The Professors on Public Life

Many academics misunderstand public life and the conditions under which policy is made. This article examines misconceptions in three major academic traditions—policy as science (e.g., ‘evidence‐based policy’), normative political theory, and the mini‐public school of deliberative democracy—and argues that the practical implications of each of these traditions are limited by their partial, shallow and etiolated vision of politics. Three constitutive features of public life, competition, publicity and uncertainty, compromise the potential of these traditions to affect in any fundamental way the practice of politics. Dissatisfaction with real existing democracy is not the consequence of some intellectual or moral failure uniquely characteristic of the persona publica, and attempts to reform it are misdirected to the extent that they imagine a better public life modeled on academic ideals.     

The Presence of Tragedy

Abstract

This paper argues that modernity can only be properly understood when tragedy is viewed as one of the conditions internal to it. Modernity and tragedy are not mutually exclusive, as Hegel and Schlegel, for example both argue, but mutually inclusive. Each is determined by the other—as tragic modernity and as modern tragedy.     

Democracy in an Age of Tragedy: Democracy,Tragedy and Paradox

Abstract

Democracy and tragedy captured a delicate poise in ancient Athens. While many today perceive democracy as a finite, unquestionable and almost procedural form of governance that glorifies equality and liberty for their own sake, the Athenians saw it as so much more. Beyond the burgeoning equality and liberty, which were but fronts for a deeper goal, finitude, unimpeachability and procedural norms were constantly contradicted by boundlessness, subversion and disarray. In such a world, where certainty and immortality were luxuries beyond the reach of humankind, tragedy gave comfort and inspired greatness. The purpose of this article is to draw explicit links between democracy, tragedy and paradox. Given that tragedy's political ascendancy coincided with the birth of democracy in ancient Athens, we may assume that democracy was somehow, if not implicitly, tragic. But what was it that made democracy and tragedy speak so intimately to each other and to the Athenians who created them? The answer, at least the one which this article entertains, is paradox.     

Normative behaviourism as a solution to four problems in realism and non-ideal theory

ABSTRACT

This article advances the case for ‘normative behaviourism’ – a new way of doing political philosophy that tries to turn facts about observable patterns of behaviour, as produced by different political systems, into grounds for specific political principles. This approach is applied to four distinct problems at the heart of the ideal/non-ideal theory and moralism/realism debates: (1) How to distinguish good from bad idealisations; (2) how to rank options of variable feasibility, cost, and danger; (3) how to distinguish legitimate acceptance of a given political system from acceptance based on coercion or false consciousness; and (4) how to translate abstract principles into concrete institutions. Objections against the general viability of normative behaviourism, and against the types of behaviour it tracks, are also considered.     

Idealism,realism, and immigration: David Miller’s Strangers in Our Midst

David Miller’s Strangers in Our Midst is an important contribution to the debate among political philosophers about how liberal democratic states should deal with the issue of migration. But it is also a thoughtful statement concerning how best to do political philosophy and, as such, contributes also to the growing debate within Anglo-American political theory about the relative merits of ‘ideal’ versus ‘non-ideal’ normative theorising. Miller’s argument in the book builds on his earlier published work in suggesting that political philosophy should be ‘for Earthlings’: it should not be understood as a process of ideal theorising which ignores political reality. He argues that normative theorists should seek to resolve complex political problems by taking seriously the political context that makes these problems complex, rather than putting aside that context in the interests of deriving first principles. This is a controversial approach, which requires political philosophers to take more seriously than they often do the expressed concerns of citizens living in democratic states and the practical problems associated with applying normative principles in ways which actually help address the issue at hand. This piece discusses some of these themes, and the issue of migration more generally, in order to help frame the debate which follows.     

Public Value and the Ideal State: Rescuing Public Value from Ambiguity

Public value theory has had its supporters and critics, with debate about the use of strategic management by public managers and confusion about the meaning of public value. This paper formalises Moore (1995) into a simple theory. That theory introduces the concept of an ‘ideal state.’ The ideal state is a simple means of describing and analysing public value, using a graphical presentation. In an ideal state roles are clear and public value is optimised. Insights from that ideal state are then applied to a more real world to clarify the nature of public value and to consider the appropriate use of strategic management by public servants. The conclusion is that public value theory provides some justification for strategic management, but the paper also demonstrates the limits to strategic management by officials.     

Kant and the critique of the ethics-first approach to politics

Abstract

Contemporary ‘realists’ attack the Kantian influence on political philosophy. A main charge is that Kantians fail to understand the specificity of politics and neglect to develop a ‘distinctively political thought’ that differs from moral philosophy. Instead, the critics say, Kantians are guilty of an ‘ethics-first approach to politics,’ in which political theory is a mere application of moral principles. But what does this ethics-first approach have to do with Kant himself? Very little. This article shows how Kant’s approach to political theory at a fundamental level includes political institutions, power, and coercion as well as disagreement, security, and coordination problems. In contrast to realists, Kant has a fundamental principle, which can explain why and guide how we ought to approach the political question, namely the norm of equal freedom. Yet, Kant’s theory does not take the form of a moralistic ought addressed to the isolated individual, but concerns a problem that we share as interdependent beings and that requires common institutions. The fruitfulness of the Kantian approach, then, is that it can take the political question seriously without being uncritical of actual politics and power, and that it can be normative without being moralistic.     

Autonomy,Reflexivity, Tragedy: Notions of Democracy in Camus and Castoriadis

Abstract

This paper looks at two 20th century theories of tragedy: those of Cornelius Castoriadis and Albert Camus. The theories that each proffer of this ancient cultural form are striking. Against more standard views, both theorists stress that tragedy is a cultural form that has only arisen historically in cultures whose forms of religious thought have been laid open to question. In this way, both argue that tragedy is an important democratic cultural form, which stages the confrontation between a no longer unquestionable divine order, and human autonomy. The intent of the paper, from the start, is a political one. It wants to place Camus alongside Castoriadis as a ‘post-Marxist’ thinker, who belongs meaningfully to what Dick Howard has called ‘the Marxian legacy’. More than this, it aims to do this by staging Camus' theorisation of tragedy, with Castoriadis', as a powerful riposte to the conservative criticism of democracy as a modern political form, that is, that it cannot muster sacral cultural forms forceful enough to meaningfully unite people beneath its banner.     

公共管理运动中的理性主义批判

公共管理运动是20世纪70年代后发展起来并产生广泛影响的政府治理理论和运动。它为政府改革和公共行政学研究提供了新的思路。然而，由于其理论和实践标准是建立在理性主义基础之上，因此公共管理运动存在着许多值得反思和批判的缺陷：对人性的认识的偏颇；对市场机制的过分崇拜以及不恰当的顾客比喻等。这些缺陷使得公共管理运动只能成为公共行政学研究的一个视角，而不能成为其替代模式。     

When the State Takes Over a Life: The Public Guardian as Public Administrator

Public guardians are appointed by the state to meet the needs of incapacitated citizens when no other willing or responsible surrogate decision maker exists. These public administrators, who live the decisional life of another citizen, need meaningful controls and accountability because of the great private and public authority that is entrusted to them. A review of program documents, interviews with public guardians and their program supervisors, and participant observations revealed complex roles for the public guardian: service monitor, service broker, client advocate, surrogate decision maker, and relationship architect. Because of the multiplicity of roles and few controls on their actions, public guardians' accountability should first be drawn from mechanical mechanisms (for instance, thorough audits and sanctions for infractions), but a second and necessary control is the principles of public administration, which are grounded in normative values and democratic governance.     

Assessing Material and Symbolic Variations in Punctuated Equilibrium and Public Policy Output Patterns

Numerous researchers have confirmed sharp and punctuated policy change. Newer findings in U.S. forest policy in the Pacific Northwest and U.S. state tobacco policy have found largely nonpunctuated changes. What are the implications for punctuated equilibrium theory? U.S. state tobacco policy‐making from 1990 to 2006 indicates a wide variety of nonpunctuated policy output patterns including: linear and constant, gently oscillating and increasing, linear and increasing, and linear and constant and then nonexponentially increasing. All nonpunctuated policies resulted in symbolic policy output change except state tobacco licensing, higher tobacco taxes, and enactment of clean indoor air legislation, which resulted in partially material and partially symbolic policy output change. Emerging from this research is a new public policy model based on social policy realism. Public policy output change can be quite complex, sometimes punctuated and sometimes not, reflecting the balance of power between sometimes competing and cooperating interest groups.     

读《20年危机(1919—1939)国际关系研究导论》——思和谐世界观

理想主义和现实主义作为国际政治理论中两大学派观点迥异,争论不休。本文首先考查了国际政治理论争论中的一个基本问题:理想与现实的矛盾。以此为基础,阐述了和谐世界观超越西方国际政治理论的特质。最后,概括出本文的结论:和谐世界观不仅调和了国际政治理论的冲突,而且超越了理想主义与现实主义的狭隘,为解决国际争端与冲突,维护国际和平提供了可能。     

Thinking with Flint: Racial Liberalism and the Roots of an American Water Tragedy

The lead poisoning of Flint, Michigan’s water is popularly framed as a case of “environmental racism” given that Flint’s population is mostly black and lower income. In this essay I argue that we see the environmental racism that underlies Flint’s water poisoning not as incidental to our political-economic order, nor even as stemming from racist intent, but as inseparable from liberalism, an organizing logic we take for granted in our modern age. I expand on the idea of “racial liberalism” here. While upholding the promise of individual freedoms and equality for all, racial liberalism—particularly as it was translated into urban renewal and property making in mid-20th-century urban America—drove dispossession. In Flint racialized property dispossession has been one major factor underlying the city’s financial duress, abandonment, and poisoned infrastructure. Yet, through austerity discourse, Flint is disciplined as if it were a financially reckless individual while the structural and historical causes of its duress are masked. Tracing the history of property making and taking in Flint and the effects of austerity urbanism on its water infrastructure, my central argument is that our understanding of Flint’s predicament—the disproportionate poisoning of young African-Americans—can be deepened if we read it as a case of racial liberalism’s illiberal legacies.     

Fact-sensitive political theory

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to argue for the importance of attention to facts in normative theorising. I discuss the problems that arise from both not displaying such attention (as some idealists do) and from doing so in the wrong way (as, for example, realists do). I propose a different brand of theorising – fact-sensitive political theory, which aims to avoid these two problems by paying attention to key facts while retaining a solid normative anchoring in abstract normative principles. The merit of abstract vs. non-abstract reasoning is that the normative debate is not torn between two distinct ends of a spectrum in the way the idealist–realist debate is. By contrast, the locus of the investigations is vertical in the sense that abstract and concrete normative discussions are given equal status and can co-exist compatibly. One of the main differences between abstract and concrete normative principles is whether abstract or concrete facts are considered necessary for the determination of the normative principles. The fact-sensitive account of normativity is neither realist nor non-ideal: it is an ambitious and demanding normative theory that contains both abstract and concrete normative reasoning. The fact-sensitive account of political theory meets the two criteria set out in this article: to integrate concrete and empirical facts about the subject matter and to subject the selection of facts to theoretical and methodological discussion and justification.     

Coming to Grips with Realism

Retrieving Realism renders the joint philosophical goals of Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor into what is probably their final and most concise form. It has two main objectives: first, it aims to deconstruct the mediationalism that undergirds Western philosophy, and second, it endorses contact theory, or embodied/embedded coping, as an alternative. In this essay, I present the book’s most salient themes and reveal areas that are ripe for further philosophical consideration. I also direct the reader to the work’s genuine ontological challenge: how to come to grips with contact theory beyond the borders of epistemology.     

Democracy and the limits of political realism

ABSTRACT

This article explores the recent resurgence of realism in the political sciences, questioning its relevance for democratic theory. Starting from a critical review of recent works in the field, the article calls into question the relevance of empirical investigations of political reality for normative theorizing, and contends that some of the normative conclusions advanced in this literature are not warranted. More precisely, the article questions the reliability of studies of political behavior and of political opinion as a sound basis on which to draw normative inferences about democratic legitimacy. It contends that the kind of epistemic realism their authors promote cannot deliver what it promises. The article concludes by proposing an alternative interpretation of the democratic principle as a practical postulate of political reason that reconciles empirical evidence about political behavior with the classical interpretation of democratic legitimacy.     

国际关系理论与实践:研究邓小平外交思想的新视角

本文从几种国际关系主流理论对外交决策的要求出发,分析了邓小平外交决策和外交思想是如何适应国际关系发展规律的。传统现实主义、新现实主义、自由制度主义等理论提出了国际体系中影响国家对外政策中的不同关键因素,反映着国际关系的总体要求。邓小平外交思想就是这样一种理性的、符合中国国情和国际体系要求的思想结晶。     

让廉洁成为社会生活中强大的文化力量

社会发展，民族振兴，既需要物质“硬实力”，也需要文化“软实力”，当前廉政文化建设的深入开展有助于形成一种廉洁的社会环境，极大地提高我国的文化力量。在反腐倡廉建设中，仅强调制度健全还不够，要从自律意识、文化氛围、社会环境等方面着手，让廉洁成为一种社会风貌，一种生活方式，以解决源头防腐的根本问题。领导干部应起到示范作用，从小事做起，从身边人管起，牢记为人民服务的宗旨，万事民为先，在广大群众中树立威信和良好形象，保障国家的长治久安与繁荣富强。     

The Tragedy of Liberal Diplomacy: Democratization,Intervention, Statebuilding (Part I)

Since the end of the Cold War, democracy promotion, intervention and statebuilding have once again been explicit features of American foreign policy. Current assessments of this return, however, overlook both their longer term history and their roots in liberal (and not just American) ideology. The contradictions and dynamics entailed in the liberal philosophy of history have already played themselves out once before, in the modernization theories and policies of the early Cold War period. Despite their academic and political failures at the time, the same assumptions now underpin democracy promotion in the post-Cold War period and show signs of the same dynamics of failure. In this two part essay, I argue that the repetition of such counterproductive policies constitutes a recurring ‘tragedy of liberal diplomacy’ in which the shaping of US foreign policy by assumptions deeply rooted in the liberal philosophy of history plays a central part in producing the very enemies that policy is designed to confront and transform.