The majoritarian conception of democracy implies that counter-majoritarian institutions such as federalism—and even representative institutions—are derogations from democracy. The majoritarian conception is mistaken for two reasons. First, it is incoherent: majoritarianism ultimately stands against one of democracy’s core normative commitments—namely, political equality. Second, majoritarianism is premised on a mistaken view of power, which fails to account for the power of numbers and thereby fails to explain the inequality faced by members of persistent minorities. Although strict majority rule serves the democratic (...) values of political agency and equality as interpreted by a set of formal conditions, an adequate conception of power shows why in real-world conditions formal-procedural inequalities, instantiated by counter-majoritarian institutions such as federalism, are sometimes required to serve democratic equality. (shrink)

Hobbesian war primarily arises not because material resources are scarce; or because humans ruthlessly seek survival before all else; or because we are naturally selfish, competitive, or aggressive brutes. Rather, it arises because we are fragile, fearful, impressionable, and psychologically prickly creatures susceptible to ideological manipulation, whose anger can become irrationally inflamed by even trivial slights to our glory. The primary source of war, according to Hobbes, is disagreement, because we read into it the most inflammatory signs of contempt. Both (...) cause and remedy are therefore primarily ideological: The Leviathan's primary function is to settle the meaning of the most controversial words implicated in social life, minimize public disagreement, neutralize glory, magnify the fear of death, and root out subversive doctrines. Managing interstate conflict, in turn, requires not only coercive power, but also the soft power required to shape characters and defuse the effects of status competition. (shrink)

The question of whether or not a closed border entry policy under the unilateral control of a democratic state is legitimate cannot be settled until we first know to whom the justification of a regime of control is owed. According to the state sovereignty view, the control of entry policy, including of movement, immigration, and naturalization, ought to be under the unilateral discretion of the state itself: justification for entry policy is owed solely to members. This position, however, is inconsistent (...) with the democratic theory of popular sovereignty. Anyone accepting the democratic theory of political legitimation domestically is thereby committed to rejecting the unilateral domestic right to control state boundaries. Because the demos of democratic theory is in principle unbounded, the regime of boundary control must be democratically justified to foreigners as well as to citizens, in political institutions in which both foreigners and citizens can participate. (shrink)

In On Global Justice, Mathias Risse claims that the earth’s original resources are collectively owned by all human beings in common, such that each individual has a moral right to use the original resources necessary for satisfying her basic needs. He also rejects the rival views that original resources are by nature owned by no one, owned by each human in equal shares, or owned and co-managed jointly by all humans. I argue that Risse’s arguments fail to establish a form (...) of ownership at all and, moreover, that his arguments against the three rival views he considers all fall short. His argument establishes, rather, a moral constraint on any conventional system of property ownership. (shrink)

Anecdotal evidence suggests that participants in conversation can sometimes act as a coalition. This implies a level of conversational organization in which groups of individuals form a coherent unit. This paper investigates the implications of this phenomenon for psycholinguistic and semantic models of shared context in dialog. We present a corpus study of multiparty dialog which shows that, in certain circumstances, people with different levels of overt involvement in a conversation, that is, one responding and one not, can nonetheless access (...) the same shared context. We argue that contemporary models of shared context need to be adapted to capture this situation. To address this, we propose “grounding by proxy,” in which one person can respond on behalf of another, as a simple mechanism by which shared context can accumulate for a coalition as a whole. We explore this hypothesis experimentally by investigating how people in a task-oriented coalition respond when their shared context appears to be weakened. The results provide evidence that, by default, coalition members act on each other's behalf, and when this fails they work to compensate. We conclude that this points to the need for a new concept of collective grounding acts and a corresponding concept of collective contexts in psycholinguistic and semantic models of dialog. (shrink)

Recent attempts to revitalize Hegel's social and political philosophy have tended to be doubly constrained: firstly, by their focus on Hegel's Philosophy of Right; and secondly, by their broadly liberal interpretive framework. Challenging that trend, Arash Abazari shows that the locus of Hegel's genuine critical social theory is to be sought in his ontology – specifically in the 'logic of essence' of the Science of Logic. Mobilizing ideas from Marx and Adorno, Abazari unveils the hidden critical import of Hegel's (...) logic. He argues that social domination in capitalism obtains by virtue of the illusion of equality and freedom; shows how relations of opposition underlie the seeming pluralism in capitalism; and elaborates on the deepest ground of domination, i.e. the totality of capitalist social relations. Overall, his book demonstrates that Hegel's logic can and should be read politically. (shrink)

Many anticosmopolitan Rawlsians argue that since the primary subject of justice is society's basic structure, and since there is no global basic structure, the scope of justice is domestic. This paper challenges the anticosmopolitan basic structure argument by distinguishing three interpretations of what Rawls meant by the basic structure and its relation to justice, corresponding to the cooperation, pervasive impact, and coercion theories of distributive justice. On the cooperation theory, it is true that there is no global basic structure, but (...) the basic structure turns out to be only an instrumental condition for realizing justice, and not an existence condition that must be met before demands of justice arise. On the pervasive impact and coercion theories, the basic structure is indeed an existence condition, but there exists a global basic structure. The upshot is that on any plausible interpretation of Rawls's account of the basic structure, Rawlsian justice is global in scope. (shrink)

Critics of state sovereignty have typically challenged the state’s right to close its borders to foreigners by appeal to the liberal egalitarian discourse of human rights. According to the liberty argument, freedom of movement is a basic human right; according to the equality or justice argument, open borders are necessary to reduce global poverty and inequality, both matters of global justice. I argue that human rights considerations do indeed mandate borders considerably more open than is the norm today but that, (...) no matter how radical in its critique of state sovereignty, human rights discourse fails to address a crucial feature of this ideology. It is not enough to engage in a substantive moral argument about what the state’s moral duties are. One must also address the procedural political question of who has the legitimate authority to decide what rights and duties to act on in cases of disagreement. In addition to human rights discourse, I argue, border activists must also draw on the challenge posed to the doctrine of state sovereignty by the democratic theory of popular sovereignty. According to democratic theory, the people subject to the state’s coercive exercise of political power, and not the state itself, is ultimately the sovereign arbiter of political questions. And because foreigners are subject to the state’s border laws, democratic theory requires granting them a participatory say in setting those laws. (shrink)

According to the democratic borders argument, the democratic legitimacy of a state's regime of border control requires granting foreigners a right to participate in the procedures determining it. This argument appeals to the All-Subjected Principle, which implies that democratic legitimacy requires that all those subject to political power have a right to participate in determining the laws governing its exercise. The scope objection claims that this argument presupposes an implausible account of subjection and hence of the All-Subjected Principle, which absurdly (...) implies that all domestic laws subject foreigners to their requirements. I argue that this objection misconstrues the logical structure of the legal requirements enshrined in domestic laws: domestic laws typically enshrine narrow-scope, not wide-scope, legal requirements. To be sure, some state laws do subject foreigners to their requirements, and the All-Subjected Principle conditions democratic legitimacy on granting foreigners some say in determining them. But the best reading of the Principle does not have such general expansionary implications. (shrink)

By the time Hobbes wrote Leviathan, he was a theist, but not in the sense presumed by either side of the present-day debate concerning the sincerity of his professed theism. On the one hand, Hobbes’s expressed theology was neither merely deistic, nor confined to natural theology: the Hobbesian God is not merely a first mover, but a person who counsels, commands, and threatens. On the other hand, the Hobbesian God’s existence depends on being constructed artificially by human convention. The Hobbesian (...) God is not a natural person; he exists as a person only insofar as he is by fiction represented. Like the state and pagan gods, he is an artificial person by fiction. The upshot is that Hobbes was a sincere theist and that his seventeenth-century critics were right to think that, in their sense, he was an atheist: he did not steadfastly believe in an independently existing deity who precedes human convention. Hobbes was agnostic on this question. He nevertheless believed that God is brought into being as an artificial person. This ‘personal theology’ not only involved a heretical interpretation of the Trinity, it also came to play a significant role in his moral and political philosophy. (shrink)

The two traditional justifications for bicameralism are that a second legislative chamber serves a legislative-review function (enhancing the quality of legislation) and a balancing function (checking concentrated power and protecting minorities). I furnish here a third justification for bicameralism, with one elected chamber and the second selected by lot, as an institutional compromise between contradictory imperatives facing representative democracy: elections are a mechanism of people’s political agency and of accountability, but run counter to political equality and impartiality, and are insufficient (...) for satisfactory responsiveness; sortition is a mechanism for equality and impartiality, and of enhancing responsiveness, but not of people’s political agency or of holding representatives accountable. Whereas the two traditional justifications initially grew out of anti-egalitarian premises (about the need for elite wisdom and to protect the elite few against the many), the justification advanced here is grounded in egalitarian premises about the need to protect state institutions from capture by the powerful few and to treat all subjects as political equals. Reflecting the “political” turn in political theory, I embed this general argument within the institutional context of Canadian parliamentary federalism, arguing that Canada’s Senate ought to be reconstituted as a randomly selected citizen assembly. (shrink)

One way to evaluate electoral rules is instrumental: we ask what effects they tend to produce. A second way is constitutive: we ask what kinds of values they embody, or whether the procedures they effect respect people's rights or moral status. A third way is genetic: we ask by what procedure the electoral rules were adopted. I shall argue that in judging the value or the legitimacy of electoral rules, we must consider not only (1) the values they serve instrumentally (...) and (2) the values, rights, or statuses they embody or respect, but also (3) the procedure by which they were chosen. I argue, moreover, that the best way to choose electoral rules in representative governments is on an ongoing basis via a randomly selected citizen assembly whose decisions are binding independently of any appeal to referenda. (shrink)

Arash Arjomandi, discípulo cercano de Eugenio Trías, junto a quien se nutrió de los principios fundamentales de la inteligencia fronteriza, intenta descubrir aquí, en compañía del lector, las prescripciones o reglas para tener una vida buena (según expresión de muchos filósofos), es decir, aquellas prácticas cotidianas que sincronicen, de un modo sostenible, la satisfacción con la vida, por un lado, y el placer o deleite, por otro. Si bien este texto es resultado de un pensamiento filosófico profundo, tiene la (...) pretensión de serle útil al gran público. Ello responde al principal móvil que le guía siempre en sus trabajos: contribuir, desde la meditación filosófica, al bien común promoviendo cambios creativos en los hábitos de pensamiento y, por tanto, en los hábitos de actuación. En medio de la ingente cantidad de ensayos que se publican cada año sobre la felicidad, la gran innovación de este libro es que no adopta una perspectiva psicológica del asunto, sino que apuesta por una visión filosófica, aunque práctica; en ningún caso, abstracta. De ahí que sea un texto orientado, de parte a parte, a la provisión de instrumentos reflexivos pero útiles para cualquier tipo de lector, aunque no tenga el menor interés por la filosofía. Arjomandi continua en este libro el estilo de escritura que inauguró en su anterior ensayo, "La alquimia filosofal", un subgénero que, en la prensa, Pablo d’Ors denominó halagüeñamente intriga filosófica, es decir, un género ensayístico que persigue, mediante pistas racionales, la demostración de una intuición a la manera de una pesquisa detectivesca. (shrink)

What motivated an absolutist Erastian who rejected religious freedom, defended uniform public worship, and deemed the public expression of disagreement a catalyst for war to endorse a movement known to history as the champion of toleration, no coercion in religion, and separation of church and state? At least three factors motivated Hobbes’s 1651 endorsement of Independency: the Erastianism of Cromwellian Independency, the influence of the politique tradition, and, paradoxically, the contribution of early-modern practices of toleration to maintaining the public sphere’s (...) religious uniformity. The third factor illustrates how a key function of the emerging private sphere in the early-modern period was to protect uniformity, rather than diversity; it also shows that what was novel was not so much the public/private distinction itself, but the separation of two previously conflated dimensions of publicity – visibility and representativeness – that enabled early-modern Europeans to envisage modes of worship out in the open, yet still private. (shrink)

The current literature standardly conceives of voting power in terms of decisiveness: the ability to change the voting outcome by unilaterally changing one’s vote. I argue that this classic conception of voting power, which fails to account for partial decisiveness or efficacy, produces erroneous results because it saddles the concept of voting power with implausible microfoundations. This failure in the measure of voting power in turn reflects a philosophical mistake about the concept of social power in general: a failure to (...) recognize that an agent can exercise individual social power with others’ assistance, in virtue of the group’s collective power, sometimes even when she could not unilaterally scuttle the group’s collective power. I therefore develop a conception of efficacy that admits of degrees and defend a Recursive Measure of voting power that takes partial efficacy into account. (shrink)

This paper subjects to critical analysis four common arguments in the sociopolitical theory literature supporting the cultural nationalist thesis that liberal democracy is viable only against the background of a single national public culture: the arguments that (1) social integration in a liberal democracy requires shared norms and beliefs (Schnapper); (2) the levels of trust that democratic politics requires can be attained only among conationals (Miller); (3) democratic deliberation requires communicational transparency, possible in turn only within a shared national public (...) culture (Miller, Barry); and (4) the economic viability of specifically industrialized liberal democracies requires a single national culture (Gellner). I argue that all four arguments fail: At best, a shared cultural nation may reduce some of the costs liberal democratic societies must incur; at worst, cultural nationalist policies ironically undermine social integration. The failure of these cultural nationalist arguments clears the way for a normative theory of liberal democracy in multinational and postnational contexts. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Marx was not primarily concerned with the question of poverty. Rather, Marx’s main object of critique is the relations of power inherent in capitalism. According to Marx, poverty is the end result of the structural processes that are constituted by relations of power. After explicating the coercion, domination, and exploitation inherent in capitalism, the chapter discusses the status and the different layers of the non-working poor in Marx’s theory, what he calls “the industrial reserve army”. The (...) chapter concludes by comparing Marx’s conception of poverty with that of liberal political philosophy. -/- . (shrink)

Two arguments apparently support the thesis that collective identity presupposes an Other: the recognition argument, according to which seeing myself as a self requires recognition by an other whom I also recognize as a self (Hegel); and the dialogic argument, according to which my sense of self can only develop dialogically (Taylor). But applying these arguments to collective identity involves a compositional fallacy. Two modern ideologies mask the particularist thesis’s falsehood. The ideology of indivisible state sovereignty makes sovereignty as such (...) appear particularistic by fusing “internal” with “external” sovereignty; nationalism imagines national identity as particularistic by linking it to sovereignty. But the concatenation of internal sovereignty, external sovereignty, and nation is contingent. Schmitt’s thesis that “the political” presupposes an other conflates internal and external sovereignty, while Mouffe’s neo-Schmittianism conflates difference (Derrida) with alterity. A shared global identity may face many obstacles, but metaphysical impossibility and conceptual confusion are not among them. (shrink)

This introduction frames the special issue titled “Mystical Solidarities: Ali Shariati and the Act of Translation.” Drawing from insights across the collection’s essays, it foregrounds a notion of translation as a transformative act, anchored in Shariati’s mystical ontology, that fosters and sustains anticolonial solidarities. To illustrate, we explore differences and affinities between Shariati and Frantz Fanon with regard to truth-telling, translation, alienation, and subjectivity. The comparison reveals a generative distinction in Shariati’s thought between cultural and existential alienation, “translated intellectuals” and (...) the act of translation. The distinction creates grounds for a vision of anticolonial solidarity responsive to circumstances in postrevolutionary Iran, a vision that reaches beyond the postcolonial state. (shrink)

National Baha’i elections, conducted world-wide without nominations, competitive campaigns, or parties, challenge the emerging consensus that the only truly democratic elections are multiparty elections in which each party’s candidates compete freely for votes. National Baha’i electoral institutions are based on three core values: respect for the inherent dignity of each person, the unity and solidarity of persons collectively, and the justice and fairness of institutions. While liberal political philosophy interprets respect for dignity exclusively in terms of equality and freedom, the (...) Baha’i model interprets dignity to require respect for the equality, freedom, and nobility of each person. The perfectionist focus on nobility helps explain the distinct features of national Baha’i elections and, in particular, the ban on campaigning. In light of ongoing concerns about the character of the electoral process in actually existing democracies, further research into Baha’i elections and their philosophical foundations provides a promising basis for rethinking widely held liberal assumptions about how democratic elections must be conducted. (shrink)

How can liberal democracies mobilize their citizens and effect their social integration, while accommodating their tremendous heterogeneity and respecting their freedom? Neo-Kantian liberals and cosmopolitans such as Habermas reject appeals to shared ethnicity, culture, or nation, for fear that they effect the suppression of difference; communitarian critics retort that theories like Habermas's are impotent to motivate social integration. My goal is to show that this theoretical impasse is an artifact of the fact that both camps articulate their disagreements within the (...) tacitly shared parameters inherited from the long-running debate between philosophy and rhetoric. By first interrogating the posited relationship between rhetoric, passion, reason, and politics in Rousseau's oeuvre, I illustrate the reception of this ancient debate in modern political theory, a reception that has effected a series of binaries such as reason/passion and abstract/concrete---the first terms associated with impotence, the second with motivational efficacy. I then turn to contemporary cultural nationalist thought, and demonstrate how these binaries are deployed to critique doctrines such as Habermas's constitutional patriotism. The Rousseauist assumption that affect requires "concrete" sites to motivate social integration is invariably combined with the presupposition that bounded communities such as the nation instantiate the required concreteness. The implausibility of that presumption such communities are "imagined" and not concrete in any relevant sense---is masked by the category of territory, which serves as a trope for concreteness. Tracing the roots of this dubious trope to Rousseau shows how "territory" reproduces the exclusionary features that the distinction between ethnic and civic-territorial nationalism tends to attribute solely to ethnicity: concreteness often means either an exclusionary boundedness directed against the foreign other, or an ossification of collective identities that stifles difference internally. Finally, turning to the discourse-ethical theory's promise to avoid this suppression of difference, I argue that Habermas fails to shake the charge of motivational impotence precisely because he is just as beholden to the philosophy/rhetoric binaries as his critics. Drawing on an Aristotelian art of rhetoric, I show how Habermas's category of discursive rationality can be reconstructed as a mode of organizing, rather than expelling, rhetoric and the passions. (shrink)

Wealth distribution based on classic sugarscape model leads to a population increase and the Gini coefficient decrease when cooperation and communication parameters are taken into account. In another study, this model was developed by implying a receipt of one-fifth of the assets of the population and derived utilization for poor people. The results showed a relation between mortality decrease, population increase, and Gini coefficient decrease (equality increase). In a synergic process, the wealth adjustment based on sugarscape model underwent some experiments (...) by implying communication and cooperation, and the mechanism of receiving and utilizing the assets. The results show that the population increase and the Gini coefficient decrease play an important role in wealth adjustment. (shrink)

Prior to 1651, Hobbes was agnostic about the existence of God. Hobbes argued that God’s existence could neither be demonstrated nor proved, so that those who reason about God’s existence will systematically vacillate, sometimes thinking God exists, sometimes not, which for Hobbes is to say they will doubt God’s existence. Because this vacillation or doubt is inherent to the subject, reasoners like himself will judge that settling on one belief rather than another is epistemically unjustified. Hobbes’s agnosticism becomes apparent once (...) we attend to his distinctions between the propositional attitudes one might adopt towards theological claims, including supposing, thinking, having faith and knowing. (shrink)

Given the hypercomplex nature of human societies, progressive political action aimed at the structural transformation of society will always have unintended consequences, sometimes indeed the opposite of what was initially sought. The question then naturally arises: Given the essential unpredictability of its outcomes, how is such political action possible? In search of an answer to this question I turn to Immanuel Kant, and reconstruct his notion of “rational hope” (Vernunftglaube) in the Critique of Practical Reason in political terms. After outlining (...) what I take to be a Kantian idea of socialism, I suggest that political action aiming at realising socialism must always incorporate hope as its immanent moment. Finally, I discuss a Freudian-derived objection to Kant, namely, the idea that socialism is an illusion, and answer it from a Kantian point of view. (shrink)

Axel Honneth reconstructs Hegel’s social and political philosophy on the basis of the concept of recognition. For Honneth, recognition is a constitutive relation between individuals that is in principle symmetrical. By conceiving recognition through symmetry, Honneth effectively bans the inclusion of power within recognitive relation. He thus regards the relations of power as cases of non-recognition or misrecognition. In this paper, I develop an alternative theory of the constitutive relation between individuals for Hegel, one that is based on the asymmetrical (...) relation of power. To this aim, I focus on the chapter of “determinations of reflection” in the Science of Logic. Through a close analysis of Hegel’s Logic, I argue that the most fundamental form of relation between individuals is the relation of opposition, that individuals are solely constituted in and through the relation of opposition, and that the relation of opposition is essentially asymmetrical. Together, these claims establish... (shrink)

What I call in this paper “the sociality of subjectivity thesis” lies at the very center of what is now called “Continental philosophy”. According to this thesis, the subject is necessarily socially constituted. In other words, it is not the case that there are first some isolated subjects, who then get into relation with each other; rather, the subjects from the beginning are formed through their interrelation. The first philosopher who systematically argued for this thesis is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In (...) this paper, I reconstruct Fichte’s argument, as it appears in his 1796 Foundations of Natural Right. The central idea of this reconstruction is the following: for Fichte, the subject can regard herself as the genuine author of her actions, only when she presupposes that there are other subjects who can ascribe those actions to her. That is, the activity of self-ascription, which constitutes the subject, is only possible with the presupposition that there are other subjects. (shrink)

The innovation systems approach has swiftly spread out worldwide in the last three decades and stood as an important framework for policy-making in the fields of science, technology, and innovation. At the same time, there have been serious and untreated concerns in the literature about the theoretical soundness of this approach. Our discussion in this paper is based on the belief that a detailed analysis on epistemological foundations of the approach could shed a judgmental light on the aforementioned concerns. To (...) provide that analysis, we reconstructed and studied the nature and evolution of innovation systems approach as a case of conceptual revolution against the more established traditions in economics of innovation. Our analyses show that the rise of the systemic view of innovation include radical changes in conceptual structures pertaining to orthodox view of innovation. These developments also go so far as to include significant shifts in epistemological foundations of the old paradigm. These later shifts provide us with an epistemological base from which we can shelter the innovation systems approach from the hard criticisms rooted in a quasi-positivist point of view. That epistemological base also shows the path for the future development of the approach towards more robustness and precision. (shrink)

There are at least five important arguments for why liberal egalitarianism permits states, under today's circumstances, to close their borders to foreigners: the public order, domestic economy, social integration, political threat, and domestic welfare arguments. Critical examination of these arguments suggests that liberal egalitarianism, rather than supporting a right to close one's borders to foreigners, mandates borders considerably more open than is the practice of today's self-styled liberal states.

Readers of Hobbes have often seen his Leviathan as a deeply paradoxical work. On one hand, recognizing that no sovereign could ever wield enough coercive power to maintain social order, the text recommends that the state enhance its power ideologically, by tightly controlling the apparatuses of public discourse and socialization. The state must cultivate an image of itself as a mortal god of nearly unlimited power, to overpower its subjects and instil enough fear to win obedience. On the other hand, (...) by drawing explicit attention to the ideological and partly illusory bases of the state’s power, Leviathan, itself construed as a political intervention designed to appeal to a broad English readership, appears to undermine the very program it recommends. Indeed, many have argued that Leviathan’s substantive political-philosophical doctrine is flatly at odds with the authority that Hobbes claimed for himself in order to advance that doctrine. The paradox, I argue, is only an apparent one. Precisely because Hobbes believed that in practice no one could ever become the mortal god that sovereignty requires, i.e., that the seat of sovereignty could never actually be securely occupied and fully represented by a mere mortal, he sought constantly to remind his readers of the precariousness of earthly sovereignty by pointing to its illusory basis. Far from seeking to undermine the sovereign, however, this reminder was designed to enhance readers’ fears, especially the fear that, despite the security they may enjoy today, the slightest misstep may lead them straight into the horrors of the state of nature. Hobbes’s purpose was, in other words, to enhance the sovereign’s power, not by enhancing our fear of him, but of his absence. Ironically, this is also in part why Hobbes insisted on the individual’s inalienable right of self-defence, an insistence that has puzzled many of his readers, given Hobbes’s obvious wish to defend absolute, unlimited sovereignty. Its political function is not to provide a covert justification for resistance theories. Rather, by reminding his readers of their right but doing so while addressing them as isolated atoms whose resistance would be hopeless, Hobbes sought to remind each one of the ultimate impossibility of securely filling the seat of sovereignty, without encouraging anyone actually to resist the most promising pretender. Like God-talk, Hobbes’s representations of sovereign power do not ultimately comprise descriptive propositions at all: they are expressions of praise and honour designed to help create the very thing they purport to describe. Hobbes was keenly aware that indivisible state sovereignty is an ideological construct whose terms are never ever fully realized in practice. (shrink)

The claim that liberal democratic normative commitments are compatible with nationalism is challenged by the widely acknowledged fact that national identities invariably depend on historical myths: the nationalist defence of such publicly shared myths is in tension with liberal democratic theory’s commitment to norms of publicity, public justification, and freedom of expression. Recent liberal nationalist efforts to meet this challenge by justifying national myths on liberal democratic grounds fail to distinguish adequately between different senses of myth. Once this is done (...) (drawing on Arthur Danto’s analytical philosophy of history), it becomes apparent that historical narratives cannot be justifiably shielded from criteria of truth and significance, and that genuinely historical myths are incompatible with liberal democratic political philosophy. (shrink)

The centrality of glory, contempt, and revengefulness to Leviathan’s account of war is highlighted by three contextual features: Hobbes’s displacement of the traditional conception of glory as intrinsically intersubjective and comparative; his incorporation of the Aristotelian view that revengefulness is provoked by expressions of mere contempt; and the evolution of his account between 1640 and 1651. An archeology of Leviathan’s famous chapter thirteen confirms that Hobbes’s thesis throughout his career was that disagreement is the universal cause of war because prickly, (...) glory-seeking humans view its expression as a sign of contempt: although Leviathan abandons Hobbes’s previous argument that war is primarily rooted in vainglorious individuals pursuing domination, Leviathan’s ‘glory’ argument for war is a descendent of the older ‘comparison’, not ‘vanity’, argument. (shrink)

A proposed measure of voting power should satisfy two conditions to be plausible: first, it must be conceptually justified, capturing the intuitive meaning of what voting power is; second, it must satisfy reasonable postulates. This paper studies a set of postulates, appropriate for a priori voting power, concerning blockers (or vetoers) in a binary voting game. We specify and motivate five such postulates, namely, two subadditivity blocker postulates, two minimum-power blocker postulates, each in weak and strong versions, and the added-blocker (...) postulate. We then test whether three measures of voting power, namely the classic Penrose-Banzhaf measure, the classic Shapley-Shubik index, and the newly proposed Recursive Measure, satisfy these postulates. We find that the first measure fails four of the postulates, the second fails two, while the third alone satisfies all five postulates. This work consequently adds to the plausibility of the Recursive Measure as a reasonable measure of voting power. (shrink)

Samuel Scheffler has recently argued that some relationships are non-instrumentally valuable; that such relationships give rise to “underived” special responsibilities; that there is a genuine tension between cosmopolitan egalitarianism and special responsibilities; and that we must consequently strike a balance between the two. We argue that there is no such tension and propose an alternative approach to the relation between cosmopolitan egalitarianism and special responsibilities. First, while some relationships are non-instrumentally valuable, no relationship is unconditionally valuable. Second, whether such relationships (...) give rise to special responsibilities is conditional on those relationships not violating certain moral constraints. Third, these moral constraints arise from within cosmopolitan egalitarianism itself. Thus the value of relationships and the special responsibilities to which they give rise arise within the parameters of cosmopolitan egalitarianism itself. The real tension is not between cosmopolitan equality and special responsibilities, but between special responsibilities and the various general duties that arise from the recognition, demanded by cosmopolitan egalitarianism, of a multiplicity of other basic goods. Indeed, even the recognition of special relationships itself gives rise to general duties that may condition and/or weigh against putative special responsibilities. (shrink)

In this paper, I demonstrate that the category of Schein in Hegel’s Science of Logic expresses the structure of ideology in general, and specifically the ideology of equality and freedom in capitalism. To this aim, I motivate Marx’s mature critique of political economy in Capital and the Grundrisse. I argue that while the semblance of equality is false and misleading, it is constitutive of the essence of capitalism. This implies that domination in capitalism does not exclude equality, but requires it. (...) In particular, I argue that the structure of domination generates equality as its own necessary moment. The paper shows, on the one hand, how a close study of Hegel’s Logic is helpful for understanding the structure of capitalism, and on the other hand, how reading Hegel’s Logic through Marx can help in unveiling its social import. (shrink)

Liberal nationalists advance two claims: (1) an empirical claim that nationalism is functionally indispensable to the viability of liberal democracy (because it is necessary to social integration) and (2) a normative claim that some forms of nationalism are compatible with liberal democratic norms. The empirical claim is often supported, against postnationalists’ view that social integration can bypass ethnicity and nationality, by pointing to the inevitable ethnic and cultural particularities of all political institutions. I argue that (1) the argument that ethno-cultural (...) particularity demonstrates the need for nationalist integration depends on an implausible reification of national identity at the level of social theory, and that (2) this reification ironically serves to undermine liberal nationalists’ normative claim. (shrink)

Overview of "Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics" to kick off online colloquium on book, with responses by Sandra Field, Michael LeBuffe, and Daniel Eggers, ending with reply from Arash Abizadeh.

The susceptibility of Habermas' socio-political theory to the charge of motivational impotence can be traced to a problem in the way in which he conceives of discursive practical reason. By implicitly constructing the notion of discursive rationality in contrast to, and in abstraction from, the rhetorical and affective components of language use, Habermas' notion of discursive practical reason ends up reiterating the same binaries — between reason and passion, abstract and concrete, universal and particular — that provide the tacit parameters (...) used by his critics to motivate the charge of impotence. Habermas' project of reconciling social integration and political rule with freedom can succeed only by rebuilding his discourse -ethical theory of politics upon a notion of discursive practical reason that overcomes these philosophy/rhetoric binaries common to both camps. Key Words: communicative action • constitutional patriotism • discourse ethics • Jürgen Habermas • practical reason • rhetoric. (shrink)

There are two rival conceptions of power in modern sociopolitical thought. According to one, all social power reduces to power-over-others. According to another, the core notion is power-to-effect-outcomes, to which even power-over reduces. This article defends seven theses. First, agential social power consists in a relation between agent and outcomes (power-to). Second, not all social power reduces to power-over and, third, the contrary view stems from conflating power-over with a distinct notion: power-despite-resistance. Fourth, the widespread assumption that social power presupposes (...) the capacity to overcome resistance is false: social power includes the capacity to effect outcomes with others’ assistance. Fifth, power-with can be exercised via joint intentional action, strategic coordination and non-strategic coordination. Sixth, agential social power is best analysed as a capacity to effect outcomes, with the assistance of others, despite the resistance of yet others. Seventh, power-over and power-with are not mutually exclusive: each can ground the other. (shrink)

Cultural-nationalist and democratic theory both seek to legitimize political power via collective self-rule: their principle of legitimacy refers right back to the very persons over whom political power is exercised. But such self-referential theories are incapable of jointly solving the distinct problems of legitimacy and boundaries, which they necessarily combine, once it is assumed that the self-ruling collectivity must be a pre-political, in-principle bounded, ground of legitimacy. Cultural nationalism claims that political power is legitimate insofar as it expresses the nation’s (...) pre-political culture, but it cannot fix cultural-national boundaries pre-politically. Hence the collapse into ethnic nationalism. Traditional democratic theory claims that political power is legitimized pre-politically, but cannot itself legitimize the boundaries of the people. Hence the collapse into cultural nationalism. Only once we recognize that the demos is in principle unbounded, and abandon the quest for a pre-political ground of legitimacy, can democratic theory fully avoid this collapse of demos into nation into ethnos. But such a theory departs radically from traditional theory. (shrink)

According to the special-obligations challenge to the justice argument for more open borders, immigration restrictions to wealthier polities are justified because of special obligations owed to disadvantaged compatriots negatively impacted by the immigration of low-skilled foreign workers. We refute the special-obligations challenge by refuting its empirical premise and draw out the normative implications of the empirical evidence for border policies. We show that immigration to wealthier polities has negligible impact on domestic wages and that only previous cohorts of immigrants are (...) adversely affected. The special-obligations challenge therefore succeeds only if special obligations owed to previous immigrants justify closing borders to further immigration; we argue that they do not. (shrink)