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Recent reforms in welfare states generate new challenges to social citizenship. Social citizenship depends on the readiness of voters to support reciprocity and social inclusion and their trust in welfare state institutions as services that will meet their needs. Reform programmes in most western countries combine New Public Management, linking market competition and regulation by targets to achieve greater efficiency and responsiveness to service-users, and welfare-to-work and make-work-pay activation policies to manage labour market change. Both developments rest on a rational actor approach to human motivation. The UK has pursued the reform programme with more vigour than any other major European country and provides a useful object less of its strengths and limitations. The book provides a detailed analytic account of social science approaches to agency. It shows that the rational actor approach has difficulties in explaining how social inclusion and social trust arise. Policies based on it provide weak support for these aspects of citizenship. It is attractive to policy-makers seeking solutions to the problem of improving the efficiency and responsiveness of welfare systems in a more globalised world, in which citizens are more critical and the authority of national governments is in decline. Recent reform programmes were undertaken to meet real pressures on existing patterns of provision. They have been largely successful in maintaining mass services but risk undermining social inclusion and eroding trust in public welfare institutions. In the longer term, they may destroy the social citizenship essential to sustain welfare states.

The ten chapters in this book are concerned with theoretical and empirical analyses of trust and distrust in post-Communist Europe after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989. The contributors come from different disciplines, ranging from history, economics, and political science to social psychology and sociology, and they show, above all, that the Soviet ‘bloc’ was in fact a rich spectrum of different countries with diverse histories, cultures, and traditions, and–not surprisingly–with different expectations for the future. Like other social concepts, trust never makes sense in isolation but only within the network of other concepts–in this case, social capital, faith, belief, solidarity, reciprocity, and security. ‘Trust’ is a highly polysemic term. Differences between meanings of trust in countries with democratic traditions and in post-totalitarian countries raise questions about the ways in which history, culture, and social psychology shape the nature and development of political phenomena. These questions include: antinomies such as trust versus risk, and trust versus fear; the co-existence of rural and urban systems; legitimacy of different political regimes; and the arbitrariness of decisions and the abuse of common sense in totalitarianism. The transition period in many post-Communist countries has now been completed and in others it is likely to be completed in the near future. Yet the chapters show that while political and economic changes can have rapid effects, cultural and psychological changes may linger and influence the quality of political trust and representations of democracy.

This book examines the relationship between law and economic globalization. It focuses on national and international efforts to protect the competitive process, exploring the critically important relationships between those two domains and the way the resulting system shapes economic activity in all parts of the world. The laws, institutions, and principles of the international domain increasingly influence national competition law development, and national competition law experience provides both the lenses through which decision makers view transnational competition issues and the incentive structures that generate their competition law decisions. The analysis examines the ideas, institutions, and people that provide the legal framework for global competition; how they evolved, how they operate today, and the forces that are likely to influence their future development. US anti-trust experience has long been at the center of this global governance picture, but European competition law experience is also rich, varied, and potentially of great value for future competition law development. China, Japan, Korea, and newer players in Latin America and Africa will also play a key role in this future, and the analysis pays close attention to them as well. On the basis of this analysis, the book analyzes current global competition law proposals and outlines a strategy that utilizes these discussions, but more specifically addresses global economic development needs. This strategy may be developed within the institutional framework of the WTO, but it may also be pursued independently.

Different theologians give different accounts of the kind of faith that is necessary for the practice of a religion such as Christianity. For some it is simply belief that there is a God (and that he has done various actions); for others it is trust in God. This book analyses the nature of belief and trust, and considers when belief and trust are rational. It concludes that the practice of a religion requires a faith which involves both trust and belief, but a fairly weak kind of belief. The book reaches this conclusion by analysing the purposes for practising a religion — the rendering of due worship and obedience to God, and the attainment of salvation for oneself and others. Someone's religious practice is rational in so far as he or she has reason for believing that practising his or her religion is the best way to achieve these purposes, and that these purposes are greatly worthwhile.

Studying institutional change regardless of whether it is focused on transitional or developing economies, may prove most fruitful when focused on its structuring of the means of production—land, labour, and capital. This book does exactly that: it singles out land as an object of study and places it in the context of one of the world’s largest and most populous countries undergoing institutional reform, the People’s Republic of China. The book argues that private property protected by law, the principle of ‘getting-the-prices-right’, and the emergence of effectively functioning markets can not be imposed, but are the outcome of a society’s historical development and institutional fabric. In other words, the creation of institutions that are trusted and perceived as ‘credible’ in the eyes of social actors hinges in part on choice and timing in relation to the constellation of socio-economic and political parameters. It is demonstrated that disregarding these might result in the establishment of ‘empty institutions’ that have little effect on social actors’ actions, and can even cause rising inequality, bad land stewardship, and social conflict. The book concludes that the key to understanding China’s successes in rural reforms lies in the state’s hands-off approach and upholding an intentional institutional ambiguity that allowed for local, credible institutions to arise.

The concept of practical reason is central to contemporary thought on ethics and the philosophy of law — acting well means acting for good reasons. Explaining this requires several stages. How do reasons relate to actions at all, as incentives and in explanations? What are values, how do they relate to human nature, and how do they enter practical reasoning? How do the concepts of ‘right and wrong’ fit in, and in what way do they involve questions of mutual trust among human beings? How does our moral freedom — our freedom to form our own moral commitments — relate to our responsibilities to each other? How is this final question transposed into law and legal commitments? This book explores these questions, vital to understanding the nature of law and morality. It presents an account of practical reason. It also offers a reinterpretation of Kant's views on moral autonomy and Adam Smith's on self-command, marrying Smith's ‘moral sentiments’ to Kant's ‘categorical imperative’.

This book is a collection of sixteen chapters written over the last twenty years. They include chapters on quasi-realism and practical reasoning, but range over many other topics, including trust, dilemmas, fiction, semantics, pragmatism, observation, and the nature of reason. This is the first book linking well-known expressivist work on practical reason to the wider concerns of contemporary pragmatism.

This arose as part of an ongoing project on ‘Visions of Governance for the Twenty‐first Century’ initiated in 1996 at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, which aims to explore what people want from government, the public sector, and non‐profit organizations. A first volume from the ‘Visions’ project (Why People Don’t Trust Government) was published by Harvard University Press in 1997; this second volume analyses a series of interrelated questions. The first two are diagnostic: how far are there legitimate grounds for concern about public support for democracy worldwide; and are trends towards growing cynicism found in the US evident in many established and newer democracies? The second concern is analytical: what are the main political, economic, and cultural factors driving the dynamics of support for democratic government? The final questions are prescriptive: what are the consequences of this analysis and what are the implications for strengthening democratic governance? The book brings together a distinguished group of international scholars who develop a global analysis of these issues by looking at trends in established and newer democracies towards the end of the twentieth century. Chapters draw upon the third wave (1995–1997) World Values Survey as well as using an extensive range of comparative empirical evidence.

Challenging the conventional wisdom, the book concludes that accounts of a democratic ‘crisis’ are greatly exaggerated. By the mid‐1990s most citizens worldwide shared widespread aspirations to the ideals and principles of democratic government, although at the same time there remains a marked gap between evaluations of the ideal and the practice of democracy. The publics in many newer democracies in Central and Eastern Europe and in Latin America have proved deeply critical of the performance of their governing regimes, and during the 1980s many established democracies saw a decline in public confidence in the core institutions of representative democracy, including parliaments, the legal system, and political parties. The book considers the causes and consequences of the development of critical citizens in three main parts: cross‐national trends in confidence in governance; testing theories with case studies; and explanations of trends.

This book studies the nature of religious faith, investigating what makes it reasonable. Religious belief needs to meet and sustain philosophical scrutiny just as any other type of belief does; nothing about religion purchases immunity from this. But at the same time religious epistemology must also respect the contours of religion, the distinctiveness of the subject-matter of religious belief. The book looks sympathetically at two currently prominent ways of defending the rationality of religious belief: ‘Reformed’ epistemology and the cumulative case for theism. It argues that the reasonableness of faith depends not only on beliefs about the world but also on beliefs about oneself (for instance about what one wants, about one's hopes and fears) and on what one is willing to trust. The book goes on to look at the relations between belief and trust, and between faith and virtue, and concludes with an exploration of one particular type of belief about oneself, the belief that one is oneself a believer.

For most of my life, I have been dismissive of both spirituality and religion. I say this to make clear the perspective and the starting point of this book, this search. No doubt, many of my readers will think of me as simpleminded, trying to recover what I should have learned had I been rightly raised in the matrix of religion, ritual, and belief. Others, my friends from the field of science and most of my political friends, will think that I am benighted, or perhaps something of a sell out, for giving up my lifelong down‐to‐earth scientific, and admittedly hyperrational way of thinking about things. But if the very idea of spirituality seemed to me to be contaminated by sectarian religion and by uncritical and antiscientific thinking, my view of life, which manifested in my becoming a philosopher (it did not come from philosophy) pointed to something else. Spirituality is not just organized religion. Nor is it antiscience, unnatural or supernatural. There is a naturalized spirituality that I have always had a glimpse of, and this is what I want to pursue in this book.