This paper focuses on a comparative analysis of the legitimate exercise of democratic power in the philosophies of Montesquieu and Locke. This analysis not only highlights a strong bifurcation in liberal thought, it also sheds light on the contemporary practice of liberalism through the example of the United States’ ‘War on Terror.’ I argue that although it is Locke who at first blush gives an account of the exercise of democratic power that is more opposed to tyranny, it is Montesquieu’s (...) broader conception that is in many ways more effective at tracking and combating tyranny. (shrink)

Montesquieu was one of the great political philosophers of the Enlightenment. Insatiably curious and mordantly funny, he constructed a naturalistic account of the various forms of government, and of the causes that made them what they were and that advanced or constrained their development. He used this account to explain how governments might be preserved from corruption. He saw despotism, in particular, as a standing danger for any government not already despotic, and argued that it could best be prevented by (...) a system in which different bodies exercised legislative, executive, and judicial power, and in which all those bodies were bound by the rule of law. This theory of the separation of powers had an enormous impact on liberal political theory, and on the framers of the constitution of the United States of America. (shrink)

The paper surveys selected alternative conceptions of rationality in contemporary and (especially) traditional economics and sociology. While the status of rationality as one of the master concepts, subjects and objectives of social science and philosophy has been further promoted in contemporary economics and sociology, questions often arise among economists and sociologists themselves as to its meaning or definition. As an attempt to help address this issue, the paper selects and examines a (limited) number of pertinent definitions and conceptions of rationality (...) from both economic and sociological theory. By virtue of its coverage of economics and sociology, this study is thoroughly interdisciplinary and contributes toward filling in a void in the current literature in which such studies are relatively rare. (shrink)

After the demise of Christianity, Western society did not become secular, according to Emile Durkheim, but located foundations in a new religion he calls the “cult of the individual.” This religion holds the rational individual person as sacred, and corresponds to a multi-faceted, complex, and diverse society united around individual democratic rights and modern science. Different traditional religions can co-exist in the cult of the individual, but only if they accept a subordinate status in relation to it. Durkheim maintains, however, (...) that all religions construct authoritative regimes of truth and moral obligations, setting the stage for conflict. How then should modern democracies respond to challenges to their authority from traditional religions? This article argues that a Durkheimian response would be to assert the values of the cult of the individual, as this is the only way to maintain the integrity and viability of Western democratic society. (shrink)

Durkheim’s epistemology, the argument for the social origins of the categories of the understanding, is his most important and most neglected argument. This argument has been confused with his sociology of knowledge and Durkheim’s overall position has been misunderstood as a consequence. This lead to the argument that there are two Durkheims: a functionalist positivist and an idealist. The current popularity of a “cultural" or “ideological” interpretation of Durkheim is as much a misunderstanding of his position as the “functional" interpretation (...) from which the current interpretations seek to rescue him. Durkheim articulated a sophisticated epistemology in the classical sense, a point that has been entirely missed. The argument, which is articulated mainly in the central chapters of “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life”, locates the origin of the fundamental categories of thought in the concrete empirical details of enacted practices. For social constructivists, social consensus, structure, or shared practices lead persons to believe certain things or think in certain ways. Because persons share the same beliefs, they act in ways that reinforce those beliefs. For Durkheim, however, the genesis of the categories of the understanding in enacted practice solved the problem of indeterminacy. (shrink)

The spirit of the laws is a symbol reflecting the ontological status and transcendental ideals of the system of positive law. The article analyses historical links between the romantic philosophy of the spirit of the nation (Volksgeist), which subsumed Montesquieu’s general spirit of the laws under the concept of ethnic culture, and recent politics of cultural and ethnic identity. Although criticising attempts at legalising ethnic collective identities, the article does not simply highlight the virtues of demos and the superiority of (...) civic culture against the vices of ethnos and the regressive nature of ethnic politics of identity. Instead, the author argues that the civil democratic concept of political identity is part of the more general process of social differentiation: unlike the pre-political ethnic concept of identity, it can be converted to generalised democratic procedures and thus dismantle the totalitarian claims of cultural identity politics. (shrink)

This article argues that the implications of the recent eclipse of the construct of the `primitive' for the practice of the human sciences have not been adequately pondered. It asks, therefore, why and how the myth of primitiveness has been sustained by the human sciences, and what purposes it has served for the modern West's self-understanding. To attempt to answer such a query, the article pursues two principal lines of inquiry. In order to appreciate what is potentially being lost, the (...) space that may be closing up as a result of the death of the `primitive', the first part of the article strives to demonstrate the latter's significance for the self-critique of modern ways of thinking and acting by historiographically reconstructing its changing roles within and representations by the human sciences. In the second section, it is contended that the eclipse of primitiveness has created a potentially problematic situation for the human sciences, since the cross-cultural mode of critique cultivated through this myth risks being neglected in a post-`primitive' age. All in all, then, the article claims that continued engagement with cultural alterity is essential for the human sciences after primitiveness, and that such an engagement can be sustained by an understanding of the different ways in which the `primitive' has been defined and has functioned over the course of the modern era. (shrink)

Research Articles Paul A. Rahe, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.