At the Margins of the Modern State
Critical Theory and Law
by Seyla Benhabib
(Polity Books, March 2025)
212 pages
Description
Facile expressions such as “Eurocentrism” and “demise of the West and the rise of the rest” miss the real challenge in this situation: how to extend moral, legal and political universalism to address the experiences of the multitude of humanity for whom western modernity has brought not only equality but also subordination, not only emancipation but also domination. Benhabib argues that rethinking this universalist project and participating in world-building together can be achieved by reconstructing and retrieving the best insights of critical social theory in the Frankfurt tradition and the liberal Kantianism of Rawls and Dworkin. In that spirit, this volume addresses state and popular sovereignty, Third World approaches to International Law, the 1951 Refugee Convention, and climate change legislation, while focusing on the changing fortunes of the European Union and cosmopolitanism. Benhabib engages with postcolonial thinkers and argues that, although validity claims and relations of domination and inequality are often intermixed, it is possible to reconstruct the insights of international law to serve a more inclusive universalism and world-building.
Contents
Part One: The European Modern State from Hegel to Habermas
1. The Specter of Popular Sovereignty in Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms. After Three Decades
2. Hegel’s Concept of the Person and International Human Rights [Lecture: video]
3. Restructuring Democracy and the Idea of Europe (with Stefan Eich)
Part Two: Democracy and Normativity Beyond Borders
4. Ronald Dworkin and The Normative Orders of International Law
5. Beyond the Hermeneutics of Suspicion. Reconstructing Cosmopolitan
Law [Lecture: video]
6. The End of the 1951 Refugee Convention? Dilemmas of Sovereignty, Territoriality, and Human Rights
Part Three: Sovereignty and Cosmopolitanism and After Europe
7. Sovereignty and Constituent Power
8. Politics in a Planetary Age. The Globe as World, Earth and Planet
9. Habermas’s New Phenomenology of Spirit: Two Centuries after Hegel
10. Conclusion. In Defense of Rational Indignation
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