Political Theory - Habermas and Rawls

Book on "Kant and Cosmopolitanism"

2012-01-29T23:41:00.004+01:00

Kant and Cosmopolitanism
The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship

by Pauline Kleingeld

(Cambridge University Press, December 2011)

232 pages

Description

This is the first comprehensive account of Kant's cosmopolitanism, highlighting its moral, political, legal, economic, cultural and psychological aspects. Contrasting Kant's views with those of his German contemporaries and relating them to current debates, Pauline Kleingeld sheds new light on texts that have been hitherto neglected or underestimated. In clear and carefully argued discussions, she shows that Kant's philosophical cosmopolitanism underwent a radical transformation in the mid 1790s and that the resulting theory is philosophically stronger than is usually thought. Using the work of figures such as Fichte, Cloots, Forster, Hegewisch, Wieland and Novalis, Kleingeld analyses Kant's arguments regarding the relationship between cosmopolitanism and patriotism, the importance of states, the ideal of an international federation, cultural pluralism, race, global economic justice and the psychological feasibility of the cosmopolitan ideal. In doing so, she reveals a broad spectrum of positions in cosmopolitan theory that are relevant to current discussions of cosmopolitanism.

Content [preview]

Introduction
1. World citizens in their own country: Wieland and Kant on moral cosmopolitanism and patriotism
2. Universal republic of world citizens or international federation?: Cloots and Kant on global peace
3. Global hospitality: Kant's concept of cosmopolitan right
4. Hierarchy or diversity?: Forster and Kant on race, culture, and cosmopolitanism
5. International trade and justice: Hegewisch and Kant on cosmopolitanism and globalization
6. Cosmopolitanism and feeling: Novalis and Kant on the development of a universal human community
7. Kant's cosmopolitanism and current philosophical debates.

Pauline Kleingeld is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. She is the editor of "Immanuel Kant, ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’ and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History" (Yale University Press, 2006) and co-author (with Eric Brown) of the entry on "Cosmopolitanism" (2006) in "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy".

See also her papers on
- "Kant's Cosmopolitan Law" (pdf, 1998)
- "Kant's Cosmopolitan Patriotism" (pdf, 2003).

Conference on "Habermas und der Historische Materialismus"

2012-01-27T22:11:00.004+01:00

Conference on "Habermas und der Historische Materialismus" at the University of Wuppertal, Germany, March 23 - 25, 2012.

Jürgen Habermas will attend the conference and take part in the discussions.

Program [pdf]

Friday, March 23, 2012

William Outhwaite (Newcastle):
Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten in Habermas’ Auseinandersetzung mit dem Historischen Materialismus

Manfred Baum (Wuppertal):
Historischer Materialismus und Kommunikationstheorie – eine Mésalliance?

Michael Quante (Münster):
Die Rückkehr des gegenständlichen Gattungswesens

Karl-Otto Apel:
Transzendentalpragmatik als Paradigma der Ersten Philosophie

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Ingo Elbe (Oldenburg):
Habermas’ Kritik des Produktionsparadigmas

Smail Rapic (Wuppertal):
Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus – Zur Aktualität eines Habermas’schen Textes aus dem Jahre 1973

Stefan Müller-Doohm (Oldenburg):
Die Zivilisierung des globalen Kapitalismus und die Zukunft Europas

Claudia Bogedan (Düsseldorf):
Forschungsprojekte der Hans-Böckler-Stiftung zu aktuellen Legitimationsfragen der kapitalistischen Ökonomie

Klaus Günther (Frankfurt):
Recht und Evolution

Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch (Frankfurt/Münster):
Die Rationalität des modernen Rechts. Zur Rekonstruktion und Revision des Historischen Materialismus im Werk von Jürgen Habermas

Regina Kreide (Gießen):
Soziale Evolution und Lernblockaden

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Georg Lohmann (Magdeburg):
Ernüchterte Geschichtsphilosophie. Zur Rolle der Geschichtsphilosophie in Habermas’ kritischer Gesellschaftstheorie

Klaus Erich Kaehler (Köln):
Hegel, Marx und das moderne Subjekt. Anmerkungen zu Habermas’ Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne

Hauke Brunkhorst (Flensburg):
Wiederkehr der Krise? – Revisionen des Marxistischen Theorieprogramms

Agnes Heller (Budapest/New York):
Meine Habermas-Rezeption vor 35 Jahren

Discussion with Axel Honneth at Humboldt University

2012-01-27T20:59:00.004+01:00

On February 2, 2012, Axel Honneth takes part in a discussion at the Humboldt University in Berlin:

Die Gegenwart der Freiheit
Zeitdiagnose und Gesellschaftskritik in Axel Honneths "Das Recht der Freiheit"

The panel:
Axel Honneth (New York/Frankfurt), Ute Frevert (Berlin), Heiner Ganßmann (Berlin) & Christoph Möllers (Berlin).

"In seiner jüngsten Monographie „Das Recht der Freiheit“ unternimmt Axel Honneth den ehrgeizigen Versuch, die Rekonstruktion der Kriterien sozialer Gerechtigkeit auf Grundlage der für die zentralen Institutionen westlich-liberaler Gesellschaften konstitutiven normativen Ansprüche mit einer umfassenden kritischen Zeitdiagnose zu verbinden. In dieser Veranstaltung wird es vor allem darum gehen, letzteren Anspruch auf den Prüfstand zu stellen: Was hat es mit Honneths grundlegender These auf sich, dass das „Wir“ persönlicher Beziehungen, das „Wir“ marktwirtschaftlichen Handelns und das „Wir“ demokratischer Willensbildung als Formen der „Wirklichkeit der Freiheit“ begriffen werden können? Zu diesem Zweck wurden Forscher_innen aus den Bereichen der Sozial- und Geschlechtergeschichte, der Wirtschafts-/Sozialwissenschaften sowie der Rechts- und Demokratietheorie zu einer Podiumsveranstaltung mit Axel Honneth eingeladen, um seine Zeitdiagnose einer kritischen Diskussion zu unterziehen."

See my post on Honneth's latest book here - and links to reviews here.

Four papers by Allen Wood on Kant, Hegel, and Parfit

2012-01-25T20:33:00.007+01:00

At his website at Stanford University, Professor Allen Wood has posted four papers:

1. Kant on Practical Reason
(Forthcoming in "Kant and Practical Justification", Oxford University Press).
Here I attempt to explicate the account of practical reason presented by Kant in the Groundwork, and to relate it critically to some contemporary conceptions of practical reason.

2. Kant and Agent-Oriented Ethics
(Published in "Perfecting Virtue", Cambridge University Press, 2011).
A critical discussion of virtue ethics and the relation of Kant's moral philosophy to it.

3. Hegel's Political Philosophy
(Published in "A Companion to Hegel", Routledge 2011).
A succinct account of Hegel's theory of the modern state, together with background information about its history and political context.

4. Humanity as End In Itself: Comments on Derek Parfit, On What Matters, Volume 1
(Published in Derek Parfit's "On What Matters", Oxford University Press, 2011).
Includes a critique of the use of 'trolley problems' in moral philosophy.

Allen Wood is Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University. He is the author of "Hegel’s Ethical Thought" (Cambridge University Press, 1990), "Kant’s Ethical Thought" (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and "Kantian Ethics" (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Allen Wood is also Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.

Book reviews of Amartya Sen & Charles Beitz

2012-01-23T20:44:00.002+01:00

From German Law Journal 2012 no. 1:

1. Review Essay – Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice (2009) [pdf]
by Michael Da Silva (Toronto)

See my post on Sen's book here.

2. Book Review – Charles R. Beitz’s The Idea of Human Rights (2009) [pdf]
by Angelina Ling (Toronto)

See my post on Beitz's book here.

Panel discussion in Frankfurt: "What World are We Living in?"

2012-01-22T20:36:00.002+01:00

On January 27, 2012, the "Frankfurter Kunstverein" in Frankfurt am Main hosts a panel discussion titled " What World are We Living in? Diagnostic Perspectives on the Society of the Present".

The panel consists of Axel Honneth (New York/Frankfurt), Juliane Rebentisch (Frankfurt) and Joseph Vogl (Berlin).
Presentation: Rainer Forst (Frankfurt).

"The opening panel will bring together various perspectives on current situations of upheaval: The global consequences of the financial crisis have already long been raising questions as to our conception of democracy and the extent to which society’s normative orders are of our own making. How can we describe the current transformations? What future will emerge from the present upheavals? And how can they be influenced politically, if at all?

The panel discussion is arranged by the Frankfurter Kunstverein and the Frankfurt University Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of Normative Orders".

Alan Thomas reviews Charles Taylor

2012-01-22T02:00:00.002+01:00

At "Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews", Alan Thomas reviews "Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays" (Harvard University Press, 2011) by Charles Taylor:

Review: "Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays"

Excerpt:
"Taylor (....) shows how there are tensions internal to our modern conception of political legitimacy that make contestation of any given political identity inevitable. Since legitimate authority is an expression of "we, the people", there is an inherent pressure to democratic inclusion. However, various functional requirements threaten to make this inclusion a homogenizing process in a way that threatens particular identifications. Unable to accommodate hierarchies of different groups, owing to its constitutive egalitarianism of status, the modern democratic state works essentially by a forced inclusion. This leads, at its limit, to ethnic cleansing in cases where, as Michael Mann puts it, "demos" is identified with "ethnos". Drawing on the work of Anderson, Calhoun, Gellner and Liah Greenfeld, Taylor argues convincingly that no explanation of nationalism can be wholly state focused: a deeper account needs to examine the underlying changes in our collective social imaginaries that make it possible for a society to conceive of itself as a society of equals, acting freely in secular time, where each citizen stands in a direct and unmediated relationship to the state. If the modern conception of political legitimacy requires collective deliberation on the part of all, then any denial of expression to a minority group is bound to generate a nationalistic counter-pressure."

See my previous post on Charles Taylor's book here (with links to some of his essays).

Alan Thomas is Professor of Philosophy at Tilburg University. He is the author of "Thomas Nagel" (Acumen Press, 2009).

Hayek Against (and For) Rawls

2012-01-21T18:09:00.002+01:00

Andrew Lister (Queens University) has posted a new paper on:

“The Mirage of Social Justice: Hayek Against (and For) Rawls” [pdf]
(Forthcoming in Critical Review, Fall 2012).

Excerpts:
... one is naturally surprised to read Hayek saying that the differences between himself and John Rawls are "more verbal than substantial", and that Rawls and Hayek agree on "the essential point," which is that principles of justice apply to the rules of institutions and social practices, but not to distributions of particular things across specific persons. [....] Hayek claimed that people had misread Rawls, ignoring his point that if a distribution results from just institutions it is just no matter what it is. Yet it clearly seems that for Rawls, justice in institutions was itself defined at least partly in distributive terms. If one thinks of the familiar contrast between old, or classical liberalism and new, or social justice liberalism, Rawls is clearly a social justice liberal. So how could Hayek have claimed to be in agreement with Rawls? This is the historical and interpretive puzzle I want to address in my lecture tonight.

[....] at the level of normative principle, Hayek is in many ways a Rawlsian. I will outline four main areas of convergence: the importance of 'pure procedural justice', the irrelevance of merit, the use of a veil of ignorance, and the principle the inequalities should benefit everyone."

Andrew Lister is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Studies, Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. See his blog here.

Interview with Honneth in Swiss TV

2012-01-21T17:16:00.004+01:00

On Sunday January 22, Barbara Bleisch interviews Professor Axel Honneth in "Schweizer Fernsehen" (SF)

"Axel Honneth: Der Kampf um Anerkennung"
11 - 12 a.m.

Update:
See the interview here (podcast: video + audio) - or here.

Axel Honneth is Jack C. Weinstein Professor of the Humanities, Department of Philosophy, Columbia University.

Review of Habermas on Religion

2011-12-22T23:10:00.003+01:00

In "The New Republic" (December 29, 2011), Peter Gordon reviews:

* Jürgen Habermas - "An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age" (Polity Press, 2010)

* Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (eds.) - "The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere" (Columbia University Press, 2011)

See the review here.

Excerpt:
"The broader point, for Habermas, is that the modern commitment to justice seems to draw nourishment from non-rational sources, and many of these sources are religious (though perhaps not all of them). In reference to Kant, Habermas observes that in our ethical reasoning we provide justification in the language of universalistic concepts that presuppose the freedom of the individual. But when we are actually moved to act on our insight into the solidarity of the human collective, we may need more than “good reasons.” For Kant, this apparent weakness in our ethical reasoning could be supplemented by his philosophy of religion. Similarly, Habermas claims, when profane reason is set free to act on its own, it “loses its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole - of the Kingdom of God on earth - as collectively binding ideals.” Simply put, profane reason may not retain the requisite strength of motive or aspiration to fulfill its own mission: “practical reason fails to fulfill its own vocation when it no longer has sufficient strength to awaken, and to keep awake, in the minds of secular subjects, an awareness of the violations of solidarity throughout the world, an awareness of what is missing, of what cries out to heaven.”

Peter E. Gordon is Professor of History at Harvard University.

(Thanks to Reza Javaheri for the link).

Rawlsian Explorations in Religion and Applied Philosophy

2011-12-19T20:57:00.004+01:00

Rawlsian Explorations in Religion and Applied Philosophy

by Daniel A. Dombrowski

(Pennsylvania University Press, 2011)

146 pages

Description

To probe the underlying premises of a liberal political order, John Rawls felt obliged to use a philosophical method that abstracted from many of the details of ordinary life, but this very abstraction became a point of criticism, as it left unclear what implications his theory had for actual public policies and life in the real political world. Rawlsian Explorations in Religion and Applied Philosophy attempts to ferret out the implications of Rawls’s theory for how we approach some of our most challenging social problems. As Daniel Dombrowski puts it, “the present book is intended to fill the gap between Rawls’s own empyrean heights and the really practical public policy proposals made by those who are government planners, lobbyists, or legislators.” Among the topics examined are natural rights, the morality of war, the treatment of mentally deficient humans and nonhuman sentient creatures, the controversies over legacy and affirmative action in college admissions, and the place of religious belief in a democratic society. The final chapter is devoted to exploring how Rawls’s own religious beliefs, as revealed in two works posthumously published in 2009, played into his formulation of his theory of justice.

Content

1. Rawls, Natural Rights, and the Process of Reflective Equilibrium
2. A Rawlsian View of War
3. Nussbaum, Mental Disability, and Animal Entitlements
4. A Rawlsian Critique of Legacy and Affirmative Action
5. "All for the Greater Glory of God": Was Saint Ignatius Irrational?
6. Rawlsian Religion

Review

"“Despite the immense secondary literature on the work of John Rawls, there has been relatively little that aims to explore the application of his approach to more concrete issues. This is exactly what Dombrowksi provides, extending and applying justice as fairness in discussions of war, mental disability, animals, affirmative action, and religion. While sympathetic to Rawls’s basic approach, Dombrowksi does not shy away from criticizing some of his brief comments in these areas. He also engages productively with the work of Nicholas Wolterstorff, Michael Walzer, and Martha Nussbaum, among others.” - Jon Mandle, University at Albany, SUNY.

Daniel A. Dombrowski is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. He is the author of "Rawls and Religion: The Case for Political Liberalism" (State University of New York Press, 2001).

"Religion without God" - Dworkin's Einstein Lectures

2011-12-18T08:59:00.007+01:00

On December 12-14, Professor Ronald Dworkin (New York University) gave three lectures at the University of Bern, Switzerland:

1. Einstein’s Worship

2. Faith and Physics

3. Religion without God

See the three lecture videos here.

Further information here.

Abstract:
"For most people religion means a belief in a god. But Albert Einstein said that he was both an atheist and a deeply religious man. Millions of ordinary people seem to have the same thought: they say that though they don’t believe in a god they do believe in something “bigger than us.” In these lectures I argue that these claims are not linguistic contradictions, as they are often taken to be, but fundamental insights into what a religion really is.

A religious attitude involves moral and cosmic convictions beyond simply a belief in god: that people have an innate, inescapable responsibility to make something valuable of their lives and that the natural universe is gloriously, mysteriously wonderful. Religious people accept such convictions as matters of faith rather than evidence and as personality-defining creeds that play a pervasive role in their lives.

In these lectures I argue that a belief in god is not only not essential to the religious attitude but is actually irrelevant to that attitude. The existence or non-existence of a god does not even bear on the question of people’s intrinsic ethical responsibility or their glorification of the universe. I do not argue either for or against the existence of a god, but only that a god’s existence can make no difference to the truth of religious values. If a god exists, perhaps he can send people to Heaven or Hell. But he cannot create right answers to moral questions or instill the universe with a glory it would not otherwise have.

How, then, can we defend a religious attitude if we cannot rely on a god? In the first lecture I offer a godless argument that moral and ethical values are objectively real: They do not depend on god, but neither are they just subjective or relative to cultures. They are objective and universal. In the second lecture I concentrate on Einstein’s own religion: his bewitchment by the universe. What kind of beauty might the vast universe be thought to hold – what analogy to more familiar sources of beauty is most suggestive? I propose that the beauty basic physicists really hope to find is the beauty of a powerful, profound mathematical proof. Godly religions insist that though god explains everything his own existence need not be explained because he necessarily exists. Religious atheists like Einstein have, I believe, a parallel faith: that when a unifying theory of everything is found it will be not only simple but, in the way of mathematics, inevitable. They dream of a new kind of necessity: cosmic necessity.

In the third lecture, I consider the moral and political consequences of fully recognizing godless religion. Constitutions and international treaties across the world declare a right to religious freedom. We must understand this to protect godless as well as godly religions, and this important extension requires complex adjustments in human rights practice. It requires a difficult but indispensible distinction between personal questions about the nature and value of human life, which people must be allowed to decide for themselves, and questions of justice that a community must answer collectively. I end the three lectures by examining, in that light, a variety of controversial topics: state-supported religion, harmful religious rituals, homosexuality, abortion, and the banning of crucifixes, headscarves, burkas or minarets in public places."

See also Ronald Dworkin's paper "Religion without God" at the "Colloquium in Legal, Political and Social Philosophy", New York University.

Ronald Dworkin is Professor of Philosophy at New York University. His latest book is "Justice for Hedgehogs" (Belknap Press, 2011). See my posts on the book here and here.

Lecture Videos on Normativity

2011-12-18T00:38:00.003+01:00

The latest three lecture videos from the the Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of Normative Orders", Goethe-University Frankfurt, November 2011:

Professor Thomas M. Schmidt (Frankfurt):
"Die „Heiligkeit des Rechts". Autonomie und Autorität normativer Geltung"
November 2, 2011

Professor Stefan Gosepath (Frankfurt):
"Die soziale Natur der Normativität"
November 9, 2011

Professor Peter Niesen (Darmstadt):
"Zwei Modelle kosmopolitischer Normativität"
November 23, 2011

See the three lectures here.

See my post on the lectures series here.

William Rehg reviews "Recognition and Social Ontology"

2011-12-17T15:31:00.005+01:00

In "Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews" (December 2011), William Rehg reviews "Recognition and Social Ontology" (Brill, 2011) edited by Heikki Ikäheimo and Arto Laitinen:

Review: "Recognition and Social Ontology"

Excerpts:
In assembling the contributions to Recognition and Social Ontology, the editors aim to bring together "two contemporary, intensively debated fields of inquiry: Hegel-inspired theories of recognition (Anerkennung) and analytic social ontology". Considering the difficulty of this goal, the collection does rather well overall. Robert Brandom, whose own work deeply embodies the analytic engagement with Hegel, provides the lead contribution. Brandom's chapter in turn provokes critical reactions in several subsequent chapters. A number of chapters attempt to show how Hegel can inform analytic social philosophy. And chapters that do not explicitly focus on Hegel nonetheless contribute to the analysis of mutual recognition.(....)

The second part of the book widens the scope of discussion. Three of the four chapters examine the relevance of Hegel for contemporary thought. Ludwig Siep opens with a helpful critical overview of recent attempts by Brandom, Pippin, Pinkard, Honneth, Taylor, and Ricoeur to put Hegel's conception of mutual recognition to work on contemporary concerns. Siep has doubts about this trend. The idea of recognition, he argues, lacks the resources to deal with three problems in social philosophy: distributive justice, cultural pluralism, and the relationship between humanity and nature.

See my previous post on the book here (with links to some of the essays).

William Rehg is Professor of Philosohy at Saint Louis University. He is the author of the excellent "Insight and Solidarity: A Study in the Discourse Ethics of Jürgen Habermas" (University of California Press, 1994) and co-editor (with James Bohman) of "Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn: The Transformation of Critical Theory" (MIT Press, 2001) and "Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Politics and Reasons" (MIT Press, 1997). William Rehg is the translator of Jürgen Habermas's "Between Facts and Norms" (MIT Press, 1996).

Essays on Comtemporary Philosophy of Human Rights

2011-12-15T21:44:00.007+01:00

Philosophical Dimensions of Human Rights:
Some Contemporary Views

Ed. by Claudio Corradetti

(Springer Verlag, 2012)

Description

This book presents a unique collection of the most relevant perspectives in contemporary human rights philosophy. Different intellectual traditions are brought together to explore some of the core postmodern issues challenging standard justifications. Widely accessible also to non experts, contributions aim at opening new perspectives on the state of the art of the philosophy of human rights. This makes this book particularly suitable to human rights experts as well as master and doctoral students.
Further, while conceived in a uniform and homogeneous way, the book is internally organized around three central themes: an introduction to theories of rights and their relation to values; a set of contributions presenting some of the most influential contemporary strategies; and finally a number of articles evaluating those empirical challenges springing from the implementation of human rights. This specific set-up of the book provides readers with a stimulating presentation of a growing and interconnecting number of problems that post-natural law theories face today.

Content [Preview]

Introduction - Claudio Corradetti

Part 1: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives on Human Rights

1. Human Rights in History and Contemporary Practice - Jeffrey Flynn
2. Philosophy and Human Rights: Contemporary Perspectives - David Reidy
3. Reconsidering Realism on Rights - William E. Scheuerman

Part 2: The Validit(ies) of Human Rights

4. The Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights - Jürgen Habermas [Abstract]
5. The Justification of Human Rights and the Basic Right to Justification - Rainer Forst
6. Social Harm, Political Judgment, and the Pragmatics of Justification - Albena Azmanova
7. “It All Depends”: The Universal and the Contingent in Human Rights - Wojciech Sadurski
8. Tiny Sparks of Contingency. On the Aesthetics of Human Rights - Giovanna Borradori
9. The Idea of a Charter of Fundamental Human Rights - Alessandro Ferrara

Part 3: Democracy and Human Rights

10. Is There a Human Right to Democracy? - Seyla Benhabib
11. Dialectical Snares: Human Rights and Democracy in the World Society - Hauke Brunkhorst
12. The Normality of Constitutional Politics: an Analysis of the Drafting of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights - Richard Bellamy & Justus Schönlau
13. Rights in Progress: The Politics of Rights and the Democracy-Building Processes in Comparative Perspective - Lorella Cedroni
14. Ethnopolitics. The Challenge for Human and Minority Rights Protection - Joseph Marko

15. Human Rights in the Information Society - Giovanni Sartor

Claudio Corradetti is Senior Researcher at The European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano (EURAC). He is the author of "Relativism and Human Rights. A Theory of Pluralistic Universalism" (Springer Verlag, 2009)

New Book: "The Right to Justification" by Rainer Forst

2011-12-13T20:19:00.003+01:00

The Right to Justification
Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice

by Rainer Forst

(Columbia University Press, 2011)

368 pages

Description

Contemporary philosophical pluralism recognizes the inevitability and legitimacy of multiple ethical perspectives and values, making it difficult to isolate the higher-order principles on which to base a theory of justice. Rising up to meet this challenge, Rainer Forst, a leading member of the Frankfurt School’s newest generation of philosophers, conceives of an “autonomous” construction of justice founded on what he calls the basic moral right to justification.
Forst begins by identifying this right from the perspective of moral philosophy. Then, through an innovative, detailed critical analysis, he ties together the central components of social and political justice - freedom, democracy, equality, and toleration - and joins them to the right to justification. The resulting theory treats “justificatory power” as the central question of justice, and by adopting this approach, Forst argues, we can discursively work out, or “construct,” principles of justice, especially with respect to transnational justice and human rights issues.
As he builds his theory, Forst engages with the work of Anglo-American philosophers such as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Amartya Sen, and critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, and Axel Honneth.

Content [Preview]

Introduction

Part 1: Foundations: Practical Reason,Morality, and Justice

1. Practical Reason and Justifying Reasons
2. Moral Autonomy and the Autonomy of Morality
3. Ethics and Morality
4. The Justification of Justice: Rawls's Political Liberalism and Habermas's Discourse Theory in Dialogue

Part 2: Political and Social Justice

5. Political Liberty: Integrating Five Conceptions of Autonomy
6. A Critical Theory of Multicultural Tolerance
7. The Rule of Reasons: Three Models of Deliberative Democracy
8. Social Justice, Justification, and Justice

Part 3: Human Rights and Transnational Justice

9. The Basic Right to Justification
10. Constructions of Transnational Justice
11. Justice, Morality, and Power in the Global Context
12. Toward a Critical Theory of Transnational Justice

Translation of "Das Recht auf Rechtfertigung. Elemente einer konstruktivistischen Theorie der Gerechtigkeit" (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2007). Translated by Jeffrey Flynn, Fordham University.

Reviews

"Rainer Forst is at the forefront of the exciting encounter between critical social theory and Anglo-American normative philosophy. His work is a worthy successor to the Rawls-Habermas dialogue, which ended all too quickly. This work documents his systematic attempt to build a theory of human rights and democratic justice, beginning with the principle of the right to justification. He writes with grace and wit; this book will be widely read." - Seyla Benhabib, Yale University

"In his ambitious masterpiece, Toleration in Conflict, Rainer Forst laid the groundwork for an innovative concept, the right to justification. Here he has developed this prolific idea in a systematic manner, establishing a compelling and original political theory. Forst, a brilliant scholar, deserves his reputation as one of the leading political philosophers of his generation." - Jürgen Habermas

Rainer Forst is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at Goethe University in Frankfurt, and director of the research cluster on the “Formation of Normative Orders.”

See my previous post on Rainer Forst's publications here.

See also two recent papers by Rainer Forst:
* "The Justification of Human Rights and the Basic Right to Justification: A Reflexive Approach" [pdf] (2011)
* "Transnational Justice, Democracy, and Human Rights" [pdf] (2011).

Adorno Handbook

2011-12-10T15:28:00.008+01:00

Adorno Handbuch
Leben - Werk - Wirkung

Ed. by Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer & Stefan Müller-Doohm

(J. B. Metzler, December 2011)

568 Seiten

Description

"This handbook offers an overview of the state of debate on Theodor W. Adorno’s work and impact and provides content-related as well as methodical tools for dealing with this prominent figure of 20th-century German-language humanities and social sciences. The objective of this undertaking, on the one hand, is to document and take stock, but also to pass criticism and reinterpret; rather than disseminating a codified doctrine it is aimed at depicting and analyzing the problems and different methods of reasoning exemplified by Adorno himself. At the core of this handbook lies the specifically interdisciplinary character of Adorno’s manner of doing philosophy the potential of which is not limited to philosophy-related research but becomes virulent in the critical interlacing of the arts, music, philosophy, and the academic sciences. This leaves no room for doctrinal limitations, on the contrary – the handbook’s more than 40 contributors demonstrate the different approaches and temperaments in discussing Adorno´s work".

Contents [Preview]

I. Leben

Versuch eines Portraits (Stefan Müller-Doohm)
Im Exil (Sven Kramer)
Traumprotokolle (Stefan Müller-Doohm)

II. Voraussetzungen, Wahlverwandtschaften

Der erste Mentor: Siegfried Kracauer (Stefan Müller-Doohm/Wolfgang Schopf)
Tod und Utopie: Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács (Hans-Ernst Schiller)
»Widerstand gegen die Gewalt des Bestehenden«: Max Horkheimer (Gunzelin Schmid Noerr)

III. Musik

Der Fortschritt des Materials (Gunnar Hindrichs)
Die Frage nach der musikalischen Zeit (Richard Klein)
Die philosophische Kritik der musikalischen Werke (Guido Kreis)
Modellfall der Philosophie der Musik: Beethoven (Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen)
Soziale vs. musikalische Kritik: Der Fall Wagner (Richard Klein)
Wahlverwandtschaft: Gustav Mahler (Peter Uehling)
Schönberg und die Folgen (Ludwig Holtmeier/Cosima Linke)
Neoklassizismus als andere Moderne: Strawinsky und Ravel (Gustav Falke)
Interpretation, Reproduktion (Reinhard Kapp)
Filmmusik (Felix Diergarten)
Musikpädagogik nach 1945 (Jürgen Vogt)
Musik und Sprache (Susanne Kogler)

IV. Literatur und Sprache

Goethe: Dialektik des Klassizismus (Thomas Zabka)
Hölderlin: Parataxis (Johann Kreuzer)
Adorno als Leser Heines (Peter Uwe Hohendahl)
Lyrik und Gesellschaft (Sven Kramer)
Kafka-Lektüre (Sonja Dierks)
Beckett als philosophische Erfahrung (Wolfram Ette)
Thomas Mann (Hans Rudolf Vaget)

V. Gesellschaft

Methode (Jürgen Ritsert)
Kritische Theorie und empirische Sozialforschung (Wolfgang Bonß)
Zeitdiagnose (Dirk Braunstein/Stefan Müller-Doohm)
Ambivalenzen der Kulturindustrie (Angela Keppler)
Radio Theory (Larson Powell)
Thesen zum Antisemitismus (Micha Brumlik)
»Ende des Individuums« (Markus Schroer)
Die Wunde Freud (Christian Schneider)
Theologie und Messianismus (Micha Brumlik)

VI. Philosophie

»Großartige Zweideutigkeit«: Kant (Josef Früchtl)
Negative Dialektik: Kritik an Hegel (Tilo Wesche)
Intermittenz und ästhetische Konstruktion: Kierkegaard (Lore Hühn/Philipp Schwab)
Materialismus: Kritische Theorie nach Marx (Ulrich Ruschig)
Antidialektik und Nichtidentität: Nietzsche (Adrián Navigante)
Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie: Husserl (Petra Gehring)
Dialektik oder Ontologie: Heidegger (Tilo Wesche)
Das Gespräch mit Benjamin (Johann Kreuzer)
Dialektik der Aufklärung (Andreas Hetzel)
Negative Moralphilosophie (Gerhard Schweppenhäuser)
Metaphysik und Metaphysikkritik (Georg W. Bertram)
Ästhetische Theorie (Ruth Sonderegger)
Essay und System (Ruth Sonderegger)

VII. Wirkung

Deutschland I: Der exemplarische Intellektuelle der Bundesrepublik (Christian Schneider)
Deutschland II: Philosophische plus politische Resonanz (Richard Klein)
Deutschland III: Die Spur der Ästhetik der Musik (Richard Klein)
Großbritannien (Christian Skirke)
Italien (Marina Calloni)
Spanien (José A. Zamora)
USA (Larson Powell)
Brasilien (Rodrigo Duarte)

VIII. Anhang

Zeittafel, Vorlesungen und Seminare, Bibliographie.

Richard Klein is editor of the journal "Musik & Ästhetik".
Johann Kreuzer is Professor for History of Philosophy and Head of the Adorno Research Centre, Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg.
Stefan Müller-Doohm is Professor Emeritus for Sociology, Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg.

Rainer Forst awarded 2012 Leibniz Prize

2011-12-09T20:25:00.011+01:00

Professor Rainer Forst (Frankfurt) will be receiving one of the ten 2012 Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz prizes.

The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize is the highest German research prize. It consists of a research grant of 2.5 million euro. The prize is awarded by the German Research Foundation. It will be conferred upon the prize winners in a ceremony to be held on February 27 in Berlin.

See the announcement here, and the press release from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt, here.

"Rainer Forst gilt national und international als der wichtigste deutsche politische Philosoph der Generation „unter 50“. Der Frankfurter Wissenschaftler führt die deutsche – und hier nicht zuletzt Frankfurter – politische Philosophie von Jürgen Habermas und Axel Honneth fort, bringt diese in kritischer Auseinandersetzung mit amerikanischen Vertretern wie John Rawls zusammen und setzt dabei Akzente zu einer ganz eigenen Philosophie. Diese dreht sich vor allem um die Grundbegriffe „Gerechtigkeit“, „Toleranz“ und „Rechtfertigung“. Auf höchst originelle Weise durchdachte und formulierte Forst die Erkenntnis, dass der Mensch schon immer in verschiedene „Rechtfertigungspraktiken“ eingebettet ist. Sie bedingen, dass letztlich alle Handlungen nach eigenen Logiken der Moral, des Rechts und anderer Diskurse legitimiert werden müssen. Unsere praktische Vernunft ist so nichts anderes als das Vermögen, diese Logiken zu erkennen und anzuerkennen – so das weitreichende Fazit des politischen Philosophen Forst.
Die ausgeprägte internationale Ausrichtung mit besonderem Interesse an den USA zeigte sich bei Rainer Forst schon früh. Nach dem Studium in Frankfurt, New York/Binghamton und Harvard war er Assistent und Gastprofessor in Berlin, Frankfurt und New York, bevor er nach Stationen in Frankfurt und Gießen 2004 Professor an der Frankfurter Universität wurde; ihr ist Forst trotz mehrerer Angebote renommierter ausländischer Universitäten treu geblieben."

See also in Frankfurter Rundschau November 9, 2011:
- Georg Leppert's article "Jubel über Leibniz-Preis"
- an interview with Rainer Forst "Frankfurt ist sehr sichtbar".

Rainer Forst is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main.

His books include:
- "Kontexte der Gerechtigkeit" (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994)
[English: "Contexts of Justice" (California University Press, 2002)],
- "Toleranz im Konflikt" (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003)
[English: "Tolerance in Conflict" (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)]
- "Das Recht auf Rechtfertigung. Elemente einer konstruktivistischen Theorie der Gerechtigkeit" (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2007)
[English: "The Right to Justification" (Columbia University Press, 2011)]
- "Kritik der Rechtfertigungsverhältnisse. Perspektiven einer kritischen Theorie der Politik" (Suhrkamp Verlag 2011)
[English: "Critique of the Structure of Justification" (Polity Press, forthcoming)].

Recent papers by Rainer Forst:
- "Transnational Justice and Democracy" (2011)
- "The Grounds of Critique" (2011)
- "Two Stories on Tolerance" (2010)
- "Dulden heißt beleibigen" (2007)

Lecture by Rainer Forst on "The Power of Tolerance" [video, Berlin 2008].

Interview with Joshua Cohen on Political Philosophy

2011-12-08T23:22:00.002+01:00

In the magazine "The European" (December 8, 2011), Martin Eiermann interviews Joshua Cohen:

"I Am Interested in Cool Ideas That Are Good"

Excerpt
"John Rawls was enormously influential as a political philosopher. Yet he never made direct contributions to journals, unlike Habermas, who is very actively participating in political discourses. So how can we explain Rawls’ considerable influence? Because there are intermediaries between high intellectual discourse and public discussion. That is what we try to be: an intermediary. We need to free ideas from the confines of their disciplinary cloisters. If they develop traction, much can happen. It’s a classic example of the division of labor: We do our work, which addresses a more limited audience than a tabloid paper, and hope that someone else picks up on it. We’re bridging a gap – at least that’s the project."

Joshua Cohen is Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society, Stanford University. He is editor of Boston Review. His books include "Philosophy, Politics, Democracy: Selected Papers" (Harvard University Press, 2009), “Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals” (Oxford University Press, 2010), and "The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays" (Harvard University Press, 2011).

Thom Brooks on "Global Justice and Politics"

2011-12-07T18:57:00.002+01:00

Thom Brooks (Newcastle) has posted a new paper on SSRN:

"Global Justice and Politics" [pdf]

Abstract
"The history of political philosophy has been largely focused on the problem of justice within borders. Contemporary political philosophers have only begun more recently to draw greater attention to problems of global justice rather than to domestic justice alone: they are concerned about identifying a just international distributive justice. The most important issue has been how best to address severe poverty. Are there duties to provide support for those in severe poverty and, if so, who has these duties? What support may be justified? These are the most pressing and challenging questions confronting political philosophers today.
This chapter examines three different approaches to how global justice and politics might address the problem of severe poverty. The first approach argues that we have positive duties to assist those in need. They argue that we have a duty to assist where there are others in need irrespective of whether or not we contributed to their situation. A second approach claims that we have negative duties to those in need that arise because we have contributed to their severe poverty. Finally, a third approach argues that our responsibilities to those in need are not a matter of choosing between our positive or negative duties, but that these duties should be understood within a wider context of our remedial responsibilities. Our focus should be on identifying who has a responsibility to remedy suffering elsewhere and this requires a wider perspective to cover all cases. Each approach is considered in turn in a sympathetic analysis where the focus is on presenting each in its best light and allowing readers to judge for themselves which is most worth defending."

The paper will be published in Fred D'Agostino and Jerry Gaus (eds.) - "Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy" (Routledge, April 2012). Further information here.

Thom Brooks is Reader in Political and Legal Philosophy at Newcastle University. He is the author of "Hegel’s Political Philosophy" (Edinburgh University Press, 2007). See his web blog here.

Companion to Nozick's "Anarchy, State, and Utopia"

2011-12-05T20:34:00.005+01:00

The Cambridge Companion to Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia

edited by Ralf M. Bader & John Meadowcroft

(Cambridge University Press, December 2011)

332 pages

Description

Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) is recognised as a classic of modern political philosophy. Along with John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), it is widely credited with breathing new life into the discipline in the second half of the twentieth century. This Companion presents a balanced and comprehensive assessment of Nozick's contribution to political philosophy. In engaging and accessible chapters, the contributors analyse Nozick's ideas from a variety of perspectives and explore neglected areas of the work such as his discussion of anarchism and his theory of utopia. Their detailed and illuminating picture of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, its impact and its enduring influence will be invaluable to students and scholars in both political philosophy and political theory.

Contents

Introduction - Ralf M. Bader & John Meadowcroft
[preview]

Part I. Morality

1. Side Constraints, Lockean Individual Rights, and the Moral Basis of Libertarianism - Richard Arneson
2. Are Deontological Constraints Irrational? Michael Otsuka
3. What We Learn from the Experience Machine - Fred Feldman [draft]

Part II. Anarchy

4. Nozickian Arguments for the More-than-Minimal State - Eric Mack
5. Explanation, Justification, and Emergent Properties - Gerald Gaus

Part III. State

6. The Right to Distribute - David Schmidtz
7. Nozick's Libertarian Theory of Justice - Peter Vallentyne
8. Does Nozick have a Theory of Property Rights? Barbara Fried
9. Nozick's Critique of Rawls - John Meadowcroft

Part IV. Utopia

10. The Framework for Utopia - Ralf M. Bader [link here]
11. E Pluribus Plurum – How to Fail to Get to Utopia in Spite of Really Trying - Chandran Kukathas [abstract].

Further information on the book here.

Ralf M. Bader is Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, New York University

John Meadowcroft is Lecturer in Public Policy at King's College London. He is the author of "James M. Buchanan" (Continuum, 2011).

Benhabib on Democratic Sovereignty and International Law

2011-12-03T22:21:00.002+01:00

In her Straus Public Lecture on November 28, 2011, Professor Seyla Benhabib analyzed the clash between democratic sovereignty and international law.

See her lecture:
"Democratic Sovereignty and International Law: The Contemporary Debate" (video)
[1 hour & 28 minutes]

Seyla Benhabib is Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University. For the academic year 2011-2012, she is a fellow at the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law & Justice, New York University.

(Thanks to Reza Javaheri for the pointer!)

Four Papers on Deliberation, Tolerance, Citizenship, and Self-Grounding

2011-12-02T20:36:00.004+01:00

Papers from the 6th ECPR General Conference (European Consortium for Political Research) at the University of Iceland, August 25-27, 2011:

Marcos Engelken (Basque Country):
"A Collective Learning Perspective on Public Deliberation" [pdf]

Abstract
Research on mini-publics, as well as in experimental settings, has produced ambiguous results for deliberative democracy. It has helped to demonstrate the “epistemic dimension” (Habermas) of public debate, that is, its inherent potentiality to change discursively citizens’ preferences and to promote collective learning processes. Furthermore, according to these results genuine public deliberation promotes the consideration of common interests, the revision of prejudices and respect towards political opponents. On the other hand, recent research has also highlighted the extremely selective conditions under which genuine deliberation can take place, thus spreading skepticism about the prospects of turning democratic deliberation into a real deliberative democracy. Besides, it has also revealed the inherent tension that exists between some of the core values constitutive of deliberative democracy – for instance, between the principle of publicity and the disposition of political actors to modify their initial opinions; between citizens’ empowerment and citizens’ disposition to revise their pre-deliberative preferences; or between deliberation and representation. This implies that no mini-public, irrespective of its institutional design, manages to satisfy simultaneously all the normative requirements of deliberative democracy. Systemic conceptions of, and rhetorical approaches to, deliberative democracy have been prompted by these considerations. A third way to conceptualize deliberative democracy is provided by the work of cognitive sociologists such as Klaus Eder, Max Miller, Piet Strydom or Bernhard Peters. Their work advances a sociologically realist, and complex, conception of public (macro) deliberation. This paper assesses the potentialities, but also possible pitfalls, of this sociological approach.

Sune Lægaard (Roskilde) & Maria Paola Ferretti (Darmstadt):
"A Multirelational Account of Tolerance and Respect" [pdf]

Abstract
Political theorists such as Anna Elisabetta Galeotti, Rainer Forst and Peter Jones have advanced toleration and respect both as theoretical concepts for understanding the place of minorities and as normative ideals for how minorities’ requests for accommodation should be met. The paper addresses a number of complications that arise in applying concepts and ideals of toleration and respect to concrete cases involving several different subjects of toleration and respect. It offers a framework for understanding the status of minorities that locates toleration and respect at the intersection of a vertical (toleration and respect from government towards its subjects) and horizontal relationship (among citizens). The paper notes how toleration and respect may mean different things in the vertical and horizontal dimensions. It further argues that the two dimensions often intersect in ways affecting both the understanding of minorities' position and how minorities' requests should be handled in light of normative ideals of toleration and respect. These theoretical and normative points are illustrated by reference to cases concerning the construction of Mosques in Europe.

Pablo C. Jiménez Lobeira (Australian National):
"Exploring an Analogical Citizenship for Europe" [pdf]

Abstract
The cultural, economic and political crisis affecting the European Union (EU) today is manifested in the political community’s lack of enthusiasm and cohesion. An effort to reverse this situation – foster ‘EU identity’ – was the creation of EU citizenship. Citizenship implies a people and a polity. But EU citizens already belong to national polities. Should EU citizenship override national citizenship or coexist with it? Postnationalists like Habermas have suggested EU citizenship can overcome nationalisms, grounding political belonging on the body of laws that members of the post-national polity generate in the public sphere. Cosmopolitan communitarianists like Bellamy, by contrast, think that EU citizens should form a mixed commonwealth, with political belonging based on national citizenship. I will argue in favour of the second option, and submit an analogical reading of the ensuing ideas of citizenship, identity and polity. Cosmopolitan communitarianist EU citizenship promises to better foster the great richness of European national cultural, religious, historical, political, legal and linguistic diversity in a ‘mixed’ polity. Its main challenge is how to keep the diverse, mixed polity together.

James Gledhill (LSE):
"The Democratic Rechtsstaat and the Problem of Self-grounding" [pdf]

Abstract
According to the realist critique of political moralism, contemporary political theory has neglected the idea of the state, and the coercive power of the state exercised through positive law, in favour of ideal theories of justice and democracy developed independently of political practice. The work of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas is often seen as paradigmatic of such political moralism. In this paper I take the realist critiques of Raymond Geuss and Bernard Williams as an opportunity for reassessing the methodological approaches of Rawls and Habermas. I begin by distinguishing William’s idea of vindicatory genealogy from Geuss’s, I argue untenable, attempt to separate the method of genealogy as critique from the project of normative justification and I claim that Rawls and Habermas can be seen as employing the methods of reflective equilibrium and rational reconstruction for just such vindicatory purposes. I proceed to offer a genealogy of the idea of the democratic Rechtstaat, to situate Rawls and Habermas within this tradition and to argue that this tradition overcomes the unsatisfactory methodological dualism of realism versus moralism. The problem of offering a self-grounding justification of the modern democratic Rechtsstaat reflects the fundamental problem for philosophy in modernity of creating its normativity out of itself, of finding immanent normative foundations within existing social practices rather than appealing to transcendent ideal principles. I conclude that Rawls fails ultimately to meet this challenge but that Habermas’s project shows how a project of normative philosophical justification can be maintained that is consistent with realist strictures.

A debate between Jürgen Habermas and Fritz Scharpf

2011-12-01T01:32:00.008+01:00

In "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" (November 30, 2011), Maximilian Steinbeis reports from a discussion between Jürgen Habermas and Fritz Scharpf in Berlin:

"Man kann Rührei nicht wieder trennen"

Excerpt
"Während der Sozialphilosoph Jürgen Habermas dafür focht, jetzt sei die Stunde der europäischen Verfassungsgebung, nahm Fritz Scharpf (Köln), der emeritierte Direktor des Kölner Max-Planck-Instituts für Gesellschafts-forschung, den Gegenstandpunkt ein. Die Euro-Krise, so Scharpf, tauge nicht als Vehikel zur Demokratisierung Europas. Im Gegenteil, dieser Weg führe in ein autoritäres, expertokratisches Super-Europa, wenn nicht gar in einen europäischen Bürgerkrieg.
Die Integration Europas, so Scharpf, habe bisher darin bestanden, politische Handlungsfähigkeit um der ökonomischen Freiheit willen zu beschränken. Die Vision eines demokratischen Europas, um die politische Handlungsfähigkeit zu stärken, liege überhaupt nicht in der Logik dieser Integration - und täte sie es, dann würde das Europa nur auseinandersprengen."

See my posts on Habermas's new book "Zur Verfassung Europas" (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011) and his article on "Europe's post-democratic era" (The Guardian, November 10, 2011).

Justice Between Generations (podcast)

2011-11-26T21:29:00.002+01:00

At the University of Oxford on September 17, 2011, Simon Caney, Mark Philp, and Adam Swift discussed the issue of intergenerational justice and asked questions like how do we allocate resources intergenerationally accross areas like welfare, pensions, higher education and environmental costs?

Podcast: "Justice Between Generations" [49 minutes]

See the program here [pdf].

Der Spiegel: "Habermas, the Last European"

2011-11-25T20:38:00.005+01:00

In the German weekly "Der Spiegel" (November 21, 2011), Georg Diez writes about Jürgen Habermas's struggle for a democratic EU - "Schluss jetzt!"

An English translation of the article is available on "Der Spiegel"s international website:

"Habermas, the Last European: A Philosopher's Mission to Save the EU"

Excerpts:
"I'm speaking here as a citizen," he says. "I would rather be sitting back home at my desk, believe me. But this is too important. Everyone has to understand that we have critical decisions facing us. That's why I'm so involved in this debate. The European project can no longer continue in elite modus." (....) " I condemn the political parties. Our politicians have long been incapable of aspiring to anything whatsoever other than being re-elected. They have no political substance whatsoever, no convictions."

Habermas wants to get his message out. That's why he's sitting here [at a debate in Paris]. That's why he recently wrote an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, in which he accused EU politicians of cynicism and "turning their backs on the European ideals." That's why he has just written a book -- a "booklet," as he calls it -- which the respected German weekly Die Zeit promptly compared with Immanuel Kant's 1795 essay "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch."

"Sometime after 2008," says Habermas over a glass of white wine after the debate, "I understood that the process of expansion, integration and democratization doesn't automatically move forward of its own accord, that it's reversible, that for the first time in the history of the EU, we are actually experiencing a dismantling of democracy. I didn't think this was possible. We've reached a crossroads."

The debate took place at the Goethe Institute in Paris on November 12. See my post here.

Charles Taylor on the "Post-Secular" (video)

2011-11-24T23:45:00.002+01:00

On June 15, 2011, Professor Charles Taylor gave a lecture at Frankfurt University on "The Meaning of "Post-Secular".

The lecture is now available on video:
"The Meaning of "Post-Secular" (73 minutes).

Charles Taylor was introduced by Professor Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (11 minutes).

Eight Papers on Public Reason

2011-11-21T00:14:00.004+01:00

Jonathan Quong (Manchester University):
"On The Idea of Public Reason" [pdf]

Gillian K. Hadﬁeld (University of Southern California) & Stephen Macedo (Princeton University):
"Rational Reasonableness: Toward a Positive Theory of Public Reason" [pdf]

Stephen Macedo (Princeton University):
"Political Education and Public Reason"

Chad W. Flanders (Saint Louis University):
"The Mutability of Public Reason" [pdf]

Funda Gençoğlu Onbaşı (Baskent University):
"Democracy, Pluralism and the Idea of Public Reason: Rawls and Habermas in Comparative Perspective"

Wojciech Sadurski (University of Sydney):
"Reason of State and Public Reason"

Sean Ingham (Harvard University):
"When is Public Reason Possible?"

Mark Redhead (California State University):
"How Global Can Global Public Reason Be?"

IEP Entry on the Frankfurt School

2011-11-20T08:57:00.002+01:00

Claudio Corradetti has posted an entry to "The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy" (IEP) on

"The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory"

Claudio Corradetti is Senior Researcher at The European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano (EURAC). He is the author of "Relativism and Human Rights. A Theory of Pluralistic Universalism" (Springer, 2009) and the editor of "Philosophical Dimensions of Human Rights" (Springer, forthcoming 2012) [see a preview here].

Paper on Rawlsian Liberalism Versus Libertarianism

2011-11-19T08:04:00.002+01:00

Barbara H. Fried (Stanford Law School) has posted a new paper on SSRN:

"The Unwritten Theory of Justice: Rawlsian Liberalism Versus Libertarianism".

Forthcoming in Jon Mandle and David Reidy (eds.) - "The Blackwell Companion to Rawls" (Blackwell, 2012).

Abstract:
When A Theory of Justice was published in 1971, utilitarianism was the game to beat in political philosophy, and Rawls made clear his intention to beat it. The appearance of Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia three years later singlehandedly enshrined libertarianism rather than utilitarianism in the popular imagination as the chief rival to Rawls’s two principles of justice. Ever since, Rawlsian liberalism has had two parallel lives in political theory. The first - the version Rawls wrote - is a response to utilitarian’s failure to take seriously the separateness of persons. The second - the unwritten version ‘received’ by its general audience - is a response to libertarianism’s failure to take seriously our moral obligations to the well-being of our fellow citizens. This article considers how, had he written the second version, Rawls might have dealt with libertarians’ critique of ‘justice as fairness’ as fundamentally illiberal, and how his two principles might have been transformed in the process.

Barbara F. Fried is Professor of Law at Standford Law School, Stanford University.

New book by Michel Rosenfeld on Pluralism

2011-11-13T09:54:00.003+01:00

Law, Justice, Democracy, and the Clash of Cultures

by Michel Rosenfeld

(Cambridge University Press, 2011)

320 pages

Description

The Cold War ideological battle with universal aspirations has given way to a clash of cultures as the world concurrently moves toward globalization of economies and communications and balkanization through a clash of ethnic and cultural identities. Traditional liberal theory has confronted daunting challenges in coping with these changes and with recent developments such as the spread of postmodern thought, religious fundamentalism, and global terrorism. This book argues that a political and legal philosophy based on pluralism is best suited to confront the problems of the twenty-first century. Pointing out that monist theories such as liberalism have become inadequate and that relativism is dangerous, the book makes the case for pluralism from the standpoint of both theory and its applications. The book engages with thinkers, such as Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Rawls, Berlin, Dworkin, Habermas, and Derrida, and with several subjects that are at the center of current controversies, including equality, group rights, tolerance, secularism confronting religious revival, and political rights in the face of terrorism.

Content [preview]

Part I. Liberal Justice and Fleeting Specters of Unity

1. Reframing Comprehensive Pluralism: Hegel versus Rawls
2. Equality and the Dialectic Between Identity and Difference
3. Human Rights and the Clash Between Universalism and Relativism

Part II. E Pluribus Unum?

4. Spinoza's Dialectic and the Paradoxes of Tolerance
5. The Clash Between Deprivatized Religion and Relativized Secularism
6. Dworkin and the One Law Principle

Part III. Can Pluralism Thrive in Times of Stress?

7. Rethinking Political Rights in Times of Stress
8. Derrida's Deconstructive Ethics of Difference Confronts Global Terrorism
9. Habermas's Discourse Ethics of Identity and Global Terror
10. Conclusion: the Hopes of Pluralism in a More Unified and More Fragmented World

Michel Rosenfeld is Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University. He is Co-Editor (with Andrew Arato) of "Habermas on Law and Democracy: Critical Exchanges" (University of California Press, 1998).

Related papers by Michel Rosenfeld:
* The Rule of Law and the Legitimacy of Constitutional Democracy (pdf, 2001)
* Spinoza's Dialectic and the Paradoxes of Tolerance (2003)
* A Pluralist Theory of Political Rights in Times of Stress (2005)
* Habermas's Call for Cosmopolitan Constitutional Patriotism in an Age of Global Terror (2006)
* Derrida's Ethical Turn and America (2006)
* Equality and the Dialectic Between Identity and Difference (2006)
* Unveiling the Limits of Tolerance (2010) [w. Susanna Mancini]

See also a panel discussion between Michel Rosenfeld, Jeremy Waldron, Tracy Higgins and Ruti Teitel on "What is Human Rights? Universals and the Challenge of Cultural Relativism" (pdf, 1999).

Reviews of Habermas's Book on Europe

2011-11-12T17:05:00.023+01:00

Reviews of "Zur Verfassung Europas" (Suhrkamp Verlag, November 2011) by Jürgen Habermas:

* Alexander Cammann - "Der Traum von der Weltinnenpolitik"
(Die Zeit, November 10, 2011)

Summary:
"Als "Buch der Stunde" feiert Alexander Cammanns Jürgen Habermas' hier versammelten jüngsten Interventionen zum Thema Europa, die auch zu den aktuellsten Debatten einige nützliche Stichwörter zu bieten scheinen. Eines davon ist die Formel "postdemokratischer Exekutivföderalismus", eine von Habermas seit längerem benannte Tendenz der europäischen Institutionen, die sich jetzt in der Bewältigung der akuten Krisen Bahn bricht. Dagegen setzt Habermas den Zustand der "transnationalen Demokratie", den es erst zu erreichen gilt. Bewundernd konstatiert Cammann, dass Habermas hier keineswegs nur an Europa, sondern gleich an die ganze Welt denkt. Auch Kritikpunkte hat Cammenn: Der Vordenker des "Strukturwandels der Öffentlichkeit" hat zum Internet offenbar nichts zu sagen, und auch der Euro spiele in seine Erwägungen kaum eine Rolle. Trotzdem: Cammann liest dieses Buch als das Vermächtnis einer Generation." [From Perlentaucher.de]

* Eckhard Fuhr - "Utopischer Realismus"
(Die Welt, November 12, 2011)
[See extract in English here.]

* Uwe Justus Wenzel - "Europäische Doppelbürgerschaft"
(Neue Zürcher Zeitung, November 15, 2011)

Summary:
"Uwe Justus Wenzel findet den utopischen Vorstoß, den Jürgen Habermas in seinem Essay zum Befinden der Europäischen Union macht, offensichtlich erfrischend, insbesondere in einer Zeit, in der sich die Politik vor allem um "Schadensbegrenzung" müht. Der Philosoph kritisiert darin nämlich nicht nur "scharfsinnig" die "intergouvernementale Aushöhlung" der Demokratie, stellt der Rezensent fest. Habermas imaginiert auch ein mögliches "transnationales demokratisches Gemeinwesen", in dem das verfassungsgebende Subjekt sowohl als Staatsbürger als auch als europäischer Bürger agiert, so Wenzel. Auch die "delikate" dialektische Argumentation des Autors, dass zwar die Nationalstaaten unabdingbar für die Europäische Union seien, allerdings die Staatsbürger als Unionsbürger sich von den "Organisationskernen der Mitgliedsstaaten" abzulösen im Begriff seien, trifft beim Rezensenten auf Interesse. Wenzel sieht Habermas Betrachtung Europas als exemplarisch für eine utopische "Weltbürgergemeinschaft" an, was er offensichtlich überaus anregend findet." [From Perlentaucher.de]

* Micha Brumlik - "Ein neues Narrativ wider die Skepsis"
(Die Tageszeitung, November 17, 2011)

Summary:
"Angesichts der Europakrise brandaktuell findet Micha Brumlik Jürgen Habermas' Essay "Zur Verfassung Europas", das nicht nur polemisch mit dem grassierenden "Exekutivföderalismus" ins Gericht geht, sondern zugleich die Utopie eines "Weltparlaments" entwirft, in der die EU lediglich eine Zwischenstation ist. Allerdings gibt es für den Rezensenten eine tiefe Kluft zwischen der Idee und der Realität, die auch Habermas' Rückgriff auf Kants "Weltbürgerrecht" und die von jüngeren Staatstheoretikern vertretene Vorstellung von möglichen Verfassungen ohne Staat nicht überbrückt werden kann. Überhaupt stellt es in den Augen Brumliks eine entscheidende Schwachstelle in Habermas Darlegungen dar, dass er seine Ideen so völlig losgelöst von der Realität der EU-Bürger entwickelt, die somit gänzlich abstrakt bleiben. Zuletzt fragt der Rezensent noch, ob die europäische Idee nicht auch ziemlich "überfrachtet" wird, wenn man sie lediglich als Vorstufe zu einer Weltgemeinschaft betrachtet, die sich global auf die Menschenrechte und den Frieden verständigen soll." [From Perlentaucher.de]

* Stefan Müller-Doohm - "Europas Rolle in einer zukünftigen Weltgesellschaft"
(Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 21, 2011)

Summary:
"Demokratische Selbstbestimmung der Bürger, so lautet das ferne Ziel der umfangreichen Interventionen zum Thema Europa, die Jürgen Habermas in seinem neuen Buch anstellt, wie Stefan Müller-Doohm uns mitteilt. Die lebenslange Beschäftigung des Autors mit Europa und seiner Verfassung beleuchtet der Rezensent für uns noch einmal kursorisch, um dann auf das den Themenkomplex bilanzierende Buch und den in seinem Zentrum, zwischen einer Dokumentation verschiedener publizistischer Vor- und Beiträge, stehenden politik- und rechtswissenschaftlichen Essay zu kommen. In insgesamt vier vom Rezensenten aufgeführten Punkten (z.B. Erweiterung, Gleichgewicht der Mächte) nähert sich Habermas seine Idee von Europa. Den Kern seiner Auseinandersetzung aber erkennt Müller-Doohm in der Kritik an mangelnder regulativer Gestaltung und an den Restriktionen staatlicher Politik." [From Perlentaucher.de]

* Tomasz Kurianowicz - "Das Volk ist klüger"
(Der Tagesspiegel, November 25, 2011)

* Gustav Seibt - "Unser inneres Brüssel"
(Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 26, 2011)

* Conrad Lay - "Nationalstaaten bürgen für ein Niveau an Gerechtigkeit und Freiheit" (Deutschlandsfunk, November 28, 2011) [Audio mp3: here]

* Johanna di Blasi - "Jürgen Habermas kritisiert den postdemokratischen Europakurs"
(Hannoversche Allgemeine, November 28, 2011)

* Arno Orzessek - "Wie lässt sich transnationale Demokratie verwirklichen?" (Deutschlandradio Kultur, December 1, 2011)

* Ronald Pohl - "Als die Bürger das Handeln erlernten"
(Der Standard, December 18, 2011)

See my previous post on Habermas's book here (with links to some of the essays).

An English version of the book is coming out next year on "Polity Press", entitled "The Crisis of the European Union: A Response."

Discussion with Habermas in Paris

2011-11-11T20:25:00.001+01:00

On Saturday November 12, Jürgen Habermas talks with Heinz Wismann at the Goethe Institute in Paris.

Further information here.

Habermas on Europe's Post-democratic Era

2011-11-10T19:46:00.003+01:00

Article by Jürgen Habermas in The Guardian (November 10, 2011):

Europe's post-democratic era
The monopolisation of the EU by political elites risks reducing a sense of civic solidarity that's crucial to the European project

Excerpt
"Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy appear to have settled some sort of compromise between German economic liberalism and French statism with a completely different intent. If I am not mistaken, they want to extend the executive federalism of the Lisbon treaty into an outright intergovernmental rule by the European Council.

Such a regime would make it possible to transfer the imperatives of the markets to the national budgets without proper democratic legitimation. This would involve using threats of sanctions and pressure on disempowered national parliaments to enforce nontransparent and informal agreements. In this way, the heads of government would transform the European project into its opposite. The first transnational democracy would become an especially effective, because disguised, arrangement for exercising a kind of post-democratic rule."

Paper on the Rawlsian Law of Peoples

2011-11-10T18:18:00.002+01:00

Wagner Artur Cabral has posted a new paper on SSRN:

"The Rawlsian Law of Peoples and the Cosmopolitist Critique"

Abstract:
In 2001 John Rawls published a little book called The Law of Peoples, that was originally supposed to be a chapter for Justice as Fairness: a Restatement, a revision and re-organization of his theory. Although it was expected in vivid anticipation, the book has generated controversy. While that may not seem surprising to Mr. Rawls – most of his theories were subject of intense debate, that being one of the reasons why they are so relevant to the Academy – the international part of the Justice as Fairness theory was received with astonishment by both his students and his “loyal opposition”. Rawlsian Law of Peoples works under a different Original Position, with restricted principles of justice and several other traits that simply seemed a completely modified setting than that of Justice as Fairness, as it were designed to reduce differences in a national legal context of basic institutions and goods. This paper tries to summarize the main criticisms that the Law of Peoples has received, specifically from a series of scholars that could be considered as defenders of Cosmopolitanism, given their commitment to the idea of an order of global justice. And hearing those voices of dissent, it tries to address the claim that this new theory of International Law is actually contradictory to Rawls’ Theory of Justice itself. At last, it will try to give suggestions of how the Law of Peoples should be different, for it to follow the principles of egalitarianism displayed throughout Justice as Fairness as a whole.

Wagner Artur Cabral is graduate in Law at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Barzil. The paper is a summary of the main points covered by the author’s graduate thesis, presented in August 2011.

Fabienne Peter on Democratic Legitimacy

2011-11-09T00:04:00.002+01:00

At "New Books in Philosophy", Robert Talisse interviews Fabienne Peter about her book "Democratic Legitimacy" (Routledge, 2008, paperback 2011):

Interview: “Democratic Legitimacy” [53 minutes]

See also Fabienne Peter's entry on "Political Legitimacy" in "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy".

Fabienne Peter is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Warwick University.

On Habermas's article on EU crisis

2011-11-08T19:21:00.011+01:00

Comments on Jürgen Habermas's article on the EU crisis (FAZ, November 5, 2011):

* Gunter Hofmann - "Die Demokratie muss auf die Füße gestellt werden" (Cicero, November 8, 2011)

* Harald Jähner - "Eine Herzensangelegenheit"
(Frankfurter Rundschau, November 8, 2011)

* Gabor Steingart - "Angriff auf die Marktwirtschaft"
(Handelsblatt, November 8, 2011)

* Jan Fleischhauer - "Unter Apokalyptikern"
(Spiegel Online, November 7, 2011)

* Bernd Ulrich - "Wir haben die Wahl"
(Die Zeit, November 10, 2011)

* Rainer Hank - "Kurszettel gegen Stimmzettel"
(Franfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 11, 2011)

* Ernst-Joachim Mestmäcker - "Der Schamfleck ist die Geldverachtung"
(Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 18, 2011)

* Georg Diez - "Schluss jetzt!"
(Der Spiegel, November 21, 2011)
[English translation: "Habermas, the Last European"]

New book on Habermas's Political Philosophy

2011-11-07T19:36:00.003+01:00

Mimesis and Reason
Habermas's Political Philosophy

by Gregg Daniel Miller

(State University of New York Press, 2011)

199 pages

Description

Complicating the standard interpretation of Habermas as a proceduralist, Mimesis and Reason uncovers the role that mimesis, or imitation, plays as a genuinely political force in communicative action. Through a penetrating examination of Habermas’s use of themes and concepts from Plato, George Herbert Mead, and Walter Benjamin, Gregg Daniel Miller reconstructs Habermas’s theory to reveal a new, postmetaphysical articulation of reason that lays the groundwork for new directions in political theory.

Content

Introduction

1. Reason and Mimesis [pdf]
2. Mimesis in Communicative Action: Habermas and Plato
3. The Subject in Communicative Action: Habermas and George Herbert Mead
4. The Experience of Mimesis: Habermas and Walter Benjamin

Coda: Habermas and the Affective Bond of Understanding

Review

"Moving beyond the impasse of mimesis versus communicative rationality, an alternative that pitted Adorno against Habermas, Gregg Daniel Miller opens up a new vista in the continuing effort to develop a viable Critical Theory for the twenty-first century. Drawing on the insights of Mead and Benjamin, he imaginatively and persuasively etablishes a point d'appui for rational critique that entents well beyond wan proceduralism without regressing to a discredited metaphisics."
- Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley

Gregg Daniel Miller is Lecturer at the University of Washington. In 2006, Gregg David Miller was awarded the Western Political Science Association's Best Dissertation Award for "Mimesis in Communicative Action: Habermas and the Affective Bond of Understanding."

Neues Buch von Charles Taylor & Jocelyn Maclure

2011-11-05T15:24:00.005+01:00

Laizität und Gewissensfreiheit

von Charles Taylor & Jocelyn Maclure

(Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011)

148 Seiten

Kurzbeschreibung

Der Kopftuchstreit in Deutschland und Frankreich, der Mord an Theo van Gogh in den Niederlanden, der Karikaturenstreit in Dänemark: die politische Dimension religiöser Haltungen ist in den letzten Jahren allgegenwärtig. Der Philosoph Charles Taylor gilt als einer der besten Kenner der modernen Religionsgeschichte und als Experte in Sachen Multikulturalismus. Zusammen mit seinem kanadischen Kollegen Jocelyn Maclure versucht er, eine Antwort auf die Frage zu finden, wie sich eine politische Gemeinschaft gegenüber religiösen Mehrheiten und Minderheiten verhalten sollte. Im Zentrum der Untersuchung steht die Frage der religiösen Neutralität des Staates, die in der Moderne unter dem Begriff des Laizismus diskutiert wird. Mit ihr ist das Problem der individuellen Religions- und Gewissensfreiheit aufs engste verbunden. Taylor und Maclure zeigen eindrucksvoll, daß alleine eine »liberal-pluralistische Politik«, die Religion nicht prinzipiell aus der öffentlichen Sphäre ausschließt, unter den Bedingungen heutiger multikultureller Gesellschaften geeignet ist, ein friedliches Zusammenleben und das fundamentale Recht der freien Religionsausübung und Gewissensfreiheit zu gewährleisten.

Inhalt

Einleitung

I. Die Laizität denken

1. Moralischer Pluralismus, Neutralität und Laizität
2. Die Prinzipien der Laizität
3. Die Regime der Laizität
4. Öffentlichkeit und Privatsphäre
5. Religiöse Symbole und Rituale in der Öffentlichkeit
6. Die liberal pluralische Laizität am Beispiel Quebec

II. Die Gewissenfreiheit denken

7. Die rechtliche Verpflichtung zu vernünftigen Ausnahme-regelungen
8. Sind religiöse Überzeugungen "kostspielige Präferenzen"?
9. Die subjektive Auffassung der Religionsfreiheit und die Individualisierung des Glaubens
10. Begünstigt die rechtliche Verpflichtung zu vernünftigen Ausnahmeregelungen die Religion?
11. Die vernünftigen Grenzen der Gewissenfreiheit

Schlußbemerkung: Die Zukunft der Laizität

Rezensionen:
* Plädoyer für den neutralen Staat (Tageszeitung, 4. November 2011)
* Lob der Vielfalt (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 3. November 2011)
* Im Grunde leuchtet die Welt (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2. November 2011)

Originalausgabe:
* Laïcité et liberté de conscience (Éditions du Boréal, 2010)

Englische Ausgabe:
* Secularism and Freedom of Conscience (Harvard University Press, 2011)

Habermas on the EU crisis - a new comment

2011-11-04T18:26:00.015+01:00

In "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" (November 5, 2011), Jürgen Habermas has published a new comment on the crisis of the EU:

"Rettet die Würde der Demokratie"
Papandreou hält dem zerrissenen Europa den Spiegel vor.
Ein Kommentar zu Frank Schirrmachers „Demokratie ist Ramsch" (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 1, 2011).

In his comment, Habermas describes the tension between democracy and capitalism and he refers to an article by Wolfgang Streeck on "The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism" in "New Left Review" Sep-Oct 2011. Wolfgang Streeck's paper was given as the 2011 Max Weber Lecture at the European University Institute, Florence, in April 2011. See the paper here [pdf].

Update:
See comments on Habermas's article here.
And an English summary here.

An English translation of Frank Schirrmachers's article: "Democracy has junk status" (PressEurop).

Honneth lecture in NYC on November 19

2011-11-03T20:40:00.002+01:00

Professor Axel Honneth talks about "Markets and Morals" at The New School for Social Research, New York, on November 19, 2011.

The lecture is arranged by the excellent journal "Constellations - An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory".

Further information here.

Axel Honneth is Jack C. Weinstein Professor of the Humanities, Department of Philosophy, Columbia University.

(Thanks to Ertug Tombus, Columbia University, for the pointer!)

Symposium in New York on Political Theology

2011-11-02T20:10:00.001+01:00

Hannah Arendt Reiner Schurmann Symposium on "Political Theology" at The New School of Social Research, New York:

Friday, November 4

Seyla Benhabib - Carl Schmitt's Critique of Kant: Sovereignty and International Law
Andreas Kalyvas - The Fallacies of Political Theology
Richard J. Bernstein - Is Politics "Practicable" Without Religion?
Simon Critchley - Fictional Force: How the Many are Governed by the Few

Saturday, November 5

Talal Asad - Reflections on the Uprising of Egypt
Gil Anidjar - Hemo Politicus
Bernard Flynn - Lefort and the Concept of Political Theology
Stathis Gourgouris - Every Religion is Idolatry

Further information here.

Paper on the Rawls-Habermas debate

2011-11-01T20:08:00.002+01:00

Now available at London School of Economics's eprint:

James Gledhill:
"Procedure in Substance and Substance in Procedure: Reframing the Rawls–Habermas debate" [pdf]

Published in: J. G. Finlayson & F. Freyenhagen (eds.) - Habermas and Rawls: Disputing the Political (Routledge, 2011), pp. 181-199.

Excerpt from Habermas's comment on Gledhill's paper
"In his "Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy", Rawls already demonstrates unmistakable sympathy for Hegel's philosophy of right because it respects the ethical rootedness of persons in the existing institutions of civil society and because it treats this embeddedness of morality in ethical life as the main focus of the theory of justice. James Gledhill chooses this perspective as the point of departure for his highly instructive comparison. He reveals a new facet of Rawls to me, for until now I had not regarded him as the better Hegelian. My reconstructive approach, which Gledhill understands quite well, originates, after all, in a Hegelian-Marxist appropriation of Kant's moral and legal philosophy; generally such an approach is supposed to be better suited to ground the political theory of justice in a social theory than strickley normative approaches. That may be true. But from such a normative point of view, Rawls's theory contains a relatively strong Hegelian element, at least according to James Gledhill's interpretation of how the "Original Position" is shaped." (Finlayson & Freyenhagen, p. 293)

James Gledhill is Fellow in Political Theory, Government Department, London School of Economics.

Habermas's lecture on Myth and Ritual (Video)

2011-10-28T20:50:00.006+02:00

Video of Jürgen Habermas's lecture on "Myth and Ritual" at Georgetown University, October 19, 2011 (1 hour & 26 minutes)

Jürgen Habermas on Myth and Ritual from The Berkley Center on Vimeo.

Further information on the event here.

Videos from Habermas's lecture at Georgetown University

2011-10-27T22:18:00.003+02:00

Uploaded by The Berkley Center at Georgetown University: Videos with excerpts from Jürgen Habermas's discussion on "Myth and Ritual" (October 19, 2011):

(1) On Secular Foundations of Political Legitimation

(2) On Ritual, Nationalism, and Religious Arguments in the Public Sphere

(3) On the Religious Sources of New Social Movements

Further information on the event here.

Habermas: "Democracy is at Stake"

2011-10-27T19:51:00.004+02:00

English translation of Jürgen Habermas's article in "Le Monde" (October 26, 2011) on Europe:

"Democracy is at Stake"
(PressEurop, October 27, 2011)

And in German:
"Demokratie in Gefahr"
(PressEurop, October 27, 2011)

See my post on the original article here.

Habermas in "Le Monde"

2011-10-25T23:18:00.010+02:00

Article in "Le Monde" (October 26, 2011):

Jürgen Habermas - "Rendons l'Europe plus démocratique!"
[Let's make Europe more democratic!]

The text is an excerpt from a lecture by Habermas to be given at a conference on November 10 in Paris - "Comment surmonter les crises du présent: Quel avenir pour l'Europe?". See the program here.

The lecture has the same title as Habermas's article in "Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik" (August 2011): "Die Krise der Europäischen Union im Licht einer Konstitutionalisierung des Völkerrechts".

Festschrift für Charles Taylor zum 80. Geburtstag

2011-10-25T22:30:00.011+02:00

Unerfüllte Moderne?
Neue Perspektiven auf das Werk von Charles Taylor

Hrsg. von Michael Kühnlein und Matthias Lutz-Bachmann

(Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011)

874 Seiten

Kurzbeschreibung

Charles Taylor gehört zu den international renommiertesten Philosophen der Gegenwart. Sein Werk vereint Sozial- und politische Philosophie zu einer umfassenden Gütertheorie der Moderne. Als Vordenker des Kommunitarismus verteidigt er die normative Unhintergehbarkeit des Guten bei der Bestimmung des Menschen; als Theoretiker der Moderne kritisiert er den »Artikulationsstau« säkularer Großerzählungen. Der vorliegende Band, der aus Anlaß des 80. Geburtstages von Charles Taylor erscheint, beschäftigt sich mit zentralen Aspekten seines philosophischen Denkens. Er umfaßt Beiträge von Philosophen, Theologen, Soziologen und Juristen, darunter Christoph Menke, Karl Kardinal Lehmann, Hans Joas und Hartmut Rosa, sowie eine Replik von Charles Taylor.

Inhalt

Michael Kühnlein & Matthias Lutz-Bachmann
Einleitung: Philosophie als Selbstreflexion der Moderne [Leseprobe]

I. Resonanz, Exkarnation und Kapitalismus

Hartmut Rosa
Is There Anybody Out There? Stumme und resonante Weltbeziehungen – Charles Taylors monomanischer Analysefokus

Hauke Brunkhorst
Die große Geschichte der Exkarnation

Axel Honneth
Markt und Moral. Alternativen der Kapitalismusanalyse

II. Liberalismus, Pragmatismus und Hermeneutik

Enno Rudolph
Rousseau absconditus. Zur Kritik der Taylorschen Liberalismuskritik

Ludwig Nagl
»The Jamesian open space«. Charles Taylor und der Pragmatismus

Franz-Josef Bormann
Zwischen partikularer Hermeneutik und universaler Objektivität

Michael Haus
Charles Taylor und Michael Walzer

III. Authentizität, Freiheit und Moderne

Christoph Menke
Was ist eine »Ethik der Authentizität«?

Thomas Buchheim
Negative und positive Freiheit

Ludwig Siep
Hegels und Taylors Kritik der Moderne

Jean-Pierre Wils
Wahl und Kontexte. Über die Geschicke religiös motivierter Handlungen im säkularen Zeitalter

IV. Christentum, Religion und Moral

Karl Kardinal Lehmann
Entsteht aus dem verfälschten Christentum die Moderne?

Friedo Ricken
Ethik des Glaubens

Matthias Lutz-Bachmann
Religion in den Ambivalenzen der Moderne

Michael Kühnlein
Religion als Auszug der Freiheit aus dem Gesetz?

Lino Klevesath & Walter Reese-Schäfer
Eine moralische Überlastung von Religion

Christian Danz
Religion als Selbstdeutung

Heinz Kleger
Moderne Bürgerreligion

Claus Leggewie
Religionsvielfalt als Problem?

V. Säkularisierung, Subtraktion und Transzendenz

Volker Gerhardt
Säkularisierung: Eine historische Chance für den Glauben

Thomas Rentsch
Wie ist Transzendenz zu denken? Kritische Thesen zu Charles Taylors Säkularisierungskonzept

Holmer Steinfath
Subtraktionsgeschichten und Transzendenz

Jürgen Goldstein
Säkularisierung als Vorsehung

Markus Knapp
Gott in säkularer Gesellschaft

Udo Di Fabio
Zur Aufklärung der säkularisierten Gesellschaft

Hans-Joachim Höhn
Reflexive Säkularisierung

Hans Joas
Wellen der Säkularisierung

VI. Gnade, Liebe und Wahrheit

Wolfgang Palaver
Güterordnung und vermittelnde Gnade. René Girard und
Charles Taylor angesichts der Krise der Moderne

Peter Strasser
Bedingungslose Liebe. Charles Taylors katholische Modernität

Micha Brumlik
Das rabbinische Verständnis theologischer Wahrheit – ein
Vorläufer pragmatistischer Wahrheitstheorien?

Martin Seel
Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe – und einige andere nicht allein christliche Tugenden

Charles Taylor
Replik

Michael Kühnlein ist Lehrbeauftragter für Philosophie an der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main. Buchveröffentlichungen: "Religion als Quelle des Selbst. Zur Vernunft- und Freiheitskritik von Charles Taylor" (Mohr Siebeck, 2008) und "Kommunitarismus und Religion" (Hrsg.) (Oldenbourg Akademieverlag, 2010).

Matthias Lutz-Bachmann ist Professor für Philosophie an der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main. Buchveröffentlichungen: "Frieden durch Recht" (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996) (mit James Bohman) und "Weltstaat oder Staatenwelt? Für und wider die Idee einer Weltrepublik" (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2002) (mit James Bohman).

Paper by Rainer Forst on Transnational Justice and Democracy

2011-10-24T22:57:00.002+02:00

An interesting working paper by Professor Rainer Forst (Frankfurt):

"Transnational Justice and Democracy" [pdf]
(Normative Orders Working Paper 04/2011)

Abstract
"The title I have chosen seems to signal a tension, even a contradiction, in a number of respects. Democracy appears to be a form of political organisation and government in which, through general and public participatory procedures, a sufficiently legitimate political will is formed which acquires the force of law. Justice, by contrast, appears to be a value external to this context which is not so much linked to procedures of “input” or “throughput” legitimation but is understood instead as an output- or outcome-oriented concept. At times, justice is even understood as an otherworldly idea which, when transported into the Platonic cave, merely causes trouble and ends up as an undemocratic elite project. In methodological terms, too, this difference is sometimes signalled in terms of a contrast between a form of “worldly” political thought and “abstract” and otherworldly philosophical reflection on justice. In my view, we are bound to talk past the issues to be discussed under the heading “transnational justice and democracy” unless we first root out false dichotomies such as the ones mentioned. My thesis will be that justice must be “secularised” or “grounded” both with regard to how we understand it and to its application to relations beyond the state."

Rainer Forst is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. His most recent book is "Kritik der Rechtfertigungsverhältnisse. Perspektiven einer kritischen Theorie der Politik" (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011).

New book on "Recognition and Social Ontology"

2011-10-22T10:50:00.002+02:00

Recognition and Social Ontology

Ed. by Heikki Ikäheimo and Arto Laitinen

(Brill, 2011)

398 pages

Description

This collection focuses on the unexamined connections between two contemporary, intensively debated lines of inquiry: Hegel-inspired theories of recognition and analytical social ontology. These lines address the roots of human sociality from different conceptual perspectives and have complementary strengths, variously stressing the social constitution of persons in interpersonal relations and the emergence of social and institutional reality through collective intentionality. In this book leading theorists and younger scholars offer original analyses of the connections and suggest new ways in which theories of recognition and current approaches in analytical social ontology can enrich one another.

Contents

1. Heikki Ikäheimo & Arto Laitinen: Recognition and Social Ontology
2. Robert B. Brandom: The Structure of Desire and Recognition [Word]
3. Robert B. Pippin: On Hegel’s Claim that Self-Consciousness is “Desire Itself” [Word]
4. Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer: Intuition, Understanding, and the Human Form of Life
5. Ludwig Siep: Mutual Recognition: Hegel and Beyond
6. Heikki Ikäheimo: Holism and Normative Essentialism in Hegel’s Social Ontology
7. Paul Redding: The Relevance of Hegel’s “Absolute Spirit” to Social Normativity
8. Michael Quante: Recognition as the Social Grammar of Species Being in Marx
9. Margaret Gilbert: Mutual Recognition and Some Related Phenomena
10. Italo Testa: Social Space and the Ontology of Recognition
11. Arto Laitinen: Recognition, Acknowledgement, and Acceptance
12. Titus Stahl: Institutional Power, Collective Acceptance, and Recognition [Link]
13. Vincent Descombes: The Problem of Collective Identity

Heikki Ikäheimo is Research Fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney. Arto Laitinen is University Lecturer at University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

Papers on Epistemic Democracy in Practice

2011-10-21T08:23:00.003+02:00

Papers presented at the international workshop on "Epistemic Democracy in Practice", Yale University, October 20-22, 2011:

André Bächtiger (Lucerne):
Contestatory Deliberation.

Jon Elster (Columbia):
Deliberations, Cycles and Misrepresentation.

Erik Oddvar Eriksen (Oslo):
The Role of Deliberation in Collective Decision-Making.

James Fishkin (Stanford):
Deliberative Democracy in Context.

Andreas Föllesdal (Oslo):
Tracking Justice Democratically.

Cathrine Holst (Oslo):
Epistocracy: Conceptual Clarifications.

Mark Klein (MIT):
Enabling Large-Scale Deliberation Using Attention-Mediation Metrics.

Hélène Landemore (Yale) & Scott E. Page (Michigan):
Deliberation and Disagreement: Problem-Solving, Prediction, and Positive Dissensus.

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (Aarhus):
Estlund on Epistocracy: A Critique.

Beth Noveck (New York):
Peer to Policy.

Josiah Ober (Stanford):
An Aristotelian Middle Way Between Deliberation and Independent-guess Aggregation.

Jon Olafson (Bifröst):
Experiment in Iceland: Crowdsourcing the Constitution.

Bjørn Erik Rasch (Oslo):
Legislative Debates and Democratic Deliberation in Parliamentary Systems.

Bo Rothstein (Gothenburg):
Quality of Government and Epistemic Democracy.

Melissa Schwartzberg (Columbia):
Epistemic Equality, Majority Rule, and Supermajorities.

Jürg Steiner (Bern):
Truthfulness In the Deliberative Model of Democrcy.

Susan Stokes (Yale):
A Rational Theory of Epistemic Democracy.

Daniel Viehoff (Sheffield):
The Normative Functions of Epistemic Democracy.

See the complete program here.

(Thanks to ABC Democracy for the pointer.)

Thomas Scanlon on Libertarianism and Liberty

2011-10-20T18:55:00.002+02:00

At "Boston Review" (October, 2011), an article by Thomas M. Scanlon on

Libertarianism and Liberty
How Not to Argue for Limited Government and Lower Taxes

and responses by

J. Bradford DeLong - Closeted Utilitarians

Will Wilkinson - Wealth and Liberty

and a reply by Thomas M. Scanlon.

Thomas M. Scanlon is Professor of "Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity" at the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. His latest book is "Moral Dimensions" (Harvard University Press, 2008).

Three lectures by Hans Joas on Human Rights

2011-10-19T18:26:00.002+02:00

Professor Hans Joas's book on the genealogy of human rights is now available in German on Suhrkamp Verlag - "Die Sakralität der Person: Eine neue Genealogie der Menschenrechte".

Hans Joas's lectures in Washington in 2009 on the same topic can be seen here:

1. Violence and the Origins of Human Rights (Video)

2. Punishment, Rights, and the Sacredness of the Person (Video)

3. Human Rights and Universal Values (Video)

The lectures were held in October 2009 at the Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, Georgetown University, Washington D.C.

Hans Joas is Permanent Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), Freiburg, Germany. From 2002 to 2011, he was Max Weber Professor and Director of the Max Weber Center at the University of Erfurt. Among his books are "The Genesis of Values" (The University of Chicago Press, 2001) and "Do We Need Religion?" (Paradigm Publishers, 2004).

Buch: "Die Sakralität der Person" von Hans Joas

2011-10-18T00:03:00.004+02:00

Die Sakralität der Person
Eine neue Genealogie der Menschenrechte

von Hans Joas

(Suhrkamp Verlag. 2011)

303 Seiten

Kurzbeschreibung

Ein hartnäckiger Meinungsstreit der letzten Jahrzehnte dreht sich um die Frage, welchen Ursprungs die Idee der Menschenrechte ist. Verdanken wir sie unserem christlich-jüdischen Erbe oder ist sie eine Erfindung der Aufklärung? Weder das eine noch das andere, behauptet der Sozialtheoretiker Hans Joas und erzählt in seinem Buch eine ganz andere Geschichte der Menschenrechte.

Im Stile einer "historischen Soziologie" fördert er dabei eine überraschende dritte Sicht der Dinge zutage: Der Glaube an die universale Menschenwürde ist das Ergebnis eines Prozesses der Sakralisierung, in dessen Verlauf jedes einzelne menschliche Wesen mehr und mehr als heilig angesehen wurde. Diesen Prozeß zeichnet Joas in exemplarischen Studien etwa über die Abschaffung der Sklaverei sowie anhand der Genese paradigmatischer "Erklärungen der Menschenrechte" nach und analysiert ihn als eine komplexe kulturelle Transformation: Erfahrungen von Gut und Böse mußten vor dem Hintergrund unterschiedlicher Werttraditionen diskursiv artikuliert, in Rechten kodifiziert und in Praktiken gelebt werden.

Die Menschenrechte, so zeigt sich, sind eben nicht das Ergebnis eines bloßen Konsenses über ein universalistisches Prinzip, sondern entstammen einem langen kulturübergreifenden Gespräch über Werte. Ihre Geschichte setzt sich aus vielen Geschichten zusammen. Hans Joas erzählt sie auf packende Weise und eröffnet damit die Debatte über die Idee der Menschenrechte neu.

Inhalt

Einleitung

1. Charisma der Vernunft? Die Entstehung der Menschenrechte
2. Strafe und Respekt. Die Sakralisierung der Person und ihre Gefährdungen
3. Gewalt und Menschenwürde. Wie aus Erfahrungen Rechte werden [pdf]
4. Weder Kant noch Nietzsche. Was ist affirmative Genealogie?
5. Seele und Gabe. Gottebenbildlichkeit und Gotteskindschaft
6. Wertegeneralisierung. Die Allgemeine Erklärung der Menschenrechte und die Pluralität der Kulturen [Vortrag, Audio]

Hans Joas ist Permanent Fellow am "Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies" (FRIAS) und assoziiertes Mitglied des Max-Weber-Kollegs und Sprecher der Kolleg-Forschergruppe an der Universität Erfurt.

Rezension:

Christoph Möllers - Etwas am Menschen ist heilig
(Die Zeit, 13. Oktober 2011)

Axel Honneth on the student protests in Chile

2011-10-17T22:56:00.001+02:00

On YouTube, Axel Honneth speaks about the student protests in Chile:

See the video here (in German with Spanish subtitles)

The video was recorded in September 2011.

Axel Honneth is Professor of Social Philosophy at Goethe University and Director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main.

Review of "Reconstructing Rawls"

2011-10-17T16:17:00.002+02:00

At "Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews", Catherine Audard reviews "Reconstructing Rawls. The Kantian Foundations of Justice as Fairness" (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011) by Robert S. Taylor:

Review of "Reconstructing Rawls"

Excerpt
The aim of this new and very controversial book by Robert Taylor, Reconstructing Rawls, is to offer a coherent criticism of the 'second' Rawls and to "reconstruct justice as fairness on Kantian foundations" against Rawls's own anti-foundationalist stance. It seeks to demonstrate the impossibility both of such a dilution of the theory of justice and of a wide consensus on its principles. The two-pronged strategy of the book is to reveal, in Parts I and II, the strongly Kantian roots of the conception of justice as fairness, demonstrating that it can only make sense on the basis of its Kantian conception of persons, and, in Part III, to conclude that "there can be no overlapping consensus on a Kantian conception of persons or justice as fairness more broadly", contrary to Rawls's central claim in Political Liberalism; but this, it is contended, will leave it stronger, not weaker. [....]

As an original contribution to a theory of justice, inspired and motivated by Rawls but mostly by a different Kantian and universalistic agenda, this is an extremely valuable and stimulating book that should be assessed on its own merits, once its claims are reformulated in less confrontational ways. But as a reconstruction of Rawls's own project, the book fails in part because the views expressed by Rawls in his Political Liberalism are not given an entirely fair hearing. More worryingly, it misses the central idea of justice as fairness, that no independent and antecedent criteria of justice should be imposed on citizens' conceptions of the good in a democratic context, as this will always involve recourse to coercion.

Catherine Audard is Visiting Fellow, Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics, and Chair of the Forum for European Philosophy. She is the author of John Rawls (Acumen Press, 2007).

See my previous post on Robert Taylor's book here.

Neues Buch: "Geltung und Macht" von Christian Marxsen

2011-10-16T09:25:00.002+02:00

Geltung und Macht
Jürgen Habermas' Theorie von Recht, Staat und Demokratie

von Christian Marxsen

(Wilhelm Fink, 2011)

279 Seiten

Kurzbeschreibung

Der Frankfurter Schule entwachsen entwickelte der einst staatsskeptische und fundamentalkritische Jürgen Habermas eine positive Theorie des demokratischen Rechtsstaates. Doch das gelang ihm nicht ohne Brüche. Christian Marxsen kommt den Widersprüchen seiner Rechtsphilosophie auf die Spur.
Jürgen Habermas bietet in seinem rechtsphilosophischen Werk "Faktizität und Geltung" einen neuen Begriff der Legitimität politischer Ordnungen. Deren Basis soll zuletzt in den Kommunikationsprozessen der Zivilgesellschaft zu finden sein. Christian Marxsen geht dem dieser Vorstellung vorausgesetzten normativen Konzept auf den Grund. Dazu verfolgt er die Entwicklung der Theorien Habermas’ von ihren kritisch-theoretischen Anfängen bis hin zu den späten normativen Ausprägungen und zeigt dabei deren unaufgelöste Widersprüche auf.

Inhalt

Einleitung

1. Absolute und instrumentelle Vernunft in der Kritischen Theorie Adornos und Horkheimers
2. Universalpragmatik - Die Rekonstruktion der Vernunftpotentiale der Moderne
3. Gesellschafttheorie als Gesellschaftskritik
4. Die Bedeutung des Rechts in der Moderne
5. Die normative Bestimmung des Rechts I - Das Demokratieprinzip
6. Die normative Bestimmung des Rechts II - Recht und Macht
7. Die soziologische Perspektive auf den demokratischen Rechtsstaat
8. Schlussbetrachtungen

Volker Gerhardt reviews Axel Honneth

2011-10-15T09:53:00.005+02:00

In "Die Welt" (October 15, 2011), Volker Gerhardt reviews "Das Recht der Freiheit. Grundriß einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit" (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011) by Axel Honneth:

Review: "Zwischen Kant und Hegel"
Paradigmenwechsel in der Frankfurter Schule
Axel Honneths Sozialkritik aus dem Geist der Hoffnung

Excerpt:
"Mit Blick auf die Tradition der Frankfurter Sozialkritik kann man das der geschichtlichen Entwicklung folgende Verfahren, das Freiheitschancen aufzuspüren und freizulegen versucht, als einen Paradigmenwechsel ansehen. Hier wird die Gesellschaft von innen her beleuchtet, und es zeigt sich, dass sie dem Kritiker weniger fremd ist, als es ihm nach strengen moralistischen Ansprüchen lieb sein kann. Axel Honneth ist der Sonderfall eines Kritikers, der sich durch die Objekte seiner Kritik selbst belehren lässt."

Volker Gerhardt is Professor of Philosophy at Humboldt University, Berlin. He is a member of the German Ethics Council. Among his books is "Partizipation. Das Prinzip der Politik" (C.H.Beck, 2007).

See links to other reviews of Axel Honneth's book here.

New book by Habermas: "Zur Verfassung Europas" [Updated]

2011-10-12T00:04:00.018+02:00

A new collection of essays by Jürgen Habermas is out on Suhrkamp Verlag:

"Zur Verfassung Europas"

Content

Vorwort [pdf]

1. Das Konzept der Menschenwürde und die realistische Utopie der Menschenrechte [Abstract]

2. Die Krise der Europäischen Union im Lichte einer Konstitutionalisierung des Völkerrechts [Abridged version]

Anhang:
3. Nach dem Bankrott. Ein Interview
4. Am Euro entscheidet sich das Schicksal der Europäischen Union
5. Ein Pakt für oder gegen Europa? [pdf]

Previously published versions of the essays:

1. German: "Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie" vol. 58 no. 3 (2010), pp. 343-357 (and a shorter version in "Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik" no. 8/2010, pp. 43-53.).
English: "The Concept of Human Dignity and The Realistic Utopia of Human Rights" in "Metaphilosophy" vol. 41, no. 4. (2010), pp. 464-480.

2. German: Shorter versions: "Europa am Scheideweg" in Handelsblatt, June 17, 2011; "Wie demokratisch ist die EU?" in "Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik" no. 8/2011, pp. 37-48.

3. German: "Die Zeit", November 6, 2008.
English: "Lessons of the Financial Crisis" in J. Habermas - "Europe: The Faltering Project" (Polity Press, 2009) pp. 184-197; and as "Life After Bankruptcy" in Constellations vol. 16 no. 2 (2009), pp. 227-234; and in SignAndSight, November 26. 2008.

4. German: "Die Zeit", May 20, 2010.
English: "Germany and the Euro-Crisis" in The Nation, June 9, 2010 (and a shorter version in "The Guardian", June 11, 2010).

5. German: "Merkels von Demoskopie geleiteter Opportunismus" in "Süddeutsche Zeitung", April 7, 2011 (and a shorter version "Der Konstruktionsfehler der Währungsunion" in "Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik" no. 5/2011, pp. 64-66).
English: "A Pact for or against Europe" in Ulrike Guérot & Jacqueline Hénard (eds.) - What Does German Think About Europe? (European Council on Foreign Relations, 2011), pp. 83-89 (and a shorter version "The Flaw in Contruction of Monetary Union" on a website by "Social Europa Journal", June 14, 2011).

An English version of Jürgen Habermas's book is coming out next year on "Polity Press", entitled "The Crisis of the European Union: A Response".

Update:
See reviews of Habermas's book here.

Description
"In light of the ongoing Euro crisis, coupled with the half-hearted, often populist reaction from Europe’s politicians, the failure of the European project has begun to seem like a very real possibility. In this essay, Jürgen Habermas sets out to defend Europe from this growing scepticism, offering instead a new compelling narrative for the history and especially for the future of the European Union. He clears the way for thinking the transnationalisation of democracy by placing the unification process within the context of the longer-term codification and civilisation of state power. Finally, Jürgen Habermas appeals to politicians to stop running the European project behind closed doors as they have up until now and instead recalibrate it as a down-to-earth, noisy and argumentative exchange of opinions in the public sphere.
In addition to the Essay on Europe's Constitution this volume also contains the essay »The Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights« (2010) as well as three interventions published by Jürgen Habermas since the beginning of the current financial crisis."

From Habermas's preface:
"Mit meinem Versuch über die »Verfassung« – also den aktuellen Zustand und die politische Verfassung – Europas will ich einerseits zeigen, dass die Europäische Union des Lissaboner Vertrags nicht so weit von der Gestalt einer transnationalen Demokratie entfernt ist, wie viele ihrer Kritiker meinen. Andererseits möchte ich erklären, warum der Konstruktionsfehler der Währungsunion nicht ohne Vertragsänderung behobenwerden kann. Die nun geplante Koordinierung der Entscheidungen der EWU-Staaten auf wichtigen Politikfeldern bedarf einer erweiterten Legitimationsgrundlage. Für eine solche transnationale Demokratie ist allerdings die bundesstaatliche Verfassung das falsche Modell. Sobald wir die Europäische Union so betrachten, als sei sie aus guten Gründen von zwei gleichberechtigten verfassungsgebenden Subjekten geschaffen worden, nämlich gleich-ursprünglich von den Bürgern (!) und den Staatsvölkern (!) Europas, erkennen wir die Architektonik des überstaatlichen und gleichwohl demokratischen Gemeinwesens. Wir brauchen also aus der beispiellosen europäischen Rechtsentwicklung des vergangenen halben Jahrhunderts nur die richtigen Konsequenzen zu ziehen. [....]"

"Ich möchte mit meinen Mitteln den Versuch machen, Denkblockaden aus dem Weg zu räumen, die gegenüber einer Transnationalisierung der Demokratie immer noch bestehen. Dabei ordne ich die europäische Einigung in den langfristigen Zusammenhang einer demokratischen Verrechtlichung und Zivilisierung staatlicher Gewalt ein. Aus dieser Perspektive soll deutlich werden, dass die Befriedung kriegerischer Nationen, also das Ziel, das nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg nicht nur die Gründung der Vereinten Nationen, sondern auch die europäische Einigung motiviert hat, die Ausgangsbasis für ein weiter ausgreifendes Ziel geschaffen hat, und zwar für den Aufbau politischer Handlungsfähigkeiten jenseits der Nationalstaaten. Die Konstitutionalisierung des Völkerrechts ist längst nicht mehr nur auf jene Pazifizierung gerichtet, die auch am Anfang der Entwicklung zur Europäischen Union stand. Das Zerplatzen neoliberaler Illusionen hat die Einsicht gefördert, dass die Finanzmärkte, ja überhaupt die durch nationale Grenzen hindurch-greifenden Funktionssysteme der Weltgesellschaft Problemlagen schaffen, welche einzelne Staaten – oder Koalitionen von Staaten – nicht mehr beherrschen können. Von diesem Regelungsbedarf wird gewissermaßen die Politik als solche, die Politik im Singular, herausgefordert: Die internationale Gemeinschaft der Staaten muss sich zu einer kosmopolitischen der Staaten und der Weltbürger fortentwickeln."

Essays on the Philosophy of T.M. Scanlon

2011-10-11T00:02:00.003+02:00

Reasons and Recognition
Essays on the Philosophy of T.M. Scanlon

ed. by R. Jay Wallace, Rahul Kumar,
and Samuel Freeman

(Oxford University Press, October 2011)

480 pages

Description

For close to forty years now T.M. Scanlon has been one of the most important contributors to moral and political philosophy in the Anglo-American world. Through both his writing and his teaching, he has played a central role in shaping the questions with which research in moral and political philosophy now grapples. Reasons and Recognition brings together fourteen new papers on an array of topics from the many areas to which Scanlon has made path-breaking contributions, each of which develops a distinctive and independent position while critically engaging with central themes from Scanlon's own work in the area.

Content [Preview]

I. Reason, Value, and Desire

1. Christine M. Korsgaard - The Activity of Reason [pdf]
2. Samuel Scheffler - Valuing
3. Niko Kolodny - Aims as Reasons [pdf]
4. Michael Smith - Scanlon on Desire and the Explanation of Action

II. Ethical Themes: Contractualism, Promissory Obligation, and Tolerance

5. Pamela Hieronymi - Of Metaethics and Motivation: The Appeal of Contractualism [draft]
6. Rahul Kumar - Contractualism on the Shoal of Aggregation
7. Seana Valentine Shiffrin - Immoral, Conflicting, and Redundant Promises
8. Angela M. Smith - The Trouble with Tolerance

III. Political Themes: Conservatism, Justice, and Public Reason

9. G. A. Cohen - Rescuing Conservatism: A Defence of Existing Value [video]
10. Charles R. Beitz - Global Political Justice and the "Democratic Deficit"
11. Joshua Cohen - Establishment, Exclusion, and Democracy's Public Reason [pdf]
12. Aaron James - The Significance of Distribution [pdf]

IV. Responsibility

13. Gary Watson - The Trouble with Psychopaths
14. Susan Wolf - Blame, Italian Style [pdf]
15. R. Jay Wallace - Dispassionate Opprobrium: On Blame and the Reactive Sentiments [draft]

R. Jay Wallace is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Rahul Kumar is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queen's University, Canada. Samuel Freeman is Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.

Neues Buch: "Anerkennung" als Prinzip der Kritischen Theorie

2011-10-10T22:58:00.003+02:00

"Anerkennung" als Prinzip der Kritischen Theorie

von Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch

(de Gruyter, 2011)

313 Seiten

Kurzbeschreibung

Die vorliegende Untersuchung zeigt, warum es vielversprechend ist, das Projekt einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie in der Tradition der Frankfurter Schule auf der Grundlage einer Theorie der Anerkennung durchzuführen. Die Kategorie der Anerkennung hat in diesem Zusammenhang besonderen Wert, weil sich mit ihr soziale Verhältnisse sowohl analysieren als auch kritisieren lassen. Als Anerkennungstheorie vermag die Kritische Theorie wesentliche Ziele in den Bereichen der Sozialtheorie und der Sozialkritik zu erreichen. Anhand einer neuen Interpretation einiger klassischer philosophischer und sozialwissenschaftlicher Texte (von Hegel, Marx, Habermas u.a.) zeigt die vorliegende Untersuchung, warum Hegels Praktische Philosophie das Projekt einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie in der Tradition der Frankfurter Schule stärker bereichern kann, als bisher angenommen wurde. Darüber hinaus bietet das Buch „Anerkennung“ als Prinzip der Kritischen Theorie eine gründliche Rekonstruktion und kritische Erörterung der anerkennungsbezogenen Überlegungen des jungen Marx. In ihr steht die Auseinandersetzung mit klassischen Texten unter systematischen Fragestellungen.

Inhalt [pdf]

1. Probleme und Perspektiven der Kritischen Theorie
2. Marx's anerkennungstheoretischen Kapitalismuskritik
3. Hegels kritische Gesellschaftstheorie

Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch ist seit 2006 Mitarbeiter am Institut für Sozialforschung, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main.

Lecture Series in Frankfurt on Normativity

2011-10-09T14:06:00.003+02:00

Ringvorlesungen des Exzellenzclusters
"Die Herausbildung normativer Ordnungen":
Wintersemester 2011/2012
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main:

Normativität: Frankfurter Perspektiven

Programm [pdf]

26. Oktober 2011
Professor Nikita Dhawan
Negotiating Normativity: Challenges and Prospects

2. November 2011
Professor Thomas M. Schmidt
Die „Heiligkeit des Rechts“. Autonomie und Autorität normativer Geltung

9. November 2011
Professor Stefan Gosepath
Die soziale Natur der Normativität

23. November 2011
Professor Peter Niesen
Zwei Modelle kosmopolitischer Normativität

30.November 2011
Professor Nicole Deitelhoff
Genese und Scheitern

7. Dezember 2011
Professor Marcus Willaschek
Soziale Geltung und normative Gültigkeit. Eine sozial-pragmatische Konzeption von Normativität

14. Dezember 2011
Professor Christoph Menke
Gesetz und Freiheit. Überlegungen im Anschluss an Hegel

21. Dezember 2011
Professor Matthias Lutz-Bachmann
Praktische Vernunft, Diskurs und Gewissen

11. Januar 2012
Professor Martin Seel
Ein Dialog zwischen Aristoteles und Kant über die Grundlagen der Moral

18. Januar 2012
Professor Axel Honneth
Die Normativität der Sittlichkeit. Institutionelle Grundlagen von Autonomie

25. Januar 2012
Professor Rainer Forst
Zu einer Kritik der rechtfertigenden Vernunft

8. Februar 2012
Professor Klaus Günther
Die Normativität des Rechts

Frank Michelman on the Priority of Liberty

2011-10-05T21:52:00.003+02:00

Frank Michelman has posted a new paper on SSRN:

The Priority of Liberty: Rawls and a 'Warren Court Model'

Abstract:
In the United States, exceptionally, an established judicial protocol for constitutional clearance of legislative incursions on freedom of action sets up a two-track scheme, prescribing searching review for a defined subset of such incursions and merely cursory review for the rest. The model further sets up a general standard of “fundamentality” by which to sort such incursions into the two classes, rather than relying on a name-by-name specification of protected liberties drawn directly from the text of the bill of rights. Political Liberalism, I argue, would be at home with both these features of the U.S. jurisprudence. The role assigned by that jurisprudence to fifth and fourteenth amendment “liberty” is matched by the role assigned to “liberty of conscience” in Rawlsian political philosophy; while the second principle of justice (and not, as might appear, any Rawlsian philosophical denial of value to freedom of action “as such”) points toward a refusal of strict-scrutiny protection for freedom of action across the board. In a Rawlsian well-ordered society, two-track scrutiny would be understandable as a device for holding the two principles of justice in equipoise.

This paper is under preparation for inclusion in a forthcoming collection: Thom Brooks & Martha Nussbaum (eds) - "Rawls’s Political Liberalism" (Columbia University Press, 2012).

Frank Michelman is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Harvard University.

Habermas at Georgetown University

2011-10-05T19:20:00.001+02:00

Jürgen Habermas will give a lecture on "Myth and Ritual" at Georgetown University, Washington DC, October 19, 2011.

For further information: here.

Review of "Creating Capabilities" by Martha Nussbaum

2011-09-24T14:56:00.002+02:00

At "Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews", Ingrid Robeyns reviews "Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach" (Harvard University Press, 2011) by Martha Nussbaum:

Review of "Creating Capabilities"

Excerpt:
"After Women and Human Development and Frontiers of Justice, two books in which she has been developing the capabilities approach as a partial theory of justice, Martha Nussbaum has now written a third book on her capabilities approach. Yet Creating Capabilities is in one sense very different from the earlier two books, since it aims to be an accessible introduction to the capabilities approach that is aiming at undergraduates and general readers. This is not an easy task, given the profoundly interdisciplinary nature of the capabilities approach. Admirably, Creating Capabilities delivers what it sets out to do and serves very well as a first theoretical introduction to the capabilities approach."

See my previous post on Martha Nussbaum's book here.

Ingrid Robeyns is Professor in Practical Philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is co-editor (with Harry Brighouse) of "Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities" (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Lectures on Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse & Habermas

2011-09-21T23:00:00.003+02:00

On YouTube, lectures (in German) by Wolfgang Welsch on the Frankfurt School:

1. Adorno & Horkheimer I

2. Adorno & Horkheimer II

3. Herbert Marcuse

4. Jürgen Habermas I

5. Jürgen Habermas II

Wolfgang Welsch is Professor of Philosophy at Friedrich Schiller University, Jena. He is the author of "Ästhetisches Denken" (Reclam, 1990) and "Vernunft. Die zeitgenössische Vernunftkritik und das Konzept der transversalen Vernunft" (Suhrkamp, 1995).

Neues Buch von Rainer Forst: "Kritik der Rechtfertigungsverhältnisse"

2011-09-20T23:50:00.010+02:00

Kritik der Rechtfertigungsverhältnisse
Perspektiven einer kritischen Theorie der Politik

von Rainer Forst

(Suhrkamp Verlag, September 2011)

240 Seiten

Kurzbeschreibung

Rainer Forst entwirft eine kritische Theorie, die unsere politische Wirklichkeit auf ihre Defizite und ihre Potentiale hin zu entschlüsseln vermag. Dazu bedarf es einer Perspektive, die sozialen und politischen Praktiken immanent ist und sie zugleich transzendiert. Forst betrachtet die Gesellschaft daher als "Rechtfertigungsordnung", die aus Komplexen verschiedener auf Institutionen bezogener Normen und entsprechender Rechtfertigungspraktiken besteht. Eine "Kritik der Rechtfertigungs-verhältnisse" hat somit die Aufgabe, Legitimationen in ihrer Geltung und Genese zu analysieren sowie die ungleiche Verteilung von »Rechtfertigungsmacht« zu thematisieren. Vom Begriff der Rechtfertigung als sozialer Grundpraxis ausgehend, entwickelt Forst eine Theorie radikaler Gerechtigkeit, der Menschenrechte und der Demokratie sowie der Macht und der Kritik selbst. Schließlich stellt er die Frage nach dem utopischen Horizont der Gesellschaftskritik.

Inhalt

Einleitung [pdf]

I. Radikale Gerechtigkeit

1. Zwei Bilder der Gerechtigkeit (1999)
2. Die Rechtfertigung der Menschenrechte (2010)
3. Die normative Ordnung von Gerechtigkeit und Frieden (2011)

II. Rechtfertigung, Anerkennung und Kritik

4. Der Grund der Kritik [English, pdf] (2009)
5. Das Wichtigste zuerst (2007)
6. "Dulden heißt beleibigen" [pdf](2007)

III. Jenseits der Gerechtigkeit

7. Die Ungerechtigkeit der Gerechtigkeit (2005)
8. Republikanismus der Furcht und der Rettung (2008)
9. Utopie und Ironie (2006)

Rainer Forst ist Professor für Politische Theorie und Philosophie an der Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt.

Reports from the 22nd German Congress of Philosophy

2011-09-17T14:21:00.005+02:00

Reports from the 22nd German Congress of Philosophy, September 12-15, 2011, at Munich University:

*Jan Küveler - "Einhörner auf der Rückseite des Mondes"
(Die Welt, September 16, 2011)

*Christian Schlüter - "O'zapft is!"
(Frankfurter Rundschau, September 17, 2011)

*jsl/ansc/crab/birn - "Trommeln für die Menschenrechte"
(Süddeutsche Zeitung, September 17, 2011) [Not available online]

*Uwe Justus Wenzel - "Im Raum der Gründe"
(Neue Zürcher Zeitung, September 21, 2011)

Excerpt from "Süddeutsche Zeitung":
"Wie immer man die Wende im Alterswerk des berühmtesten lebenden deutschen Philosophen Jürgen Habermas bezeichnen will - religionsfreundlich, kulturalistisch, wertkonservativ - , im Abschlusssvortrag des Münchner Kongresses erfuhr sie eine geradezu spektakuläre neue Ausprägung. Denn Habermas entwarf in der von Aufmerksamheit berstenden Großen Aula der Universität nichts Geringeres als eine Theorie über die Entstehung von Sprache und Kultur.

Kurzfassung einer langen Geschichte: Nur aus dem religiösen Ritual des Frühmenschen könne die Symbolsprache entstanden sein, und durch dieses "intersubjektive Erlebnis", so Habermas, sei erst die menschliche Vergesellschaftung möglich geworden. Im Ritual hat sich demnach die folgenreiche "Verkörperung von Gründen" - so der Titel des Vortrags - vollzogen: eine gemeinschaftlicher Bezugspunkt, der, im Gegensatz zur frei flottierenden Alltagspraxis, der Problematisierung enthoben ist und so "gesellschaftliche Solidarität und übersubjektiven Geist" stiftet. Aus dieser "archaischen Quelle" speise sich die Sprache sowie jede normative und kulturelle Tradition. Und dies bedeutet für den politischen Denker Jürgen Habermas, dass wir auch heute bei allem "diskursiven Fluss der Alltagskommunikation" dem normativen Traditionsbestand "Demokratie und Menschenrechte" dieselbe Ehrfurcht entgegenbringen oder entgegenbringen sollten, wie sie der ululierende Steinzeitmensch beim Tanz um den Altar empfand. [....] Für die Diskursethik, die heute weltweit wirknungsreichste Demokratietheorie überhaupt, heißt das: Das Gute manifestiert sich nicht mehr nur im Diskurs selber, es braucht jetzt auch ein heiliges Zentrum, das niemand hinterfragt. [....]

Verblüffend, wie schnell und unmerklich Jürgen Habermas inzwischen von "Religion" zu "Normativität", "Institution" und "Tradition" gelangt, als wäre alles dasselbe. [....] Vom alten Götterkult bis zum Grundgesetz: So, wie Habermas in München von "Konsolidierung", "Dogmatisierung", "Kanon", "Prägekraft der Tradition" sprach, klang er schon ein bisschen wie seine einstigen liberalkonservativen Gegner. Jürgen Habermas früher und heute - das ist offenbar, wenn beide den Vergleich erlauben, eine Entwicklung fast wie vom frühen zum späten Platon. Der große Schlussapplaus des Münchner Publikums galt denn auch nicht einem Argument, sondern auch einem alten Weisen." [jsl]

Excerpt from "Frankfurter Rundschau":
"Als Jürgen Habermas zum Abschluss der Tagung noch einmal betonte, dass er nicht Teilnehmer am religiösen Sprachspiel sei, und fragte, ob denn „Religionen auf einen Philosophenkongress gehören“, hielt er sich dennoch eine Hintertür offen: Nicht nur in Hinblick auf die Beschäftigung mit der Kunst, sondern auch in den opaken Niederungen der Lebenswelt ringe die Philosophie, obwohl die diskursive Vernunft ihr Zentrum sei, stets aufs Neue mit dem Außersprachlichen."

See my previous post on the event here.

David Reidy on John Rawls

2011-09-14T20:30:00.002+02:00

David A. Reidy has posted a new paper on SSRN:

"John Rawls" [pdf]

Abstract
"This paper sets out the central features of John Rawls's political philosophy paying special attention to its relationship to his early work in moral epistemology. It will appear as the entry on Rawls in the "Encyclopedia of Ethics" forthcoming from Wiley-Blackwell."

David Reidy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee. He is co-editor (with Rex Martin) of "Rawls's Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia?" (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006).

French conference on Jürgen Habermas

2011-09-14T20:04:00.005+02:00

A conference about Habermas takes place in Pessac/Bordeaux October 6-7:

"Les Lumières de Jürgen Habermas"

Programme [pdf]

October 6, 2011
(Maison des Sciences de l'Homme d'Aquitaine, Pessac)

Rainer Forst
Enlightenment and Religion. Bayle, Kant and Habermas

Estelle Ferrarese
La Publicité entre morale et politique? Sur l’autonomie du politique chez Habermas

Yves Cusset
Repenser le droit à l’hospitalité avec Habermas

Tristan Coignard
Poursuivre la réflexion sur la citoyenneté mondiale après Kant et Habermas

October 7, 2011
(Goethe Institute, Bordeaux)

Céline Spector
Souveraineté populaire et droits de l’homme: Rousseau, aux sources de l’autonomie démocratique

Alexandre Dupeyrix
Entre contextualisme et universalisme: Le dialogue Rorty-Habermas

Maïwenn Roudaut
Lumières, identité(s) et culture chez Habermas

Sophie Guérard de Latour
Culture et démocratie: La question du droit des minorités chez Habermas

Florian Nicodème
Processus ou philosophie de l’histoire? Habermas et "le concept d’Aufklärung"

Gérard Raulet
Légitimité et globalisation. Une relecture des "Problèmes de légitimation dans le capitalisme avancé"

Jean-Marie Lardic
Habermas et la motivation de l’éthique

Guillaume Le Blanc
Le nouvel esprit de la démocratie

Neues Buch von Ingeborg Maus: "Über Volkssouveränität"

2011-09-12T20:55:00.004+02:00

Über Volkssouveränität
Elemente einer Demokratietheorie

von Ingeborg Maus

(Suhrkamp Verlag, September 2011)

Kurzbeschreibung

Das gegenwärtige Wiederaufblühen basisdemokratischer Forderungen verleiht einer Theorie der Volkssouveränität besondere Aktualität. Ingeborg Maus’ Konzeption einer "Demokratisierung der Demokratie" verteidigt die gesetz- und verfassunggebende Gewalt des Volkes gegen Staatsapparate, die sich zunehmend aus der Gesetzesbindung befreien und so jeder demokratischen Kontrolle entziehen. Darüber hinaus vertritt sie eine weitgehende Übertragung von Gesetzgebungskompetenzen an die gesellschaftliche Basis. Das Prinzip der Volkssouveränität wird im Hinblick auf heutige Bedingungen konkretisiert: Eine Analyse der Parzellierung der Gesellschaft und der Fragmentierung des politischen Entscheidungssystems zeigt, daß für eine Realisierung von Volkssouveränität neuer Bedarf und neue Chancen bestehen.

Inhalt

Einleitung [pdf]

I. Sinn und Bedeutung von Volkssouveränität in der modernen Gesellschaft

II. Strukturen der Volkssouveränität

1. Volkssouveränität versus Konstitutionalismus
2. Die Struktur subjektiver Freiheitsrechte im Verfassungssystem der Volkssouveränität
3. Basisdemokratische Aktivitäten und rechtsstaatliche Verfassung
4. Die Transformation des Volkssouveränitätsprinzips in der Weimarer Republik

III. Zur Begründung von Volkssouveränität

1. Vom materialen Naturrecht des Mittelalters zum prozeduralen Naturrecht der Moderne
2. Varianten und Modifikationen des demokratischen Kontraktualismus [Fichte, Rawls, Habermas, Kant]

IV. Die Folgen politologischer Inkompetenz in Rechts- und Verfassungsfragen für das Verständnis rechtsstaatlicher und demokratischer Prinzipien im Kontraktualismus des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts

V. Der zerstörte Zusammenhang von Freiheitsrechten und Volkssouveränität in der aktuellen nationalstaatlichen und internationalen Politik

VI. Vom Nationalstaat zum Globalstaat oder: der Verlust der Demokratie

Ingeborg Maus ist emeritierte Professorin für politische Theorie und Ideengeschichte an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. Von 1987 bis 1991 arbeitet Ingeborg Maus in der von Jürgen Habermas geleiteten Arbeitsgruppe Rechtstheorie an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main (Ingeborg Maus, Rainer Forst, Günter Frankenberg, Klaus Günther, Bernhard Peters und Lutz Wingert).

New Book: Recontructing Rawls

2011-09-09T22:00:00.004+02:00

Reconstructing Rawls
The Kantian Foundations of Justice as Fairness

By Robert S. Taylor

(Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011)

336 pages

From the Preface

"This book has one overarching goal: to reclaim Rawls for the Enlightenment — more specifically, the Prussian Enlightenment. His so-called political turn in the 1980s, motivated by a newfound interest in pluralism and the accommodation of difference, has been unhealthy for autonomy-based liberalism and has led liberalism more broadly towards cultural relativism, be it in the guise of liberal multiculturalism or critiques of cosmopolitan distributive-justice theories. I believe it is time to redeem Theory’s implicit promise of a universalistic, comprehensive Kantian liberalism, a promise that went unredeemed in Rawls's lifetime but on which this book attempts to deliver. Reconstructing Rawls on Kantian foundations leads to some unorthodox conclusions about justice as fairness, to be sure: for example, it yields a more civic-humanist reading of the priority of political liberty, a more Marxist reading of the priority of fair equality of opportunity, and a more ascetic or antimaterialist reading of the difference principle. It nonetheless leaves us with a theory that is still recognizably Rawlsian and reveals a previously untraveled road out of Theory — a road very different from the one Rawls himself ultimately followed."

Contents

Introduction [pdf]

Part 1: Kantian Affinities
1. Rawls’s Kantianism

Part 2: Reconstructing Rawls
2. The Kantian Conception of the Person
3. The Priorities of Right and Political Liberty
4. The Priority of Civil Liberty
5. The Priority of Fair Equality of Opportunity
6. The Difference Principle

Part 3: Kantian Foundations
7. Justifying the Kantian Conception of the Person
8. The Poverty of Political Liberalism

Conclusion: Justice as Fairness as a Universalistic Kantian Liberalism

Robert S. Taylor is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis.

See also Robert S. Taylor's papers on Rawls:
- "Self-Realization and the Priority of Fair Equality of Opportunity" (2005)
- "Kantian Personal Autonomy" (2005)
- "Rawls's Defense of the Priority of Liberty: A Kantian Reconstruction" (2008)

Reviews of Honneth's Book on Social Freedom

2011-09-07T21:23:00.014+02:00

Reviews of "Das Recht der Freiheit. Grundriß einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit" (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011) by Axel Honneth:

*Angelika Brauer - "Respekt muss sein"
(Der Tagesspiegel, July 30, 2011)

*Ludwig Siep - "Wir sind dreifach frei"
(Die Zeit, August 20, 2011)

*Christoph Möller - "Frei macht, was ohnehin geschieht"
(Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 24, 2011)

*Thomas Meyer - "Mit Hegel in die vernünftige Wirklichkeit"
(Süddeutsche Zeitung, August 29, 2011)

*Christian Schlüter - "Es geht um die Würde"
(Frankfurter Rundschau, August 30, 2011)

*Hans Bernhard Schmid - "Ist die Gesellschaft krank?"
(Neue Zürcher Zeitung, September 13, 2011)

*Conrad Lay - "Die Buchkritik: Axel Honneth's Das Recht der Freiheit" [pdf] (SWR2, September 29, 2011)
Also as audio here.

*Alexander Petring - Die unsittliche Gegenwart
(Berliner Republik 4/2011, October 2011)

*Volker Gerhardt - Zwischen Kant und Hegel
(Die Welt, October 15, 2011)

*Nicklas Baschek - "Diese Welt anerkennen"
(Litteraturkritik.de)

*Frank Wiebe - "Die Freiheit, die wir meinen"
(SciLogs, November 13, 2011)

*Bernd Mayerhofer - "Something of a Masterpiece"
(Goethe Institut, January 2012)

See also interviews with Axel Honneth:

* "Liebe als höchste Form der Freiheit" (5 minutes)
(German television "3sat"; September 9, 2011)

* "Axel Honneth: Der Kampf um Anerkennung" (58 minutes)
(Swizz television "SF"; January 22, 2012)

See my previous post on Honneth's book here.

Updated entry on Habermas in "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy"

2011-09-07T00:04:00.001+02:00

Updated entry on Jürgen Habermas in "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy":

"Jürgen Habermas"
by James Bohman & William Rehg
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition)

New Book on Pragmatism and Democracy

2011-09-06T22:00:00.003+02:00

The Priority of Democracy
Political Consequences of Pragmatism

by Jack Knight & James Johnson

(Princeton University Press, 2011)

336 pages

Description

What is the primary value of democracy? When should we make decisions democratically and when should we rely on markets? And when should we accept the decisions of unelected officials, such as judges or bureaucrats? Knight and Johnson explore how a commitment to pragmatism should affect our answers to such important questions. They conclude that democracy is a good way of determining how these kinds of decisions should be made--even if what the democratic process determines is that not all decisions should be made democratically. So, for example, the democratically elected U.S. Congress may legitimately remove monetary policy from democratic decision-making by putting it under the control of the Federal Reserve.

Knight and Johnson argue that pragmatism offers an original and compelling justification of democracy in terms of the unique contributions democratic institutions can make to processes of institutional choice. This focus highlights the important role that democracy plays, not in achieving consensus or commonality, but rather in addressing conflicts. Indeed, Knight and Johnson suggest that democratic politics is perhaps best seen less as a way of reaching consensus or agreement than as a way of structuring the terms of persistent disagreement.

Contents [Preview]

1. Preliminaries [pdf]
2. Pragmatism and the Problem of Institutional Design [pdf]
3. The Appeal of Decentralization
4. The Priority of Democracy and the Burden of Justification
5. Reconsidering the Role of Political Argument in Democratic Politics
6. Refining Reflexivity
7. Formal Conditions: Institutionalizing Liberal Guarantees
8. Substantive Conditions: Pragmatism and Effectiveness
9. Conclusion

Jack Knight is Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University. James Johnson is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester.

Derek Parfit in "The New Yorker"

2011-09-05T19:59:00.002+02:00

In "The New Yorker" (September 12, 2011), Larissa MacFarquhar has written a profile of Derek Parfit:

"How to Be Good"
(only the abstract is available online for nonsubscribers)

Excerpts:
"Around the mid-nineties, Parfit started reading Kant. He hadn't read him seriuosly before because he had always found him irritating - his appalling sentences (it was Kant, he felt, who had made really bad writing philosophically acceptable), his grandiloquence, his infuriating inconsistencies and glaring mistakes. He felt that the crucial Kantian idea of autonomy, for instance, was just a blatant cheat: Kant wanted there to be a universally valid moral law, and he wanted every person to have the moral autonomy to determine the law for himself, and he just couldn't have both those things at once.

"I asked a Kantian, "Does this mean that, if I don't give myself Kant's Imperative as a law, I am not subject to it?" "No", I was told, "you have to give yourself a law, and there's only one law". This reply was maddening, like the propaganda of the so-called People's Democracies of the old Soviet bloc, in which voting was compulsory and there was only one candidate. And when I said" "But I haven't given myself Kant's Imperative as a law". I was told "Yes, you have."

The thing that mattered enormously to Kant - moral autonomy, motive - didn't seem that important to Parfit. He thought that individual selves were less significant than other people thought they were, so he wasn't that interested in motive; he thought that moral truths existed independently of human will, so he wasn't going to place much value on autonomy in Kant's sense [....] Parfit's first love in moral philosophy was someone completely unlike Kant - Henry Sidgwick.... [....]

As he read deeper and deeper into Kant, he began to feel that the grandiloquence and inconsistency that had irritated him in the past were the product of an emotional nature so passionately extreme that it was simply incapable of Sidgwick's careful self-criticism. For Kant, something was never just good, it was necessary; there was little "most" or "some" in Kant, only "all" or "none". Parfit recognized that he, too, was an emotional extremist who found it difficult to accept answers that fell between everything and nothing. [....] He came to believe that Kant was the greatest moral philosopher since the ancient Greeks..."

See my previous posts on Derek Parfit's new book "On What Matters" and on reviews of the book.

John Rawls on the EU

2011-09-03T17:04:00.004+02:00

On his blog "Understanding Society", Daniel Little has written an interesting post on "John Rawls and the EU".

Daniel Little's post is based on letters between John Rawls and Philippe Van Parijs in 1998. The letters were published in "Revue de philosophie économique/Review of Economic Philosophy" (vol. 7, 2003): "Three letters on The Law of Peoples and the European Union". See the letters here [pdf].

See also Glyn Morgan's paper on "John Rawls: Eurosceptic? European Integration as a Realistic Utopia" (2008).

Christian Schlüter reviews Axel Honneth

2011-08-30T19:00:00.005+02:00

In Frankfurter Rundschau (August 30, 2011), Christian Schlüter reviews "Das Recht der Freiheit. Grundriß einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit" (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011) by Axel Honneth:

Review: "Es geht um die Würde"

Excerpts:
"Honneth grenzt sich klar von den kantianisch inspirierten Freiheitskonzeptionen ab, wie sie in den letzten Jahrzehnten etwa von John Rawls und Jürgen Habermas vertreten wurden. Dabei gehört der begriffsgeschichtliche erste Teil gewiss zu den stärksten Abschnitten in dem Buch. Bemerkenswert ist allemal, wie Honneth versucht, ausgerechnet dem preußischen Staatsphilosophen Hegel ein modernes Konzept der Freiheit zu entlocken: Es ist der Immanenz verpflichtet und erhält sein normatives Profil durch den Abgleich des Anspruchs, Freiheit zu verwirklichen, mit der tatsächlich verwirklichten Freiheit [....]

Honneths Plädoyer für eine neue Kultur der Freiheit mündet in der Forderung, Europa nicht nur als Sonderwirtschaftszone, sondern endlich auch als politischen, zumal demokratischen Raum zu gestalten. Politik im Namen der Freiheit muss gestalten. Sonst hört sie auf, frei zu sein und wickelt sich selber ab. Honneths großes Verdienst besteht allerdings nicht allein darin, das politisch Vernünftige noch einmal zu vergegenwärtigen. Vielmehr erinnert sein Buch an eine Bedeutung der Freiheit, die uns beinahe schon abhanden gekommen ist. Sie ist an Begriffe wie Würde und Scham gebunden, sie ließe sich am ehesten beschreiben als Zugänglichkeit und Zutraulichkeit, als ein Vertrautsein mit der Welt. Denn in einer fremden und feindlichen Welt ist der Menschen unfrei."

Thomas Meyer reviews Axel Honneth

2011-08-29T18:20:00.008+02:00

In "Süddeutsche Zeitung" (August 29, 2011), Thomas Meyer reviews "Das Recht der Freiheit. Grundriß einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit" (Suhrkamp Verlag, 21011) by Axel Honneth:

Review: "Mit Hegel in die vernünftige Wirklichkeit"

Excerpt:
Dem skelettierten, dafür gegenwartstauglich gemachten Hegel bleibt es überlassen, nicht nur den alten Deutungskonkurrenten Kant aus dem Feld zu schlagen, sondern auch dessen tatsächliche und vermeintliche Nachfolger. Während die Altvorderen der „Frankfurter Schule“ aus guten Gründen schon kaum mehr einer Erwähnung wert betrachtet werden, dürfte sich nicht nur Jürgen Habermas die Augen reiben: Er, der selbst an einer großen Rechtsphilosophie arbeitet, und viele andere werden als institutionen-vergessene Kantianer beiseitegeschoben, um Platz für das Soziale zu bekommen. Kants Idee der „wohlgeordneten Freyheit“ ist für Honneth nämlich nichts anderes als der Verzicht auf die Dimension des „Sozialen“.
Ein solch defizitäres Freiheitsverständnis, das immer erst nachträglich die Bedingungen dafür schaffen muss, die Anwendung der bloß gedachten Freiheit erst zu ermöglichen, verbleibt in einer schlecht gedachten Rechtsmetaphysik. Ganz anders sei dies bei Hegel angelegt. Der gehe davon aus, dass das „Subjekt als in soziale Strukturen eingebunden gedacht werden“ müsse, die seine „Freiheit garantieren“, bevor es erst dann „als freies Wesen in Verfahren hineinversetzt werden kann, die über die Legitimität der gesellschaftlichen Ordnung wachen.“

Thomas Meyer is Guest Professor at the Centre of Jewish Studies, Karl-Franzens-University Graz.

Habermas at the 22nd German Congress of Philosophy

2011-08-28T23:38:00.007+02:00

Lectures at the 22nd German Congress of Philosophy, September 12-15, 2011, at Munich University:

Jürgen Habermas
Über die Verkörperung von Gründen

Robert Pippin
Die Form der Vernunft

Seyla Benhabib
Rights-bearing and Reason-giving: Constructing the Subject of Rights

Susan Neiman
Politische Ziele, moralische Gründe

Franz von Kutschera
Fünf Gründe, kein Materialist zu sein

Peter Gärdenfors
Reasons for Meanings: A Theory of Semantics Grounded in Perception, Action and Interaction

Lorraine Daston
Vernunft, Rationalität und Regeln: Von der Aufklärung zum Kalten Krieg

See the program here.

Among the other participants are: Robert Brandom, Michael Tomasello, Michael Quante, Peter Koslowski, Lutz Wingert, Volker Gerhardt, Alessandro Pinzani, Slavoj Zizek, Rahel Jaeggi, Rainer Forst, Charles Larmore, and Simone Chambers.

Update:
Reports from the congress in Munich:

*Jan Küveler - "Einhörner auf der Rückseite des Mondes"
(Die Welt, September 16, 2011)

*Christian Schlüter - "O'zapft is!"
(Frankfurter Rundschau, September 17, 2011)

Steven Wheatley on Deliberative Democracy and International Law

2011-08-28T11:11:00.002+02:00

Free full text from "European Journal of International Law" (vol. 22 no. 2, 2011):

A Democratic Rule of International Law

by Steven Wheatley

Abstract
"This article examines the way in which we should make sense of, and respond to, the democratic deficit that results from global governance through international law following the partial collapse of the Westphalian political settlement. The objective is to evaluate the possibilities of applying the idea of deliberative (‘democratic’) legitimacy to the various and diverse systems of law. The model developed at the level of the state is imperfectly applied to the inter-state system and the legislative activities of non-state actors. Further, regulation by non-state actors through international law implies the exercise of legitimate authority, which depends on the introduction of democratic procedures to determine the right reasons that apply to subjects of authority regimes. In the absence of legitimate authority, non-state actors cannot legislate international law norms. The article concludes with some observations on the problems for the practice of democracy in the counterfactual ideal circumstances in which a plurality of legal systems legislate conflicting democratic law norms and the implications of the analysis for the regulation of world society."

Steven Wheatley is Professor of International Law at the Law School, University of Leeds. He is the author of "The Democratic Legitimacy of International Law" (Hart, 2010). See my post here.

Habermas on Europe and the "New German Question"

2011-08-26T23:01:00.003+02:00

Addressing a panel hosted by the European Council on Foreign Relations (Berlin, April 6 2011), Jürgen Habermas criticized political elites for shirking their responsibility of delivering Europe to its citizens, instead relying on opportunism that threatens to "sink 50 years of European history". The panel discussion with Jürgen Habermas, Joschka Fischer, Henrik Enderlein and Christian Calliess on "Europe and the re-discovery of the German nation-state" is now available in English at "Eurozine":

Europe and the "New German Question" [pdf]

The text was originally published in German in "Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik" (May 2011). See my previous post here.

Excerpt:
Habermas: "Are we now seeing a new version of the same German question that led to the founding of the EU? I don't think so. Back then politicians had the Second World War and the mass crimes on their shoulders and were thinking in terms of the categories of the nineteenth century. The aim of stopping a colossus once again waging power politics at the heart of Europe by incorporating it was an important motive. I don't see a similar situation today. For some years now the Federal German Republic has been making an increasingly amorphous impression and seems to me to be characterized rather by the way it does not pursue any "power political" interests in the classical sense. The governments of this economically successful republic make themselves beholden to the twin imperatives that more or less every state must follow these days, namely trimming the economy to the interests of competitiveness, while making certain social concessions, so that output legitimacy forestalls any difficulties that might hinder domestic re-election. In this sense Germany is relatively weak, as far as its will to shape political structures is concerned. But accompanying this weakness I see a growing sense of national self-centredness; and consequently there arises the potential for disruption at the heart of Europe, which, under the present government, is for the first time seriously obstructing the unification of Europe."

Christoph Möllers reviews Axel Honneth

2011-08-24T19:13:00.004+02:00

In "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" (August 24, 2011), Professor Christoph Möllers reviews "Das Recht der Freiheit. Grundriß einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit" (Suhrkamp Verlag, 21011) by Axel Honneth:

Review: "Frei macht, was ohnehin geschieht"

Excerpts:
"Gegen einen normativen Individualismus entwirft Honneth ein Konzept sozialer Freiheit, in der der Mensch Selbstbestimmung nur in Gemeinschaft vollziehen kann. Das "Recht der Freiheit" erfüllt dieses Programm innerhalb einer imposanten Theoriearchitektur [....]. Der Anspruch des Buches ist hoch, und warum nicht in der eher zu bescheidenen akademischen Philosophie in Deutschland? In jedem Fall ist es den Versuch wert, vom Begriff der Freiheit mehr zu verlangen, als es die politische Theorie üblicherweise tut. Viele Gründe zur Vorfreude also, die die gewisse Enttäuschung des Rezensenten miterklären mögen. Dies gilt nicht für den ersten Hauptteil, eine luzide historische Darstellung des Freiheitsbegriffs aus der Perspektive der eigenen Konzeption. Sie kann als ein eigenes wichtiges Buch gelesen werden und bestätigt die Einsicht, dass Philosophen die besten Philosophiehistoriker sind. [....]

Hegels Theorie bezog ihre Stärke aus ihrer Distanz zu moralischen Urteilen, ihrem Interesse an Institutionen, ihrem geschichtsphilosophischen Drive und einem begriffsgeleiteten Gegenwartshunger, der uns heute bei Denkern wie Habermas und Luhmann fasziniert. Wer solches in diesem voluminösen Band sucht, wird zu selten fündig: Das "Recht der Freiheit" orientiert sich nicht an Hegels Philosophie des Rechts, sondern an Honneths berühmter, aber kaum weiterentwickelten Deutung der Theorie des Selbstbewusstseins in Hegels "Phänomenologie". Diese wird auf die Ebene der politischen Theorie verlagert: Politik als verallgemeinerte gelungene Zweierbeziehung scheint das Ideal. Gegenwartsanalysen gehen in langen historischen Rekonstruktionen unter.[....]

Christoph Möllers is Professor of Public Law and Jurisprudence at the Humboldt-University, Berlin. He is the author of "Der vermisste Leviathan: Staatstheorie in der Bundesrepublik" (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008).

New book: 40 Essays on Jürgen Habermas

2011-08-23T20:20:00.003+02:00

Jürgen Habermas, Volumes I and II

ed. by Camil Ungureanu, Klaus Günther
& Christian Joerges

(Ashgate, 2011)

1014 pages

Description

Jürgen Habermas is widely regarded as one of the outstanding intellectuals of our time. This collection focuses on the theory of law which can be distilled from his vast compendium of work. At the same time the collection places this theory in the context of Habermas' overall contribution to the theory of society, political theory and social philosophy. Volume I on 'The Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy' identifies the theoretical foundations. Volume II focuses on the critical debate of Habermas' discourse theory of law and democracy, on the challenges posed by the postnational constellation (Europeanization and processes of globalization) and on particular strands within his work, such as genetic technology and religion. Each volume is prefaced by a comprehensive introduction by the editors.

Contents

VOLUME I

Introduction: Jürgen Habermas's Discourse Theory of Democracy and Law [20 pages]

Part I: Foundations

1. Enlightenment and the Idea of Public Reason (1995), Thomas McCarthy [Abstract]
2. Facts, Norms, and Normative Facts (2000), Robert Brandom
3. Universality and Truth, and Response to Jürgen Habermas (2000), Richard Rorty

Part II: The Discourse Theory

4. Grasping the Force of the Better Argument (2003), William Rehg [Abstract]
5. The Communicative Paradigm in Moral Theory (1999), Alessandro Ferrara
6. Legitimacy Without Morality (2002), Peter Niesen
7. Plurality of the Good? (1997) Karl-Otto Apel [Abstract]
8. Values and Norms (2002), Hilary Putnam
9. Comment on Jürgen Habermas' "From Kant to Hegel and Back Again" (1999), Charles Taylor [Abstract]

Part III: Habermas's Theory of Democracy

10. Historical Context and the Legacy of German Legal-Political Thought (2003), John P. McCormick
11. On the Origins of Constitutional Patriotism (2006), Jan-Werner Müller
12. Models of Public Space (1992), Seyla Benhabib [Abstract]
13. Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy (2001), Iris Marion Young
14. The Rule of Reasons (2001), Rainer Forst [Abstract]
15. Reflections on Habermas on Democracy (1999), Joshua Cohen [Abstract]

Part IV: The Legal System

16. Democracy, Human Rights, and the Problem of a Worldwide Civil Society (1998), Albrecht Wellmer
17. Individual Freedom and Social Equality (2000), David Ingram
18. Basic Rights and Democracy in Jürgen Habermas's Procedural Paradigm of Law (1994), Robert Alexy [Abstract]
19. Procedural Justice? (2003) Cristina Lafont [Abstract]
20. A Question of Institutionalization (2007), Christopher F. Zurn

VOLUME II

Introduction: Reflections on Habermas's Postnational Constellation [22 pages]

Part I: Debating Habermas

1. Political Liberalism: Reply to Habermas (1995), John Rawls [Abstract]
2. How Can the People Ever Make the Laws? (1997) Frank I. Michelman
3. Quod Omnes Tangit (1995), Niklas Luhmann
4. From Consent to Dissent (2000), Marcello Neves
5. The Other of Justice (1995), Axel Honneth
6. Governmentality and Deliberative Politics (2005), Thomas Biebricher
7. Derrida on Free Decision (2008), Camil Ungureanu [Abstract]
8. Critical Social Theory and the Feminist Critiques (1995), Jean L. Cohen

Part II: The Postnational Constellation

9. Habermas, Supranational Democracy and the European Constitution (2006), John P. McCormick [Abstract]
10. An Emerging European Public Sphere (2005), Erik Oddvar Eriksen [Abstract]
11. The Constitutionalization of International Law (2001), Klaus Günther
12. Facts Without Norms? (2007) Christoph Humrich
13. Global Governance Without Global Government? (2008) William E. Scheuerman
14. State and Constitution – a Reply to Scheuerman (2008), Hauke Brunkhorst [Abstract]
15. Towards a Critical Theory of Global Justice (2001), Rainer Forst [Abstract]
16. Habermas's Call for Cosmopolitan Constitutional Patriotism in an Age of Global Terror (2007), Michel Rosenfeld
17. Preventing Military Humanitarian Intervention? (2009) Regina Kreide
18. Habermas on Human Cloning (2004), Eduardo Mendieta [Abstract]
19. Online Forums and Deliberative Democracy (2005), Davy Janssen & Raphaël Kies
20. A Secular State for a Postsecular Society? (2007) Maeve Cooke [Abstract]

Jeffrey Flynn on Human Rights

2011-08-21T21:08:00.002+02:00

Jeffrey Flynn has posted a new paper on SSRN:

"Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Human Dignity" [pdf]

Abstract:
This paper begins with two recent, contrasting historical accounts of when human rights were invented. In Inventing Human Rights (2007), Lynn Hunt tells the story of how the psychological foundations for human rights were laid with the rise of the humanitarian sentiment prior to the revolutionary period of the late eighteenth century. In The Last Utopia (2010), on the other hand, Samuel Moyn goes against the grain of most recent scholarship by focusing on a crisis of political utopianism in the 1970s as the locus for the roots of the contemporary resonance of human rights. Both historians draw our attention, though in different ways, to the relationship between human rights and humanitarianism.

In addressing this relation, I argue for the need to distinguish the logic of humanitarianism (viewing others as objects of suffering) from that of human rights (viewing others as subjects of rights). Drawing on recent work by discourse theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Rainer Forst, I distinguish between passive and active components of human dignity, relating the former to the politics of humanitarianism and the latter to the politics of human rights. I further distinguish between two perspectives on the politics of human rights: internal and external. Relying on these two sets of distinctions, I defend the following claims. A theory of human rights needs to be able to account for both perspectives, internal and external. When it comes to the relation between humanitarianism and human rights, invoking humanitarian motifs within the politics of human rights runs the risk of wrongly viewing violations of human dignity in overly passive terms. Yet as a historical matter, humanitarian motifs may have been essential in getting the contemporary politics of human rights off the ground. Rather than proposing that we try to purify human rights practice of humanitarian motifs, I maintain that we must keep in mind the potential underside of the latter. The ultimate aim of human rights in practice must be to go beyond viewing others as merely objects of concern to viewing them as subjects of rights.

The paper will be presented at the APSA 2011 Annual Meeting in September.

Jeffrey Flynn is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Fordham University.

Ludwig Siep reviews Axel Honneth

2011-08-20T10:04:00.003+02:00

In "Die Zeit" (August 18, 2011), Professor Ludwig Siep reviews "Das Recht der Freiheit. Grundriß einer demokratischen Sittlichkeit" (Suhrkamp, 2011) by Axel Honneth:

Review: "Wir sind dreifach frei"

Excerpt:
"Gibt es einen Leitfaden, nach dem man Fortschritte und Rückschritte in der europäischen Geschichte der beiden letzten Jahrhunderte beurteilen kann? Ist eine "normative Rekonstruktion" der Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte aus philosophischer Sicht möglich? Der Frankfurter Philosoph Axel Honneth findet diesen Leitfaden bei Hegel. Während Habermas die Maßstäbe der kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie in einer sprachphilosophischen Transformation Kants neu formulierte, geht Honneth auf Hegels Kantkritik und seine Historisierung der Vernunft zurück. Auch für Honneth kann man moralische Normen und Gerechtigkeitsvorstellungen nicht durch hypothetische Diskurse oder Vertragsmodelle, wie etwa bei Rawls, rechtfertigen. Man hat keine Argumente, wenn man ganz von den Werten der Institutionen absieht, in denen man lebt. Diese wiederum sind ohne das Verständnis ihrer historischen Entwicklung weder zu verstehen noch zu rechtfertigen. Honneth plädiert fur eine materiale und historische Gerechtigkeits- und Freiheitstheorie. [....] Für Honneth ist die entscheidende Wertvoraussetzung der Moderne die Freiheit in drei Bedeutungen: als gleiches Recht eines jeden Menschen auf bestimmte Grundrechte, als Anspruch auf das eigene autonome Urteil über moralische Normen und als "soziale Freiheit".

Abstract (from "Perlentaucher"):
"Sehr eingehend widmet sich der in Münster Philosophie lehrende Ludwig Siep diesem Buch seines Frankfurter Kollegen Axel Honneth, der darin mit Rückgriff auf den späten Hegel die modernen Gesellschaften auf die Entwicklung der Freiheit abklopft, auf gleiches Recht, die Autonomie des Urteils und die soziale Freiheit. Beeindruckt zeigt sich Siep davon, wie kompakt Honneth die gesamte Sozialgeschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts rekonstruiert und dabei Fort- und Rückschritte in den Sphären Familie, Arbeit und Politik unter die Lupe nimmt. Dabei kommt Honneth zu dem auch für den Rezensenten überraschenden Ergebnis, dass Fortschritte in Bezug auf Freiheit, Gleichberechtigung und wechselseitige Anerkennung eigentlich nur in der privaten Sphäre erreicht wurden, während in Ökonomie und Politik die Spielräume kleiner wurden. So viel zum Sittenverfall! Siep ist nicht mit allen Schlüssen, die Honneth zieht, einverstanden, auch seine konfliktfreie Sicht auf die Anerkennung findet Siep diskutabel, aber er schätzt das Werk schon deshalb, weil ihm das Kunststück, den späten Hegel für eine moderne Gesellschaftskritik zu revitalisieren."

See my previous post on Axel Honneth's new book here.

Ludwig Siep is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Münster. He is the author of "Anerkennung als Prinzip der praktischen Philosophie " (Alber, 1979) and "Konkrete Ethik: Grundlagen der Natur- und Kulturethik" (Suhrkamp, 2003).

Eva Erman on The Boundary Problem

2011-08-18T20:34:00.002+02:00

Eva Erman has posted a new paper at SSRN:

"The Boundary Problem: A Discourse-Theoretical Solution" [pdf]

Abstract:
"Democracy presumes a collective who are in a specific sense self governing or selfdetermining. However, the problem of who should be included in this collective and thus take part in the collective democratic decision-making, what is sometimes called the boundary problem in democratic theory, is an increasingly pressing political problem in a globalized world. A basic presumption of this paper is that insofar as we wish to address this problem as part of a normative democratic theory, the defended criterion of justified inclusion must be compatible with a proper criterion of democratic legitimacy. The overall aim is to show that a particular discoursetheoretical approach has resources to achieve this. With reference to what is labelled the "equal influence principle", the thesis defended is that a discourse-theoretical solution to the boundary problem is preferable to solutions drawing on some version of the all affected (interests) principle."

The paper will be presented at the 2011 APSA Annual Meeting in Seattle, September 1-4.

Eva Erman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Uppsala University, Sweden. She is the author of "Human Rights And Democracy: Discourse Theory And Global Rights Institutions" (Ashgate, 2005) and Co-Editor (with Anders Uhlin) of "Legitimacy Beyond the State? Re-examining the Democratic Credentials of Transnational Actors" (Palgrave, 2010). She is Chief Editor of "Ethics and Global Politics".

New Book: Robert Bellah on Religion in Human Evolution

2011-08-17T21:00:00.005+02:00

Religion in Human Evolution
From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

(Harvard University Press, September 2011)

784 pages

Description

How did our early ancestors transcend the quotidian demands of everyday existence to embrace an alternative reality that called into question the very meaning of their daily struggle? Robert Bellah, one of the leading sociologists of our time, identifies a range of cultural capacities, such as communal dancing, storytelling, and theorizing, whose emergence made this religious development possible. Deploying the latest findings in biology, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, he traces the expansion of these cultural capacities from the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (roughly, the first millennium BCE), when individuals and groups in the Old World challenged the norms and beliefs of class societies ruled by kings and aristocracies. These religious prophets and renouncers never succeeded in founding their alternative utopias, but they left a heritage of criticism that would not be quenched.

Bellah’s treatment of the four great civilizations of the Axial Age — in ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India — shows all existing religions, both prophetic and mystic, to be rooted in the evolutionary story he tells. Religion in Human Evolution answers the call for a critical history of religion grounded in the full range of human constraints and possibilities.

Contents [preview]

1. Religion and Reality
2. Religion and Evolution
3. Tribal Religion: The Production of Meaning
4. From Tribal to Archaic Religion: Meaning and Power
5. Archaic Religion: God and King
6. The Axial Age I: Introduction and Ancient Israel
7. The Axial Age II: Ancient Greece
8. The Axial Age III: China and the Late First Millennium BCE
9. The Axial Age IV: Ancient India
10. Conclusion

Reviews

This is an extraordinarily rich book based on wide-ranging scholarship. It contains not just a host of individual studies, but is informed with a coherent and powerful theoretical structure. There is nothing like it in existence. Of course, it will be challenged. But it will bring the debate a great step forward, even for its detractors. And it will enable other scholars to build on its insights in further studies of religion past and present.
- Charles Taylor

This great book is the intellectual harvest of the rich academic life of a leading social theorist who has assimilated a vast range of biological, anthropological, and historical literature in the pursuit of a breathtaking project. Robert Bellah first searches for the roots of ritual and myth in the natural evolution of our species and then follows with the social evolution of religion up to the Axial Age. In the second part of his book, he succeeds in a unique comparison of the origins of the handful of surviving world-religions, including Greek philosophy. In this field I do not know of an equally ambitious and comprehensive study.
- Jürgen Habermas

Robert N. Bellah is Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.

See an interview with Robert N. Bellah on his new book: "Where Does Religion Come From?" (The Atlantic, August 17, 2011).

See also an interview from 2008 on "Rethinking Secularism and Religion in the Global Age" [pdf]

Update:
Post by Robert Bellah at "The Immanent Frame" on his new book: Where Did Religion Come From?

Thomas Christiano on Human Right to Democracy

2011-08-17T19:28:00.003+02:00

Free online article from "Philosophy and Public Affairs" (Spring 2011, vol. 39 no. 2):

"An Instrumental Argument for a Human Right to Democracy" [pdf]

by Thomas Christiano

Excerpt:
"I argue here that there are good grounds for thinking that there is a moral human right to democracy and that this does not impinge at all on the right of collective self-determination. The argument given here is fully instrumental, relying heavily on empirical studies that support the theses that (1) democracies are normally reliable protectors of certain very urgent and widely accepted human rights and (2) nondemocracies and partial democracies reliably fail to protect these rights. The moral human right to democracy is grounded in the central role democracy plays protecting other fundamental moral rights in political societies and in international society. There is, I think, also an argument for the human right to democracy that makes democratic rights fundamental, but it must proceed from more controversial premises. It is worthwhile to make out a separate strong instrumental argument for the right to democracy based on the minimal premise that democracy is essential to the protection of very urgent and widely accepted human rights."

Thomas Christiano is Professor of Philosophy and Law at the Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona. He is the author of "The Constitution of Equality. Democratic Authority and its Limits" (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Seyla Benhabib on Human Right to Democracy

2011-08-16T00:42:00.002+02:00

Professor Seyla Benhabib has posted a new paper on SSRN:

"Is There a Human Right to Democracy? Beyond Interventionism and Indifference" [pdf]

Abstract:
"There is wide-ranging disagreement in contemporary discourse about the justification as well as the content of human rights. On the one hand, the language of human rights has become the public vocabulary of a conflict-ridden world which is increasingly growing together. The spread of human rights, as well as their defense and institutionalization, are now seen as the uncontested language, though not the reality, of global politics. In this essay I wish to shift both the justification strategy and the derivation of the content of human rights away from minimalist concerns towards an understanding of human rights in terms of the “right to have rights” (Hannah Arendt). I will defend a discourse-theoretic justification strategy which seeks to synthesize the insights of discourse ethics with Hannah Arendt’s concept. I thereby hope to point the way toward a more robust defense of human rights within a global justice context. Whereas in Arendt’s work, “the right to have rights” is viewed principally as a political right and is narrowly defined as the “right to membership in a political community,” I will propose a non-state-centered conception of the “right to have rights,” understood as the claim of each human person to be recognized and to be protected as a legal personality by the world community."

The paper will be presented at the APSA Annual Meeting 2011 and it will appear as part of a forthcoming book, titled: "Dignity in Adversity. Human Rights in Troubled Times" (Polity Press, September 2011)

The paper was originally presented in 2007.

See also Joshua Cohen's paper "Is There a Human Right to Democracy" [pdf] (2006).

Seyla Benhabib is professor of political science and philosophy at Yale University.

Martha Nussbaum on Creating Capabilities

2011-08-15T23:25:00.002+02:00

In this video Professor Martha Nussbaum explains the Capabilities Approach, as outlined in her new book, "Creating Capabilities" (Harvard University Press, 2011):

Video: Nussbaum on Creating Capabilities (10 mins)

See my previous post on Nussbaum's book here.

Also an interview with Martha Nussbaum in BBC Radio 4 here (28 mins).

Martha Nussbaum is Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago.

Symposium on Thomas Christiano’s "The Constitution of Equality"

2011-08-11T18:53:00.002+02:00

Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy (JESP) has published a symposium on Thomas Christiano's "The Constitution of Equality. Democratic Authority and its Limits" (Oxford University Press, 2008):

C.L. Ten (Singapore)
The Limits of Democratic Authority [pdf]

Corey Brettschneider (Brown)
Judicial Review and Democratic Authority: Absolute v. Balancing Conceptions [pdf]

Cindy Holder (Victoria)
Democratic Authority From The Outside Looking In: States, Common Worlds and Wrongful Connections [pdf]

Thomas Christiano (Arizona)
Reply to Critics of The Constitution of Equality [pdf]

Thomas Christiano is Professor of Philosophy and Law at the Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona.

(Thanks to ABC Democracy for the pointer!)

Peter Vallentyre reviews G. A. Cohen

2011-08-09T22:34:00.003+02:00

At "Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews", Peter Vallentyne reviews "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy" (Princeton University Press, 2011) by G. A. Cohen:

Review of "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy"

Peter Vallentyre is Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of Missouri. His web site contains a large number of online papers.

See my post on G.A. Cohen's book here.