Human Empowerment
- Title
- Human Empowerment: A Framework to Analyze Social and Political Change
- Speaker(s)
- Speaker: Christian Welzel # Professor Dr
- Date and Time
- 28th Jan 2014 16:00 - 28th Jan 2014 19:00
- Location
- International Centre for Mathematical Sciences (ICMS), 15 South College Street
- URL
- http://www.q-step.ed.ac.uk/community/events/other_events/2014/launch_lecture
The lecture presents a general theory of emancipation. This theory informs a framework to study past and current trends in economic, social and political change with a normative focus on human empowerment (and disempowerment). The lecture also outlines how the general theory of emancipation is anchored in an evolutionary root principle: the utility ladder of freedoms. Based on the World Values Surveys and other data, the lecture shows evidence of the existence of the utility ladder of freedoms and its cross-cultural mechanisms of operation.
Specifically, it is shown that improving living conditions - from increasing life expectancies to longer education to wider connectivity - transform the lives of increasing population segments from a source of threats into a source of opportunities. As this happens, practicing and tolerating universal freedoms becomes increasingly instrumental to take advantage of the opportunities that a more promising life offers. SInce evolution has shaped humans as perceptive beings, such fundamental changes in objective utilities do not escape people's attention. Thus, in recognition of the grown utilities of universal freedoms, people begin to adopt emancipative values that emphasize these freedoms. Eventually, this value change feeds multiple social pressures to provide, protect and refine the entitlements that guarantee universal freedoms. Hence, if freedoms grow, they do so in a sequence from objective utilities to subjective values to legal guarantees.
Prof. Dr. Christian Welzel is President (emer.) And (des.) Vice President Of The World Values Survey Association; Chair In Political Culture Research, Center For The Study Of Democracy, Leuphana University, Germany; Foreign Consultant, Laboratory Of Comparative Social Research, Higher School Of Economics, St. Petersburg
