The precondition of any feminist politics – a usable category of ‘woman’ – has proved to be difficult to construct, even proposed to be impossible, given the ‘problem of exclusion’. This is the inevitable exclusion of at least some women, as their lives or experiences do not fit into the necessary and sufficient condition(s) that denotes group membership. In this paper, I propose that the problem of exclusion arises not because of inappropriate category membership criteria, but because (...) of the presumption that categories can only be organised by identity relations or shared properties among their members. This criterion of sameness as well as the characterisation of this exclusion as essentialism attests to a metaphysics that is not conducive to resistance and liberatory projects. Following a strain of hybrid thinking in feminist and post-colonial theory, I outline an alternative pluralist logic that confronts oppressive binaries that impede theory work in gender, sexuality, and race theory, and limit political action and resistance. The problem of exclusion is neither irresolvable nor is it essentialism. Instead it is a denial of subjectivity due to pseudodualistic self/Other dichotomies that can be resisted by adopting a new categorial logic. While this paper focuses on the specific problem of formulating a category of ‘woman’, it has implications for other areas of gender, critical race, and postcolonial theory. Rather than working toward an inclusive category founded on sameness, theorists need to develop independent and positive categories grounded in difference. Our current categorial logic does not permit such a project, and therefore a new metaphysics must be adopted. (shrink)

The debate on equality and non-discrimination is certainly not a new one, but the way it is incorporated in that on social exclusion leads to several shifts within the discourse on social justice. The term social exclusion is multidimensional although its western use in a selective way about markets promoting equality separates it from the Indian emphasis on social justice as linked to ending discrimination of dalit groups. The concept of social exclusion is inherently problematic as it (...) faces three major challenges in India: the first relates to the historical discrimination of certain groups and their exclusion; the second is about the political economy of the excluded; and the third questions the way in which equality responses are restricted within the framework of social exclusion. (shrink)

According to a recent interpretive orthodoxy, Spinoza is a profoundly democratic theorist of state authority. I reject this orthodoxy. To be sure, for Spinoza, a political order succeeds in proportion as it harnesses the power of the people within it. However, Spinoza shows that political inclusion is only one possible strategy to this end; equally if not more useful is political exclusion, so long as it maintains what I call the depoliticised acquiescence of those excluded.

The debate about justice in immigration seems somehow stagnated given that it seems justice requires both further exclusion and more porous borders. In the face of this, I propose to take a step back and to realize that the general problem of borders—to determine what kind of borders liberal democracies ought to have—gives rise to two particular problems: first, to justify exclusive control over the administration of borders (the problem of legitimacy of borders) and, second, to specify how this (...) control ought to be exercised (the problem of justice of borders). The literature has explored the second but ignored the first. Therefore, I propose a different approach to the ethics of immigration by focusing on concerns of legitimacy in a three-step framework: first, identifying the kind of authority or power that immigration controls exercise; second, redefining borders as international and domestic institutions that issue that kind of power; and finally, considering supranational institutions that redistribute the right to exclude among legitimate borders. (shrink)

The subject of this paper is the increasing success of the FPÖ, the Austrian Freedom Party commonly classified as a right-wing populist party. Analyzing the possible causes of this incremental success, I especially focus on the party’s communication strategy. My thesis is that the discursive strategy of the FPÖ revolves around the unwarranted identification of persons and practices depicted as a benevolent and salvific “we” artificially set against a malevolent and dangerous “they”. This identification is unwarranted because it lacks any (...) modulation of level and logical articulation. Once thus constructed, the discursive strategy of the FPÖ includes, on one hand, the irremediable conflict of “we” and “they” and, on the other, the equalisation of “they”, so as to construct networks of guilty complicity among all subjects extraneous to the “we” represented through the leader’s will. (shrink)

The theoretical underpinnings of public international law have taken the sovereign status of the nation-state for granted since the beginning of the modern era. After centuries of evolution in legal and political thought, the state's definition as a bounded territorial unit has been strictly codified. The legal development of the nation-state was an ideological project informed by extra-legal considerations. Additionally, the ever-narrowing scope of the juridical idea of sovereignty functioned as a boundary mechanism instrumental in colonising Africa and other (...) regions. While international law claims universal liberalism today, the current system based on sovereign nation-states represents not social inclusion but fierce and dangerous exclusion. -/- The central thesis of this book is that the development of legal sovereignty was, rather than part of the modernist progress narrative, a historically contingent evolutionary regression. While other social systems such as economics and science became globalised, politics and law counterintuitively became more territorialised. It is argued that the nation-state today is not only anachronistic but is dangerously ill-equipped for facing international problems such as the climate crisis or global pandemics. Finally, it also leaves African states and many other formerly-colonised territories at a particular disadvantage by regulating their political practices into a predefined mould. (shrink)

When we participate in political debate or protests, we are judged by how we look, which clothes we wear, by our skin colour, gender and body language. This results in exclusions and limits our freedom of expression. The Politics of Becoming explores radical democratic acts of disidentification to counter this problem. Anonymity in masked protest, graffiti, and online de-bate interrupts our everyday identities. This allows us to live our multiple selves. In the digital age, anonymity becomes an inherent part (...) of everyday communication. Through our smart devices we express our selves differently. As cyborgs, our identities are disrupted and reassembled. We curate self-representations on social media, create avatars, share selfies and choose the skin colour of our emojis. The Politics of Becoming encourages us to engage in a revolution of the self. Democratic pluralism is not only a matter of institutional design but also about how we express our identities. Inner revolutions change our personal realities and plant a seed for democratic futures. (shrink)

Human nature is a concept that transgresses the boundary between science and society and between fact and value. It is as much a political concept as it is a scientific one. This chapter will cover the politics of human nature by using evidence from history, anthropology and social psychology. The aim is to show that an important political function of the vernacular concept of human nature is social demarcation (inclusion/exclusion): it is involved in regulating who is ‘us’ (...) and who is ‘them.’ It is a folk concept that is used for dehumanization, for denying (a) membership in humankind or (b) full humanness to certain people in order to include or exclude them from various forms of politically relevant aspects of human life, such as rights, power, etc. (shrink)

Despite widespread recognition of an emergent politics of data in our midst, we strikingly lack a political theory of data. We readily acknowledge the presence of data across our political lives, but we often do not know how to conceptualize the politics of all those data points—the forms of power they constitute and the kinds of political subjects they implicate. Recent work in numerous academic disciplines is evidence of the first steps toward a political theory of (...) data. This article maps some limits of this emergent literature with an eye to enriching its theoretical range. The literature on data politics, both within political theory and elsewhere, has thus far focused almost exclusively on the algorithm. This article locates a further dimension of data politics in the work of formatting technology or, more simply, formats. Formats are simultaneously conceptual and technical in the ways they define what can even count as data, and by extension who can count as data and how they can count. A focus on formats is of theoretical value because it provides a bridge between work on the conceptual contours of categories and the technology-centric literature on algorithms that tends to ignore the more conceptual dimensions of data technology. The political insight enabled by format theory is shown in the context of an extended interrogation of the politics of racialized redlining. (shrink)

This essay contributes to developing a new approach to political legitimacy by asking what is involved in judging the legitimacy of a regime from a practical point of view. It is focused on one aspect of this question: the role of identity in such judgment. I examine three ways of understanding the significance of identity for political legitimacy: the foundational, associative, and agonistic picture. Neither view, I claim, persuasively captures the dilemmas of judgment in the face of disagreement (...) and uncertainty about who “I” am and who “we” are. I then propose a composite, pragmatic picture. This view casts the question of political legitimacy as an existential predicament: it is fundamentally a question about who you are—both as a person and as a member of collectives. The pragmatic picture integrates rational, prudential, and ethical qualities of good judgment that were heretofore associated with mutually exclusive ways of theorizing legitimacy. It also implies that the question of legitimacy cannot be resolved philosophically. (shrink)

Although conceptually distinct, ‘ time ’ and ‘community’ are multiply intertwined within a myriad of key debates in both the social sciences and the humanities. Even so, the role of conceptions of time in social practices of inclusion and exclusion has yet to achieve the prominence of other key analytical categories such as identity and space. This article seeks to contribute to the development of this field by highlighting the importance of thinking time and community together through the lens (...) of political apologies. Often ostensibly offered in order to re-articulate both the constitution of ‘the community’ and its future direction, official apologies are prime examples of deliberate attempts to intervene in shared understandings of political community and its temporality. Offering a detailed case study of one of these apologies, I will focus on Australian debates over the removal of indigenous children from their families, known as the Stolen Generations, and examine the temporal dimensions of the different responses offered by former prime ministers John Howard and Kevin Rudd. (shrink)

This article explores the relation between biological life and political life, placing it in the context of the ancient Greek distinction between the life of the home and the realm of politics. In contrast with the oikos, the life of the polis was characterized by attempts to exclude from its sphere both the constraints of necessity that oblige human action to conform to the exigencies of survival as well as the violence that accompanies this pursuit. Although this exclusion (...) has never been successful, the question of how to achieve it lies at the heart of the oldest philosophical reflections on politics and, in a more concealed fashion, remains central to our political concerns today. Invoking the work of Giorgio Agamben, this article explores the earliest discussions concerning the question “what is political life?” to show why so much depends upon how we answer this question. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to consider whether it is permissible for a liberal democratic state to deny anti-liberal-democratic citizens and groups the right to run for parliament. My answer to this question is twofold. On the one hand, I will argue that it is, in principle, permissible for liberal democratic states to deny anti-liberal-democratic citizens and groups the right to run for parliament. On the other hand, I will argue that it is rarely wise (or prudent) for ripe (...) democracies to exclude anti-liberal-democrats from parliamentary elections. There are at least two reasons for this. The first is related to the inherent stability of just institutions. The second is that exclusion can lead to group polarization and enclave deliberation that can engender political extremism and impair processes of interpersonal and intrapersonal deliberation in liberal democracies. (shrink)

The purpose of this dissertation is to design a conception of political poverty that can address the loss of the experience of political freedom. This form of political poverty is described as separate from poverty of resources and opportunities, and poverty of capabilities required for participation. The study aims to make intelligible how a person or a group can suffer from a diminishing and fracturing of social experience, which can lead to the inability to experience oneself as (...) a capable and credible political agent, political engagement as a meaningful field of action, and democratic politics as a meaningful avenue for changing things for the better. This is a phenomenon which has been heretofore neglected by political theorists. -/- The study presents a heuristic diagnosis of political poverty as loss of experiential freedom that involves four aspects of experience that have specifically political relevance: loss of trust, loss of expressivity, loss of a sense of access to the public world, and the loss of future temporality in experience. Diminishing and fracturing of these aspects of social experience can lead to politically impoverished persons and groups to become complicit in their own marginalisation by remaining unmotivated to challenge it. These aspects of social experience are approached through phenomenological portraits, chosen from literature on social exclusion and poverty. The diagnosis remains open to further development through exploration of other aspects of experience. -/- The study draws on the thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hannah Arendt to present an account of political freedom as only experienced in co-existence with others. Through a critical discussion of their work, a more comprehensive account of political agency is developed. The experience of having political agency involves not just the cognitive and communicative capacities of the subject, but also the entire perceptual and motor intentionality of their lived body. The experience of meaningfulness is approached by exploring the intersubjective constitution of the self in a dialectical process with their social environment. This experience is described as a form of faith in oneself as an agent and in the meaningfulness of political engagement. Such faith is a practical, meaning-giving intentional relationship of a lived body to their social environment. -/- This study emphasizes the experience of being a capable and credible political agent, and experiencing politics as a meaningful field for engagement, as important aspects of political freedom that should be considered alongside inclusivity of democratic processes, the equality of opportunity to participate, and the equality of the cognitive and communicative capabilities required for effective participation. In order to discuss political poverty as the loss of experiential freedom, we must go beyond objectivist models of social critique and approach the problem with the tools of existential phenomenology. (shrink)

In recent years, the growing number of persons to whom basic human rights have been explicitly denied—stateless persons, refugees, undocumented workers, sans papiers and unlawful combatants—has evidenced the logic of contemporary nation-state politics. According to this logic, the state defines itself by virtue of what it excludes while what is excluded is given no other recourse than the state for its protection. Hannah Arendt elucidates this logic when she observes that the stateless and the refugee can only be recognized as (...) human beings when they have already been recognized as citizens. Their appeal to human rights for protection was fruitless because they needed to have citizen rights, the recognition of a government, or of other citizens who can appeal to that government, in order to invoke these rights. In the terms Arendt uses to name political action, one needs to be seen and heard already, the privileges of those who are citizens, in order to appeal to be seen and heard. Just as political life (bios), in order to be free, was only possible once the necessities were accounted for in natural life (zoē), so citizenship is recognized to the exclusion of the non-citizen, that is, the merely human. -/- . (shrink)

Calvin was a man of the Church so his political doctrine stems from his ecclesiology, in response to both the Papal doctrine on the delegate power of the magistrates, and the Lutheran subordination of the Church to the civil authorities. He was not concerned with discussing the best possible regime, but rather with preparing a theological justification of civil power that would make it depend exclusively on God, not on the people. I will hold that Calvin states the people’s (...) function is merely instrumental: they accept the authority chosen by God, but do not institute it. The only really relevant element is that both political vocation and the transmission of power that is indispensable to it, derive uniquely and exclusively from God. The discrepancies apparent in different authors’ interpretations can be clarified by recovering the context of his argumentation. This is the objective of this article. (shrink)

Public justification in political liberalism is often conceptualized in light of Rawls’s view of its role in a hypothetical well-ordered society as an ideal or idealizing form of justification that applies a putatively reasonable conception of political justice to political matters. But Rawls implicates a different idea of public justification in his doctrine of general reflective equilibrium. The paper engages this second, more fundamental idea. Public justification in this second sense is actualist and fundamental. It is actualist (...) in that it fully enfranchises actual reasonable citizens. It is fundamental in that political liberalism qualifies conceptions of political justice as reasonable to begin with only if they can be accepted coherently by actual reasonable citizens. Together, these features invite the long-standing concern that actualist political liberalism is objectionably exclusionary. I argue that the exclusion objection, while plausible, is more problematic in own right than it seems if actualist and fundamental public justification hypotheticalizes and discursive respect is compatible with substantive discursive inequality. This leaves proponents and critics of political liberalism with deeper questions about the nature of permissible discursive inequality in public justification. (shrink)

Whatever the merits idealized liberal accounts of citizenship education may have in the seminar room, in this essay I argue that they are both unpersuasive and ineffectual. This is the case, because they are insufficiently attentive to the empirical realities, first (a) with respect to how real – versus imaginary – school systems function; and second, (b) with respect to the broader political context in which citizenship education policies are implemented. Because so much is already known about the former, (...) I devote more attention in this essay to the latter. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate why anorexia nervosa emerged in non-Western nations after Western globalization efforts. Using Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of gender from The Second Sex alongside Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of the “docile body,” I argue that the emergence of anorexia nervosa in non-Western nations reflects the Western sovereign’s subordination of women. While patriarchal oppression is not exclusive to the West, I contend that the political ideology behind Western industrialization has allowed new avenues for patriarchal oppression to permeate. (...) To conclude, I demand that mainstream discourse on anorexia nervosa consider the political conditions which are catalytic to its occurrence. (shrink)

Does the recent success of Podemos and Syriza herald a new era of inclusive, egalitarian left populism? Because leaders of both parties are former students of Ernesto Laclau and cite his account of populism as guiding their political practice, this essay considers whether his theory supports hope for a new kind of populism. For Laclau, the essence of populism is an “empty signifier” that provides a means by which anyone can identify with the people as a whole. However, the (...) concept of the empty signifier is not as neutral as he assumes. As I show by analyzing the role of race in his theory, some subjects are constituted in a way that prevents their unmediated identification with the people. Consequently, Laclau’s view should be read as symptomatic of the problems with populist logic if its adherents are to avoid reproducing its exclusions and practice a more inclusive politics. (shrink)

In Toleranz im Konflikt and in other works the German philosopher Rainer Forst presents an intricate interpretation of tolerance as a moral-political virtue. His aim is to resolve many of the well-known paradoxes by distinguishing different components of tolerance and distinguishing the reasons that we may have for objecting, accepting or rejecting certain practices and views. Good ethical reasons for objecting to certain practices and views do not morally justify their suppression by legal means and state power. In this (...) way Forst connects his inclusive analysis of tolerance, with both his account of the contexts of justification and his defense of what he calls the moral right to justification. In his critical discussion Tim Heysse sounds the political implications of this analysis of tolerance. He criticizes its exclusive focus on political and legal power and its corresponding neglect of social power. However, he also calls attention to the fact that Forst’s analysis has the merit of revealing tolerance as a potential source of political conflict in society. (shrink)

The article provides a focused overview of the recent debates in political philosophy on the role of religious arguments (as reasons for action) in liberal democracy, as well as a preliminary defence of a particular approach to the issue. Drawing on Christopher Eberle’s typology, we distinguish three main camps – Justificatory Liberalism, basing its advocacy of a “doctrine of religious restraint” on Rawls’s account of public justification; its Liberal Critics, embracing a wholly permissive position vis-à-vis religious arguments in the (...) public sphere; and New Traditionalism, which assigns priority to the religious rationale. The article deals in more detail with the exchange between the first two camps. Upon considering their strengths and weaknesses, we argue for a more robust “third way” between exclusion from and unqualified inclusion of religious arguments in public debates in liberal democracy. Inspired by the work of Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier, we the outline in the closing sections a framework of such “minimal justificatory liberalism” that steers clear of several errors shared by both the defenders and the critics of justificatory liberalism. (shrink)

This year's book award committee reviewed thirty nominated books. We identified seven finalists, each well worth our special attention: Milton Fisk's impressive Towards a Healthy Society, Gary Francione's feisty Introduction to Animal Rights, Timothy Gaffaney's engaging Freedom for the Poor, David Ingram's historically insightful Group Rights, Rachel Roth's poignant Making Women Pay, Karen Warren's finely articulated Ecofeminist Philosophy, and the eventual winning entry, Phillip Cole's Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration. We're here today to discuss this (...) important book. (shrink)

Abstract According to Aristotle, human beings are by nature political animals. It is now common knowledge that being political is not a human privilege for him: bees, wasps, ants and cranes are other political species. Although they are not the only political animals, human beings, for Aristotle, are still more political than the other political animals. The present article investigates the precise sense of this comparison; and it claims that the higher degree of human (...) politicalness is not to be explained by reference to those exclusively human features like having capacity for speech and moral perception. It is claimed that human beings are more political rather because they live in a multiplicity of communities differing in form. -/- . (shrink)

I use critical phenomenological resources in Tetsurō Watsuji and Sarah Ahmed to explore the spatial origin of some social impairments in Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). I argue that a critical phenomenological perspective puts pressure on the idea that social impairments in ASD are exclusively (or even primarily) neurocognitive deficits that can be addressed by focusing on cognitive factors internal to the autistic person — for example, training them to adopt a more neurotypical approach to social cognition. Instead, I argue that (...) the structure and character of some neurotypical spaces may play a regulative role in shaping aspects of at least some of the social impairments autistic people exhibit when they inhabit these spaces. I also briefly consider some possible therapeutic applications of this critical phenomenological approach. (shrink)

What kind of rhetoric frames French reproductive policy debate? Who does such policies exclude? Through an examination of the “American import” of gender studies, along with an analysis of France’s Catholic heritage and secular politics, I argue that an unwavering belief in sexual difference as the foundation of French society defines the productive reproductive citizen. Sylviane Agacinski is perhaps the most vocal public philosopher who has framed the terms of reproductive policy debate in France, building an oppositional platform to reproductive (...) technology around anthropological assertions of sexual difference. This paper engages with Agacinski to examine rhetorical claims of sexual difference and how such claims delayed passage of France’s revised bioethics legislation that extends access of assisted reproductive technology (ART) to “all women.” Though the “PMA pour toutes” [ART for all women] legislation was eventually passed, such rhetoric motivated the explicit exclusion of all trans person from its extension, thus hardly permitting ART to all women. (shrink)

Spinoza rarely refers to art. However, there are extensive resources for a Spinozist aesthetics in his discussion of health in the Ethics and of social affects in his political works. There have been recently been a few essays linking Spinoza and art, but this essay additionally fuses Spinoza’s politics to an affective aesthetics. Spinoza’s statements that art makes us healthier (Ethics 4p54Sch; Emendation section 17) form the foundation of an aesthetics. In Spinoza’s definition, “health” is caused by external objects (...) that maintain our power to act in a variety of ways. Humans need such objects because our complex bodies constantly lose or consume many parts necessary to our overall functioning. Notably, Spinoza defines humans’ bodies through this complexity (2p13Sch), so health as maintenance of complexity is a distinctly human endeavor. Further, while art is not the only healthy activity, I argue that art is a particularly potent cure, which explains Spinoza’s otherwise opaque comment that music can cure melancholy (by which he meant a near-total inability to act, akin to death). Rather than only causing frivolous pleasures, art may be as essential to human flourishing as are other human beings in general; other people are “most useful” because of the variety of actions they make possible (4p35Cor & Sch1). Art’s production of a dizzying variety of affects is likewise most useful for health. -/- Having established how art in general affects the individual, I then explain the role of artists in shaping social groups. Artists use vivid and highly charged affective techniques, as do political sovereigns and religious prophets (TTP chapters 1-2 & 15-16). However, sovereigns and prophets are concerned exclusively with “morality,” defined by Spinoza as the use of affects (primarily based on fear and hope) to produce “obedience” in the generic multitude or people at large. An artist, however, rarely causes affects in the whole nation, affecting instead only a smaller niche or “sub-genre” of people. The affects produced in this group are also not identical to those used by sovereigns, since artists do not primarily deploy sad affects of hope and fear but instead use a wide variety of joyful affects. Further, in Spinoza’s analysis of ceremonies (TTP chapter 5), we see how small groups exposed to repeated ceremonies or social practices eventually develop new strengths which they lacked before. Repeated exposure to shared aesthetic “ceremonies” (e.g., live music performances) of the same sub-genre will over time create the capacity of new powers in the sub-genre of people, which distinguishes them from the masses. Spinoza says sovereigns forge a “second nature” for the generic people through affects; we can then affirm that smaller groups exposed to a distinct sub-genre of art can acquire a new “third nature” which will contain unique powers extending beyond healthy maintenance of their existing bodies. That is, art in general is necessary to flourish and remain whole (maintaining health), but it can also occasionally expand what one is to unforeseen heights (through specific artistic sub-genres). (shrink)

In this article I use Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology as a method for presenting a disclosing critique of aphonia as the loss of a political voice of one’s own. I claim that aphonia is a phenomenon that is qualitatively different from a lack of opportunities for democratic participation and a lack of the communicative capabilities required for effective political participation. I give examples from sociological literature on social exclusion and political apathy, and then diagnose them using (...) Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of operative intentionality and the lived body. A picture emerges of aphonia as the diminishing of the expressive modality of the lived body. This can lead to the inability to perceive oneself as a capable public speaker and the public realm as a welcoming field of possibilities for political engagement. I propose that democratic theory should consider the way that the negative social experiences of social marginalization can diminish, or even completely take away, the capability to authentically give a voice to one’s experiences in public on one’s own terms. I conclude with a call for grass-roots alternatives towards engendering political participation among marginalized groups through a “therapeutic” approach to political inclusion. (shrink)

The paper deals with the methodological clash between idealism and anti-idealism in political philosophy, and highlights its importance for public reason (PR) and public justification (PJ) theorising. Upon reviewing the broader context which harks back to Rawls’s notion of a realistic utopia, we focus on two major recent contributions to the debate in the work of David Estlund (the prototypical utopian) and Gerald Gaus (the cautious anti-utopian). While Estlund presents a powerful case on behalf of ideal theorising, claiming that (...) motivational incapacity and other non-ideal features of “human nature” – the so-called bad facts – do not normally refute the desirability of highly utopian theories of justice, we show that Gaus is correct in stressing the importance of feasibility considerations, including empirical knowledge about human societies. Because moral disagreement is to be expected even among cognitively and morally excellent reasoners, we argue that Estlund’s search for Truth about justice must idealise away normative diversity as just another bad fact. This methodological dispute has important ramifications for current debates about PR and PJ as the grounds of liberal legitimacy. Because consensual approaches rely on strong idealisation which results in exclusion of numerous comprehensive doctrines from consideration, we conclude that convergence-based liberal political theory has distinct advantage as regards exploiting normative diversity to the advantage of everyone. (shrink)

This qualitative research aims to explore and unravel the theory of natural law within its Greek context and its influence on political thought, particularly addressing the need to counteract the damages of tyranny and the cyclical succession of regimes, as articulated by Plato. This study reveals that the concept of natural law predates Stoics and it is rooted within the pre-Socratic natural philosophy. The study exposes that Aristotelian ethics and politics are rooted in the concept of natural law, ultimately (...) giving rise to the Aristotelian "mixed form of government" and laying the groundwork for republicanism. In extending this inquiry, I attempt to identify a parallel argument in ancient Iran, investigating the presence of natural law and its impact on the political landscape. The concept of natural law, emphasizing the alignment of social and political affairs with nature's rules, played a significant role in shaping the Indo-Iranian communities. The Sanskrit term rta and its Avestan equivalent, Aša, denote this foundational concept. However, the ascendancy of Zoroastrianism and its new theology led to the consolidation of all Indo-Iranian gods into the singular omnipotent deity, Ahura Mazdā. Ahura Mazdā, along with its prophet Zaraθuštra, possessed the authority to govern both earthly life and the afterlife. The exclusive attributes of Ahu and Ratu empowered God and its messenger to formulate and enact laws ensuring a place in heaven. Consequently, Divine Law and positive law became intricately intertwined within a unified legal framework. This divine law, sanctioned by God and enforced by the King, diverges from the Greek perspective, particularly that of Aristotle, where tyranny is seen as a deviation from the ideal political order. In the Iranian context, tyranny is synonymous with God's representation, sharing the holiness and regal attributes of a King, who, in the Iranian and Avestan sense, enjoys God's blessing as Xvarənah or Faer-e Izadi. The intertwining of law and authority of the King precludes the possibility of an independent legal sovereignty apart from the King’s authority. The monotheistic tenets of Zaraθuštra’s religion, officially established in the 4th century AD as the Religion of the State, solidify this integrated system. Consequently, the coexistence of republicanism or any mixed form of government within Iran becomes unattainable under the influence of this monotheistic doctrine. (shrink)

Many philosophers of music, especially within the analytic tradition, are essentialists with respect to musical experience. That is, they view their goal as that of isolating the essential set of features constitutive of the experience of music, qua music. Toward this end, they eliminate every element that would appear to be unnecessary for one to experience music as such. In doing so, they limit their analysis to the experience of a silent, motionless individual who listens with rapt attention to the (...) sounds produced by either musicians a on stage, a stereo, or a portable device. This approach is illustrated in recent work by Nick Zangwill. Drawing on essentialist assumptions, Zangwill concludes that properly musical experience is effectively disembodied and radically private. While this seems plausible when we consider the essentialists’ paradigm case, Zangwill’s conclusion seems odd once we consider the wide variety of ways that people experience music. One’s body and social situation seem ineluctably enmeshed within the experience of, e.g., hot jazz played in a nightclub, where listeners bob their heads and dance to the music, cheer on the musicians, and socialize with their fellow concertgoers. The question this paper aims to answer is: should we consider this and similar experiences of music properly “musical”? I maintain that we should. Far from the world of pure music that Zangwill and others relegate properly musical experience, I conclude that our musical experiences are fully enmeshed within the somatic, affective, and interpersonal dimensions of human life. (shrink)

This paper challenges the first Gettier counterexample to the tripartite account of knowledge. Noting that 'the man who will get the job' is a description and invoking Donnellan's distinction between their 'referential' and 'attributive' uses, I argue that Smith does not actually believe that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. Smith's ignorance about who will get the job shows that the belief cannot be understood referentially, his ignorance of the coins in his pocket (...) shows that it cannot be understood attributively. An explanation for why Smith appeared to have justified true belief is given by distinguishing between 'belief' and 'belief in truth'. Smith believes the sentence 'the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket' to be true (he mistakenly believes that Jones will get the job, of whom he knows that he has ten coins in his pocket) (hence his 'belief'), the sentence is true (hence 'truth'), and he has sufficient reason to assent to it (hence his 'justification'). But he does not believe the proposition expressed. Hence he does not know it either. (shrink)

One of the most basic questions facing democratic theory is who ought to be included in political participation. Most recent discussions of this question have focused on the wrongful exclusion of those who ought to be included. Less attention has been paid to the question of whether political participation can be objectionably over-inclusive. Robert Dahl insists that it can; a claim to inclusion, he writes, “cannot be justified if it is advanced by persons whose interests are not (...) significantly affected by the decisions of that unit.” This essay is a moral defense of what Dahl would consider political over-inclusion, of empowering those entirely unaffected by a given political decision to participate in the making of that decision. My argument is not that the unaffected have a right to participate or that they are somehow wronged by political exclusion in a manner analogous to how the affected may be wronged when excluded. What matters morally is not what a proper resolution to a specific political conflict will do for the unaffected—by definition, it can do nothing for them. What matters is what the inclusion of the unaffected can do to improve the quality of the decision being made, and hence to benefit those affected by this decision. My focus will be on one particular manner in which the inclusion of the unaffected can improve political decision-making: namely, by increasing impartiality. As I argue in the first section of this essay, whereas the affected can only possess what I call “artificial impartiality,” the unaffected possess what I call “natural impartiality.” . (shrink)

Niepełnosprawność jest jedn¸a} z cech różnicuj¸a}cych jednostki i grupy we współczesnych społeczeństwach. Osoby o ograniczonej sprawności fizycznej, poznawczej i psychicznej s¸a} szczególnie narażone na dyskryminacjȩ oraz wykluczenie społeczne, gospodarcze i polityczne. Co istotne kwestia socjalna osób niepełnosprawnych na pocz¸a}tku XXI wieku zmienia siȩ wchodz¸ac w relacjȩ z procesem starzenia siȩ ludności. Artykuł ma na celu przybliżenie wybranych teoretycznych koncepcji działań na rzecz poprawy wizerunku niepełnosprawności i ograniczania barier doświadczanych przez osoby niepełnosprawne w dostȩpie do różnego rodzaju zasobów, przestrzeni i szans. (...) Krytyczna analiza literatury przedmiotu obejmuje wskazanie cech koncepcji polityki aktywizacji oraz zasad i celów polityki społecznej w holistycznym paradygmacie normalizacji. Podsumowanie zawiera możliwe dalsze kierunki badań i analiz. ** Disability is one of the features that differentiate individuals and groups in modern societies. People with reduced physical, cognitive and psychological efficiency are particularly exposed to discrimination and social, economic and political exclusion. What’s important social issue of people with disabilities in the early 21st century changes by entering into a relationship with the ageing of the population. Article aims to introduce some theoretical concepts efforts to improve the image of disability and reduce the barriers faced by persons with disabilities in access to different kinds of resources, spaces and opportunities. A critical analysis of the literature includes: description of the concept of activation policy as well as principles and objectives of social policy in a holistic paradigm of normalization. This summary contains possible future directions of research and analysis. (shrink)

How political communities should be constituted is at the center of Hannah Arendt’s engagement with two ancient sources of law: the Greek nomos and the Roman lex. Recent scholarship suggests that Arendt treats nomos as imperative and exclusive while lex has a relationship-establishing dimension and that for an inclusive form of polity, she favors lex over nomos. This article argues, however, that Arendt’s appreciation occurs within a general context of more reservations about Rome than Roman-centric interpretations admit. Her writings (...) show that lex could not accommodate the agonistic spirit and Homeric impartiality that helped the Greeks achieve human greatness and surpassing excellence. Arendt also points out that Roman peace alliances occurred at the expense of disclosive competition among equals and assumed some form of domination. Indeed, although Arendt appreciates lex’s relationship-establishing aspect, she is undoubtedly critical of anti-political practices accompanying lex, manifested when the Romans required enemies’ submission to terms of peace the Romans themselves set. In the end, Arendt’s statements regarding nomos and lex highlight the fundamental challenge in free politics: balancing the internal demand of agonistic action with the external need to expand lasting ties. (shrink)

Identity politics is subject to similar critiques in contemporary public debate and political theory. A central topos of this critique is that identity politics is essentializing: it fixes subjects to their social position and resorts to a politics of particularity that leads to divisions in national citizenship and democratic discourse (the communitarian and liberal position) and to divisions within social movements (the critical position). Contrary to this one-sided critique, we propose a different interpretation with the concept of “constructivist identity (...) politics.” We show that political identities are not essentialistically given, but emerge from processes of social and political construction; that they are actively produced, learned, and practiced by political (sub)cultures and movements. In these processes of construction, political articulation and agency are produced, enabling subjects to critique relations of domination and discrimination. Following radical democratic theory, we argue that the particular political perspectives of identity politics thus enabled do not endanger democracy or solidarity in social movements, but contribute to their further democratization by actualizing the universal principles of democracy in particular disputes. While the construction processes of identity politics tend to essentialize and produce exclusions, critical reflection on such tendencies is also inherent to identity politics. This understanding also enables a critique of such identity politics that is not oriented towards the democratic values of equality and freedom and blocks critical self-reflection. After an overview of contemporary identity politics critique, we elaborate this constructivist understanding following debates in feminist and postcolonial theory since the 1980s. Building on this, we systematically develop the notion of constructivist identity politics by differentiating three aspects of it: subjectification, articulation, and representation. We refer to approaches by Foucault, Rancière, Laclau/Mouffe, and Hall and illustrate the respective aspects through examples of migrant self-organizations as well as gay culture and queer critique. (shrink)

Whilst media and political rhetoric in Britain is sceptical and often outright damning of the (presumed) morals and behaviours of the White marginalized poor, our aim is to explore the conditions under which successful communities are nevertheless built. Specifically, we examine the features of community and stress its importance both for belonging and bonding around shared norms and practices and for fostering the necessary bridging essential for interacting and cooperating with others. In considering what it means to foster a (...) community that acts as a breakwater against the tides of stigma or disadvantage, we pay special attention to what we will call enabling conditions – essential features that communities either can or should be able to provide or that exist independent of communities and are indispensable for accessing opportunities in the wider society. We detail the dynamics of White poverty and exclusion before turning our attention to possible responses to these challenges. In searching for viable responses to stigma and disadvantage, we compare some different typologies of community presently available to the White poor in Britain and examine whether these are sufficient to satisfy the enabling conditions associated with more robust forms of group membership. (shrink)

The deliberative systems approach is a recent innovation within the tradition of deliberative democratic theory. It signals an important shift in focus from the political legitimacy produced within isolated and formal sites of deliberation (e.g., Parliament or deliberative mini-publics), to the legitimacy produced by a number of diverse interconnected sites. In this respect, the deliberative systems (DS) approach is better equipped to identify and address defects arising from the systemic influences of power and coercion. In this article, I examine (...) one of the least explored and least understood defects: the exclusion of non-speaking political actors generated by the uniform privileging of speech in all sites within a system. Using the examples of prefigurative protest, Indigenous refusal to deliberate, and the non-deliberative agency of disabled citizens, I argue that the DS approach allows theorists to better understand forms of domination related to the imposition of speech on those who are either unwilling or unable to speak. (shrink)

This article presents a new account of the relationship between Michel Foucault’s work and neoliberalism, aiming to show that the relationship is significantly more complicated than either Foucault’s critics or defenders have appreciated in the recent controversy. On the one hand, I argue that Foucault’s salutary response to some of Gary Becker’s ideas in the lecture course from 1979 should be read together with the argument of Discipline and Punish. By means of this contextualization I show that Foucault’s sympathetic response (...) to Becker is limited to the domain of penal practices, specifically concerning the question of how to resist their rationality of normalization, and thus it involves no broader commitment to neoliberal economic theory or its political implications. On the other hand, however, I argue that there is a strategic allegiance between Foucault’s work and the ascendance of the neoliberal rationality of governing, although it has nothing to do with his sympathetic engagement with Becker’s work. Instead, I explain how Foucault’s focus on the political stakes of subjectivity has helped to congeal, in the posthumous neoliberal context, a conception of politics that leaves out the topic of economic equality. To explain how Foucault’s work has had this unintended yet lasting effect, I introduce the concept of topical exclusion. It designates a social mechanism of producing ignorance, which operates by directing attention instead of creating false consciousness. The strategic relationship between Foucault’s work and neoliberalism today illustrates that this type of explanation is essential in the analysis of power relations. Thus, my account motivates the adoption of topical exclusion as a conceptual supplement that equips the Foucaultian framework to study cases in which relations of power harness, produce, and sustain ignorance, not knowledge. (shrink)

Political philosophy in the last decades has turned away from universal narratives of progress, on grounds that these narratives produce exclusion and justify domination. However, the universal values that underlie emancipatory political projects seem to presuppose universal history, which explains its persistence in some contemporary political philosophers committed to such projects. In order to find a response to the paradox according to which universal history is inherently exclusionary and yet necessary to uphold universal values, I examine (...) the contrast between Adorno’s and Lyotard’s perspectives on the problem of writing history ‘after Auschwitz’. For both philosophers, Auschwitz interrupts our fundamental normative and cognitive values, because any attempt to identify the meaning of the camps by means of these values misunderstands the suffering that took place in them. Yet this interruption produces a feeling that calls for the institution of new universal normative values. For Adorno, this value is a purely negative command to act in such a way that Auschwitz does not repeat itself. For Lyotard, by contrast, it is the demand to invent new idioms that make it possible to find meaning in Auschwitz. (shrink)

Especially but not exclusively in the United States, there is a significant gulf between expert opinion and public opinion on a range of important political, social, and scientific issues. Large numbers of lay people hold views contrary to the expert consensus on topics such as climate change, vaccines, and economics. Much political commentary assumes that ordinary people should defer to experts more than they do, and this view is certainly lent force by the literally deadly effects of many (...) denials of established science. But there are complex philosophical issues here, concerning, among other things, (i) what an expert is; (ii) what kind of deference is called for; (iii) and when deference is called for. This entry gives an overview of these three issues and recent work on them. It then examines some potential collective and pragmatic disadvantages of deference, before concluding with reflections on what we can say to those who distrust experts. (shrink)

In Mexico, the management of public resources has been questioned by the State, and mainly the results that the public administration at its three levels (federal, state and municipal), by the lack of transparency in the application and verification of public resources. The experience that gives us the operation of different emerging programs that focused on reducing social and economic inequality in the country, we can locate them as the first attempts in the search for a solution that is complex. (...) Moving from the role of the benefactor and welfare state to the promoter of the regions and in the recognition of the focalization of priority attention areas, the path that has been taken is not only the beginning. Recognizing the public nature of public finances as a promoter of social development, we must understand it as the one assumed by the State through social, political and economic co-responsibility to solve poverty and marginalization of its own public policy orientation and vision of solution has been made since the eighties. From the above, we can point out some preliminary conclusions including the study of the indigenous language-speaking population with a high level of social exclusion in the methodology for the definition of multidimensional poverty in Mexico, will allow the allocation of public resources in the fight against poverty to be effective since it will make it possible to identify to the target population that is subject to social exclusion and marginalization. This invites us to a final reflection: What to do to address the just social demands of the indigenous population that is immersed in poverty, marginalization and exclusion? What to do so that they do not leave their communities, and if they have already done so, how to attend to the needs of family groups that are due to the expense of a remittance that may never arrive? (shrink)

In response to the Royal Society report’s claim that “the acceptability of geo­engineering will be determined as much by social, legal, and political issues as by scientific and technical factors” (Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty [London: Royal Society, 2009], ix), a number of authors have suggested the key to this challenge is to engage the public in geoengineering decision-making. In effect, some have argued that inclusion of the public in geoengineering decision-making is necessary for any geoengineering project (...) to be morally permissible. Yet, while public engagement on geoengineering comes in various forms, the discussion in geoengineering governance and the ethics of geoengineering have too often conceptualized it exclusively in terms of public participation in decision-making, and supported it by various liberal democratic values. However, if the predominant understanding of public engagement on—or, the role of the public in—geoengineering decision-making is indeed only grounded on liberal democratic values, then its normative relevance could be challenged by and in other ethical-political traditions that do not share those values. In this paper, I shall explore these questions from a Confucian perspective. I argue that the liberal democratic values invoked in support of the normative importance of public participation are, at least, foreign to Confucian political philosophy. This presents a prima facie challenge to view public participation in geoengineering decision-making as a universal moral requirement, and invites us to reconsider the normative significance of this form of public engagement in Confucian societies. Yet, I contend that the role of the public remains normatively significant in geoengineering governance and the ethics of geoengineering from a Confucian perspective. Drawing from recent work on Confucian political philosophy, I illustrate the potential normative foundation for public engagement on geoengineering decision-making. (shrink)

How ought we to evaluate and respond to expressions of anger and resentment? Can philosophical analysis of resentment as the emotional expression of a moral claim help us to distinguish which resentments ought to be taken seriously? Philosophers have tended to focus on what I call ‘reasonable’ resentments, presenting a technical, narrow account that limits resentment to the expression of recognizable moral claims. In the following paper, I defend three claims about the ethics and politics of resentment. First, if we (...) care about socially just processes of reconciliation, we have good reason to pay attention to the logic of resentments. Second, the account philosophers offer of resentment – its distinctive features, aims, rationality, and gratification – will affect the conclusions we draw about which actual resentments to take seriously, which aspects of resentful claims need addressing, and what it means to address and repair them. In contesting definitions of resentment, I argue, we do more than simply perform housekeeping in philosophical taxonomies of emotion. Restricting our understanding to essentially ‘moral’ cases may cause us to lose sight of expressly political resentments. Instead, I argue, a plausible account of resentment must acknowledge that we resent violations and threats that are not necessarily self-pertaining, may not be expressible as individual, discrete injuries, and cannot always be construed as moral threats. Second, given the dependence of moral judgments on a broader horizon of moral possibility, philosophical standards of ‘reasonable’ or ‘appropriate’ resentment cannot avoid being politically charged. Thus, the widely accepted account of ‘reasonable’ resentment cannot make philosophical sense of the most interesting and perplexing cases. Ironically, a theoretical measure designed to revalue emotional expressions of moral protest may result in the exclusion and silencing of those with the most reasons to protest. (shrink)

Settler colonialism is structured in part according to the principle of civilizational progress yet the roots of this doctrine are not well understood. Disparate ideas of progress and practices related to colonial dispossession and domination can be traced back to the Enlightenment, and as far back as ancient Greece, but there remain unexplored logics and continuities. I argue that civilizational progress and settler colonialism are structured according to the opposition between politics governed by reason or faith and the figure of (...) the child as sinful or bestial. Thus, it is not contingent, but rather necessary that justificatory frameworks of European empire and colonialism depict Indigenous peoples as children. To illustrate how the theoretical link between Indigenous peoples and children emerges not as a simple analogy, but rather, as the source of the premodern/modern and savage/civilized binaries, I trace the various historical iterations of the political/childhood opposition through the classical, medieval, enlightenment, and modern eras. I show how the model of civilizational progress from a premodern and savage state of childhood continues to serve as the model for settler colonial exclusion and domination of Indigenous peoples. (shrink)

The distinction between clinical research and clinical practice directs how we partition medicine and biomedical science. Reasons for a sharp distinction date historically to the work of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, especially to its analysis of the “boundaries” between research and practice in the Belmont Report (1978). Belmont presents a segregation model of the research-practice distinction, according to which research and practice form conceptually exclusive sets of activities and interventions. This (...) model is still the standard in federal regulations today. However, the Commission’s deliberations and conclusions about the boundaries are more complicated, nuanced, and instructive than has generally been appreciated. The National Commission did not conclude that practice needs no oversight comparable to the regulation of research. It debated the matter and inclined to the view that the oversight of practice needed to be upgraded, though the Commission stopped short of proposing new regulations for its oversight, largely for prudential political reasons. (shrink)

This paper provides an examination of some problems caused by the concentration of influence in the capital markets of developed countries. In particular, I argue that large asset managers exercise quasi-political power that is not democratically legitimate. In section two, I will examine the economic driver behind the size and power of the big asset managers: the passive investing revolution. I will discuss several respects in which this revolution has fundamentally changed capital markets, most notably by making a large (...) share of investors universal owners. In the third section, I argue for my central analytical conjecture: asset managers exercise quasi-political power. They use their influence to shape the rules of the game in public capital markets in order to implement social and environmental policies that have traditionally been the exclusive purview of states. “Asset manager capitalism” is a recent term coined to refer to the contemporary system of corporate governance that succeeded the Berle and Means corporation with its dispersed ownership; the argument of this section is that asset manager capitalism is also a new political-economic regime. In the fourth section I defend my central normative claim: asset manager capitalism is an untenable and illegitimate political-economic arrangement, for at least two reasons. First, the power of asset managers is not checked by any institutional constraints, and is not rendered legitimate by any democratic process. More fundamental than this procedural critique is an argument that the interests of asset managers could not be aligned with the public interest, given the fact that the distribution of capital is highly unequal. I conclude by discussing several proposals to reform asset manager capitalism. (shrink)

Aristotle’s Politicsis not only famous for its theory of constitutions, but for its statements about human nature. According to the central claim of Aristotle’s political anthropology, man is by nature a political animal (phusei politikon zôon). This famous statement is presented as the conclusion of the first set of arguments that Aristotle develops in the second chapter of book I of the Politics(Pol.,I, 2, 1252a24–1253a3). Aristotle’s statement is inextricably linked with the claim that the polisexists by nature (phusei), (...) which he mentions in the same phrase, as part of his conclusion: “From these considerations it is evident that the polisis one of the things that exist by nature, and that man is by nature a political animal”(Pol.,I, 2, 1253a1–3). Evidently, the claims that the polisexists by nature and that man is by nature a political animal are complementary. This article presents an interpretation of the two complementary claims or theses arguing that in Pol.,I, 2 Aristotle conceives exclusively of human beings as political animals because the whole chapter focuses on theanalysisof the polis,a community peculiar to humans. Italso examines Aristotle’sclaim that the polis“is by nature prior (proteron) to the household and to the individual”(Pol.,I, 2, 1253a18–19). The paperdisagrees withscholars whounderstand this claim as an independent third thesis and theoremand argues that Aristotle’s claim functions as a strong argument for the thesis that man is by nature a political animal. Furthermore, it contends thatAristotle neither defends an organic theory of the polisnor has a “tendency towards totalitarianism”(J. Barnes). -/- . (shrink)