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)

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.

I start this paper by addressing Kant’s question why rightful interactions require both domestic public authorities (or states) and a global public authority? Of central importance are two issues: first, the identification of problems insoluble without public authorities, and second, why a domestic public monopoly on coercion can be rightfully established and maintained by coercive means while a global public monopoly on coercion cannot be established once and for all. In the second part of the paper, I address the nature (...) of the institutional structure of individual states and of the global authority. Crucial here, I argue, is Kant’s distinction between private and public right. Private right concerns rightful relations between individual legal subjects, where public right concerns their claims on their public institutions. I propose that the distinction between private and public right should be central to liberal critiques of current legal and political developments in the global sphere. (shrink)

Whether this satirical inscription on a Dutch innkeeper's sign upon which a burial ground was painted had for its object mankind in general, or the rulers of states in particular, who are insatiable of war, or merely the philosophers who dream this sweet dream, it is not for us to decide. But one condition the author of this essay wishes to lay down. The practical politician assumes the attitude of looking down with great self-satisfaction on the political theorist as a (...) pedant whose empty ideas in no way threaten the security of the state, inasmuch as the state must proceed on empirical principles; so the theorist is allowed to play his game without interference from the worldly-wise statesman. Such being his attitude, the practical politician — and this is the condition I make — should at least act consistently in the case of a conflict and not suspect some danger to the state in the political theorist's opinions which are ventured and publicly expressed without any ulterior purpose. By this clausula salvatoria the author desires formally and emphatically to deprecate herewith any malevolent interpretation which might be placed on his words. (shrink)

Kant divides moral duties into duties of virtue and duties of justice. Duties of virtue are imperfect duties, the fulfillment of which is left to agent discretion and so cannot be externally demanded of one. Duties of justice, while perfect, seem to be restricted to negative duties (of nondeception and noncoercion). It may seem then that Kant's moral philosophy cannot meet the demands of global justice. I argue, however, that Kantian justice when applied to the social and historical realities of (...) the world can generate positive duties to promote and provide for the well being of others. (shrink)

This book celebrates recent developments in the institutionalization and juridification of what it calls cosmopolitan norms. It treats genocide as a synecdoche for several new legislative and normative trends in human rights, especially in Europe. The book seeks to reclaim universalism for a post-metaphysical politics, but its reclamation is marked by traces of earlier universalisms that promise moral guidance from above to a wayward human world below. The author opens and closes these lectures by invoking Hannah Arendt, the democratic theorist (...) to whom she is very much indebted. Arendt was relentlessly insistent on the politicality of the trial. Through it, the still-new Israeli state sought its own legitimation as a nation state by casting itself as protector of international Jewry and seeker of justice for the crimes of the Holocaust. It is in this context that her other two criticisms, wrong charges and wrong setting, are significant. (shrink)

The theory of justice is one of the most intensely debated areas of contemporary philosophy. Most theories of justice, however, have only attained their high level of justification at great cost. By focusing on purely normative, abstract principles, they become detached from the sphere that constitutes their “field of application” - namely, social reality. Axel Honneth proposes a different approach. He seeks to derive the currently definitive criteria of social justice directly from the normative claims that have developed within Western (...) liberal democratic societies. These criteria and these claims together make up what he terms “democratic ethical life”: a system of morally legitimate norms that are not only legally anchored, but also institutionally established. Honneth justifies this far-reaching endeavour by demonstrating that all essential spheres of action in Western societies share a single feature, as they all claim to realize a specific aspect of individual freedom. In the spirit of Hegel’s _Philosophy of Right_ and guided by the theory of recognition, Honneth shows how principles of individual freedom are generated which constitute the standard of justice in various concrete social spheres: personal relationships, economic activity in the market, and the political public sphere. Honneth seeks thereby to realize a very ambitious aim: to renew the theory of justice as an analysis of society. (shrink)

ABSTRACT There are two traditions of immanent social critique. One of them, prominent in contemporary Frankfurt school critical theory, regards the immanence of critique as a quality of the standard employed. Such a conception of immanent critique needs to show, prior to the concrete practice of critique, how the standard is immanent in the object of critique. Showing this is the task of a “model of immanent critique.” The other tradition, going back to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and practiced in (...) particular by Dewey in his later works, regards the immanence of critique as the form of critical practice itself. Because such a conception of immanent critique does not, at the outset, ask how the standard is immanent to its object, it also does not need a model licensing critical practice. Indeed, it must be inherently hostile to any attempt at modeling immanent critique because the immanence lies in the power of critical practice to transform any models it applies. (shrink)

Benhabib examines one set of cosmopolitan norms determining a German Constitutional Court Case which denied long-term resident aliens voting privileges in local and district-wide elections, illuminating the “paradox of democratic legitimacy.”.

The article takes critiques of the entanglement of law with violence as a point of departure for exploring the possibility of a ‘tertium of law’. It thereby seeks to overcome the dichotomous basic assumptions that see law as always oscillating between an apology for violence on the one hand, and a utopia of reason on the other. The text analyses the possibility of this ‘tertium’, a ‘legal force’ beyond legal violence and legal reason, in four steps, drawing on the work (...) of Jacques Derrida and authors of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, in particular on Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. It argues that in a first step law needs to be dissociated from the State. The violence of law, however, does not stem solely from law’s ties with State power. Law itself is violent even where it is not State law. The second step of legal critique thus needs to consist in the commemoration of legal violence, followed by a third that demands the transformation of violence to force. These three instances of critique are the precondition for a last and essential step according to which a critique of law must facilitate the transcendence of legal violence by taking law and its promise of justice at its word in order to turn this promise against law itself. (shrink)

More and more human beings find themselves not sharing in the collective identity of their host countries, while enjoying certain rights and benefits as guest workers or permanent residents. The entitlement to social rights, which T. H. Marshall had considered the pinnacle of citizenship, has been dissociated from shared collective identity and political membership. This chapter begins by considering the disaggregation of citizenship; then, building on the promise of “jurisgenerative politics,” it develops the concept of “democratic iterations” as offering normative (...) and institutional solutions to the paradoxes of democratic legitimacy. Examining several cases from contemporary European debates concerning the rights of foreigners and immigrants, the chapter then illustrates processes of democratic iteration at work. Democratic iterations are complex ways of mediating the will- and opinion-formation of democratic majorities and cosmopolitan norms. In conclusion, the chapter discusses the ontological puzzles of cosmopolitan norms. (shrink)

At the center of much of this chapter's disagreement with Jeremy Waldron is interpreting Immanuel Kant's doctrine of jus cosmopoliticum, which can be rendered into English as “cosmopolitan right” or “cosmopolitan law.” Kant's doctrine of universal hospitality opens up a space of discourse. The discourse of hospitality moves from the language of morals to that of juridical right. No matter how limited in scope the right of hospitality may be, Kant's three articles of “Perpetual Peace,” taken together, articulate principles of (...) legal cosmopolitanism, according to which the individual is not only a moral being who is a member of a universal moral community but is also a person entitled to a certain status in a global civil society. Referring to “hospitality” as signifying all human rights claims that are cross-border in scope, may be more intelligible when viewed against the intentions of Kant's essay as a whole. (shrink)

Cosmopolitanism is attractive as a normative orientation, but the historical record of actual cosmopolitanisms, like that of practical universalisms more generally, is not encouraging. When they have not been merely empty, cosmopolitanisms' ostensibly universal values have too been often co-opted by dominant powers, making them into ideologies of domination. My question here is not whether but how to embrace cosmopolitanism so as to avoid these perversions. The key, I argue, is to focus on the processes through which their ostensibly universal (...) values are challenged and appropriated from below, in struggles against exclusion, domination and exploitation. This means understanding cosmopolitanism not as a plan, project or design, but as a process and practice of contestation. In order to be truly universalistic and inclusive, cosmopolitanism must be political and its politics must be contestatory. (shrink)

I am calling attention at the outset to Hegel’s procedure in interpreting the thought of others not to suggest that he simply failed to represent their views, but rather to indicate that he invariably sets them down in the midst of his own systematic idealism and judges them in accordance with the adequacy of their response to questions posed by his own position. One consequence of this approach is that Hegel views a philosophical position not primarily in terms of its (...) own unifying intention, but from the standpoint of the Idea and his own logic of the Notion plus the assumption that this logic is working itself out through the history of thought. If we apply this principle to his treatment of Kant, it becomes clear that the central point of Hegel’s critique must be that Kant failed to hold fast to the actuality of reason and the force of the Idea because he opted for the primacy of the understanding and its knowledge of finite reality over all speculative thought. In short, Kant was attacked for subordinating what Hegel made paramount. In this sense the ultimate validity of Hegel’s critique of Kant is made to depend on the viability of Hegel’s own system. (shrink)

Hegel's early philosophical essay demonstrates the need for a pure empiricism and complete formalism in scientific endeavor.

The general aim of this essay is to respond to Habermas and to reexamine the Hegelian idea that the issues of justification and application cannot really be separated. In what follows, I will review the similarities that Habermas acknowledges between discourse ethics and Kant's moral philosophy. Second, I will argue that the differences that Habermas sees between himself and Kant are inessential. Habermas' rethinking of the universalist project does not move it beyond Kant in any fundamental way. Finally, I will (...) argue that discourse ethics, despite Habermas' protests, is just as susceptible to Hegelian critique as Kant's moral philosophy. (shrink)