{"title":"What is a deliberative system? A tale of two ontologies","authors":"M. Bevir, K. Y. Chan","doi":"10.1177/14748851211034106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211034106","url":null,"abstract":"Deliberative systems theorists have not explained what a deliberative system is. There are two problems here for deliberative systems theory: an empirical problem of boundaries (how to delineate the content of a deliberative system) and a normative problem of evaluation (how to evaluate the deliberation within a deliberative system). We argue that an adequate response to these problems requires a clear ontology. The existing literature suggests two coherent but mutually exclusive ontologies. A functionalist ontology postulates self-sustaining deliberative systems with their own functional goals and logics independent of human intentionality. In contrast, an interpretive ontology conceives of deliberative systems as the products of the beliefs and actions of the actors in the relevant practices—deliberative systems derive from human intentionality. We conclude by showing how these conflicting ontologies lead to different empirical and normative agendas.","PeriodicalId":46183,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49013279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transformations of work and democratic decay","authors":"Johan Andreas Trovik","doi":"10.1177/14748851211035475","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211035475","url":null,"abstract":"Democracies worldwide are under stress. Two distinct families of explanation can be identified by the relative emphasis they place on the cultural versus the economic. Protesting against this dichotomy, there are those who insist that economic and cultural grievances interact. A conceptual scheme which ties together the economic and the cultural through interaction, however, rests on a prior separation. In this article, a richer and more plausible account of the relationship between transformations of work and contemporary democratic decay is developed. This account is based on a social practice model of work, in which the economic and the cultural are entirely intertwined. The social practice of work is among other things a privileged site for the realisation of certain ‘goods of work’. These include self-respect, self-esteem and self-realisation. It is by altering expectations about the realisation of the goods of work that transformations of work have contributed to an environment within which democracies are under stress.","PeriodicalId":46183,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46930105","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"African American political thought reimagined: A review of African American Political Thought: A Collected History","authors":"Adom Getachew","doi":"10.1177/14748851211038727","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211038727","url":null,"abstract":"This review essay surveys the contributions of the new edited volume African American Political Thought: A Collected History. The thinker-based approach to the study of African American political thought advanced in the volume highlights the ways in which thinkers reformulate the central political questions of the intellectual tradition and constitute the canon through the citation and invocation of earlier figures. It also draws attention to the rhetorical, strategic, and tactical dimensions of their political thought. The volume sets a new standard for study of African American political thought and makes a persuasive case for the tradition’s important contributions to political theory broadly. However, by tying its significance too closely to its interventions within American political thought, the volume inadvertently minimizes the global resonances of African American political thought.","PeriodicalId":46183,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45713018","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Is the privatization of state functions always, and only intrinsically, wrong? On Chiara Cordelli’s The Privatized State","authors":"Lisa Herzog","doi":"10.1177/14748851211038725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211038725","url":null,"abstract":"The legitimacy of putting public activities – such as providing education and welfare, but also running prisons or providing military services – into the hands of private companies is hotly contested. In The Privatized State, Chiara Cordelli puts forward an original argument, from a Kantian perspective, for why it is problematic: it replaces the omnilateral will of all citizens, which is realized through public institutions, with the unilateral will of agents to whom these activities have been delegated. While adding an important dimension to the debate, I am not fully convinced that private institutions always fail to realize the omnilateral will, and that this is the only, or always most central, normative problem of privatization. Instead, many concrete cases of privatization seem normatively overdetermined in their wrongness. Nonetheless, Cordelli’s brilliant discussion invites us to rethink these phenomena from an important angle and helps us to better understand what an ideal civil service would look like.","PeriodicalId":46183,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47958596","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Corrigendum","authors":"","doi":"10.1177/14748851211022134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211022134","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46183,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14748851211022134","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49222099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Demos (a)kurios? Agenda power and democratic control in ancient Greece","authors":"Matthew Landauer","doi":"10.1177/14748851211015331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211015331","url":null,"abstract":"Ancient Greek elite theorists and ordinary democratic practitioners shared a distinctive account of the institutional features of democracy: democracy requires both institutions that empower ordinary citizens to decide matters and the widespread diffusion of agenda-setting powers. In the Politics, Aristotle makes agenda control central to his understanding of what it is to be kurios in the city, to his distinction between oligarchy and democracy, and to his analysis of the preconditions for democratic control of the polis. For democratic citizens, isēgoria (the equal right to speak and make proposals in the assembly) was more than an expression of the democratic commitment to equality. It was also an institutional tool to resist oligarchic domination of the agenda. Institutionalizing isēgoria was part of the Athenian response to a crucial problem for democratic theory and practice: how to ensure that popular participation reliably translates into popular control.","PeriodicalId":46183,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14748851211015331","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49554253","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revisiting ancient and modern liberty: On de Dijn’s Freedom: An Unruly History","authors":"Lena Halldenius","doi":"10.1177/14748851211017103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211017103","url":null,"abstract":"Annelien de Dijn’s Freedom: An Unruly History is a rich and thought-provoking work in intellectual history, tracing thinking and debating about political freedom in the West from ancient Greece to our own times. The ancient notion of freedom as self-government (what Quentin Skinner calls neo-roman liberty) is referred to as the ‘democratic conception’. The argument is that this conception survived through the renaissance, the early-modern period and the 18th-century Atlantic revolutions only to be deliberately scrapped in the 19th century in favour of liberal freedom – absence of state interference – thus severing the ancient links between freedom and democracy and turning democracy into a threat to freedom. The book is an impressive achievement and the use of sources staggeringly wide. However, though the liberal turn is certainly a fact of history, I am not convinced that it was such a decisive break, nor that the relations between conceptions of freedom and attitudes to democracy are as clear-cut as de Dijn needs them to be. De Dijn claims, with regret, that the liberal view remains our view and is now an essential part of Western civilization, but I find that to be empirically under-substantiated. By using the liberal turn to define an age, de Dijn lets history play out through the lens of the elite.","PeriodicalId":46183,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14748851211017103","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45898832","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Domestic institutions, growth and global justice","authors":"Chris Armstrong","doi":"10.1177/14748851211015328","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211015328","url":null,"abstract":"According to one prominent theory of development, a country’s wealth is primarily explained by the quality of its institutions. Leaning on that view, several political theorists have defended two normative conclusions. The first is that we have no reason for concern, from the point of view of justice, if some countries have greater natural resource endowments than others. The second is that proposals for redistribution across borders are likely to be superfluous. Advocates of global redistribution have not yet grappled with these momentous arguments, or shown whether, and how, they might be rebuffed. This article does just that.","PeriodicalId":46183,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14748851211015328","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48160688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction","authors":"D. Williams","doi":"10.1177/14748851211002020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211002020","url":null,"abstract":"This introduction to the review symposium on Ryan Patrick Hanley’s works on the relatively neglected early modern philosopher François Fénelon (1651–1715) provides a brief overview of the symposium itself before turning to Hanley’s treatment of Fénelon’s work on the intersection of politics and religion, culminating in a comparison of Fénelon with his most celebrated admirer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The article sketches how both francophone thinkers employ conceptions of divine justice as a measure to counter the dangers of amour-propre, contrasting Fénelon’s thick theology with Rousseau’s thin theology.","PeriodicalId":46183,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14748851211002020","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44499702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hannah Arendt, antiracist rebellion, and the counterinsurgent logic of the social","authors":"Will Kujala","doi":"10.1177/14748851211009206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211009206","url":null,"abstract":"Arendt’s concept of the social is at the heart of her interventions in racial politics in the United States. Readers of Arendt often focus on whether her distinction is too rigid to accommodate the reality of US racial politics, or whether it can be altered to be more capacious. The central issue here is that of closing the gap between conceptual abstraction and concrete reality. However, by extending our archive regarding the social and political beyond Arendt—to work in subaltern studies and the thought of Arendt’s radical Black contemporaries—I argue that we can craft a concept of the social as a counterinsurgent logic by which political acts are reduced to social disorder, neutralizing the political edge and novelty of revolt. The distinction between the social and political is therefore useful not to describe or categorize kinds of revolts or struggles but to critically examine the way they are interpretatively and concretely transformed from ‘political’ to ‘social’ struggles. Situating Arendt among contemporary revolutionaries such as James and Grace Lee Boggs, I argue that they mobilized such a distinction, asking not what rebellions were but what might be made of them.","PeriodicalId":46183,"journal":{"name":"European Journal of Political Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/14748851211009206","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46953077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}