A Sociology of Liberal Democracy?1 (original) (raw)
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The normative underpinnings of democracy and the balance between morality and legitimacy
International Journal of Philosophical Studies
Jürgen Habermas’s political philosophy incorporates the view that legitimacy is immanent to law, even though it makes morality a central component of democratic legitimacy. Taking this as a starting point, the article examines one criticism that applies to Habermas’s political theory, insofar as he puts morality at the centre of his reconstruction of the concept of legitimacy. Habermas claims that the moral point of view justifies only those norms that embody universalizable interests and rules out those that embody particular interests. Therefore, the objection is that particular citizens will have no reason to endorse these norms and act according to them, because these norms do not incorporate their interests. The article goes on to show that Habermas can successfully answer this objection by means of the principle of discourse. The principle performs this function, inasmuch as it has a post-Kantian nature. On the one hand, it incorporates Kantian autonomy. And on the other, the Hegelian insight that autonomy has to be actualized through modern institutions and practices.
Secularization of the Politics of Law: On Roots of Liberal Democracy
This paper offers a theoretical analysis of the interplays of secularization in the sphere of law and the sources of legality in liberal democracies. First section focuses on the sphere of law, and argues that not only its form and content, but also its enforcement has become secular. These surely happen simultaneously with secularization in a different yet related aspect of governance – namely, the practices of law-making. The following section argues that secularization in this particular area of who makes the law has taken place in conjunction with the rise of liberal, parliamentary, constitutional democracy that attributes the constituent power of the politico-legal system to the people. A direct effect of this is observable in the ways people identify (identity) with the politico-legal system and how the system represents (representation) the people have changed; this is extensively discussed in the last section.
No Democracy for Devils: Democratic Authority and Political Obligation
2017
Like any doctoral journey, mine has been one full of ups and downs. Now that its excitement and bewilderment are over, and that new excitements and bewilderments lie ahead, I am happy to thank all those that have made my journey more cheerful, fascinating and insightful than it would have otherwise been. I am solely responsible for this work, but the result would have been even more flawed without their help. First and foremost, I am grateful to Antonella Besussi, for believing in me and saving my passion for political philosophy. She has always encouraged and urged me to think autonomously and to look after what I thought. For this, I owe her immensely. I wish to thank the whole Political Theory Project and the NASP Graduate School in Social and Political Sciences for illuminating discussions, endless classes, much debated reading groups and helpful conversations, covering far more things than simply my dissertation. I am indebted to all my professors, colleagues and friends who shared this journey with me and made more than three years pass by unnoticed. A special thank must go to Giulia Bistagnino and Francesca Pasquali, for patiently discussing my ideas time and again, especially when I felt I was going astray, but did not know how to get back. They carefully read my work and gave me advice and encouragement when I most needed it. I am also grateful to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, which welcomed me as one of their PhD students for one term and provided me with first-hand experience of political philosophy as a collective enterprise. In particular, I wish to thank Tom Christiano, David Schmidtz for discussing my and their work with me and for always taking seriously what I had to say. During my PhD I had the chance to discuss the ideas of this dissertation at some conferences and seminars, among which the Summer School in Equality and Citizenship at the University of Rijeka, the ASPP conferences in Amsterdam and London, the workshop on discursive dilemma in Turin, the conference on democracy at the University of Iceland, the colloquium and meeting in moral and political philosophy at the University of Minho and the graduate conference in Pavia. I am grateful to the organizers and participants of these events for their comments, criticisms and suggestions on my work. I am also much indebted to those who generously read all or part of my dissertation and gave me indispensable food for thoughts. In particular, I
Ethics as the State Theory of Democracy
The global search for answers will draw on the attempts of different cultures to seek answers to problems of the human condition. Within each culture, the process will begin with an exploration of its own culturally specific values, ideals, concepts and stories as the way that their culture has dealt with those problems. These can then be compared to the values, ideals, concepts and stories in other cultures so that we can appreciate similarities and differences. Different cultures have much to learn from each other. For example, Anglo-American ideology has been strong on emphasizing the importance of individuals but has tended to be weak on understanding institutions. Institutions are often reduced to matrices of interpersonal contracts rather than seen as organic wholes. This preference for individuals and lack of understanding of institutions leads to hostility towards them-particularly 'public' ones. European and Japanese cultures seem to take institutions seriously and to possess a stronger understanding of their nature. For me, this helps to review the significance of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment certainly, and rightly, placed the individual at the centre of legal and political philosophy. The fundamental point of the enlightenment was that institutions should serve individuals, rather than the other way around. This does not mean that institutions should be abandoned, but that the manner of their justification should be conceived-as means of protecting, realizing and furthering individual human rights. Reinventing and recombining values as indicated above, the values of liberal democracy were formed in and for strong states. Although these values were often based on long-standing ideals found in a wide variety of cultures, that context affected the ways in which those ideals were expressed, combined and conceived as liberal democratic values (for example, the citizen-democracy of Athens gave way to the representative democracy in modern states). Constitutional values for a more global world may be variations on the values of citizenship, democracy and welfare. However, they may also be recombined in new values within new concepts that speak more effectively to the problems of globalization. Sometimes the values will not be recombined but reinvented in a different form that may expose more general classes of value of which liberal democratic values were merely the contemporary form. It will taken one example-citizenship. Post-Westphalia authoritarian states saw individuals as subjects. The enlightenment saw them as citizens. What was new was the idea that institutions such as the state existed to serve individuals rather than the individual in service of the state. The concept of citizenship built upon earlier enlightenment values of family, tribe and
Legitimacy without Liberalism: A Defense of Max Weber’s Standard of Political Legitimacy
Analyse & Kritik, 2017
In this paper I defend Max Weber's concept of political legitimacy as a standard for the moral evaluation of states. On this view, a state is legitimate when its subjects regard it as having a valid claim to exercise power and authority. Weber’s analysis of legitimacy is often assumed to be merely descriptive, but I argue that Weberian legitimacy has moral significance because it indicates that political stability has been secured on the basis of civic alignment. Stability on this basis enables all the goods of peaceful cooperation with minimal state violence and intimidation, thereby guarding against alienation and tyranny. Furthermore, I argue, since Weberian legitimacy is empirically measurable in terms that avoid controversial value judgments, its adoption would bridge a longstanding divide between philosophers and social scientists
Morality as a Political Problem
János Kis opens his latest book Politics as a Moral Problem with an observation that the community of democratic countries finds itself in a state of a deep malaise. 2 He is not alone in making such an observation. Many thinkers have been reflecting lately on disturbing trends that distort the cultural and social support for liberal democracy and erode its political practice, thus facilitating the way for what Colin Crouch has labeled "post-democracyˮ and Sheldon Wolin called "inverted totalitarianism.ˮ 3
Contemporary Political Theory, 2005
shortest and most incidental of its five translated essays. What this second and retitled edition omits is Tribe's introduction. What it adds is Hennis' intellectual autobiography, in which he traces his early career as an academic and a social democrat, and his changing attitude toward Weber, but not his later becoming a major political commentator of the German right. This apparent transformation is, however, readily explicable in terms of the inherent conservatism of German practical philosophy. The second volume by Hennis translates Max Webers Wissenschaft vom Menschen, published in 1995, and also includes a 'translator's appendix'. The five constituent essays by Hennis concern various aspects of Weber's thought, sources and pedagogy. The longest and most synoptic is the first: 'Max Weber's Science of Man'. Although all of these are of great interest for scholars of Weber, it must be added that this second volume will be of less interest to specifically political theorists than the first. This not only sets out Hennis' elemental conception of Weber's 'central question', 'theme' and science (or, as Hennis then happily called it, philosophy) of man-that of the relation between 'personality and life orders'-but also examines Weber's relation to the German Historical School of Economics and the relation of his 'liberalism' to his practical 'logic of judgement'. What the two volumes present is neither any new account of Weber as a systematic thinker, because Hennis denies that he was such, nor any systematic account of practical philosophy, because practical philosophy is set against systematization, but a coherent if diffuse account of Weber, which illuminates much about him and, also, about the conservative rationale of practical philosophy's account of the shaping of personality by social order.