Cosmopolitanism and Democracy

GBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup('ISBN:9780748638819'); This book explores Kant's cosmopolitanism and the normative requirements consistent with a Kantian based cosmopolitan constitution. Topics such as cosmopolitan law, cosmopolitan right, the laws of hospitality, a Kantian federation of states, a cosmopolitan epistemology of culture and a possible normative basis for a Kantian form of global distributive justice are explored and defended. Contrary to many contemporary interpretations, Brown considers Kant's cosmopolitan thought as a form of international constitutional jurisprudence that requires minimal legal demands versus the extreme condition of establishing a world state. Viewing Kant's cosmopolitan theory as a minimal form of global jurisprudence allows it to satisfy communitarian, realist and pluralist concerns without surrendering cosmopolitan principles of human worth and cosmopolitan law. In this regard, it provides a more comprehensive understanding of Kantian cosmopolitanism and what normative implications this vision has for contemporary international political theory. Key Features Outlines the various positions within Kant's cosmopolitanism and examines their interrelated themes and conclusions Defends a Kantian cosmopolitan position against its most profound critics Argues for the contemporary and interdisciplinary relevance of Kant's cosmopolitan thought and its importance for understanding and resolving current global concerns "

The term ‘political legitimacy’ is unfortunately ambiguous. One serious source of confusion is the failure to distinguish clearly between political legitimacy and political authority and to conflate political authority with authoritativeness. I will distinguish between (1) political legitimacy, (2) political authority, and (3) authoritativeness. I will also articulate two importantly different variants of the notion of political authority. Having drawn these distinctions, I will argue first that political legitimacy, rather than political authority, is the more central notion for a theory of the morality of political power. My second main conclusion will be that where democratic authorization of the exercise of political power is possible, only a democratic government can be legitimate. Another ambiguity is also a source of confusion. Sometimes it is unclear whether ‘legitimacy’ is being used in a descriptive or a normative sense. In this article I am concerned exclusively with legitimacy in the normative sense, not with the conditions under which an entity is believed to be legitimate. However, a normative account of legitimacy is essential for a descriptive account. Unless one distinguishes carefully between political legitimacy, political authority, and authoritativeness, one will not be clear about what beliefs in legitimacy are beliefs about.

Political Animals Revisited

This paper aims to advocate a Williamsian approach to political realism and contends that contemporary realist political theory is built on an ‘a-theoretical core’ that the paper will call ‘political realism’ in the broader sense (for a very different approach to Williams, see Hall, 2013). The central tenet of this thesis is that contemporary realist political theory fundamentally differs from mainstream political theory not only in its political outlook, but also in its views about the tasks and prospects of theorizing. In other words, ‘political realism’ imposes severe constraints on theorizing in a realist key and makes contemporary realist political theory especially vulnerable to criticisms coming from mainstream political theory. This paper contends, however, that the inherent limitedness of contemporary realist political theory is a fair price that is worth paying for a more realistic understanding of politics.The argument of the paper is built on the Williamsian assumption that mainstream political theory is ultimately a sort of ‘applied morality’ and that the fundamental problem with mainstream political theory as ‘applied morality’ is not so much its strong commitment to pre-political moral principles as its being fundamentally shaped by an ethical theory.

Solidarity and Place-Making in Supranational Politics:A Review of Inés Valdez's Transnational Cosmopolitanism and Paulina Ochoa Espejo's On Borders Arturo Chang (bio) Inés Valdez. Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 228 pp. $105.00 (hc). ISBN: 9781108630047. Paulina Ochoa Espejo. On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 344 pp. $32.95 (pb). ISBN: 9780190074203. Recent debates in political theory have turned to supranational politics to better delineate spaces of collective resistance, emancipation, and solidarity. Beyond the international sphere, this supranational turn centers varied forms of place-based practices and spaces that frame political organizing—among these are transnational, hemispheric, convergent, and scalar approaches.1 The role of the nation-state and nation-led global order within these frameworks, however, remains in dispute. To what extent can theories of political solidarity and collective resistance truly decenter the nation-state given its dominance as an organizing and regulating institution? Similarly, questions remain regarding the respective commitments that political leaders, thinkers, and marginalized groups hold toward the nation-state as an emancipatory project. While the field has attended to these problems via the history of political thought and contemporary political theory, space remains for addressing them from a normative standpoint. Two recent books speak to this need in significant ways: Inés Valdez's Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft (2019) and Paulina Ochoa Espejo's On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place (2020). While Valdez and Ochoa Espejo respond to distinct, and sometimes contrasting political questions, both are invested in constructing a normative framework that can adjudicate between experiences of injustice as they manifest across state jurisdictions and within local, national, transnational, and territorial contexts. In this regard, putting Ochoa Espejo and Valdez in conversation provides a helpful account of where studies of supranational politics stand; further, their overlap reveals a need to attend to questions of place and place-making politics within these debates. Valdez's, Transnational Cosmopolitanism proposes a framework that transnationalizes cosmopolitan thought to better capture forms of "solidarity that contest the exclusionary structure of domestic and international realms of politics" of national spaces (1). In doing so, Valdez draws on W.E.B. Du Bois's writings on transnational solidarity among marginalized groups, which emphasize the "political craft" of building networks of commiseration via place-based politics—what Valdez calls the transnational "counter-public" (153). Transnational cosmopolitanism, however, also draws on neo-Kantian principles that [End Page 393] are themselves enmeshed in the domestic and international politics that subject marginalized groups to colonial and neocolonial power. Thus, as Valdez argues, transnational cosmopolitanism offers a "normative and theoretical problem" that questions to what extent neo-Kantian cosmopolitanism can be reimagined to account for solidarities which "facilitate emancipatory forms of political subjectivity, hospitable political exchanges, and coalition making that contest exclusionary forms" of governance (123). Transnational Cosmopolitanism embarks on the task of amending neo-Kantian cosmopolitanism and its privileging of Eurocentric notions of solidarity from the outset (6). In response to the limitations of Kantian and neo-Kantian cosmopolitanism, transnational cosmopolitanism proposes four changes in its approach to global politics (18–19). First, it accounts for the role of "heterogeneous racial structures of power" in grounding different forms of subjection across domestic, international, and transnational politics. Second, it aims to think beyond state and interstate politics by centering the "political craft" (18) of cosmopolitan solidarity that operates beyond these contexts. Third, it highlights identity-based coalitions that support "transnational counter-publics" (19) by pursuing emancipation from the margins. Fourth, transnational cosmopolitanism "transfigures extant understandings of cosmopolitanism, communication, and hospitality" through the "transnational and solidaristic political craft of subaltern actors" (19). Valdez aims to identify the "processes of will-formation" that allow coalitions to organize toward overcoming domination within domestic and international politics. Valdez's critique of Kantian and neo-Kantian cosmopolitanism comprises the first two chapters of the book. As Valdez shows through a contextualist account of the anticolonial principles behind Perpetual Peace in chapter 1, Kant's cosmopolitanism was committed to a civilizational and racial hierarchy (24). As such, Kant...

Developments in contemporary analytic political theory have called for political theory to situate itself near political science, to pay attention to political institutions, to follow the research output of the social sciences, and to present sensitivity to method. This empirical and methodological turn has brought about a debate regarding the form and desirability of such empirically grounded political theory. We aim, first, to clarify what the empirical turn in political theory implies for research in political theory. We shall situate such empirically grounded political theory in contemporary analytic political theory, in contemporary analytic political theory’s descriptive and prescriptive steps, and also examine how this turn complements contemporary analytic political theory’s evaluative step. Second, to suggest a defense of this empirical development, as if properly understood, it would assist empirically grounded contemporary analytic political theory to achieve its own stated goals. Third, to provide a template for a research design in empirical contemporary analytic political theory.

What does contemporary political theory have to learn from the recent outpouring of postcolonial writing? What aspects of the normative apparatus of contemporary liberal political theory, for example, are brought into focus and into question by postcolonial concerns and approaches? Despite the sometimes wilful obscurantism of postcolonial theorists, and a tendency to reduce complex arguments and traditions in political theory to easy slogans, I want to claim that there are enormously important and relevant issues at play in their work that deserve careful attention. They speak to some of the most pressing and distressing issues of our day. Namely, they are relevant to an understanding of the ‘politics of recognition’; the ‘bewildering landscape’ of demands for cultural recognition in late-modern political societies everywhere – north, south, east and west (Tully 1995: 2; Taylor et al. 1992; Young 1990; Kymlicka 1995). The demand for recognition is linked to questions of identity, whether on the part of an individual or a group. Identity is partially shaped, as well as misshaped, by recognition (or its absence) by others. The specific differences that are recognized (or not), and the particular ways in which they are, have very real consequences – political, economic and cultural – for the parties involved. Postcolonial theory, in part, attempts to map and make sense of the interdependencies and asymmetries between these differences and identities.

The Eyes of the People. Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship by Jeffrey Edward Green (2010) questions the hegemonic discourse prevailing in contemporary democratic theory according to which democracy is conceptualized as a vocal, decision- and law-centered form of government, and a dominant thread running throughout political thought over the last 150 years. On these bases, he juxtaposes two diverging conceptualizations of democratic life: the deliberative and the plebiscitary notions, the former based on the primacy of the voice, and the latter on the primacy of the eye. In particular, plebiscitary, ocular democracy relocates the object of popular power in the leader, rather than the law; its organ in the People's gaze, rather than its decision; its critical idea in leaders' candor (i.e., the institutional prerequisite of leaders not being in control of the conditions of their public activity) rather than the People's autonomy. As a result, Green conveys a post-representative and post-deliberative reading of mass democracy that aims at defending plebiscitarianism, both normatively and ethically. In the present paper I shall develop a critical analysis of Green's book and suggest that contemporary political theory should develop normative models for empowering popular sovereignty through a reconceptualization, rather than a dismissal, of representative politics.

The Principle of Fairness and Free-Rider Problems

Contents: Series preface Introduction Part I The Nature of Law and Justice: Law as a Kantian idea of reason, Ernest J. Weinrib Kant's theory of justice, Thomas W. Pogge (1988) Kant and human dignity, Joachim Hruschka. Part II Private Law: Freedom and constraint in Kant's metaphysical elements of justice, Katrin Flikschuh Kant's theory of property, Mary McGregor Kant's theory of contract, Sharon Byrd Part III Public Law: From anarchy to republic: Kant's history of state constitutions, Jan Joerden Kant's transcendental deduction of political authority, Kevin Thompson Kant on the state, law, and obedience to authority in the alleged 'anti-revolutionary' writings, Kenneth R. Westphal Kant on welfare, Mark LeBar. Part IV Criminal Law Kant's theory of punishment: deterrence in its threat, retribution in its execution, B. Sharon Byrd On the history of justification and excuse in cases of necessity, Joachim Hruschka Wrongdoing, desert, and punishment, Thomas E. Hill Jr . Part V International Law: Kant's idea of a world republic, Guiliano Marini The state as a 'moral person', B. Sharon Byrd Kant's just war theory, Brian Orend Kant, intervention and the 'failed state', Georg Cavallar and August Reinisch. Part VI Cosmopolitan Law: Justice and foreigners: Kant's cosmopolitan right, Sankar Muthu Kant's cosmopolitan patriotism, Pauline Kleingeld Bibliographies Indexes.

Reviewed by: The Reject: Community, Politics and Religion After the Subject by Irving Goh Kir Kuiken Goh, Irving. The Reject: Community, Politics and Religion After the Subject. Fordham University Press, 2015. 384 pp. It is rare these days to read a book as ambitious as Irving Goh's The Reject. Taking up the question that Jean-Luc Nancy posed in 1988—"Who comes after the subject?"—Goh's study proposes a theory of "the reject" as a crucial figure through which to reconceptualize modern critical and political theory's reliance on the centrality of the subject. Engaging in a reading that charts this figure through a range of contemporary French philosophers, the study simultaneously attempts to articulate how "the reject" might help to posit, as Goh puts it, "another ethics, another 'religion without religion,' and another politics, all 'without the subject'" (23). Not content merely to articulate a coherent theory of "the reject," Goh's study also attempts to suggest how such a figure might help us to revise our understanding of the political purchase of post-humanism, animal ethics, and network theory. This is a tall order for a single volume, and given all the touchstones it tries to include, the commentary stretches itself thin in places. Nevertheless, the book is highly provocative, striving as it does to invent a new conception of a politics without the subject. As such, it should interest a range of readers—from those interested in philosophy and religion, to readers of contemporary critical and political theory. Goh's study is divided into six chapters: the first introduces the project as a whole; chapters 2-4 (the backbone of the book) develop readings of "the reject" in contemporary theory; chapters 5-6 figure as a prolegomena for how "the reject" might be brought to bear on questions of "posthumanism," and a conclusion, respectively. The second chapter, "(After) Friendship, Love, and Community," attempts to uncover a theory of the reject in Derrida's Politics of Friendship, in Deleuze's thinking about community (specifically his conception of "nomadology") and in several of Cixous's texts from the 1990s. The chapters that follow, "The Reject and the 'Postsecular' or Who's Afraid of Religion" and "Prolegomenon to Reject-Politics: From Voyous to Becoming Animal," proceed to work out how the figure of "the reject" reorients the significance of the recent [End Page 107] so-called "religious turn" in French thought, and how it reimagines the nature of resistance in contemporary political theory. Goh's justification for concentrating on Derrida, Deleuze, and Cixous, centers on the way these authors all purportedly minimize the role of the subject. Though Goh also deals obliquely with Irigaray, Badiou, Balibar and Rancière, for example, these thinkers, he claims, all have conceptions of "the reject" that are repressed insofar as, for them, "the reject" is deployed only in order to re-imagine the nature of subjectivity. Goh's gambit, in other words, is to insist that "the reject" replaces the subject as the starting point for politics, religion, conceptions of the community, and so on. Rather than destabilize these concepts from within, "the reject" is presented as an alternative, a space or figure through and from which one can overcome tout court the role that the subject, however "destabilized" or "deconstructed," plays in political and religious thought. When Goh turns to Derrida in chapter two, however, this line or division between "the reject" and the subject becomes difficult to maintain. In this chapter, Goh focuses on Derrida's Politics of Friendship, attempting to demonstrate how "the reject" emerges in the context of Derrida's reading of Aristotle. If, in Aristotle, "the reject" is the one who violates friendship by not reciprocating, by doing nothing, in Derrida, "the reject" becomes an active force: The being-loved, previously targeted or passive reject, now becomes a figure that potentially bears an active force of rejection of friendship, precisely through his or her silence, inaction, and nonresponse. One is now uncertain if the being-loved, in his or her secret silence, is not in fact consciously rejecting acknowledging and responding to the aimance of friendship. (44) In Goh's analysis of Derrida's reading of Aristotle...

This article explores the uses of Greek literature, philosophy, and politics in contemporary political theory. It explains that, since the second half of the 20th century, the study and deployment of Greek texts in political theory has served four interrelated projects: (1) to underscore political theory’s roots as an embedded and politically relevant practice; (2) to show that the history of political thought may function as contemporary critique; (3) to recover the spontaneity, plurality, and equality of classical politics for modernity; (4) and to offer new resources for thinking about democratic equality and activity. The article suggests that the question of how to recuperate the new political theoretical possibilities posed by a polyvocal or deconstructed Plato remains an underappreciated but critical question for political and democratic theory today.

Globalisation and global governance are frequently employed buzzwords when discussing the characteristics of the current global order. This chapter seeks to both define and illustrate the interaction between these two concepts, along with their accompanying ramifications for state sovereignty. In doing so, it identifies the primary actors involved, including states, intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), regional entities, multinational corporations (MNCs), and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). This chapter also outlines key IR theoretical approaches to global governance, a relevant discussion as global governance is often addressed as an analytical concept or tool, which provides a certain perspective on global politics that differs from mainstream IR theories. The second half of the chapter proceeds on a brief analysis of the ways in which globalization and the diversification of governance play out on the global stage, comparing their differing effects within democratic and authoritarian state systems. In doing so it highlights some adverse effects and critical views on global governance. The chapter concludes that globalisation may exacerbate existing challenges to democratic structures of governance, and that it is therefore necessary to carefully evaluate the organisation and efficacy of global governance schemes.

Contemporary political theory is focused on the question of common life of groups and individuals with divergent axiological worldviews. The need for common life, social cohesion and solidarity is sometimes in contradiction to the space of freedom that these groups and individuals require by their very nature. Recognition stands in the nexus of this contradiction: we need rules that will accept us as equal citizens of a polity but at the same time allow for the expression of our difference. Political liberalism informs us with idea that constitutional rules have to be legitimate for those to whom these are directed. What do these two streams of normative reasoning tell us about existing and desirable constitutional orders of polities, specifically postnational like the European Union, and what form of citizenship would account for minorities? I argue that liberal multiculturalism is to some extent just another reinterpretation of the national state which legitimizes the intrusion of the concepts of the good in the sphere not only in politics but in the constitutional outset of modern national states. National majority has always come with various other forms of exclusion: patriarchal, white, heteronormative etc. Thus, with the main discourse of national states that stays at the pedestal of modern European intellectual history we have different kinds and types of minorities, phenomenologically distinctive, but all united by the constitutional and political exclusion they experience within a setting of a national state. Degrees and forms change both historically and geographically but the matrix of exclusion in its essence remains the same: citizenship is used a strategy for social closure that gives majority more of something, be it resources or status. If this is the nucleus of the normative problem that lies in the heart of constitutionalism, democracy and citizenship what is the theoretical solution of this conundrum? In this thesis argue that constitutional patriotism is an optimal form of citizenship for an emerging European polity. This notion is thoroughly analyzed and developed through a new theoretical paradigm. The main idea is that European belonging is based on the allegiance to a certain set of constitutional rights that stem from quasi-constitutional acts and practices of the EU and allow for better recognition of those who I named identity minorities. To be legally equal and recognized, in my understanding, means is to have the same point of reference, the basic set of rules that govern us and give equal standing for our different conceptions of good life. In other words, my thesis, in its philosophical core, is a story about the good and right and their mutual interdependence. Though liberals are often criticized for their insistence on rights, forgetting that rights themselves can be a form of particular good, I try to show that it is still the only normatively acceptable form of establishing an order in which minimal common rights will enable us to have the liberty to establish and achieve our conceptions of the good life. In other words, primacy of rights over good is the only logical solution for the axiological clash that might emerge between these two analytical categories. This conclusion stems from both lines of reasoning applied in my dissertation: theories of recognition and political liberalism. In final chapters I show that EU citizenship is being created in a deterritorialized and postnational polity. These two features give a distinct identity to the EU polity making it more open and inclusive for minorities and I explicate this through three normative arguments why constitutional patriotism is normatively the most acceptable form of EU citizenship.

Acknowledgement of the ethical dimension of global finance is commonplace in the wake of financial crises. The sub-prime crisis and ensuing credit crunch are only the latest in a long run of global financial crises that wreak social havoc and force us to consider alternative possibilities for global finance. By defining cosmopolitanism and analysing how cosmopolitan ideas can increasingly provide an account of the governance of global finance, Brassett examines whether global finance can be regulated so as to provide cosmopolitan values like social security, equality and democratic accountability. It suggests that such an exercise is not adequately resourced by existing theoretical approaches to critical IPE and instead develops a new pragmatic approach based on the thought of Richard Rorty. Combining ethical theory with empirical analysis, it focuses on the Tobin Tax – (a proposal to place a small levy on foreign currency transactions to dampen speculation and raise vast revenues) – and explores whether it could underpin more cosmopolitan forms of global financial governance. This book situates cosmopolitan ideas in the extant dilemmas and indeterminacies of global ethics, suggesting alternatives where possible. It will be of interest to students and scholars of international ethics, global governance, global civil, international relations, international political economy, global finance, public policy, critical theory, political theory and philosophy.