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"Social and political philosophy"
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Ideal and Nonideal Theory
One of the many distinctions introduced in John Rawls's monumental work, A Theory of Justice, was that between the ideal and the nonideal theories of justice. Like many of Rawls's dichotomies, this one has come to frame much subsequent discussion in moral and political philosophy, and use of the Rawlsian terminology has become perfectly commonplace. Here, Simmons examines some possible alternative approaches to the ideal-nonideal distinction and suggests some reasons for favoring the Rawlsian approach.
Journal Article
Of rule and office : Plato's ideas of the political
\"In this book, Melissa Lane argues that the concept of political office should be central to our understanding of Greek politics and political theory. Yet discussions of the Greeks tend to focus on courts and assemblies, or at most, on lottery as a means of selecting officeholders - without thinking about their powers of command or about how they were held accountable. Meanwhile, discussions of Plato's Republic and Statesman tend to ignore the profound extent to which his understanding of politics was articulated in terms of the vocabulary and practice of officeholding, on the one hand, and an interrogation of whether these were adequate to a full understanding of ruling, on the other. In The Origins of Political Office: Ancient Greek Ideas of Ruling and Being Ruled, based on the 2018 Carlyle Lectures at the University of Oxford, Melissa Lane explores public office as a principal building block of Greek political ideas that lies at the intersection of command and accountability. In this way, she argues, the normative conception of office was not a form of absolute rule, but rather always constrained by the ruled, who held them accountable through elections and various forms of review. In return, the ruled gave up some of their freedom by agreeing to obey their rulers. Lane weaves together the role played by this understanding of office in key historical moments, especially but not only in Athens, with its use and rethinking by the philosophers particularly Plato. She does so with novel attention to the absence and abuse of office in various dimensions: from anarchy to tyranny. The book offers a path-breaking interpretation of the relationship between office-holding and ruling, of the meaning of ruling and being ruled, and of the significance of office in political theory and practice both in ancient Greece and with reference to today\"-- Provided by publisher
BOOK
Perfectionist Liberalism and Political Liberalism
Perfectionist liberalism is a type of liberal political view by Isaiah Berlin that spells out a set of controversial metaphysical and ethical doctrines concerning the nature of value and the good life, and then goes on to recommend political principles built upon these values. Joseph Raz took Berlin's formulations, which were compressed and allusive, and developed ideas with more clarity. The major liberal alternative to Berlin's and Raz's theories is the view called political liberalism, developed by Charles Larmore and John Rawls. The author compares and contrasts these political philosophies. Adapted from the source document.
Journal Article
An Africana philosophy of temporality : homo liminalis
This book is a timely intervention in the areas of philosophy, history, and literature. As an exploration of the modern political order and its racial genealogy, it emerges at a moment when scholars and activists alike are wrestling with how to understand subject formation from the perspective of the subordinated rather than from dominant social and philosophical modes of thought. For Sawyer, studying the formation of racialized subjects requires a new imagining of marginalized subjects. Black subjectivity is not viewed from the static imaginings of social death, alienation, ongoing abjection, or as a confrontation with the treat of oblivion. Sawyer innovates the term \"fractured temporality,\" conceptualizing Black subjects as moving within and across temporalities in transition, incorporated, yet excluded, marked with the social death of Atlantic slavery and the emergent political orders it etched, and still capable of exerting revolutionary force that acts upon, against, and through racial oppression.
Book
American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization
Neoliberalism and neoconservatism are two distinct political rationalities in the contemporary United States. They have few overlapping formal characteristics, and even appear contradictory in many respects. Yet they converge not only in the current presidential administration but also in their de-democratizing effects. Their respective devaluation of political liberty, equality, substantive citizenship, and the rule of law in favor of governance according to market criteria on the one side, and valorization of state power for putatively moral ends on the other, undermines both the culture and institutions of constitutional democracy. Above all, the two rationalities work symbiotically to produce a subject relatively indifferent to veracity and accountability in government and to political freedom and equality among the citizenry.
Journal Article
Rhetoric and the Public Sphere: Has Deliberative Democracy Abandoned Mass Democracy?
The pathologies of the democratic public sphere, first articulated by Plato in his attack on rhetoric, have pushed much of deliberative theory out of the mass public and into the study and design of small scale deliberative venues. The move away from the mass public can be seen in a growing split in deliberative theory between theories of democratic deliberation (on the ascendancy) which focus on discrete deliberative initiatives within democracies and theories of deliberative democracy (on the decline) that attempt to tackle the large questions of how the public, or civil society in general, relates to the state. Using rhetoric as the lens through which to view mass democracy, this essay argues that the key to understanding the deliberative potential of the mass public is in the distinction between deliberative and plebiscitary rhetoric.
Journal Article
The aesthetico-political : the question of democracy in Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, and Rancière
\"This study uses new arguments to reinvestigate the relation between aesthetics and politics in the contemporary debates on democratic theory and radical democracy. First, Carl Schmitt and Claude Lefort help delineate the contours of an aesthetico-political understanding of democracy, which is developed further by studying Merleau-Ponty, Rancière, and Arendt. The ideas of Merleau-Ponty serve to establish a general \"ontological\" framework that aims to contest the dominant currents in contemporary democratic theory. It is argued that Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, and Rancière share a general understanding of the political as the contingently contested spaces and times of appearances. However, the articulation of their thought leads to reconsider and explore under-theorized as well as controversial dimensions of their work. This search for new connections between the political and the aesthetic thought of Arendt and Merleau-Ponty on one hand and the current widespread interest in Rancière's aesthetic politics on the other make this book a unique study that will appeal to anyone who is interested in political theory and contemporary continental philosophy\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders
The question of whether 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.
Journal Article