Political Theory

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.

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.

The problem ofjustifying democracy arises when a society sees the need for cooperative, collective action. Collective action may be needed to solve coordination problems, public goods problems, Prisoner's Dilemmas, and other structural problems of human interaction or perhaps to realize common ideals of justice in concrete political institutions. Once the need for collective action is established, one must ask how the goals of a cooperative endeavor are to be secured. Cooperation requires that individuals, at least over a specified range of activity, pursue a joint strategy. To assure voluntary compliance in a joint venture, cooperation must be to each person's advantage. However, each person may have an incentive to induce others to cooperate and to defect from the joint strategy in the hope of enjoying the fruits of cooperation without incurring the opportunity costs of compliance. This is the essence of the Prisoner's Dilemma, and considerations of this sort suggest that if collective action is to succeed, policies or strategies formed collectively must be coercively enforceable. Coercion, however, requires justification. Because solving the problem of rational noncompliance requires that collective decisions be coercively enforceable, the rules by which collective decisions are reached require justification. Douglas Rae neatly puts the problem of justification that emerges when political solutions are coercively enforceable as follows: "Once a political community has decided which of its members are to participate directly in the making of collective policy, an important question remains: 'How many of them must agree before a policy is imposed on the community?"" This is essentially the question to which the principle of democratic rule provides an answer: by what process are collective decisions to be made? Answering Rae's question requires a normative framework. We could say that a procedure for making collective decisions is justified if and

Should Animals Have Political Rights?

Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge. Edited by Andrew Dobson and Robyn Eckersley. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 270p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper. African American Environmental Thought: Foundations. By Kimberly K. Smith. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. 264p. $29.95. Irrespective of what some students of political theory might claim, transformations within the discipline—especially in terms of concept formation and substantive foci—are oftentimes closely related to developments within real-world political discourses and practices. One notable example, of course, is the way in which the feminist movement in the 1960s brought about not only important transformations in our understanding of the history of political thought (e.g., in terms of the troubling position of many canonical theorists on the “private” status of women), but also new ways to reconceptualize politics today. With the “ecological challenge” confronting the world today, it is no wonder that there is now a new subfield within the discipline of political theory (in the United States, at least, it goes under the name of “environmental political theory”), one that is involved in a major rethinking of the history of political thought, not to mention the deconstruction and reconstruction of important political traditions and concepts to meet these challenges.

Civic Studies:

Two important methodological debates in political theory concern (i) the place of historical research and interpretation in normative inquiry; and (ii) the importance of comparing different cultural traditions of political thought. The first question animates a long-standing controversy over the relative importance of ‘history of political thought’ versus ‘philosophy’ in political theory, while the second has been central to the recent growth of ‘comparative political theory’. Despite both debates being concerned, in fundamental ways, with history and comparison, they have remained surprisingly disconnected from broader debates in the humanities and social sciences about the use of comparative history and, in particular, of the prominent methodological approach in political science known as ‘comparative historical analysis’. This may reflect the fact that the debates over history of political thought and comparative political theory have fundamentally revolved around thought—history as the history of thought and comparison as the comparison of thought—whereas comparative historical analysis is more centrally focused on the study of political behaviour. In this paper I suggest that this neglect of comparative historical analysis in political theory represents a missed opportunity. Like other forms of social scientific inquiry, comparative historical analysis can yield important empirical knowledge for political theorists. But I wish to more ambitiously suggest that comparative historical analysis can also be adapted for conducting normative political theory itself. I summarise the key features of comparative historical analysis for political theorists, and explain how its use of historical cases can supplement both the use of imaginary thought experiments and the study of contemporary politics. I then delineate three specific ways in which comparative historical analysis might be used to support normative inquiry: deductive testing, inductive construction, and casuistic elaboration. All three, I argue, can help meet recent calls to bring the study of real political behaviour more centrally into political theory research.

This chapter discusses how contemporary environmental political theories utilize “classic” or “canonical” texts in the history of political theory in the West from Plato to the twentieth century, primarily through appropriations and critiques of older conceptions of political society and “nature.” The chapter shows why appropriations and critiques of the works of older theories such as those of Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Burke, Mill, Marx, and Arendt matter, and should matter, for the new subfield of environmental political theory. Even if older texts cannot provide definitive answers to current questions, they can inform and invigorate environmental discourse as well as exhibit its essential politicalness. Conversely, close reading of the canon can help generate further questions about humans’ relation to their environments, thus encouraging, it is hoped, a more vital green public sphere.

Ethics and the Orator: The Ciceronian Tradition of Political Morality

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.

The prospect of rapid technological development and automation has heightened attention toward issues of work and leisure, prompting many to ask what the future of work will be. Though this question is sometimes asked as a matter of forecasting, the path forward is not predetermined. A range of collective choices shape the conditions of people's work and leisure. It is essential for these choices to be guided by consideration of what the future of work should be. This article reviews recent literature in normative political theory about work and leisure, focusing on how they should be conceptualized, the multidimensional values and disvalues associated with both, and the grounds of people's claims to each. It highlights how the goods and bads of work and leisure are unequally shared by class, race, and gender, as well as the theoretical and practical advantages of considering people's interests in work and leisure in conjunction.

Could the notion of compromise help us overcoming – or at least negotiating – the frequent tension, in normative political theory, between the realistic desideratum of peaceful coexistence and the idealistic desideratum of justice? That is to say, an analysis of compromise may help us move beyond the contrast between two widespread contrasting attitudes in contemporary political philosophy: ‘fiat iustitia, pereat mundus’, on the one side, and ‘salus populi suprema lex’, on the other side. More specifically, compromise may provide the backbone of a conception of legitimacy that mediates between idealistic (or moralistic) and realistic (or pragmatic) desiderata of political theory, i.e. between the aspiration to peace and the aspiration to justice. In other words, this paper considers whether an account of compromise could feature in a viable realistic conception of political legitimacy, in much the same way in which consensus features in more idealistic conceptions of legitimacy (a move that may be attributed to some realist theorists, especially Bernard Williams). My conclusions, however, are largely sceptical: I argue that grounding legitimacy in any kind of normatively salient agreement does require the trappings of idealistic political philosophy, for better or – in my view – worse.

Consider a seemingly fruitful ordering of our intellectual labours: think in ideal terms about justice and legitimacy, then bring our ideas and arguments to bear upon messy (and very much nonideal) real-world complications. This ordering is most often associated with John Rawls, but this was not his actual practice. That is no vice: Rawls took wide reflective equilibrium seriously as a philosophical method, moving back and forth from ideal to nonideal considerations in ways that belie the usefulness of any priority claims. We do not gain much insight by asserting the priority of either ideal or nonideal theorizing. Indeed, we could stop using those terms altogether, and theory might be none the worse, if we embrace something like Rawls’ constructivist method. Normative political theory should, then, reject certain methodological conceits lurking in some of the philosophical work we otherwise embrace.

Drawing on empirical evidence from history and anthropology, we aim to demonstrate that there is room for genealogical ideology critique within normative political theory. The test case is some libertarians’ use of folk notions of private property rights in defense of the legitimacy of capitalist states. Our genealogy of the notion of private property shows that asking whether a capitalist state can emerge without violations of self-ownership cannot help settling the question of its legitimacy, because the notion of private property presupposed by that question is a product of the entity it is supposed to help legitimize: the state. We anchor our genealogical critique in recent work on ideology in epistemology and philosophy of language and in current debates on the methodology of political theory. But, unlike more traditional approaches that aim to debunk whole concepts or even belief systems, we propose a more targeted, argument-specific form of ideology critique.

Can liberalism continue to serve feminist purposes as the most practical vehicle for gaining the reforms needed for women to lead fuller and freer lives, or are feminism’s aspirations incompatible with the underlying premises of liberal theory? This book explores the troubled relationship between feminist theory and liberal political theory by examining the work of three contemporary feminists – Martha Nussbaum, Susan Moller Okin and Jean Hampton – who are unwilling to give up on liberalism. Abbey examines why, and in what ways, each of these theorists believe that liberalism offers the normative and political resources for the improvement of women’s situations. In doing this the book explores issues at the heart of recent debates in feminist and political theory, including the sexual contract, public/domestic separation, structures of power, intersectionality, care and dependency. The Return of Feminist Liberalism offers new insights into the tension between feminism and Rawlsian liberalism and will be welcomed by a wide range of readers in political theory, political philosophy, gender studies and feminist theory.