This article aims to question the anti-individualist stance in Carl Schmitt's concept of the political by uncovering the historical bias of Schmitt's anti-individualism, seen here as one of the main driving forces behind his argument. For Schmitt, the political can take place only when a collectivity is able to declare war to another collectivity on the basis of feeling existentially threatened by the latter. As such, Schmitt's framework implies the inescapable possibility of war, as the condition which makes possible the (...) political. Acknowledging the previous criticisms of Schmitt raised by John Rawls and Iris Marion Young, this article takes a different path by pointing to certain historically tacit assumptions in 1927 Germany which Schmitt took for granted, but which are not suitable for a contemporary political theory. The demonstration is done first by showing how the structure of interruption functions in the works of Schmitt, then showing how he conceives of the individual as a possible interruption of the political in history, and then placing this structure of interruption in the historical context of Schmitt's writing. (shrink)

The obligations we owe to those with whom we share a valuable relationship (like friendship) cannot be reduced to the obligations we owe to others simply as fellow persons (e.g. the duty to reciprocate benefits received). Wallace suggests that this is because such valuable relationships are loving relationships. I instead propose that it is because, unlike general moral obligations, such valuable relationships (and their constitutive obligations) serve our normative interests. Part of what makes friendship good for us is that it (...) involves bonds of loyalty. Our lives go better if we are bound to others in this way. (shrink)

…I see my list on political theology functioning like Wittgenstein’s ladder metaphor in his Tractatus. Once graduate students read and grasp these important texts, they should “throw away the ladder”, so to speak, and deconstruct all they have learned about political theology to illuminate contemporary problems on their own. Once they reach the top, they can throw away the ladder.

The aim of this essay is to clarify the meaning and extent of Kant's liberalism by contrasting some of his key ideas to those of Burke, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Nozick, Rawls, and Schmitt. My claim is that Kant's political philosophy navigates the path between the extremes of liberalism and conservatism, just as his theoretical philosophy tries to navigate between dogmatism and skepticism, and that current liberal claim on Kant has important limitations in Kant's letter, as well as in spirit.

Recently, British Prime Minister Theresa May made a bold anti-cosmopolitan claim: ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship...

Constitutions serve (at least) two central functions. One is to settle certain controversies by offering a definitive solution, such as adoption of a presidential or parliamentary system, a one-house or two-house legislature, or guaranteeing a certain term of years to judicial appointees. Not surprisingly, there is rarely litigation about such solutions, even if one finds them troublesome; instead, one can suggest amending the constitution or even replacing it. A second function is precisely to engender litigation by addressing certain issues—very often (...) involving rights—that don't lend themselves to the kinds of definitive textual solutions similar to those involving structural features of a polity. If the first constitution can be described as a “constitution of settlement,” this second constitution is a “constitution of legal conversation” inasmuch as lawyers constantly dispute the meanings to be assigned such terms as “equal protection,” “human dignity,” and the like. But how does this apply to the preambles commonly, though not always, found in constitutions? Preambles often claim to evoke what binds together the society for whom the constitution is being drafted—religion, ethnicity, histories, languages, or commitments to norms, including universalistic ones. But to what extent are such claims of unity attempts by political elites to marginalize sectors of the society that do not in fact share the attributes in question? In any event, there is nothing “innocent” about constitutional preambles, and they are well worth taking seriously whether or not they are useful to lawyers engaged in litigation. (shrink)

Abstract Carl Schmitt distinguishes between political theories in terms of whether they rest on the anthropological assumption that man is evil by nature or on the anthropological assumption that man is good by nature, and he claims that liberal political theory is based on the latter assumption. Contrary to this claim, I show how Kant's liberalism is shaped by his theory of the radical evil in human nature, and that his liberalism corresponds to the characterization of liberalism that Schmitt himself (...) offers. My discussion of this issue will be shown to have certain implications with respect to the view that for Kant evil is the product of society. I show that this view is mistaken insofar as it fails to recognize that Kant's political philosophy implies that human beings require the type of society that best suits their radically evil natures, namely, a commercial one in which the ?vices of culture? largely have free play, while the state's role is limited to that of preventing the antagonisms found in society leading to the mutual destruction of its members. (shrink)

Recent setbacks to international institutions and projects of global governance have been viewed as marking a resurgence of nation-state sovereignty. In fact, however, many of the major controversies and developments in contemporary international law and geopolitics concern the administration, autonomy, and internal hierarchy not of states, but of supra-state regions. The spatial logic of a world divided into such regions is best articulated in Carl Schmitt’s theory of the Großraum, which in various respects describes and explains key features of modern (...) world order. Taking regional systems as self-constituting political units characterized by internal forms of dominance and legitimation aids in identifying the operation of hegemony in contemporary international law and institutions. It also makes possible a reinterpretation of global constitutionalist discourse as a democratizing project that finds its most important expressions in counter-hegemonic movements within the various “great spaces” constituting today’s world. (shrink)

David Luban identifies a tension between Arendt's conception of ethnic identification in a context of persecution and her conception of humanity. That tension pertains to the reality—or realities—that Arendt addresses: the moral reality of her Bildung that appears throughout her work, and is centered on the “dignity of man,” on the one hand, and the divisive, “political” reality that she was forced to face when “attacked as a Jew,” on the other. By implicitly accepting that in a context of persecution (...) one cannot escape the framing relevance of the “political” —an idea that is also present in her imaginary condemnation speech of Eichmann—Arendt betrays a fundamental theme of her work: “forgiveness” and the inherent possibility of a “new beginning.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In the following text we aim to present a proposal of interpretation of Hobbes's work from sociobiology viewpoint. Despite the fact it may strike some at first as an anachronism or straightforward wrong, reading the philosopher of Mamelsbury from a sociobiological perspective, can shed light on some particular aspects of his argument, particularly those referring to the construction of human nature and its influence on the modulation of the state of nature and on the justification of authority and political (...) obligation. So, Hobbes proceeds as a sociobiologist since he offers us a tale about the emergence of morality from where it didn't exist before and moves from there to a specific understanding of political authority. RESUMO No texto a seguir, pretendemos apresentar uma proposta de interpretação da obra de Hobbes a partir de sociobiologia. Apesar de poder chocar alguns em primeiro lugar como um anacronismo ou errado, ler o filósofo da Mamelsbury a partir de uma perspectiva sociobiológica pode lançar luz sobre alguns aspectos particulares do seu argumento, em especial os referentes à construção da natureza humana e sua influência sobre a modulação do estado de natureza e sobre a justificação da autoridade e obrigação política. Portanto, Hobbes procede como um sociobiólogo, já que ele nos oferece um conto sobre o surgimento da moralidade de onde ela não existia antes e se move de lá para uma compreensão específica da autoridade política. (shrink)

This article traces the semantics of ?life? and ?vitality? in Carl Schmitt up to the 1930s. It shows that Schmitt deploys these vitalist elements against the modern ?spirit of technicity? in his attempt to combat the lack of substantial ideas in modern politics. However, Schmitt himself cannot escape a fundamental political relativism. There remains an unstable tension at the heart of his thought between the quest for substance and the quest for order. The latter is relativist because it is a (...) quest for order as such, any order. Although Schmitt's semantics of life and vitality is not drawn from a biological register, it adopted a völkisch meaning in 1933. Anti-Semitism becomes a form of life and racial homogeneity fills in for substance. The article concludes that, while there are good reasons for criticizing the modern ?spirit of technicity,? Schmitt's critical model is fundamentally flawed. (shrink)

While the concept of humanity is most often referred to as the moral source of the Responsibility to Protect’s motivational capacity, humanity’s normative status and value has continued to be left assumed and/or unexplored. Consequently, there remains a considerable lack of analysis into humanity’s role in supposedly helping to both locate moral harm and subsequently provide a motivational cause that can drive protection practices in support of the Responsibility to Protect principle. In response to this lacuna, this article puts forward (...) three hypotheses regarding the motivational role of humanity in this process: humanity functioning as a rhetorical tool with no motivational qualities, humanity as a concept that works to redefine sovereignty in support of the Responsibility to Protect and humanity as a motivating principle that ultimately diminishes in influence as the Responsibility to Protect principle is diffused into action. Through this analysis, the article offers a more rigorous and sy... (shrink)

The term “intellectual” is a French coinage that dates to the years preceding the Dreyfus affair. Nevertheless, the concept has a distinguished pedigree that can be traced back to Voltaire's heroic interventions under the ancien régime —most notably, the Calas affair—as well as Victor Hugo's vehement protests against Louis Bonaparte's petty caesarism. The first intellectuals were, as a rule, littérateurs . They were interlopers who relied on the renown they had accrued in their field of expertise to hazard moral pronouncements (...) about actualités or current events. By virtue of their literary or scientific prestige—or, to use a contemporary locution, their “cultural capital”—they hoped to shame the political authorities into rectifying a gross miscarriage of justice. As Jean-Paul Sartre once put it, intellectuals are “ those who involve themselves in matters that are none of their business .”. (shrink)

For the traditional legalistic discourse on the International Criminal Court, “politics” is a bête noire that compromises the independence of the Court and thus needs to be avoided and overcome. In response to this legalistic approach, a burgeoning body of literature insists that the Court does not exist and operate “beyond politics”, arguing that the ICC is an institution where law and politics are intimately connected. The present article seeks to contribute to this “non-traditional” literature by addressing two of its (...) fundamental weaknesses: First, writers of the “non-traditional camp” often present a rather limited view of “politics”; in particular, they have shied away from taking the radical step of portraying and analysing the ICC as a “political actor”. This undermines both its critical and constructive potential. Secondly, these commentators offer a simplistic explanation as to why “traditionalists” treat politics as the ICC’s bête noire: Traditionalists, they claim, are “legalists” with scant interest in and understanding of politics. By focusing on the ICC’s nature as a political actor, this article does not only paint a more nuanced picture of the ICC but also demonstrates the constructive potential of this understanding of the ICC to shed light on the so-called “peace versus justice dilemma”. And secondly, it demonstrates that precisely because the ICC is and ought to be a prudent political actor, it must officially disavow politics. The “noble lie” of disavowing politics, therefore, is a prudential strategy to avoid dangerous moral and political consequences and, ultimately, to secure the continued existence of the ICC itself. (shrink)

The aim of my article is to relate Roberto Esposito’s reflections on Europe to his more recent proposal of instituent thought. I will try to do so by focusing on three theoretical cornerstones of Esposito’s thought: the first concerns the evidence of a link between Europe, philosophy and politics. The second is deconstructive: it highlights the inadequacy of the answers of the most important contemporary ontological-political paradigms to the European crisis, as well as the impossibility of interpreting this crisis through (...) theoretical-political categories such as sovereignty. The third relates more directly to the proposal of a new political ontology, which Esposito defines as instituent thought. Esposito’s discussion of political theology is the central theoretical nucleus of this study. This discussion will focus, in particular, on the category of negation, from which any political ontology that is based on pure affirmativeness or absolute negation is criticized. In his opinion, philosophical theories developed on the basis of these assumptions have proved to be incomplete or ineffective in relation to the current European and global philosophical and political crisis. Esposito therefore perceives the urgent need to propose a line of thought that is neither negatively destituent, nor affirmatively constituent, but instituent, capable of thinking about order through conflict. Provided that we do not think of the institution statically–in a conservative sense–but dynamically, as constant instituting in which conflict can become an instrument of a politics increasingly inspired by justice. (shrink)

How is it possible, that after the exhilarating start of democratic transitions in the late 1980s and 1990s, today authoritarian–populist options seem to be emerging in many new, as well as old democracies? Why does populism, that in most of its historical varieties has been anti-institutional and anti-procedural, turn to constitution making and constitutional rhetorics as one of its main arenas of contestation? The answers to these questions are related. In the following, in the form of six theses, I start (...) with what I mean by ‘populism’. Next, I wish to point to the two deficits of liberal democracy that provides the context for the rise of populist politics. These deficits according to me have been intensified in many of the new democracies. I continue by stressing populisms own deficits as the reason for turning to the constituent power. I end with a consideration of what liberal democrats can do to address the causes of the populist temptation. (shrink)

Philosophers of education tend to mention Max Weber's social theory in passing, assuming its importance and presuming its comprehension, but few have paused to consider how Weber's social theory might consciously inform educational theory and research, and none have done so comprehensively. The aim of this article is to begin this inquiry through a pedagogical reading of Weber's social theory. The basis of my inquiry is Weber's claim in ‘Science as a Vocation’ that the moral purpose of scholarship is met (...) when it provides persons with ‘self-clarification’ and a ‘sense of responsibility’. Using this claim as guide, I make two arguments. First, I make the interpretive argument that Weber's descriptive social theory can be reconciled with his normative remarks about pedagogy. Second, I make the critical argument that Weber's conception of education not only withstands objections, but that it can also help us to discern blind-spots obscured by the objectors' intellectual positions. Ultimately, I conclude that Weber's social theory should influence educational scholars, particularly, by serving as a sober guide for persons who would do well to interrogate the purposes of their work in a time and place where the practice of education is stuck between two undesirable purposes, increasing bureaucratisation and charismatic reform. (shrink)

In Verfassungslehre, Carl Schmitt spells out the radical implications of his own analysis in Der Begriff des Politischen of the concept of the political. He argues in this respect that the political component of modern constitutions, which is suppressed by liberal thinking through its privilege of the rule of law, is the most important component of these constitutions. The political component refers essentially to the form of the political unity of a people. In showing the priority of the political component, (...) Schmitt inter alia insists on drawing a distinction between the constitution and constitutional laws, the resurrection of the concept of sovereignty, understanding equality as first of all and necessarily implying an inequality in respect of those who are excluded from the political unity, and on the subjection of freedom to the political component of the constitution. What would the implications be for constitutional theory if one were to take seriously Derrida’s deconstruction of Schmitt’s concept of the political in Politiques de l’amitié? This essay takes the first tentative steps in this direction, by exploring in detail Derrida’s analysis as well as the new structure of the political that comes to the fore in this text. (shrink)

Two fires are kindled at the threshold of the metaphysical era, and both are extinguished, almost simultaneously, as soon as metaphysics exhausts itself in its final Nietzschean inversion. The political reality of the twenty-first century is, as a whole, a comet tail of these ancient blazes that, until recently, seemed to be older than time itself, gave the impression of being eternal, undying, inextinguishable. How to find one's bearings among the cinders and ashes of what the flames consumed? How to (...) make sense—if make sense we must—of the burnt and smoldering remains,…. (shrink)