Is Racism (Necessarily) a Moral Wrong?

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.

About the Contributors

This article calls for a critical re-evaluation of Walzer’s theory of justice. It argues that there is a deep tension between Walzer’s social criticism and his complex equality. Social criticism is based on the normative value of a connected and ‘whole’ self, and complex equality is based upon a value pluralism that threatens to fragment this sense of wholeness. Walzer therefore commissions a tacit premise, borrowing from the same ‘political philosophy’ that he explicitly repudiates, and which social criticism is intended to supplant. This premise is a Kantian-inspired conception of self; brought to the argument as an a priori premise and thus in violation of Walzer’s own stated commitment to ‘internalism’ and ‘interpretation’. Furthermore, this same conception of self is the moral source of Walzer’s substantive commitment to the universal value of pluralist political regimes. The article closes with a suggested reconciliation of the inherent tension within Walzer’s theory.

Through a critical engagement with Lawrence Blum’s theory of racism, I defend a “social criticism” model for the philosophical study of racism. This model relies on empirical analyses of social and psychological phenomena but goes beyond this to include the assessment of the warrant of widely held beliefs and the normative evaluation of attitudes, actions, institutions, and social arrangements. I argue that we should give political philosophy theoretical primacy over moral philosophy in normative analyses of racism. I also show how conceptualizing racism as an ideology gives us a unified account of racism and helps us to see what is truly troubling about racism, both in the past and today.

Part 1: The Middle Ages 1. The Early Influence of Nature on the Public Mind 2. The Influence of Germanic Traditions 3. The Influence of Christianity 4. Charlemagne's Political System 5. The Fall of the Frankish Empire 6. Political Thought and Sentiment in the Time of the Late Carolingians 7. Religious Revival, Cluny and Lorraine 8. Germany Under the Saxon House 9. The Ideology of the Emperorship 10. The First Great Conflict with the Papacy 11. The Spirit of the High Middle Ages 12. The Rise and the Fall of the Hohenstaufens 13. Political Thought and Social Criticism in the Age of the Hohenstaufens 14. Opinions on the Decline of the Empire 15. Social Development and Colonisation 16. Rudolph of Habsburg and the Next-Following Kings 17. New Political and Spiritual Struggles with the Papacy 18. The Closing Middle Ages 19. Political Thought in the 15th Century 20. Social Criticism in the Late Middle Ages 21. The Development of Particularism and of the Constitutional Structure 22. The Effect of Particularism on the Law and Social Relations 23. The Jews in the Middle Ages 24. The Rise of National Power Politics in Europe. Maximilian I 25. Humanism and the Rise of the Modern Spirit Part 2: The Reformation and Counter-Reformation 1. Emperor Charles V 2. The Causes of the Reformation. Luther's Personality 3. Luther's Attack on the Papacy and its Immediate Consequences 4. Church Government and Social Reform in Luther's Thought 5. The Spreading of Luther's Teachings 6. Eberlin's Plan for a Democratic Welfare State 8. Revolutionary Agitation Amongst the Knights, Hutten's End 9. The Great Peasant War 10. Luther on War and Revolution 11. The Break with Humanism 12. The Rise of State Churches and a New Orthodoxy 13. The Anabaptists and Other Sects 14. The Freethinkers 15. Luther, the Turkish Menace and the Question of War 16. The Emperor, the Reichstag and the Protestants 17. The Civil War, the Religious Peace and its Effect 18. Calvin and the Reformed Church 19. The Regeneration of the Catholic Church and the Jesuits 20. Religious Strife Among the Protestants 21. The Counter-Reformation in Germany and Austria 22. Economic, Social and Cultural Developments 23. The Territorial States 24. The Thirty Years War 25. The Peace of Westphalia and the Aftermath of the War

This essay examines how inequalities are structured and rendered rightful in Kant’s political philosophy in order to offer a sketch of Kant’s juridical racism, or the ways in which his political philosophy is well-equipped to contain and maintain racial exclusions. By drawing on Nkiru Nzegwu’s conception of colonial racism, it highlights the forms of institutional racism that are perpetuated through juridical and colonial orders, which exceed Kant’s own theory of race, operating as what Huaping Lu-Adler has called a “racial ideology” embedded in his political philosophy. It first mines Kant’s arguments about the dependency of women in the Doctrine of Right, showing that these arguments offer a conceptual map of how raced inequality might be organized within the rightful state, organized as a form of juridical racism. It then turns to his cosmopolitan arguments, showing that working towards a rightful cosmopolitan condition will involve developing a shared conception of possessive rights, which Kant took to be a priori. In Kant’s inclusion of domestic right in this basic scheme of rightful possessive relations, we see an example of what Maria Lugones called the “modern/colonial gender system”, through which the invention and enforcement of normative gender roles becomes a critical method of coloniality. Thus, instead of treating gender as analogous to race in Kant’s arguments, I propose that we understand the normative structure of gendered dependency as a feature of Kant’s racial ideology.

Letter from the Editors: Contemporary Popular Culture and Social Criticism

As Axel Honneth has recently noted, the critical concerns of social philosophers during the past three decades have been focused primarily on questions of justice, with ethical issues about the human good being largely excluded. In the first section I briefly explore this exclusion in both ‘Anglo-American’ political philosophy and ‘German’ critical theory. I then argue, in the main sections, that despite this commitment to their exclusion, distinctively ethical concepts and ideals can be identified both in Rawls’s Theory of Justice and in Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, taking these as exemplary, representative texts for each theoretical school. These ethical elements, and their implications for the critical evaluation of economic institutions, have gone largely unnoticed. In the final section I indicate the kinds of debates that might be generated, were these to be given the attention they arguably deserve. I focus especially on the significance of empirical issues, and hence on the role of social science in social criticism.

Abnormal Justice

In this article, I inquire into the “naturalistic” aspect of John Dewey’s China lectures on social philosophy and ask what his naturalism about social philosophy is. In the lectures and the notes, Dewey describes the subject-matter and the method of social philosophy in naturalistic terms: the object of social philosophy is conceived as “associated life” and its method is likened to the “art of medicine,” as the social philosopher is understood to be advancing “diagnoses” and “cures” for “social pathologies.” I next revisit Dewey’s naturalistic metaphysics in the hope of finding a clue for how to conceive of Dewey’s naturalistic conception of the social. Finally, I indicate how Dewey’s naturalism informs the very significance of the critical social philosophy advocated in the Lectures . His naturalistic social philosophy establishes an evaluative approach to social reality, which is not reducible to the normativity of moral or political justification, but is based immanently on the authority of “associated life” itself.

This paper discusses the concept of public value in relation to government ICT investment from three perspectives – theory foundations, assessment methods, and an application example. The discussion of theory foundations combines attention to the roots of the concept of public value in political philosophy and public administration. The origins of the concept of public value are discussed in terms of foundational ideas in political and moral philosophy about the nature of the good society: utilitarianism and the social contract. The concern with public value, or utility, in early Western moral and political philosophy is central to the two major schools of thought, utilitarian and social contractarian. The social order that produces the greatest good or utility for the greatest number is preferred in the utilitarian perspective. The contractarian view holds that a good society should be based on shared principles and arrangements that avoid the potential evils of unconstrained greed. Though these two views political and moral philosophy differ, they weave similar connections among the basic concept of value, individual interests, societal interests, and institutional forms. These concepts and connections are basic to the public value framework.

Criticism and Connection:An Interview with Michael Walzer Jeffrey J. Williams (bio) Michael Walzer is a social critic. For over six decades, he has commented on politics, war, and religion in a score of books and in Dissent magazine, which he has had a hand in editing for a good part of that time. A keyword for Walzer is "connection," and he emphasizes the ways in which people form their values in communities—national, religious, political, and intellectual. This view is sometimes called communitarianism; contrary to the standard theory of liberalism, which stresses the rights of individuals, Walzer focuses instead on the way in which rights are formed within the context of their associations Moreover, justice is decided not in an overarching frame but in different "spheres" and through interpretation. This leaning toward interpretation undergirds Walzer's view of war, and he is known for "just war theory." A student of Irving Howe (the New York Intellectual who founded Dissent in 1953), Walzer began publishing in Dissent as an undergraduate, commenting on communism in Europe and the civil rights movement in the US. Thereafter followed a string of books, on the history of revolution and the possibility of social democracy in The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Harvard UP, 1965); on contemporary politics in Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War, and Citizenship (Harvard UP, 1970), Political Action (Quadrangle, 1971), Radical Principles: Reflections of an Unreconstructed Democrat (Basic, 1980), and The Politics of Ethnicity (co-author; Harvard, 1980); on war in Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (Basic, 1977; 4th ed. 2006); and on political theory in Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Basic, 1983). Walzer's idea of connection grounds his definition of the intellectual, which he elaborates on in Interpretation and Social Criticism (Harvard UP, 1987) and A Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (Basic, 1988); in the latter he asserts that "criticism follows [End Page 371] from connection" and, "if [the critic] were a stranger, really disinterested, it is hard to see why he would involve himself in their affairs." He again looked at revolution in Exodus and Revolution (Basic, 1985), and continued commenting on contemporary politics in What It Means to Be an American (Marsilio, 1992), Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (U of Notre Dame P, 1994), Toward a Global Civil Society (ed.; Berghahn, 1995), On Toleration (Yale UP, 1997), and Politics and Passion: Toward a More Egalitarian Liberalism (Yale UP, 2004). In the past decade, Arguing about War (Yale UP, 2004) and Getting Out: Historical Perspectives on Leaving Iraq (ed. with Nicolaus Mills; U of Pennsylvania P, 2009) apply his ideas about just war to US interventions. On interpretation, he has particularly looked to the Jewish tradition, and he has had a hand in compiling The Jewish Political Tradition (co-ed.; Yale UP; vol. 1, 2000; vol. 2, 2003), and Law, Politics, and Morality in Judaism (ed.; Princeton UP, 2006). 50 Years of Dissent (co-ed.; Yale UP, 2004) selects key essays from the magazine, and Thinking Politically: Essays in Political Theory (Yale, 2007) provides a reader of Walzer's own work. There are several books on Walzer, especially his views of war, as well as communitarianism and political philosophy. Born in 1935 in New York, Walzer attended Brandeis (BA, 1956), taking courses with Howe and Lewis Coser, who provided his introduction to the New York Intellectuals. While writing for Dissent, he took his PhD at Harvard (1961). From there, he taught at Princeton and Harvard until being appointed to the Institute for Advanced Studies in 1980, where he is now professor emeritus. This interview took place on 18 November 2011 in Michael Walzer's apartment in lower Manhattan. It was conducted and edited by Jeffrey J. Williams, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, and transcribed by Merrill Miller and Jacquie Harris, MA students in the Literary and Cultural Studies program there. Jeffrey J. Williams: To begin, I want to ask how you became a critic. I know you started writing for Dissent as a young man, publishing an...

Reviewed by: Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance José Medina Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Pp. 276. $28.95 pbk. 978-0-7914-7102-9. Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance is collaborative philosophy at its very best. The essays that the editors have assembled constitute a very successful critical intervention in philosophy through a set of challenging dialogues on race and epistemic practices. This critical intervention raises exciting questions for future generations of scholars in epistemology, race theory, political philosophy, and philosophy more generally. Drawing on the pioneering work of Charles Mills and standpoint epistemologists (e.g., Marilyn Frye and Sandra Harding), the essays in this volume identify problematic limitations and assumptions in traditional ways of philosophizing that have been pervasive. They delineate the contours of blind spots that operate both in academia and in the social world outside it, tracing their origins and their consequences. They identify questions that have gone not only unanswered but unasked for too long. The critical work that this volume does is innovative and at the same time firmly grounded in rich theoretical traditions that have been marginalized by the philosophical establishment (race theory, feminist theory, and—more recently—queer theory). In this sense, Lorraine Code calls attention to the philosophical excavations of Michèle Le Doeuff, who uncovers a forgotten critical tradition of women philosophers (such as Gabrielle Suchon in the seventeenth century) who offered critical reflections on the exclusions and distortions of masculine knowledge, providing critical tools to develop alternative epistemic practices. On the other hand, in African American philosophy there has been a long and important tradition of critical discourses that identify and diagnose racially motivated forms of ignorance. From DuBois to contemporary race theorists, racial ignorance has been shown to involve entrenched habits and attitudes that go well beyond a mere absence of true belief or a mere presence of false belief; racial ignorance has been shown to be based on a lack of interest to know and a lack of opportunities to explore social realities pertaining to race. As Elizabeth Spelman points out, this is the centerpiece of James Baldwin's powerful indictment of white America: "that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it" (119). This ignorance is based on a deeply seated epistemic resistance to know. It is a very active and resilient form of not-knowing, not a mere unwillingness to believe, not a mere casual neglect or a simple form of self-deception. It is an ignorance that requires a carefully orchestrated and laboriously maintained form of epistemic neglect, an unknowingness carefully [End Page 313] generated and supported by an entire range of institutions, practices, habits, and attitudes. This ignorance does not bear the mark of passivity but actually takes a lot of agency. As Spelman puts it, this form of ignorance is "an appalling achievement" that requires "grotesquely prodigious effort" (120); it is an ignorance that needs management. Spelman's analysis of epistemic management sketches a "route to undoing such ignorance" through an understanding of "the labor it takes to create and sustain it" (123). As many of the essays in this volume show, the proactive lack of epistemic concern for racial others is also a lack of concern for oneself in relation to these others, that is, an ignorance of one's racial positionality and responsibility. This ignorance—far from being a mere ideological excrescence, an accidental side effect of relations of oppression—is actually a fundamental cultural mechanism for safeguarding privilege and domination. Relations of oppression are protected by being erased from the minds of those who perpetrate them and sometimes (when possible) from the minds of those who suffer them. Sarah Hoagland offers an analysis of racial ignorance as based on a denial of meaningful relationality, which simultenously produces a lack of understanding of oneself and a lack of understanding of others with whom one is constitutively related. Paul Taylor and Shannon Sullivan illustrate this relational ignorance and its consequences by showing how U.S. citizens' ignorance of Haiti and Puerto Rico...

Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha, eds., Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations. Stanford University Press, 2012, 352 pp., $25.18 paperback, (978-0-8047-7539-7) Arendt and Adorno offers its readers a timely and sophisticated collection of essays evaluating the historical, political, and theoretical proximity of these two important 20th century thinkers. The premise of the collection is that even if the personal relationship between Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno was a strained one, bordering on open hostility (at least on Arendt's part), this by no means should be allowed to become a judgment on the interconnections between their respective bodies of work. On the contrary, as Gandesha points out in his introduction to the collection, there are significant commonalities between these thinkers' personal circumstances that also no doubt draw the content of their respective work into proximity and dialogue. Adorno and Arendt each lived through the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, both were of German-Jewish heritage, both were involuntarily exiled to the United States throughout this period--although unlike Adorno, Arendt opted to remain in the United States after the war--and both maintained common friendships with other prominent intellectuals of the time. As one might expect, such historico-biographical affinities left deep and lasting traces on their respective bodies of work, the similarities and differences of which this collection does an admirable of job of putting into relief and dialogue. The book is divided into three main sections. The first broadly canvasses the views of Adorno and Arendt on modernity's relationship to philosophy and political philosophy, while the second examines their often parallel understandings of Nazi totalitarianism, its relationship to the fate of Europe's Jews, and--although this theme is more implied than discussed outright--the implications of this fate for the viability of cosmopolitanism and the paradigm of human rights. The final section takes up the experience of exile common to both thinkers in order to consider its ramifications for the exiled intellectuals' attempted theorization of an unfamiliar social and cultural environment. The pieces in this collection are strong without exception, and several are written by established scholars who will be familiar to readers working in contemporary social theory, such as Seyla Benhabib, J.M. Bernstein, and Dieter Thoma, among others. The book's first section features essays broadly focused on the relation between modernity and modern philosophy in Adorno and Arendt's writing. Taking up the influence of Walter Benjamin on both Arendt and Adorno, Seyla Benhabib argues that this influence accounts for the centrality of Kant's concept of reflective judgment in both thinkers' respective works, representing a form of aesthetically derived resistance to the categories of the reified modern world. While for Benhabib, Adorno, here unlike Arendt, neglects the communicative potentials of the aesthetic, J.M. Bernstein's contribution offers something of a counter-weight to Benhabib's view with its argument that Arendt's account of civil disobedience should be read as a philosophical transcription of Adorno's aesthetic theory into the domain of politics. Such transcription contests the Habermasian line that Adorno's aesthetics retreat into a subjective utopia, since on Bernstein's reading Arendt's notion of civil disobedience requires the reactivation of the normative promise of founding deeds, and so constitutes a form of political communication across time and between generations. In contrast to these pieces that assay the commonality between Arendt and Adorno, Dana Villa's essay lays out the differences between Adorno and Arendt's theories of society and politics. By following closely Weber's theory of bureaucratic domination Adorno is led to retreat into the increasingly compromised sphere of private individuality; such a retreat is contrasted to Arendt's attitude toward politics: while sharing to some extent Adorno's critique of the liberal individual, she ultimately believes that political action in the public sphere is still possible. …

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