As part of the recent rethinking of green politics, the construction of a green democracy has been subjected to increasing scrutiny. There is a growing consensus around deliberative democracy as the preferred model for the realisation of the green programme. As a result several arguments emerge when deliberative principles and procedures are to be justified from a green standpoint. This paper offers a critical assessment of the green case for deliberative democracy, showing that deliberation is being asked to deliver more (...) than it is able to. However, it is suggested that the connection between sustainability, understood as a normative principle, and deliberative procedures may ultimately offer the best grounds for such a defence. (shrink)

This essay formulates eight goals that have emerged from worldwide moral deliberation on "transitional justice" and that may serve as a useful framework when particular societies consider how they should reckon with violations of internationally recognized human rights.

Deliberative democracy harbors a recurrent tension between full inclusion and intelligible speech. People with profound cognitive disabilities often signify this tension. While liberal deliberative theorists sacrifice inclusion for intelligibility, this exclusion is unnecessary. Instead, by analyzing deliberative locations that already include people with disabilities, I offer two ways to revise deliberative norms. First, the physical presence of disabled bodies expands the value of publicity in deliberative democracy, demonstrating that the publicity of bodies provokes new conversations similar to rational speech acts. (...) Second, the inclusion of people with profound disabilities necessitates a form of collaborative speech in which individuals make claims collaboratively. Habermas offers an ideal site to pursue this analysis because he recognizes the theoretical tension between inclusion and intelligibility and because his personal testimony reveals important insight into the lived experience of disability. (shrink)

The “participatory turn” cutting across technical approaches for appraising environment, risk, science, and technology has been accompanied by intense debates over the desired nature, extent, and quality of public engagement in science. Burgeoning work evaluating the effectiveness of such processes and the social study of science in society more generally is notable, however, for lacking systematic understanding of the very actors shaping these new forms science-society interaction. This paper addresses this lacuna by drawing on United Kingdom based in-depth empirical research (...) that made space for participatory appraisal experts to reflect on effective practice and novel questions of competence, expertise, and citizen-specialist relations within analytic-deliberative processes. Emerging practitioner principles warn that existing participatory models have not sufficiently considered constructivist perspectives on knowledge, analysis, and deliberation. Effective participatory appraisal under uncertainty needs to guard against the “technocracy of participation” by opening up to diversity, difference, antagonism, and uncertainties/indeterminacies. (shrink)

The “participatory turn” cutting across technical approaches for appraising environment, risk, science, and technology has been accompanied by intense debates over the desired nature, extent, and quality of public engagement in science. Burgeoning work evaluating the effectiveness of such processes and the social study of science in society more generally is notable, however, for lacking systematic understanding of the very actors shaping these new forms science-society interaction. This paper addresses this lacuna by drawing on United Kingdom based in-depth empirical research (...) that made space for participatory appraisal experts to reflect on effective practice and novel questions of competence, expertise, and citizen-specialist relations within analytic-deliberative processes. Emerging practitioner principles warn that existing participatory models have not sufficiently considered constructivist perspectives on knowledge, analysis, and deliberation. Effective participatory appraisal under uncertainty needs to guard against the “technocracy of participation” by opening up to diversity, difference, antagonism, and uncertainties/indeterminacies. (shrink)

Liberalism as a political ideology and a philosophical doctrine has championed individual autonomy, social and political equality, and democratic and inclusive political institutions. Consequently, liberalism is known for its commitment to tolerance and value pluralism. Yet liberalism has been critiqued for being insensitive to claims of culture. Indeed, an attitude of benign neglect toward diversity was once quite common among liberals, as was a general lack of interest in global concerns. Worse yet, according to some critics the liberal tradition—in spite (...) of its purported liberating mission of autonomy and self-determination —has provided the rationale for imperialism rooted in the liberal assumptions about reason and historical progress. Though these ironies are a clear source of embarrassment for today's liberals, liberalism still displays an uneasy commitment to pluralism. Liberals today are more challenged than ever to look at the dynamics of diversity both at home and abroad. (shrink)

This essay argues for the conceptual connection of legitimacy, resistance and ‘the people’ within liberal theories of public justification by making two primary claims: that legitimacy and resistance are mutually constitutive of one another and that together legitimacy and resistance are constitutive of an aspirational conception of ‘the people’. These claims revolve around the idea that the legitimacy of democratic regimes necessarily entails the questioning of that legitimacy through resistance, which concerns demands that say something about the makeup of ‘the (...) people’. The concern is conceptual, examples of resistance showing how the conceptual connection manifests itself. (shrink)

A hallmark of recent critical social science has been the commitment to methodological and theoretical pluralism. Habermas and others have argued that diverse theoretical and empirical approaches are needed to support informed social criticism. However, an unresolved tension remains in the epistemology of critical social science: the tension between the epistemic advantages of a single comprehensive theoretical framework and those of methodological and theoretical pluralism. By shifting the grounds of the debate in a way suggested by Dewey's pragmatism, the author (...) argues that a thoroughgoing pluralism strengthens, rather than weakens, both the social scientific and political aims of critical social science. Not only does pragmatism offer a plausible interpretation of the epistemic pluralism of the social sciences, but it also provides a way of thinking about their fundamentally practical and political character. With a better normative vocabulary with which to discuss the epistemological issues of such a pluralistic mode of inquiry, the democratic role of critical inquiry and its specifically practical form of verification can be clarified. (shrink)

Reviso tres maneras diferentes como los ideales de la democracia deliberativa han cambiado a la luz de las preocupaciones prácticas sobre su viabilidad, es decir, haciendo cada vez más importante el problema de cómo este ideal puede acercarse a sociedades caracterizadas por profundos desacuerdos, problemas sociales de enorme complejidad e instrumentos inoperantes en sus instituciones existentes. En primer lugar, las teorías de la democracia deliberativa enfatizan el proceso mismo de la deliberación, y no sus condiciones y procedimientos ideales y contrafácticos. (...) En segundo lugar, los demócratas deliberativos se interesan cada vez más en los problemas de la institucionalización, en hacer del voto, la regla de mayorías, la representación, los tribunales y el derecho constitucional, instituciones más deliberativas, en pro de una mayor democracia directa. En tercer lugar, los deliberativistas se ocupan de examinar y comparar los diferentes escenarios y procedimientos de la deliberación, señalando problemas empíricos y obstáculos que no siempre pueden anticiparse al recurrir únicamente a argumentos conceptuales. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Critics, Observers, and Participants: Two Forms of Critical Theory Social Inquiry as Practical Knowledge Pluralism and Critical Inquiry Reflexivity, Perspective Taking, and Practical Verification Conclusion: The Politics of Critical Social Inquiry Notes.

This paper analyses the possibility of granting legitimacy to democratic decisionmaking procedures in a context of deep pluralism. We defend a multidimensional account according to which a legitimate system needs to grant, on the one hand, that citizens should be included on an equal footing and acknowledged as reflexive political agents rather than mere beneficiaries of policies, and, on the other hand, that their decisions have an epistemic quality. While Estlund’s account of imperfect epistemic proceduralism might seem to embody a (...) dualistic conception of democratic legitimacy, we point out that it is not able to recognize citizens as reflexive political agents and is grounded in an idealized model of the circumstances of deliberation. To overcome these ambiguities, we develop an account of democratic legitimacy according to which disagreement is the proper expression of citizens’ reflexive agency and the attribution of epistemic authority does not stem from a major expertise or specific ability, but it comes through the public confrontation among disagreeing agents. Consequently, the epistemic value of deliberation should be derived from the reasons-giving process rather than from the reference to the alleged quality of its outcomes. In this way, we demonstrate the validity of the multidimensional perspective of legitimacy, yet abstain from introducing any outcome-oriented criterion. Finally, we argue that this account of legitimacy is well suited for modeling deliberative democracy as a decision-making procedure that respects the agency of every citizen and grants her opportunity to influence public choices. (shrink)

The article elaborates an original intertwined reading of republican theory, deliberative democracy and political equality. It argues that republicans, deliberative democrats and egalitarian scholars have not paid sufficient attention to a number of features present in these bodies of scholarships that relate them in mutually beneficial ways. It shows that republicanism and deliberative democracy are related in mutually beneficial ways, it makes those relations explicit, and it deals with potential objections against them. Additionally, it elaborates an egalitarian principle underpinning the (...) resulting model that I label Equality of Access and Deliberation. The upshot of these considerations is a novel and mutually reinforcing interrelated three-tiered theoretical and institutional proposal. (shrink)

Today many scholars seem to agree that citizens should be involved in expert deliberations on science and technology issues. This interest in public deliberation has gained attraction in many practical settings, especially in the European Union, and holds the promise of more legitimate governance of science and technology. In this article, the authors draw on the European Commission’s report ‘‘Taking the European Knowledge Society Seriously’’ to ask how legitimate these efforts to ‘‘democratize’’ scientific expertise really are. While the report borrows (...) from deliberative democrats’ normative accounts of legitimacy, the authors identify a tension between the principles for legitimate rule prescribed by deliberative democratic theory and the report’s celebration of diversity and dissent. While this inconsistency suggests that the legitimacy of deliberative governance arrangements is justified on empirical rather than normative grounds, it remains an open question whether studies of science and technology offer enough empirical support for such a justification. In this article, the authors address this pressing question and propose three possible responses. (shrink)

This article takes up the question of how to facilitate substantive inclusion in deeply divided societies. Turning to deliberative democracy and consociationalism, we find that there is a surprising amount of overlap between the two potentially contradictory models of inclusion. We consider the deliberative potential of consociational institutions that not only address majority and minority relations, but that also find ways to include minorities within minorities. To this end, we examine the institutions that make up a consociation and recommend a (...) two-stage approach to deliberation that facilitates the articulation of public reasons in political decision-making. We argue that extending broad inclusion in an initial stage of deliberations where people do not have to adhere to the criterion of public reason avoids pre-emptive exclusions, while introducing this criterion in a second, decision-making stage of deliberations retains the benefits of deliberative democracy. This two-stage approach addresses the democratic concerns in consociational democracy vis-à-vis minority groups and in deliberative democracy vis-à-vis marginalized groups (that is, minorities within minorities). We argue that adopting this two-stage approach will deepen the level of inclusion found within consociational democracies and widen the applicable scope for deliberative democracy, which is often thought most amenable to small-scale decision-making. (shrink)

The questions of this article are: what can we learn from deliberative democratic theory, its critics, the practices of local deliberative communities, the needs of potential participants, and the experiences of virtual communities that would be useful in designing a technology-facilitated institution for global civil society that is deliberative and democratic in its values? And what is the appropriate design of such an online institution so that it will be attentive to the undemocratic forces enabled by power inequalities that can (...) emerge in discursive communities? I answer these questions with an institutional innovation that meets a need of global civil society and that is responsive to critics of deliberative democratic theory and attentive to the particular agents engaged in women's human rights activism. (shrink)

Offers a revised understanding of human subjectivity that avoids the extremes of both traditional humanism and cultural relativism.“Acknowledging the importance of the ‘middle voice’ of rhetoric is a worthwhile endeavor. For this, Vivian’s goals are to be applauded.” — Rhetoric and Public Affairs.

Many nongovernmental forms of business regulation aim at reducing ethical violations in commerce. We argue that such nongovernmental ethics standards, while often laudable, raise their own ethical challenges. In particular, when such standards place burdens upon vulnerable market participants (often, though not always, SMEs), they do so without the backing of traditional legitimate political authority. We argue that this constitutes a structural analogy to wars of humanitarian intervention. Moreover, we show that, while some harms imposed by such standards are desirable, (...) others are best thought of as a form of collateral damage. We thus look at the well-developed literature on just war theory for inspiration and find that the principles of jus ad bellum and jus in bello contain many insights that can be fruitfully adapted to the case of nongovernmental standard-setting. Consequently, we propose the Ius ad Normam—a set of principles that should guide would-be standard-setters in assessing whether imposing those burdens is ethically justifiable in particular cases. We also discuss how powerful multinational businesses often act simultaneously as standard-takers and standard-setters and explore the normative implications of this dual role. (shrink)

Offering the first developed account of political liberal education, this book combines a thorough analysis of the theoretical groundwork of political liberal education with application-oriented approaches to contemporary educational challenges. Following in depth engagement with the shortcomings of Rawls’ theory and addressing some key objections to neutrality-based restrictions in education, the volume moves on to provide an insightful discussion of topics such as same-sex relations in sex-education, the position of migrant children and the rights of religious parents to determine the (...) education of their children. This book outlines a political liberal account of education which provides a useful contribution to the current debates about liberalism and education in a way unprecedented in the literature on political liberalism so far. It is of interest to anyone working at the intersection of political philosophy and philosophy of education as well as for scholars with a broader interest in how liberalism can respond to the challenges of value pluralism. (shrink)

In the last three decades, ongoing debates on the epistemic features of democratic decision making have influenced the way we conceive the basic terms of democratic theory, such as inclusion, participation, public reason, and collective autonomy.1 Within these debates, attention has been given to the role played by mobilized collectives in the generation of the knowledge necessary for the enhancement of the epistemic quality of those processes. However, little attention has been given to a further epistemic function of mobilizations: the (...) innovations they have brought about in the very practices within which new knowledge and perspectives are generated. Using... (shrink)

Political liberals assume an accessibility requirement, which means that, for ensuring civic respect and non-manipulation, public officials should offer accessible reasons during political advocacy. Recently, critics have offered two arguments to show that the accessibility requirement is unnecessary. The first is the pluralism argument: Given the pluralism in evaluative standards, when officials offer non-accessible reasons, they are not disrespectful because they may merely try to reveal their strongest reason. The second is the honesty argument: As long as officials honestly confess (...) their beliefs after offering non-accessible reasons, disrespect and non-manipulation do not occur. This paper defends the accessibility requirement and asserts that these two arguments overlook a unique feature of the political domain. While all citizens collectively own political power as a corporate body, an official does not privately own her political power. Instead, she is a trustee who has a duty to act on behalf of the corporate body, that is, she has to make decisions on grounds that are accessible to others. This duty explains why, despite pluralism, the accessibility requirement is necessary. Moreover, given that political decisions are profoundly influential to each person, requiring people to be honest is ineffective in discouraging disrespectful and manipulative acts. (shrink)

Recent proposals for computer-assisted argumentation have drawn on dialectical models of argumentation. When used to assist public policy planning, such systems also raise questions of political legitimacy. Drawing on deliberative democratic theory, we elaborate normative criteria for deliberative legitimacy and illustrate their use for assessing two argumentation systems. Full assessment of such systems requires experiments in which system designers draw on expertise from the social sciences and enter into the policy deliberation itself at the level of participants.

For many deliberative theorists, the importance of a public exchange of reasons lies in its capacity to improve the quality of democratic decision making. The 1831-1832 debate over abolishing slavery in Virginia in the state’s House of Delegates raises the question of whether it can do so on its own. The bigotry of those opposing the abolition of Virginian slavery was matched only by the prejudice of those advocating for its end. This paper examines James Bohman’s sophisticated defense of deliberative (...) democracy but argues for the value of negative and disclosive experience. (shrink)

In this article, I examine Luhmann’s, Bunge’s and others’ views on emergence, and argue that Luhmann’s epistemological construal of emergence in terms of Totalausschluss (total exclusion) is both ontologically flawed and detrimental to an appropriate understanding of the distinctive features of social emergence. By contrast, Bunge’s rational emergentism, his CESM model, and Wimsatt’s characterization of emergence as nonaggregativity provide a useful framework to investigate emergence. While researchers in the field of social theory and sociology tend to regard Luhmann as the (...) sole representative of systems theory, the latter has been characterized by its diversity, and the writings of such systems theorists as Mario Bunge deserve more (critical) attention from social researchers than they receive at present. Finally, this article suggests that the perennial debate over methodological individualism and holism in social science may make real progress if such ambiguous terms as reduction and reductionism are elucidated before they are employed. (shrink)

In this article, I examine Luhmann’s, Bunge’s and others’ views on emergence, and argue that Luhmann’s epistemological construal of emergence in terms of Totalausschluss (total exclusion) is both ontologically flawed and detrimental to an appropriate understanding of the distinctive features of social emergence. By contrast, Bunge’s rational emergentism, his CESM model, and Wimsatt’s characterization of emergence as nonaggregativity provide a useful framework to investigate emergence. While researchers in the field of social theory and sociology tend to regard Luhmann as the (...) sole representative of systems theory, the latter has been characterized by its diversity, and the writings of such systems theorists as Mario Bunge deserve more (critical) attention from social researchers than they receive at present. Finally, this article suggests that the perennial debate over methodological individualism and holism in social science may make real progress if such ambiguous terms as reduction and reductionism are elucidated before they are employed. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy is a noble project: an attempt to make citizens philosophize. Critics of deliberative democracy usually claim either that the proposed deliberation threatens an existing moral consensus or, instead, that deliberation is impossible amid power imbalances that oppress the weak. But another problem is that combining democracy and deliberation is inherently an attempt to engage publicly in a private activity—where sensitivity to each interlocutor may require a special form of address. Can this be done? Yes, in some contexts. The (...) tradition of esoteric writing has demonstrated that it is possible to layer one's discourse in such a way that all citizens can partake at a level that suits them. But writing for a public is not really deliberation among equals; it is leadership by the writer of the readers. Genuine dialogue among equals that takes account of their differences is, in contrast, inherently a private affair. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy is a noble project: an attempt to make citizens philosophize. Critics of deliberative democracy usually claim either that the proposed deliberation threatens an existing moral consensus or, instead, that deliberation is impossible amid power imbalances that oppress the weak. But another problem is that combining democracy and deliberation is inherently an attempt to engage publicly in a private activity—where sensitivity to each interlocutor may require a special form of address. Can this be done? Yes, in some contexts. The (...) tradition of esoteric writing has demonstrated that it is possible to layer one's discourse in such a way that all citizens can partake at a level that suits them. But writing for a public is not really deliberation among equals; it is leadership by the writer of the readers. Genuine dialogue among equals that takes account of their differences is, in contrast, inherently a private affair. (shrink)

Power and leadership are typically theorized as exercises of sovereignty in the western tradition of thought. This essay takes up Michel Foucault’s challenge to escape the ‘spell of monarchy’ in our thinking in order to move beyond sovereign models of power. Interdisciplinary scholarship on complex adaptive systems provides fertile ground for this endeavor, illustrating the dynamics of post-sovereign power and opportunities for post-sovereign leadership. Viewing human organizations as complex adaptive systems helps us to theorize leadership without over-simplifying its nature or (...) exaggerating its potential. It also undermines the prevailing identification of sovereign power as the only antidote for anarchy. (shrink)

In the current crisis of liberal democracy, Confucianism has been cited as offering superior alternative models of government. With the resources from Dewey’s Pragmatism, this paper defends democracy, which should not be equated to de facto liberal democracies, as desirable for Confucian societies. It examines the affinities between Confucian and Dewey’s conception of the person and community and argues for an understanding of democratic values that brings together Dewey’s democratic values and Confucian ideals of personal cultivation and virtuous governance.

Discursive deference in the governance of science and technology is rebalancing from expert analysis toward participatory deliberation. Linear, scientistic conceptions of innovation are giving ground to more plural, socially situated understandings. Yet, growing recognition of social agency in technology choice is countered by persistently deterministic notions of technological progress. This article addresses this increasingly stark disjuncture. Distinguishing between “appraisal” and “commitment” in technology choice, it highlights contrasting implications of normative, instrumental, and substantive imperatives in appraisal. Focusing on the role of (...) power, it identifies key commonalities transcending the analysis/participation dichotomy. Each is equally susceptible to instrumental framing for variously weak and strong forms of justification. To address the disjuncture, it is concluded that greater appreciation is required—in both analytic and participatory appraisal—to facilitating the opening up of governance commitments on science and technology. (shrink)

In this article, I assess Jürgen Habermas’s defence of civil disobedience as ’the guardian of legitimacy’ in democratic societies. I suggest that, despite its appeal, the defence as it stands is incomplete. The problem relates to his account of the justification of this mode of protest. Although Habermas wants to defend civil disobedience as a response to inadequacies in deliberative democratic procedures, he does not provide us with a clear and compelling account of these inadequacies. In order to provide such (...) an account, I examine the various ways in which the illegitimate circulation of social power can distort democratic processes. Civil disobedience can be seen as a legitimate response to inequalities in social power, a defence that builds on the strengths of Habermas’s approach while transcending its limitations. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]. (shrink)

Many political philosophers have held that democracy has epistemic benefits. Most commonly, this case is made by arguing that democracies are better able to track the truth than other political arrangements. Truth, however, is not the only epistemic good that is politically valuable. A number of other epistemic goods – goods including evidence, intellectual virtue, epistemic justice, and empathetic understanding – can also have political value, and in ways that go beyond the value of truth. In this paper, I will (...) survey those who have argued that democracy can be valuable because of these other epistemic benefits, considering (1) the ways in which these epistemic goods can be of political value and (2) the challenges that democracies face in producing them. (shrink)

This paper aims at providing an epistemic defense of democracy based on John Dewey’s idea that democracies do not only find problems and provide solutions to them but they also articulate problems. According to this view, when citizens inquire about collective issues, they also partially shape them. This view contrasts with the standard account of democracy’s epistemic defense, according to which democracy’s is good at tracking and finding solutions that are independent of political will-formation and decision-making. It is also less (...) vulnerable to the criticisms that have been raised against the standard account. To show this, the paper develops a theory of expressive domination and argues that problem-articulation works best when it is inclusive and domination-free. It also shows that democratic conflict represents a fundamental element for problem-articulation. (shrink)

This article provides two empirical evaluations of deliberation. Given that scholars of deliberation often argue for its importance without empirical support, we first examine whether there is a "deliberative difference"; if actors engaging in deliberation arrive at different decisions than those who think on their own or "just talk." As we find a general convergence within deliberation scholarship around reasons and inclusion, the second test examines whether these two specific mechanisms are central to deliberation. The first evaluation looks at outcomes (...) within a laboratory setting; the second at videotapes of decision-making processes within this setting. Our results show two things. First, in terms of outcomes, deliberation differs from other forms of interaction. Second, reasons and inclusion are central to the deliberative process. The more reasons provided within each group, the more likely participants were to change their position; similarly, the more inclusive groups were, the more likely participants were to change their position. We conclude by arguing that more work needs to be done, both in evaluating the deliberative difference and in disaggregating deliberation and examining its central explanatory mechanisms. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo es proponer un concepto de agente crítico que dialogue con una práctica democrática deliberativa, considerando qué significa el acto de dar razones. Para tal efecto, en este trabajo se discute, primero, qué significaría ser crítico o tender hacia la criticidad tanto autorreferente como hacia terceros. Esta sección está apoyada principalmente con ideas provenientes de la teoría de la argumentación y de la lógica informal. En segundo término, se aborda el concepto de democracia deliberativa a la (...) luz de la sinergia conceptual que habría entre la participación -potencial- de un agente crítico en tal contexto sociopolítico. En esta sección se pasa revista a algunas de las ideas centrales de la teoría de la democracia deliberativa. Y en la tercera y última parte, se aborda el problema de dar y recibir razones discutiendo la propuesta semántica inferencialista de Brandom (2002, 2005) para observar de qué manera este acercamiento puede aportar a una teoría de la deliberación y a un concepto -y educación- de agente crítico. En las conclusiones se sintetizan las ideas principales y, además, se hace un contrapunto entre la noción de agencia, concepto que es importante en mi propuesta, y la noción de persona, concepto de especial valor en la teoría de la democracia deliberativa. (shrink)

Much of the interest of critical realists in the hermeneutic character of social inquiry has been shaped by debates with critics. Critical realists insist that the meaningful character of societies does not exclude the possibility of treating them as objects that have causal powers and that these objects are more than the sum-total of their meanings. In what follows, I want to go beyond this debate. Working within critical realist ontology, the question I want to ask is what kind of (...) hermeneutics is required for the study of the causal powers of meaningful objects. If hypotheses about the causal powers of such objects can be confirmed only in dialogues, then what kind of dialogues and with whom are necessary for the understanding of causal powers? The question of the interpretation of causal objects is not merely a methodological one. Social structures are ontologically different from natural ones, and the nature of our understanding of meaningful objects is in part dependent on the way we come to apprehend them in thought. I argue that the approach to the understanding of the causal power of meaningful objects that has emerged in the debate between critical realists and their critics tends to view the study of causal powers as a dialogue between experts in the service of a more democratic society. Against this view, I suggest an understanding of the study of causal powers as a dialogue between critical social science and the public, a dialogue that takes place in the public sphere. (shrink)

It has been noted that certain similarities can be detected between the work of the Bakhtin Circle and the work of Jürgen Habermas. While I do not deny that these sorts of similarities can be detected, I also argue that the insights of the Bakhtin Circle can be used to provide the basis of a critique of Habermas. My specific aim is to show how Habermas perpetuates a ‘stylistic’ approach to discourse theory. ‘Stylistics’, as conceived by the Bakhtin Circle, explores (...) discourse through the dualism of an objectively defined set of linguistic norms that can be appropriated through the creative linguistic competence of individual speakers. On this understanding, individuals within their everyday environment choose elements from objective linguistic norms in order to make sense of their world. However, a stylistic approach to discourse implicitly denigrates the usefulness of everyday utterances because it suggests that, for language to gain normative meaning and understanding, it must always refer back to an objective linguistic system. By using the Bakhtin Circle’s theoretical insights, I flag up several problems that emerge from Habermas’s particular standpoint on stylistics. (shrink)

Bhikhu Parekh is an internationally renowned political theorist. His work on identity and multiculturalism is unquestionably thoughtful and nuanced, benefiting from a tremendous depth of knowledge of particular cases. Despite his work’s many virtues, however, the normative justification for Parekh’s recommendations is at times vague or ambiguous. In this essay, I argue that a close reading of his work, in particular his magnum opus Rethinking Multiculturalism and the selfproclaimed sequel A New Politics of Identity, reveals that his claims frequently rely (...) upon a Kantian account of moral dialogue and indeed moral personhood that he remains unwilling to claim. Recognizing this latent Kantianism is essential to a thorough assessment of Parekh’s work on identity, and his criticisms of other theorists. It is only because of his ambiguity that his multiculturalism is able to avoid the sort of charges that he levels against other responses to diversity, including those of such authors as Rawls, Habermas, Kymlicka, and Raz. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy entails a commitment to deciding political questions on their merits. To that end, people engage in an exchange of reasons in a shared endeavour to arrive at the right answer or the best judgement they can make in the circumstances. Of course, in practice a shared judgement may be impossible to reach. Yet while compromise may seem a natural way of dealing with the disagreement that deliberation leaves unresolved – for example, some deliberative theorists argue that a willingness (...) to compromise manifests respect for the considered views of others, even as we continue to disagree with them – the relationship between deliberation and compromise is not as straightforward as one might think. To explain why, this paper contrasts conflicts of judgement with conflicts of preference, interest and value to show why greater attention needs to be paid to the character of the decision to be made. (shrink)

In recent years much has been written on the political and social effects of the Internet on the public sphere, but comparatively little attention has been paid to its effects on the educational systems in Europe and beyond. More specifically, the effect of the shift in the locus of public communication to the private sphere, with everyone commenting on everything from their personal computers, tends to undermine and delegitimize the traditional institutions of education. New forms of communication need new educational (...) and behavioral standards. At the same time, not only individual citizens but especially public intellectuals and educators have to come to grips with the fact that there is less and less regulation of the new spaces and new publics they address. This article discusses what we can possibly expect our public education to achieve under these new conditions of local and global communication systems. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper investigates whether, in theoretical terms, corporations can be citizens. The argument is based on the observation that the debate on “corporate citizenship” (CC) has only paid limited attention to the actual notion of citizenship. Where it has been discussed, authors have either largely left the concept of CC unquestioned, or applied rather unidimensional and decontextualized notions of citizenship to the corporate sphere. The paper opens with a critical discussion of a major contribution to the CC literature, the work (...) of Logsdon and Wood (Wood and Logsdon 2001; Logsdon and Wood 2002). It continues with a consideration of the nature and role of metaphors for business and of the contestable nature of the political concept of citizenship. It evaluates corporations as citizens through a four-dimensional framework of democratic citizenship offered by Stokes (2002). The analysis suggests that corporations do not easily fit the “liberal minimalist” model of citizenship. It finds, however some possibilities for fit with the three more participatory models. The paper concludes by cautioning against basing corporate citizenship on legal and administrative status or identity, and mapping out specific criteria by which we might determine whether corporations could be considered as citizens by virtue of their participation in processes of governance. (shrink)

Most environmental philosophers have had little use for 'conventional' philosophical and political thought. This is unfortunate, because these traditions can greatly contribute to environmental ethics and policy discussions. One mainstream concept of potential value for environmental philosophy is the notion of the public interest. Yet even though the public interest is widely acknowledged to be a powerful ethical standard in public affairs and public policy, there has been little agreement on its descriptive meaning. A particularly intriguing account of the concept (...) in the literature, however, may be found in the work of the American pragmatist John Dewey. Dewey argued that the public interest was to be continuously constructed through the process of free, cooperative inquiry into the shared good of the democratic community. This Deweyan model of the public interest has much to offer environmental philosophers who are interested in making connections between normative arguments and environmental policy discourse, and it holds great promise for enhancing environmental philosophy's role and impact in public life. (shrink)

The commons is frequently taken to be a model of democracy. Yet, the problems of overuse and enclosure that plague common-pool resources suggest that democratic norms of inclusion, equality, and pluralism may not be realized in practice. Existing contractarian accounts of the democratic value of the commons tend to assume equality of power and clear boundaries between users and non-users. Alternative accounts that emphasize practices of commoning assume a shared social identity that appears incompatible with pluralism. These accounts provide little (...) insight into how common-pool resource regimes marked by inequalities of power might be democratized for the long-term. In contrast, I argue that the idea of treaty can serve as the basis for a democratic theory of the commons that justifies exclusion of those who would oppress marginalized groups, facilitates polycentric governance, and creates opportunities for deliberation and contestation. I illustrate the argument with reference to disputes over fisheries between the Mi’kmaq, non-Indigenous peoples, and the Canadian state. (shrink)