Political Theory

Três variantes do personalismo na política da América Hispânica: o caudilhismo, o bolivarianismo e o populismo como expressões de afirmação regional / Three variants of personalism in Hispanic America’s politics: caudilism,bolivarianism and populism as expressions of regional affimation

by Francisco Mata Machado Tavares (Franck)

Abstract: This article discusses, from a political-theoretical approach, three variants of the
charismatic... more Abstract: This article discusses, from a political-theoretical approach, three variants of the
charismatic legitimation of power that are identified, along different historical epochs, in Hispanic
America. The goal is to identify the common features and the differences between caudilism,
bolivarianism and populism. The argument I intend to justify is that the political personalism in
this subcontinent is closely related to the affirmation of its regional autonomy, and, thus, to the
denial of the legalist-rationalist legitimation consubstantiated in the European constitutionalism.
There would be, thus, a paradoxical relation between the citizenry autonomy pressupposed in the
constitutional ideal, and the local autonomy, which is intrinsic to the expressions of personalism
in Hispanic America

Exit Rights and Entrance Paths: Accommodating Cultural Diversity in a Liberal Democracy Perspectives on Politics 8(4): 1021-1033, December 2010

by Sigal Ben-Porath

Gloria di Dio e legge terrena. Un approccio cattolico alla teologia politica

by Giovanni Cogliandro

in Democrazia e diritto, 3/2008 “Teologia Politica”, pp. 147-188, numero chiuso in redazione il 1. Novembre 2009.

Nel sistema della filosofia del diritto di Hegel lo stato doveva essere autonomo dalla Chiesa, perché conteneva in sé... more Nel sistema della filosofia del diritto di Hegel lo stato doveva essere autonomo dalla Chiesa, perché conteneva in sé la sua essenza, in quanto è la suprema realizzazione dello spirito oggettivo. Paradossalmente però la forma-stato poteva innestarsi solo in una coscienza religiosa diffusa e genericamente cristiana (ma non certo cattolica) che aveva il compito di educare le coscienze dei cittadini. Böckenförde riferisce questa considerazione alla contemporaneità: la forma dello stato attuale non si può più basare sulla religione, quindi il suo consenso è sempre sospeso, ed è per questo che spesso si riaffaccia l’idea della “religione civile”, prevalentemente come un retaggio di queste diffuse moderne cui si farà cenno. Di contro Habermas ritiene necessario un approfondimento sulle ragioni della separazione richiesta nelle costituzioni liberali tra Stato e Chiesa e sul ruolo che le tradizioni e le comunità religiose possono svolgere nella società civile. L’argomentazione di Habermas è compatibile con il liberalismo politico rawlsiano, e si fonda sul dato di fatto che la laicità è condizione necessaria ma non sufficiente per una equa garanzia della libertà religiosa.
In Italia tali tematiche sono state di recente riportate al centro dell’attenzione da pensatori come Cacciari Tronti e Agamben, per citare solo i più influenti. Delineare il rapporto che intercorre tra la manifestazione della gloria di Dio nell’uomo e la vita pubblica nelle sue due manifestazioni di politica e diritto è sempre un grande rischio e un azzardo, poiché significa fare i conti con la sempre manchevole risposta che gli uomini danno all’assolutamente gratuita opzione della kenosi, la sempre ingrata e imperfetta risposta alla scelta di offrire la propria grazia tramite il Cristo che si è incarnato e si è lasciato crocifiggere ed è risorto per unire a se tutti gli uomini nella visione celeste del Padre tramite il lumen gloriae.
L’interpretazione del katèchon come diritto naturale conobbe diverse traversie, fino a giungere alla nozione giacobina di un diritto naturale dei popoli di sovvertire i propri sovrani e persino di giustiziarli in nome del medesimo diritto. Fichte vede nella strada intrapresa dalla Rivoluzione Francese nel campo del diritto il fine stesso a cui tende tutta l’umanità fino alla definitiva scomparsa della forma-Stato in quanto non piú necessaria. Fichte e i teorici giacobini utilizzano toni messianici che riecheggiano le idee di Gioacchino da Fiore, il monaco medievale che teorizzava, dopo quella del Padre e del Figlio, un’età dello Spirito, nella quale si sarebbero realizzate tutte le istanze di liberazione dell’uomo . Questo lascia in ombra un fondamentale dilemma, ben enucleato da Koselleck: "Il problema storico da risolvere è se Luigi XVI sia stato assassinato, oppure giustiziato, o addirittura punito; non il 'fatto' che una ghigliottina di un certo peso gli abbia staccato la testa dal tronco" . Il lungo processo di secolarizzazione della sovranità e la sua trasformazione in calcolo maggioritario fu il rovesciamento del tradizionale rapporto tra lotta cruenta e politica: la politica quantificata secondo tecniche sempre più raffinatesi nei due secoli scorsi diventa la prosecuzione della lotta cruenta con altri mezzi. Quello che era l’arbitrio del sovrano diviene la sovranità del parlamento, seguendo l’esempio inglese in cui il problema centrale del costituzionalismo è come limitare questo potere ormai considerato normativo e naturale.

Cosmopolitanism vs Terrorism? Discourses of Ethical Possibility Before and After 7/7

by james brassett

The article provides a critical analysis of the relationship between cosmopolitanism and terrorism, via the question... more The article provides a critical analysis of the relationship between cosmopolitanism and terrorism, via the question of response. Using 9/11 and 7/7 as key moments in the evolution of this relationship, the article asks: how does cosmopolitanism respond to terrorism? What limits does this response contain? How might we go beyond such limits? It is argued that cosmopolitan responses to terrorism provide an important, but limited (and sometimes limiting), alternative to mainstream discourses on terror. After 9/11 the possibility for cosmopolitan thinking ‘beyond’ the mainstream view was articulated by a range of authors, including Archibugi, Habermas, Held and Linklater. A brief survey suggests that defending international law, constructing international institutions and alleviating global poverty were seen as good responses, in the context of divisive mainstream politics. However, by engaging a case study of the Make Poverty History campaign, the article argues that when cosmopolitan ideas were cemented in practice, the distinctiveness of a cosmopolitan response faded. This point was brought into sharp relief by a number of moralising responses to 7/7. Straightforward dichotomies between ‘barbaric terrorists’ and ‘civilised cosmopolitans’ served to construct cosmopolitanism as a coherent, and united, global community. Available tactics, for this ‘community’, were reduced to more-of-the same – more aid, more global democracy – and assertions of a moral equivalence between Bush and ‘Terror’, such that ‘you are either with cosmopolitans, or, you are with the War on Terror’. In light of
these ethical closures, and drawing from the arguments of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, the article identifies some cursory ways in which cosmopolitans might think beyond such limits, to articulate an imaginative and engaged approach to global ethics.

Performing the Sub-Prime Crisis: Trauma and the Financial Event

by james brassett

The article provides a critical analysis of the performative effects of invocations of trauma and traumatic imagery... more The article provides a critical analysis of the performative effects of invocations of trauma and traumatic imagery during the sub-prime crisis. We develop a pragmatic approach to performativity that foregrounds the ambiguity between the importance of performative utterances, on the one hand, and overlapping performativities that produce subjects capable of ‘‘hearing’’ such utterances, on the other. We argue that a performative effect of the traumatic narrative of the sub-prime crisis was to constitute it as ‘‘an event’’ with traumatic characteristics. Financial subjects came to anticipate the object of financial salvation through intervention to save the banks; and such a view worked to curtail the range of political possibilities that were thinkable. Lines of pragmatic resistance are suggested, which turn the logic of trauma toward broadly progressive ends. In this way, the political dimension of performativity is brought forward: if finance is performative, then this only invites the question of how we might perform it differently.

Crisis Is Governance: Sub-Prime, the Traumatic Event, and Bare Life

by james brassett

co-authored with Nick Vaughan-Williams

This article provides a critical analysis of how discourses of trauma and the traumatic event constituted the... more This article provides a critical analysis of how discourses of trauma and the traumatic event constituted the ethico-political possibilities and limits of the sub-prime crisis. Metaphors of a “financial tsunami” and pervasive media focus on emotional “responses” such as fear, anger and blame constituted the sub-prime crisis as a singular, traumatic “event” demanding particular (humanitarian) responses. Drawing upon the work of Giorgio Agamben, we render this constituted logic of event and response in terms of the securing of sovereign power and the concomitant production of bare life; the savers and homeowners who became “helpless victims” in need of rescue. Using Agamben’s recent arguments about “the apparatus” and processes of subjectification and de-subjectification, we illustrate this theoretical approach by addressing the position of the British economy, bankers and homeowners. On this view, it was the movement between subject positions—from safe to vulnerable, from entrepreneurial to greedy, from victim to survivor—that marked out the effective manner of governance during the sub-prime crisis. In the process sovereign categories of financial citizenship, asset based welfare and securitisation (which many would posit as the very problem) were confirmed as central to our future “survival”. In short, (the way that the) crisis (was constituted) is governance.

A Pragmatic Approach to the Tobin Tax Campaign: The Politics of Sentimental Education

by james brassett

The article provides a critical analysis of the campaign for a Tobin
Tax. A popular view that global civil... more The article provides a critical analysis of the campaign for a Tobin
Tax. A popular view that global civil society can act as an agent for ethics is interrogated by appeal to the dilemmas and political contests which pervade the campaign. Problems with financial and institutional universalism undermine any unambiguous ethical appeal in the TobinTax by imposing a set of limits on thinkable avenues of reform. How ever, and drawing on the philosophical pragmatism of Richard Rorty, it is argued that the campaign can be celebrated for its role in ongoing practices of ‘sentimental education’. By illustrating the harm that financial markets cause, the Tobin Tax involves larger, more diverse, audiences in a conversation about global finance; technical and sentimental discourses blur. Moreover, those very contests that pervade the campaign can act to interrupt the totalizing aspects of the proposal, thus making alternatives thinkable. Engaging the ‘politics of sentimental education’, in this way, allows a contingent celebration of what is ethically useful in the Tobin Tax, while leaving an area of contest that is potentially antithetical. Rather than plump for an either/or position, the difficult, but ethical, challenge is to do both-and. The article concludes by suggesting how this ‘politics of sentimental education’ might bear upon existing knowledge about the theory and practice of global civil society.

Ethics in world politics: cosmopolitanism and beyond?

by james brassett

The Politics of Legitimate Global Governance

by james brassett

Legitimacy is an important question to ask of the theory and practice of global governance. In this introduction, we... more Legitimacy is an important question to ask of the theory and practice of global governance. In this introduction, we make two propositions that are used to push thinking about these issues forward. Firstly, in analytical terms we outline a spectrum between legitimacy and legitimization which is aimed to capture the diverse set of approaches to this subject and to develop an engaged and reformist attitude that refuses the either-or distinction in favour of a methodologically pluralist logic of ‘both and’. Secondly, in political terms, we argue that discussions of legitimate global governance in both policy and academic circles can carry a ‘Trojan horse’ quality whereby the ambiguity of the term might allow a point of intervention for more ambitious
ethical objectives.

The New Spartakists. The thought of Rosa Luxemburg to understand the Global Movement

by Iñigo Errejón Galván

2005 - Con Pablo Iglesias en Barker, C. And Tyldesley (eds.) “Alternative Futures and Popular Protest. Conference Papers Supplementary Volume”. Manchester Metropolitan University
press.

La Pologne, un don maternel de Catherine de Médicis ? La cérémonie de la remise du Decretum electionis à Henri de Valois

by Ewa Kociszewska

Le Moyen Age 2011/3-4 (Le mécénat féminin en France et en Bourgogne, XIV-XVIe siècles. Nouvelles perspectives)

British irony, global justice: a pragmatic reading of Chris Brown, Banksy and Ricky Gervais

by james brassett

The article provides a critical analysis of the concept of irony and how it relates to global justice. Taking Richard... more The article provides a critical analysis of the concept of irony and how it relates to global justice. Taking Richard Rorty as a lead, it is suggested that irony can foreground a sense of doubt over our own most heartfelt beliefs regarding justice. This provides at least one ideal sense in which irony can impact the discussion of global ethics by pitching less as a discourse of grand universals and more as a set of hopeful narratives about how to reduce suffering. The article then extends this notion via the particular – and particularly – ethnocentric case of British Irony. Accepting certain difficulties with any definition of British Irony the article reads the interventions of three protagonists on the subject of global justice – Chris Brown, Banksy and Ricky Gervais. It is argued that their considerations bring to light important nuances in irony relating to the importance of playfulness, tragedy, pain, self-criticism and paradox. The position is then qualified against the (opposing) critiques that irony is either too radical, or, too
conservative a quality to make a meaningful impact on the discussion of global justice. Ultimately, irony is defended as a critical and imaginative form, which can (but does not necessarily) foster a greater awareness of the possibilities and limits for thinking/doing global justice.

Deliberation and Global Governance: Liberal, Cosmopolitan, and Critical Perspectives

by james brassett

Misyurov D.A. Dialectical formulas based on the binary notation as the development formulas // Credo New. 2012. №2

by Dmitry Misyurov

The article suggests dialectical formulas based on the binary notation as the development formulas: formula with... more The article suggests dialectical formulas based on the binary notation as the development formulas: formula with dominant and the non-dominant elements; universal formula; formula with symbolic weight of elements; tautological formula. For example, it suggests an opportunity to use the dialectical formulas for modeling and artificial intelligence creation, etc.

On Political Representation

by Emmanuel Sigalas

“When Adequate Isn’t: The Retreat From Equity in Educational Law and Policy and Why it Matters”

by Rob Reich

La alternativa al funcionalismo y al marxismo: la sociología del Estado de Birnbaum

by Luis I Gordillo

Revista de Estudios Políticos (nueva época). ISSN: 0048-7694, Núm. 156, Madrid, abril-junio (2012), págs. 167-207 (Co-authored with I. Beobide)

Este trabajo recoge las aportaciones de la Sociología y de la Sociología histórica del Estado, tanto en el orden... more Este trabajo recoge las aportaciones de la Sociología y de la Sociología histórica del Estado, tanto en el orden metodológico como en los resultados de su aplicación, al rescatar al Estado o Estados del olvido en el que la Sociología y la Ciencia Política los habían tenido hasta el último cuarto del s. XX. Estas aportaciones, a partir de la labor inicial de Marx, Durkheim y Weber, interpretan al Estado como fenómeno particular histórico y social, plural y multiforme en sus manifestaciones y como variable independiente de análisis y explicación de los más diversos hechos sociales.

This study analyses the different contributions of Sociology and the Classic State Sociology to the State Theory, taking into account their methodologies and the results of their application, revisiting the theory of the emergency of the State within those approaches. These contributions, starting with Marx, Durkheim and Weber see the State as a phenomenon being particular, historic, social, plural and multiform. At the same time, the State is considered as an independent element in order to analyse and justify a range diversity of social facts.

Call for Papers "Methods in Practice" Workshop, Manchester Workshop in Political Theory, 5-7 September 2012

by Jens Olesen

Rawls's Duty of Assistance: Transitional Not Humanitarian or Sufficientarian

by Caleb Yong

Draft only; comments welcome.

DEMOCRATICALLY AESTHETICISED POLITICS:

by Jon Simons

Prepared for delivery at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 30th- September 2nd, 2007. Copyright by the American Political Science Association