In the final article of this issue, Giovanni Polcini presents the Italian approach of the “rule of law,” promoted by its governmental institutions in multilateral fora on priority areas related to the struggle against global crime, drugs, money laundering, and terrorism. We must distinguish this from “rule by law.” According to Polcini, the first is dedicated—in order to pave the way for a just and fair society—to counter the abuse of power by authorities and to build new legally oriented societal circumstances. The latter may be used for political reasons to oppress or discriminate against people and avoid accountability under the guise of formality, legality, and legitimacy. It is argued that the rule of law delivers a concrete basis from which to eradicate poverty, to fight discrimination and exclusion, and to protect the environment, also by providing predictability. Polcini then refers to the statement of the International Development Law Organization (IDLO), located in Rome and affiliated with the United Nations, whose members argue that the rule of law is no longer optional but the very heart of the development toward sustainability (IDLO 2015). It addresses the needs that are expressed in the socioeconomic/financial, the sociopolitical/legal, the sociocultural/welfare, and the socioenvironmental dimensions of societies. Therefore, it is (according to Polcini) also an intrinsic as well as instrumental value to economic sustainability as an aspect of the encompassing sustainability of human existence. That means that by applying the rule of law, developments in the socioeconomic/financial dimension will really support the overall sustainability. These outcomes should be locally owned and tailored to local needs. Polcini remarks that this also refers to the essence of the 1948 Constitution of the Italian Republic—namely, to place the individual at the heart of the regulation of human relationships. This form of reasoning is attractive for clarifying and deepening the so-called normative factors of the social quality approach, a theme that remained until now behind the scenes. Yet, without a fundamental insight into societal processes with which to contribute to a greater solidarity, justice, human dignity, and capacity to act (e.g., as citizens) in a responsible way, we cannot make conclusions about the increase or decrease of social quality at a specific time at a specific place.

With the focus on the rule of law, the current issue of our journal stimulates the dialogue about a highly relevant societal aspect of the sociopolitical/legal dimension. In this issue, this may happen by reflecting the content of the first four articles through the lens of the orientation on the rule of law. These four articles are outcomes of social quality projects in Ukraine, a comparison between four Scandinavian and four Eastern European countries, in the Netherlands, and in China, respectively. In the first article, Zuzana Novakova discusses the problematique of the current circumstances in Ukraine with regard to the four dimensions of its societal circumstances, introducing a new distinction in the social quality approach. She—and the Ukrainian National Platform—underpin Polcini’s argument. The platform argues that one of the most urgent priorities is to strengthen the rule of law and anticorruption mechanisms for combatting “the prevalence of informal, often corrupt, practices of influence, which … is difficult to eradicate without significant renewal of the judiciary and prosecutorial corps” (UNP 2017: 7).

In the third article, Harry Nijhuis explores the development of appropriate conceptualizations of public health and, more importantly, what adequate practices and methodologies are to be applied in today’s societal context. Referring to experiences in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, he argues that the neoliberal individualistic ontology is not suited for dealing with practices that concern collective processes. Notions about what is true (objective traceable), what is truthful (subjective recognizable), and what is just (ethical orientation) need to be taken on board for creating solutions for interpersonal and societal complex health issues. This is not to align with the neoliberal assumptions. Nijhuis’s empirically based explanation refers to a social quality–oriented project in the borough of Laak of the city of The Hague.

In the fourth article, Xu Yanhui and Gong Ziyu argue that in the traditional understanding of poverty, noneconomic aspects and dynamic characteristics are neglected. The question of truth and justice go beyond the matter of income. This article examines the influence of social quality and community capacity on Chinese urban residents’ capability poverty, a concept that refers to Amartya Sen’s theory. This theme has affinity with the second article (Bódi et al.) by accentuating the difference between resources (for people) and possibilities (of people) to better cope with their circumstances. Community capacity as a concept is related to the older concept of community development. This theme has affinity with the third article (Nijhuis) by accentuating the role of communities to elaborate their circumstances according their needs and suppositions. They explain the nature and application of their indicators in their empirical research and demonstrate that community capacity construction or community empowerment—for them, a synonym—will change capability deprivation and poverty in the broader sense of the word. In other words, it makes sense to connect ideas, theories, and practices of community empowerment with the rule of law as well.

The second point is that he does not reflect or explain the existing laws, which at the end of the day defend present property rights that conflict with any sense of justice. This is also the case in, for example, Thomas Piketty’s famous work Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Chomsky as well as Piketty are strongly engaged with the consequences of the increasing economic inequality in all continents. In the case of Piketty (2014), he is preoccupied with the difference in the return of capital (r) and the economic growth (g), without analyzing the complex relationships between r and g and all factors that influence this, as well as the role for the change in inequality. Neither he nor Chomsky are dedicated to propositions and assumptions underlying (legal) politics in the past centuries that paved the way for current suppositions and practices concerning property and property rights. Existing laws are an outcome of processes in the sociopolitical/legal dimension. This dimension was and became more and more—because of the increasing dominance of neoliberally based interests—subjected to socioeconomic/financial interests. With presenting the rule of law—and with the understanding of law as norm and as content of law, with the value and the quality of being just (see Sartori: 307)—we must rethink the present and the outcomes of assumptions underlining suppositions of property rights as point of departure for the strengthening of the plutonomy. Without a change of these assumptions, the development toward the overall sustainability will be impossible.

In that case, everything on Earth will remain subjected to the commodification as condition for making profit with global market mechanisms. Worthwhile for this rethinking is the study by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick about the process resulting into the Early American Republic. The authors have shown that United States’ founders (Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, etc.) used the work by famous representatives of the French Enlightenment and the Scottish Renaissance more or less as their basic equipment. Not only for them but for all their followers as well, it was a condition for approaching public questions in a responsible way (Elkins and McKitrick 1995: 84). Very fruitful for their attention was their interest in the austere simplicity of the Roman Republic: “The imagery of the Latin classics had penetrated their lives, words, thoughts, and acts in endless ways ever since they could remember. The almanacs of the day, with lines from Horace, Virgil, and Ovid, had sung the praises of virtuous husbandry” (48). This may be appreciated as a sharp contradiction with the tweets of the highest level of the current administration of the United States. Notwithstanding this impressive heritage, “the amount of attention and discussion given to the judiciary in the Constitutional Convention was only a fraction of that devoted to the executive and legislative branches” (64). Both historians logically analyzed what since the end of the eighteenth century happened and thus not what did not happen. The latter concerns the elaboration of principles and their rational for changing and developing productive and reproductive relationships. And this remark refers to the subject matter of the rule of law as conceived by, for example, Sartori.

In the first article, Zuzana Novakova explores the current problematique of Ukraine, a condition for understanding the heuristic meaning of the distinction and the mutual dialectic between four essential societal dimensions: the socioeconomic/financial, the sociopolitical/legal, the sociocultural/welfare, and the socioenvironmental dimension of societal life. The Ukrainian society is passing through multiple parallel transitions in which the old is dying and the new is not yet born. But what is being born will never be fully grasped without understanding these dialectics. How can the way be paved for the rule of law as pleaded by the Ukrainian National Platform without understanding the outcomes of this dialectic? The way in which the EU’s Support Group for Ukraine tries to stimulate development with huge investments is remarkable: it presents best practices from the European Union and tries to assist their operationalization in Ukraine in all four dimensions, in order to “modernize” the institutional settings in all dimensions. But this is being done without articulating the nature of the problematique as an outcome of the dialectic or reciprocity between these dimensions. Neither does it articulate the existing problematique in the EU as demonstrated in these examples (EC 2016; EC and HR 2017). This article’s challenge is to reflect the recent set of reforms in the Ukrainian context and to locate these within the four constitutive dimensions of societal life. Novakova applies elements of the social quality framework to analyze processes in these dimensions in such a way that the outcomes will deliver points of departure for clarifying the reciprocity of these processes. She highlights that it is necessary go beyond the traditional dichotomization of the “economic” and the “social” in policy design. This means in fact a dichotomization between the “economic” and a “black box,” preventing rational clarifications of these processes. A founded clarification delivers a perspective to the importance of the development in all four dimensions that play a primary role in the change of the productive and reproductive relationships in the daily circumstances of residents of Ukraine. This is a condition for recognizing the lack of the current quality of “the social” in this country. In the context of Ukraine’s multiple transitions, it is important to go beyond nonrelated and fragmented approaches, or superficial parallels with developments in surrounding countries, EU member states, and Russia. According to Gianfranco Tamburelli (2016), this is necessary to overcome the crisis in Ukraine as well.

In the third article, Harry Nijhuis discusses the question of public health, its origin, the theoretical and practical development in recent decades, and the real current challenges—namely, to be functional for people as actors in complex societal circumstances. The article is partially based on applied strategies to cope with these circumstances in the borough of Laak in The Hague. These strategies were strongly influenced by the social quality approach in the past decade and financed by the European Commission and the municipality of The Hague (EFSQ 2015). According to Nijhuis, the essential aspect is that in the slipstream of neoliberal transformations, services in the context of public health have become increasingly individualist in orientation. Government and other financing institutions like insurance companies (in his example, from the Netherlands) have adopted a new public management as methodology of choice to plan and control the arrangement with providers. At the same time, we may notice in many countries an emergence of a new generation of citizen collectives organizing themselves in “commons” or “cooperatives” to be able to play a responsible role for changing their daily circumstances. This supposes—in line with the first article—a comprehensive approach of these circumstances in order to go beyond the individualistically oriented competition toward understanding how to reach well-balanced forms of cooperation. Societal complexity questions “the market” as the mechanism of choice for arranging effective and just provisions of care, prevention, and promotion of health.

In fact, Nijhuis goes beyond the featherlight theoretical distinction between state, market, and civil society. In all four relevant dimensions of societal complexities, we can recognize different types of actors: from the side of politeia (most of them from political systems), the oikos (most of them from economic systems), the civitas (most of them from community systems), and the agora as place of deliberative communicative interactions. Relevant is also academia, which is related in transparent and mostly nontransparent way with actors of the politeia and oikos, and mostly less functional for the civitas. Nijhuis presents examples from the daily reality of the borough of Laak how the representatives from these different backgrounds operate. This raises the concern that changes are necessary for paving the way for a participative public health, one that will strengthen the possibilities (or capabilities) of citizens to cope with their circumstances. With this in mind, Nijhuis extends the original definition of Charles-Edward Winslow from 1922, as discussed by William Darrow, participative public health should be or is “the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting health and efficiency through organized community efforts and informed decision making” (2015: 29). The agora on the community level is the place for their communicative interactions, a condition for cooperatives of citizens to cope with actors from the politeia and oikos in a transparent way. In other words, the agora as conceived in the social quality approach is the medium to change forms of top-down government into governance as an outcome of the dialectic between by law determined equal positioned actors. This should be the challenge of elaborating the rule of law.

The final article by Giovanni Polcini has already been discussed. Argued is that its theme—the rule of law in the broader sense—is essential for discussing the outcomes of processes within each of the four dimensions (many times referred to earlier) and especially for discussing the outcomes of the dialectics of these processes. All previous articles explain mostly implicitly the immense importance of this theme. But seen from his perspective, Polcini expresses in conclusions his affinity with these articles, even though the actual articles were not known to him when he wrote his contribution. He states that introducing and spreading new values at the community and organizational levels is an essential aggregator both for capacity building and institution building. This is not always easy, but it is an essential part of sustainable human development. Spreading common values is crucial to prevent the tendency of decision makers uniting around a policy without questioning basic assumptions.