Eu challenge.

Fifty years after the first publication of Charles Wright Mills’ The Power Elite (1956), certainly one of the most important works in American political and social sciences, the essay offers a retrospective about its fortune in western culture. Widely discussed by leading sociologists such as Dahl, Parsons, Bell and Sweezy, The Power Elite greatly contributed to the debate between elitism and pluralism in the Fifties and the Sixties and influenced also the New Left movement, particularly SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). Then, from the end of the Seventies to the mid-Eighties, the analysis of Mills’ papers and unpublished writings gave new impulses to the study of his works. After a quite long period of sharp indifference, the new contributes of the last years show a return of interest in his work and in Mills’ ability in revealing (to reveal?) the contradictions of the American dream.

The situation in international relations and international law today can be best characterized as a tension between two cultures, the culture of legal formalism and the culture of legal dynamism. To turn the legal culture of the globe towards legal dynamism is the basic political strategy of the hegemonic powers, in particular the United States. The constitutional outcome is a global constitutionalism that constitutes a global public, global civil society, global basic rights and the principle of equality before law for all global actors, which are states, organizations and individual human beings. But there is a deep contradiction between democratic equal rights and undemocratic constitutional law of check and balances within the global constitutional text books and in particular legal practice. The author then tries to find facilities for radical democratic reformism within the existing separation of global legal powers.

In the last decades there has been new «cases» for the theory of the just war. This theory is more and more invoked to justify military interventions, thus becoming increasingly comprehensive. This led one of the most known and discussed interpreters, Michael Walzer, to an apparent radicalization of his former positions, tending to define the limits more than the possibilities of military interventions. This extension shows the vitality of the theory, but on the other side reveals more patently its aporias, and more, it risk to give the way to a sort of «short-circuit» both in regard of other Walzer’s theories (such as the pluralistic approach, the emancipative possibilities of «inner criticism», the central role of politic in the human vicissitudes, the crucial relevance of social justice), and in regard of the «secular» form of justification and the legimization of military conflicts which is brought about by the same idea of the «just» war.

The article starts with the following assumption: in situations of state failure characterized by large-scale loss of life, military intervention can sometimes be justified as a lesser evil, when compared to the prospect of ongoing suffering and destruction. Advocates of humanitarian intervention however often appear to be reasoning in excessively deontological terms. Their insistence on the need to «do something» in the face of human suffering has forestalled an adequate reflection on (a) the dilemmas of actually taking sides to coerce local parties into peace; (b) the likely consequences of military intervention on the local balance of power; and (c) the need to subsequently commit adequate time and resources to rebuild a viable state. Drawing on the principles of classical just war thinking, the article lays out the framework for a moderately consequentialist theory of humanitarian intervention: without denying that there is a moral duty to react in the face of widespread human suffering, military intervention can ultimately be justified only if its likely consequences are adequately dealt with, and if those who intervene have the political will to rebuild an inclusive, self-sustaining state.

Political globalism understood as the building of a world political society with an authority of the same level is discussed through peace/war and sovereignty questions. Connection between politics and violence, the problem of sovereignty and of its overcoming, the way to a planetary society are treated grounding on some authors (Hobbes, Kant, Kelsen, Maritain, Sturzo, Bobbio). Preference for the paradigm of «peace through politics» (Maritain, Pacem in terris) in respect of that «peace through law» (Kelsen and neokantians) is argued. The former paradigm introduces the fundamental concept of planetary institutions capable of matching with the situation of a world as «global village» with a common good to secure but without a political centre. Its achievement is a long range project: in present situation, where connection between international politics and ethics is not denied, a multilateral action in favour of peace and human rights seems the best option.

South American geopolitcs follows a different path with respect to its American or European versions. The latter explore in particular its contribution to the theory of «living space» (lebensraum) and the expansionist wars fought by Nazi Germany. For this reason, after the Second world war, western democracies set geopolitics aside. In South America geopolitics had arrived in the Thirties and the article examines nazi propaganda which, drawing on geopolitical arguments, aimed to create a «Deutsch Südamerika», starting from German colonies in Argentina and southern Brazil. The most relevant Brazilian figures who kept on cultivating geopolitics during the Cold war and military dictatorship are analyzed. Geopolitics was used, for example, in the fight for the supremacy over South America which involved Argentina and Brazil, in the debate over the internationalization of the Amazon, in the plans for the control of Antarctica. Geopolitics has now partly gone back to being a scientific discipline in the West, anyhow it has to be kept under observation as it tends to be used by politicians and generals to advance territorial claims which may lead to international crises, and even open armed conflicts.

Numbers may give precision to all kinds of analyses, and also to the analyses of political phenomena. However, political numbers, that is the counting of political phenomena, must be subordinated to well chosen criteria. Numbers alone are never enough. They must be combined with criteria of relevance. In this article, the author makes two examples. The first one is the well-known, but still very important case of the classification of party systems. As Sartori has shown, the simple counting of the number of parties is likely to be totally misleading. The other example refers to the analysis of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. The definition of authoritarian regimes by Linz is based not just on the number of groups (limited pluralism), but on the fact that authoritarian pluralism is non-competitive and non-responsible. In the same vein, one cannot say that the existence of several groups and associations in the Soviet Union suggested the appearance of pluralism. Associations licensed by the Communist Party were never autonomous. Hence, just counting their number meant fully to misunderstand the evolution of the Soviet Union and to confuse the process of differentiation through modernization with political decompression leading to an opening of the regime (that, in fact, never took place). The overall lesson is that theorizing must always precede counting (and quantification).

On the occasion of the conferring of the Laurea honoris causa on Leopoldo Elia, former professor in the University of Turin and former President of the Italian Constitutional Court, he has given a lectio magistrastralis on The Presidentialization of Politics, both from the point of view of constitutional law and political science. The intersection of the two perspectives is intrinsic to the phenomenon itself, since the preconditions and the contexts which condition it are strictly connected to the form of government within the democratic state. For this very reason the constitutionalist test appears extremely relevant to evaluate the findings of political science. Before the lectio magistralis, professor Di Giovine delivered the laudatio in which he illustrated the scientific profile of Leopoldo Elia.