Social physics or sociophysics is a field of science which uses mathematical tools inspired by physics
to understand the behavior of human crowds. In a modern commercial use,
it can also refer to the analysis of social phenomena with big data.
Social physics is closely related to econophysics, which uses physics methods to describe economics.
History
The earliest mentions of a concept of social physics began with the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. In 1636 he traveled to Florence, Italy, and met physicist-astronomer Galileo Galilei, known for his contributions to the study of motion.
It was here that Hobbes began to outline the idea of representing the
"physical phenomena" of society in terms of the laws of motion. In his treatise De Corpore, Hobbes sought to relate the movement of "material bodies"
to the mathematical terms of motion outlined by Galileo and similar
scientists of the time period. Although there was no explicit mention of
"social physics", the sentiment of examining society with scientific
methods began before the first written mention of social physics.
Later, French social thinker Henri de Saint-Simon’s first book, the 1803 Lettres d’un Habitant de Geneve, introduced the idea of describing society using laws similar to those of the physical and biological sciences. His student and collaborator was Auguste Comte, a French philosopher widely regarded as the founder of sociology, who first defined the term in an essay appearing in Le Producteur, a journal project by Saint-Simon. Comte defined social physics:
Social
physics is that science which occupies itself with social phenomena,
considered in the same light as astronomical, physical, chemical, and
physiological phenomena, that is to say as being subject to natural and
invariable laws, the discovery of which is the special object of its
researches.
After Saint-Simon and Comte, Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet, proposed that society be modeled using mathematical probability and social statistics. Quetelet's 1835 book, Essay on Social Physics: Man and the Development of his Faculties, outlines the project of a social physics characterized by measured variables that follow a normal distribution, and collected data about many such variables.
A frequently repeated anecdote is that when Comte discovered that
Quetelet had appropriated the term "social physics", he found it
necessary to invent a new term, "sociologie" ("sociology") because he disagreed with Quetelet's collection of statistics.
There have been several “generations” of social physicists. The first generation began with Saint-Simon, Comte, and Quetelet, and ended with the late 1800s with historian Henry Adams. In the middle of the 20th century, researchers such as the American astrophysicist John Q. Stewart and Swedish geographer Reino Ajo, who showed that the spatial distribution of social interactions could be described using gravity models. Physicists such as Arthur Iberall use a homeokinetics approach to study social systems as complex self-organizing systems.
For example, a homeokinetics analysis of society shows that one must
account for flow variables such as the flow of energy, of materials, of
action, reproduction rate, and value-in-exchange. More recently there have been a large number of social science papers that use mathematics broadly similar to that of physics, and described as “computational social science”.
In the late 1800s, Adams separated “human physics” into the
subsets of social physics or social mechanics (sociology of interactions
using physics-like mathematical tools) and social thermodynamics or sociophysics (sociology described using mathematical invariances similar to those in thermodynamics). This dichotomy is roughly analogous to the difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics.
Examples
Ising model and voter dynamics
A
5x5 representational grid of an Ising model. Each space holds a spin
and the red bars indicate communication between neighbors.
One of the most well-known examples in social physics is the relationship of the Ising model and the voting dynamics of a finite population. The Ising model, as a model of ferromagnetism, is represented by a grid of spaces, each of which is occupied by a Spin (physics),
numerically ±1. Mathematically, the final energy state of the system
depends on the interactions of the spaces and their respective spins.
For example, if two adjacent spaces share the same spin, the surrounding
neighbors will begin to align,
and the system will eventually reach a state of consensus. In social
physics, it has been observed that voter dynamics in a finite population
obey the same mathematical properties of the Ising model. In the social
physics model, each spin denotes an opinion, e.g. yes or no, and each
space represents a "voter".
If two adjacent spaces (voters) share the same spin (opinion), their
neighbors begin to align with their spin value; if two adjacent spaces
do not share the same spin, then their neighbors remain the same. Eventually, the remaining voters will reach a state of consensus as the "information flows outward".
Example
of social validation in the Sznajd model. If two neighbors agree (top),
then their neighbors agree with them. If two neighbors disagree
(bottom), their neighbors begin to disagree as well.
The Sznajd model is an extension of the Ising model and is classified as an econophysics model. It emphasizes the alignment of the neighboring spins in a phenomenon called "social validation".
It follows the same properties as the Ising model and is extended to
observe the patterns of opinion dynamics as a whole, rather than
focusing on just voter dynamics.
Potts model and cultural dynamics
The Potts model
is a generalization of the Ising model and has been used to examine the
concept of cultural dissemination as described by American political
scientist Robert Axelrod.
Axelrod's model of cultural dissemination states that individuals who
share cultural characteristics are more likely to interact with each
other, thus increasing the number of overlapping characteristics and
expanding their interaction network. The Potts model has the caveat that each spin can hold multiple values, unlike the Ising model that could only hold one value.
Each spin, then, represents an individual's "cultural
characteristics... [or] in Axelrod’s words, 'the set of individual
attributes that are subject to social influence'".
It is observed that, using the mathematical properties of the Potts
model, neighbors whose cultural characteristics overlap tend to interact
more frequently than with unlike neighbors, thus leading to a
self-organizing grouping of similar characteristics.
Simulations done on the Potts model both show Axelrod's model of
cultural dissemination agrees with the Potts model as an Ising-class
model.
Recent work
In modern use “social physics” refers to using “big data” analysis and the mathematical laws to understand the behavior of human crowds.
The core idea is that data about human activity (e.g., phone call
records, credit card purchases, taxi rides, web activity) contain
mathematical patterns that are characteristic of how social interactions
spread and converge. These mathematical invariances can then serve as a
filter for analysis of behavior changes and for detecting emerging
behavioral patterns.
Social physics has recently been applied to analyze the COVID-19pandemics.
It has been demonstrated that the large difference in the spread of
COVID-19 between countries is due to differences in responses to social stress. The combination of traditional epidemic models with social physics models of the classical general adaptation syndrome triad, "anxiety-resistance-exhaustion", accurately describes the first two waves of the COVID-19 epidemic for 13 countries.
The differences between countries are concentrated in two kinetic
constants: the rate of mobilization and the rate of exhaustion.
Recent books about social physics include MIT Professor Alex Pentland’s book Social Physics or Nature editor Mark Buchanan’s book The Social Atom. Popular reading about sociophysics include English physicist Philip Ball’s Why Society is a Complex Matter, Dirk Helbing's The Automation of Society is next or American physicist Laszlo Barabasi’s book Linked.
Mark Twain: "[A] favorite theory of mine [is] that no occurrence is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before, and perhaps often."
Historic recurrence is the repetition of similar events in history. The concept of historic recurrence has variously been applied to overall human history (e.g., to the rises and falls of empires), to repetitive patterns in the history of a given polity, and to any two specific events which bear a striking similarity.
While it is often remarked that "history repeats itself", in cycles of less than cosmological duration this cannot be strictly true. In this interpretation of recurrence, as opposed perhaps to the Nietzschean interpretation, there is no metaphysics. Recurrences take place due to ascertainable circumstances and chains of causality.
G.W. Trompf, in his book The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, traces historically recurring patterns of political thought and behavior in the west since antiquity. If history has lessons to impart, they are to be found par excellence in such recurring patterns.
Historic recurrences of the "striking-similarity" type can sometimes induce a sense of "convergence", "resonance" or déjà vu.
An eastern concept that bears a kinship to western concepts of historic recurrence is the Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven, by which an unjust ruler will lose the support of Heaven and be overthrown. In the Islamic world, Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) wrote that Asabiyyah (social cohesion or group unity) plays an important role in a kingdom's or dynasty's cycle of rise and fall.
G. W. Trompf describes various historic paradigms
of historic recurrence, including paradigms that view types of
large-scale historic phenomena variously as "cyclical"; "fluctuant";
"reciprocal"; "re-enacted"; or "revived". He also notes "[t]he view proceeding from a belief in the uniformity of human nature [Trompf's emphasis]. It holds that because human nature does not change, the same sort of events can recur at any time." "Other minor cases of recurrence thinking", he writes, "include the isolation of any two specific events which bear a very striking similarity, and the preoccupation with parallelism, that is, with resemblances, both general and precise, between separate sets of historical phenomena" (emphasis in original).
G. W. Trompf notes that most western concepts of historic recurrence
imply that "the past teaches lessons for ... future action"—that "the
same ... sorts of events which have happened before ... will recur". One such recurring theme was early offered by Poseidonius (a Greek polymath, native to Apamea, Syria; c. 135–51 BCE), who argued that dissipation of the old Roman virtues had followed the removal of the Carthaginian challenge to Rome's supremacy in the Mediterranean world. The theme that civilizations flourish or fail according to their responses to the human and environmental challenges that they face, would be picked up two thousand years later by Toynbee. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 60 BCE – after 7 BCE), while praising Rome at the expense of her predecessors—Assyria, Media, Persia, and Macedonia—anticipated Rome's eventual decay. He thus implied the idea of recurring decay in the history of world empires—an idea that was to be developed by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (1st century BCE) and by Pompeius Trogus, a 1st-century BCE Romanhistorian from a Celtic tribe in Gallia Narbonensis.
By the late 5th century, Zosimus (also called "Zosimus the Historian"; fl. 490s–510s: a Byzantine historian who lived in Constantinople)
could see the writing on the Roman wall, and asserted that empires fell
due to internal disunity. He gave examples from the histories of Greece
and Macedonia. In the case of each empire, growth had resulted from
consolidation against an external enemy; Rome herself, in response to Hannibal's threat posed at Cannae, had risen to great-power status within a mere five decades. With Rome's world dominion, however, aristocracy had been supplanted by a monarchy, which in turn tended to decay into tyranny; after Augustus Caesar, good rulers had alternated with tyrannical ones. The Roman Empire,
in its western and eastern sectors, had become a contending ground
between contestants for power, while outside powers acquired an
advantage. In Rome's decay, Zosimus saw history repeating itself in its
general movements.
The ancients developed an enduring metaphor for a polity's evolution, drawing an analogy between an individual human's life cycle and developments undergone by a body politic: this metaphor was offered, in varying iterations, by Cicero (106–43 BCE), Seneca (c. 1 BCE – 65 CE), Florus (c. 74 CE – c. 130 CE), and Ammianus Marcellinus (between 325 and 330 CE – after 391 CE). This social-organism metaphor, which has been traced back to the Greek philosopher and polymathAristotle (384–322 BCE), would recur centuries later in the works of the French philosopher and sociologistAuguste Comte (1798–1857), the English philosopher and polymath Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), and the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917).
Niccolò Machiavelli, analyzing the state of Florentine and Italian politics between 1434 and 1494, described recurrent oscillations between "order" and "disorder" within states:
when states have arrived at their
greatest perfection, they soon begin to decline. In the same manner,
having been reduced by disorder and sunk to their utmost state of
depression, unable to descend lower, they, of necessity, reascend, and
thus from good they gradually decline to evil and from evil mount up to
good.
Machiavelli accounts for this oscillation by arguing that virtù (valor and political effectiveness) produces peace, peace brings idleness (ozio), idleness disorder, and disorder rovina (ruin). In turn, from rovina springs order, from order virtù, and from this, glory and good fortune. Machiavelli, as had the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, saw human nature as remarkably stable—steady enough for the formulation of rules of political behavior. Machiavelli wrote in his Discorsi:
Whoever considers the past and the
present will readily observe that all cities and all peoples ... ever
have been animated by the same desires and the same passions; so that it
is easy, by diligent study of the past, to foresee what is likely to
happen in the future in any republic, and to apply those remedies that
were used by the ancients, or not finding any that were employed by
them, to devise new ones from the similarity of events.
In 1377 the Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun, in his Muqaddima (or Prolegomena), wrote that when nomadic tribes become united by asabiyya—Arabic for "group feeling", "social solidarity", or "clannism"—their superior cohesion and military prowess puts urban dwellers at their mercy. Inspired often by religion, they conquer the towns and create new regimes. But within a few generations, writes Ibn Khaldun, the victorious tribesmen lose their asabiyya
and become corrupted by luxury, extravagance, and leisure. The ruler,
who can no longer rely on fierce warriors for his defense, will have to
raise extortionate taxes to pay for other sorts of soldiers, and this in
turn may lead to further problems that result in the eventual downfall
of his dynasty or state.
David Hackett Fischer
has identified four waves in European history, each of some 150–200
years' duration. Each wave begins with prosperity, leading to inflation,
inequality, rebellion and war, and resolving in a long period of
equilibrium. For example, 18th-century inflation led to the Napoleonic wars and later the Victorian equilibrium.
Sir Arthur Keith's theory of a species-wide amity-enmity complex suggests that human conscience evolved as a duality: people are driven to protect members of their in-group, and to hate and fight enemies who belong to an out-group. Thus an endless, useless cycle of ad hoc "isms" arises.
Similarities
One of the recurrence patterns identified by G. W. Trompf involves "the isolation of any two specific events which bear a very striking similarity". The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana observed that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Karl Marx, having in mind the respective coups d'état of Napoleon I (1799) and his nephew Napoleon III (1851), wrote acerbically in 1852: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
In the 18th century, Samuel Johnson
wrote that "whatever can happen to man has happened so often that
little remains for fancy or invention" and that people are "all prompted
by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated
by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by
pleasure".
Plutarch's Parallel Lives traces the similarities between pairs of a Roman and a Greek historical figure.
Hernán Cortes's fateful 1519 entry into Mexico's Aztec Empire was reputedly facilitated by the natives' identification of him with their god Quetzalcoatl, who had been predicted to return that very year; and English Captain James Cook's fateful 1778 entry into Hawaii, during the annual Makahiki festival honoring the fertility and peace godLono, was reputedly facilitated by the natives' identification of Cook with Lono, who had left Hawaii, promising to return on a floating island, evoked by Cook's ship under full sail.
On 27 April 1521, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, in the Philippine Islands, foolhardily, with only four dozen men, confronted 1,500 natives who defied his attempt to Christianize them and was killed. On 14 February 1779, English explorer James Cook, on Hawaii Island,
foolhardily, with only a few men, confronted the natives after some
individuals took one of Cook's small boats, and Cook and four of his men
were killed.
Poland's Queen Jadwiga, dying in 1399, bequeathed her personal jewelry for the restoration of Kraków University (which would occur in 1400); and Leland Stanford's widow Jane Stanford attempted, after his 1893 death, to sell her personal jewelry to restore Stanford University's financial viability, ultimately bequeathing the jewelry to fund the purchase of books for Stanford University.
In 1812 French Emperor Napoleon – born a Corsican outsider – was unprepared for an extended winter campaign, yet invaded the Russian Empire, precipitating the fall of the French Empire; and in 1941 German FührerAdolf Hitler – born an Austrian outsider – was unprepared for an extended winter campaign, yet invaded the Russian Empire's Soviet successor state (which was ruled by Joseph Stalin, born a Georgian outsider), thus precipitating the fall of the German Third Reich.
Mahatma Gandhi worked to liberate his compatriots by peaceful means and was shot dead; Martin Luther King Jr. worked to liberate his compatriots by peaceful means and was shot dead.
Over history, confrontations between peoples – typically, geographical neighbors – help consolidate the peoples into nations, at times into frank empires;
until at last, exhausted by conflicts and drained of resources, the
once militant polities settle into a relatively peaceful habitus. Martin Indyk
observes: "Wars often don't end until both sides have exhausted
themselves and become convinced that they are better off coexisting with
their enemies than pursuing a futile effort to destroy them."
Humans tend to behave in accordance with the principles of social physics described by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes after he had met the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei in 1636 in Florence.Humans, empirically-minded, tend to doubt what has not been presented by their own senses or by unquestioned authorities, and inertly to not act unless compelled by circumstances.
John Vaillant writes, in reference to the global-warming crisis,
of "the self-protective tendency to favor the status quo over a
potentially disruptive scenario one has not witnessed personally." While it was clear from the laws of physics that rising levels of "greenhouse gases" in Earth's atmosphere must eventually cause disastrous climate warming, with consequently enhanced droughts, floods, forest fires, and cyclones, people were easily lulled into complacency by the mendacities of fossil-fuel interests.
Similarly, navies continue building aircraft carriers,
at enormous expense, despite their clear vulnerability to attack,
because their construction creates civilian jobs and because, says
Stephen Wrage, political science teacher at the U.S. Naval Academy,
"Historically, the top leadership of military organizations has not
abandoned obsolete prestige weapons until compelled to do so by a
calamity."
People ignore warnings about the dangers of nuclear power plants until anticipated nuclear power-plant accidents occur; and people ignore warnings about the dangers of nuclear weapons,
which in 1945 destroyed two Japanese cities, have on several occasions
come close to destroying more of the world's cities, and could still do
so in future.
The dangers of the fissile-fossil complex (nuclear-power generation and fossil-fueled power generation) have been denied or minimized by power interests, as the dangers of tobacco smoking have been denied or minimized by tobacco interests.
Jessica Tuchman Mathews, daughter of The Guns of August author Barbara Tuchman, observes that "[P]owerful reasons to doubt that there could be a limited nuclear war [include] those that emerge from any study of history, a knowledge of how humans act under pressure, or experience of government." Apposite evidence for this is provided in Martin J. Sherwin's Gambling with Armageddon,
which makes clear, on the basis of recently declassified documents,
that it was a matter of sheer chance that war was averted during the
Cuban Missile Crisis: numerous events, had they taken a slightly
different course, could each have precipitated nuclear war.
Her dispatches were not first
drafts of history; they were letters from eternity. ... To see history –
at least the history of war – in terms of people is to see it not as a
linear process but as a series of terrible repetitions ... It is her
ability to capture ... the terrible futility of this sameness that makes
Gellhorn's reportage so genuinely timeless. [W]e are ... drawn... into
the undertow of her distraught awareness that this moment, in its
essence, has happened before and will happen again.
posits that [the character] Quentin [Compson, who suicides in Absalom, Absalom!]
represents Faulkner's view of tragedy as recurrence. "Again" was the
saddest word for the character and the author alike because it "suggests
that what was has simply gone on happening, a cycle of repetition that replays itself, forever." ... "What was
is never over", Gorra writes, pointing out that the racism that
ensnared Faulkner in the last century persists in th[e 21st] ... "Again. That's precisely why Faulkner remains so valuable – that very recurrence makes him necessary."
British novelist Martin Amis observes that recurring patterns of imperial ascendance-and-decline are mirrored in the novels published; according to Amis, novels follow current political trends. In the Victorian era, when Britain was the ascendant power, British novels were large and tried to express what society as a whole was. British power waned during the Second World War
and ended after the war. The British novel was then some 225 pages long
and centered on narrower subjects such as career setbacks or marriage
setbacks: the British novel's "great tradition" increasingly looked
depleted. Ascendance, according to Amis, had passed to the United
States, and Americans such as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and John Updike began writing huge novels.
Novelists and historians have discerned recurrent patterns in the histories of modern political tyrants.
Gabriel García Márquez, in his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch
(1975), ... create[d] a composite character: a mythical, unnamed
autocrat who has held sway, seemingly forever, over an invented
Caribbean country akin to Costaguana in Joseph Conrad's Nostromo. To portray him, García Márquez drew upon a motley cohort of Latin American caudillos ... as well as Spain's Generalissimo Francisco Franco ...
Ruth Ben-Ghiat in Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020), writes Ariel Dorfman, documents the "viral recurrence" around the world, over the past century, of despots and authoritarians
"with comparable strategies of control and mendacity". Ben-Ghiat
divides the narrative into three – at times, overlapping – periods:
Dorfman notes the absence, from Ben-Ghiat's study, of many authoritarian rulers, including communists like Mao, Stalin, Ceaușescu, and the three Kims of North Korea. Nor is there mention of Indonesia's Suharto or the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, "though the CIA engineered coups that led to both ... lording it over their lands, and the agency can also be linked to Pinochet's military putsch in Chile." Dorfman believes that Juan Domingo Perón would also have been an instructive example to include in Ruth Ben-Ghiat's study of Strongmen.
British political commentator Ferdinand Mount brings attention to the ubiquitous recurrence of mendacity in politics:
politicians lie to cover up their mistakes, to gain advantage over
their opponents, or to achieve purposes that might be unpalatable or
harmful to their public or to a foreign public. Some notable
practitioners of political mendacity discussed by Mount include Julius Caesar, Cesare Borgia, Queen Elizabeth I, Oliver Cromwell, Robert Clive, Napoleon, Winston Churchill, Tony Blair, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump.
Libertarians advocate for the negative liberty aspect of civil liberties, emphasizing minimal government intervention in both personal and economic affairs. Influential advocates of this interpretation include John Stuart Mill, whose work On Liberty argues for the protection of individual freedoms from government encroachment, and Friedrich Hayek, whose The Road to Serfdom warns against the dangers of expanding state power. Ayn Rand'sAtlas Shrugged and Ron Paul'sThe Revolution: A Manifesto further emphasize the importance of safeguarding personal autonomy and limiting government authority.
These contributions have played a significant role in shaping the
discourse on civil liberties and the appropriate scope of government.
Many contemporary nations have a constitution, a bill of rights,
or similar constitutional documents that enumerate and seek to
guarantee civil liberties. Other nations have enacted similar laws
through a variety of legal means, including signing and ratifying or
otherwise giving effect to key conventions such as the European Convention on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The existence of some claimed civil liberties is a matter of dispute, as are the extent of most civil rights. Controversial examples include property rights, reproductive rights, and civil marriage.
In authoritarian regimes in which government censorship impedes on
perceived civil liberties, some civil liberty advocates argue for the
use of anonymity tools to allow for free speech, privacy, and anonymity. The degree to which societies acknowledge civil liberties is affected by the influence of terrorism and war. Whether the existence of victimless crimes
infringes upon civil liberties is also a matter of dispute. Another
matter of debate is the suspension or alteration of certain civil
liberties in times of war or state of emergency, including whether and to what extent this should occur.
The formal concept of civil liberties is often dated back to Magna Carta, an English legal charter agreed in 1215 which in turn was based on pre-existing documents, namely the Charter of Liberties.
The Fundamental Rights – embodied in Part III of the constitution –
guarantee liberties such that all Indians can lead their lives in peace
as citizens of India. The six fundamental rights are right to equality,
right to freedom, right against exploitation, right to freedom of
religion, cultural and educational rights and the right to
constitutional remedies.
Huge rallies like this one in Kolkata are commonplace in India.
These include individual rights common to most liberal democracies,
incorporated in the fundamental law of the land and are enforceable in a
court of law. Violations of these rights result in punishments as
prescribed in the Indian Penal Code, subject to the discretion of the judiciary.
These rights are neither absolute nor immune from constitutional
amendments. They have been aimed at overturning the inequalities of
pre-independence social practices. Specifically, they resulted in the
abolishment of untouchability and prohibited discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth. They forbid human trafficking and unfree labour. They protect the cultural and educational rights of ethnic and religious minorities by allowing them to preserve their languages and administer their own educational institutions.
All people, irrespective of race, religion, caste or sex, have the right to approach the High Courts or the Supreme Court
for the enforcement of their fundamental rights. It is not necessary
that the aggrieved party has to be the one to do so. In the public
interest, anyone can initiate litigation in the court on their behalf.
This is known as "public interest litigation". High Court and Supreme Court judges can also act on their own on the basis of media reports.
The Fundamental Rights emphasize equality by guaranteeing all
citizens access to and use of public institutions and protections,
irrespective of their background. The rights to life and personal
liberty apply to persons of any nationality, while others, such as the
freedom of speech and expression are applicable only to the citizens of India (including non-resident Indian citizens). The right to equality in matters of public employment cannot be conferred to overseas citizens of India.
Fundamental Rights primarily protect individuals from any
arbitrary State actions, but some rights are enforceable against private
individuals too. For instance, the constitution abolishes untouchability and prohibits begar.
These provisions act as a check both on State actions and the actions
of private individuals. Fundamental Rights are not absolute and are
subject to reasonable restrictions as necessary for the protection of
national interest. In the Kesavananda Bharati vs. State of Kerala case, the Supreme Court ruled that all provisions of the constitution, including Fundamental Rights can be amended.
However, the Parliament cannot alter the basic structure of the
constitution like secularism, democracy, federalism, and separation of
powers. Often called the "Basic structure doctrine", this decision is
widely regarded as an important part of Indian history. In the 1978 Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India
case, the Supreme Court extended the doctrine's importance as superior
to any parliamentary legislation. According to the verdict, no act of
parliament can be considered a law if it violates the basic structure of
the constitution. This landmark guarantee of Fundamental Rights was
regarded as a unique example of judicial independence in preserving the
sanctity of Fundamental Rights.
The Fundamental Rights can only be altered by a constitutional
amendment, hence their inclusion is a check not only on the executive
branch but also on the Parliament and state legislatures. The imposition of a state of emergency
may lead to a temporary suspension of the rights conferred by Article
19 (including freedoms of speech, assembly and movement, etc.) to
preserve national security and public order. The President can, by order, suspend the constitutional written remedies as well.
Despite the adoption of this liberal constitution, often referred
as the "Postwar Constitution" (戦後憲法, Sengo-Kenpō) or the "Peace
Constitution" (平和憲法, Heiwa-Kenpō), the Japanese governing elites have
struggled to usher in an inclusive, open and Pluralist society. Even after the end of World War II and the departure of the Allied government of occupation in 1952, Japan has been the target of international criticism for failing to admit to war crimes, institutional religious discrimination and maintaining a weak freedom of the press,
the treatment of children, minorities, foreigners, and women, its
punitive criminal justice system, and more recently, the systematic bias
against LGBT people.
The first Japanese attempt to a bill of rights was in the 19th century Meiji constitution (1890), which took both the Prussian (1850) and British constitutions as basic models.
However, it had but a meagre influence in the practice of the rule of
law as well as in people's daily lives. So, the short and deliberately
gradual history of struggles for personal rights and protection against
government/society's impositions has yet to transform Japan into a
champion of universal and individual freedom. According to constitutional scholar, Shigenori Matsui,
People tend to view the Bill of
Rights as a moral imperative and not as a judicial norm. The people also
tend to rely upon bureaucrats to remedy social problems, including even
human rights violations, rather than the court.
— Shigenori Matsui, "The protection of 'Fundamental human rights' in Japan."
Despite the divergences between Japan's social culture and the Liberal Constitutionalism
that it purports to have adopted, the country has moved toward closing
the gap between the notion and the practice of the law. The trend is
more evident in the long term. Among several examples, the Diet (bicameral legislature) ratified the International Bill of Human Rights
in 1979 and then it passed the Law for Equal Opportunity in Employment
for Men and Women in 1985, measures that were heralded as major steps
toward a democratic and participatory society. In 2015, moreover, it
reached an agreement with Korea to compensate for abuses related to the so-called "women of comfort" that took place during the Japanese occupation of the peninsula. However, human rights group, and families of the survivors condemned the agreement as patronizing and insulting.
Human rights organizations, national and foreign, expand the list
to include human rights violations that relate to government policies,
as in the case of daiyo kangoku system (substitute prison) and the methods of interrogating crime suspects.
The effort of these agencies and ordinary people seem to pay off. In
2016, the U.S. Department of State released a report stating that
Japan's human right record is showing signs of improvement.
Australia
Whilst
Australia does not have an enshrined Bill of Rights or similar binding
legal document, civil liberties are assumed as protected through a
series of rules and conventions. Australia had primary involvement in
and was a key signatory to the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights
(1948)
the right to freedom from discrimination based on out-of-state
residence (historical prejudice based upon residence within one state
affecting treatment within another)
Certain High Court interpretations of the Constitution have allowed
for implied rights such as freedom of political communication (which is
construed broadly) and the right to vote to be established, however,
others such as freedom of assembly and freedom of association are yet to
be identified.
Refugee issues
Within the past decade, Australia has experienced increasing
contention regarding its treatment of those seeking asylum. Although
Australia is a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention (1951), successive
governments have demonstrated an increasing tightening of borders;
particularly against those who seek passage via small water vessels.
The Abbott Government (2013) like its predecessors (the Gillard
and Howard Governments) has encountered particular difficulty curbing
asylum seekers via sea, increasingly identified as "illegal
immigration". The recent involvement of the Australian Navy in refugee
rescue operations has many human rights groups such as Amnesty
International concerned over the "militarisation" of the treatment of
refugees and the issue of their human rights in Australia.
The current "turn-back" policy is particularly divisive, as it involves
placing refugees in government lifeboats and turning them towards
Indonesia. Despite opposition however, the Abbott government's response
has so far seen a reduction in the number of potential refugees
undertaking the hazardous cross to Australia, which is argued by the
government as an indicator of its policy success.
Europe
European Convention on Human Rights
The European Convention on Human Rights, to which almost all European countries belong (apart from Belarus), enumerates a number of civil liberties and is of varying constitutional force in different European states.
The German constitution,
the "Grundgesetz" (lit. "Base Law"), starts with an elaborate listing
of civil liberties and states in sec. 1 "The dignity of man is
inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all public
authority." Following the "Austrian System", the people have the right to appeal to the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany
("Bundesverfassungsgericht") if they feel their civil rights are being
violated. This procedure has shaped German law considerably over the
years.
In June 2008 the then Shadow Home Secretary David Davisresigned his parliamentary seat
over what he described as the "erosion of civil liberties" by the then
Labour government, and was re-elected on a civil liberties platform
(although he was not opposed by candidates of other major parties). This
was in reference to anti-terrorism laws and in particular the extension
to pre-trial detention, that is perceived by many to be an infringement
of habeas corpus established in Magna Carta.
The Constitution of Mexico
was ratified on February 5, 1917. Similar to the U.S. Constitution, the
United Mexican States provides all citizens the right to freedom of
expression, but this right is not absolute (for example, child pornography, death threats, and defamation
are exceptions to freedom of speech, and offenders can be subject to
penalties). However, unlike the United States and Canada, Mexico has
stricter limits on citizenship. For example, only people born in Mexico
may take roles in law enforcement, legislating, or enlist in the armed
forces. It also states each person born in Mexico cannot be deprived of
their citizenship status.
The United States Constitution, especially its Bill of Rights, protects civil liberties. The passage of the Fourteenth Amendment further protected civil liberties by introducing the Privileges or Immunities Clause, Due Process Clause, and Equal Protection Clause. Human rights within the United States are often called civil rights, which are those rights, privileges and immunities held by all people, in distinction to political rights, which are the rights that inhere to those who are entitled to participate in elections, as candidates or voters.
Before universal suffrage, this distinction was important, since many
people were ineligible to vote but still were considered to have the
fundamental freedoms derived from the rights to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness. This distinction is less important now that
Americans enjoy near universal suffrage,
and civil rights are now taken to include the political rights to vote
and participate in elections, being furthermore classified with civil
liberties in general as either positive rights or negative rights.
Because Native American tribal governments retain sovereignty over
tribal members, the U.S. Congress in 1968 enacted a law that essentially
applies most of the protections of the Bill of Rights to tribal
members, to be enforced mainly by tribal courts.
The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was signed into effect by President Ronald Reagan on August 10, 1988. The act was passed by Congress to issue a public apology for those of Japanese ancestry who lost their property and liberty due to discriminatory actions by the United States Government during the internment period.
This act also provided many other benefits within various sectors of
the government. Within the treasury it established a civil liberties
public education fund. It directed the Attorney General to identify and
locate each individual affected by this act and to pay them $20,000 from
the civil liberties public education fund. It also established a board
of directors who is responsible for making disbursements from this fund.
Finally, it required that all documents and records that are created or
received by the commission be kept by the Archivist of the United States.
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