Stefan Müller-Doohm' s extensive biography of Jürgen Habermas will be published by Suhrkamp Verlag on Habermas's 85th birthday in June 2014:
"Jürgen Habermas: Eine Biographie" [pdf]
Information from Suhrkamp Verlag:
"Jürgen Habermas", so schrieb der US-amerikanische Philosoph Ronald Dworkin anlässlich des 80. Geburtstags des großen europäischen Denkers, "ist nicht nur der berühmteste lebende Philosoph der Welt. Sein Ruhm selbst ist berühmt." Nach mehrjährigen Forschungen, intensiver Recherche und ausführlichen Gesprächen mit Weggefährten, Zeitzeugen sowie mit Habermas selbst legt Stefan Müller-Doohm nun die erste umfassende Biographie des bedeutendsten Intellektuellen unserer Zeit vor. Sie beleuchtet sowohl das Zusammenspiel von philosophischer Reflexion und intellektueller Intervention als auch das Wechselverhältnis von Lebens- und Werkgeschichte vor dem Hintergrund historischer Ereignisse.
Deutlich wird so das Bild eines einzigartigen Denkers, zu dessen wichtigsten philosophischen Errungenschaften eine Theorie verständigungsorientierten Handelns gehört, der aber dann, wenn er den Eindruck gewinnt, dass die Gesellschaft hinter ihren Möglichkeiten zur Gestaltung freier und gerechter Lebensverhältnisse zurückbleibt, zum unnachgiebigen Kritiker wird.
Stefan Müller-Doohm is Professor Emeritus at Oldenburg University. He is the author of "Adorno. Eine Biographie" (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003) [English: "Adorno" (Polity Press, 2008)] and "Jürgen Habermas. Leben, Werk, Wirkung" (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008).
Demokratie oder Kapitalismus?
Europa in der Krise
Hrsg. von Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik
(Blätter Verlagsgesellschaft, 2013)
288 S.
Inhalt [pdf]
1. Kapitalismus ohne Demokratie
* Was nun, Europa? - Wolfgang Streeck
* Der politische Euro - Elmar Altvater
* Europa in der Falle - Claus Offe
* Die gnadenlose Euro-Logik - Hubert Zimmermann
* Auf den Ruinen der Alten Welt - Wolfgang Streeck
* Demokratie oder Kapitalismus? [Auszug] - Jürgen Habermas
* Vom DM-Nationalismus zum Euro-Patriotismus? - W. Streeck
* Euroabwicklung - Stephan Schulmeister
2. Die Diktatur das Austerität
* Wir sparen uns zu tode - Paul Krugman
* Das infernalische Dreieck - Peter Bofinger
* Euroland bald abgebrannt? - Rudolf Hickel
* Das Regime der Prekarisierung - Isabell Lorey
* Die Krise in der Krise - Karl Georg Zinn
* Austerität - Paul Krugman
3. Die neue deutsche Frage
* Welches Deutschland braucht Europa? - Ulrike Guérot
* Europa und die neue Deutsche Frage - Jürgen Habermas et.al.
* Der Konstruktionsfehler der Währungsunion - Jürgen Habermas
* Kooperieren oder scheitern - Ulrich Beck
4. Mehr Demokratie Wagen
* Wie demokratisch ist die EU? - Jürgen Habermas
* Kollektiver Bonapartismus? - Hauke Brunkhorst
* Stabilitätsgewinn durch Demokratieverzicht? - H-J. Urban
* Lebendige Demokratie - Claudio Franzius und Ulrich K. Preuß
* Das Europa von heute und die Wirklichkeit von morgen - Oskar Negt
Democracy and Media Decadence
by John Keane
(Cambridge University Press, 2013)
Description
We live in a revolutionary age of communicative abundance in which many media innovations - from satellite broadcasting to smart glasses and electronic books - spawn great fascination mixed with excitement. In the field of politics, hopeful talk of digital democracy, cybercitizens and e-government has been flourishing. This book admits the many thrilling ways that communicative abundance is fundamentally altering the contours of our lives and of our politics, often for the better. But it asks whether too little attention has been paid to the troubling counter-trends, the decadent media developments that encourage public silence and concentrations of unlimited power, so weakening the spirit and substance of democracy. Exploring examples of clever government surveillance, market censorship, spin tactics and back-channel public relations, John Keane seeks to understand and explain these trends, and how best to deal with them. Tackling some tough but big and fateful questions, Keane argues that 'media decadence' is deeply harmful for public life.
Contents
1. Communicative Abundance [excerpt]
2. Monitory Democracy
3. Media Decadence
4. Democracy's Opponents
5. Why Freedom of Public Communication?
John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB). He is the author of "Global Civil Society?" (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and "The Life and Death of Democracy" (Simon & Schuster, 2009).
See also some of John Keane's papers:
* "Monitory Democracy and Media-Saturated Societies" [pdf]
* "Media Decadence and Democracy"
* "Democracy in the Age of Google, Facebook, and WikiLeaks" [pdf]
* "Eleven Theses on Communicative Abundance"
See also Ramon A. Feenstra's "Democracy in the Age of New Media Galaxy" [pdf]
"Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy" volume 16, issue 4 (September 2013), is a special issue on "Compromising on Justice".
Here are the introduction and four of the articles:
* "Introduction: Compromising on Justice" [pdf]
by Fabian Wendt
* "Sustaining Democracy: Folk Epistemology and Social Conflict" [pdf] by Robert B. Talisse
Abstract:
"When political philosophers ask whether there is a philosophical justification for democracy, they are most frequently concerned with one of two queries. The first has to do with the relative merits of democracy as compared with other regimes. The second query has to do with the moral bindingness of democratic outcomes. But there is a third query we may be engaging when we are looking for a philosophical justification of democracy: what reason can be given to democratic citizens to pursue democratic means of social change when they are confronted with a democratic result that seems to them seriously objectionable or morally intolerable? In this paper I develop an epistemological response to the third query. The thesis is that we have sufficient epistemological reasons to be democrats. The epistemological norms that we take ourselves to be governed by can be satisfied only under certain social conditions, and these social conditions are best secured under democracy."
* "Toleration Out of Respect?"
by Sune Lægaard
Abstract
"Under conditions of pluralism different cultures, interests or values can come into conflict, which raises the problem of how to secure peaceful co-existence. The idea of toleration historically emerged as an answer to this problem. Recently Rainer Forst has argued that toleration should not just be based on a modus vivendi designed to secure peaceful co-existence, but should be based on moral reasons. Forst therefore advances what he calls the ‘respect conception’ of toleration as an in itself morally desirable type of relationship, which is furthermore the only conception of toleration that avoids various so-called ‘paradoxes of toleration’. The paper first examines whether Forst’s respect conception can be applied descriptively to distinguish between actual patterns of behaviour and classify different acts of toleration. Then the focus is shifted to toleration out of respect as a normative prescription, which Forst presents as a requirement of justice. At both levels, it is argued that Forst’s respect conception is problematic since it presupposes that answers to very substantial normative questions, which are precisely what people tend to disagree on under conditions of pluralism, are already at hand. The respect conception therefore seems to be at best a theoretical idea belonging in ideal-theory, not a useful practical solution to actual conflicts under conditions of pluralism."
* "Consensus, Compromise, Justice and Legitimacy"
by Enzo Rossi
Abstract
"Could the notion of compromise help us overcoming – or at least negotiating – the frequent tension, in normative political theory, between the realistic desideratum of peaceful coexistence and the idealistic desideratum of justice? That is to say, an analysis of compromise may help us move beyond the contrast between two widespread contrasting attitudes in contemporary political philosophy: ‘fiat iustitia, pereat mundus’, on the one side, and ‘salus populi suprema lex’, on the other side. More specifically, compromise may provide the backbone of a conception of legitimacy that mediates between idealistic (or moralistic) and realistic (or pragmatic) desiderata of political theory, i.e. between the aspiration to peace and the aspiration to justice. In other words, this paper considers whether an account of compromise could feature in a viable realistic conception of political legitimacy, in much the same way in which consensus features in more idealistic conceptions of legitimacy (a move that may be attributed to some realist theorists, especially Bernard Williams). My conclusions, however, are largely sceptical: I argue that grounding legitimacy in any kind of normatively salient agreement does require the trappings of idealistic political philosophy, for better or – in my view – worse."
* "Peace Beyond Compromise"
by Fabian Wendt
Abstract
"Our societies are marked not only by disagreements on the good life, but also by disagreements on justice. This motivates philosophers as divergent as John Gray and Chandran Kukathas to focus their normative political theories on peace instead of justice. In this article, I discuss how peace should be conceived if peace is to be a more realistic goal than justice, not presupposing a moral consensus. I distinguish two conceptions of peace to be found in the literature. One, ordinary peace, conceives of peace as non-violent coexistence based on modus vivendi arrangements. Modus vivendi arrangements, in turn, are explained as a special kind of compromise. Ordinary peace does not presuppose a moral consensus and is therefore realistic, but at the same time it is too minimalist and undemanding to be satisfying. The other conception of peace, ambitious peace, can be found in Kukathas’s work. It is a conception of peace ‘beyond compromise’, not minimalist and undemanding, but, I will argue, not realistic because presupposing at least a second-order moral consensus. In the end, I advocate a division of labour between both conceptions of peace under the umbrella of an overarching ideal of peace".
John E. Roemer and Alain Trannoy have posted a new paper at SSRN:
"Equality of Opportunity" (112 pages)
Abstract
"This forthcoming chapter in the Handbook of Income Distribution (eds., A. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon) summarizes the literature on equality of opportunity. We begin by reviewing the philosophical debate concerning equality since Rawls (sections 1 and 2), present economic algorithms for computing policies which equalize opportunities, or, more generally, ways of ordering social policies with respect to their efficacy in opportunity equalization (sections 3, 4 and 5), apply the approach to the conceptualization of economic development (section 6), discuss dynamic issues (section 7), give a preamble to a discussion of empirical work (section 8), provide evidence of population views from surveys and experiments concerning conceptions of equality (section 9), and a discuss measurement issues, summarizing the empirical literature on inequality of opportunity to date (section 10). We conclude with mention of some critiques of the equal-opportunity approach, and some predictions (section 11)."
John E. Roemer is Professor of Political Science and Economics at Yale University. He is the author of "Theories of Distributive Justice" (Harvard University Press, 1996) and "Equality of Opportunity" (Harvard University Press, 1998).
Alain Trannoy is Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.
Jürgen Habermas gave a lecture at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam on November 5.
A video of the lecture is now available here:
"Deliberative Democracy and Political Crisis"
Habermas's lecture was part of a symposium on "The Future of Democracy". See my previous post on the event and the programme here.
The lecture will be published in Dutch in "De Groene Amsterdammer".
On November 6, H. M. King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands awards the Erasmus Prize 2013 to Jürgen Habermas at the Royal Palace of Amsterdam, at 4.00 p.m.
The Erasmus Prize is an annual award for a person who has made an exceptional contribution to culture, society or social science. The prize money is a sum of Euro 150.000. The theme of the Erasmus Prize this year is "The Future of Democracy". His Majesty the King is patron of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation.
See my previous post on the Erasmus Prize here.
Update
* Jürgen Habermas' acceptance speech
* Photos from the ceremony here.
The symposium on "The Future of Democracy" with Jürgen Habermas in Amsterdam on November 5 will be live streamed here.
The symposium starts with a lecture by Jürgen Habermas on "Deliberative Democracy and Political Crisis" at 10.30 a.m. (local time).
See my previous post on the event and the programme here.
Update:
Video of Habermas's lecture here.
The Society of Equals
by Pierre Rosanvallon
(Harvard University Press, 2013)
384 pages
Description
Since the 1980s, society’s wealthiest members have claimed an ever-expanding share of income and property. It has been a true counterrevolution, says Pierre Rosanvallon — the end of the age of growing equality launched by the American and French revolutions. And just as significant as the social and economic factors driving this contemporary inequality has been a loss of faith in the ideal of equality itself. An ambitious transatlantic history of the struggles that, for two centuries, put political and economic equality at their heart, The Society of Equals calls for a new philosophy of social relations to reenergize egalitarian politics.
There is no returning to the days of the redistributive welfare state. Rather than resort to outdated notions of social solidarity, we must instead revitalize the idea of equality according to principles of singularity, reciprocity, and communality that more accurately reflect today’s realities.
Contents [preview]
Introduction: The Crisis of Equality
1. The Invention of Equality
2. The Pathologies of Equality
3. The Century of Redistribution
4. The Great Reversal
5. The Society of Equals: A Preliminary Outline
Pierre Rosanvallon is Professor of Political History at the Collège de France and Director of Studies at L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is the author of "Democracy Past and Future" (Columbia University Press, 2006) and "Democratic Legitimacy" (Princeton University Press, 2011).
See Rosanvallon's lecture "Rethinking Equality in an Age of Inequalities" [pdf] from November 2011. A video of the lecture is available here.
A review of the book by Daniel Ben-Ami in "The Financial Times" here.
An interview with Rosanvallon on his book here (in French).
German edition: "Die Gesellschaft der Gleichen" (Hamburger Edition, 2013). A review by Anna Hollendung here.
A Companion to Rawls
Ed. by Jon Mandle & David A. Reidy
(Wiley-Blackwell, October 2013)
587 pages
From the Introduction
"It is now more than 10 years since John Rawls died in 2002, at the age of 81, and more than 60 years since his first publication in 1951. Yet, his work continues to occupy a unique and central position in contemporary political philosophy. Over the years it has generated an enormous secondary literature and sparked numerous interpretive and critical debates. The recent publication of Rawls's Princeton undergraduate thesis and his Harvard lectures in moral and political philosophy and the archival processing by Harvard of Rawls's unpublished papers, lectures, letters, annotated books, and so on, have only served further to stimulate interest in and debate over Rawls's work, often raising new questions, reviving debates thought to be settled, and suggesting new ways of understanding Rawls's work. With all this in mind, we were keen to produce with this volume not so much a summary of past scholarly work as a serviceable roadmap for current and future work on Rawls. Accordingly, we asked our contributors to address themselves to the themes and issues that in their view will or should occupy the attention of scholars engaged or likely to engage in this work."
Contents [preview]
Introduction - Jon Mandle & David A. Reidy
Part I. Ambitions
1. From Philosophical Theology to Democratic Theory - David A. Reidy
2. Does Justice as Fairness Have a Religious Aspect? [pdf] - Paul Weithman
Part II. Method
3. Constructivism as Rhetoric - Anthony Simon Laden
4. Kantian Constructivism - Larry Krasnoff
5. The Basic Structure of Society as the Primary Subject of Justice - Samuel Freeman
6. Rawls on Ideal and Nonideal Theory - Adam Swift & Zofia Stemplowska
7. “The Choice from the Original Position” - Jon Mandle
Part III. A Theory of Justice
8. The Priority of Liberty - Robert S. Taylor
9. Applying Justice as Fairness to Institutions - Colin M. Macleod
10. Democratic Equality as a Work-in-Progress - Stuart White
11. Stability, a Sense of Justice, and Self-Respect - Thomas E. Hill, Jr
12. Political Authority, Civil Disobedience, Revolution - Alexander Kaufman
Part IV. A Political Conception
13. The Turn to a Political Liberalism [pdf] - Gerald Gaus
14. Political Constructivism [doc] - Aaron James
15. On the Idea of Public Reason [pdf] - Jonathan Quong
16. Overlapping Consensus - Rex Martin
17. Citizenship as Fairness - Richard Dagger
18. Inequality, Difference, and Prospects for Democracy - Erin I. Kelly
Part V Extending Political Liberalism: International Relations
19. The Law of Peoples - Huw Lloyd Williams
20. Human Rights - Gillian Brock
21. Global Poverty and Global Inequality - Richard W. Miller
22. Just War - Darrel Moellendorf
Part VI. Conversations with Other Perspectives
23. Rawls, Mill, and Utilitarianism - Jonathan Riley
24. Perfectionist Justice and Rawlsian Legitimacy - Steven Wall
25. Rawlsian Liberalism versus Libertarianism - Barbara H. Fried
26. The Young Marx and the Middle-Aged Rawls - Daniel Brudney
27. Challenges of Global and Local Misogyny [abstract] - Claudia Card
28. Critical Theory and Habermas - Kenneth Baynes
29. Rawls and Economics - Daniel Little
30. Learning from the History of Political Philosophy - S.A. Lloyd
31. Rawls and the History of Moral Philosophy - Paul Guyer
Jon Mandle is Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University at Albany. He is the author of "Global Justice" (Polity Press, 2006) and "Rawls's A Theory of Justice: An Introduction" (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
David A. Reidy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee. He is co-editor (with Martin Rex) of "Rawls's Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia?" (Blackwell, 2006).
Roadmap to a Social Europe [pdf]
Ed. by Anne-Marie Grozelier et.al.
(Social Europe Report, October 2013)
155 pages
Social Europe Journal, together with its partners for this project - the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), the IG Metall, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, the Hans Böckler Stiftung and the French Institute Lasaire - has published an eBook with 43 articles on different aspects of the European social dimension written in spring and summer 2013.
The book has three principal sections: In the first part, some of Europe’s most prestigious thinkers and analysts make the connection between the discussion about Social Europe and the wider European malaise. One cannot discuss the social dimension in isolation but has to link it to the wider debate about the future of European integration if you want to be realistic, up-to-date and relevant.
Following this, the second part brings together trade union views "from the ground" across Europe. European political discussions are often perceived as detached from the real lives of people in the member states and the discussion about Social Europe is no exception. Therefore we collected the views of European and national trade union leaders and thus added an important dimension that has often found too little appreciation.
In the third and final part, some of the best experts in the field address a series of more specific issues related to the social dimension of the European Union and make recommendations for how to tackle them.
The essays in the first section of the book are:
Democracy, Solidarity And the European Crisis
- Jürgen Habermas
Europe Is Trapped Between Power And Politics
- Zygmunt Bauman
Pragmatism, Idealism And European Demoicracy
- Kalypso Nicoalidïs
What Is The Social Dimension Of The EU?
- Martin Seeleib-Kaiser
What Does A Social Europe Look Like Today?
- Jean-Paul Fitoussi and Xavier Timbeau
Social Policy Will Be Critical To A Sustainable EMU
- Simon Deakin
Social Europe Is The Only Solution
- Robin Wilson
Europe’s Democracy Deficit: Putting Some Meat On The Bones
Of Habermas’ Critique
- Steven Hill
The Euro-Dividend
- Philippe van Parijs
A new article by Jürgen Habermas on politics and religion has been published in "Politik und Religion" (C.H. Beck Verlag, 2013), edited by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Heinrich Meier.
Here is an excerpt:
"Kant und Hegel wollten noch den Wahrheitsgehalt der religiösen Überlieferung philosophisch auf den Begriff bringen. In den Krisen- und Entfremdungs-diagnosen der Junghegelianer setzte sich dieser Übersetzungsprozeß eher unbeabsichtigt fort. Auch in dem Perspektivenwechsel, den Existenzphilosophie und Pragmatismus vom Was der Objekte auf das Wie des performativ zu leistenden Umgangs mit der Welt und uns selbst vornehmen, verrät sich eine ähnliche semantische Osmose. [.......]
Die Philosophie sollte den Faden einer dialogischen Beziehung zur Religion nicht abreißen lassen. Denn wir können nicht wissen, ob sich der bis heute – bis zu Jacques Derridas Begriffsschöpfungen – andauernde Prozeß einer Übersetzung unabgegoltener religiöser Bedeutungspotentiale in die Begrifflichkeit nachmetaphysischen Denkens schon erschöpft hat.
Die Empfehlung einer dialogischen Beziehung schließt ein funktionalistisches Verständnis der Religion aus. Denn eine mögliche Fortsetzung jener semantischen Osmose, die ich aus der Sicht der Philosophie angedeutet habe, setzt ja weder voraus, daß dieser Dialog ein Nullsummenspiel ist, noch folgt daraus, daß sich das philosophische Denken auf diesem Wege von Religion abhängig macht. Ich exponiere lediglich die Frage, ob sich vielleicht im Zuge einer weitergehenden philosophischen Versprachlichung des Sakralen die beide folgenden Defizite, die ich als Mängel nachmetaphysischen Denkens empfinde, ausgleichen lassen.
Im Hinblick auf die überkomplexen Herausforderungen der im Entstehen begriffenen Weltgesellschaft empfinde ich es erstens als ungewiß, ob die Ressourcen einer unverlierbaren (!), aber nur schwach motivierenden Vernunftmoral, auf die sich auch die verfassungsrechtlichen Integration weitgehend säkularisierter Gesellschaften in letzter Instanz stützen muß, ausreichen. Diese Moral darf zwar – und das ist ihre Stärke – mit universalistischem Anspruch auftreten; aber zu solidarischem Handelns kann sie uns nur noch indirekt – in der Erwartung eines kumulativen Zusammentreffens individueller Entscheidungen – durch den Appell an das Gewissen eines jeden einzelnen Individuums verpflichten. Kants ”Reich der Zwecke” ist intelligibler Gemeinde der Gläubigen – im Vollzug gemeinsamer Praktiken.
Zweitens bin ich im Hinblick auf die vielfältigen lebensweltlichen Symptome eines sich zum Universum abschließenden und versiegelnden Kapitalismus, der die Politik entwaffnet und die Kultur einebnet, von der Frage beunruhigt, ob der in der Philosophie selbst brütende Defätismus der Vernunft deren Kraft zu einer Transzendenz von innen vollends aufzehrt und die Spannkraft eines üben den jeweiligen Status quo hinauszielenden normativen Bewußtseins zermürbt."
On September 29, 2013, Jürgen Habermas received the Kassel Prize "Das Glas der Vernunft".
Habermas received the prize because of his commitment to a common European future and a cosmopolitical oriented world society.
See the report in the German TV channel Hessenschau.
See also two reports in the German newspapers:
* Die Welt
* Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
And photos here.
"Journal of Moral Philosophy" (vol. 10, issue 3, 2013) features an article by Charles Larmore:
"What Is Political Philosophy?" [pdf]
Abstract
"What is political philosophy’s relation to moral philosophy? Does it simply form part of moral philosophy, focusing on the proper application of certain moral truths to political reality? Or must it instead form a more autonomous discipline, drawing its bearings from the specifically political problem of determining the bounds of legitimate coercion? In this essay I work out an answer to these questions by examining both some of the classical views on the nature of political philosophy and, more particularly, some recently published writings by Bernard Williams and G.A. Cohen."
Charles Larmore is Professor of Philosophy at Brown University. He is the author of "The Morals of Modernity" (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and "The Autonomy of Morality" (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Politik und Religion
Zur Diagnose der Gegenwart
Hrsg. von Friedrich Wilhelm Graf & Heinrich Meier
(C. H. Beck, 2013)
Kurzbeschreibung
Das Spannungsverhältnis von Politik und Religion ist zu einem zentralen Gegenstand öffentlicher Aufmerksamkeit geworden. Der politischreligiöse Radikalismus der Gegenwart hat die Sprengkraft augenfällig gemacht, die die Religion in sich birgt. Zugleich verbindet sich mit der Religion die Hoffnung, dass sie den gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt in der Moderne zu stärken vermag.
International renommierte Wissenschaftler und führende Intellektuelle behandeln u. a. die Oszillationen von Politik und Religion in den USA und in Russland, das lange Streben nach dem Islamischen Staat, das Konzept der Theokratie, Judentum und Antike. Sie analysieren den Prozess der Sakralisierung und Entsakralisierung und formulieren grundsätzliche Positionen zur Bestimmung des Verhältnisses von Politik und Religion aus der Sicht der Theologie und der Philosophie.
Inhalt
Einleitung [pdf]
- Friedrich Wilhelm Graf
Religion und Politik in den Vereinigten Staaten
- Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Von der Entkirchlichung zur Laisierung. Staat, Kirche und Gläubige in Rußland
- Gregory L. Freeze
Die lange Suche nach dem Islamischen Staat
- Hillel Fradkin
Religion und Politik in der klassischen politischen Wissenschaft
- Robert C. Bartlett
Theokratie: Die Herrschaft Gottes als Staatsverfassung in der jüdischen Antike
- Peter Schäfer
Archäologie des Befehls
- Giorgio Agamben
Sakralisierung und Entsakralisierung
- Hans Joas
Politik und Religion
- Jürgen Habermas
Epilog: Politik, Religion und Philosophie
- Heinrich Meier
Friedrich Wilhelm Graf ist Professor für Systematische Theologie und Ethik an der Universität München.
Heinrich Meier ist Professor der Philosophie an den Universitäten München und Chicago.
Kommentar:
Uwe Justus Wenzel - "Sollen die Gläubigen an die Demokratie glauben?" (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 23. Juli 2012)
Religion without God
by Ronald Dworkin
(Harvard University Press, October 2013)
192 pages
Description
In his last book, Ronald Dworkin addresses questions that men and women have asked through the ages: What is religion and what is God’s place in it? What is death and what is immortality? Based on the 2011 Einstein Lectures, Religion without God is inspired by remarks Einstein made that if religion consists of awe toward mysteries which “manifest themselves in the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, and which our dull faculties can comprehend only in the most primitive forms,” then, he, Einstein, was a religious person.
Dworkin joins Einstein’s sense of cosmic mystery and beauty to the claim that value is objective, independent of mind, and immanent in the world. He rejects the metaphysics of naturalism—that nothing is real except what can be studied by the natural sciences. Belief in God is one manifestation of this deeper worldview, but not the only one. The conviction that God underwrites value presupposes a prior commitment to the independent reality of that value—a commitment that is available to nonbelievers as well. So theists share a commitment with some atheists that is more fundamental than what divides them. Freedom of religion should flow not from a respect for belief in God but from the right to ethical independence.
Contents
1. Religious Atheism?
2. The Universe
3. Religious Freedom
4. Death and Immortality
Read an except from the book here.
The book is based on three lectures Dworkin gave at the University of Bern, Switzerland, in December 2011. See the videos here.
Reviews:
* Stanley Fish (The New York Times, blog)
* James Carroll (The Boston Globe)
* Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux (The American Prospect)
* Scott McLemee (Inside Higher Ed)
* Jeremy Waldron (The Guardian)
* Michael Rosen (The Nation)
A symposium on Axel Honneth's political philosophy will be held September 20-21 at Stony Brook University:
"Freedom's Right" [pdf]
The program:
"The Normativity of Ethical Life” [poster]
- Axel Honneth
"Self-Defensive Subjectivity: The Diagnosis of a Social Pathology"
- Chad Kautzer
"The Insufficiency of Recognition"
- Michael Thompson
“The Ineliminability of Progress?”
- Amy Allen
“Juridification and Politics”
- Daniel Loick
“Reconstructivism: On Honneth's Heglianism”
- Robert Pippin
"Response"
- Axel Honneth
Religion in a Liberal State
Ed. by Gavin D'Costa, Malcolm Evans, Tariq Modood, & Julian Rivers
(Cambridge University Press, 2013)
272 pages
Description
As religion has become more visible in public life, with closer relations of co-operation with government as well as a force in some political campaigns, its place in public life has become more contested. Fudged compromises of the past are giving way to a desire for clear lines and moral principles. This book brings the disciplines of law, sociology, politics and theology into conversation with one anther to shed light on the questions thrown up by 'religion in a liberal state'. It discusses practical problems in a British context, such as the accommodation of religious dress, discrimination against sexual minorities and state support for historic religions; considers legal frameworks of equality and human rights; and elucidates leading ideas of neutrality, pluralism, secularism and public reason. Fundamentally, it asks what it means to be liberal in a world in which religious diversity is becoming more present and more problematic.
Contents [preview]
Introduction
1. Religion in a Liberal State - Raymond Plant
2. The European Court of Human Rights and Religious Neutrality - Ian Leigh
3. Religion and Sexual Orientation - Maleiha Malik
4. Liberal Religion and Illiberal Secularism - Linda Woodhead
5. Moderate Secularism in Liberal Societies? - Derek McGhee
6. Excluded, Included or Foundational? - Veit Bader
7. Justificatory Secularism - Cécile Laborde
8. What Lacks is Feeling: Hume versus Kant and Habermas - John Milbank
9. Arguing Out of Bounds: Christian Eloquence and the End of Johannine Liberalism - John Perry
In "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" (September 5, 2013) Ulrich Beck writes about
"Das Zeitalter der Kosmopolitisierung"
Excerpts
"Politik, Medien und Sport tun so, als ob der Nationalstaat ewig bestehen müsste. In Wahrheit sind wir längst alle Weltbürger, gestehen es uns aber nicht ein. Höchste Zeit, sich über Chancen und Risiken Gedanken zu machen." [......]
"Es ist (....) zentral, klar zwischen Kosmopolitismus und Kosmopolitisierung zu unterscheiden. Kosmopolitismus handelt von Normen, Kosmopolitisierung von Fakten.
Kosmopolitismus im philosophischen Sinn, bei Immanuel Kant wie bei Jürgen Habermas, beinhaltet eine weltpolitische Aufgabe, die von oben, also Regierungen und internationalen Organisationen, oder von unten, etwa zivilgesellschaftlichen Akteuren, durchgesetzt wird.
Kosmopolitisierung dagegen vollzieht sich von unten und innen, im alltäglichen Geschehen, oft erzwungen, unbemerkt, ungewollt - selbst wenn weiterhin Nationalflaggen geschwenkt werden und Politiker die nationale Leitkultur ausrufen und den Tod des Multikulturalismus verkünden.
Wie tief geht der Epochenwandel, der einen anderen Blick auf die Welt fordert? Erleben wir vielleicht sogar eine neue Achsenzeit? Wir wissen es nicht."
"Die Zeit" (September 5, 2013) asked 48 artists and intellectuals how they are going to vote in Germany’s federal election on September 22.
Here is what Jürgen Habermas answered:
"Nach meinem Eindruck steht die ungare Stimmungslage vor der Bundestagswahl in Zusammenhang mit der Tabuisierung des Themas, das eine kleinmütigperspektivenlose Kanzlerin aus machtopportunistischen Gründen unter dem Deckel halten möchte. Ich meine die Krise einer Währungsunion, die auch aufgrund der Kurzsichtigkeit und des national bornierten Gerangels der in Brüssel versammelten Regierungschefs auf dem halben Weg zu einer politischen Union feststeckt. Zu Hause legt sich der Wortschwall der Verleugnung wie ein Schaumteppich auf die Köpfe einer verunsicherten Bevölkerung, die es besser weiß und doch an die unglaubwürdige Botschaft des im eigenen Garten gesicherten Wohlstandes glauben möchte – mag es den Nachbarn noch so schlecht gehen.
In dieser Situation empfiehlt sich Peer Steinbrück als ein Politiker von ganz anderer Statur – durchsetzungsfähig, zukunftsorientiert und verantwortungsbereit, ein Charakter mit Sinn für das, was relevant ist. Rot-Grün traue ich den Mut zu, die Alternativen offen auf den Tisch zu legen und Frankreich fur einen echten Politikwechsel zu gewinnen.
Um für den Kurs in Richtung eines demokratischen Kerneuropas Mehrheiten zu schaffen, wird sich freilich am Ende die ganz große Koalition der zwei einhalb europafreundlichen Bundestagsparteien zusammenfinden müssen. Dafur haben SPD und Grüne schon in der Opposition Vorleistungen erbracht. Deshalb sollten sich beide Parteien, wenn es denn weder für sie noch für Schwarz-Gelb reichen sollte, auch nach der Wahl nicht trennen – und, sei's drum, mit einer in Europafragen tief zerstrittenen Union nur gemeinsam die nächste Regierung bilden."
See also my post: "How Germany's Political Elite is Failing".
Andreas Kluth at The Economist:
"How Germany's Political Elite is Failing"
"Jürgen Habermas ..... recently diagnosed a collective failure of Germany's political elites. At a time when Germany faces historic decisions about the future of the European Union, its politicians are waging an election campaign about banalities. At the same time, German and foreign academics are discussing these historic challenges in great depth [......] I've tried to capture the strange asynchrony between this year's election campaign with its bizarre controversies and the academic range of opinions about the current German Question in an essay for the journal Juncture, which belongs to a progressive British think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)".
Ben Jackson (Oxford) has posted a very interesting paper at academia.edu:
"Property-Owning Democracy: A Short History"
Excerpt
"The rise to prominence of the term “property-owning democracy” in late twentieth-century political discourse and political theory is, on the face of it, a confusing and contradictory story. Political theorists following in the footsteps of John Rawls alighted upon the idea of a property-owning democracy in the 1980s and 1990s as a non-socialist model for the advancement of egalitarian distributive objectives. In the same period, intellectuals and politicians associated with the rise of neo-liberalism, in particular those attached to the Thatcher government in the UK, sought to foster a property-owning democracy that was indifferent to a significant widening of income and wealth inequalities and was explicitly intended to undermine the electoral base of egalitarian politics. But these two versions of this fertile objective were not as distinct as they might appear, since both had in fact grown from the same historical root."
The paper is published in Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson (eds.) - "Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond" (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). See my post on the book here.
Ben Jackson is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Oxford.
At the American Political Science Association (APSA) 2013 Annual Meeting August 29 - September 1 in Chicago, there will be presented many new papers on deliberative democracy. Here are some of them:
* Two Ideals of Deliberation?
by Graham Smith (University of Westminster)
Abstract:
This essay offers a provisional critique of the current trajectory of work on the ‘deliberative system’ and to propose a more cogent approach to thinking through the relationship between deliberative practices and the broader social, political and economic systems focused on the cultivation of what we term a ‘deliberative stance’. To this end, the paper engages primarily with two essays authored by Jane Mansbridge generally considered the cornerstone of the development of the deliberative system approach: the 1999 essay ‘Everyday talk and the deliberative system’ and the more recent 2012 piece ‘A systemic approach to deliberative democracy’, which can be reasonably seen as a manifesto for the deliberative system approach given its wide range of co-authors well-known within deliberative circles: James Bohman, Simone Chambers, Thomas Christiano, Archon Fung, John Parkinson, Dennis Thompson and Mark Warren.
* Comprehensive Deliberation: Democratic Reasoning Across Religious Difference
by Benjamin Hertzberg (Harvard University)
Abstract:
Many now believe that democracy grants citizens the moral permission to contribute religious arguments to democratic discussions. This permission poses a puzzle: because religious arguments are not broadly persuasive, the citizen who makes such an argument intending to persuade seems irrational. Further, it seems irrational for citizens to attempt to persuade some of their religious fellows. So the permission to contribute religious arguments seems practically incoherent. In this essay, I draw on a deliberative systems approach to argue that it is possible for citizens to mutually persuade each other even if they argue from their comprehensive commitments. Demonstrating the possibility of comprehensive deliberation shows why the intention to persuade via comprehensive arguments is not irrational. It also shows that religious citizens fully participate in democratic deliberation and that such deliberation can potentially transform citizens’ religious commitments. The possibility of comprehensive deliberation explains how democratic citizens can reason across religious difference.
* Understanding Deliberative Systems in Practice: The Crucial Role for Interpretive Research
by Carolyn M. Hendriks (Australian National University), Selen Ayirtman Ercan (University of Canberra) & John Boswell (University of Southampton)
Abstract:
Research on deliberative democracy has taken an empirical turn. There is a now an expanding literature that seeks to explore deliberative practice as it occurs in contemporary political practice. Much of this empirical scholarship has been situated within what Bevir and Ansari (2012) label a ‘modernist’ tradition of social inquiry, where hypotheses are tested, causal relationships identified and explanatory models developed. Under this mode of research, scholars have focused much attention on studying deliberative forums; offering insights into the nature and quality of deliberation and the effect of deliberation on individual preferences. But, these discrete face-to-face interactions represent only a small portion of the diversity of what constitutes public deliberation. The recent shift towards a deliberative systems approach emphasizes precisely this point and suggests understanding deliberation as a communicative activity occurring in a diversity of spaces. Notwithstanding its conceptual appeal, the systemic approach raises several questions, particularly when it comes to its empirical investigation and invites us to think harder about how we might study broader understandings of public deliberation. This paper argues that interpretive approaches, with their emphasis on understanding phenomena through experiences, perspectives, artifacts and actions, offer valuable tools for studying how deliberative systems are enacted in modern polities, and the possibilities and limitations for improving them. Drawing on recent empirical studies, the paper demonstrates how interpretive approaches can shed light on how deliberation occurs within, and across, a range of modes and settings in a deliberative system.
* Ten Issues for a Deliberative System
by Stephen Elstub (University of the West of Scotland) & Peter McLaverty (Robert Gordon University)
Abstract:
As the focus on institutionalising deliberative democracy is moving to a focus on achieving deliberative political systems (Chambers 2009; Thompson 2008; Dryzek 2010; Parkinson & Mansbridge 2012), this paper addresses ten crucial issues (Elstub and McLaverty 2014) that plague its study, and are hindering the further development of deliberative democracy and its ability to progress to a systemic level. A number of these issues perennially affect democracy per se, not just the deliberative variant. However, the unique focus on public debate that is found in deliberative theory accentuates many of these problems, and, or provides distinct interpretations of the issues. Moreover, the welcome and necessary attention given to a systemic analysis of deliberative democracy further creates distinct interpretations of these ten problems, but also generates new potential solutions. The paper will therefore describe the ten issues, locating them within a deliberative system demonstrating that with some of the issues it makes it easier for deliberative democracy to overcome them, or at least changes the nature of the problem. In particular, we address five pathologies that inhibit political institutional arrangements in reaching the deliberative ideal in the system as a whole: tight-coupling, de-coupling, institutional domination, social domination, and entrenched partisanship and analyse how they relate to each of the ten issues and lacunae identified.
* The Pragmatic Turn of Democracy in Latin America
by Thamy Pogrebinschi (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung)
Abstract:
In recent years, participatory and deliberative experiments have increasingly become an integral part of the process of democratic consolidation in Latin America. Given the speed with which they have been multiplied and institutionalized, a reassessment of democratization in Latin America seems necessary. This paper argues that a number of countries on the continent have taken a pragmatic turn, which can be read also as a detour from the democratic consolidation expected by third-wave scholars. Such pragmatic turn of democracy in Latin America does not imply substituting representative institutions for alternative, participatory or deliberative innovations, but rather using the latters as means to correct some of the alleged failures of the formers, as well as to attain social ends that they seem unable to achieve. The new, experimental pragmatic democracies of Latin America would then gradually displace the defective, delegative or pseudo ones, as the paper further claims.
