Consensus, compromise, justice and legitimacy

Normative political theory over recent decades has focused mainly on what ought to be done as far as migration policies are concerned. It faces a basic challenge, which stems from two competing, yet equally fundamental, ideals underpinning liberal democratic societies: a commitment to moral universalism and the exclusionary requirement of democracy. The objective of this special issue, ‘New Challenges in Immigration Theory’, is to provide a conceptual overview of (some) immigration theories and to highlight the challenges new streams of immigration pose for normative (political) theory and liberal democratic practice. The issue will consider how to reconcile state-based exclusion with a commitment to equal moral concern for all persons, by focusing on the non-standard immigration questions that have so far been ‘neglected’ by normative political theory. In line with this objective, the issue will discuss some of the inadequacies of the dominant political theories of immigration and show how such theories can be expanded to take account of new migration challenges such as brain drain, climate migration, detention of irregular migrants and asylum seekers, rights of labour migrants, transnational networks of movement, and so on.

This ambitious and lively book argues for a rehabilitation of the concept of 'human needs' as central to politics and political theory. Contemporary political philosophy has focused on issues of justice and welfare to the exclusion of the important issues of political participation, democratic sovereignty, and the satisfaction of human needs, and this has had a deleterious effect on political practice. Lawrence Hamilton develops a compelling positive conception of human needs: the evaluation of needs must be located within a more general analysis of institutions, but can in turn help to justify forms of coercive authority that are directed toward the transformation of political and social institutions and practices. His argument is animated throughout by provocative and original discussions of topics such as autonomy, recognition, rights, civil society, liberalism and democracy, and will interest a wide range of readers in political and social philosophy, political theory, law, development and policy.

Historical analyses of the relations between political theory and time often hinge on two claims. The first is that political theorists have until recently put less emphasis on the future than the past when debating political legitimacy and obligation. The second is that the history of political theory draws a fundamental distinction between theories that invoke time to legitimate political structures and theories that reject temporal considerations in favor of timeless principles. This chapter disputes these two claims by maintaining that competing languages of legitimacy harbor different and interrelated conceptions of temporality. A survey of time conceptions in the history of political philosophy shows that normative political theory is inherently multitemporal, involving double regard for the past and the future. And, since even tenseless principles of legitimacy often depend on temporally related forms of formulation and application, considerations about time seem inescapable in normative political theory.

<p>Con la ayuda de cuatro filósofos políticos tomistas contemporáneos (Copleston, Lachance, Maritain y Chal- meta), trazamos esbozos del paradigma de la filosofía política de Tomás de Aquino1, que servirá de base para el diálogo con los filósofos políticos contemporáneos. El presente artículo integra, en este estado inicial de la investigación, dos ensayos: el primero presenta nuestra posición frente a la distinción entre filosofía política y ciencia política, clave epistemológica del arranque de la investigación; y, el segundo, trata de articular tres épocas del tomismo político contemporáneo (los primeros tres cuartos del siglo XX, último cuarto y contemporaneidad) en torno a las relaciones entre los conceptos de “bien común”, lo “uno” y lo “múltiple”.</p><p> </p><p>Los mencionados ensayos pertenecen al “contexto de descubrimiento”, según lo planteara Reichenbach en su <em>Experience and Prediction </em>(1938). En el aludido “contexto” de la ciencia encontramos la investigación en el siguiente estado: búsqueda, recolección de información y organización de datos.</p>

This article argues, first, that the works of Niklas Luhmann have not yet been fully assimilated into political theory, and that political theory which wishes to remain adequate to the conceptual evolution of the contemporary social sciences should allow itself to be challenged by the paradigm shift in Luhmann's approach to the political system. Second, it sets out a reconstruction of Luhmann's social theory in terms of its implications for normative political inquiry, political concept-formation, and the theoretical foundations of political-theoretical discourse. In this regard, it asserts that Luhmann's theory incorporates a sociological transformation of political theory, and indeed of politics itself, and that it identifies most standard preconditions of political theory as conveniently simplified residues of metaphysical philosophy, albeit reconstituted through the perspective of Enlightenment. Third, it argues that Luhmann's account of politics also contains certain highly controversial implications, not least in its diminution of society's politicality, and that political theorists might wish to engage in an immanently critical analysis of his work in order to counteract some of its claims about politics and political legitimacy. In setting out this claim, it suggests that Luhmann's concept of legitimacy is unaccountably restricted, and it outlines certain theoretical opportunities for imagining, on the ground of a critical reading of Luhmann, a restatement of legitimacy as a central concept of societal analysis.

In this chapter, I would like to consider the complicated relationship between Critical Theory (which is taken here in the restricted sense of the Frankfurt School tradition) and Political Philosophy. I will capitalise these two intellectual endeavours for the sake of clarity, so their names appear distinctly in the discussions that follow. The purpose of my chapter is to problematise the long-standing suspicions of classical and contemporary Political Philosophy by Critical Theorists, so that one may question the boundaries that are often erected within Critical Theory in relation to Political Philosophy, and thereby encourage Critical Theorists to engage more substantially with the latter. The chapter proceeds in five steps. In the first section, I briefly summarise the defining features of the research programme that the name of Critical Theory designates. Despite all the fluctuations in the understanding of it, and the immense variations in the theoretical tools mobilised to attempt to fulfil it, if we restrict the focus to the most eminent representatives of the tradition, a consistent project can be identified from the moment of its inception until today. I summarise the key features of the Critical Theory project to then highlight, in the second section, the different ways in which political dimensions are entailed in it. I distinguish a number of senses of "politics" in which Critical Theory takes an interest, as a direct result of its project. In the third section, I briefly recall the methodological, conceptual, and political reasons explaining why, throughout the generations, Critical Theorists have been suspicious of classical and contemporary Political Philosophy. To justify these claims and the call for greater cooperation between the traditions, I highlight, in the fourth section of this chapter, a number of areas in which work in Critical Theory has shown itself to be relatively underdetermined on political issues. In the final section, I provide some suggestions for how contemporary Critical Theory might address some of its deficits in the treatment of political questions, by engaging with authors situated outside the tradition.

In recent decades political theory has been an area of undoubted strength in Australian political studies. Across fields such as deliberative democracy, republicanism, feminist theory, and environmental political theory, the Australian contribution to international debates has been considerable. Yet telling the story of the development of Australian political theory involves grappling with certain definitional challenges, which stem both from the nature of political theory as an intellectual endeavour as well as its ambiguous location within the academy. First, although the identity of political theory as a distinct academic sub-field is closely related to the development of political science it in fact draws on a range of intellectual disciplines including philosophy, history, sociology and law, and political theorists can be found in university departments in all of these disciplines. The second point concerns the political philosophy versus political science divide (with the corresponding division between ‘normative’ and ‘empirical’ theory) which has not been as sharply drawn in Australia as it has been, especially, in the United States, with its strong behaviouralist and positivist traditions. The dominance of a behaviouralist conception of political science — ‘the American Science of Politics’ in Bernard Crick’s phrase — gave rise to the oft-repeated story of the death of classical or normative political theory in the 1950s and 1960s, only to be revived by Rawls and Nozick in the early 1970s.KeywordsPolitical SciencePolitical TheoryAustralian StudyPolitical TheoriseDeliberative DemocracyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

If the state in democracies like India engages in violence, then is this state still accepted by the people? The conception of legitimacy in this study is about observable behaviour, about if and why people accept power holders as authority, and not about whether it is the ideal way to engage with violent power holders within the discourses of normative political theory. And what we see in both the field-sites of this study, is acceptance, though it may be slow and appear flickering or contextual at time. The specific vision that the nation-state is, marked by geographical boundaries and internal sovereignty often needs to use violence to legitimize its existence. Such use of violence does not appear to be leading to a dis-illusionment with the form or the institutions of the state.

Reviewed by: Kant's Political Legacy: Human Rights, Peace, Progress by Luigi Caranti Frederick Rauscher Luigi Caranti. Kant's Political Legacy: Human Rights, Peace, Progress. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2017. Pp. x + 310. £90.00. In all three areas of Kant's political philosophy that Luigi Caranti covers, he offers compelling and persuasive accounts that sharpen our understanding of Kant and show the value of close study of historical texts for today's philosophy. Recent political philosophy inspired by Kant often draws from his more general moral writings, as exemplified by Rawls's use of the categorical imperative as a procedure. Others, however, cite Kant's works more directly concerned with political philosophy. Caranti assesses these readings in two areas—the foundations for human rights and the conditions for international peace—and adds an assessment of Kant on progress toward a just political order. [End Page 352] The first two topics receive parallel treatment. Caranti devotes one chapter each to reviewing Kant's position, to assessing recent political philosophy on the topic, and to showing how the proper understanding of Kant leads to a better contemporary position. He is clearly at home in both the historical and contemporary worlds and, even better, moves smoothly between them to the benefit of both. Human rights, for Kant, consist in fact of the sole innate right to freedom together with the other rights that it implicitly contains, such as formal equality and being one's own master. While some contemporary theorists would simply base these rights on other goods, or see them as built into the political culture already, or assert without further ground that humans have dignity deserving these rights, Caranti argues that Kant requires that any basis for human rights must show why humanity has value. Caranti sees Kant as insisting that the value of humanity lies not in an end-setting capacity, but in the capacity to have a good will. For contemporary application, he suggests that Kant's own conception of good will as one willing the categorical imperative is too narrow, and that a broader conception of a good will as one that wills some version of a moral law is universal and can serve as the explanation of humanity that grounds human rights. I am skeptical of this solution for two reasons. First, historically, I think that Kant grounded humanity on rational self-governance in general more than on the specifically moral self-governance of the good will. Second, I suspect that broadly acceptable contemporary rights claims must be based on individual value as a basis of moral value rather than moral value, in the guise of the capacity for being moral, as a basis for individual value. Caranti's second main topic, international peace, comprises in my opinion the most successful part of the book. He details the main features of contemporary Democratic Peace Theory (after a thorough assessment of its many variations and critics), which essentially claims that democracies will not war against one another, particularly when they are involved in international institutions with other democracies and are interdependent economically through trade. The resulting "zone of peace" would set these peaceful states off from the remainder of the world; as the zone expands so would overall peace. Kant's explanations of the conditions for peace, however, require not democracy per se but states governed by representatives with a republican (civic) ethos. The international institutions must not be limited to these kinds of states but include all states. Economic interdependence is not alone reflective of the required cosmopolitan conscience that individuals need to develop. Democratic Peace Theory and Kant's actual model offer divergent policy implications. Carenti successfully shows not only that contemporary Democratic Peace Theory has misunderstood Kant's position, but also that what it neglects in Kant would improve its overall position. Since the third main topic, a proof of the inevitability of progress, has not been taken up in contemporary political philosophy, Carenti focuses on a close reading of Kant, with chapters covering Idea for a Universal History and Toward Perpetual Peace. He argues that Kant's history essay provides an empirical argument that stands independently of any regulative or providential claims...

Christian Reus-Smit is one of the leading experts on international theory, history, and international law. He has pioneered new conceptualizations of individual rights and political legitimacy in the development of international orders, generating innovative debates around concepts of legitimacy, power and social and political theory at the intersection of international relations. This chapter details a 30-minute conversation between Reus-Smit and Constance Duncombe in his office in the School of Political Science and International Studies at The University of Queensland in August 2017, which explored how technology has both informed his work and how he understands its social and cultural underpinnings. In this conversation Reus-Smit discusses technology as a material artefact and its role in transformative change of the international order. Key here is the insight that how we conceptualize technology, including social media, matters for how we understand its material and ideational power. Reus-Smit’s principal innovation is to see technology not just as a social artefact, but also as congealed ideas.

Should Animals Have Political Rights?

Much attention is focussed on recent debates in contemporary political philosophy concerning the relative merits of ideal theory and non-ideal theory. In one of their many forms, these debates take shape as a realist challenge to idealistic or utopian approaches to normative political theory. This article shows that the philosophical tradition of pragmatism both instructively anticipates and also, more importantly, can today contribute to contemporary realism. It is shown how a political pragmatism, particularly one centred in William James’ work, helps frame two key contributions that would be resources for the realist challenge to ideal theory. First is an orientation towards unruly pluralism as a feasibility condition that should constrain political theorising. Second is a procedural norm of inclusive tolerance that can help enact the motion of a liberal political vision under the constraints of unruly pluralism.

If the end of a legal system is the well-being of its people, as Madison claims in Federalist, No. 45, and if it is irrational to sacrifice means to ends, as Madison says in Federalist, No. 40, then Cicero was right to conclude that salus populi suprema lex, that the people's welfare is supreme law—that the people's welfare should prevail over conflicting legal arrangements.

Beyond Mass Incarceration?

Neoliberalism initially invoked the authority of competitive markets as the ideal epistemic mechanism for socio-economic coordination. Yet, the rise of neoliberal ‘market society’ in Western advanced economies since the 1970s has been underpinned by a normative political theory that advocates the reconfiguration of society and politics around the authority of economic theory and knowledge in both production, but especially finance. Conversely, the reform-era development of China’s ‘socialist market economy’ has been underpinned by an insistence on retaining centralized political power over the allocation of financial capital. This article argues that the rise of digital algorithmic technologies constitutes one means by which these contrasting politico-economic visions are being more closely reconciled. It investigates the ways in which China’s ongoing construction of an explicitly authoritarian capitalism is being facilitated by the deployment of complementary financial technologies that enable the Chinese Communist Party to embrace the micro-level epistemic coordinative function of markets without relinquishing macro-level political power and juridical sovereignty over these markets. Following a comparative historiography of the praxis of ‘neoliberal’ and ‘neostatist’ political theory in contemporary capitalism, two case studies of blockchain-enabled currency and big-data driven credit scoring in China illustrate the emergent Fintech foundations of Chinese authoritarian capitalism. The findings contribute to our understanding of how markets are being reshaped by new algorithmic technologies, as well as illuminate some of ideological contradictions in existing conceptions of markets as (neo)liberal institutions at the centre of capitalist political economy.