ABSTRACT:This paper argues that, although stakeholder engagement occurs within the context of power, neither market-centered CSR nor the deliberative model of political CSR adequately addresses the specter of power asymmetries and the inevitability of conflict in stakeholder relations, particularly for powerless stakeholders. Noting that the objective of stakeholder engagement should not be benevolence toward stakeholders, but mechanisms that address power asymmetries such that stakeholders are able to protect their own interests, I present a framework of stakeholder engagement based on agonistic (...) pluralism that seeks to structure and utilize discord rather than reduce or eliminate it. I then propose arbitration as an agonistic mechanism to address power asymmetries in stakeholder engagement and explore its implications. (shrink)

In the 1980s extra-parliamentary social movements and critical theories of race, class, and gender added a new sociocultural understanding of justice—recognition—to the much older socioeconomic one. The best-known form of the struggle for recognition is the identity politics of disadvantaged groups. I argue that there is still another option to conceptualize their predicament, neglected in recent political philosophy, which understands exclusion not in terms of injustice, more particularly a lack of sociocultural recognition, but in terms of a lack of freedom. (...) I draw my inspiration from Hannah Arendt's model of political action. Arendt diagnoses exclusion not solely as a mode of injustice, but as a lack of participation and public freedom. Consequently, she advocates a struggle for participation, political equality, and freedom as a strategy for emancipation or empowerment. Arendt could help feminists see that collective empowerment is made possible not by a shared identity (the target of poststructuralist critics) but by common action in the service of a particular worldly issue or common end. In other words, feminists would do well to appreciate the revolutionary quality and heritage of the feminist movement better, that is, its character as a set of practices of freedom. (shrink)

This article offers a novel account of a key concept in Hannah Arendt’s political thought: amor mundi. In political theory’s ethical turn, theorists have increasingly turned to amor mundi as a source of ethical guidance and inspiration for politics. However, in doing so, they have elided Arendt’s distinct understanding of care. This article recovers Arendt’s understanding of amor mundi as care for the world by reconstructing the central concerns of her dissertation, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, and tracing them to the (...) “Crisis” essays of Between Past and Future. It shows that amor mundi emerges in the dissertation as part of a question: if love is our fundamental orientation toward the world, how can we love the world without instrumentalizing it? The two “Crisis” essays provide the following answer: if love is to avoid—and perhaps militate against—the instrumentalization of the world, it must take the form of care. Following this analysis, this article contends that the contribution of amor mundi to the ethical turn is best understood, not as the ethos needed to guide action in the political realm, but as a key pre- or nonpolitical ethos needed to conserve the world where politics takes place—and thus the very possibility of politics. (shrink)

This paper examines Honig’s use of Rancière in her book ‘Democracy and the Foreigner’. In seeking to clarify the benefits of ‘foreignness’ for democratic politics it raises the concern that Honig does not acknowledge the ways in which her own democratic cosmopolitanism may be more akin to Rancière’s police than politics. By challenging Honig’s assertion that democracy is usually read as a romance with the suggestion that it is more commonly read as a horror, I unpick the interstices of Honig’s (...) and Rancière’s work to separate foreignness from democratic cosmopolitanism. Instead, although I posit democratic cosmopolitanism’s potential as a police more conducive to politics I also suggest that the particular salience of Honig’s ‘foreigner’ figure is that it supplements Rancièrian politics, demonstrating a praxis of ‘looking anew’ at our ordinary social practices. By making these seem strange to us, we can discover a new critical perspective from which to question and subvert, thereby furthering the potential of Rancièrian democratic politics. (shrink)

This article reassesses Arendt's relationship to Augustine, exploring the Augustinian context for Arendt's own thinking about the relationship between thought and action. What Arendt drew from Augustine, the contours of which remain in her later work, is a journey of memory in which reflection, as it removes us from the world, paradoxically reveals us as inserted into this world. Out of this ontology of origins emerges an ethic of beginning as we recognize, in the moment of reflection, a bond of (...) kinship and an equality toward each other that is constituted by our common relationship of beginning and fatefulness to the world. It is this Augustinian journey of memory that continued to guide Arendt's thinking in developing a political ethic that shared with action the ontological foundation of beginning. (shrink)

This article asks whether we can identify a vitalistic undertow in Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy that would make sense for contemporary political and constitutional theory as well. The arguments are presented by contrasting Nietzsche’s philosophy with the social theory of Herbert Spencer. After an introduction, the first main part discusses Spencer and his so-called ‘organic analogy’ in which he draws parallels between natural organisms and the body politic. Spencer’s social theory is a paradigmatic example of vitalism and organic state theory and, (...) as a counterpoint, can help tease out Nietzsche’s vitalism as well. The article then examines Nietzsche’s admittedly fragmentary encounters with Spencer and his flirtations with vitalism and organic state theory. In the conclusions, the reconstructed narrative about Nietzsche’s vitalism is linked with Nietzsche’s main philosophical works in the hope of provisionally extracting a Nietzschean ‘constitutional theory’ from his notion of will to power. (shrink)

Para Hannah Arendt, a modernidade configura um período histórico de obscurecimento das determinações políticas democráticas, pois, onde a política não foi reduzida ao plano da violência, como no caso dos fenômenos totalitários, ela foi reduzida ao plano da administração burocrática dos interesses econômicos da sociedade. Neste artigo, pretendo discutir a constituição argumentativa desse diagnóstico, referindo-o à sua raiz de inspiração, isto é, as críticas de Nietzsche e Heidegger à modernidade. Finalmente, procuro demonstrar que Arendt não se limitou a uma concepção (...) negativa das possibilidades políticas modernas, pois vislumbrou nos modernos eventos revolucionários a possibilidade de uma revitalização da política em suas determinações democráticas originárias, dado que aí se restabeleceram os laços entre a ação política, a liberdade e a felicidade pública. (shrink)