Human Plurality Research Articles

Toward a Theoretical Foundation for the History of Chinese Political Philosophy

This essay seeks to theoretically defend a certain type of narratable history of Chinese political philosophy against the challenge of both cultural essential ism and its critique.1 I will begin with an examination of cultural essentialism in existing works on the history of Chinese political philosophy, which shall serve as a foundation for the alternative approach I will then develop. It is my contention that it is possible to formulate a non-essentialist notion of Chinese political philosophy that may facilitate the writing of an integrated, chronological history of Chinese political 21 conclude by considering its broader implications in relation to the notion of East Asian civilization.I believe that we no longer have to defend the necessity of studying the Chinese tradition of political philosophy perse, for much ink has been devoted to the critique of various versions of Eurocentrism. Since Europe's discovery of competing civilizations around the world, even Europeans themselves have gradually accepted an irremediable human pluralism, perhaps with the exception of some narrow-minded and recalcitrant intellectuals. It became possible to think of Europe as only one of many civilizations, and not necessarily the best one. I presume that many view Chinese or East Asian civilizations to be on an equal ontological footing with the European one. At the very least, they are, in principle, equally worthy of scholarly attention.Having said this, what I want to discuss in this essay is the question of whether a specific form of exploration-i.e., an integrated, chronological history of Chinese political philosophy-is theoretically defensible. Before proceeding to explore its theoretical justification, a few comments on the state of the art seem to be in order, although I will make no effort to state the long pedigrees of relevant works on Chinese political philosophy or thought.Hsiao Kung-chuan's A History of Chinese Political is practically the only book-length study available in Western languages that introduces students to Chinese political thought from antiquity to the present.3 In fact, Hsiao's work is part of the 1930-40's scholarly trend that produced quite a few histories of Chinese political thought including those of Tao Xisheng, Lii Zhenyu, Liang Qichao and Lu Simian.4Until the 1980s, very few scholarly efforts were made to write a chronological narrative of Chinese political thought in mainland China since then. As many scholars acknowledge, such a void in mainland Chinese scholarship was caused largely by political turmoil during that period.5 Meanwhile, Taiwanese scholars, who were relatively free from political uncertainty, 6 produced a series of histories of Chinese political thought or philosophy, including those of SaMengwu, Xie Fuya, Ye Zuhao, and Yang Youjiong to name but a few.7 Over the last few decades, however, as the political landscape changed, mainland Chinese scholars have increasingly produced histories of Chinese political thought or philosophy. growing number of volumes entitled The History of Chinese Political Thought indicates the fact that chronological narrative is a popular genre in mainland Chinese scholarly writing on Chinese political thought or philosophy, while there appears to be no corresponding tendency outside China.Cultural Essentialism in the Histories of Chinese Political PhilosophyThis is not the place to attempt a review of all recent works on Chinese political philosophy in mainland China. Suffice it to say, significant portions of existing histories of Chinese political philosophy are still founded on an picture of Chinese political philosophy as somewhat determinate, bounded, and homogeneous. One indication is that many relevant studies are based on the dichotomy between the Chinese tradition of political philosophy and Western political In my view, it is this essentialist approach that leads scholars to consider the otherwise unfeasible chronological narrative to be constructive and even desirable. …

Dignity in adversity: human rights in troubled times

Preface vii Acknowledgments x 1. Introduction: Cosmopolitanism without Illusions 1 2. From The Dialectic of Enlightenment to The Origins of Totalitarianism: Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the Company of Hannah Arendt 20 3. International Law and Human Plurality in the Shadow of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin 41 4. Another Universalism: On the Unity and Diversity of Human Rights 57 5. Is There a Human Right to Democracy? Beyond Interventionism and Indifference 77 6. Twilight of Sovereignty or the Emergence of Cosmopolitan Norms? Rethinking Citizenship in Volatile Times 94 7. Claiming Rights Across Borders: International Human Rights and Democratic Sovereignty 117 8. Democratic Exclusions and Democratic Iterations: Dilemmas of Just Membership and Prospects of Cosmopolitan Federalism 138 9. The Return of Political Theology: The Scarf Affair in Comparative Constitutional Perspective in France, Germany, and Turkey 166 10. Utopia and Dystopia in Our Times 184 Notes and References 196 Index 285

A Pluralist Reconstruction of Confucian Democracy

In this paper, I attempt to revamp Confucian democracy, which is originally presented as the communitarian corrective and cultural alternative to Western liberal democracy, into a robust democratic political theory and practice that is plausible in the societal context of pluralism. In order to do so, I first investigate the core tenets of value pluralism with reference to William Galston’s political theory, which gives full attention to the intrinsic value of diversity and human plurality particularly in the modern democratic context. I then construct a political theory of Confucian pluralist democracy by critically engaging with two dominant versions of Confucian democracy—Confucian communitarian democracy and Confucian meritocratic democracy. My key argument is threefold: (1) the unity in Confucian democracy should be interpreted not as moral unity but as constitutional unity; (2) Confucian virtues should be differentiated (or pluralized) between moral virtues and civic virtues; (3) in Confucian democracy minorities have the constitutional right to contest public norms in civil society.

Now Let Us Make Europeans – Citizenship, Solidarity and Identity in a Pluri-Cultural Europe

The euro crisis has hit “Europe” (the European Union, or EU) at its root. Economic harshness, social unrest and political turmoil betray a deeper problem: a weak pan-European sense of belonging — a common political identity thanks to which European citizens may regard each other as equals, and therefore as deserving of recognition, trust, and solidarity. This paper explores interculturalism from an analogical perspective, looking at the harmonious interplay between human rights and cultural plurality, as a possible source of trust and solidarity among European citizens. Only a common — even if analogical — political identity, whereby European citizens regard each other, if not as “siblings” at least as “cousins,” can make the sacrifices required to overcome the crisis meaningful — and therefore less unlikely to happen.

Diasporic Dialogues in Mid-Century New York: Stefan Wolpe, George Russell, Hannah Arendt, and the Historiography of Displacement

AbstractThis article explores mid-century New York intellectual scenes mediated by the avant-garde émigré composer Stefan Wolpe (1902–72), with special emphasis on Wolpe's interactions with jazz composer George Russell (1923–2009) and political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–75). Cross-disciplinary communities set the stage for these encounters: Wolpe and Russell met in the post-bop circles that clustered in Gil Evans's basement apartment, while Wolpe encountered Arendt at the Eighth Street Artists’ Club, the hotbed of Abstract Expressionism. Wolpe's exchanges with Arendt and Russell, long unacknowledged, may initially seem unrelated. Yet each figure shared a series of “cosmopolitan” commitments. They valued artistic communities as spaces for salutary acts of cultural boundary crossing, and they tended to see forms of self-representation in the arts as a way to respond to the dehumanizing political disasters of the century. Wolpe and Arendt focused on questions of human plurality in the wake of their forced displacements as German-Jewish émigrés, whereas Russell confronted dilemmas of difference as an African American migrant from southern Ohio in New York. Bringing together interpretive readings of music with interview- and archive-based research, this article works toward a historiography of aesthetic modernism that recognizes migration as formative rather than incidental to its community bonds, ethical aspirations, and creative projects.

Constructive Politics as Public Work

This essay argues that fulfilling the promise of participatory democratic theory requires ways for citizens to reconstruct the world, not simply to improve its governance processes. The concept of public work, expressing civic agency, or the capacity of diverse citizens to build a democratic way of life, embodies this shift. It posits citizens as co-creators of the world, not simply deliberators and decision-makers about the world. Public work is a normative, democratizing ideal of citizenship generalized from communal labors of creating the commons, with roots in diverse cultures. Shaped through contention with forces which threaten shared ways of life and their commons, grounded in an understanding of human plurality, public work has political qualities that unmask sentimentalized civic discourses of modern elites. Public work places citizens, not markets or states, as the foundational agents of democracy. It opens a path beyond the political crisis.

É possível a ética do discurso de HABERMAS para pessoas com deficiência?

O presente estudo objetiva discutir, em primeiro lugar, a possibilidade de participação de pessoas com deficiência(s) no discurso, na ação e na interlocução. Em segundo lugar, analisa-se a Ética do Discurso de Jürgen Habermas e sua relação com a possibilidade de participação de pessoas com deficiência(s) no discurso, na ação e na interlocução; essa ideia é corroborada pelo fato de defensores e autodefensores de pessoas com deficiência sugerirem que a teoria de Habermas e sua Ética do Discurso deveriam servir como base para a busca/luta por equidade de respeito e de oportunidades. Apesar de a teoria de Habermas parecer referir-se apenas a pessoas que são capazes de falar por si mesmas “naturalmente”, isto é, a pessoas que não necessitam de modificações ambientais para participarem do discurso, da ação e da locução, a Ética do Discurso de Habermas levanta uma questão urgente a ser enfrentada pela sociedade humana: o respeito à pluralidade humana.

Ernst Cassirer, Hannah Arendt, and the twentieth century revival of philosophical anthropology

This essay suggests that Hannah Arendt was influenced by Ernst Cassirer’s revival of the Kantian discourse of philosophical anthropology, an approach which critiqued metaphysical and environmentally determinist theories of human nature and instead interpreted human being in cultural terms as ‘open to the world’. The article suggests that Arendt’s focus on human plurality as the condition of meaning and subject formation may have been influenced by Ernst Cassirer’s dialogical philosophy of symbolic forms. Lastly the essay explores the political implications of Cassirer and Arendt’s anthropology of human culture. Where Cassirer’s cosmopolitan anthropology often refuses a conventional or Eurocentric determination of cultural agency, Arendt tended to trope her conception of a durable ‘human world’ as the antithesis of the primitive and indigenous, the lifeworld of so-called Naturvölker.

On Vulnerability as Judith Butler’s Language of Politics: From Excitable Speech to Precarious Life

On Vulnerability as Judith Butler’s Language of Politics: From Excitable Speech to Precarious Life George Shulman (bio) It is often said that philosophy begins in wonder, but it may be the case that political theory begins in a sense of danger—in emotions of fear or dread, in perceptions of impending or potential harm, in experiences of vulnerability or injury. Most famously, Thomas Hobbes made the English Revolution a “state of nature” to elicit and mobilize fear of premature, violent death in the service of a state-building project promising safety. So also, after Socrates’s judicial murder, Plato dreamed a republic in which philosophy (and its practitioners) would be safe, not vulnerable. And did Marx not depict communism as the “specter” of destruction haunting the European bourgeoisie? If canonical political thought is animated by representations of danger and harm, which must be apprehended at all to be addressed by action, so political theorists often speak in a voice of warning about “what is to be done.” Of course the other side of warning and injury is (the hope for) safety, even plenitude. So Plato imagines a world safe for philosophy, while Hobbes promises that mortal safety, and indeed material well-being, are possible if people consent to a sovereign power that “overawes them all.” The capacity of this mortal god to terrify is the condition of its capacity to protect. As these examples suggest, however, the move from dangerous vulnerability to abiding safety may come at the expense of (democratic) politics itself as a distinctive human practice. Plato and Hobbes seem to seek safety by imagining sovereign states and extrapolitical truths: by these absolutes they promise to overcome or at least contain the conflict arising from human plurality and social inequality. On the one hand they argue that the absence of sovereign [End Page 227] power and truth—and so the messy pervasiveness of politics because justice is not self-evident nor order automatic—is the major cause of human suffering. On the other hand, their critics say, by wedding philosophy and power to secure a sovereign framework of life, they would rescue human beings from danger at too high a cost. Indeed, theorists who value politics depict Plato and Hobbes as making impossible promises: that philosophy can generate a principle of (absolute, extrapolitical) authority that can give political life a secure “foundation,” and thereby end it. If it is impossible to transcend conditions of finitude and plurality, however, then politics is not only inescapable, but valuable. For as Machiavelli argues, human beings do face mortal danger unless they generate durable political forms, but they must create order from among themselves by political means, and their capacity to do so is jeopardized—we should say endangered—by despair in their capacity to act, by excessive fear of conflict and by fantasies of escaping the contingencies that make action and choice at once necessary and costly. For Machiavelli, then, the price of false promises of safety is freedom, but conceived politically as an agonistic practice of fashioning a common world out of plural (and often acute) differences, freedom is also the best means to sustain a durable framework for human life in all of its dimensions. Accordingly, a central element in the “genre” of political theory is argument about danger and how to forestall it. When figures like Machiavelli and Arendt take up the “vocation” of political theory, therefore, they take on the rhetorically complex task of persuading people to face what they are invested in denying: the importance of dangers not yet visible; the necessity (and fatefulness) of choices people would rather defer; the impossibility of moral purity in making them; the burdens, risks, and suffering that inhere to human freedom. Judith Butler surely places herself among those who challenge the illusions and longings that generate subjugation in the name of an impossible safety. Let us assess, then, the value but also the dangers in her argument about the chimera of safety, by reading Excitable Speech, published in 1997, in tandem with her more recent work, especially Precarious Life, published in 2005. It is typically said that Butler’s work has shifted from a critique of identity politics...

Moral argument, religion, and same-sex marriage: advancing the public good

Chapter 1 Introduction Part 2 Part I. Same-Sex Marriage and Partnerships Chapter 3 Introduction to Part I Chapter 4 Chapter 1. A Commentary on the Old Saw that Same-Sex Marriage Threatens Civilization Chapter 5 Chapter 2. Looking for Liberty and Defining Marriage in Three Same-Sex Marriage Cases Chapter 6 Chapter 3. The Religion Clauses and Same-Sex Marriage Chapter 7 Chapter 4. Against Neutrality in the Legal Recognition of Intimate Relationships Part 8 Part II. Same-Sex Attraction and Liberal Democratic Theory Chapter 9 Introduction to Part II Chapter 10 Chapter 5. Marriage Equality and the Morality of Liberalism: The California Decision Chapter 11 Chapter 6. Same-Sex Marriage and the American Political Tradition Chapter 12 Chapter 7. The Special Status of Religion Under the First Amendment...and What it Means for Gay Rights and Anti-Discrimination Laws Chapter 13 Chapter 8. Supporting Queer Youth: A New Vision of Child, Family, and State Chapter 14 Chapter 9. Consuming its own? Heteronormativity contra Human Plurality Chapter 15 Conclusion

The emergent realities of project praxis in socially complex project environments

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present an overview of a completed doctoral action research thesis that moved beyond focussing on the instrumentality of project actuality to explore project praxis as social process.Design/methodology/approachSoft systems methodology is selected as the process of enquiry for the thesis, to explore a perceived complex problematic situation. A conceptual framework is designed to guide thinking to explore the social nature of projects, through acknowledging the interconnected nature of human realities, the pragmatism of knowledge and the emergent nature of cognition.FindingsThe paper reveals the reality of project complexity as being socially derived, necessitating an emergent project management response to the inherent differences created from human plurality. Organisational resilience emerged as dependent upon recognising and successfully managing the evolving cognition that arises from a multiplicity of human and project environmental interconnections.Practical implicationsThe project context plays a significant role in determining project outcomes. Projects, as social process will benefit from a PM strategy that adaptively responds to manage the power and politics inherent in project practice, particularly in contexts involving socially disparate stakeholders.Originality/valueThe research is implemented in a Middle Eastern setting where local cultural constraints add to organisational and project complexity caused by socio‐cultural differences in an expatriate workforce. Portraying projects as “complex adaptive systems” has facilitated a shift in project management thinking from traditional linear, inflexible models, towards approaches which can more ably accommodate for human diversity in project practice.

The Revival Dilemma: Reflections on Human Rights, Self-Determination and Legal Pluralism in Eastern Indonesia

On the fall of Suharto, the long-surviving authoritarian president of Indonesia, in 1998, the ‘reform era’ began. Quite revolutionary laws on decentralisation sought to meet international notions of democracy and human rights, and local claims to greater self-determination. The decentralisation process in Indonesia was thus accompanied by a nationwide trend to revive local traditions, political units and institutions, and traditional leaders. This paper focuses on the Moluccan islands in Eastern Indonesia, where, in addition to a revival of adat (tradition and customary law), there was a strategic move by local people to foster reconciliation after conflicts in the early post-Suharto period, mainly between Christians and Muslims.At the international level Indonesia took account of the recently developed notions of collective human rights, including indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination and autonomy, and their rights to preserve and practice their own culture. This entailed the revival and re-recognition of traditional villages (negeri) and the reinstallation of traditional village heads (raja). New decentralisation laws enabled village people as cultural collectivities to return to their village adat, but tended towards the exclusion, or non-equal treatment, of cultural outsiders.At the national level decentralisation provisions, constitutional amendments, and a Human Rights Law were enacted. These were to be implemented at the local level. However, progress was impeded by the outbreak of bloody and lengthy Christian-Muslim conflict. After a peace meeting in 2002 put an official end to the conflict, local actors hoped to build sustainable peace through the revival or strengthening of traditions, traditional leaders, structures and customary law. The raja as traditional leaders and potential mediators, but also part of the national government system, were to play a central role. The new national autonomy law gave such local tendencies legal support, and stated that diversity was to be acknowledged. The laws raised many issues. There were various difficulties in determining who should be raja in many districts, and in settling their powers. There were further questions as to whether the observance of cultural rights could be premised on fixed and static notions of culture, as to which persons should make the decisive choices, and whether adat could be reduced to writing without losing its necessary flexibility. The paper uses a study of the Honitetu district to explore these issues.It is suggested in conclusion that an unconditional revival of adat would be counterproductive. It is argued that it is crucial to preserve the flexibility of adat in order to adapt it to changing political, social and economic circumstances and to accommodate all people living in the territories, both cultural insiders and outsiders.

International Law and Human Plurality in the Shadow of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin

Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin were witnesses to the twentieth-century. They both experienced the dislocating transformations on the European continent as a consequence of two world wars, lost their states as well as their homes in this process, narrowly escaped the clutches of the Nazi extermination machine, and made it to the New World through sheer luck and fortuitous circumstance. Their thought is marked by the cataclysms of the last century, and they have in turn emerged as indispensable interlocutors for all of us in understanding this past. Arendt and Lemkin were contemporaries and there are astonishing parallels in their early biographies. She was born in Hannover in 1906 (d. 1975) and grew up in Koenigsberg in East Prussia. After WWI, the Polish Corridor was created and cut East Prussia and Koengisberg off from the rest of Weimar. In 1945, Koenigsberg was occupied by the Soviets and renamed “Kaliningrad.” Lemkin was born in Bezwodene in 1900, then part of Tsarist Russia. Between the two World Wars (1918–1939) Bezwodene became part of Poland, and today is Bezvodna in Belarus. When Arendt was arrested by the Gestapo in the Spring of 1933 and was forced to flee to Paris via Prague with her mother, she had been carrying out research in the Prussian State Library at the request of Kurt Blumenfeld on anti-Semitic measures undertaken by Nazi nongovernmental organizations, business associations and professional clubs to exclude Jewish members. Her Zionist friend, Kurt Blumenfeld in turn, was preparing to present this material at the 18th Zionist Congress. During those very same years, Ralph Lemkin was a young clerk in the Polish State Prosecutor’s office who had been collecting documents on Nazi war legislation, particularly those affecting cultural, linguistic, religious activities and artifacts of cultural and religious groups. In 1933, he had sent a paper to a League of Nations conference in Madrid, in which he proposed that “the crimes of barbarity and vandalism be considered as new offences against the law of nations.”1 In 1939, he fled from Poland and reached Stockholm, where he continued to do extensive research on Nazi occupation laws throughout Europe. On April 18, 1941, he arrived in the United States via Japan. That very same year, Arendt and her second husband, Heinrich Bluecher, arrived in New York via Portugal. Yet in contrast to Arendt, who acquired world-wide fame after her arrival in the USA with her many works and university appointments, Lemkin, after the general acclaim he received with the passage of the Genocide Convention by the United Nations in 1948, fell into obscurity and died a lonely death, destitute and neglected in New York in 1959. It is certainly fascinating to speculate whether these Jewish refugees, who were caught up in the great dislocations of their time, ever met one another in some location or association in the United States. We just don’t know. What is even more astonishing is the lack of any discussion in Hannah Arendt’s work of Lemkin’s great book on the concept of genocide,2 nor any evidence that Lemkin knew Arendt’s work on totalitarianism, which certainly was the most powerful historical documentation and philosophical analysis in the early 1950s of the unprecedentedly murderous character of the Nazi regime. Arendt and Lemkin appear to

Women's Bodies Between National Hospitality and Domestic Biopolitics

This paper develops a political ontology of hospitality from the philosophies of Arendt, Derrida and Levinas, paying particular attention to the gendered, temporal, and corporeal dimensions of hospitality. Arendt's claim, that central to the human condition and democratic plurality is the welcome of ‘natality’ (innovation or the birth of the new), is used to argue that the more that this hospitality becomes conditional under conservative political forces, the more that the time that it takes is given by women without acknowledgement or support. Women's bodies are thus caught within the dual poles of conservative government: regulation of the unpredictable expressions of ‘natality’ in the ‘home’ and management of the uniformity and ‘security’ of the nation. The limitations in Arendt's political ontology of hospitality are addressed by adding consideration of the operation of biopolitics and of the body as bios.

Striving to Promote Shared Values

UNESCO was established in 1945 to contribute to peace and security by promoting intellectual collaboration among nations. Its work in the fields of education, science, culture and communication is firmly based on shared values such as justice, equity and respect for human rights, cultural diversity, pluralism and democratic principles, as reiterated in the latest Medium Term Strategy, 2008–13. These values also underpin UNESCO's efforts to promote dialogue among civilizations, a UN initiative. From its inception, UNESCO has considered its role to be an ethical one and this is reflected in various UNESCO Declarations and Conventions. Drawing inspiration from UNESCO's response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which stresses the importance of a global and inclusive vision of development, this article argues that in a world characterized by inequality, on the one hand, and global interdependence, on the other, a more concerted effort is needed to inculcate a global commitment to a just world order as a precondition to a dialogue among civilizations.

Statecraft at the Crossroads: A New Diplomacy

The severe global economic contraction that began in 2008 accelerates the transition to a new age of international politics, one characterized by weak but reassertive states, rising powers, waning American primacy, shifting media ecology, and aroused and empowered societies. This new age of political ferment requires a dramatic reassessment of the way the United States formulates and conducts its national security strategy. This article explores the nexus between our foreign policy and politics across domestic and foreign boundaries on several key national security challenges. It recommends a new diplomacy employing public diplomats deeply attuned to the cultural and political particularities of human plurality in the global public square.

Can There Be Pluralism Without Conflict?

One of the dreams of education is to create conditions for more peaceful forms of coexistence across human divisiveness — a dream that has shaped efforts in intercultural, multicultural, and cosmopolitan educational projects alike. Such maneuvers regularly cast pluralism in terms of “diversity,” “multiplicity,” and “difference,” and largely claim that the “recognition” of identities, achieved most often through dialogue, constitutes the political hope for developing a more inclusive democracy. In this sense, democracy is seen to be pluralist in its intent to account for the wide variety of cultural traditions, ethnic groupings, linguistic communities, and religious beliefs in human society. By ingesting these, so to speak, into democratic processes, the hope is that we better nourish the body politic. But are the terms by which we often identify such variation adequate to facing the question of human pluralism and what pluralism means for democracy? And is it the case that dialogue across such variation — and the recognition to which this supposedly leads — are the optimal ways of promoting democratic possibility and dealing with conflict?

Hannah Arendt, 1906–1975

AbstractThis essay provides an overview of the life and theoretical concerns of Hannah Arendt. It traces the way her experience as a German Jew in the 1930s informed her analysis of totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism and her idea of the “banality of evil” in Eichmann in Jerusalem. The essay takes issue with those of Arendt's critics who detect a lack of “love of the Jewish people” in her writing. It also traces the way Arendt's encounter with totalitarian evil led to a deeper questioning of the anti-democratic impulses in the Western tradition of political thought—a questioning that finds its fullest articulation in The Human Condition and On Revolution. Throughout, my concern is to highlight Arendt's contribution to thinking “the political” in a way friendly to the basic phenomenon of human plurality. I also highlight her recovery and extension of the main themes of the civic republican tradition.

Rewriting citizenship? Civic education in Costa Rica and Argentina

To what degree are nations ‘rewriting’ citizenship by expanding discussions of human rights, diversity and cultural pluralism in modern civic education, and what explains variation between countries? This study addresses these issues by analysing the intended content of civic education in Costa Rica and Argentina. Over time, civic education in both countries has become more focused on rights and the empowerment of individuals. In addition, both countries embrace aspects of global citizenship through an affirmation of human rights. Citizenship thus expands outward and upward, incorporating more groups and people into the national polity while also broadening the concept of citizenship beyond the nation‐state. Nevertheless, Costa Rica and Argentina vary in the intensity of the adoption of global citizenship, most likely a result of divergent historical experiences with state sponsored violence.

Arendt and Nietzsche on responsibility and futurity

This article compares Nietzsche's and Arendt's critiques of the juridical concept of responsibility (that emphasizes duty and blame) with the aim of deriving an account of responsibility appropriate for our time. It examines shared ground in their radical approaches to responsibility: by basing personal responsibility in conscience that expresses a self open to an undetermined future, rather than conscience determined by prevailing moral norms, they make a connection between a failure of personal responsibility and the way a totalizing politics jeopardizes human plurality. Two differences between Arendt and Nietzsche are also explored: Nietzsche's account of the corporeal and affective dimensions of conscience explains how politics can foreclose the futural, undetermined dimension of conscience; Arendt's account of political community exposes the mutual dependence of personal and political responsibility. By drawing together these aspects of Arendt's and Nietzsche's thought, the article aims to show how a failure of political responsibility can precipitate a failure of personal responsibility by undermining the basis of normativity that both liberal democratic politics and individual moral conscience would ordinarily share.