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Croce's appreciation of Hegel was always as ambivalent as the title of his famous study suggests. Indeed, although related to two of the major 19th century exponents of Italian Hegelianism – Bertrando and Silvio Spaventa his first encounter with Hegel had been one of almost total rejection. As he wrote to the philosopher Donato Jaja in 1892, ‘I believe that the fundamental principles, and especially the method, of that system are entirely erroneous; and the damaging consequences of this error will become plain when applied to particular disciplines’. The study of Marx and the influence of Gentile and Labriola, however, led him to review his earlier position and in 1906 to translate the Encyclopedia and to write the accompanying book What is living and what is dead in the Philosophy of Hegel. Thereafter Croce, who had already completed his Aesthetic (1902) and the first edition of the Logic (1905), was increasingly to present his own philosophy as a sustained commentary on, and development of, Hegel's philosophy. An examination of his classic study of Hegel thus provides an important insight into salient features of Croce's own philosophical system as it later developed.

Resistance To The Poll Tax Has Been Described As ‘The greatest popular rejection of unjust law since Chartist time’. During the period 1990 – 91, for example, summonses for nonpayment in England and Wales were taken out agaha nearly a quarter of those registered for the charge, whilst in Scotland approximately 38 per cent of the registered population were pursued by legal means. Somewhat surprisingly in the light of the large numbers of people involved and the undoubted role which the unpopularity of the tax played in Mrs Thatcher's removal from the premiership, the campaign has reccived little attention from political scientists and none, as far as I know, from legal or political philosophers.

Commissioning A Series On ‘Identity Politics’ Inevitably involves making contentious, if hopefully defensible, editorial choices about what each of these terms involves. Issues relating to ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ have figured ever more prominently on both the political and academic agendas over the past thirty years. These terms are often employed to describe a wide range of somewhat heterogeneous phenomena. For example, a recent UK Economic and Social Research Council Programme on ‘Identity and Choice’ lists under this rubric everything from ethnicity, nationality, gender and religion, to class, disability, shopping and musical preferences. However, such usage risks broadening the concept of identity to the point of vacuity. Therefore, the scope of this series is somewhat narrower: namely, political identity. Of course, the concept of the ‘political’ is itself contested and likewise seemingly infinitely expandable to all issues and areas of life. Consequently, a more restricted meaning applies here too, with politics limited to the making of collectively binding decisions amongst people holding divergent opinions and interests.

RECENT EVENTS IN EASTERN EUROPE HAVE GENERATED A large degree of uncritical triumphalism amongst certain Western commentators. The collapse of the communist regimes in these countries as the result of their failure to manage their economies and the consequent demand on the part of their citizens for more accountable government, has led many to link the struggle for democracy with a desire for capitalism. Some writers have gone so far as to portray the demise of ‘actually existing socialism’ as the culmination of ‘a universal human evolution in the direction of free societies’ grounded in ‘the empirically undeniable correlation between advancing industrialisation and liberal democracy’.

MANY COMMENTATORS HAVE VIEWED THE CITIZEN'S CHARTER programme as a cynical exercise, having little to do with either the political participation one associates with citizenship or the establishment of a general bill of rights in the manner of the great Charters of the past. Although these criticisms possess some force, they fail to recognize that a distinctive conception of citizenship and rights underlies the initiative. In section one, we give an outline of this view of the citizen and trace its origins in the New Right critique of the social-democratic theory that predominated during the post-war period. This exercise forms a necessary preliminary both for understanding the objectives of the policy, the task of section two, and for assessing its coherence and plausibility, the aim of section three. We shall conclude that the scheme fails because it either substitutes the market for the state where it is inappropriate or omits to do so where it might provejustified. In these respects, the combination of politics and markets from the mixed-economy perspective of the social democratic conception of citizenship may well be superior.

Compromise is routinely evoked in everyday language and in scholarly debates across the social sciences. Yet, it has been subjected to relatively little systematic study. The introduction to this inter-disciplinary volume addresses the research gap in three steps. First, we offer three reasons for the study of compromise: its empirical omnipresence in politics, its theoretical potential to bridge the rationalist-constructivist divide, and its normative promise to recognize the plurality of society. Second, we introduce different approaches to the coherence, legitimacy and limits of compromise found in the existing explanatory and normative literatures. We discuss why these literatures need to speak to one another, and identify possible applications in empirical research. Third, we conceptualize compromise as one possible solution to a conflict. Distinct from both dissensus and consensus, all compromises share three characteristics: concessions, non-coercion and continued controversy. However, different types of compromise can be distinguished by how mutual, costly and painful concessions are; by whether all forms of coercion are absent; and by the degree to which the relevant parties’ grounds for conflict are transformed. We conclude by discussing the challenge and appeal of ‘politics as compromise’ in plural and complex societies.

Coalitions are often condemned as undemocratic and unprincipled because of the compromises they involve. Politicians are accused of betraying the commitments they made during the election. Paradoxically, proponents of this view suggest that if compromises are to be made they should be pragmatic and based on policy rather than principle. This article disputes this thesis and defends compromise as both principled and democratic. The first section distinguishes a shallow compromise based on the maximal satisfaction of exogenously defined preferences from a deep compromise resulting from reasoning on principle, and argues it proves impossible to avoid the latter. The second section suggests that the obligation to compromise forms part of the ethos of democracy, whereby citizens must agree despite their disagreements. The third section concludes by showing that while representatives will almost certainly betray their electoral mandate if obliged to make only shallow compromises, they can legitimately engage in deep compromises for their voters when they reason as they do.

The democratic legitimacy of European governance is often said to rest on its ‘output’. However, such arguments also make the implicit ‘input’ claim that the community method and new modes of governance offer a more participatory and deliberative style of democratic politics to standard democratic processes, which is best suited to represent the European interest. We test such claims by analysing them from three different perspectives: functional, societal and delegatory. We conclude that they are grounded on a substantive conception of representation in which the agents of European governance ‘stand’ or ‘act’ for the European public. However, such claims are empty without formal democratic processes of authorization and accountability that ensure European governance effectively promotes the democratic values of political equality and responsiveness.

Taking its cue from Benjamin Constant’s famous comparison of the liberty of the ancients with that of the moderns, this article examines the compatibility of democracy with free markets within the EU. Constant argued that commerce had replaced the political liberty of the ancients with the civil liberties of the moderns. Nevertheless, he contended a degree of political liberty remained necessary to guarantee these civil liberties. The difficulty was whether the political system could operate in the interest of all if modern citizens had ceased to identify with the public interest in the manner of the ancients and preferred to pursue their private interests. Constant believed representative democracy offered a form of political liberty that was compatible with modern liberty. It involved a less demanding view of civic virtue to ancient liberty and a different conception of the public interest as promoting rather than in conflict with private interests. However, for it to operate as Constant expected required certain social and cultural conditions that emerged in European nation states but are not themselves the products of commerce and may even be undermined by it: namely, a national identity; a social contract; and political parties. The EU involves a further deepening of modern commercial liberty beyond the nation state. This article explores three main issues raised by this development. First, have any of the three elements that facilitated the operation of representative democracy within the member states evolved at the EU level? Second, if not, is it possible to create an effective form of representative democracy on a post-national basis as the logical entailment of the liberties of the moderns? Third, if neither of these is possible, can we simply detach modern liberty from political liberty and see social rights as attributes of free movement, and efficient and equitable economic regulations as the products of technocratic governance? All three questions are answered in the negative.