O artigo procura mostrar em que sentido a democracia deliberativa proposta pela teoria discursiva de Jürgen Habermas dá conta do problema dos reducionismos econômicos e juridificantes da mundialização ou globalização, entendida como uma colonização técnico-sistêmica do mundo da vida. Recorrendo a sua concepção de um ethos democrático transnacional embasado na soberania popular, a teoria habermasiana logra resgatar o caráter normativo da mundialização através da irredutibilidade de valores humanos como a liberdade, a dignidade e os direitos humanos, inerentes às mais diferentes (...) e incompatíveis autocompreensões de mundos da vida. (shrink)

This paper argues that economic agents, including corporations, have the duty to further justice, not just a duty merely to comply with laws and do their share. The duty to further justice is the requirement to assist in the establishment of just arrangements when they do not exist in society. The paper is grounded in liberal theory and draws heavily on one liberal theorist, Kant. We show that the duty to further justice must be interpreted as a duty of virtue (...) that is owed. This means that the duty is not enforceable but that violating this duty is still wrong and not merely non-virtuous. Our analysis has consequences for the morality of commercial life. It is often suggested that the morality of the market is a special, restricted morality that is leaner than the morality that agents must acknowledge outside the market. If our analysis is correct, the duty to further justice cannot be exempted from market morality, even if it is agreed that this must be leaner than the morality outside commercial life. Our analysis also has direct consequences for John Ruggie’s view on the responsibilities of businesses. Ruggie has never explicitly acknowledged a duty on the part of business enterprises to further justice. If our analysis is correct, his view is contradictory in that it presupposes the normative validity of free market enterprise yet shrinks from taking into account the conditions of its possibility. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas assigns civil society groups ‘to bear a good portion of the normative expectations, especially the burden of a normatively expected democratic genesis of law’. This article looks at concrete attempts in the Philippine constitution to provide structures so that these groups can carry out the role Habermas envisages for them, and examines whether such attempts are sufficient to enable said groups to intervene in the political process as effectively as he expects of them.

Contemporary Anglo-American political thought is witnessing a revival of theories of deliberative democracy. The principle of public argumentation, according to which the legitimation of a general norm is predicated upon a rational and open dialog among all those affected by this norm, constitutes their common underlying assumption. This assumption is itself grounded in the metatheoretical claim that arguing is the defining activity of a demos of free and equal members. Habermas' well-known formulation of communicative or discursive democracy represents one of (...) the earliest, most discussed, and indeed most emblematic versions of the existing models of deliberative democracy. It is here, I believe, that Castoriadis' political theory can prove exceptionally important as it provides a starting point and a solid ground for articulating one of the most incisive and convincing critiques of the limits and flaws of communicative democracy. Although Castoriadis himself never directly discussed deliberative democracy as such, we can try to approximate from various parts of his work what he might have thought about, especially when it comes to Habermas' model. (shrink)

The Islamist movement in Turkey bases its mobilization strategy on transforming everyday practices. Public challenges against the state do not form a central part of its repertoire. New Social Movement theory provides some tools for analyzing such an unconventional strategic choice. However, as Islamist mobilization also seeks to reshape the state in the long run, New Social Movement theory (with its focus on culture and society and its relative neglect of the state) needs to be complemented by more institutional analyses. (...) A hegemonic account of mobilization, which incorporates tools from theories of everyday life and identity-formation, as well as from state-centered approaches, is offered as a way to grasp the complexity of Islamism. (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)

This paper argues that political civility is actually an illusionistic ideal and that, as such, realism counsels that we acknowledge both its promise and peril. Political civility is, I will argue, a tension-filled ideal. We have good normative reasons to strive for and encourage more civil political interactions, as they model our acknowledgement of others as equal citizens and facilitate high-quality democratic problem-solving. But we must simultaneously be attuned to civility’s limitations, its possible pernicious side-effects, and its potential for strategic (...) manipulation and oppressive abuse, particularly in contemporary, pluralistic and heterogeneous societies. (shrink)

Libre Culture is the essential expression of the free culture/copyleft movement. This anthology, brought together here for the first time, represents the early groundwork of Libre Society thought. Referring to the development of creativity and ideas, capital works to hoard and privatize the knowledge and meaning of what is created. Expression becomes monopolized, secured within an artificial market-scarcity enclave and finally presented as a novelty on the culture industry in order to benefit cloistered profit motives. In the way that physical (...) resources such as forests or public services are free, Libre Culture argues for the freeing up of human ideas and expression from copyright bulwarks in all forms. (shrink)

Although Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology of perception and his essays on art, politics, and language already showed an affinity between the aesthetic phenomena of expression and style and the political and cultural dynamics of society at large, this paper specifically focuses on his late theorizing of the notion of flesh and its relevance to his late understanding of politics and democracy. The emergence of flesh as a concept was contemporary to Merleau-Ponty’s break with Marxism as a philosophical model and with revolutionary (...) dialectics as a political project. It is by showing that such a break was consistently grounded on his theorizing of the being flesh of both the body and of society that this paper shows Merleau-Ponty’s unique contribution to democratic theory and to contemporary political philosophy. In the course of this analysis, it will become clear that in philosophically breaking with the position of a “no that is a yes”—i.e. the model of the revolution, which implies a total negation of the given that becomes a total affirmation of the new order (dictatorship) once in power—he would politically embrace the Weberian “heroic liberalism”—or his “non-communist left”—of parliamentary democracy. (shrink)

Awareness of, and respect for differences of gender, race, religion, language, and culture have liberated many oppressed groups from the hegemony of white, Western males. However, respect for previously denigrated collective identities should not be allowed to confine individuals to identities constructed around one main component used for political mobilisation, or to identities that depend on a priority of properties that are not optional, like race, gender, and language. In this article I want to sketch an approach for accommodating different (...) kinds of identity within a multicultural constitutional democracy. From a vantage point provided by a definition and explanation of personal identity, I want to show how people define, construct and change their personal identities to make themselves into unique individuals. Next I show how democratic political institutions and the personal identities of individuals reciprocally influence one another. In the final section I sketch ways in which diverse personal identities ought to be accommodated in multicultural constitutional democracies. The conclusion is that a society which gives its members the liberty, space, and opportunity to freely construct their own identities might avoid the formation of closed groups committed exclusively to their own sectional interests. (shrink)

What I consider in this paper are various forms of government, various technologies and discursive regimes of government that are in common use today. What interests me are the categories and tools, practical dispositifs and languages that developed over the last decades ‘to constitute, define, organize, and instrumentalize the strategies that individuals, acting freely, may use to deal with one another’ (Foucault). The paper considers first the neo-liberal wish to reassert the individual as alone in responsibility for his/her own life (...) after the unfortunate digression into Welfare Statism and Keynesian economics, source of all ills. It then focuses on some material and social technologies that encourage people to accept full and complete ‘self-sovereignty’. This section leads to a discussion on the new demands (and resistance) society imposed on this liberal normative ideal. It notably considers the growing demands to ‘participate’ in decision processes and to be environmentally friendly. In section Les Mots et Les Choses: A New Discursive Regime , it considers the discursive regime that progressively took shape and which currently permeates international governance bodies of all stripes—from the World Bank to the Conference of Parties for Climate Change. In the final section, it comes back to the initial question and considers what these changes actually mean for the democratic order as constituted over the past 250 years. (shrink)

The author revisits H. L. A. Hart's theory of positive law and argues for a major qualification to the thesis of the separation of law and morality based on a concept of systemic legitimacy derived from the social theory of Jurgen Habermas. He argues that standards for assessing the degree of systemic legitimacy in modern legal systems can develop through reflective exercise of “critical legality,” a concept coined to parallel Hart's “critical morality,” and an expanded understanding of the “external” and (...) “internal” perspectives on legal systems. Following Habermas, he argues that modern positive law must retain systemic legitimacy. After suggesting criteria for measuring systemic legitimacy, the author concludes that the concept provides a useful approach to contemporary problems of “lawless” regimes and “law's imperialism.”. (shrink)

This essay sheds new light on Korean democracy after democratization. It examines how the notion of ‘transcendental collectivism’, associated with familial bonds and the concept of chŏng, led to an emphasis on citizen‐empowerment. This participatory perspective replaced the militant elite‐led activism of the transitional period, which was underpinned by a Confucian ‘transcendental individualism’ predicated on the concept of ren. The argument is based on a detailed case study of a recent episode of citizen action. The article shows how the search (...) for a new democratic citizenship that was capable of overcoming the parochial regionalism that has bedeviled Korean politics for decades, led ordinary (especially young) Korean citizens to come up with a new national democratic civic ethos that corresponded to the changed political environment. This new ethos was uri‐responsibility, a uniquely Korean view of collective moral responsibility. After examining uri‐responsibility and comparing it with Kantian‐liberal accounts of responsibility, its strong democratic implications for Korea are explored. (shrink)

Relying on Niklas Luhmann's systems theoretical redescription of modern society, this article aims at questioning the basic theoretical notions of the ongoing inclusion/exclusion debate. The most remarkable aspect of Luhmann's reassessment of the inclusion/exclusion relationship within functionally differentiated societies is that individuals are basically situated within the exclusion domain of society, and thus cannot but partially be included within society's function systems and organizations. This reassessment not only allows Luhmann to raise fundamental questions with respect to the implicit norm of (...) full inclusion which still dominates the debate on inclusion and exclusion, but it also directs his attention to the different inclusion/exclusion conditions within function systems, organizations and interaction systems. Eventually Luhmann's position comes down to the idea that exclusion rather than inclusion is the rule, and, moreover, that inclusions differ from one another. The article closes off with a critical evaluation of Luhmann's redescription of the inclusion/exclusion debate. It is argued that systems theory might suffer from empirical deficiency, as it seems to have difficulties to detect and to depict the actual mechanisms of social exclusion without resorting to theories that are more geared to empirical reality and that are of help in observing it. Key Words: evolution • function systems • inclusion/exclusion • Niklas Luhmann • networks • organizations. (shrink)

What does social justice require in contemporary societies? What are the requirements of social democracy? Who and where are the individuals and groups that can carry forward agendas for progressive social transformation? What are we to make of the so-called new social movements of the last thirty years? Is identity politics compatible with egalitarianism? Can cultural misrecognition and economic maldistribution be fought simultaneously? What of the heritage of Western Marxism is alive and dead? And how is current critical social theory (...) to approach these and other questions? Much of the most productive work done in recent social theory has revolved around such issues, in particular, around those concerning the relationship between the politics of recognition and the politics of distribution. After the intense theoretical focus over the last fifteen years or so on the issues of recognition politics—multiculturalism, multi-nationalism, identity politics, group-differentiated rights, the accommodation of difference, and so on—some social theorists have worried that attention has been diverted from important issues of distributive equality—systematic impoverishment, increasing material inequality, ‘structural’ unemployment, the growth of oligarchic power, global economic segmentation, and so on. While some critics seem to have adopted a blunt ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ line of criticism,1 others have attempted to develop an overarching, integrative theoretical framework adequate to the diverse issues concerning both economic and cultural justice. For example, Axel Honneth proposes that a suitably developed and normatively robust theory of intersubjective recognition can adequately integrate an analysis of apparently diverse contemporary struggles: those for a just division of labor and hence, a fair distribution of resources and opportunities, as well as those for a culture free of identity-deforming disrespect and denigration. (shrink)

Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in securing the common good. The common good is never what individuals or particular groups want or desire, but always reaches beyond such particular (...) desires towards that which societies as a whole should consider as desirable. This does, of course, put the common good in tension with the desires of individuals and groups. Neo-liberal modes of governance have, over the past decades, put this particular educational set up under pressure and have, according to some, eroded the very idea of the common good. This set of contributions reflects on this state of affairs, partly through an exploration of the idea of publicness itself – how it can be rearticulated and regained – and partly through reflections on the current state of education in the ‘north’ and the ‘south.’. (shrink)

This dissertation addresses a debate about the proper relationship between democratic theory and institutions. The debate has been waged between two rival approaches: on the one side is an aggregative and economic theory of democracy, known as constitutional economics, and on the other side is deliberative democracy. The two sides endorse starkly different positions on the issue of what makes a democracy legitimate and stable within an institutional setting. Constitutional economists model political agents in the same way that neoclassical economists (...) model economic agents, that is, as self-regarding, rational maximizers; so that evaluations of democratic legitimacy and stability depend on the extent to which the design of institutional rules and practices maximize individual utility by promoting efficient schemes of collective choice. Deliberative democrats, on the other hand, understand political agents as communicative reason-giving subjects who justify their preferences and positions on issues that jointly affect them in a process of consensus-directed discourse, or deliberation; so that evaluations of democratic legitimacy and order depend on the degree to which institutional norms and practices promote deliberation and draw upon deliberated public judgment. I argue that despite the numerous incompatibilities between constitutional economics and deliberative democracy—which amount to a 'deep divide'—an opportunity to produce a genuine synthesis of the two approaches arises inasmuch as it is possible to overcome several points of opposition in their separate research programmes. The central thesis of the dissertation is that it is possible to construct a bridge spanning the divide between constitutional economists and deliberative democrats, and that Dewey and Bentley's transactional view can facilitate this bridge-building project. Pursuant to this end, the points of opposition between the v research programmes are mediated by way of five concepts which, on balance, favor deliberative democracy and its feasible institutionalization. (shrink)

This article examines how gender shapes the development, involvement, and visibility of teenagers as political actors within their communities. Based on ethnographic research with two high school student movement organizations on the West Coast, the author argues that gender impacts the potential for young people's political consciousness to translate into public, social movement participation. Specifically, the gendered ways in which youth conceptualize and negotiate parental power influences whether or not, and in what ways, youth can emerge as visible agents of (...) social change in their communities. For girl activists, there is more of a marked discontinuity between their political ideals and their political action because of their conflicts with parental power than for boys. This article considers the consequences of teens' relationships to parental power on their sociopolitical development, as well as the counter-effects posed by the feminist interventions of adult allies within youth movements. (shrink)

The Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality of the European Parliament is one of the key actors within the European Union institutional framework for gender equality policies. In the context of this Committee, women’s interests are continuously being defined by discursive and deliberative processes. Civil society actors are being included into these processes of policy-making through institutional funding and public hearings. Through the inclusion of particular organizations and the selection of experts for hearings, existing meanings are being reproduced and/or (...) challenged. The article argues that battlegrounds have been opened in recent years as dominant discourses are questioned by the inclusion and legitimation of new civil society actors. Both the FEMM Committee, as a feminist stronghold, and the established women’s organizations at the EU level are being challenged. It becomes contested who the gender experts are, and diverse understandings of gender equality and women’s interests are being articulated. (shrink)

Given powerful globalizing processes under way, the topic of how to conceptualize the modern public sphere is becoming increasingly urgent. Amidst the array of alternatives, the efforts of Jürgen Habermas to attempt to balance out the two main conceptual requirements of this idea, a universalistic construction of the principle of shared interests and a sensitivity to the fact of modern pluralism, might seem a particularly promising option. In order to reconstruct the main motivations of, and to determine a set of (...) criteria of assessment for, Habermas's ongoing attempt to outline a theory of the public sphere adequate to the conditions of the present, the article turns first to a discussion of the seminal formulations of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. I suggest that the later writings are only partially successful in their attempt to redress some of the main conceptual difficulties that emerge in this early account. (shrink)

From the beginning of his career Alain Touraine tried to develop a heterodox sociological terminology which promised to open up new ways of thinking about the dynamics of modern societies. This article tries to bring to light some of the Sartrean roots of Touraine's early theoretical tools and to reconstruct his intellectual development through the 1970s and 1980s when he formulated his ideas on the emergence of social movements within post-industrial society. It will be argued that Touraine's major works of (...) the 1990s - though not without some theoretical problems - offer fresh insights into the conditions of modernity and are able to correct and modify interpretations of modernity of major theorists such as Habermas and Taylor. (shrink)

: There has been an intensive scholarly debate about the developmentof Indonesia’s post-New Order democracy. Some scholars have laudedIndonesia’s surprisingly successful transition to democratic consolidation,while others have disputed such a notion, arguing that Indonesia’s democraticprocess tends to be stagnant and even regressive. However, the absence ofa progressive civil society as a result of the increasingly dominant positionof oligarchic political elites in the structure of state power and democraticinstitutions, are a number of important factors that encourage the declineof democracy. This article (...) investigates the conditions that drive the role ofmoderate Islamic organizations weredeclining rather than increasing in fighting for a democratic agenda. Referringto the research data obtained through interviews, documentation and casestudies on Nahdlatul Ulama activism - the largest moderate Islamicorganization in a predominantly Muslim country, this article arguesthat the decline of civil Islamic organizations is closely related to socio-politicalfragmentation and the strengthening of the conservative wing within moderateIslamic organizations. At the same time, the decline of the organization whichhad a glorious reputation as a champion of tolerance, pluralism, and democracyin the 1980-1990s had implications for the regression of Indonesian democracymarked by, among other things, the exclusion of religious minority groups suchas Shi’a from the public sphere. (shrink)

This essay presents a novel approach to specifying the meaning of the concept of populism, on the political position it occupies and on the nature of populism. Employing analytic techniques of concept clarification and recent analytic ideology critique, it develops populism as a political kind in three steps. First, it descriptively specifies the stereotype of populist platforms as identified in extant research and thereby delimits the peculiar political position populism occupies in representative democracies as neither inclusionary nor fascist. Second, it (...) specifies on this basis analytically–normatively the particular stance towards liberal representative democracy (in particular towards popular sovereignty and democratic legitimacy) that unifies populism’s political position and explains how populist politics can be compelling for democratic citizens. The normative core (populist ideology) turns out to require no more than two general principles of legitimizing political authority by elections. Surprisingly, it does not need a separate anti-pluralist or exclusionary commitment: it entails it. Third, this normative model allows a response to a contested question in the theoretical discussion, namely, whether populism (properly specified) can be democracy-enhancing. The article defends the negative answer in virtue of the normative core alone and does so as much vis-à-vis a minimal (purely electoral) as vis-à-vis a normatively ambitious (liberal) conception of democracy. The reconstruction of the normative core of populist ideology enables a novel argument to show that populism is incompatible with the continued democratic legitimation of political authority even in the normatively most austere conception of ‘electoral democracy’, not just with ‘liberal democracy’. Assuming a normatively more ambitious concept of democratic legitimation in terms of political autonomy, the model also produces an extremely direct argument showing that populists cannot fulfil their promise of ‘taking back control’ over political decision-making to the population. (shrink)

Radical democratic political theorists have used the concept of constituent power to sketch ambitious models of radical democracy, while many legal scholars deploy it to make sense of the political and legal dynamics of constitutional politics. Its growing popularity notwithstanding, I argue that the concept tends to impede a proper interpretation of civil disobedience, conceived as nonviolent, politically motivated lawbreaking evincing basic respect for law. Contemporary theorists who employ it cannot distinguish between civil disobedience and other related, yet ultimately different, (...) modes of political illegality. The essay also examines Jürgen Habermas’ recent contributions to a theory of mixed or dualistic constituent power, conceding that Habermas avoids many theoretical and political ills plaguing competing radical democratic theoretical retrievals. Nonetheless, Habermas’ attempt to salvage the idea of constituent power as part of... (shrink)

Beyond the reaches of scholarly debates about how to define and value civility properly, social actors across various institutional domains routinely demarcate civil from uncivil behavior. Yet this everyday classification process remains understudied and undertheorized, despite being widespread and having significant stakes for the individuals and groups involved. This article begins to fill this gap by developing the concept of civility contests—practical efforts to draw symbolic boundaries between civil and uncivil individuals, groups, or behaviors. Through a focus on the realm (...) of political protest in the United States, this article demonstrates that civility contests involve a wide range of political actors (including institutionalized power holders, opposing movements, and the media) who engage in this boundary-work in order to justify the control or (de)legitimation of protest. It then highlights patterned disparities in the outcomes of these contests, demonstrating that the likelihood of being marked as uncivil and the extent to which this prompts negative social sanction is shaped by one’s social position. Overall, the article seeks to stimulate and guide future empirical research on civility contests and to deepen theoretical understandings of the relationship between symbolic and social boundaries and the role of symbolic boundary-work in the reproduction of political inequality. (shrink)

Recent disclosures suggest that many governments apply indiscriminate mass surveillance technologies that allow them to capture and store a massive amount of communications data belonging to citizens and non-citizens alike. This article argues that traditional liberal critiques of government surveillance that center on an individual right to privacy cannot completely capture the harm that is caused by such surveillance because they ignore its distinctive political dimension. As a complement to standard liberal approaches to privacy, the article develops a critique of (...) surveillance that focuses on the question of political power in the public sphere. (shrink)

Different theories on public sphere complete each other or collide in examining the intersubjective relationships involved in organizing and administering the responses of society to the political and economical power repertory. Habermas’s default theory, who invokes the critical participation of every citizen in the public communication, is rather extended in the counter-theories represented by Fraser’s “subaltern counterpublics”, Mouffe’s “agonistic politics” or Hardt and Negri’s “shared commons”. These observations are undertaken by artists in their public art practices and inform the contemporary (...) art theories on audience participation. (shrink)

In the light of a renewed interest today in forms of direct political participation, this paper explores the contributions of Sartre and Arendt to defending direct political action as an intrinsically valuable form of human freedom. Both thinkers note, however, that such forms of action and the 'spaces of freedom' in which they become possible are always fleeting and transitory. The paper argues that Sartre's account of the ways in which human action is always mediated and alienated by materiality is (...) important in accounting for this phenomenon. (shrink)

Kimberley Brownlee’s Conscience and Conviction offers a powerful defence of civil disobedience as a conscientious and communicative mode of protest. The overall argument of the book is important and compelling, but this critical commentary explores certain aspects of Brownlee’s view that warrant further consideration and clarification. Those aspects relate to her suggestion that civil disobedience is a dialogic mode of communication, her attempt to ground a moral right of civil disobedience in a principle of humanism, and her belief that the (...) right establishes a defeasible moral claim against all forms of interference. (shrink)

We aim to show how collective emotions can be incorporated into the study of episodes of political contention. In a critical vein, we systematically explore the weaknesses in extant models of collective action, showing what has been lost through a neglect or faulty conceptualization of collective emotional configurations. We structure this discussion in terms of a review of several “pernicious postulates” in the literature, assumptions that have been held, we argue, by classical social-movement theorists and by social-structural and cultural critics (...) alike. In a reconstructive vein, however, we also lay out the foundations of a more satisfactory theoretical framework. We take each succeeding critique of a pernicious postulate as the occasion for more positive theory-building. Drawing upon the work of the classical American pragmatists–especially Peirce, Dewey, and Mead–as well as aspects of Bourdieu's sociology, we construct, step by step, the foundations of a more adequate theorization of social movements and collective action. Accordingly, the negative and positive threads of our discussion are woven closely together: the dismantling of pernicious postulates and the development of a more useful analytical strategy. (shrink)

Universalism and particularism have become poles of modern social thought and lead to distinct definitions of democracy, citizenship, and social policy. Challenging Habermas and the Habermasians, this article argues that democracy can never be identified with domination. Meanwhile, contesting Chatterjee and Foucault, the author reaffirms citizenship and law in their various forms in relation to both bounded and unbounded serialities as the basis for democracy, beyond and despite governmentality. Latin America, and especially Brazil, with processes that check state domination and (...) have implied democratizing changes, provide the empirical focus for the discussion, albeit mediated by other countries, particularly India. (shrink)

According to Maria Markus, the development of a particularly open and interested moral-psychological disposition towards the other is critical to the endeavour of subjects to realize the decent society. Drawing on the work of George Herbert Mead, it will be argued that such a sense of decency involves not just a normative commitment to reciprocity but a reflexive appreciation of the significance of the other to the formation of the self. Meads sketches of intersubjective freedoms are shown to provide a (...) critical perspective on unjust social relations from the standpoint of the utopian horizon of a decent society. Meads conception converges, as well as contrasts, with Markuss perspective on civil society and the regulative ideal of the decent society. Significantly, Markuss account of the problem of the potential divergence between the decency of institutions and the decency of human relationships highlights the difficulties of interconnecting democratic justice and intersubjective freedoms. (shrink)

What is the distinctive trait of the Latin American pattern of modernization? In contrast to western societies, where the debate on modernization has been dominated by the Weberian thematic of bureaucratiz-ation, the most salient feature of the Latin American developmental path is the chronic frailty of legal-constitutional arrangements. In Latin America, the process of modernization and social differentiation has not been followed by the legal stabilization of social complexity but is characterized by a low degree of juridification and institutional precariousness. (...) Drawing on insights from both Luhmann's and Habermas' theories, the article provides a critical theoretical framework for the study of the peculiarities of the Latin American modernizing path. (shrink)

In the wake of the devastating Sichuan earthquake in 2008, the Chinese state, for the first time in the history of the People’s Republic, held a nationwide mourning rite for ordinary disaster victims. Why did this “mourning for the ordinary” emerge in the wake of the Sichuan earthquake but not previous massive disasters? Moreover, the Chinese state tried to demonstrate through the mourning that the state respected ordinary people’s lives and dignity. But this moral-political message contradicted the state’s normal repressive (...) practice. The contradiction was salient when the state forbade the parents of child victims, who died of school collapse, to mourn their children at anniversaries of the earthquake. What can account for this contradiction? Drawing on the state-society relations perspective, I argue that the emergence of “mourning for the ordinary” can be explained by some important changes in structural state-society relations in China in the 2000s, such as the rapidly developing civil society with moral consciousness and the more adaptive authoritarian Chinese state with concern about its moral legitimacy. These changes were strengthened in the situational dynamics in 2008, which led to the state’s acceptance of a mourning proposal from the public sphere. The mourning did not occur in previous disasters because those structural factors were absent or weak and the situational dynamics were different. The state suppressed parents’ mourning and outside activists’ alternative mourning because the state’s concern with stability overrode its moral legitimation, particularly in the changing political context after the Beijing Olympics, and, meanwhile, the civil society was unable to resist the state’s repression. This study theorizes an important but understudied mourning genre, “mourning for the ordinary,” and introduces the state-society perspective into public ritual study. (shrink)

The concept of civil society has once again emerged as a viable mechanism for developing and sustaining deliberative democracy. However, an essential component of many strategies to sustain civil society appears lacking, especially when we see the growing cynicism and apathy among citizens. What is missing is a strategy for training or encouraging citizens to participate more fully in civil society. The skills of advocacy can, at least in part, help renew civic activism. Thus, the role of advocacy will be (...) explored as a potential way to resuscitate civil society. (shrink)

Citizenship and its education is again gaining importance in many countries. This paper uses England as its primary example to develop a Habermasian perspective on this issue. The statutory requirements for citizenship education in England imply that significant attention be given to the moral and social development of the learner over time, to the active engagement of the learner in community and to the knowledge skills and understanding necessary for political action. This paper sets out a theoretical framework that offers (...) a perspective on learning suitable for these far-reaching aims. We argue that schools need to shift from the currently dominant discourse of accountability to incorporate a discourse of care in order to make room for an effective and appropriate pedagogy for citizenship. Habermas’s social theory gives us a theoretical framework that properly locates schools within the lifeworld as part of civil society. Schools should therefore attend to hermeneutical and emancipatory concerns, not only to strategic interests. We put these in the context of Habermas’s social theory to paint an alternative vision learning for citizenship education which is based in developing the dispositions, values and attitudes necessary for lifelong learning with a view to developing ongoing communicative action. (shrink)

Analysts of political culture within the "civil religion" tradition have generally assumed that discourse in civil society is structured by a single set of enduring codes based on liberal traditions that actors draw upon to resolve crises. Based on two case studies of national crises and debate in Brazil during its transition to democracy, I challenge this assumption by demonstrating that not only do actors draw upon two distinct but interrelated codes, they actively seek to impose one or another as (...) dominant. In Brazil this is manifest in actors who defend elements from the code of liberty and its valuation of the freestanding citizen, and those who defend the corporate code and its valuation of the collectivity over the individual. In an earlier debate on crime the corporate code was dominant, but in a later debate surrounding presidential improprieties, the liberal code became dominant. This analysis makes two contributions to the literature: it highlights the importance of nonindividualist cultural codes, such as the corporate code, in animating discourse in the public sphere in democratizing societies, raising attention to the importance of the symbolic contestation between actors seeking to establish one or another code during political transitions. Second, it offers a subtle commentary on the literature on democratization: changes in collective representations in the public sphere may not proceed apace of institutional changes and may be contingent on the kinds of crisis events and actors willing to contest previously dominant codes. (shrink)

This article explores some aspects of what has been termed ‘new contractualism’ in social policy, using the Norwegian policy on poverty and social exclusion as an empirical example. An important purpose is to identify how the move to new contractualism implies new modes of controlling behaviour and to explore the ethical legitimacy of this approach. Firstly, contractualism is seen in relation to some dominating discourses in Norwegian and European social policy over the last 20–30 years, emphasizing the importance of economic (...) considerations concerning the financial sustainability of the welfare state. Secondly, the article explores some implications of contractual modes of thought for balancing rights and duties in the welfare state, concluding that the principle of a welfare contract is a euphemism for a polity that basically imposes more obligations on the recipients of welfare services. Thirdly, it elaborates on the tension field between the possible democratic benefits of contractualism and more paternalistic consequences. Although relational contracts may enhance client-influenced service provision, paternal outcomes are likely, owing to the fact that such contracts are often used as instruments for behaviour-changing efforts (e.g. to create an economically active citizen). (shrink)

Weber's piece on the development of the north-European Western city has not commanded attention in the recent theoretical literature. This article argues that it can however provide fresh insights into some key problems of Weber's diagnosis of modernity and into his general sociological theory, especially as to his theory of action and creativity. A more open-ended conception of modernity can be gained from its analysis, which is more compatible with Weber's own methodological assumptions. A different relationship between freedom and rationality (...) may be derived as a theoretical and political consequence from the discussion of The City. Key Words: collective subjectivity • creativity • freedom • modernity • rationalization • Weber • Western city. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the competing and complimentary relationships between intersubjectivity and discursive logic. It contends that the ultimate failure of Husserlian phenomenology is a testament to the dilemma of subjectivist philosophy. Indeed, political philosophy requires a paradigm-shift from subjectivity to intersubjectivity. With this in mind, this paper examines the classical encounter between morality and ethical life in connection with discursive ethics. While it argues that Habermas still retains a strong residue of subjectivist philosophy, it attempts to clarify the (...) discursive analysis of Foucault and probes into its applicability to practical philosophy. (shrink)

In 1971, Chicano activist Armando Réndon began to chart new directions for Chicana/o politics that move away from a narrow emphasis on cultural and ethnic nationalism. He argues that urban Chicana/o neighborhoods ought develop community-based organizations to provide support services for residents and to advocate local concerns to elected officials. In the first part of this essay, I reconstruct Réndon's concept of a 'barrio union' as an example of participatory democracy. I situate his concept of neighborhood democracy within Mexican American (...) and Progressive movement history, and then highlight contemporary experiments with this model that are particularly successful in transforming traditionally marginalized individuals into active democratic participants. I then suggest that the barrio union is a repository of cultural, ethical, and political ideals that might be used by progressive Chicana/o activists to challenge the meaning of dominant institutions and political traditions within the United States, particularly the ways in which we conceive of race and American citizenship. (shrink)