Suchergebnisse

The problem raised when democratic majorities take decisions that impose restrictions on religious minorities may be avoided through 'the strategy of privatization', but not when the issue is the character of public space. This article considers a challenging case: the Swiss referendum decision to ban any future construction of Islamic minarets. It examines two grounds for opposition: the human right to freedom of religion, and the liberal principle of equal treatment of cultures. It argues that the human right is too limited, and that the equal treatment principle can be trumped by considerations of national identity when public space is involved. Nevertheless, the content of that identity and its public expression must remain open to democratic deliberation, and the Swiss decision can be faulted on those grounds.

This article reconstructs and reflects on the 1989 debate between Jerry Cohen and myself on market socialism in the light of Cohen's ongoing defence of communitarian socialism. It presents Cohen's view of market socialism as ethically deficient but a modest improvement on capitalism, and outlines some market socialist proposals from the 1980s. Our debate centred on the issues of distributive justice and community. I had argued that a market economy might be justified by appeal to desert based on productive contribution, but Cohen saw effort as the only relevant desert base, and claimed that only non-comparative judgements of economic desert were possible. Market-derived inequalities, therefore, could not be deserved. He also condemned markets for relying on the motives of greed and fear, and therefore as destructive of community. In reply, I asserted that markets also liberated people from fixed social roles, and that market competition could be viewed differently, as providing the most effective way for people to contribute to each other's welfare. In retrospect, this debate can be seen to raise questions about the nature of justice and the purpose of political philosophy that have come to the fore in recent exchanges between 'realists' and 'idealists'.

This paper asks how a modern liberal state that wishes to remain true to its own values should respond to mass inward migration. Three of those values – freedom, equality of opportunity, and human rights – appear to support fully open borders. But a democratic welfare state needs citizens who trust one another, and this in turn raises questions of cultural identity. The cultural integration of immigrant groups requires limits to the numbers being admitted, and the selection of those who will become citizens in future. A closer inspection of the three open borders arguments reveals that none of them is decisive. In particular, immigration is not a human right. Nevertheless refugees, whose human rights are imperilled, may have strong claims to be admitted by liberal states. Ideally these claims should be met by setting up an international burden-sharing scheme. Where refugee numbers are so high as to impose severe costs on the receiving state, the decision to admit needs to be democratically authorised.

Political philosophy appears to have recovered from its alleged death in the middle of the last century, but now faces the realist charge that in the work of John Rawls and those influenced by him it fails to be political in the right way; it is merely "applied moral philosophy." I dismiss the hyper-realist position of authors such as Raymond Geuss for taking an implausibly narrow view of politics. There is more merit in Bernard Williams's claim that legitimacy, not justice, is the central problem of political philosophy. Yet we cannot understand the significance of legitimation without referring to the moral values that are realized when it succeeds. Thus, Williams fails to show that political normativity can be detached entirely from ethics. Moreover the legitimacy requirements of a liberal state, according to Williams, are substantively close to the requirements of justice according to Rawls. In light of the latter's turn to "political liberalism," they appear also to hold convergent views about the status of the theories they are advancing. I conclude by suggesting that the "applied moral philosophy" charge would apply only to philosophers who believe that general moral principles, like utility or rights, can do all the work of political evaluation. Politics does indeed have special features that impose distinctive justificatory requirements on its procedures and the outcomes they produce.

This paper places the issue of subsidiarity in the context of a wider question: "What boundaries between political units ought there to be?" Rejecting the idea of a world without borders, it begins by examining the view of international lawyers, encapsulated in the principle of uti possidetis, that existing state boundaries must be treated as sacrosanct unless modified by mutual consent. It then considers three normative approaches to boundary-drawing. The functional approach seeks to create political units that can best perform the economic and other functions expected of states. The political approach argues for boundaries that will enclose well-functioning democracies, which depends partly on the constitution of the demos itself, and partly on its likely impact on those outside of the boundaries. The homeland approach looks for boundaries that respond to the pre-existing territorial claims of nations and other groups. Since all three approaches have merit, boundary-drawing must try to accommodate each of them, which in the case of disputed boundaries will mean looking for solutions other than the traditional hard-bordered nation-state.

What first caught my eye when reading Patti Lenard's clear and carefully argued critique of citizenship revocation was a claim at the end of her first paragraph: the power to revoke citizenship, she says, "is incompatible with democracy." That is quite a strong claim, and my thoughts turned immediately to the fons et origo of democracy, ancient Greece. Weren't the Greek city-states notorious for the readiness with which they disenfranchised, banished, exiled, even outlawed some among their own citizens? And in the case of Athens especially, wasn't this in part because it was a democracy (at least for those who qualified for citizenship), and expulsion from the demos was one of the devices used to protect it?

Neo-Kantian political theories, such as those developed by Jeremy Waldron and Anna Stilz, aim to provide an account of state legitimacy and territorial boundaries that avoids the problems faced by rival nationalist theories. Kant's own theory of the state appears to be biased towards the status quo, and therefore has difficulty in explaining what is wrong with rights-respecting colonialism or the annexation of one state by another. Two possible ways forward are explored. One involves making state legitimacy conditional on meeting more stringent standards of distributive justice. The other involves appealing to the idea of a self-determining 'people'. However the latter must avoid collapsing either into a version of nationalism (if the 'people' are identified in cultural terms) or a form of voluntarism (if the 'people' are required subjectively to 'affirm' the regime that governs them). Thus neo-Kantian theories cannot deliver a plausible account of self-determination without, like Kant himself, tacitly invoking political identities of the kind that they seek to repudiate.

This paper attempts first to define "modernity" within a Hindu context, using Religion in Modem India (Robert D. Baird, ed.) and Modem Religious Movements in India (J.N. Farquhar) as points of departure. Many of the Hindu thinkers studied by both the Baird and the Farquhar texts were either monastic or ascetic leaders, and of the four Hindu modem movements described in the Baird edition, three were monastic centered movements. Thus, "modem" in the Hindu context is closely interrelated with a monastic or an ascetic way of life and with monastic movements as institutions of socio-religious change. Indeed, Agehananda Bharati, in his insightful article entitled, "The Hindu Renaissance and its Apologetic Patterns" (1970), identifies Swami Vivekananda, who is a key figure in the Baird and Farquhar texts, as an ideal model of a scientific, modem man, who, nevertheless is a monastic. Bharati concludes that "Modern Hindus derive their knowledge of Hinduism from Vivekananda, directly or indirectly." The remainder of the paper provides an analysis of Swami Vivekananda's definition of modernity, which he first formulated in 1893 at the World's Parliament of Religions. The paper concludes with notes on the monastic institution, the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, that Vivekananda founded in order to carry out his vision of Hindu modernity.