Jim Tully's “Deparochializing Political Theory and Beyond” provides an exemplar account of the modes of theoretical and dialogical engagement required for recovering non-Western thinkers and provincializing Western political thought. I argue that Tully's approach helps explain the provincialism of anticolonial political theory in matters of political economy even while it substantively fails to follow its own dictates. By provincialism I mean the lack of sustained attention to Third World Marxist thinkers and their critique of capitalist political economy, despite their centrality in the anticolonial tradition. To explain this oversight, I argue that post-Cold War Anglo-American political theory narrowed the engagements with anticolonial thinkers because of its own detachment from a critical political economy. This, I argue, diminished the ability of anticolonial political theory to place capitalist accumulation through the expropriation of nature and labor as central to the politics of colonialism and the unjust world that ensued after decolonization.

Genuine dialogue seems to require sincere commitment to reciprocal questioning. This view is reinforced by the idea of reciprocal elucidation, which tempts us to see it as binary: both engage, and understanding flows; one refuses, and nothing happens. This makes it seem that real dialogue depends on the other's ethical choice. I challenge that intuition. Instead, I propose that by adopting an externalist view, we can see that dialogue reveals the character of its participants, regardless of intent. Thus, rightly understood, reciprocal elucidation isn’t confined to ideal cooperation—it can expose injustice and asymmetry, even when one party manipulates or withholds meaning. Its power lies beyond mutual consent.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence have sparked widespread interest from political philosophers. In this review article, I examine two different methodological approaches to engaging with such technology by comparing Mathias Risse's Political Theory of the Digital Age and Josh Simons’ Algorithms for the People. Risse undertakes a broad exploration of the political questions raised by AI in an effort to update liberal-egalitarian thought for the digital century. Conversely, Simons adopts a narrower scope, homing in on machine learning algorithms used in ranking and automated decision making and grounding analysis in the economic, legal, and technical features of these systems. My argument is that while both works make valuable contributions to the field, if we wish political philosophy to guide the integration of technology into our common lives, we should prefer Simons’ approach.

Lars Moen's The Republican Dilemma (2024) offers a novel and insightful contribution to the debate between liberals and republicans about the meaning of political freedom. Moen bases his criticism of republicanism on Ian Carter's Equivalent Judgments Thesis . According to this thesis, the theory of pure negative freedom and the republican theory entail equivalent comparative judgments about the freedom of people. In this paper I argue, first, that there are significant differences between the pure negative freedom theorist's assessment of individual cases and Philip Pettit's republicanism's assessment of those same cases. And I use these differences to raise doubts about the existence of a strong empirical correlation between the implications of the two views. Second, with regard to a putative equivalence in policy recommendations , I concede to Moen that there are important similarities between John Rawls’ and Pettit's recommendations. But I argue that these similarities do not support the equivalent judgments thesis because Rawls is not an advocate of the theory of pure negative freedom.

Philosophically, conservatism can be said to refer to a disposition or an attitude towards the given. Whether this kind of philosophical conservatism supports or relates to political conservatism, however, is another matter. This article considers two thinkers who share a remarkably similar account of philosophical conservatism, but reach radically different conclusions about its compatibility with political conservatism: Michael Oakeshott and G.A. Cohen. Both Oakeshott and Cohen develop what I call a relational conservatism, that is, a conservatism that defends the given by transposing the non-instrumental logic of personal relations to things, institutions, or activities. But they radically disagree about its political implications. This article focuses on their core disagreement: the relationship between relational conservatism and markets. I show that this disagreement does not primarily come from diverging accounts of the market, but from opposing views on the scope of non-instrumental valuation. Oakeshott claims that there are activities that it is “proper” to approach or value non-instrumentally and other activities for which such a mode of valuation is “improper,” chief among them market activities. Cohen, meanwhile, does not place any limit on his relational conservatism, from which he derives a critique of markets as forces of instrumentalization. I argue that Cohen adopts a more critical view of markets because he is more radically committed to relational conservatism than Oakeshott.

Radical realists in political theory seek to develop an empirically grounded ideology critique that eschews moral premises. In their view, ideal theories of justice risk being prejudice-ridden due to the social relativity of moral intuitions and judgments. Their approach has been associated with early critical theory, a connection that is underexplored in the literature. This article examines the potentials and pitfalls of a non-moral critique of hierarchies and beliefs in legitimacy from a particular angle: by examining the affinities between radical realism and the Frankfurt School, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno. From this vantage point, the article highlights several philosophically productive overlaps that radical realists could explore to further strengthen their approach. Yet it also articulates reasons to question the desirability of eliding moral ideas in the critique of ideologies. Radical realists struggle to account for the interests that spark and guide their critical stance towards situations in which power justifies itself. Moreover, by attempting to remain outside the moral realm, they face difficulties capturing a particularly insidious feature of ideologies: the abuse and distortion of moral concepts to justify senseless suffering. The article concludes that critical theory should rescue morality from moralism.

Recent republican debates about judicial review have focused on whether courts deliver legitimate forms of political contestation about rights. These ‘political constitutionalists’ frame the separation of powers as a matter of ‘friction’. The rival approach emphasizes whether the expertise and capacity of courts can ‘efficiently’ get certain jobs done to secure different ends. These rival approaches inform debates about judicial review and bills of rights. This article argues that emphasizing political contestation fails to address the problem of complicity between the branches. Judicial politics in the USA, Canada, the UK and New Zealand suggests that judicial complicity with the political branches lets political actors escape democratic accountability for policy choices related to rights. Courts enable this by abusing the power to interpret law to help political factions protect or reform the status quo. As such, liberty can have something to fear from the judiciary when it does not act alone.

Many scholars claim that Abbé Sieyès (1748–1836) was the first to deploy the concept of a pouvoir constituant (constituent power) as the power that establishes a constitutional order under which the ordinary powers of government are conferred. Others find the substance of the theory to have been articulated by earlier figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whilst conceding that the terminology of pouvoir constituant was not used until Sieyès. What no one has observed until now is that the Scottish Presbyterian divine, Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661), can lay claim to being the first to explicitly use the language of constituent power and to develop a theory of the grounds of constitutional government expressly in those terms. Rutherford argues that “the constituent is above that which is constituted,” and thus draws a clear distinction between constituent and constituted power. Furthermore, he vests the former ultimately in the people while the King possesses only constituted power. Rutherford presented a theory of constituent power that had all the essential elements of the theory of pouvour constituant we find in Sieyès, albeit a theory embedded in a political and intellectual context as different from that of Sieyès as his is from our own.

The article shows that Fichte's conception of human rights implies concrete guidelines for the economic organization of states and international relations. First, I elucidate Fichte's view on human rights at the domestic level. Fichte's complex theory of human rights consists in a meta-right to live in a state that secures at least two “original rights”: a right to bodily inviolability and a right to sufficient property. I focus on the latter. Due to Fichte's unorthodox view of property rights as rights to actions rather than objects, this amounts to a right to work. This right, according to Fichte, must be realized in a planned economy. Second, I focus on the global level. Fichte's right to sufficient (unorthodox) property has implications for three dimensions of global justice: cosmopolitan right, the right of nations and commercial relations. Third, I draw some insights from thinking through Fichte's global material constitution for long observed conceptual tensions regarding his political and legal philosophy, namely between freedom and security as well as cosmopolitanism and nationalism, and for current debates in politics and political theory.

I offer in this paper a new conception of democratic self-determination . My proposal defends Rafanelli's peaceful reform intervention from the concern that we should not promote justice abroad, because it would interfere with the self-determining choice of other people to select an authoritarian government. I challenge this influential view of authoritarian self-determination. I argue instead that self-determination should be democratic in its input , or the procedure deliberating and voting on the constitution. Self-determination should also be democratic in its output , or the constitution's rules. Democratic self-determination offers three important advantages: it joins self-determination indivisibly with other inalienable human rights, such as the human right to racial non-discrimination. Second, it guards against the problem of the false mandate, or authoritarians attempting to legitimate their autocratic rule using rigged referenda and suppressed debate. Third, democratic self-determination reduces the risk of ethnic conflict given the diversity of actual states. Democratic self-determination passes the a ctual deliberation test , since it has been vindicated by inclusive deliberation with people from diverse cultures.