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Well-stated modern political or democratic theory is rights-based. Meaningful democracy rests as a precondition on the equal rights of citizens. This idea stems from Rousseau's distinction between a general will -- one which is impersonal and tends toward equality, that is, the equal basic rights of citizens -- and a transitory will of all. For instance, absent equal basic rights, one might imagine a possible world in which what I have called a self-undermining series of wills of all, or the results of so called majority rule, disenfranchises the population. In the USA, one might think, contra-historically, of a regime in which the women, as a majority, disenfranchise the men, the Black, Latin, and Asian women disenfranchise the White women, and by a series of reductions by further 'majorities,' three people still have the suffrage, two of whom disenfranchise one. Based on Rousseau, John Rawls' Theory of Justice thus emphasizes the priority of the equal liberty principle over an economic difference principle.1 The difference principle permits those inequalities which also benefit the least advantaged. But the priority of the equal liberty principle rules out any inequality, otherwise beneficial to the least advantaged, which enables the rich to control the government. This priority makes equal basic rights the inescapable precondition for any decent majority rule or distribution of income. Note that in principle, such a regime may be international -- even a democracy of demoi in James Bohman's phrase -- rather than national. Adapted from the source document.

This article confronts two recent sets of thinking on slums and slum dwellers-the optimism that inadequate shelter can somehow be resolved in the near future and the opposing naysayer view warning of some kind of apocalypse. Neither line of thought is entirely wrong. Without the implementation of appropriate policies, the growth of festering slums continues to be an inevitable occurrence. The heart of this paper warns against over-generalization of the urban housing crisis: a phenomenon afflicting most journalists and increasingly academics too. To inject some objectivity into this pressing discussion, current lines of fashionable thinking about the proliferation of slums, access to land by the poor, infrastructure policies, social and residential segregation, privatization, property rights, and slumlords will be challenged and contested. The paper will also denounce the recent resuscitation of the word 'slum,' a pejorative term with all of its negative connotations, for the people who live in low-income areas. Adapted from the source document.