New Waves in Political Philosophy PDF
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New Waves in Political Philosophy Edited by Boudewijn de Bruin and Christopher F. Zurn New Waves in Political Philosophy New Waves in Philosophy Series Editors: Vincent F. Hendricks and Duncan Pritchard Titles Include: Boudewijn de Bruin and Christopher F. Zurn (editors) NEW WAVES IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Vincent F. Hendricks and Duncan Pritchard (editors) NEW WAVES IN EPISTEMOLOGY Yujin Nagasawa and Erik J. Wielenberg (editors) NEW WAVES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen, Evan Selinger and Søren Riis (editors) NEW WAVES IN PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY Thomas S. Petersen, Jesper Ryberg and Clark Wolf (editors) NEW WAVES IN APPLIED ETHICS Kathleen Stock and Katherine Thomson-Jones (editors) NEW WAVES IN AESTHETICS Forthcoming: P.D. Magnus and Jacob Busch NEW WAVES IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Otavio Bueno and Oystein Linnebo NEW WAVES IN PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS Allan Hazlett NEW WAVES IN METAPHYSICS Future Volumes New Waves in Philosophy of Language New Waves in Philosophy of Mind New Waves in Meta-Ethics New Waves in Ethics New Waves in Formal Philosophy New Waves in Philosophy of Law New Waves in Philosophy Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–53797–2 (hardcover) Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–53798–9 (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in the case of diffi culty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England New Waves in Political Philosophy Edited by Boudewijn de Bruin and Christopher F. Zurn Selection and editorial matter © Boudewijn de Bruin and Christopher F. Zurn 2009; Chapters © their individual authors 2009. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-22122-2 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-0-230-22123-9 ISBN 978-0-230-23499-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230234994 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data New waves in political philosophy / edited by Boudewijn de Bruin and Christopher F. Zurn. p. cm.—(New waves in philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–22123–9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Political science – Philosophy. I. Bruin, Boudewijn Paul de. II. Zurn, Christopher F., 1966– JA71.N4795 2009 320.01—dc22 2008030200 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Contents Foreword to The New Waves in Philosophy Series vi Introduction vii Notes on Contributors xv 1 Feminism and the Subject of Politics 1 Amy Allen 2 Liberty and Its Circumstances: A Functional Approach 19 Lena Halldenius 3 Human Needs and Political Judgment 40 Lawrence Hamilton 4 Rethinking Ideology 63 Rahel Jaeggi 5 Making Nonsense of Loyalty to Country 87 Simon Keller 6 Finding Theoretical Concepts in the Real World: The Case of the Precariat 105 Mika LaVaque-Manty 7 Reflexive Democracy as Popular Sovereignty 125 Kevin Olson 8 Democratic Legitimacy without Collective Rationality 143 Fabienne Peter 9 The Political Philosophy of Social Suffering 158 Emmanuel Renault 10 The Subject of Multiculturalism: Culture, Religion, Language, Ethnicity, Nationality, and Race? 177 Sarah Song 11 The Aesthetic of Freedom 198 Ajume H. Wingo Index 221 v Foreword to The New Waves in Philosophy Series The aim of the series The New Waves in Philosophy is to gather the young and up-and-coming scholars in philosophy to give their view of the subject now and in the years to come, and to serve a documentary purpose, that is, “this is what they said then, and this is what happened.” It will also provide a snap-shot of cutting-edge research that will be of vital interest to researchers and students working in all subject areas of philosophy. The goal of the series is to have a New Waves volume in every one of the main areas of phi- losophy. We would like to thank Palgrave Macmillan for taking on the entire The New Waves in Philosophy series. VINCENT F. HENDRICKS DUNCAN PRITCHARD (Series editors) vi Introduction Part of the established New Waves in Philosophy series, this collection of essays breaks new ground by providing an unparalleled snapshot of new work in political philosophy. The book brings together up-and-coming scholars from across the globe using such diverse methodologies as critical theory and social choice theory, historical analysis and conceptual analysis. The volume demonstrates the vibrancy of contemporary political theoriz- ing not only when treating perennial topics – democracy, equality, legiti- macy, liberty, patriotism, political freedom, rationality – but also when revivifying topics briefly out of favor – human needs, ideology, judgment, political aesthetics – and tackling topics more recently put on the agenda – citizenship, collective agency, cultural contexts, feminism, identity, multi- culturalism, social suffering, subjectivity. To present readers with a broad cross-section of what is timely, original, and innovative in political thought, we reviewed the dossiers of some 200 political philosophers and political theorists who had received their PhDs in 1996 or after, read publications of a quarter of those, and developed an invitee list meant to represent the breadth and heterogeneity of contempo- rary research. The resulting eleven papers demonstrate, we believe, the excitement and ferment in the field across the world, as well as the quality of its practitioners. Amy Allen’s “Feminism and the Subject of Politics” investigates the question of whether the notions of gendered subjectivity and subjection are still, after twenty-five years of intense focus, an important set of topics for feminist political theory. After all, the slogan “the personal is political” might be understood as a regrettable retreat from distinctly political issues of power, the public, and collective action, rather than as a revelatory reali- zation of the potency of self-transformation through heightened conscious- ness. Taking her cue from a recent provocative thesis that feminist political thought ought to avoid the problem of the subject altogether, Allen argues that such a leave-taking is neither conceptually possible nor normatively advisable for a feminism defined by the aim to understand, critique, and transform relations of subordination based on gender. In particular, Allen argues that feminists have developed powerful tools for understanding sub- ject formation and gendered subjection by reinterpreting Foucault’s insights into disciplinary forms of power. Yet she also contends that an adequate understanding of the political must go beyond a focus on individual subject formation to include as well an account of intersubjective relations, specifi- cally in the type of collective political agency highlighted by Arendt. In the vii viii Introduction end, Allen argues that an adequate feminist political theory must put forward an integrated analysis of gender subordination that systematically comprehends the many faces and normative valences of power as mani- fested in political processes of individual subject formation, collective action, and the interactions between intrasubjective and intersubjective processes. In her “Liberty and Its Circumstances: A Functional Approach,” Lena Halldenius takes a look at various meanings of the political ideal of f reedom – noninterference, nondomination, self-determination – and examines the role they play in social and political theorizing. She forcefully argues in favor of a multifaceted view of freedom, embodying practical as well as mor- al-political and evaluative dimensions, and uses this perspective to study variations and changes in freedom within each of the three concepts. In this way she makes intelligible cases that have been described as “paradoxes of freedom” in which an agent was not free to do the things she freely did. Halldenius continues by turning our attention to what, on analogy with Rawls’ circumstances of justice, she calls “circumstances of freedom,” refer- ring to those conditions without which investigations of freedom would be meaningless. Two such circumstances are scrutinized. Halldenius recom- mends, first, keeping dispositional power out of a definition of freedom, and, second, paying due attention to the importance of institutions such as law as circumstances of freedom. It is therefore worthwhile to understand the disagreements among adherents of competing conceptions of freedom as about the relative importance of various circumstances of freedom rather than about what to consider as curtailments of freedom. In his “Human Needs and Political Judgment” Lawrence Hamilton argues for an innovative revivification of classical themes of political judgment, rhetoric, and objective human needs and true interests, but now conceptu- alized for use in modern, complex, representative democracies. Analyzing political judgment as combining the ability to choose how best to proceed with the rhetorical skills to convince others, Hamilton claims that political philosophy becomes unrealistic and impotent when it ignores judgment. As the requirements of good political judgment cannot be specified through universally applicable criteria, he recommends that we design political insti- tutions to facilitate good judgment in the different contexts in which it is required. Rather than employ the dominant normative framework of rights and preferences that is central to liberalism, however, Hamilton argues that the normative framework of human needs better facilitates such salubrious political judgment. Because a theory of human needs – including not only vital needs requisite for life, but also needs requisite for human agency and needs that are specific to particular social configurations – reflects the actual reasons and motivations of persons and is open to the practical poli- tics of collective need interpretation, it is better suited to real-world political deliberations and decisions about how to proceed. Intriguingly, Hamilton Introduction ix recommends a number of distinctive institutions to facilitate such partici- patory needs-focused judgment in the context of the modern state: annual district assemblies of citizens for assessing true needs and interests, a consil- iar system with counselors as intermediaries between citizens and their representatives, and citizen plebiscites every ten years for assessing various policy proposals and their likely developmental paths in the light of citizens’ politically interpreted needs. In “Rethinking Ideology” Rahel Jaeggi proposes revitalizing the endeavor of ideology critique by both demonstrating its relevance to contemporary social and political phenomena and, more fundamentally, arguing that it is not crippled from the get-go by two apparent paradoxes. On the one hand, according to ideology critique, ideologies are simultaneously true and false, but it is not clear how this could even be possible, let alone grasped in the- ory. Jaeggi argues that the dual epistemic status of ideologies arises from the complex interrelations between social practices and the norms they are taken to realize, such that ideology critique seeks not only to expose defi- cient practical realizations of social norms but also to destabilize deficient understandings of those interrelations which themselves contribute to the maintenance of unjust social relations. On the other hand, Jaeggi argues that ideology critique is a unique form of social analysis that has normative significance even as it forswears moralizing condemnation of the present in favor of idealized accounts of justice. Although this appears to put ideology critique in an untenable logical space between purely descriptive and purely normative approaches to political theorizing, she argues that it points rather to its specific strength. For according to her account, ideology critique employs a specific form of normativity that adopts its standards from exist- ing social reality – and so is a form of internal critique – even as it is not limited to a quiescent acceptance of regnant standards as they currently exist – as proponents of external critique might charge. The key here is to enlist the Hegelian idea of learning processes whereby a form of transforma- tion of the present from within is initiated by practical and theoretical insight into the strengths and deficiencies of current sociopolitical arrange- ments. This leads Jaeggi to defend ideology critique as a unique form of political theory that is simultaneously analytic and normative, whereby the descriptive and critical elements are systematically interconnected and, ultimately, theory is intended to take on practical efficacy for initiating progressive change. In “Making Nonsense of Loyalty to Country” Simon Keller addresses a pressing political question. While loyalty to one’s country is held by some as a prime political virtue, and famously criticized as nationalistic by those with a cosmopolitan agenda, Keller sets out a detailed analysis to defend the provocative claim that loyalty to country rests on a conceptual mistake. To begin with, Keller carefully distinguishes loyalty from such attitudes as patriotism, endorsement, or feelings of duties, and argues that
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