The purpose of this article is to introduce an innovative approach to the theoretical debate of the last two centuries on how to appropriately conceptualize modern democracy. The main argument that is being put forward by the analysis is that the common reliance on the assumption of pre-modern political philosophy, that democracy is a certain type of political regime or at least a form of rule, has become insufficient to cover the influence and scope of its modern (...) meaning and practical use. Political theory faces the risk of becoming misguided and prejudiced, if the problem of re-conceptualizing democracy is not taken seriously into account. The article tends to offer new insights on the ongoing democratic debate by focusing on one simple question: can modern democracy be understood in terms of a political regime or should it be viewed as a distinct entity? The field of study relevant to our analysis of democracy ranges from Enlightenment thinkers, such as J. J. Rousseau and Voltaire, to XIX–XX century political philosophers (like A. de Tocqueville and C. Schmitt) and some contemporary theorists, like P. Manent. The article starts with explanations, why it is important to look deeper into the conceptual difficulties of modern democracy and why political philosophy and its theories on political regimes are crucial for such a task. Parts 3–5 of the analysis tend to prove that the only way to appropriately understand modern democracy is to identify and question its basic assumptions: the sovereignty of the people and social equality. The final part of the article – part 6 – offers a critique of understanding modern democracy as a political regime. The critique identifies three main theoretical problems, inherent to the discussion on modern democracy, which make it difficult to avoid contradictions when applying the name “democratic” to various political regimes. The article concludes that: First, democracy is not a political regime in a pre-modern sense of the term, which is an assumption still widely taken for granted in political theory. Democracy should be seen as a universal principle of legitimization of power, which can be applied by various regimes. Second, political philosophy faces the danger of adopting an oversimplified understanding of democracy as merely an institutional form of rule (a view perpetuated by social sciences); as well as the danger of conceptualizing democracy as a substance-free and abstract ideal, applicable to all forms of government. Both of these concepts fail to acknowledge the scope of democracy and thus should not be seen as satisfactory. Third, theoretical discussions on democracy suffer from three conceptual shortcomings, which make it impossible to speak about democracy as a political regime. The three problems are: 1. a tendency to see democracy as an ideal concept with no need of practical grounding; 2. making democracy a formal concept with no need of references to its normative nor positive substance; 3. making democracy a pseudo-religious entity by imitating structural elements of Christian religion: faith in a universal nature of humans, an all-powerful sovereign (the people), messianic mission. Lastly, the article generalizes that political philosophy has an obligation to demystify the concept of democracy in order to re-emerge discussions about the substance of different political regimes. For this purpose the concept of loyalty should be taken into account. If we want to prove that a certain state corresponds to a certain political regime, we must try to understand why its subjects maintain loyalty to a specific form of rule. Only unprejudiced political philosophy is capable of such a task, that’s why it should avoid taking the concept of democracy for granted. (shrink)

Tourism is one of the socio-economic trends that significantly contributes to the shift of the planetary system into the Anthropocene regime. At the same time, it is also a socio-cultural practice characteristic of the imperial mode of living, or consumerism. Thus, it is a form of commodification of nature, also a way of deepening social inequalities between a privileged minority of the global population and an exploited majority providing services to those whose socio-economic status allows them to travel for (...) fun and commoditised “experience”. This is not an inevitable activity, an activity in which environmental costs (carbon footprint, water footprint, energy consumption, and waste production) are necessary to ensure the basic resources of life. Tourism is therefore a form of luxury consumption. For any tourism model to be, not only, environmentally sustainable but also socially just, or at least acceptable, it would have to be accessible to all people. Ecotourism should also have to meet the criterion of a solidarity mode of living referred to as sufficiency. This is hardly conceivable in the climatic, demographic, and political regime of the Anthropocene. The latter is likely to be characterized by, among other things, mass migration of climate or environmental refugees on the one hand and climate apartheid of the states of the global North on the other. Ecotourism, accessible to an even smaller proportion of the world`s population than the current mass tourism, will thus be more likely to accentuate the social and environmental inequalities of which it is already a significant manifestation. Therefore, the question is whether the concept of ecotourism is not just another manifestation of greenwashing, i.e. an attempt to legitimize economic, social, and cultural activities that devastate the social and environmental environment. (shrink)

The information regime is mediated by the culture of the electronic device. It is characterized by the control of the deluded citizen through the deployment of freedom, thereby nullifying the core issue of human life: freedom. Through phenomenological-hermeneutic methodology (Heidegger, 2002), this work starts from the world of digital life to direct the interpretation towards digital governance, all of which appears as a hermeneutic horizon the information regime. It is concluded that in this new social order the (...) class='Hi'>political and all other orders that arise from interaction are governed by a capitalism of emotions. (shrink)

The essay concerns the negative end of the political argument of the Republic, that injustice—the rule of unreason—is both widespread and undesirable, and that whatever shadows of virtue or order might be found in its midst are corrupt and unstable. This claim is explained in detail in Republic 8 and 9. These passages explain recognizable faults in recognizable regimes in terms of the failure of the rule of reason and the corresponding success of the rule of non-rational forms of (...) motivation. I will first look at degenerate regimes as they appear in a less systematic way in the Ship of State passage in Republic 6 and in the discussion with Thrasymachus in book 1. I then give a general overview of the system of degenerate regimes in book 8 to examine what exactly goes wrong with them and why, and explain how the process of degeneration ought be understood as the progressive decay of the rule of reason. Finally, I argue that a close look at this decay reveals something surprising: that degenerate regimes and characters feature weak versions of virtue, shadow-virtues that are based on appearances and held in place by force. Thus in the end the whole process of degeneration ought be understood as an extended conflict between reason and appetite. (shrink)

The present article aims to offer a synoptic picture of communist Romania’s relations with Third World countries during the Ceaușescu regime. Within these relations, economic and geopolitical motivations coexisted along with ideological ones, thus making the topic one of the most interesting and relevant key for understanding RSR’s complex and cunning international strategy. However, I intend to prove that mere pragmatism is not enough to comprehend the drive behind Ceaușescu’s diplomatic efforts in post-colonial Africa; ideological factors need also to (...) be taken into account. (shrink)

Recently the role of ideology and hegemony has received increased attention to explain varying dynamics of diffusion and autocratic cooperation. As a result, patterns of interaction in clusters from regions without hegemony or ideology have been overlooked because their autocracy-toautocracy transitions are no threat to the global status of democracy, even when active regime promotion is very common. This article will apply insights from economic cluster theory to political regimes and introduce a typology to differentiate among clusters. (...) class='Hi'>Regime Cluster Theory is the first framework that presents three ideal-types of ideological, hegemonic and biotopical regime clusters. With a new concept of ‘biotopical clusters’ the paper explains the dynamics of clusters in often omitted regions, like in Sub Saharan Africa, Latin America during the Cold War, or Central Asia during the 1990s. RCT offers a dynamic approach to recognize and assess patterns of forcible regime promotion per cluster as well as distinguish between their different diffusion patterns (coercive, voluntary, bounded learning, contagion) in four arenas: institutions, ideas, policy and administrative practices. RCT advances the comparative study of regime promotion and diffusion in various regions of the world and hopes to shed new light on related theories of alliance formation, regional institutionalization, and (conflict) spill-over effects. (shrink)

The recent political developments in the Philippines require a reevaluation of the nature of the State under the Rodrigo Duterte regime. Just years ago, scholars illustrated the regime of Duterte to be a populist, illiberal, or authoritarian one. But since then, and especially during the pandemic, a lot of things have changed. In this paper, I will argue that Duterte’s regime is a fascist one. Unlike how Walden Bello characterized Duterte as a fascist original, a characterization (...) laden with theoretical inconsistencies and practical difficulties, I will develop a concept of fascism proper to the neoliberal and semi-colonial conditions of the Philippines. I will likewise trace the rise, development, and stabilization of the regime’s fascism. The discussion will be supported and illuminated by some illustrative examples taken from the experience of the mass movement in Cebu. (shrink)

Powerful, technically complex international compliance regimes have developed recently in certain professions that deal with risk: banking (the Basel II regime), accountancy (IFRS) and the actuarial profession. The need to deal with major risks has acted as a strong driver of international co-operation to create enforceable international semilegal systems, as happened earlier in such fields as international health regulations. This regulation in technical fields contrasts with the failure of an international general-purpose political and legal regime to develop. (...) We survey the new global regulatory systems in the actuarial, banking and accounting fields, with a view to showing how the need to deal reasonably with risk has resulted in an international de facto law solidly based on correct abstract principles of probability. (shrink)

Extant theoretical work on the political resource curse implies that dependence on resource revenues should decrease autocracies’ likelihood of democratizing but not necessarily affect democracies’ chances of survival. Yet most previous empirical studies estimate models that are ill-suited to address this claim. We improve upon earlier studies, estimating a dynamic logit model that interacts a continuous measure of resource dependence with an indicator of regime type using data from 166 countries, covering the period from 1816-2006. We find that (...) an increase in resource dependence at time t - 1 increases the likelihood of autocratic persistence at t, but has no appreciable effect on democratic survival. We go beyond existing empirical studies to show that increases in resource dependence have persistent and substantial cumulative effects on autocracies' likelihood of becoming democratic over the long-term, showing that the total effect of resource dependence on regime type is much larger than the short-term (one period) effect indicates. (shrink)

The paper offers five desiderata on a realist normative theory of politics: that it should avoid moralism, deontologism, transcendentalism, utopianism, and vanguardism. These desiderata argue for a theory that begins from values rooted in a people’s experience; that avoids prescribing a collective deontological constraint; that makes the comparison of imperfect regimes possible; that takes feasibility and sustainability into account; and that makes room for the claims of democracy. The paper argues, in the course of exploring the desiderata, that a neo-republican (...) philosophy of government does pretty well in satisfying them. (shrink)

This paper examines the differences between moralist, realist, and pragmatist approaches to political legitimacy by articulating their largely implicit views of judgment. Three claims are advanced. First, the salient opposition among approaches to legitimacy is not between “moralism” and “realism.” Recent realist proposals for rethinking legitimacy share with moralist views a distinctive form, called “normativism”: a quest for knowledge of principles that solve the question of legitimacy. This assumes that judging legitimacy is a matter of applying such principles to (...) a case at hand. Second, neither Rawls nor Habermas is a normativist about political legitimacy. The principles of legitimacy they proffer claim to express rather than adjudicate the legitimacy of a liberal-democratic regime, and thus cannot solve the question of legitimacy at a fundamental level. But perhaps we should question the normativist aspiration to theoretically resolving the problem to begin with. My third claim is that a “pragmatist” approach enables us to rethink political legitimacy more deeply by shifting focus from the articulation of principles to the activity of judging. Implicit in Rawls’s and Habermas’s theories I then find clues towards an alternative account of judgment, in which the question of legitimacy calls not for theoretical resolution but for ongoing practical engagement. (shrink)

The second book of Aristotle’s Politics is generally taken to examine politeiai or constitutions that either exist in cities that are said to be well governed or were proposed by theoreticians and are thought to be well organized (II.1, 1260b30–32; II.12, 1274b26–28). Prominent are Aristotle’s examinations of Plato’s Republic and the constitution of Sparta; but Aristotle also devotes chapters to the examination of Plato’s Laws, the proposed constitutions of Phaleas of Chalcedon and Hippodamos of Miletus, and the existing constitutions of (...) Crete, Carthage, and Solon’s Athens. Prominent, also, is scholarly analysis of Aristotle’s remarks about the Republic and Sparta – whether his criticisms of Plato are insightful and fair or whether his remarks about Sparta are historically accurate and hit upon the causes of Sparta’s fourth century decline. Far less prominent, though, is scholarly discussion of Aristotle’s remarks about the other constitutions analyzed in Politics II, how Politics II as a whole is organized, or what light – if any – the book sheds on the Politics as a whole. Such scholarly neglect is unfortunate for at least two major reasons. First, Politics II claims that since the Politics proposes to study which political community is best of all for people who are most able to live in accord with one’s prayers (kat’ euchên), it is necessary to investigate other constitutions reputed to be best (II.1, 1260b27–29). Such a claim suggests a close link between Politics II and Politics VII/VIII but such a link needs elaboration. In what way does Politics II prepare the way for Politics VII/VIII? Secondly, Politics II contains not only criticism of other constitutions, but also substantive political theorizing – most noticeably about the organization of property in the best regime, the problem of political innovation, and the relationship between political theorizing and chance. Aristotle’s critiques of Plato’s Republic, the constitution of Hippodamos, and the constitution of Carthage generate a series of substantive theoretical reflections about the problematic nature of political innovation and political theorizing that rise above mere examinations of the views of his predecessors. Viewing Politics II solely as a repository of criticism loses sight of the theoretical insights Aristotle offers therein, self-conscious insights about the very nature of political theorizing. (shrink)

Standard accounts of civil disobedience include nonviolence as a necessary condition. Here I argue that such accounts are mistaken and that civil disobedience can include violence in many aspects, primarily excepting violence directed at other persons. I base this argument on a novel understanding of civil disobedience: the special character of the practice comes from its combination of condemnation of a political practice with an expressed commitment to the political. The commitment to the political is a commitment (...) to engaging with others as co-members in the on-going political project of living together. I show how such an understanding of civil disobedience is superior to the Rawlsian strain of thought, which focuses on fidelity to law. Rawls was concerned with civil disobedience solely in the context of overriding political obligation. The project of characterizing a contestatory political practice that can be distinguished and used in a wider variety of contexts than Rawls is concerned with, including under illegitimate regimes, beyond the nation-state, or on behalf of anarchism, requires a different understanding of civil disobedience. (shrink)

This paper draws a link between Heidegger’s reading of Plato’s allegory of the cave and his support for the National Socialist regime during the early 30’s. Three interrelated suggestions are made: (1) That Heidegger’s reading of the allegory of the cave is informed by his preoccupation with the imminent threat of nihilism. (2) That Heidegger’s interpretation radicalizes his critique of the public sphere to the effect that it renders the latter irredeemable. (3) That the unbridgeable gap between philosophy and (...) the public sphere commits Heidegger to the anticipation of a catastrophic event that will open up the possibility of genuine freedom. (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)

I argue that a distinction between three autoimmunities is implied in Derrida’s _Rogues_. These are the autoimmunities of democracy as a regime of power, of democracy to come and of sovereignty. I extrapolate the relations between three different autoimmunities using the figure of the internal enemy in order to argue for an agonistic conception of democracy.

The years that followed the fall of the Berlin wall and various authoritarian regimes in different regions of the world, witnessed the growth of a wide literature on democratization, which was influenced more and more by the paradigm of transition and the “consolidation” of democracy. Since then, evaluations as well as perspectives through which were seen various regimes (the new democracies “with problems”) are developed mainly through the theoretical lens of consolidation paradigm, according to which full democratic consolidation was the (...) endpoint of regime transitions. But it has become clear today that in many countries, in which more than three decades have passed since the fall of authoritarian regimes, the issue of “completion” of democracy in their social and political context is still far from being a happy reality. The purpose of this paper is to criticize both in the theoretical and the empirical level, the concept of “consolidation of democracy”, seeing it as a non-valid concept for the study of democratization. This paper will argue that essentially the concept of consolidation is teleological and problematic in the sense that democracy is seen not as a process but an endpoint product. (shrink)

In numerous places in his Ethics and Politics, Aristotle associates political justice (or ruling in turns) and the regime of polity. I argue that there is a necessary connection between political justice and polity due to their origins in political mixing. Aristotle is the first to discover political justice and polity because his predecessors had thought that the elements which they combine -- excellence and equality in the case of political justice, and oligarchy and (...) democracy in the case of polity -- were antithetical. The novelty of Aristotle's 'discoveries' points to their connection, namely that both originate in the political mixing of elements. This article examines such political mixing in detail and shows how an institutional arrangement such as ruling in turns can be adapted to different regime-types. (shrink)

The choices we make in our daily lives have consequences that span the oceans: many consumers are not aware that some of the most exotic foods which belong to our breakfast plates every single day, such as coffee or chocolate, have a profound impact on the lives of many people. In Western societies, we are used to eating and consuming fresh ingredients which sprout on a different continent, yet we are unable to see the very hands that carry a simple (...) thing as a banana to our tables, as a consequence of a global supply chain. This alienation from the places and people involved in the supply chain leads consumers to ignore the impact of producing some foods and enabling them to travel all the way to one’s table. What is regarded as a simple commodity, in fact, is a result of the labour and exploitation of many families and crops on the other side of the ocean. Modern slavery comes in many guises and is often obscured by the alienation of modern consumers from their products, an example of which includes the slave system that holds many people tied behind our food chains. As consumers, we unconsciously become commissioners of a system of inequality and exploitation which we ignore. This includes many ‘fair-trade’ certified products, which are employed by multinationals as a psychological marketing tactic. This phenomenon is described by the cultural anthropologist Richard Robbins (2013) as the ‘commodification of morality’, where even commitments to just, fair or sustainable practices have been monopolised by economic agents. Within this framework, our moral choices are put on the market with a price which rarely returns or reflects the true cost of such products. This article begins by defining modern slavery, proceeding with a particular focus on forced labour in the current neoliberal regime. This is then contextualised in the case study of bananas as one of the most consumed, yet furthest grown, items of Western diets. The article then analyses the ethical backdrop of economic practices, using the fair-trade movement as a synecdoche of the moral economy of our day. The main question raised within this analysis is to what extent our moral choices can contribute to exploitation or to social change, and how our way of eating can oppose the great inequalities that still exist in the present context. (shrink)

The thesis examines political and economic transitions in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and particularly in post-communist Ethiopia and Angola between 1989-2019 by applying the interpretative scheme of transition theory. The research question investigated how the economic liberalization of centrally planned political systems affects their political liberalization and vice versa. The main hypothesis attempted to answer whether transition theory can apply as an interpretative model in order to explain post-communist developments in the SSA context. Characteristic noteworthy country examples, which (...) have experienced communism for an extended period and are now under a hybrid developmental state form - with their impressive economic development being driven mainly by the state - are Ethiopia and Angola. Ethiopia and Angola belonged among the fastest-growing economies in the world among China, India and East Asian countries with astonishing high growth rates for extended periods. In turn, their political transition presented signs of liberalization. Yet, they seem to follow the stagnated path of developmental states and hybrid regimes. Ιn order to examine the political and socio-economic parameters of these transformations, the methodology uses also a combination of qualitative and quantitative research data through a twofold comparative approach. From the political perspective two similar political systems are compared. From the economic perspective, we compare a non-resource-rich economy such as Ethiopia with a resource-rich economy such as Angola. The degree of influence of socio-economic interventions by major external actors such as China, US and the EU to democratic consolidation, and vice versa, is examined as well as the repercussions of radical and gradual reforms. The findings of the study suggest that rapid economic transitions along with gradual political reforms in Ethiopia, Angola - and broadly in SSA - inevitably cause delays in socio-economic developments such as employment, inclusiveness and poverty alleviation. Structural external transition drivers in SSA such as debt, structural adjustment programs, subsidies, humanitarian aid and trade deficits seem to hamper its economic transitions than to facilitate its progress and non-dependency. These drivers lead to a vicious circle in most of the empirical examples of SSA. The strong hybrid developmental states of Ethiopia and Angola – despite their democratic progress - present more similarities to the developmental states of China or rest East Asia than to the Central Eastern European countries. In a certain degree, there are similarities also with cases of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which are still under Russia’s significant influence. The most context-specific parameters though, which concern Sub-Saharan Africa and diversify the states of Ethiopia and Angola from the existing interpretative scheme of transition theory are their high ethnic diversity and economic dependence from their external partners as well as their sui generis leadership. These parameters pose significant constraints to the diverse ethnic groups in their struggle for power and for their access to the natural resources. (shrink)

A closer look at the character of Odysseus in the opening passages of the Philoctetes reveals a more nuanced psychology of guilt and justification than commentators have thus far appreciated in the cunning hero's role. This paper examines the relations of sympathy between Odysseus, Neoptolemus, and Philoctetes as a way of entering into the complicated political drama of the work. Conceiving politics in the Philoctetes as a hybrid construction of the demands of nature and the demands of the gods, (...) this study provides a reading of Sophocles' play as an observation of the necessity for political regimes to efface the very conditions of sympathy that made them possible in the first place. On this reading, Sophocles' tragedy is to be seen as an explorarion of the damage incurred by individuals when such effacement takes place. (shrink)

Following media-theoretical studies that have characterized digitization as a process of all-encompassing cybernetization, this paper will examine the timely and critical potential of Günther Anders’s oeuvre vis-à-vis the ever-increasing power of cybernetic devices and networks. Anders has witnessed and negotiated the process of cybernetization from its very beginning, having criticized its tendency to automate and expand, as well as its circular logic and ‘integral power’, including disruptive consequences for the constitution of the political and the social. In this vein, (...) Anders’s works, particularly his magnum opus Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen [The Obsolescence of Man], sheds new light on the technologically organized milieus of the contemporary digital regime and also highlights a new form of cybernetic ‘conformism’. The goal of the essay is therefore, not only to emphasize the contemporary nature of Anders’s thought but also to use it to frame a critique of current neo-technocratic and, ultimately, post-political concepts, such as ‘algorithmic regulation’, ‘smart states’, ‘direct technocracy’, and ‘government as platform’. This essay argues that cybernetic capitalism is causing what Anders terms ‘ Unfestgelegtheit’ to disappear; that is, we are losing the originary possibility of technologically structuring our world in alternative ways, particularly given the determinist character of current technologies. (shrink)

It is argued (a) that laws are assurances of protections of rights and (b) that governments are protectors of rights. Lest those assurances be empty and thus not really be assurances at all, laws must be enforced and governments must therefore have the power to coerce. For this reason, the government of a given region tends to have, as Max Weber put it, a "monopoly on power" in that region. And because governments are power-monopolizers, it is tempting to think that (...) the concepts of government and law are to be understood in terms of the concept of power. In actuality, the first two concepts are to be understood primarily in terms of the concept of morality--of rights-protection, to be specific--and only secondarily in terms of the concept of power. Contentions (a) and (b) appear to be inconsistent with obvious facts (e.g. the fact that Pol Pot's regime violated the rights of those over whom it had power). But (a) and (b) are compatible with those facts. This is a consequence of two principles. First, moral requirements have a "dimension of weight," as Dworkin put it, meaning that one moral imperative can be outweighed, without being obliterated, by another moral imperative. Second, sentential operators can have different degrees of scope. "It is hereby assured that" is such an operator. Linguistic surface structure may obfuscate the degree of scope that it has in a given sentence. That fact compatibilizes our analysis with the fact that there are evil laws and evil governments. (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)

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), born in Hanover, Germany, was a public intellectual, refugee, and observer of European and American politics. She is especially known for her interpretation of the events that led to the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. -/- Arendt studied under German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers and set out to pursue a path as an academic, writing a dissertation on St. Augustine. However, Hitler, the Nazi regime’s rise to power, and the bloody Holocaust forever (...) changed her life. Being Jewish, Arendt was forced to flee the country, seeking refuge in France and eventually the United States. After living through the outbreak of WWII, Arendt devoted the rest of her life to writing about politics, although less in a traditional philosophical sense and more in the vein of a political observer, interpreting events of the twentieth century. -/- This essay explains some central insights of her political thought and how she developed these concepts to overcome the loss of politics as public debate in Nazi Germany. (shrink)

After the collapse of the totalitarian regimes, participation into public matters has been an objective of democratic theory. Judging by a variety of instances from the sixties to today, it can be said that finding new means for encouraging audiences to participate in their works has become the major concern for contemporary art as well. Therefore, we can say that the problem of participation is the focal point of art and politics.

The "second-generation indigenization" hypothesis of Huntington's phenomenological observations on totalitarianism in Cold War regime collapse subtly portrayed the realpolitik interest groups' political influences with autocracy disbandment processes. The research puts democratization as the premise and globalization as purpose for the analysis, with the cultural anthropological psychopathology & criminological elements of genocide and crime against humanity explained, underlying some of the Communist Party of China (CPC)’s organizational behaviors. With the regionalism purposes & approaches to multilateralism by People's Republic of (...) China (PRC), the end of democratization is leveraged against the procedural means with power politics of declared “decmocracy”. Between quantitative autocratic controls and realpolitik local-regional interest groups, the connotation of democratization in liberal international globalization has either been used for militant purposes or pushed the landscape of regime collapse into realpolitik local groups and autocratic controls in the process of globalization, with a case study on a local branch of Argricultural Bank of China on supply-side hijacking by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC). With the industrial interests omposed on realpolitik local groups, autocratic regionalism becomes of the "best interest scenario" for the realpolitik local groups with psychopathological spread of the criminological behaviors, by the cyber organizational criminal operations correlated with PRC’s approaches to international relations and multilateralism through bilateral trade & finance in monetary and currency domains, developed into the digitization of economies with criminological schemes in telecommunication, information, and informatics systems. However, the diminishing autonomy & freedom of the territorial population in turn derogated the real economy that wielded the prisoners' dilemma between autocracy and totalitarianism in a negative sum game deterioration cycle, with the censorship practices by the illicit regimes for propaganda controls sustaining "ideology security". In the democratization process of the dictatorial regime, "second-generation indigenization" is thus mapped to the sectarian interests respondent to dictatorial propaganda generation, other than a natural phenomenon out of autonomy and freedom premises in decision theory. The article recaps the coup d'état between Xi Jinping and Bo Xilai before Xi took the autocratic power, and analyzes the human rights situation in the obstacle of democratization and by the coercion mechanism imposed on the mainland China civil society for the militant purposes, with its behaviral spread of censorship to the “internet platforms” in liberal democratic countries by financial interest incentives and avoidance from war threats, whereby military backends in the cyber systems already indicate otherwise. (shrink)

In the literature on transitional justice, there is disagreement about whether countries like the United States can be characterized as transitional societies. Though it is widely recognized that transitional justice mechanisms such as truth commissions and reparations can be used by Global North nations to address racial injustice, some consider societies to be transitional only when they are undergoing a formal democratic regime change. We conceptualize the political situation of low-income Black communities under the U.S. imprisonment and policing (...) regime in terms of three criteria for identifying transitional contexts: normalized collective and political wrongdoing, pervasive structural inequality, and the failure of the rule of law. That these criteria are met, however, does not necessarily mean that a transition is taking place. Drawing on the American political development and abolition democracy literatures, we discuss what it would mean for the United States to transition out of its present imprisonment and policing regime. A transitional justice perspective shows the importance of not only pushing for truth and reparation, but for an actual transition. (shrink)

This article re-exams the old tension between the philosopher and the city. Reading Ibn Bājja’s Governance of the Solitary and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra against the background of Plato’s Republic, I argue that they both embrace several key aspects of Platonic political philosophy: the assumption that philosophical natures can grow spontaneously in sick cities, the ideal of the philosopher legislator and the correlative project of founding a virtuous new regime. Yet in preparation for this final task, each prescribes (...) a regimen of solitude for philosophers, so that they might preserve their own health and autonomy. While this spiritual exercise at first appears merely temporary and provisional—aimed at the cultivation of a philosopher ruler and the eventual establishment of a healthy political regime —I argue that both Ibn Bājja and Zarathustra ultimately abandon their Platonic ambitions and opt instead for the apolitical contemplative life. (shrink)

In this Article I argue that the citizenship status of Israel’s Palestinian citizens has been eroding since the "events" of October 2000 and that, as a result, Israel, within its rpe-1967 borders, may be moving from a form of democracy that has been termed "ethnic democracy" towards a form of non-democratic state that has been termed "ethnocracy." My argument is based primarily on two legal documents: the new Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, 2003, which denies Palestinian citizens the right (...) to unite with their closest family members who are residents of the Occupied Territories, and the decision of the High Court of Justice that upheld the constitutionality of this law in 2006. Two other developments that seem to support my thesis are analyzed as well: the "events" of October 2000 themselves and the report of the state commission of inquiry that investigated these events, and the plan, advanced by Yvette Lieberman and his political party, "Yisrael Beytenu," to shift the border between Israel and the West Bank westward, depriving tens of thousands of citizen-Palestinians of their Israeli citizenship. (shrink)

Furthering Western style academic freedom has been challenging, as Arab countries, especially Libya, have known only autocratic regimes throughout their modern existence. Amidst its current political and social upheaval, Libyan society is drifting towards the unknown. The problem addressed in this study is the impact of political change on the state of academia but, more specifically, academic freedom. Since the intervention in Libya by NATO states, many academics have lost their jobs. Some have become refugees outside of Libya (...) as a direct result of the appropriation of most of the governmental posts in the country by religious and political radicals. The research questions reflect ways in which the new inserted de facto leaders of post-transitional Libya have impacted life on Libyan campuses and academic freedom. (shrink)

There appear to be few ways available to improve the prospects for international cooperation to address the threat of global warming within the very short timeframe for action. I argue that the most effective and plausible way to break the ongoing pattern of delay in the international climate regime is for economically powerful states to take the lead domestically and demonstrate that economic welfare is compatible with rapidly decreasing GHG emissions. However, the costs and risks of acting first can (...) be very large. This raises the question of whether it is fair to expect some states to go far ahead of others in an effort to improve the conditions for cooperation. I argue that a costly obligation to act unilaterally and to accept weak initial reciprocity can be justified and does not violate standards of fair burden sharing. Rather, the costs of creating the underlying conditions within which we can hope to achieve meaningful international cooperation are non-­‐ideal burdens for which we can appropriately assign fair shares. (shrink)

The eight contributions in this volume result from three conferences held at the Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux 3 between 2005 and 2007 on nature and household relations, nature and regime-types (politeiai), and nature and education. Three of the chapters examine Aristotle’s notion of nature through consideration of his remarks about the household (specifically, the relationship between family relations and constitutions in cities, the critique of Plato’s dissolution of the family, and the different senses of nature in the Politics), (...) two are focused on the nature of regime-types (specifically kingship and the relationship between politeia and laws), and the final three chapters are concerned with the nature of the best regime described in Politics VII-VIII (specifically the discussion of thumotic peoples in VII.7, the implicit critique of Plato in the account of the material conditions of the best regime, and the place of leisure in Politics VII.14). Pierre Pellegrin, a major translator and scholar on Aristotle’s political and biological writings provides a preface on the tension between universality and cultural specificity in contemporary reading of the Politics. (shrink)

One of the main problems of Albania since the overthrow of the communist dictatorship and the beginning of the transition in 1991 has been the consolidation of a functional constitutional democracy. Having a functional and applicable constitutional order by all institutions and mechanisms has been a significant challenge for Albania. Political parties are one of these mechanisms or vital elements in maintaining and improving the constitutional order in Albania. In democratic regimes, political parties continue to be the most (...) important bridge between the state and the mass of society. Political parties are the institutions that hold the position of a political leader in society, and democratic states cannot survive if they do not have political parties that fulfil their functions in consolidating, preserving, and improving democracy. The object of this study will be political parties in Albania and their role in the consolidation or not of the constitutional order during the period of democratic transition. In this study, the three main parties in Albania are taken as case studies, namely the Socialist Party of Albania, the Democratic Party of Albania, and the Socialist Movement for Integration. (shrink)

One of the main problems of Albania since the overthrow of the communist dictatorship and the beginning of the transition in 1991 has been the consolidation of a functional constitutional democracy. Having a functional and applicable constitutional order by all institutions and mechanisms has been a significant challenge for Albania. Political parties are one of these mechanisms or vital elements in maintaining and improving the constitutional order in Albania. In democratic regimes, political parties continue to be the most (...) important bridge between the state and the mass of society. Political parties are the institutions that hold the position of a political leader in society, and democratic states cannot survive if they do not have political parties that fulfill their functions in consolidating, preserving, and improving democracy. The object of this study will be political parties in Albania and their role in the consolidation or not of the constitutional order during the period of democratic transition. In this study, the three main parties in Albania are taken as case studies, namely the Socialist Party of Albania, the Democratic Party of Albania, and the Socialist Movement for Integration. (shrink)

This paper speculatively reconstructs the unique intervention that Pyotr Chaadaev, the early nineteenth-century Russian thinker, made into the political-theological debate. Instead of positioning sovereignty and exception against each other, Chaadaev seeks to think the (Russian) exception immanently, affirming its nonrelation to, and even nullity or nothingness vis-à-vis, the (European, Christian-modern) world-historical regime—and to theorize the logic of sovereignty that could arise from within this nullity. As a result, we argue, nothingness itself becomes, in Chaadaev, operative through and as (...) the sovereign act and the figure of the sovereign, exemplified for him by the Russian emperor Peter the Great (1672–1725). (shrink)

The present paper is an attempt at examining the value configuration and the socio-demographical profiles of the local political elites in four countries of East-Central Europe: Romania, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Poland. The treatment is a comparative one, predominantly descriptive and exploratory, and employs, as a research method, the case-study, being a quite circumscribed endeavor. The cases focus on the members of the Municipal/Local Council in four towns similar in terms of demography and developmental strategies (i.e. small-to-medium sized (...) communities of around 35,000 inhabitants, with economies largely based on food industry and commercial activities): Tecuci (Galați county, Romania), Česká Lípa (Liberec region, Czech Republic), Targovishte (Targovishte province, Bulgaria), and Oleśnica (Lower Silesia province, Poland). Hypothesizing that the local elites of the former Sovietized Erurope tend to differ in outlook, priorities, and value attainment, as compared to their Western counterparts, the paper considers the former’s attitudes and perspectives in regard to seven values: a series of values customarily connected with the concept of ‘democracy’ (i.e. citizen participation, political conflict, gradual change, economic equality), state intervention in economy, decentralization and increased local autonomy, cultural-geographical self-identification. The study uses, as well, five models of value attainment in what concerns the ‘ideal portrait’ of the local councilor (Putnam 1976): ethical, pragmatic, technocratic, political, and gender. According to the results of a study applying a standard written questionnaire among the local councilors of the three communities in the period December 2010-February 2013, the paper distinguishes among three corresponding types of local elites: (1) ‘predominantly elitistic,’ (2) ‘democratic elitist,’ and (3) ‘predominantly democratic,’ following two types of explanation accounting for the differences among the four cases: the legacy of the defunct regime and the degree of administrative decentralization. (shrink)

This paper argues that the current scholarship of radical politics primarily bannered by Christopher Ryan Maboloc is a misappropriation of the postMarxist political project of Mouffe and Laclau. Drawing primarily both on Mouffe’s and Laclau’s work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics and an interview with Chantal Mouffe herself, the paper argues how the post-Marxist radical political project of Mouffe and Laclau fails to theoretically fit to the style of governance and regime of Duterte. (...) Fundamental to the idea of radical democratic politics is the task of radicalizing liberal democracy. However, as discussed in the paper, liberal democracy is a project whose very institutions and processes Duterte and his regime have undermined and attacked. Under Duterte’s regime, radical democracy lost the conditions for its flourishing, rendering its own impossibility. (shrink)

Book review of Elizabeth F. Cohen's Illegal: How America’s lawless immigration regime threatens us all.

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)

The paper is focused on the criticisms that theorists of political constitutionalism raise against legal constitutionalism, especially with regard to the idea of representation and political sovereignty. At the same time, the intention is to reconstruct the debate between legal and political constitutionalism in contemporary liberalism, starting from the so-called counter-majoritarian difficulty. This debate concerns two different approaches: the political one rejects the idea of judicial review by the Supreme Court because it may establish a possible (...) rule of the judges (Michelman; Dworkin). It defends the role of Parliament in constitutional matters, in contrast with the role of the Supreme Court, inasmuch as – according to them – it is not open to political participation. Parliament is considered the only place in which we can exercise our constitutional power and in which our rights could be adequately protected (Bellamy; Waldron; Tushnet; Goldoni). On the other hand, legal constitutionalism upholds the idea of judicial review, defending the role of the Supreme Court as “exemplar of public reason” (Rawls 1993). This article tries to answer to three fundamental questions about constitutional democracy under the banner of political liberalism: 1. What do we mean by counter-majoritarian difficulty? 2. What is the answer that legal and political model of constitutionalism give to this question? 3. What is the role of constitutional courts in democratic regimes and what is their authority within the State? (shrink)

This chapter assesses John Gray’s modus vivendi-based justification for liberalism. I argue that his approach is preferable to the more orthodox deontological or teleological justificatory strategies, at least because of the way it can deal with the problem of diversity. But then I show how that is not good news for liberalism, for grounding liberal political authority in a modus vivendi undermines liberalism’s aspiration to occupy a privileged normative position vis-à-vis other kinds of regimes. So modus vivendi can save (...) liberalism from moralism, but at cost many liberals will not be prepared to pay. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Hall (1996) raises the question of the relationship between Aristotle’s Politics and Poetics by claiming that Aristotle had separated drama from its civic origins; various rejoinders to her challenge can be found in Heath (2009) and Jones (2012). In response to this question, I argue that a central connection between these two works is their shared concern about the effects of performance—both in the case of drama and music—either for performers or their audience. Aristotle’s criticisms of “spectacle” (opsis) in (...) tragedy—a problem taken up most recently in Bouchard (2012), Hanink (2011), Konstan (2013), Sifakis (2013), and Wise (2008)—thus parallel his criticisms of slavishness in musical performance in Politics 8. Thus, the problem of Aristotle’s silence about tragedy in his account of education in Politics 8—a problem taken up by Lord (1982) and more recently Ford (2004)—is explainable on the basis of an explicit and central doctrine from the Poetics, namely that a drama can produce the function of tragedy independent of public performance. On my reading, Aristotle’s Politics and Poetics together retain tragedy as a central “cultural” institution for the liberally educated citizen, a view completely consistent with everything Aristotle defends about tragedy in the Poetics. But Politics 8 displaces tragedy as the pre-eminent form of public education and in its place supplies instrumental music—no doubt much to the consternation of Athenian democrats both historically and their kindred spirits in contemporary drama and classics departments. My paper concludes by articulating and speculating about why music eclipses tragedy as the pre-eminent form of liberal arts education in Aristotle’s best regime. (shrink)

A vast historical, cultural and philosophical chasm separates the thought of the 10th century Islamic philosopher al-Farabi and Friedrich Nietzsche, the progenitor of postmodernity. However, despite their significant differences, they share one important commitment: an attempt to resuscitate and reappropriate the project of Platonic political philosophy, particularly through their conceptions of the “true philosopher” as prophet, leader, and lawgiver. This paper examines al-Farabi and Nietzsche’s respective conceptions of the philosopher as commander and legislator against the background of their Platonic (...) source, and reflects upon the human cost each thinker is willing to abide in order to establish a regime that would be conducive to the perfectibility and flourishing of the human being. (shrink)

As a nexus of fertility’s finitude and female midlife, menopause is a physical and cultural phenomenon through which the relation between the medicalization of the female reproductive cycle and normative attitudes toward aging become expressed. Age, like other systems of separation, can function as an “instrument of regulatory regimes” and shows similarities to gender in its body-bound, surface-focused, and morally coded position in the sociomedical sphere. However, although age is an influential social category, its reliance on historical and epistemic constructions (...) of the body has not been politicized to a degree comparable to other categories like gender, race, and sexuality. As Kathleen. (shrink)

The aim of this master’s thesis is to analyse and highlight the interaction between science, politics and law. More precisely, our research question concerns the use of scientific arguments in social spheres (notably in politics and law) instead of legal or political arguments. In fact, we want to raise the way in which certain actors invoke scientific arguments to impose "objective" elements of fact in debate and, in this way, refrain from politically and "subjectively" discussing these same elements (or, (...) at least, their social consequences). This Master’s thesis will adopt an interdisciplinary theoretical framework (chapter 1) mobilising philosophy of science, philosophy of law, sociology of law, legal technique and analytical theories. Then, we will apply it to a case study: the European regulation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) after the European Court of Justice (CJEU) ruling of 25 July 2015 (chapter 2). The first chapter will provide theoretical elements to rethink the interaction between science, politics and law. The first section will propose a 'state of the art’ of the philosophical literature on the relationship between science (as a regime of truth) and politics. This master’s thesis will assess a truth under construction rather than a transcendental truth. Section 2 anticipates authoritarian claims based on science by considering the relationship science can have with power (Foucault). A solid review of philosophical, sociological and legal literature highlights the risks of giving decision-making power to an all-powerful science. Notably, the use of science to justify discriminatory policies is emphasised as these policies could not be challenged because, at the time, it was considered an objective scientific truth. Finally, section 3 offers a critique of the narratives of neutral and objective science, through the approach of science in action. This sociological approach presented all the doubts and subjectivity of science in action. The second chapter will propose a case study to illustrate the theoretical framework. We have chosen GMOs because they constitute a hybrid 'event', marked by scientific controversies, and with major socio-economic implications. The legal framework of GMOs in the European Union will be presented in the first section. In addition, the legal status of new breeding techniques (NBTs) will be examined. The second section will analyse the ruling of the European Court of Justice which made NBTs subject to GMO regulation. Finally, the third section will propose a reflection on the philosophy of law on the modes of existence of scientific, legal and political disciplines. (shrink)

The philosophical significance of rhythm in the United States has been undermined from both sides of what Adorno and Horkheimer called the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’. When rhythm has not been falsely exalted, promising a fetishised, racialised ‘return’ to the body, it has been devalued through the tainted associations of rhythmic synchronisation with fascist regimes and the demand for compliance. In this article, I engage these issues as they inflect the politics of musical form. Adorno’s notorious critique of jazz – developed (...) across a wide range of essays spanning three decades (1933-1962) – has been rightly disparaged, but his concept of the politics of metric regularity has not been repudiated. In what follows, I provide an analysis of how metric regularity works for Adorno as a concept – its limitations and presuppositions. Adorno opens up new critical thought about rhythm by taking seriously the problem of the bass drum in jazz and its historical and structural relation to the military march. However, he gets seriously wrong the different implications of marching rhythm for African-American (and therefore American) history, failing to understand its radical difference from the dangers of European fascism for its victims. -/- Transnational rhythmic forms in the black diaspora (including the United States) and the interracial experiences that these forms enable, at least as in-principle possibilities, continually contest the ‘the divisions between life and thought’ that have been taken for granted by majoritarian philosophy in the West. From this perspective, the segregation of intellect from feel (a technical term among musicians to indicate those normatively right aesthetic choices that nevertheless emerge in excess of predetermined rules is not tenable given the polyrhythmic background that must be presupposed in order for any piece of diasporic music, including and especially in the United States, to be intelligible. (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)