Suchergebnisse

In Foundations of Modern International Thought, David Armitage provides a genealogy of the multiple foundations of international political thought. But he also enables political theorists to reflect on the nature of the pluralisation of our concepts: that is, the way various components come together (or apart) in particular circumstances to form a concept that either becomes dominant or is rendered to the margins. Armitage claims that concepts can 'never entirely escape their origins'. In this paper I explore this claim from the perspective of contemporary debates about the nature of cosmopolitan political thought. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

This article investigates Barry Hindess's distinctive interpretation of liberal political thought, and especially his analysis of liberalism's emphasis on the normative priority of liberty. For Hindess, drawing on Foucault's lectures on the history of early modern political thought and liberalism, liberty is an important aspect of liberal thought but so too is "government," understood in the broadest sense. Any genealogy of the liberal conception of freedom must, therefore, also deal with the nature of liberal government, understood as a distinctive "rationality" of government. Hindess' "realist" approach to political thought, his focus on the relationship between freedom and government and the extent to which liberalism governs not only through freedom but also in determining which agents and/or groups could not be governed in this way, offers a rich and unusual perspective on the nature of liberal freedom. The article concludes with an attempt to provide an account of liberty as a distinctly political value that incorporates aspects of Hindess' analysis and yet challenges it in other ways, especially with regard to the importance liberty plays in the way we conceive of the legitimate exercise of political power.

The very idea of republican human rights, seems paradoxical. My aim in this article is to explore this disjunctive conjunction. One of the distinctive features of republican discourse, both in its civic humanist and neo-Roman variants, is the secondary status that rights are supposed to play in politics. Although the language of rights is not incommensurable with republican political thought, it is supposed to know its place. What can republican categories of political understanding offer for grappling with the challenges of global politics? Many philosophical expressions of human rights today are Kantian or neo-Kantian in inspiration, and as a result they are plagued by the familiar difficulties raised by Kantian approaches to politics in general. In particular, the growing prominence of human rights discourse has led to withering attacks on the appeal to human rights without any effective means of enforcement. Does republicanism offer any resources for rethinking human rights, and in particular, addressing the concern with the often moralistic and depoliticizing nature of human rights talk today? What conception of human rights best promotes freedom as non-domination? Are our practices of human rights effective instruments for minimizing domination?