Contemporary political theory is fractured in its account of ontology and methods. One prominent fault line is between empirical and normative theory – the former usually called ‘philosophy of social science’, or ‘social-science methodology’, and not ‘theory’ at all. A second fault line exists between analytical and post-modern political theory. These fractures prevent political researchers who engage with the same substantive issues, such as the right of same-sex couples to marry, from speaking to one another in a common language. This (...) paper's first section discusses the history of the fact-value divide in political studies: a history that led to the contemporary state of the discipline. The second section argues that Searle's philosophy provides tools that can bridge this divide. The third section raises normative objections that limit the extent to which one can accept Searle's theory as a fully general account of social and political reality. Although limited in scope, Searle's argument should be welcomed as an attempt to provide a common set of important tools for political researchers on all sides of these debates. (shrink)

Political fact-checkers evaluate the truthfulness of politicians’ claims. This paper contributes to an emerging scholarly debate on whether fact-checkers treat political parties differently in a systematic manner depending on their ideology (bias). We first examine the available approaches to analyze bias and then present a new approach in two steps. First, we propose a logistic regression model to analyze the outcomes of fact-checks and calculate how likely each political party will obtain a truth score. We test our model with a (...) sample of fact-checks from Newtral, a major Spanish fact-checker. Our model would signal bias under two assumptions: a) all political parties are on average equally accurate in their statements; b) the verification method gives precise instructions and is implemented systematically. We investigate this second assumption with a series of interviews with Newtral fact-checkers. We show that standard verification protocols are so loosely implemented that fact-checks reflect a set of journalistic decisions, rather than a bias in the statistical sense. We call for a more rigorous definition of verification methods as a pre-requisite for an unbiased assessment of politician’s claims. (shrink)

In the last two decades Anglophone political theory witnessed a renewed interest in social-scientific empirical findings—partly as a reaction against normative theorizing centred on the formulation of abstract, intuition-driven moral principles. This brief paper begins by showing how this turn has taken two distinct forms: (i) a non-ideal theoretical orientation, which seeks to balance the emphasis on moral principles with feasibility and urgency considerations, and (ii) a fact-centric orientation, which seeks to ground normative conclusions in empirical results. The core of (...) the paper then compares and contrast three variants of fact-centric political theory: normative behaviourism, grounded normative theory, and radical realism. The upshot: normative behaviourism achieves focus on observable behaviour at the cost of status quo bias, grounded normative theory achieves radicalism at the cost of endorsing an activist orientation to theorising, and radical realism combines a non-activist orientation with the potential for far-reaching critique of the status quo. (shrink)

The consequences of correctly implementing a normative political theory arguably bear on its acceptability. A theory whose correct implementation permits slavery is highly implausible. We defend a claim about incorrect implementation. We argue that normative political theories that will predictably be put to bad use deserve harsher assessments than theories that will predictably be put to better use. Theories that key political actors will predictably invoke to justify bad policy recommendations are bad theories, even if those recommendations are not logical (...) consequences of the theories (even in conjunction with well-established factual propositions). However, standard discussions of political theories ignore such “misapplications” when it comes to assessing the principles and values proclaimed by those theories. We reject this view because the action guidance that a normative political theory effectively provides is mediated by political actors’ prior beliefs. At the limit, these actors may regard public policies as specifying principles that the theory proclaims, as something different from regarding such policies as causally effective in achieving the ends or enforcing the rights proclaimed by those principles. As a result, political actors see themselves as exempted from the need to undertake careful causal analysis. Morally defensible action guidance requires, then, that those principles be qualified by empirically-grounded policy constraints. Normative political theories qualified in those ways constitute theoretical improvements, that is, improvements on the action guidance that the theories provide on their own. (shrink)

Politics is full of people who don't care about the facts. Still, while not caring about the facts, they are often concerned to present themselves as caring about them. Politics, in other words, is full of bullshitters. But why? In this paper I develop an incentives-based analysis of bullshit in politics, arguing that it is often a rational response to the incentives facing different groups of agents. In a slogan: bullshit in politics pays, sometimes (...) literally. After first outlining an account of bullshit, I discuss the incentives driving three different groups of agents to bullshit: politicians, the media, and voters. I then examine several existing proposals to combat bullshit in politics, arguing that each will fail because they ignore the relevant underlying incentives. I conclude somewhat pessimistically that a certain amount of bullshit in politics is inevitable. (shrink)

Fact-checking agencies assess and score the truthfulness of politicians’ claims to foster their electoral accountability. Fact-checking is sometimes presented as a quasi-scientific activity, based on reproducible verification protocols that would guarantee an unbiased assessment. We will study these verification protocols and discuss under which conditions fact-checking could achieve effective reproducibility. Through an analysis of the methodological norms in verification protocols, we will argue that achieving reproducible fact-checking may not help much in rendering politicians accountable. Political fact-checkers do not deliver either (...) reproducibility or accountability today, and there are reasons to think that traditional quality journalism may serve liberal democracies better. (shrink)

Politicotainment and democratainment are concepts used to identify the relevance of popular culture for citizenship. Among the most prominent examples of these concepts are political fiction series. Merging political facts with fictional narratives, such series provide a unique opportunity to engage the audience with political matters in an entertaining way. But can these series also affect the agenda of the public and the news media? Based on aggregate-level data of Google search queries and news-media content, the current study examines (...) the agenda-setting effects of the political fiction series Borgen. Time-series analyses show that only a few Borgen episodes affected the public agenda and even fewer the news media agenda. Evidence is also found for negative patterns. Thus, we should be careful not to overestimate the impact of political fiction in terms of agenda-setting effects: It occasionally has agenda-setting effects but more often not. (shrink)

Two important methodological debates in political theory concern (i) the place of historical research and interpretation in normative inquiry; and (ii) the importance of comparing different cultural traditions of political thought. The first question animates a long-standing controversy over the relative importance of ‘history of political thought’ versus ‘philosophy’ in political theory, while the second has been central to the recent growth of ‘comparative political theory’. Despite both debates being concerned, in fundamental ways, with history and comparison, they have remained (...) surprisingly disconnected from broader debates in the humanities and social sciences about the use of comparative history and, in particular, of the prominent methodological approach in political science known as ‘comparative historical analysis’. This may reflect the fact that the debates over history of political thought and comparative political theory have fundamentally revolved around thought—history as the history of thought and comparison as the comparison of thought—whereas comparative historical analysis is more centrally focused on the study of political behaviour. In this paper I suggest that this neglect of comparative historical analysis in political theory represents a missed opportunity. Like other forms of social scientific inquiry, comparative historical analysis can yield important empirical knowledge for political theorists. But I wish to more ambitiously suggest that comparative historical analysis can also be adapted for conducting normative political theory itself. I summarise the key features of comparative historical analysis for political theorists, and explain how its use of historical cases can supplement both the use of imaginary thought experiments and the study of contemporary politics. I then delineate three specific ways in which comparative historical analysis might be used to support normative inquiry: deductive testing, inductive construction, and casuistic elaboration. All three, I argue, can help meet recent calls to bring the study of real political behaviour more centrally into political theory research. (shrink)

In response to Kuper's article Singer writes, " I show that his counter-examples are often irrelevant to what I am advocating, and he has not substantiated his extraordinary claim that the approach I advocate would 'seriously harm the poor'.".

In light of the recent debate over post-truth or post-fact politics, Arendt’s work provides important insights on the relationship between truth and politics. While some scholars argue that Arendt regards truth as antagonistic to politics, others focus on her notion of truth of facts in politics. We assert that, for Arendt, truthfulness is essential for politics, but the truthfulness of political actors involves more than the willingness to acknowledge and recognise facts. We read (...) Arendt’s essay “Socrates” and elicit three expectations regarding the truthfulness of political actors: the willingness to constitute one’s own doxa, the willingness to actively engage in dialogue with others and relate one’s doxa to theirs, and the willingness to develop an ongoing practice of “enlarged thought” by sustaining a mental conversation with a variety of doxai in one’s imagination. We find that this threefold notion of truthfulness is of ultimate political importance since it plays an essential role in the human ability to bring to life relationships of plurality and to constitute a “common world.” Our analysis allows us to articulate the challenges associated with practicing truthfulness in the contemporary political realm and the conditions that could enable political actors to take on this practice. (shrink)

The growing exploration of political life from an aesthetic perspective has become so prominent that we can now speak of an "aesthetic turn" in political theory. But what does it mean and why an aesthetic turn? This collection of essays aims to answer such questions from a variety of perspectives, to think in a new way about the possibilities and weaknesses of democratic politics.The book first outlines the theoretical motivations and historical conditions that led to the turn to aesthetics. (...) Essays then call attention to the presence of aesthetic themes and arguments in political theory as well as to parallels between theories of aesthetics and politics, revealing how much political theory can gain from making use of aesthetic modes of thought. They demonstrate that much of what is essential to democratic politics can in fact only be disclosed through aesthetic theorizing.A significant contribution to the contemporary debate in political theory, The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought will appeal to all students interested in the interdisciplinary crossroads of aesthetic and politics. (shrink)

Political realists’ rejection of the so-called ‘ethics first’ approach of political moralists, has raised concerns about their own source of normativity. Some realists have responded to such concerns by theorizing a distinctively political normativity. According to this view, politics is seen as an autonomous, independent domain with its own evaluative standards. Therefore, it is in this source, rather than in some moral values ‘outside’ of this domain, that normative justification should be sought when theorizing justice, democracy, political legitimacy, and (...) the like. For realists the question about a distinctively political normativity is important, because they take the fact that politics is a distinct affair to have severe consequences for both how to approach the subject matter as such and for which principles and values can be justified. Still, realists have had a hard time clarifying what this distinctively political normativity consists of and why, more precisely, it matters. The aim of this paper is to take some further steps in answering these questions. We argue that realists have the choice of committing themselves to one of two coherent notions of distinctively political normativity: one that is independent of moral values, where political normativity is taken to be a kind of instrumental normativity; another where the distinctness still retains a justificatory dependence on moral values. We argue that the former notion is unattractive since the costs of commitment will be too high, and that the latter notion is sound but redundant since no moralist would ever reject it. Furthermore, we end the paper by discussing what we see as the most fruitful way of approaching political and moral normativity in political theory. (shrink)

Imagine some policy P about which a scholar said “The best way to help people escape from poverty would be P.” Is this a claim about political philosophy or economics? On the one hand, it seems to be an empirical statement, but there is a normative component as well. Besides the obvious normativity of “best,” there is the tacit implication that poverty is bad and that this is at least some reason to endorse P. But the fact that one can (...) easily imagine either a political philosopher or an economist making the claim points to one reason for the recent growth of programs in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE), programs of study which emphasize the interdisciplinary connection between political philosophy and the social sciences. Political philosophy is, of course, philosophy, which means it is a combination of analytic and normative tools, but since its subject matter involves human behavior and social institutions, empirical study of those seems like it should be relevant as well. Since political philosophy addresses questions about the social order, findings from the social sciences are surely relevant, chiefly from economics and political science. At first glance this seems directly analogous to the way philosophy of cognitive science would find relevance from work in neurology. But social scientists are themselves often beholden to normative priors which frame their methodology. The increased popularity of and growth of programs in PPE is therefore definitely beneficial both to the philosophers and to the social scientists who explore these issues. However, while the empirical is relevant, and, I would argue, essential, to good work in political philosophy, I would resist the suggestion that the empirical is exhaustive and that the philosophical is either superfluous or unwarranted. (shrink)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's attack on the natural jurisprudence of Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf is well known. But what happened to modern natural jurisprudence after Rousseau not very well known. The aim of this article is to try to show how and why it turned into what Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès called “social science” and the bearing that this Rousseau-inspired transformation has on making sense of ideology, or the moral and political thought of the late eighteenth-century French ideologues.

In Sovereignty across Generations, Ferrara attempts a dual feat. He demonstrates that political liberalism needs a nuanced doctrine of constituent power to be brought in line with traditional democratic concerns. At the same time, he argues that political liberalism is capable of making constituent power safe for democracy, in reining in its unruly and unbound character. By distinguishing between ‘the people’ and the electorate, Ferrara develops a transtemporal conception of the constituent subject, allowing moderate transformation but in effect binding all (...) future time-slices of the people. In my comment, I address two issues with this. First, I ask how such accounts deal with the fact of immigration. It is not clear whether a historically indexed constituent subject has the normative power to bind new citizens arriving with quite distinct historical baggage. A second question is whether Ferrara’s Rawlsian-Michelmanian take is different from, and superior to, the Habermasian account of constituent power, especially to Habermas’s constructive views on supranational constitution-making. Both questions address whether Ferrara’s historically indexed account is sufficiently open to future developments. (shrink)

Since the early Gestaltists there has been a strong interest in the question of how problem solvers get stuck in a mental impasse. A key idea is that the repeated activation of a successful strategy from the past results in a mental set (‘Einstellung’) which determines and constrains the option space to solve a problem. We propose that this phenomenon, which mostly was tested by fairly restricted experiments in the lab, could also be applied to more complex problem constellations and (...) naturalistic decision making. We aim at scrutinizing and reconstructing how a mental set determines the misinterpretation of facts in the field of political decision making and leads in consequence to wrong expectations and an ill-defined problem representation. We will exemplify this psychological mechanism considering a historical example, namely the unexpected stabilization of the Franco regime at the end of World War II and its survival thereafter. A specific focus will be drawn to the significant observation that erroneous expectations were taken as the basis for decisions. This is congruent with the notion that in case of discrepancy between preconceived notions and new information, the former prevails over the new findings. Based on these findings, we suggest a theoretical model for expectation violation in political decision making and develop novel approaches for cognitive empirical research on the mechanisms of expectation violation and its maintenance in political decision making processes. (shrink)

The name ‘pluralism’ frequently rears its head in political philosophy, but theorists often have different things in mind when using the term. Whereas ‘reasonable pluralism’ refers to the fact of moral diversity among citizens of a liberal democracy, ‘value pluralism’ is a metaethical view about the structure of moral practical reasoning. In this paper, I argue that value pluralism is part of the best explanation for reasonable pluralism. However, I also argue that embracing this explanation is compatible with political liberalism’s (...) commitment to avoiding controversial premises. According value pluralism an explanatory role does not entail according it a justificatory one. What’s more, explaining reasonable disagreement in terms of reasonable disagreement about value weights opens up space for direct appeal to substantive values within political liberalism. In particular, promoting a substantive political value when doing so does not conflict with other values is unproblematic. (shrink)

Political deliberation and decision-making typically take place in circumstances of substantial uncertainty about what should be done. Some of this uncertainty concerns decision-relevant empirical facts and some of it concerns decision-relevant normative facts. It is widely accepted that uncertainty about empirical facts should make us cautious and that political justification must take such uncertainty into account. Some have argued, however, that uncertainty about empirical and normative facts is not symmetrical, and that normative uncertainty does not demand (...) the same caution. In this chapter, I argue that the argument against symmetry does not work in the political context and that political justification must take normative uncertainty into account. (shrink)

Just as different sciences deal with different facts—say, physics versus biology—so we may ask a similar question about normative theories. Is normative political theory concerned with the same normative facts as moral theory or different ones? By developing an analogy with the sciences, we argue that the normative facts of political theory belong to a higher— more coarse-grained—level than those of moral theory. The latter are multiply realizable by the former: competing facts at the moral level (...) can underpin the same facts at the political one. Consequently, some questions that moral theories answer are indeterminate at the political level. This proposal offers a novel interpretation of John Rawls’s idea that, in public reasoning, we should abstract away from comprehensive moral doctrines. We contrast our distinction between facts at different levels with the distinction between admissible and inadmissible evidence and discuss some implications for the practice of political theory. (shrink)

This article discusses the significance of historical research in normative political philosophy. Methodologically ahistoricist philosophers argue that historical research has limited relevance to political philosophy as it only serves to validate if a theory is sufficiently historically fact-sensitive. However, this perspective allows for minimal engagement with intellectual history. In contrast, I advocate for a more substantial role of historical research, suggesting that it not only provides evidence to refute political philosophical views but also serves as a source of imaginative resources. (...) I show that thinkers from across the humanities, like R.J. Collingwood, Quentin Skinner, Michel Foucault, Raymond Geuss, David Graeber, and Bernard Williams, have recognised the importance of these imaginative resources in shaping methodological reflections. These thinkers are concerned that limiting the relevance of history to normative theorising exposes ahistoricist thinkers to imaginative failures. I argue that this is best construed as a concern about the epistemic reliability of their evaluative judgments. Imaginative failures can introduce biases that unjustifiably restrict the range of solutions to practical collective problems they contemplate. Historical research serves a normative function that is unavailable to the methodologically ahistoricist approach by preventing such failures. (shrink)

There has been a resurgence of Darwinian naturalism in political theory, as manifested in the recent work of political scientists such as Roger D. Masters, Robert J. McShea, and James Q. Wilson. They belong to an intellectual tradition that includes not only Charles Darwin but also Aristotle and David Hume. Although most political scientists believe Darwinian social theory has been refuted, their objections rest on three false dichotomies: facts versus values, nature versus freedom, and nature versus nurture. Rejecting these (...) dichotomies would allow the social sciences to be linked to the natural sciences through Darwinian biology. (shrink)

A vacuum is arising in the social policy of advanced countries. It is due to the fact that both of the currently dominant bases for social policy, market-oriented policy, and its presumed antagonist, welfare state policy, have the same and an insufficiently broad production value model at their core. The solution is to create a true new alternative, work quality policy, based on a re-understanding of work organization and the alternative forms of value it can create. Understanding work organization’s consequences (...) can help resolve current dilemmas relating to (a) economic growth based on low production cost instead of skill development, (b) hidden costs of work intensity and job insecurity, (c) true service sector productivity, and (d) current fragility of democratic institutions. (shrink)

Through her silencing thesis, Langton has contributed to the study of epistemic injustice by highlighting a possible cause of such a phenomenon: She asserts that the pornographic representation of sexual relationships affects the felicity conditions of speech uttered by women, so this speech is not understood as an illocution by men. This fact arguably undermines women’s credibility, since their testimony is not even registered in men’s testimonial sensibility. However, this thesis entails problematic consequences from at least two standpoints. From a (...) theoretical perspective, it enacts a circularity when it comes to the empirical individuation of the subordinative effects of pornography. I will point out that this problem arises from Langton’s substantive conception of power, i.e. from her notion of authority as an attribute which can be ascribed to preexisting subjects. From a political perspective, such conception of power allows Langton to performatively rank women as credible when testifying sexual violence, but it also leads her to silencing alternative political strategies, e.g. the ones proposed by Butler. Hence, I propose to consider this form of silencing as a specific kind of epistemic injustice, one that neutralises the performative value of political discourses. (shrink)

This essay explores hitherto unnoticed conceptual transactions between reflections on scientific method and a rethinking of political-economic categories in early-nineteenth century Britain through the writings of William Whewell and Richard Jones. Closely examining personal correspondences between Whewell and Jones, their works, contemporary debates on political economy and the problem of scientific method, Jones’s pedagogic practices, Karl Marx’s engagements with Jones, and his receptions as a teacher of political economy in colonial governance and imperial education, I argue that Jones drew upon (...) Whewell’s philosophical considerations on the relation between “fact” and “idea,” to reconstitute the epistemological orientation of political economy. (shrink)

This article criticizes Laura Valentini's criterion for distinguishing good and bad idealizations in normative political theory. I argue that, on an attentive reading of her criterion, all ideal theories she discusses must be written off as incorporating bad idealizations. This fact makes Valentini's criterion trivially implausible, for it is argued that there are good idealizations that succeed in promoting the action-guiding goal of ideal theory. Upon rejecting an attempt to salvage the idealizations that Valentini marks off as bad, I develop (...) an alternative criterion for demarcating good and bad idealizations. The criterion holds that the standing of a theory's idealized assumptions depends on whether the stipulated idealizations can be feasibly realized in the non-ideal world, and thus on whether the principles that the theory generates can be made relevant for real-world practice. I also claim that the feasibility criterion better reflects the function of idealization in promoting action-guidance. Unlike Valentini's criterion, the feasibility criterion yields the result that Rawls' theories of domestic and international justice both incorporate bad idealizations. (shrink)

Since its appearance in English translation in 1996, Jurgen Habermas's Between Facts and Norms has become the focus of a productive dialogue between German and Anglo-American legal and political theorists. The present volume contains ten essays that provide an overview of Habermas's political thought since the original appearance of Between Facts and Norms in 1992 and extend his model of deliberative democracy in novel ways to issues untreated in the earlier work. Habermas's theory of democracy has at least (...) three features that set it apart from competing positions. First, it combines a concern with questions of normative justification with an empirical analysis of the social conditions necessary for the realization of democratic institutions. Second, at the heart of his model is the assertion of an internal relationship between liberalism and democracy. Finally, Habermas defends a conception of universal human rights that is not only sensitive to cultural differences but also calls for legal and political institutions that facilitate the cultivation of cultural and religious identities within pluralistic societies. These essays demonstrate the extraordinary power of Habermas's theory of democracy through a further engagement with Rawls's political liberalism and through original contributions to current debates over nationalism, multiculturalism, and the viability of supranational political institutions. (shrink)

Social egalitarianism holds that individuals ought to have equal power over outcomes within relationships. Egalitarian philosophers have argued for this ideal by appealing to features of political society. This way of grounding the social egalitarian principle renders it dependent on empirical facts about political culture. In particular, egalitarians have argued that social equality matters to citizens in political relationships in a way analogous to the value of equality in a marriage. In this paper, we show how egalitarian philosophers are (...) committed to psychological premises, and then illustrate how to test the social egalitarian’s empirical claims. Using a nationally representative survey experiment, we find that citizens will sometimes prioritize equality over competing values, but that the weight of social equality diminishes when moving from personal to political cases. These findings raise questions for thinking about how to explain the normative significance of social equality. (shrink)

For this Clarendon Paperback, Dr Griffin has written a new Postscript to bring the original book fully up to date. She discusses further important and controversial questions of fact or interpretation in the light of the scholarship of the intervening years and provides additional argument where necessary. The connection between Seneca's prose works and his career as a first-century Roman statesman is problematic. Although he writes in the first person, he tells us little of his external life or of the (...) people and events that formed its setting. Miriam Griffin addresses the problem by first reconstructing Seneca's career using only outside sources and his de Clementia and Apocolocyntosis, whose political purposes are undisputed. In the second part of the book she studies Seneca's treatment of subjects of political significance, including his views on slavery, provincial policy, wealth, and suicide. On the whole, the word of the philosopher is found to illuminate the work of the statesman, but notable exceptions emerge, and the links that are revealed vary from theme to theme and rarely accord with traditional autobiographical interpretations of Seneca's works. (shrink)

In this paper, I am arguing for hermeneutic responsibility in political judgment, as it can be attributed to Arendt’s work. Political judgment is reflective judgment relying on representation by imagination and therefore only has exemplary validity. Along the line of Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, I point out her argument for a different generality in politics than the generality of concepts. This generality of political judgment always refers back to the particular. Only by this reference to the particular, (...) namely to facts and situations of direct interaction, can the spectator, who undertakes the political judgment, create the public realm where action takes place. However, this task attributed to the spectator also implies the task of reshaping the public realm. These acts of giving an account of and reconsidering all over again facts handed over by narration and testimony imply the hermeneutic responsibility to unceasingly retrieve factual truth which is rooted in direct interaction. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn his account of public reason Rawls assumes that some facts ought to be treated as ‘fixed’, or beyond reasonable disagreement. These include, for him, facts upon which there is a scientif...

Political methodologists have long sought to develop standards that can guide political scientists in the process of concept formation. Yet, the methodology literature has struggled to provide satisfactory solutions to the fundamental problem of conceptualization: for any given concept, there are a large number of attributes one could postulate as its defining characteristics, and it is unclear how to adjudicate between different possible definitions. We leverage the fact that the theory within which a concept appears places important restrictions on concept (...) formation: conceptualizations entail ontological claims that need to be consistent with those of the theories in which they appear. (shrink)

Should our factual understanding of the world influence our normative theorising about it? G.A. Cohen has argued that our ultimate normative principles should not be constrained by facts. Many others have defended or are committed to various versions or subsets of that claim. In this paper I dispute those positions by arguing that, in order to resist the conclusion that ultimate normative principles rest on facts about possibility or conceivability, one has to embrace an unsatisfactory account of how (...) principles generate normative political judgments. So political theorists have to choose between principles ostensibly unbiased by our current understanding of human motivation and political reality, or principles capable of reliably generating political judgments. I conclude with wider methodological observations in defence of the latter option, and so of a return to political philosophy’s traditional blend of normative and descriptive elements. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Shadows of Being: Encounters with Heidegger in Political Theory and Historical Reflection by Jeffery Andrew BarashRylie JohnsonBARASH, Jeffery Andrew. Shadows of Being: Encounters with Heidegger in Political Theory and Historical Reflection. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2022. 260 pp. Paper, $42.00ELIZABETH C. SHAW AND STAFF*Composed of a series of unique yet thematically connected chapters, Jeffrey Andrew Barash's latest book carefully addresses the relationship between Martin Heidegger's thought and political theory and (...) how these are connected through the thematization of historical narrative. In light of the publication of the controversial Black Notebooks, Barash's book serves as a significant contribution to debates regarding Heidegger's political engagement with National Socialism. However, rather than simply rehash this engagement, Barash takes a critical approach, arguing that Heidegger's historical narrative, that is, the history of Being, buttressed a "political mythology" and "fatalism" that absolved human beings of historical, ethical, and political responsibility. Thus, through a confrontation with Heidegger, Barash demonstrates the danger of denying human agency in the future course of history, since "fatalism only makes more probable the outcome it claims to foresee."While invested in explicating the political and ethical implications of Heidegger's thought, Barash is critically oriented around demonstrating a presupposition within the Seinsfrage, or the question of being that motivated Heidegger's philosophy. Heidegger presupposed that reraising the question of being was the fundamental task of philosophy, one that rendered "subordinate" other forms of historical reflection. Consequently, Barash argues that Heidegger established a "strategy of interpretation" that privileged his own standpoint in the history of Western thought and allowed him to set aside contrary ethical, political, and historical interpretations. Ultimately, this resulted in the formulation of the myth of the history of Being that placed Heidegger himself at the culminating point of Western history. The essays that compose Barash's book address the various implications of Heidegger's presupposition.The book is separated into two parts. The first consists of direct interpretations of Heidegger's thought and is composed of six chapters. The second addresses the critical reception of that thought, reflected in such figures as Hannah Arendt and Emanuel Levinas, and is composed of chapters seven through ten. [End Page 541]Chapter 1 focuses on Heidegger's broad legacy today, which according to Barash is threefold: the prevalence of historical deconstruction, his complicity with "Germanic ideology," and his criticisms of Western scientific rationality, all of which Heidegger rendered into an effect of metaphysics and the forgetting of the Seinsfrage. Chapter 2 discusses Heidegger's metaphysics of memory, showing that his inversion of the traditional eternal view of memory in favor of one grounded in mortality obscured other forms of "collective remembrance." Through a reading of St. Paul and Spinoza, chapter 3 investigates Heidegger's presupposition by revealing that the radical separation of the ontological from the ontic matters of theology, politics, and ethics is in fact an ontic decision of the "ethical order." Chapter 4 extensively discusses Heidegger's understanding of race and its relationship to Nazi orthodoxy. Highlighting that Heidegger was certainly critical of biological racism, Barash nevertheless shows that Heidegger articulated a "metaphysical" racism at the level of the history of Being. Chapter 5 reflects on Heidegger's Being-historical interpretation of World War II. Barash shows Heidegger's fatalism whereby the war was not a matter of human choices but was "attributed to an abandonment of Being." Chapter 7 closes part 1 by discussing the status of mythology in Heidegger's thought. Criticizing mythology as a form of historical production, Heidegger nonetheless creates his own myth: the history of Being. This mythological dimension is perhaps the most problematic aspect of Heidegger's thought.In the second part, Barash changes the trajectory of his arguments, addressing the critical reception of Heidegger's legacy by other philosophers. In chapter 7, Barash discusses the influence of Heidegger on Hannah Arendt's view of the public world, a world that theoretically rests on Heidegger's Dasein. But while Heidegger failed to adequately grapple with the public, Arendt radicalized it, showing that political reflection served as the basis for the philosophical problem of truth. Chapter 8 reflects upon the influence that the... (shrink)

In this paper, we employ what we term as ‘the ethical dimension in political market orientation ’ framework to underline how an integration of information from relevant stakeholder groups can inform the formulation of market-oriented, yet ethical policies. Against the backdrop of India’s Look East Policy, we undertake a critical analysis of historic economic data from 1980 to 2014 in the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura, often termed as the Seven Sisters because of their (...) interdependence. Our analysis of the data, using time-series methods, reveals that policy changes ensuing from the economic reforms of 1990s and the initiation of the LEP in 1991 have resulted in regional income convergence in North-Eastern India. A key contribution of our work emanates from the fact that we determine two structural breaks endogenously from long time-series data, thereby identifying three distinct policy regimes, rather than specifying exogenous breaks based on historic and theoretical conjectures. Overall, our work offers both conceptual insights into processes that enable ethical and inclusive policy making, as well as empirical evidence emerging from stochastic convergence of incomes per capita for the Seven Sister states in the North-Eastern region in India, to illustrate how regional economic inequality can be reduced through targeted market-oriented policies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.1 (2000) 39-58 [Access article in PDF] A Life in Politics: Leonardo Bruni's Cicero Gary Ianziti Leonardo Bruni's Life of Cicero deserves to occupy an important place in the annals of early modern history-writing. 1 Completed in October 1415, the Cicero marks a turning point in Bruni's career. It represents his first major foray into the field of historiography, preceding by a (...) few months his completion of the first book of the more famous History of Florence. 2 The Cicero contains many of the features upon which Bruni's reputation as a historian was later to be based. It is written in concise, elegant Latin; it demonstrates a high degree of sophistication in its handling of a wide range of source material; it reveals the workings of a mature, critical intelligence capable of formulating judgments that often go against the grain of accumulated tradition. 3 Nor should we be surprised that Bruni's breakthrough into such territory took place within the framework of biography. Since the time of Petrarch, life-writing had been practiced by Italian humanists as the preferred form of historical composition. 4 Bruni's mentor Coluccio Salutati was a devotee of the genre, and Bruni himself served his apprenticeship [End Page 39] in history-writing by translating seven of Plutarch's Lives between 1405 and 1412. 5Bruni's Cicero was an immediate success in its own day. 6 It even supplanted its most august rival, Plutarch's ancient biography of Cicero. The latter had begun to circulate in the West as early as 1401 in the Latin version executed by another of Salutati's protégés, Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia. 7 After the appearance of Bruni's Cicero, however, Plutarch's Cicero came under duress. By the 1430s Bruni's Cicero was "more widely diffused" than Plutarch's. 8 Bruni's text soon became standard, to the extent that the editio princeps of the Latinized Parallel Lives (Rome, 1470) printed Bruni's Cicero in preference to Plutarch's, setting a precedent followed by subsequent editions down to 1514. 9 The trend then suddenly reversed: Plutarch's biography (in the 1401 translation of Angeli) staged a remarkable comeback, returning to occupy its rightful place in the Latin editions of the Parallel Lives published after that date. 10 Bruni's Cicero meanwhile sank into oblivion. Its primacy had lasted almost one hundred years. [End Page 40]The first modern scholar to deal with Bruni's Cicero was Hans Baron. As early as 1928 Baron had found a place for the work within the scheme of "civic humanism," or Bürgerhumanismus as he then called his emerging concept. In his edition of Bruni's selected writings, Baron included a section from the Cicero, that dealing with the Roman statesman's literary output. 11 The decision to publish this extract rather than the whole work was in part dictated by Baron's conviction that most of Bruni's Cicero was a mere reworking of Plutarch and therefore unworthy of further attention. 12 But the choice of the section on Cicero's literary activity also depended on the fact that it contained statements which appeared to confirm Baron's view of Bruni as a "civic humanist." In particular, Baron emphasized Bruni's presentation of Cicero's literary studies as intimately connected with his political activity. In later years Baron often quoted these same passages in support of his "civic" thesis. 13This is not the place to discuss the wider implications of Baron's thesis itself. It will be enough to note that with regard to Bruni's Cicero, the "civic" focus was purchased at the expense of the work as a whole. One does not have to look very far into Bruni's Cicero to realize that it can hardly be described as subservient to Plutarch. Moreover, it contains passages in which Bruni shows himself to be much less sanguine than Baron about the supposed healthiness of the connection between letters and political life. For example, when weighing up... (shrink)

Political realists complain that much contemporary political philosophy is insufficiently attentive to various facts about politics yet some political philosophers insist that any critique of normative claims on grounds of unrealism is misplaced. In this paper I focus on the methodological position G.A. Cohen champions in order assess the extent to which this retort succeeds in nullifying the realist critique of contemporary political philosophy. I argue that Cohen’s work does not succeed in doing so because the political principles (...) that we are prepared to endorse are hostage to various fact-sensitive judgements about how they apply to the political domain. I then argue that this discredits various philosophical approaches to political theorising which begin by utilising non-political thought-experiments, such as Cohen’s own Why Not Socialism? (shrink)

Rachel Wells turns to the examination of three recent artistic practices, which integrate facts in their work not as an antagonistic other but as a constitutive element to their efficacy and ethics. She argues, that in introducing news, factual actions, or objects with traces of factual events, Alfredo Jaar, Jeremy Deller and Martin Creed use facts in order to retract from the position of art as an expression of artistic freedom and subjectivity and thus as the opposite of (...) fact. Instead, she states that by introducing the factual the artists underline each in their own way the instability of given eptistemological and ethical frameworks. Far from being a mere relativist pose, Wells understands this denial of a stable subjectivist position as a reconfigured sense of “decision”—perhaps in the sense of Nancy’s articulation of a “decision of existence—that lets the factual take precedence over the control in and of the artwork as a heightened form of responsiveness and responsibility. Whereas Jaar uses the factual to engage overt political action, Deller presents facts that avoid taking an overtly critical perspective forcing the viewer to think about political events. Creed in contrast seeks for the interpretation of the past altogether, would avoid to take over the responsibility of taking a position. Whereas David Hume stated famously, that reasoning concerning matter of fact is founded in causality and Immanuel Kant concludes, that responsibility and freedom begins where causality ends, Wells understands the positions of Jaar, Deller and Creed as an attempt to reconcile the realm of the factual and the realm of the moral. Responsibility would then arise exactly out of the insight in the impossibility to ground moral stances in rationality and causality and in an attempt to use causality to demonstrate this impossibility. (shrink)

According to some authors, Latour’s attention to politics during the last decades is the result of his proposing a different approach to politics that entails, with respect to his overall project, one of two situations. Either his epistemological proposal has suffered a “normative turn”—which necessarily breaks with the previous assumptions of Actor-Network Theory (ANT); or, if ANT’s view on technosciences remains valid, his political proposal becomes not possible as a new normative approach. In this paper, I will focus (...) on the critique voiced by John Law, as well as Graham Harman. I will argue that this is a false dilemma because there has not been a change in Latour’s conceptual basis, nor a lack of coherence within his thought that would undermine the democratic commitment of his Political Epistemology. I will justify this by exposing the fact that Latour’s overall project, as part of Science Studies, has not lately followed a “political” but an “ontological” turn, which has been underling his works since the very beginning of ANT. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to historicize Frank Plumpton Ramsey’s Apostle talks delivered from 1923 to 1925 within the social and political context of the time. In his talks, Ramsey discusses socialism, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Ramsey’s views on these three intellectual movements were interconnected, and they all contributed to his take on the policy debates occurring then on the role of women in economy. Drawing on archival materials, biographical facts, and the historiographical literature on the early interwar politics (...) of motherhood, I show that Ramsey held a positive view of the feminist campaign for family endowment. He demanded government financial support for motherhood in recognition of the economic significance of women’s domestic works, which, as such, could bring economic independence to them. In addition, he found such an economic scheme compatible with the kind of maternalism endorsed by Freudian psychoanalysis—his favorite theory of psychology. (shrink)

Realist thinkers in political philosophy often criticize ideal theorists for neglecting or eliminating the fact of politics in their work. This is supposed to be problematic because we should never expect to overcome politics. Any theory that attempts to do so is said to be unrealistic, naïve, and impractical. Although much has been said in the dispute between realists and ideal theorists in recent years, this particular line of criticism, which should be distinguished from other criticisms of ideal (...) theory, has not been clearly or explicitly addressed by ideal theorists in the literature. I deal with this issue by examining the ideal theory of John Rawls, which has been a prominent target of realist criticisms. My aim is to see where politics exists, or might exist, in Rawls’s theory, and whether this politics satisfactorily answers to the various aspects of the realist’s critique. My analysis suggests that there may be no inherent or necessary conflict between ideal theory and real politics, after all. (shrink)