Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book. Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the (...) social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published. (shrink)

May's theorem famously shows that, in social decisions between two options, simple majority rule uniquely satisfies four appealing conditions. Although this result is often cited in support of majority rule, it has never been extended beyond decisions based on pairwise comparisons of options. We generalize May's theorem to many-option decisions where voters each cast one vote. Surprisingly, plurality rule uniquely satisfies May's conditions. This suggests a conditional defense of plurality rule: If a society's balloting procedure collects only a single vote (...) from each voter, then plurality rule is the uniquely compelling electoral procedure. To illustrate the conditional nature of this claim, we also identify a richer informational environment in which approval voting, not plurality rule, is supported by a May-style argument. (shrink)

This essay argues that human rights are a necessary condition for global democracy. Human rights constrain power, enable meaningful political agency, and support and promote democratic regimes within states, all of which are fundamental elements in any scheme for global democracy.

Goodhart does not advocate that democracy is a human right that should be protected and promoted as such, but reconceptualizes democracy itself as "human rights".

James Bohman’s account of what might be involved in thinking about ‘democracy across borders,’ and specifically of what might be involved in thinking about a potential shift from dêmos to dêmoi, compels both affirmation and resistance. His account is both elegant and sharply focussed: positive attributes that nevertheless affirm a very particular understanding of elegance, and a precise focus that manages to evade many considerations that might be considered important by people seeking to think about democracies and their futures in (...) many different situations. (Published: 5 February 2010) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2010, pp. 21-36. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v3i1.4851. (shrink)

In this critique of Michael Goodhart's "Human Rights and Global Democracy," Eva Erman argues that Goodhart has reconceptualized democracy and therefore does not offer a better understanding of the relationship between human rights and global democracy.

In his Democracy across borders, Bohman articulates an ambitious political proposal for a future international order. Perhaps its most salient feature is the promise of global democracy without a world government. Global democracy is usually associated with the ideal of a world community unified under a set of global democratic institutions. Fear of the totalitarian consequences that such a concentration of power would generate often leads even the staunchest cosmopolitans to limit their democratic aspirations to the national level and merely (...) hope for the progressive implementation of the rule of law at the global level. In his book, Bohman tries to break with the widespread assumption that an increase in democratization across national borders must be purchased at the price of a concentration of power that dangerously increases the potential for political domination. According to Bohman, this assumption is rooted in a narrow understanding of the democratic ideal - an understanding that needs to be replaced by a more complex one. (Published: 5 February 2010) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2010, pp. 13-19. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v3i1.4850. (shrink)

It is a special privilege for me to have my book, Democracy across borders, discussed by insightful critics, all of whom in one way or another have contributed to emerging thinking about democracy, globalization, and international institutions. But it is also a privilege to have it discussed in this particular journal, which I see as a very good example of a transnational (rather than international) space for reflection and communication on matters of global politics. It is transnational, at least in (...) part; not just because of what is discussed here, but also because of the norms that underlie its public form of communication: the norm of open access by which some of the barriers for the exercise of communicative freedom across borders are removed. Such communicative spaces did not exist even 10 years ago, although some people were already attempting to find new ways to realize communicative freedom. Other scholars may have objected that scholarly discussion should not be conducted this way, that it violated established norms of the profession and would always be marginal. However, those making such objections realized that the idea of open access would be potentially transformative, allowing the emergence of new publics and creating a dynamic process by which the norms of communicative freedom would be realized and strengthened by new institutions. Such a process might be described as transnationalization, a process that fills out the communicative infrastructure on which novel publics are based and through which they can reconstitute themselves for a variety of political purposes. (Published: 5 February 2010) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2010, pp. 71-84. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v3i1.4855. (shrink)