The article examines Quentin Skinner's influential interpretation of Machiavelli's views on liberty, and the sharp divergence between his methodological ideas and his actual practice. The paper explores how Skinner's political ideals directed his interpretation against his own methodological precepts, to offer a basis for a ‘revival’ of republican theory. Skinner's reinterpretation of Machiavelli as a theorist of negative liberty is examined, and refuted. The article analyses Skinner's claim about liberty as the key political value for Machiavelli, and demonstrates that liberty (...) is secondary to empire on the list of Machiavelli's priorities. Skinner's vocabulary and efforts to tone down or ignore Machiavelli's more aggressive ideas are closely examined. The analysis offered in the article, it is suggested, has wider implications, showing the difficulty of applying contextualism in practice, by the very founder of this approach in the history of ideas. (shrink)

In response to the environmental and political crisis that we currently face, new ways of thinking and acting that provide alternatives to the current operation of liberal democracy and capitalism...

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 1, Page 197-207, January 2022. Annelien de Dijn’s Freedom: An Unruly History is a rich and thought-provoking work in intellectual history, tracing thinking and debating about political freedom in the West from ancient Greece to our own times. The ancient notion of freedom as self-government is referred to as the ‘democratic conception’. The argument is that this conception survived through the renaissance, the early-modern period and the 18th-century Atlantic revolutions only to be (...) deliberately scrapped in the 19th century in favour of liberal freedom – absence of state interference – thus severing the ancient links between freedom and democracy and turning democracy into a threat to freedom. The book is an impressive achievement and the use of sources staggeringly wide. However, though the liberal turn is certainly a fact of history, I am not convinced that it was such a decisive break, nor that the relations between conceptions of freedom and attitudes to democracy are as clear-cut as de Dijn needs them to be. De Dijn claims, with regret, that the liberal view remains our view and is now an essential part of Western civilization, but I find that to be empirically under-substantiated. By using the liberal turn to define an age, de Dijn lets history play out through the lens of the elite. (shrink)

In On the People’s Terms, Philip Pettit incorporates the Sieyèsian notion of constituent power into his constitutional theory of non-domination. In this article, I argue that Emmanuel Sieyès’s understanding of liberty precludes such an appropriation. While a republican, his conceptualisation of liberty in the face of commercial society stood apart from theories of civic vigilance, preferring instead to disentangle individuals from politics and maximise what he understood to be their non-political freedoms. Sieyès saw that liberty was heightened through relations of (...) representation and commercial dependency. This conception of liberty was pivotal to the identity of the nation, and so allowed Sieyès to assess forms of collective injustice committed by the French nobility. It also provided the normative foundation of his theory of constituent power. For Sieyès, constituent power guarded against legislative excess in a decidedly minimal sense, intending instead to separate citizens from the political sphere so they were not burdened with ongoing participation or public vigilance. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship of pragmatism to the theory of deliberative democracy. It elaborates a dilemma in the latter theory, between its deliberative or epistemic and democratic or inclusive components, and distinguishes responses to this dilemma that are internal to the conception of deliberation employed from those that are external. The article goes on to identify two models of pragmatism and critically examines how well each one deals with the tension identified in deliberative democracy.

Este artículo tiene como objetivo analizar las menciones y usos que realiza Nicolás Maquiavelo de la figura de Moisés en Il principe y en los Discorsi. Maquiavelo realiza un particular tratamiento que es necesario seguir de cerca: es a partir de su análisis que podemos encontrar insumos para interrogar cómo operan los liderazgos en la obra maquiaveliana y cómo los líderes interactúan con el pueblo a través de un círculo pasional que se genera entre ambos. A estos efectos, procederemos en (...) este artículo del siguiente modo: en primer lugar, restableceremos secuencialmente las menciones a Moisés en la obra de Maquiavelo. Solo una vez proporcionada esta reconstrucción nos dirigiremos al tratamiento de los ejes temáticos que resultan relevantes -la ausencia de la religión en Moisés, la crueldad, la tensión entre virtud y fortuna, y la relación entre líder y pueblo- con el fin de pensar la innovación teórica que estos ejemplos ilustran. (shrink)

This article compares the ways in which Michel Foucault’s and Quentin Skinner’s historical analyses seek to unsettle the limits on present forms of freedom. We do so by comparing their ways of analysing discourse, rationality and agency. The two authors differ significantly in the ways they deal with these three phenomena. The most significant difference lies in their ways of addressing agency and its relationship to power. Notwithstanding these differences, the historical analyses of both authors seek to problematize the ways (...) in which past thoughts and practices limit contemporary forms of freedom. While Foucault seems to go furthest in this endeavour, a comparison may enrich both lines of historical analyses. (shrink)

Like many rights theorists, Peter Jones regards rights as lying outside politics and providing constraints upon it. However, he also concedes that rights are matters of reasonable disagreement and that, as a matter of fairness, disputes about them ought to be resolved democratically. In this paper I develop these concessions to argue that rights require democratic justification and that this can only be provided via a real democratic process in which those involved ?hear the other side?. I relate this argument (...) to the republican theory of non-domination, contending that it fits the Lockean project of regarding rights as constraints on arbitrary power better than liberal views that place rights outside the democratic process. I conclude by noting the implications of this argument for rights-based judicial review of legislation. (shrink)

Linguistic justice is about institutions distributing material and symbolic resources fairly when they are faced with linguistic diversity. However, no theory of linguistic justice has developed a systematic and comprehensive account of the moral dilemmas that take place in interpersonal linguistic relationships, in particular the power dynamics leading to (linguistic) domination. The aim of this article is to start building a general theory of linguistic domination, one that offers new conceptual tools for both empirical and normative analyses of linguistically diverse (...) societies. Using the republican tradition of thought, I argue that there is linguistic domination whenever someone is subject to the uncontrolled capacity for interference over their linguistic uses, ideology and acquisition by another agent. This article tests under what conditions this phenomenon takes place and the parties involved in it (both in terms of individuals and political institutions). (shrink)

RESUMEN Este trabajo pretende analizar el papel jugado por la ideología en lo que respecta al despliegue histórico de los derechos humanos, interrogándose sobre si dicho despliegue ha cumplido con una función eminentemente ideológica. La reflexión transcurrirá a través de la visión de dos pensadores que han mantenido una de las discusiones filosóficas contemporáneas más interesantes: Louis Althusser y Michel Foucault. En un primer momento, se esbozará la teoría althusseriana de la ideología, con el fin de sostener que los derechos (...) humanos han operado como un "aparato ideológico", interpelando al individuo desde un contexto inmanentemente capitalista. En un segundo momento, comprobaremos que Michel Foucault fue muy crítico con los planteamientos althusserianos. La noción de sujeto trascendental será crucial en dicha crítica, puesto que en la perspectiva foucaultiana nunca existen sujetos constituidos con anterioridad a las tramas de poder efectivas. En el análisis foucaultiano, la ideología dejará de ocupar un lugar esencial. Las aportaciones de Slavoj Žižek también resultarán, por cierto, determinantes en toda esta discusión. Finalmente, se trazarán algunas reflexiones criticas para pensar la posibilidad emancipadora de los derechos humanos en el mundo contemporáneo. ABSTRACT This paper intends to analyze the role played by ideology in regard to the historical implementation of human rights, questioning whether this implementation has fulfilled an eminently ideological function. The reflection will pass through the vision of two scholars who have held one of the most interesting contemporary philosophical discussions: Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. At first, the Althusserian theory of ideology will be outlined, in order to defend that human rights have operated as an "ideological apparatus", questioning the individual from an immanently capitalist context. Then, we will verify that Michel Foucault was very critical of the Althusserian approaches. The notion of a transcendental subject will be crucial in such criticism, since in the Foucaultian perspective there are never subjects that are constituted prior to effective dynamics of power. In Foucaultian analysis, ideology will no longer occupy an essential place. The contributions of Slavoj Žižek will also be, by the way, decisive throughout this discussion. Finally, some critical reflections will be drawn to think about the emancipatory possibility of human rights in the contemporary world. (shrink)

Political philosophy systematically explores the implications of our fundamental moral commitments in order to identify moral principles. These principles provide criteria for the evaluation of the...

La filosofía jurídico-política kantiana es —desde hace varios años— protagonista de primer nivel en los debates sobre la justicia, la propiedad y la pobreza. El renacimiento vino de la mano del trabajo de varios filósofos y juristas que, afortunadamente, se apartan de los incómodos y desacertados apodos que recibió Kant en la segunda mitad del siglo pasado: “Kant el político moralista”, “Kant liberal”, “Kant, el defensor de la propiedad privada exclusiva y excluyente”. Ha vuelto ahora con renovado y creciente interés, (...) el “Kant republicano”, luego de casi dos siglos de olvidos. No pretendo realizar una reseña de la abundante bibliografía de uno y otro período interpretativo —el del Kant liberal y el del Kant republicano—; el objetivo principal de este trabajo es recuperar algunas piezas del Kant republicano de la mano de la tradición republicana histórica que se inicia con Aristóteles y reaparece, con fuerza renovada, en algunos representantes modernos del derecho natural, siendo Kant uno de ellos. Comenzaré con una reseña acerca de lo que juzgo como la interpretación contemporánea más influyente sobre la justicia en Kant, la de John Rawls; para luego apuntar algunas tesis sobre el valor de la concepción kantiana de la justicia pública, entendida como el imprescindible correlato institucional del derecho a la libertad innata, el único derecho natural inalienable. (shrink)

This paper addresses republican conditions of legitimacy for the constitution of the civic statuses of migrants. It identifies two legitimacy tests to which any civic status is subject, namely, that it does not make its bearers more vulnerable to the arbitrary exercise of private or public power and that the constitution of the person as bearer of this status is not itself the product of an arbitrary exercise of public power . It is argued that R1 puts significant constraints on (...) what can be legitimate migrant statuses and R2 links republicanism to cosmopolitanism in terms of a basic norm in respect of the production and allocation of civic statuses in that those who are subject to such a regime should have the effective power to ‘shape and contest’ the rules of this regime. (shrink)

According to ‘global institutionalism,’ individuals who do not share a state have duties of justice to one another, and this is explained, in part, by the institutional connections that obtain between them. In this chapter, I defend this view against two challenges. First, I consider challenges raised by ‘non-institutionalists,’ who deny that facts about global institutional interaction bear on the nature of duties of justice that arise between particular individuals. Second, I address challenges posed by ‘domestic institutionalists,’ who accept the (...) claim that facts about institutional interaction bear upon the scope of justice but deny that the right sort of interaction necessary to ground duties of justice is found in the global domain. (shrink)

Ideologies are still very much in evidence, although some of their configurations are novel. Their denial typifies utopian and neutralist approaches, but those are instances of misrecognition. Liberal epistemology (as distinct from liberal theory) has contributed to an awareness of ideological diversity, but also to the possibility of choice among ideologies, as items of eclectic ? and occasionally inventive ? consumption. Pluralism may hence become fragmentation, albeit a constrained one. Liberalism also encourages uncertainty and multiple future paths, endorsing the impermanence (...) and non?doctrinaire nature of much contemporary political thinking. The mass media, social movements and networks, and popular political language have disseminated new vehicles and forms of ideology, and the notion of a ?post?ideological? age is itself a masking device. Ideologies mutate regularly, their boundaries are porous, and ideological delocalization is countered by cultural decentralization. Yet the fragility of particular ideological arrangements must not be confused with ideological fragility in general. (shrink)

Status inequalities seem to play a fairly big role in creating inequalities in health. This article assumes that there can be good reasons to fight status inequalities in order to reduce inequalities in health. It examines whether the neorepublican ideal of non-dominance does a better job as a theoretical foil for this as compared to a liberal notion of non-interference. The article concludes that there is a prima facie case for incorporating non-dominance into our thinking about public health, but that (...) it needs to go hand in hand with a more traditional liberal ideal of non-interference. (shrink)

This article offers a combined reading of Karl Löwith’s and Leo Strauss’s critique of social theory from the point of view of the natural law tradition broadly understood. Within the context of a growing interest in revisiting social theory’s debt to natural law, the piece seeks to unfold the connections between the two traditions without searching to restore any kind of natural law. Rather, it looks at their relationships as one of Aufhebung — the suspension and carrying forward — of (...) natural law premises within modern social theory. The works of these two writers point against conventional wisdom within social theory: Löwith’s secularization thesis calls into question the view of the irreligious nature of modernity’s historical break as well as its faith in immanent progress; Strauss’s reconstruction of natural law (right) gives due credit to the non-religious origins of modernity but at the price of withdrawing even more autonomy from any modern claim to self-assertion. Although some compatibility is recognizable in their critiques, I shall also be arguing that their substantive results point to opposite directions. A critical distance must also be maintained from their interpretations in the spirit of reinvigorating the project of modern social theory. (shrink)

While dominant management thinking is steered by profit maximisation, this paper proposes that sustained organisational growth can best be stimulated by attention to the common good and the capacity of corporate leaders to create commitment to the common good. The leadership thinking of Kautilya and Ashoka embodies this principle. Both offer a common good approach, emphasising the leader's moral and legal responsibility for people's welfare, the robust interaction between the business community and the state, and the importance of moral training (...) of leaders in identifying and promoting the common good. We argue that the complex process of re-orientating corporate priorities towards the common good requires alertness and concerted effort if both business and society are to truly benefit. As Ashoka said: ‘A good deed is a difficult thing’. (shrink)

This paper offers a brief account and defense of freely associated production as a political ideal. I discuss its conceptual structure, specifying what is meant by free association in terms of economic production, the sense in which it is a value for political order, and its approximate place in an historical lineage of reflection on freedom. Given that our economic arrangements are constitutively determined by law and public policy, and involve relations of governing power, the values that legal authority must (...) subserve bear directly on the productive sphere. One of those values – arguably the highest – is relational freedom. Reigning structures of production violate its demands. Without understanding the ways in which that violation occurs, we cannot effectively address some of our most urgent social crises. (shrink)

Republicanism is an approach within political theory that seeks to secure the values of political liberty and non-domination. Yet, in historical practice, early modern republics developed empires and secured their liberty through policies that dominated others. This contradiction presents challenges for how neo-Roman theorists understand ideals of liberty and political freedom. This article argues that the historical practices of slavery and empire developed concurrently with the normative ideals of republican liberty. Republican liberty does not arise in the absence of power (...) but is inherently connected to the exercise of power. (shrink)

Ecological sustainability is essential in order to ensure human flourishing and human freedom.1 There is a scientific consensus regarding the anthropogenic origin of the activities leading to diffe...

This paper responds to the focus issue on exemplarity that includes contributions by Kyle Lambelet, Brian Hamilton, and Gustavo Maya. The paper calls attention to ancient, medieval, and modern precedents that ought to inform our thinking about the ethical and political significance of exemplars.

Neste artigo o autor relaciona os pensamentos políticos de Locke e Sidney para defender que Locke não pode ser inserido na tradição republicana da qual os escritos de Sidney fazem parte. Isto porque: 1) inexiste na teoria política lockeana uma visão de que a virtude cívica seja o suporte para instituições livres, tal como existe na referida tradição evocada por Sidney; 2) Locke reconhece o fundamento constitucional da prerrogativa do rei, o que para os republicanos, Sidney entre eles, é incompatível (...) com a liberdade; 3) Locke retrata um povo excessivamente cordato e permissivo com o uso do poder por parte do governante, e também pouco disposto ao exercício do direito de resistência. Diferentemente, Sidney recorre à história para defender que os povos livres revelam as qualidades necessárias para conduzir essa resistência, já que o reconhecimento de que o governo de si mesmo e a resistência à tirania é uma questão de dignidade do homem como ser de liberdade. (shrink)

Are the rights, duties, and virtues of citizenship grounded exclusively in considerations of justice, or do some or all of them have other sources? This question is addressed by distinguishing three different accounts of the justification of these rights, duties, and virtues, namely, the justice account, the common-good account, and the equal-membership account. The common-good account is rejected on the grounds that it provides an implausible way of understanding what it is to act as a citizen. It is then argued (...) that the justice account and the equal-membership account provide complementary perspectives that differ in terms of the scope of the duties they ground: the latter offers an analysis of the duties that citizens proper (those with an unconditional right of residence and full political rights) owe to each other, whereas the former provides an analysis of the duties that those who are under the jurisdiction of the same state, whether fellow citizens or not, owe to each other. The article concludes by arguing that the distinction between the justice account and the equal-membership account cuts across the traditional one that is drawn between liberal and republican theories of citizenship. (shrink)

In recent years, political theorists have increasingly turned their attention to the past in search of conceptual renovation in the present. While recourse to the past has been a recurring thread throughout the history of political thought, the overlapping concern of recent scholarship has been to revisit seemingly exhausted political concepts with the aim of repurposing them for contemporary political challenges and realities. The three edited collections under review – Positive Freedom, Perfektionismus der Autonomie and Rethinking Liberty Before Liberalism – (...) are distinguished by their thoughtful attempts at retrieving and politicizing the concepts of positive freedom, post-Kantian perfectionism, and neo-Roman liberty in contemporary political thought. These retrievals present promising avenues for theoretical innovation, along with the ever-present risk of diminishing interpretive returns. (shrink)

I happened to be reading Andrew Peterson’s Civic Republicanism and Civic Education: The Education of Citizens in England on the weekend that the Queen’s Diamond.

ABSTRACT It used to be said that shame culture waned in early modernity, but there is a growing body of historiography on the vital role that recognition and the opinion of others continued to play. Honour mattered; for some it was the mark and the maker of your true self. While philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, Hume, Smith, and Rousseau disagreed in their evaluations of the phenomenon, they were united in thinking that the great engine of recognition whirred like furious (...) clockwork through human society. When one listens to voices from the margins of power, however, to formerly enslaved black women and men, and white women, one hears a different story – that the machine is broken. I argue that, albeit from incomparable positions, they articulate a theory of misrecognition in the face of systematic power. Sensitive to the entanglements of epistemology and naturalised inequality, they offer a politics of vision that deconstructs the punitive lenses of gender and race which render people invisible and misunderstood, and in so doing they try to write themselves into view. They offer an account of the mysterious intractability of hegemonic ways of seeing that poses a challenge to both the putatively laissez-faire economy of recognition of their enlightened contemporaries, and to the emancipatory teleology of modern recognition theorists. (shrink)

The paper begins by discussing the normative principles of the two main theoretical currents in public administration in our days: NewPublicManagement and NeoWeberianism. Both orientations are very influential, not only froma theoretical point of view, but also as blueprints for administrative reforms. The paper focuses on the differences between the two currents regarding normative principles: rational self-interest, in the case of New Public Management, and civic duty or altruism, in the case of NeoWeberianism. The paper discusses such normative principles or (...) normativemotivationswith some references to the history of political thought, particularly to Hegel’s criticism of Kant regarding the concept of the state and its relationships to the market. In a final section, the paper develops some proposals for institutional designs that could promote desinterested (altruistic) motivations among civil servants. The institutional designs materialize thus the idea of a positive ethics for public administration. (shrink)

Historians of philosophy are increasingly likely to emphasize the extent to which their work offers a pay‐off for philosophers of un‐historical or anti‐historical inclinations; but this defence is less familiar, and often seems less than self‐evident, to intellectual historians. This article examines this tendency, arguing that such arguments for the instrumental value of historical scholarship in philosophy are often more problematic than they at first appear. Using the relatively familiar case study of René Descartes' reading of his scholastic and Aristotelian (...) contemporaries, the article attempts to problematize this notion of pay‐off from an historian's perspective. (shrink)

This article addresses the question of how, if at all, citizens can sustain an effective sense of political belonging without sacrificing other sources of ethical identity. We begin with a critical analysis of Rousseau's classic considerations of politics and religion, which concludes that membership of a sub-political ethical community is incompatible with an effective sense of political belonging. This critique leads us to a consideration of the basic character of contemporary constitutional-democratic polities (drawing on the work of James Tully) and (...) of Waldron's account of the circumstances of politics. These considerations are developed into the claim that we can identify two sources of political belonging: recognition and acknowledgement - which correspond to two aspects of democratic citizenship: as status and as mode of being. On the basis of this claim, we argue that an effective sense of political belonging can be compatible with membership of sub-political ethical communities iff members of the political community are characterised by the majoritarian virtue of civic responsiveness and the minoritarian virtue of civic endurance. We sketch the character of these virtues and the relationship to one another in arguing that only the widespread presence of both kinds of virtue is sufficient to secure citizens' confidence in the polity and hence its stability. (shrink)