Suchergebnisse

Christian Democratic actors and thinkers have been at the forefront of many of the twentieth century's key political battles - from the construction of the international human rights regime, through the process of European integration and the creation of postwar welfare regimes, to Latin American development policies during the Cold War. Yet their core ideas remain largely unknown, especially in the English-speaking world. Combining conceptual and historical approaches, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti traces the development of this ideology in the thought and writings of some of its key intellectual and political exponents, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. In so doing he sheds light on a number of important contemporary issues, from the question of the appropriate place of religion in presumptively 'secular' liberal-democratic regimes, to the normative resources available for building a political response to the recent rise of far-right populism.

The discourse of anti-relativism in the political thought of the Catholic Church -- Elements for a public critique of the Catholic discourse of anti-relativism -- Rationalism: between relativism and religion -- Defense of a relativist conception of democracy

This article addresses the question of the philosophical foundation for democratic normativity by tying it to a debate that has recently been attracting a lot of attention within the field of political theory: the debate concerning the possibility of a purely procedural justification of majority rule. In an increasingly influential book, David Estlund has recently argued that such a justification is in fact impossible, and therefore that democratic theory needs to rely on an 'epistemic' criterion of legitimacy, by which he means a standard of normative truth that is independent from the procedures through which political decisions are actually taken. Through an analysis of the thought of Hans Kelsen on this topic I attempt to show, in a first part, that a purely procedural justification of majority rule is in reality possible, without running into the objections raised by Estlund against such a project. In the second part, I then seek to show that introducing a substantive criterion of normative truth within the framework of democratic theory ultimately raises more problems than it solves, because such a criterion proves to be in tension with three core democratic principles: an idea of freedom as consent, a notion of equality as the impossibility of discriminating between subjective viewpoints, and a notion of pluralism understood as referring to the inherent legitimacy of political conflict. Adapted from the source document.

This article critically examines the notion that a direct line of continuity can be drawn between the Enlightenment and totalitarianism. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer advanced this argument based on a comparison between the works of Immanuel Kant and the Marquis de Sade. Adorno and Horkheimer suggested that the systematic pursuit of evil described in de Sade's work is the "black spot" in Kant's ethical system. Instead, this article attempts to show that the real point of convergence between the two writers is that they base their moral and political reflections on the notion of autonomy and that, as a result, the tradition of the Enlightenment carries a significant emancipatory power. Adapted from the source document.