The essay seeks to vindicate the importance of the humanities or liberal arts deriving from their crucial contribution to the ‘humanization of humanity.’ This vindication is timely in view of the widespread curtailment of humanistic or liberal education in many institutions of higher learning. It is also timely as a pedagogical antidote to the fascination with violence in our world (which often culminates in ‘crimes against humanity’). In a first step, the paper traces the historical development of the humanities or (...) liberal arts in the West. Next, I highlight some crucial features of humanistic education: the emphasis on ethical and character formation; the fine-tuning of moral judgment; and the cultivation of a sensus communis. Another central feature is that such education offers a counterpoint to the overwhelming preoccupation today with career training and utilitarian objectives. In the words of Martha Nussbaum: it is ‘not for profit,’ but serves an intrinsic good. In this respect, humanistic pedagogy bears a close affinity to the needed education for democracy and world citizenship. (shrink)

The essay seeks to vindicate the importance of the humanities or liberal arts deriving from their crucial contribution to the “humanization of humanity”. This vindication is timely in view of the wide-spread curtailment of humanistic or liberal education in many institutions of higher learning. It is also timely as a pedagogical antidote to the fascination with violence in our world (which often culminates in “crimes against humanity”). In a first step, the paper traces the historical development of the humanities or (...) liberal arts in the West. Next, I highlight some crucial features of humanistic education : the emphasis on ethical and character formation ; the fine-tuning of moral judgment ; and the cultivation of a sensus communis. Another central feature is that such education offers a counterpoint to the overwhelming preoccupation today with career training and utilitarian objectives. In the words of Martha Nussbaum : it is “not for profit”, but serves an intrinsic good. In this respect, humanistic pedagogy bears a close affinity to the needed education for democracy and world citizenship. (shrink)

Citizenship as a compulsory subject was added to the National Curriculum in England in 2002 following the 1998 report, 'Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools'. It was little noticed at the time that the report stressed active citizenship much more strongly than democracy. The underlying presupposition was what historians call 'civic republicanism' the tradition from the Greeks and the Romans of good government as political government, that is, citizens reaching acceptable compromises of group interests and values (...) by public debate. This is contrasted to modern liberalism. To stress 'democracy' unduly in citizenship education can lead to definitional dogmatics about multiple meanings of the term, even to disillusionment. Democracy is a necessary element in good government but not a sufficient one, unless subjective opinion is enshrined over knowledge through education. The practices of free politics are both historically and logically prior to democracy. (shrink)

The terms “politics” and “political” have become so overdetermined that it is difficult to use them in any effective manner. We argue that this has dangerous political consequences, and that this could be addressed by providing a new, sounder, notion of politics. This paper argues that defining politics in relation to the notion of play can provide a notion both intuitively appealing and able to withstand the problematic overdeterminations. We argue that politics is the set of practices through which the (...) indeterminate of Spielraum is made more determinate. This suggests that politics is always partly a matter of play: it is about instituting values without making any claims about the legitimacy of this instituting act. With reference to Huizinga and Nietzsche’s analyses of play, we define play as the living unity of seriousness and frivolity, and non-play as either seriousness without frivolity or frivolity without seriousness. In order to illustrate this, we comparatively analyse the attitudes of Barack Obama and Donald Trump in the single context of the well-known yearly White House Correspondent’s Dinner. There, we see two opposed attitudes to playfulness. Our analysis allows us to apply our _Spielraum_ model of politics to show that the thrust of Obama’s attitude involves an embrace of the non-foundational nature of politics as play, whereas Trump’s attitude is politicidal: it is animated by a refusal to acknowledge its own lack of foundation, leading to an oscillation between over-seriousness and over-frivolity. (shrink)

No reverberatory effect of the great war has caused American public opinion more solicitude than the failure of the “melting-pot.” The tendency... has been for the national clusters of immigrants, as they became more and more firmly established and more and more prosperous to cultivate more and more assiduously the literatures and cultural traditions of their homelands. Assimilation, in other words, instead of washing out the memories of Europe, made them more and more intensely real. Just as these clusters became (...) more and more objectively American, did they become more and more German or Scandinavian or Bohemian or Polish.... [This] is not, however, to admit the failure of Americanization. It is not to fear the failure of democracy. It is rather to urge us to an investigation of what Americanism may rightly mean. It is to ask ourselves whether our ideal has been broad or narrow—whether perhaps the time has not come to assert a higher ideal than the “melting pot.”... We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and not by the consent of the governed. All our elaborate machinery of settlement and school and union, of social and political naturalization, however, will move with friction just in so far as it neglects to take into account this strong and virile insistence that American shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it, and not what a ruling class, descendent of those British stocks which were the first permanent immigrants, decide that America shall be made. Randolph Bourne (1916/1977, 248ff). (shrink)

This article explores the civic republican conception of citizenship underlying the Labour government's programme of civil renewal and the introduction of education for democratic citizenship. It considers the importance of the cultivation of civic virtue through political participation for such developments and it reviews the research into how service learning linked to character education can lead to the civic virtue of duty or social responsibility.

Politics has been defined in different and contradictory ways in the last century or so. If politics is to be a single subject of study then contradictory theories should be capable of being related together. In this article I argue that they can be related in terms of what I call the Aristotelian criterion. The article is in four parts. Firstly, I discuss the problem of defining politics; secondly, I introduce the criterion; thirdly, I consider five modern theories of politics (...) (those of Arendt, Oakeshott, Collingwood, Schmitt and Rancière) in relation to the criterion; and fourthly, I use the criterion to put forward an original and capacious definition of politics.1. (shrink)

Quotas, including youth quotas for representative institutions, are usually evaluated from within the social justice discourse. That discourse relies on several questionable assumptions, seven of which I critically address and radically revise in this contribution from a libertarian perspective. Temporal justice then takes on an entirely different form. It becomes a theory in which responsibilities are clear and cannot be shifted onto the shoulders of the weak and innocent. I shall only briefly sketch some outlines and general implications of such (...) a theory, arguing that it offers too little guidance for our imperfect world. While that implies more tolerance for quotas, I nevertheless propose an alternative more suited to a representative, deliberative democracy: veto rights. (shrink)

Both environmental social movements and academic thinkers appear to move away from fundamental critique of dominant values in the direction of a more pragmatic approach to environmental politics. This article highlights some of the disadvantages of this development, using environmental concerns to illustrate the broader argument that decent societies aiming for social and environmental justice are best served by the existence of an informed, fundamental type of opposition next to cooperative, loyal modes of dissent. For academics in their inescapable role (...) as fundamental critics, this would imply a relatively distant role as guardians of the critical potential of civil society. (shrink)

Based upon research into small community-based organisations, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can be interpreted as a technology that emerges from complex environments of support, teaching, and community development. While the ICTs investigated are commonplace and relatively simple systems (personal computers, Internet), they are part of complex and extended systems of action, knowledge, information, and support that reach into local communities. This basket of processes and skills, oriented around social justice principles, can be conceived of as ‘technologies of care’, strongly (...) influenced by the values and work activity primarily concerned with supporting people in need. Furthermore, prior research has tended to take a dystopic view about the use of technology by women, who are the major workforce in such environments, but a more nuanced approach is taken her, demonstrating that while workers are competent with ICTs, they is only one element in a process which relies upon communicative and interpretive independence. This understanding of the place of ICTs in human services work has important implications for those implementing or designing ICTs, though clarifying workers’ tacit understandings is a research challenge. Based on more recent research, suggestions are also made about the limitations of the study and the need to take into account other ways of articulating tacit, practical knowledge about ICT relationships through methods such as CO-MAP. (shrink)

:This essay seeks to defend the claim that political philosophy ought to be appropriately guided by the phenomenon of politics that it seeks to both offer a theory of and, especially in its normative guise, offer a theory for. It does this primarily through the question of political values. It begins by arguing that for any value to qualify as a value for the political domain, it must be intelligible in relation to the constitutive features of politics as a human (...) activity. It then examines the extent to which the preconditions for the realization of values in practice ought to figure in our considerations as to whether they are values that fit or belong to our social world. We can understand these parts of the essay as responding to two related questions, respectively: Is this a political value at all? — which is to ask, is it a value that is appropriate for the political realm?; and then Is this a political value for us? The final section responds to the often-made complaint that political philosophy ought not to make any concessions to the actual world of politics as it really is, arguing that attending to the realities of politics, and in particular the constitutive conditions of political activity, gives meaning to the enterprise as the theorization of politics. Furthermore those same conditions provide the limits of intelligibility beyond which ideals and values can no longer be, in any meaningful sense, ideals and values for the political sphere. (shrink)

This Comment treats each of Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus's three subjects ?entrepreneurship, democratic activity, and cultivation of solidarity ? in turn. Though marred by inattention to moral consequences and an accordingly unjustified meliorism, the authors? insights reaffirm and strengthen a number of convictions obscured in current political?theory debates. In particular, their account of the virtuous citizen, and of a variant of solidarity which grows out of such citizens? activity, deserves recognition. The basic contention that humans are ?at their best? when (...) self?consciously engaged in transformative activities is accepted, with the essential caveat that such activity can only be sustained for relatively short periods of time by individuals and polities alike. (shrink)

Robert Dahl's democratic theory has been remarkably consistent over the course of his long career. While Dahl has maintained a markedly un‐romantic view of modern democracy, and can best be read as an immanent critic of its liberal variant, he has steadily clung to certain radical aspirations, even as their prospects have waned. Dahl's often‐unnoticed radicalism lies in his desire to see democracy break out of the institutional bonds of the liberal state. Reviewing his career forces one to consider the (...) ultimately Utopian character of his quiet radicalism and the significance of its apparent failure. Paradoxically, Dahl's call for the extension of democracy into the economic sphere would be less Utopian if it were more radical at its foundation—that is, if his basic premises would lead him to seriously question citizens’ existing preferences. (shrink)

My theme at its most general is the relation between culture and power; at its most specific, the relation between a particular type of culture, so-called high culture, and two types of power, namely governmental power, and the related but more diffuse power prevailing in society at large.

The debate on political constitutionalism has entirely neglected the constitution-making dimension. This is probably due to the fact that constitution-making usually brings with it undesirable outcomes such as the entrenchment of rights or structures. These outcomes do not respect reasonable disagreement among citizens because they violate the only fair system for settling disagreement: majority rule and equal voting rights. This article argues that political constitutionalists may regret the absence of any claim about constitution-making. Either they are overlooking certain problems inherent (...) to the electoral process that is supposed to tackle disagreement or, even worse, they are downplaying the entrenching effect of ordinary political processes by ignoring the redemptive properties of constituent power. In both cases, their claims undermine the political dimension of constitutionalism. (shrink)

In JAP 9 (1992) Gordon Graham argued that liberals cannot be counted on to support democratic institutions since there are no conceptual or strongly contingent links between democracy and liberal ideals. This paper responds to Graham's challenge by claiming that his model of liberal aristocracy is not liberal in several respects. In particular, the liberal should recognise a right to democratic participation which individuals may plausibly claim as an element in a respectable conception of how to live well. The right (...) to democratic participation is shown to stand alongside other important liberal ideals which may be justified in this fashion, e.g. freedom of religious worship and freedom of association. Furthermore, I argue against those who claim that political participation enacts delusory aspirations that the rights which are promoted and protected within a democratic constitution are necessary for both individual and collective autonomy — and so the liberal should defend them. (shrink)

Political and economic internationalization and globalization, the rise of sub-national self-governing regions and spheres, governance replacing government and many related processes change the role and context of the nation-state, the protector of mass democracy. The concept of representation, representation as ‘acting for,’ can help develop answers to the threat that this ‘loss of polity’ poses to equal and universal access to decision-making, i.e., the ideals behind mass democracy. Examining the reasons why the two most prominent conceptions of representation – substantive (...) and descriptive – would be valuable, I argue that we can only make an uncontroversial case for substantive representation. I show that currently popular cures for ‘loss of polity’ cannot be construed as new versions of or alternatives for mass democracy. Finally, I discuss two ideal-types of more reasonable interpretations of the ideals behind mass democracy. (shrink)

Helen Frowe has recently offered what she calls a “practical” account of self-defense. Her account is supposed to be practical by being subjectivist about permissibility and objectivist about liability. I shall argue here that Frowe first makes up a problem that does not exist and then fails to solve it. To wit, her claim that objectivist accounts of permissibility cannot be action-guiding is wrong; and her own account of permissibility actually retains an objectivist (in the relevant sense) element. In addition, (...) her attempt to restrict subjectivism primarily to “urgent” situations like self-defense contradicts her own point of departure and is either incoherent or futile. Finally, the only actual whole-heartedly objectivist account she criticizes is an easy target; while those objectivist accounts one finds in certain Western European jurisdictions are immune to her criticisms. Those accounts are also clearly superior to hers in terms of action-guidingness. (shrink)