Speaking to the People: Critchley,Rousseau and the Deficit in Practical Rationality

Abstract

This article considers Critchley's Infinitely Demanding and his essay "The Catechism of the Citizen" in relation to the theory-practice debate and the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It considers what these texts say about the relation between politics and religion on one hand and reason and sensuousness on the other. The focus is the way the latter text takes up a quasi-religious response to the motivational deficit in secular liberal democratic life thematized in Infinitely Demanding.     

Individual integrity,freedom of association and religious exemption

ABSTRACT

Of the many questions Cécile Laborde addresses in her magisterial Liberalism’s Religion, several relate to what she describes as ‘the puzzle of exemptions’. I examine some of the issues raised by her efforts to solve that puzzle: whether her ideal of moral integrity squares with the nature of religious belief; whether we should find the case for collective religious exemptions in freedom of association and the ‘coherence interests’ of associations; how much significance we should give to the ‘competence interests’ of organised religions; and by which criteria we should assess individual claims to religious exemption.     

Trade Winds: NAFTA and the Rational Public

The sharp increase in suppport for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) poses a challenge to many of our conceptions of public opinion. Most large shifts in public opinion follow major events. Based on models estimated from the September to November NBC News/ Wall Street Journal surveys, I show this was not the case with respect to public opinion on NAFTA. Instead, the increase in support for the pact reflected a slower response to a public debate over the merits of free trade versus protectionism. As the debate proceeded, large segments of the public— including the least interested—developed more highly constrained belief systems. By the end of the public discourse, the most and least interested citizens both linked attitudes on the merits of trade to their positions on NAFTA and to their evaluations of the elites on each side of the issue. People made up their minds on NAFTA on the basis of arguments about trade, not about their own self-interest. The NAFTA case suggests that there may be a rational public at the individual level after all, even among people who may not usually be interested in public affairs.     

Sustaining Peace One Day at a Time: Inclusion,Transition Crises,and the Resilience of Social Contracts

ABSTRACT

This article argues that inclusion is a key driver of resilient social contracts and a foundation for sustaining peace. Drawing on case studies conducted under the Forging Resilient Social Contracts project and building on the literature on transitions from war to peace and authoritarianism to democracy, the theoretical framework links inclusion to peace sustainability. Interrogating how and why processes of inclusion matter, we argue that resilient social contracting is driven by elite inclusion, societal inclusion and their interactions. Four case-studies illustrate the arguments. Resilient social contracting, findings suggest, allows countries to weather crises and survive to ‘transition another day’.     

Enoch Powell's appeal to the left

The campaign against the so‐called ‘ritual slaughter’ of animals has been hijacked by right‐wing extremists, including members of the National Front, in a bid to incite racial intolerance of Muslims and Jews. The arguments and the terminology used by some animal rights supporters, including the well‐known national organization, Compassion in World Farming, tend to encourage xenophobia and racism, engendering an ‘us’ and ‘them’ approach to the animal rights debate.     

Cognitive Biases and the Strength of Political Arguments

Competition in political debate is not always sufficient to neutralize the effects of political rhetoric on public opinion. Yet little is known about the factors that shape the persuasiveness of political arguments. In this article, I consider whether cognitive biases influence the perceived strength of political arguments, making some arguments more persuasive than others. Lessons from neurobiology and recent political psychology research on emotion lead to the expectation that individuals are more likely to be persuaded by political arguments that evoke loss aversion via a fearful response—even in the face of a counterargument. Evidence from two experiments corroborates this expectation. I consider the normative implications of these empirical findings and potential avenues for future research.     

Flourishing children,flourishing adults: families,equality and the neutralism-perfectionism debate

Abstract

Political philosophers are divided on the question of whether society should guide individuals in their projects and goals in light of the competing, yet overlapping, values of moral independence and human well-being. The lively neutralism-perfectionism debate appears to be significantly muted, however, when it comes to children who, all parties assume, should be guided by adults in their plans of life. Thus, in their stimulating new book, Family Values: the Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships, liberals Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift affirm the role of the family in directing and enabling children’s flourishing. My paper challenges this distinction between parents and children in the liberal position to argue that the idea that it is appropriate to direct children to enable them to flourish, entails in fact, a commitment to policies that promote and enable the flourishing of all.     

Idleness,Usefulness and Self-Constitution

Abstract

The core argument of the paper is that the modern philosophical notion of self-constitution is directed against the prospect of human beings dissolving into idleness. Arguments for self-constitution are marked by non-philosophical presuppositions about the value of usefulness. Those arguments also assume a particular conception of superior experience as conscious integration of a person’s actions within an identifiable set of chosen commitments. Exploring particular arguments by Hegel, Kant, Korsgaard and Frankfurt the paper claims that those arguments are problematic in the various ways in which they suppose usefulness and explicitly or implicitly take extra-philosophical views of idleness.     

Religion and discrimination: extending the ‘disaggregative approach’

ABSTRACT

Cécile Laborde’s disaggregation strategy, which is convincingly applied to religion, liberal neutrality, and freedom of association, should be extended to discrimination, in order to more systematically determine whether, when, and why indirect religious discrimination is unfair. Moreover, while Laborde’s distinction between the ‘Disproportionate Burden scenario’ and the ‘Majority Bias scenario’ is a powerful alternative to the discrimination-focused account of the justifiability of religious exemptions, the epistemic status of that distinction is not immediately clear. A case can be made that Disproportionate Burden and Majority Bias do not map onto different types of minority exemption claims. They are perspectives or analytical frames that may jointly and usefully be applied to most instances of such claims.     

Migrants’ inhabiting through commoning and state enclosures. A postface

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I deploy the framework of commons as social systems which I have developed in my last book Omnia Sunt Communia to interpret the debate developed in this issue, enquire on the relationship between commons and citizenship, and ground the question of migrants’ inhabiting on the theory of commoning.     

Skinhead culture: the ideologies,mythologies, religions and conspiracy theories of racist skinheads

ABSTRACT

Groups of racist skinheads now constitute a significant element of the global radical right. The British youth subculture of the late 1960s has thus been transformed into a worldwide social movement, the violent cutting-edge of white supremacist resistance to multiculturalism. Pollard examines the historical development of the racist skinhead phenomenon and, in particular, analyses the origins, nature and development of the ideas that inspire it: the foundational myth; ‘skinhead, a way of life’; Odinism or paganism; the skinhead as victim; skinheads as a vanguard of white, male, working-class revolutionaries; National Socialism and antisemitism; and, above all, racialism.     

Waging Lawfare: Law,Environment and Depoliticization in Neoliberal Australia

ABSTRACT

When environmental NGOs in Australia successfully sued the nation’s environment minister in August 2015 to temporarily withhold environmental approval for Australia’s largest coal mine, the ruling Coalition government accused environmentalists of waging “lawfare.” Through a critical discourse analysis of Parliamentary debate and media coverage, this article explores the lawfare battles fought in Australia in 2015, arguing that these were a site of depoliticization, in Mouffe’s (2005, Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the Political. Abingdon: Routledge) sense of the term. By exploring how the question of legal regulation of coal mining was rationalized, moralized, and stripped of significant political or ideological differences, this seeks to add to our understanding of processes of depoliticization by considering metadiscourses concerning “the law.”     

Global democracy and feasibility

ABSTRACT

While methodological and metatheoretical questions pertaining to feasibility have been intensively discussed in the philosophical literature on justice in recent years, these discussions have not permeated the debate on global democracy. The overall aim of this article is to demonstrate the fruitfulness of importing some of the advancements made in this literature into the debate on global democracy, as well as to develop aspects that are relevant for explaining the role of feasibility in normative political theory. This is done by pursuing two arguments. First, to advance the work on the role of feasibility, we suggest as intuitively plausible two metatheoretical constraints on normative political theorizing – the ‘fitness constraint’ and the ‘functional constraint’ – which elucidate a number of aspects relevant in determining proper feasibility constraints for an account in political theory. Secondly, to illustrate the usefulness of this feasibility framework, we sketch an account of global democracy consisting of normative principles which respond differently to these aspects and thus are tied to different feasibility constraints as well as exemplify how it may be applied in practice.     

Alan Patten’s theory of equal recognition and its contribution to the debate over multiculturalism

In this introduction, we first give a brief overview of the debate over multiculturalism in political theory. We then situate Alan Patten’s Equal Recognition in that context by highlighting his major normative thesis, according to which there are reasons of principle, in a liberal democracy, to grant special forms of public recognition and accommodation to cultural minorities. Finally, we present a succinct summary of the nine articles that follow this introduction and that critically engage with Patten’s arguments.     

A Pragmatist Critique of Liberal Epistemology

Abstract

This paper wrestles with the issue of the place of comprehensive beliefs within the public space. It tries to strike a middle path between the liberal ban on comprehensive beliefs and the anti-liberal claim that comprehensive beliefs should be given full pride of place in public deliberations. The article relies on arguments that are inspired by the pragmatist tradition. It starts locating the main cause of failures at articulating comprehensive beliefs and public reason in a central feature of liberal epistemology, namely the way it conceives public reason via a preliminary distinction between public and non-public beliefs. After criticizing this distinction, the article introduces a distinction between the normative practice of justification and the normative practice of adjudication as a more perspicuous way to establish the place that comprehensive beliefs should play within political forums. It then concludes showing that this approach provides a satisfying answer to the issue of the public role of comprehensive beliefs in a liberal democratic regime that is respectful of citizens’ thick identities while at the same time complying with the requirements of respect set by the liberal tradition.     

On representation(s): art,violence and the political imaginary of South Africa

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to explore the multiple layers of representation which occur in the South Africa Pavilion at the Art Biennale in Venice in order to understand how they constitute and affect the state’s political imaginary. By analysing three artworks (David Koloane’s The Journey, Sue Williamson’s For thirty years next to his heart, and Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases) which were exhibited in the 2013 Pavilion, two key arguments emerge: 1) in this context artistic representation can be understood as a form of political representation; and, 2) these artists are simultaneously state and citizenry representatives. A tension emerges between the political imaginary desired by the South African state and the political imaginary enacted by its representatives. The article draws on seven months of participant observation fieldwork at the Biennale, which involved 76 interviews with people associated with the South Africa Pavilion, including government representatives, exhibition organisers, artists, and visitors. Part I explores the concept of representation in order to establish the two philosophical trajectories (political and artistic) with which this article engages – with particular reference to Michael Saward’s framework of the representative claim. Part II explores the multiple representative claims which the three artists and their artworks enact.

Abbreviations: Biennale: Venice Art Biennale; DAC: Department of Arts and Culture; For thirty years: For thirty years next to his heart, by Sue Williamson; TRC: Truth and Reconciliation Commission; US: United States of America     

Laborde’s religion

ABSTRACT

Cécile Laborde’s Liberalism’s Religion proposes liberal principles to address political controversies over religion. One is the public reason requirement that reasons for state policies should be accessible. Another is the civic inclusiveness requirement according to which symbolic religious establishment is wrong when it communicates that religious identity is a component of civic identity. A third is the claim that liberal states have meta-jurisdictional authority to settle the boundary between what counts as religion and what counts as non-religion. The article considers whether Laborde has managed to articulate these three principles in a way that is operationalisable and can serve to provide solutions to practical controversies over religion. It is argued that Laborde’s formulations leave important issues open, and some ways of settling these issues are considered.     

On Sugar,Capitalism, and Socialism

Elinor G. K. Melville: A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994

Douglas Murray: Cultivating Crisis: The Human Cost of Pesticides in Latin America ,Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994

Wes Jackson: Becoming Native to this Place . Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1994.

Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello: Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction From Ground Up .Boston: South End Press, 1994.

Wolfgang Sachs, editor: Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict . London and New Jersey: Zed Books and Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 1993.

John Walton: Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture, and Rebellion in California . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992.

Brendan Prendiville: Environmental Politics in France . Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1994.     

Nonalienation among peoples: Symposium on Catherine Lu’s Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics

ABSTRACT

This contribution gives an appreciation of Catherine Lu’s book Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics and introduces some concepts and motifs, themes and arguments that play a role in the discussion by the three commentators Reinhard Wolf, Alasia Nuti, and Kimberly Hutchings in this book symposium. The discussion adds to the development of the categories of structural injustice, alienation, and reconciliation, and especially of the systematic relations among them. I conclude that the notion of nonalienation as reconciliation in world order will be worth investigating even independently of questions of historical injustice.