Leftist Critique or Fight for Democracy? Contimporanul Covering the Trial from Dealul Spirii. The general knowledge about the political dimension of the Romanian historical avant-garde places the groups on the left of the political spectrum. However, there is little work on what this means precisely when it comes to the concrete historical situations. It may well be that Contimporanul, the main press organ of the avant-garde supported a political agenda of socialist origin, but what does (...) it mean specifically? In order to give a complete historical-intellectual picture of the Romanian avant-garde, specifically of Contimporanul, one must also account for the first couple of years of its appearance, when it published a large number of political opinion articles, written mainly by the same authors that would become central for the artistic movement as well. We aim to fill this gap in the scholar writings by giving a detailed account of the reactions found in the pages of Contimporanul related to the political events of that time, notably those that involved the socialist movement. The case in point is the Trial of Dealul Spirii and the alleged political assassinations against socialist leaders committed or condoned by the state authorities. The overall image of the political ideology of Contimporanul from those years shows rather a marked democratic attitude towards the events, and a great deal of journalistic objectivity behind the attacks against the liberal establishment. (shrink)

SUMMARY The research focuses on the three main political parties in Albania, namely Socialist Party, Democratic Party and Socialist Movement for Integration. Its objectives are to measure the Intra-Party Democracy(IPD) in the Albanian political parties and to explore the meaning that party members attach to it. The IPD is understood and broken down into categories and sub-categories so that parties in particular and all interested actors in the field of political parties and democracy could understand, which (...) component of IPD parties are performing better and where they are performing worse. IPD is measured against two dimensions: inclusiveness and decentralization. Inclusiveness denotes the extent to which party members have the right to express their opinions and participate in the decision-making process. With decentralization is understood the process which makes possible the decentralization of the decision-making process from the highest national party level to party sub-national levels and party members. In a decentralized party, subnational party units enjoy a certain level of autonomy from the party in the center. The analysis is based on both primary and secondary data. Content analysis of party statutes particularly focuses on measuring IPD, while focus groups with party members and interviews with high-ranking officials of the political parties are used to explore the meaning that party members have on IPD, as well as validate content analysis findings. The main findings are: -/- Content Analysis of Party Statutes: Parties do have rules that govern their internal life, however these rules need to be improved in order to strengthen IPD. Especially problematic were the provisions for the role of the executive committee and party president, which provide these two institutions, especially the leader of the party with powers that don’t hold him/her accountable to the party members and middle level organs. Furthermore, members were not sufficiently involved in the procedures of candidate nominations for MPs, in the election of the national Executive and Executive Committee and in the election of the Party President. The analysis also finds that voting procedures are not sufficiently at place to allow members express their will and participate in the decision-making process and that members are not or little consulted in terms of programmatic issues. The analysis of the relationship between the national and subnational levels of party organization revealed that the center of the party has accumulated power to the detriment of the subnational units which enjoy little autonomy in the decision-making process. -/- Focus Groups and Interviews: The study finds that party members linked system-level democracy with IPD and that they have a very clear understanding if IPD: what it is and how it could be achieved. They linked IPD with the structure and organization of the party, seeing it as an important instrument that allows for decentralization of power and integration of rank and file into the decision-making process. The party members considered the statute as an important educational political tool and invoked it whenever disputes rose or decisions had to be taken. They linked IPD with the electoral system and considered that closed list proportional was a system that strengthened the power in the hands of the few at the party top executive level and weakened IPD. (shrink)

Political parties have been the subject of a recent resurgent interest among political philosophers, with prominent contributions spanning liberal to socialist literatures arguing for a more positive appraisal of the role of parties in the operation of democratic representation and public deliberation. In this article, I argue for a similar re-evaluation of the role of political parties within contemporary republicanism. Contemporary republicanism displays a wariness of political parties. In Philip Pettit’s paradigmatic account of republican democracy, rare mentions (...) of political parties often stress their tendency to lead to factionalism or corruption. Others working in the republican tradition such as Richard Bellamy and Ian Shapiro provide more extended discussion of the role of parties, but limit their theoretical function to enabling electoral competition. I argue that political parties play a far more significant role in promoting non-domination than this. In addition to enabling electoral competition, I show that political parties are also essential to the effective operation of two other components of republican democracy: contestation and interest-formation. I further argue that understanding political parties in these terms is compatible with republican democracy more generally, addressing the worry that parties will produce factional rather than common-good oriented public decisions. (shrink)

Modern democracy is impossible without political parties. They are necessary in the process of the construction of the political class and building of relations between politicians and ‘ordinary people’. So, in Poland in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries the significance of parties is also very important. Their history is older than the history of the reborn Poland. Especially in Galicia, an autonomous province of the Hapsburg empire, we can see the activities of many politicians. A part of them (...) in 1895 declared the birth of the Popular Party which is a constant element of the Polish political scene. The second traditional current is the socialistic movement, which is also always legally active in Poland. These two camps represent, in simplification, the ‘two Polands’—the first more traditional, conservative and provincial, and the second more progressive, ‘European’ and urban. Actually, in the typical consciousness of a Polish citizen, the political representation of the ‘black’ country is the party Law and Justice of Jarosław Kaczyński, and the ‘red’ country admires the Citizen Platform with Donald Tusk as a leader. But probably the idea of a twoparty system, like in the Anglo-Saxon world, is still very distant to reality, because in the European continent, the tradition of pluralism in a policentric version is still very significant. In Poland, even in the period of the ‘real socialism’ this conception of the organization of political life was realized, though naturally in the specific version. There were three legal parties and the Polish United Workers’ Party (the PUWP) was the most important. From 1976, the PUWP in the light of the Constitution had the official hegemony in the Republic. It is possible to compare this situation with the period 1926–39, when, after the coup d’état by Marshal Piłsudski, the Government still won in the election and the official elite wanted to create a stable political force with a perspective of permanent rule. But we must remember that between the wars opposition always was legal. In our times of demoliberalism, this is quite normal (though under the Constitution, unconstitutional parties, for example, communist or fascist, are unacceptable); however, interesting is the fact that when you observe sine ira et studio the evolutional trend of the Polish political system, you easily find the tendency of the ‘stabilization’ of the party system in the way of legal operations. From 1997, the laws concerning political parties have changed the possibilities of the conquest of seats in the Seym. Actually, only the parties having 5 per cent (or 8 per cent in coalition) of votes can gain the representation in the Diet. So it is possible to claim that the little parties today are in a more complicated situation than in the first years after the ‘operation of Round Table’ in 1989. The contemporary system is maybe more stable, but less liberal. There are theoreticians who note the danger of the alienation of the political class in the situation of the renewal of the alienation of the political elite, which de facto is more connected with the state than with the society. Many theoreticians emphasize that in the future the role and the character of political structures will be profoundly different from today. Maybe they are prophets, but we can expect that the Polish political parties or ‘post-parties’ and also political structure as a whole will have many similarities with their actual equivalents, because the mentality of the Polish nation, including the politicians, is more or less enduring. (shrink)

Contemporary democratic theorists have tended to assume that democracy is compatible with and even requires a capitalist economic system. Rosa Luxemburg offers a democratic criticism of this view, arguing that the dominating effects of a capitalist economy undermine the ability of liberal democracy to actualise its ideals of freedom and equality. Drawing on Luxemburg’s writings, this article theorises a model of socialist democracy which combines support for public ownership and control of the means of production (...) with a plural multi-party electoral system and a defence of civil liberties. It recovers Luxemburg’s conceptualisation of a socialist democracy as the extension of democratic principles to major social and economic institutions currently governed by nondemocratic authority structures. It defends this version of socialist democracy from the liberal objection that it violates citizens’ property rights and the Marxist objection that it retains the dominating structures of the state and a coercive legal system. (shrink)

This paper subjects to critical analysis four common arguments in the sociopolitical theory literature supporting the cultural nationalist thesis that liberal democracy is viable only against the background of a single national public culture: the arguments that (1) social integration in a liberal democracy requires shared norms and beliefs (Schnapper); (2) the levels of trust that democratic politics requires can be attained only among conationals (Miller); (3) democratic deliberation requires communicational transparency, possible in turn only (...) within a shared national public culture (Miller, Barry); and (4) the economic viability of specifically industrialized liberal democracies requires a single national culture (Gellner). I argue that all four arguments fail: At best, a shared cultural nation may reduce some of the costs liberal democratic societies must incur; at worst, cultural nationalist policies ironically undermine social integration. The failure of these cultural nationalist arguments clears the way for a normative theory of liberal democracy in multinational and postnational contexts. (shrink)

A new emphasis on diversity and difference is displacing older myths of nation or community. A new attention to gender, race, language or religion is disrupting earlier preoccupations with class. But the welcome extended to heterogeneity can bring with it a disturbing fragmentation and closure. Can we develop a vision of democracy through difference: a politics that neither denies group identities nor capitulates to them? In this volume, Anne Phillips develops the feminist challenge to exclusionary versions of democracy, (...) citizenship and equality. Relating this to the crisis in socialist theory, the growing unease with the pretensions of Enlightenment rationality, and the recent recuperation of liberal democracy as the only viable politics, she builds on debates within feminism to address general questions of difference. When democracies try to wish away group difference and inequality, they fail to meet their egalitarian promise. When yearnings towards an undifferentiated unity become the basis for radical politics and change, too many groups drop out of the picture. Through her critical discussions of recent feminist and socialist theory Anne Phillips rejects this democracy of denial. She also warns, however, of the dangers on the other side. The simpler celebrations of diversity risk freezing group differences as they are, encouraging a patchwork of local identities from which people can speak only to themselves. Her arguments then combine in a powerful restatement of the case for a more active and participatory democracy. It is only through enhanced communication and discussion that people can respect and learn from their differences. (shrink)

This article introduces the Völkerpsychologie of the German psychologist and liberal politician Willy Hellpach. It shows how Hellpach used the once venerable approach of Völkerpsychologie, introduced by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal in the nineteenth century, to adapt to the Third Reich and distract the authorities from his political career. The article provides a close reading of Hellpach's main text on the subject, the Einführung in die Völkerpsychologie published in 1938, and explains the ease with which he was able (...) to make this approach compatible with Nazi ideology. Hellpach's case thus illustrates the proximity of national-liberal thinking to ?Nazi ideology?. Moreover, on account of the post-war reception of Hellpach's Völkerpsychologie by scholars such as Ralf Dahrendorf, the article examines the uneasy and incomplete repudiation of Völkerpsychologie after 1945. It concludes that the origins of widely used concepts such as ?national habitus? or ?national identity? can be traced back to the tradition of Völkerpsychologie and related studies of national character. (shrink)

Western democracy theorists accept the "liberal democracy thesis" and claim that the only morally justifiable conception of democracy is liberal democracy regulated by substantive liberal values. According to this thesis, democracy not regulated by liberal values in nonliberal nations, if at all feasible, necessarily leads to the oppression of minorities and is therefore morally unjustifiable. This article aims to refute the liberal democracy thesis by arguing that democracy in (...) "decent" nonliberal nations is not only feasible but also morally justifiable. (shrink)

One under-theorized aspect of "multiculturalism and the antidiscrimination principle" is religious and ethnicity based political parties. With political organization, the fact of pluralism is made concrete for democratic purposes. When the struggle for empowerment is "waged within the world of democratic politics" it is waged through parties. That is the associational form modern democracies have settled on for participation, representation, and governing, and for countervailing power and regular opposition. Particularist parties and bloc voting are key instruments of political conflict and, (...) as important, of political integration. This Paper looks at the challenges these parties pose to democracy; specifically, at the principal reasons given for banning parties from participation in electoral politics. I identify four categories of justification for disqualification: violent overthrow, incitement to hate, altering the character of the nation, and outside support or control. This is a preliminary to setting out regulative principles of "defensive democracy.". (shrink)

In recent years much has been written about the contemporary revolutionary democracy of Afro-Asian countries, particularly in connection with the new experience of noncapitalist development or socialist orientation. Serious study of the revolutionary process in former colonial and semicolonial countries would be inconceivable without the formulation of this problem. Under the conditions of the general crisis of capitalism and the growing influence of scientific socialism, conceptions of the departure from capitalism, of the adoption of a non-capitalist path of (...) development and of a socialist orientation in domestic and foreign policy, are developing and maturing in various Eastern countries as a result of the evolution of the ideas of national liberation and social justice and the fact that the leading champions of independence and progress are beginning to embrace scientific socialism. Study of the experience of the movement of Asian and African countries along the noncapitalist path shows that they have made major socioeconomic progress, but also reveals significant objective and subjective difficulties in the policies of the revolutionary democratic forces. (shrink)

The politics of populism is the politics of belonging. It reflects a deep challenge to the liberal democratic state, which attempts to maintain social boundaries (as an imperative of state capacity) but also allow immigration. Boundaries—established through citizenship and norms of belonging—must be both coherent and malleable. Changes to boundaries become sites of contestation for exclusionary populists in the putative interest of “legitimate” citizens. Populism is an inevitable response to liberal democratic adjustment; any liberal democracy that (...) redefines citizenship opens itself to populist challenge. (shrink)

While the word “democracy” has proliferated in social and political discourse in recent decades, I suggest that the liberal democracy of the past, connected as it is (especially in the West) to the market economy, is insufficient for the challenges facing the contemporary Latin American context. I assess and criticize democratic ideas in order to suggest that the way forward is radical democracy based on socio-economic and political justice. These, however, have to be articulated at a (...) variety of levels, from that of local and indigenous peoples to that of national and international relations. (shrink)

Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy captures the unique blend of politics and economics, along with a particular culture and civil society, that are characteristic of liberal democracy. Commercial and economic activity have been so crucial to liberal democracy that it has often been characterized as “commercial republicanism,” and Schumpeter referred to it with justification as “bourgeois democracy.” Schumpeter’s view, which is too often characterized as simply elitist, can be situated in the realist tradition, (...) offering a helpful corrective to simplistic understandings of democracy, such as populist understandings, that are at odds with the promise of liberal democracy. Yet while Schumpeter thought that capitalism would collapse under its own contradictions, and wondered if democracy could survive without it, today global capitalism looks unstoppable. It is bourgeois democracy that looks fragile, not because of the collapse of capitalism, as Schumpeter predicted, but because of its success. Can liberal democracy surive if global capitalism undermines the middle class on which it depends? (shrink)

The concept of ressentiment is increasingly being drawn upon to analyse current political developments, but in doing so it is important to have a clear understanding of its original meaning in the work of Nietzsche and Scheler, who applied it to the inner logic of democracy, rather than political movements opposed to liberal democracy. This article introduces an important essay written in 1937, ‘National Socialism as a doctrine of rancour’, by the Dutch modernist writer, Menno ter (...) Braak. Despite having been highly influential in Dutch literature and scholarship, he is virtually unknown in the Anglophone world, since none of his work has been translated. This article is an important contribution both as a rare examination of how ressentiment can be used to analyse 1930s National Socialism, and as an analysis of the role of ressentiment as a moral sentiment in democratic politics, especially its populist variants. (shrink)

Abstract: To respond to globalization-related challenges, many contemporary political theorists have argued for forms of democracy beyond the level of the nation-state. Since the early 1990s, however, political theory has also witnessed a renewed normative defense of nationhood. Liberal nationalists have been influential in claiming that the state should protect and promote national identities, and that it is desirable that the boundaries of national and political units coincide. At first glance, both positions—global democracy and nationalism—seem (...) to contradict each other. We do not share this oppositional picture. Developing a more harmonic picture of nationalist ideals and cosmopolitan visions is the aim of this essay. (shrink)

Justin Holt argues that the Rawlsian requirements for justice are, contrary to Rawls’ own pronouncements, better met by socialism than ‘property owning democracy’, both of them preferring both to just plain capitalism, even with a welfare state tacked on. I suggest that Rawls’s ‘requirements’ are far less clear than most think, and that the only clarified version prefers the capitalist welfare state.

This chapter offers an overview of the serious challenges with which democracies must contend in the face of increasing climate destabilization and menacing environmental breakdown. After a brief introduction, the second section will discuss various accounts of what democracyDemocracy is or should be, from liberal and republican to deliberative and radical, and briefly indicate which difficulties these accounts face. The third section diagnoses democracy’s climate-related weaknesses. As a global and long-term intergenerational problem that is connected to deeply entrenched (...) economic fossil fuel infrastructure, climate change challenges national and usually short-termist democratic governments to consider noncitizens (especially the global poor, nonhuman beings, and future generations) as well as safeguard the basic safety of the populace and secure constitutionally guaranteed rights of citizens. The fourth and fifth sections provide an overview of the many remedies found in the literature, including eco-authoritarian proposals for less democracy, which some authors either recommend or predict and fear. Section “More Democracy” discusses a host of proposals for more democracy, from expansion to previous noncitizens and deeper citizen participation, including climate disobedience, to institutional reforms, especially regarding future people. The chapter ends with suggestions for how climate change might force democracies to adapt, including the alternative between eco-fascism and eco-socialism that some see as a likely prospect. (shrink)

Rawls stipulates that nonideal theory must include theories of punishment and compensatory justice, as well as a justification for the forms of opposition to unjust regimes, from civil disobedience and conscientious refusal to militant resistance, rebellion and revolution. (TOJ, p. 8) Given the Kantian interpretation of nonideal theory we now can see that each of its parts must be constructed to contribute to the teaching of justice. The preferred theory of moral development enables us to understand how persons come to (...) adopt nonideal conceptions and practices, and how they can be convinced to change their thinking. The theory of history enables us to determine which traditions contain empirical causes of contemporary conceptions and practices.We recall that Rawls identifies the parties in the original position as we ourselves; when we ground our judgments upon its procedures, then we can perceive the world as persons in that position do. Our view need not be obscured by the economic determinism of traditional Marxism, nor does it require a psychoanalytic corrective in the manner stipulated by contemporary critical Marxists. A Rawlsian critique of American liberal democracy resolves the question of these determinants in the same way as it resolves all questions of an empirical nature, by placing them in their systematic unity according to a Kantian moral anthropology. If we can see what judgments result regarding empirical injustices and their removal we may ourselves learn something of how to redesign nonideal culture to conform to ideal principles of justice. And this prospect in turn is identical to the prospect of constructing a bridge between social theory and practice within liberal democracy. (shrink)

This article advances a critical analysis of John Rawls’s justification of liberal democratic nuclear deterrence in the post-Cold War era as found in The Law of Peoples. Rawls’s justification overlooked how nuclear-armed liberal democracies are ensnared in two intransigent ethical dilemmas: one in which the mandate to secure liberal constitutionalism requires both the preservation and violation of important constitutional provisions in domestic affairs, and the other in which this same mandate requires both the preservation and violation of (...) the liberal commitment to international legal arrangements and to the rule of law generally. On this view, the choice to violate constitutional provisions and international legal arrangements is evidence of nuclear despotism. Moreover, this choice does not imply that the ethical foreign policy dilemmas were resolved. Instead, it implies that the dilemmas force liberal democratic governments into implementing ethically paradoxical policy outcomes. (shrink)

Democracy may well be the primary virtue of political systems. Yet European politics is marked by a democracy deficit that will not disappear spontaneously. While legal and political theory on this issue is dominated by supporters of civic institutionalism and constitutional republicanism, liberal nationalists seem to be split. They justify the civic nationhood of member states, but they shrink away from the idea of a European people. This essay claims that a quasi-national conception of European identity (...) can be conducive to the rise of a democratic political union of Europe. It discusses the mechanisms and rules for Europeanization of the sense of equal dignity and solidarity. This approach to supranational identity is explicitly instrumental and orientated towards the long run. However, the main liberal objections against it can be countered. (shrink)

The 20th century is the aeon for the social and national liberation of the individual. Freedom is a boon and basic right of every individual’s existence. Human freedom is infringed by certain social and economic order. This research paper undertakes the task to reveal the reasons behind the pandemonium of humankind living in capitalism; the basic fact for the rise and development of socialism around the globe. This paper is divided into six parts. Part I is introduction. Part II (...) deals with historical need to replace capitalism by socialism. Part III explores the economic decisive factors in capitalism. Part IV explores the economic decisive factors in socialism. Part V leads to threats of neo-colonialism. Part VI is conclusion. This research finally leads to the conclusion that socialism is the system for the abolition of regime of exploitation created by capitalism. It aims at transforming a just society based upon principles of equality, fraternity, democracy and fair play. (shrink)

This paper examines how three Dutch political parties employ the Internet as a tool to enhance ‘digital democracy’. The potential of digital democracy is considered to be strongest in the sphere of collective action outside the domain of political institutions. In this article, however, attention is given to how institutionalized channels might be supportive of digital democracy. Three components of the democratic process – information provision, deliberation, and political decision-making – are examined in the content and user (...) assessments of the web sites of the Socialist Party, the Christian Democratic Party and the Green Party. Minor differences were found in the party web sites regarding information provision; substantial differences were found regarding the degree and nature of political deliberation available on the sites. Indicators of the third component, political decision-making, were least evident on all three web sites. User assessments of the sites and opportunities for political deliberation followed, more or less, the general public images of the related political parties. (shrink)

Democracy is the very rationale for many nationalist movements aspiring to form a state of their own. In their view, political sovereignty is a necessary condition for a people to secure in its own culture, language and traditions, first, to control its internal affairs and second, to gain a voice in the concert of nations. The latter is increasingly important, so goes the argument, in a context in which the shaping of a new global world order is at issue. (...) The same argument is currently made by citizens of existing liberal countries who urge their state to keep, within new economic or political larger unions, the control of the national economy, culture and institutions. (shrink)

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed that their political project involved a commitment to democracy, and many subsequent Marxists have claimed that Marxism’s conception of socialism and communism represents a supremely democratic social arrangement. Many of Marxism’s critics, however, reject this belief, holding that the Marxist conception of socialism and communism entails anti-democratic policies, practices and institutions. While the position of Marxism’s critics is, without question, the predominant view today, it turns out that the arguments used to support this (...) position are highly problematic, insofar as they proceed from certain liberal-democratic assumptions about democracy that Marxists can reasonably reject. (shrink)

In this author-meets-critics dialogue, Sanjay Lal, author of, argues that Gandhian values of nonviolence raise aspirations of liberal democracy to a higher level. Since Gandhian values of nonviolence are closely associated with religious values, liberal democracy should make public commitments to religions on a non-sectarian basis, except for unreasonable religions. Critic Jeff Shawn Jose agrees that Gandhian values can strengthen liberal democracy. However, Jose finds a contradiction in Lal’s proposal that a liberal state (...) should support reasonable religions only. A more consistent Gandhian approach would focus on everyday interactions between citizens and groups rather than state-directed preferences. Critic Douglas Allen also welcomes Lal’s project that brings Gandhian philosophy into relation with liberal democratic theory; however, he argues that universalizing the Absolute Truth of genuine religion is more complicated than Lal acknowledges. D. Allen argues for a Gandhian approach of relative truths, which cannot be evaluated apart from contingency or context, and he offers autobiographical evidence in support of his critical suspicion of genuine religion. Critic Michael Allen argues that Lal’s metaphysical approach to public justification violates a central commitment of political liberalism not to take sides on any metaphysical basis. M. Allen argues that democratic socialism is closer to Gandhi’s approach than is liberalism. Lal responds to critics by arguing that Gandhi’s evaluation of unreasonable religions depends upon an assessment of violence, which is not as problematic as critics charge, either from a Gandhian perspective or a liberal one. Furthermore, by excluding unreasonable or violent religions from state promotion, Lal argues that he is not advocating state suppression. Finally, Lal argues that Gandhian or Kingian metaphysics are worthy of support by liberal, democratic states seeking to educate individuals regarding peaceful unity in diversity. (shrink)

This paper articulates a functionalist account of intra-party democracy (IPD). Like realist critics, we insist that IPD practices be evaluated on the basis of whether they facilitate resistance to domination and capture at the level of the polity as a whole, and therefore accept certain realist worries about IPD. Yet realists neglect the possibility that wealthy interests could control the political agenda by capturing all viable parties simultaneously-and that mass-facing IPD could counter this threat of oligarchic agenda capture. Taking (...) this as the key function of IPD within broader democratic systems, we conclude that inclusionary party reform is less urgent in more flexible party systems, where dissenters are better able to resist this threat from within the framework of inter-party competition. Regardless of the context, meanwhile, we also conclude that mass-facing IPD practices should aim at enabling ordinary members and supporters of a party to resist agenda capture by oligarchic interests. Though we stop short of defending any particular set of reforms, we reject the emphasis of recent IPD advocates on individualized forms of deliberative participation, in favor of a more oppositional and collectively-oriented approach-on the grounds that the latter is more likely to encourage the development of effective institutions of countervailing power. (shrink)

Events in recent years have underscored the dependence of the liberal international order (LIO) on the domestic fate of liberalism in countries like the United States—where, according to critics such as Mark Lilla and Francis Fukuyama, liberals have imperiled themselves through an unwise embrace of identity politics. These critics argue that identity politics undermines solidarity and empowers the illiberal right, and that it should be rejected in favor of a unifying creedal nationalism based on common liberal values. This (...) analysis, I argue, overlooks the fact that “common” creedal values have expanded in American history when their meanings were being controversially reinterpreted from identity-based perspectives. If American liberalism is to emerge from its current crisis, it will need to incorporate the claims of identity into a sense of national belonging that can resist the authoritarian, ethnoracial nationalism promoted by the LIO's enemies. The likelihood that such a process will be controversial is reason for liberal critics of identity politics to consider how the claims of identity might be an asset, not an obstacle, to revitalizing liberal democracy against its challengers. (shrink)

The book under review offers a novel approach to politicizing the "animal issue." Drawing on liberal citizenship theory, the authors argue that key concepts of international justice such as "citizen," "denizen," and "sovereignty" may be mapped onto human-animal relations in order to protect individual animal rights as well as ecosystem integrity. The ambition is also to overcome some well-known problems of traditional animal rights theory in relation to ecological concerns. Yet the argument that ecosystems, like human states, ought to (...) be seen as sovereign communities entails problematic concept-stretching that may undermine the individual rights it was meant to protect. (shrink)

Virtue ethics now constitutes one of three major approaches to the study of ethics by Anglophone philosophers. Its proponents almost all recognize the source of their approach in Aristotle, but relatively few of them confront the problem that source poses for contemporary ethicists. According to Aristotle, ethikê belongs and is subordinate to politikê. But in the liberal democracies within which most Anglophone ethicists write, political authorities are not supposed to legislate morality; they are supposed merely to establish the conditions (...) necessary for individuals to choose their own life paths. Contemporary ethicists who have addressed this question have proposed three very different answers to the question of how virtue ethics ought to be related to politics in modern nation-states. Martha Nussbaum seeks to provide all human beings with the capacities—intellectual and moral as well as material—they need to choose the best way of life. Arguing that the modern nation-state is incapable of providing its citizens with the education they need to live a good life, Alasdair MacIntyre looks to smaller, tradition-based communities. Because political action is coercive and truly ethical action is voluntary, Douglas den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen insist, ethics and politics should be strictly separated. This article examines each of these attempts to revive an Aristotelian understanding of ethics, bringing out the advantages and problems involved. (shrink)

Public discourse on religious matters is a sensitive issue in Romania. It has raised heated debates for at least two reasons: on the one hand, the repressive policy of the Communist regime concerning religion created a strong boomerang-effect, a religious renaissance after 1989; on the other hand, there is a deep cleavage between the “two Romanias:” the urban and the rural, the modernized and the traditionalist, the liberal and the conservative. Religion still serves as a major cultural marker of (...) national identity, and the church is one of the most trusted institutions in Romania. We are exploring the hypothesis that the 2006-2007 religious icon scandal in Romania is a typical example of heated public debate in a transitional society. (shrink)

This book offers a contemporary critique of liberal democracy, understood as a set of institutions and as a set of ideas.

The article’s intellectual core resides in the examination of social phenomena through the lenses of ambivalence and ambitemptiness. Democracy is conceived through the cultivation of the ideal of national solidarity within the framework of the “indivisible and unified nation” and revolution — values which, according to B. Anderson, individuals do not choose of their own volition. Nevertheless, it functions by virtue of structures that are freely chosen by individuals, specifically political parties and civil society organisations, among which trade (...) unions assume a paramount role in ensuring social solidarity. The author posits that a functioning political democracy, viewed as a historically ambi temptuous phenomenon, necessitates the reanimation of sustained equilibrium between the for ces of social hegemony and counter-hegemony. This revival hinges on transformative shifts in the structure of civil society, particularly reinstatement of pivotal social functions to trade unions. The article underscores the phenomenon of unprecedented demonstrative solidarity exhibited by the Democratic Party of the USA towards the strike movement. The author emphasises that a fully-fledged European liberal democracy was established during its golden age, preceding financial globalisation, as a social democracy. Within its framework, competitive and pluralist elections were complemented by the possibility of nationwide strikes facilitated by trade unions capable of social mobilisation. Proposing the term “political society” to denote the phenomenon encompassing political parties and movements, the article argues that their viability depends on their connection with civil society structures. It is asserted that neither right-wing nor left-wing populism possesses the capacity to fully neutralise “democratic fatigue”. (shrink)

One of the major political problems the world faces at the moment of its so-called globalization concerns the possibilities of maintaining, transforming, and expanding democracy. Globalization, as the extension of neo-liberal markets, the formation of multi-national, non-democratic economic powers, and the ubiquitous use of teletechnologies, threatens the modus vivendi of older democracies in ways that call for the reinvention of an old idea. Inasmuch as teletechnical globalization transforms space and time so as to put into question their (...) very presence, and inasmuch as deconstruction has always sought to rethink the constitution as well as deconstitution of the metaphysics of presence, I will here examine the concept of democracy that Jacques Derrida developed over the last few years of his life. (shrink)

Welfare capitalism is going through a deep crisis, and alternative models to welfare state capitalism such as liberal socialism and property-owning democracy are once again becoming prominent in public debates. The aim in this article is to compare the merits and the limits of liberal socialism and of property-owning democracy through the specific case of the distribution of educational capital, by comparing two educational systems: the Pay It Forward (PIF) system and the Tax-subsidy scheme (TS) system. (...) Based on the analysis of these two educational systems, we provide three arguments in favor of liberal socialist institutions in general and the PIF educational system in particular: (1) the individual common assets argument, (2) the principle of reciprocity argument, and (3) the predistribution argument. (shrink)

The political phenomenon that covered the period between 1958 and 1974 was known as the National Front. From the context of conceptual references related to this period, we will work on the concept of “hegemony”, which will be addressed based on Antonio Gramsci’s category. This paper aims to unravel the different political interests during a time of national unity that prevailed since the two-party system was established. Our general goal is to contribute to the discussion and analysis of (...) our political culture from a historical perspective, mostly of the student community, which, once inserted in the country’s reality, can take a stand regarding political events, thereby stopping dominance and hegemony based on National Unity agreements from becoming new totalitarian forms of “democracy”. (shrink)

Jeremy Bentham is a philosopher who deserves a prominent position in the history of democratic ideas. He not only thought popular rule as a vehicle for materializing his vision of utilitarian society, but also gave us a detailed picture of the basic institutions of the form of democratic governance he envisaged. It is also noteworthy that in hisradical system the people, who are the ultimate and undisputable source of all power, are protected from the authoritarian tendencies of state authorities not (...) by a bill of constitutional rights but by a set of enhanced democratic powers that enable them to exercise strict control over their elected representatives. In this essay we present an outline of his ?unusuallyliberal? theory of democracy based on recently published texts and studies as well as a brief assessment of its strong and weak points. (shrink)

Nae Ionescu is one of the most influential and controversial Romanian thinkers. The present article explores a less used perspective in studying Nae Ionescu’s philosophical, political and journalistic activity: the philosophical roots of his major political ideas. The anti-democratic position of Nae Ionescu was, theoretically explained, by the criticism to Rene Descartes and J.J. Rousseau’s ideas. The individual is supposed to be an instrument of history and nation. Any individualizing tendency is allegedly a betrayal to the nation. Moreover, the (...) leader has mystical prerogatives therefore the universal suffrage is not consistent. On its turn, the nation is not defined on the basis of the social contract. Nation is “a community of love and life”, in Nae Ionescu’s opinion. Nae Ionescu’s beliefs largely influenced the right-wing Romanian ideology during the years between First and Second World Wars. (shrink)

This book is an important contribution to the theory of democracy and socialism. The underlying question it poses is: how, if at all, can one have both socialism and democracy? In posing an answer to this question, Professor Cunningham addresses the following topics: the definition of democracy and whether socialism is necessary to its progress: the socialist retrieval of liberal democracy associated with the work of C. B. Macpherson: the political consciousness that Gramsci placed (...) at the center of socialist politics: and attempts by those in women's and national liberation movements to go beyond 'class reductionism' in socialist theory and practice. Unlike other works on this topic, the book devotes much attention to defining key terms and drawing politically relevant conclusions. It will therefore be fully accessible to undergraduates as well as graduates and teachers of philosophy and political science. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s critical acceptance of the Jewish national liberation movement and her support for the formation of a Jewish Army during the Second World War stand in contrast to her later critique of armed anticolonial struggles. I address this tension in three steps. First, I explain the role of violence in her theory of liberation. Next, I address the problem with liberation in terms of a sovereign nation-state and the alternative of federation. Finally, I return to the case of (...) Jewish liberation to show that the apparent tension can be resolved if it is understood within the framework of federalism. Instead of understanding national liberation as self-determination, federalism allows for a non-sovereign freedom that supports the plurality of nations within a shared political community. (shrink)

Previous concerns about new democracies, as in the wake of the Arab Spring, have now been turned inside Western liberal democracies. These appear under siege because of populist movements which give vent to harsh economic and national identity claims. Among all liberal democracies the EU needs a re-elaboration of its core principles to gain more support from its peoples. I propose to examine a conservative view that preserves the core of liberal-democratic principles, while relying on an (...) idea of ‘Transnational European Civic Ethos’ (TECE) that crosses national boundaries. TECE can overcome the lack of a common European demos, limiting its claims to segments of the European population that have something in common and can fruitfully deliberate together. TECE can defuse part of the populist threats that I take as expressing conservative attitudes without a response in contemporary liberal democracy. Final normative considerations from the model of the ‘reasonable citizen’ come to support the TECE proposal. (shrink)

Two of the dominant frameworks for criticizing capitalism and liberal democracy in contemporary political theory is Socialist republicanism, on the one hand, and radical democracy, on other hand. Whereas radical democratic thinkers have for decades criticized liberal democracy for being elitist, hierarchical and outright anti-popular, socialist republicans have for the last 10 years developed critiques of capitalism centred on the neo-republican idea of freedom as non-domination and proposed various arguments for workplace democracy (...) and cooperative forms of ownership. Despite the common ambition of uncovering hierarchical relations of economic, political and social power, and creating new egalitarian and participatory modes of political organization, no systematic comparison of socialist republicanism and radical democracy exists. This paper fills this gap by comparing the different understandings of (a) institutions and (b) political action and (c) their diverging historical and political relations to socialism. (shrink)

This article describes the relation between the existence of regional parties in Romania vs. stable democracies like Belgium and Germany and the degree of regional issue dimensions reflected by partiesí electoral support. It also reflects the impact of regional dimension on voting behavior. The research is based on the nationalization concept introduced by Mark P. Jones and Scott Mainwaring, well operationalized here by Gini Index based vote share of parties in subunits applied on one or more countries. From here, the (...) study wants to promote a new formula which permits the evaluation of regional dimension from all issue dimensions of a country and counting the score like a reflection of differences between parties (regional, national), the differences between voters expectations on regional issues, the competition pattern, the increase or decrease of the national issue dimensions by changing inside the given party system. (shrink)

The complexity of supply chains means that it is difficult to tell where national security arguments begin and end. That may weaken some of the traditional arguments for free trade for the same reasons that we accept the difficulty of rational economic calculation in a socialist society. National security arguments for protectionism may not remain restricted to very small and manageable segments of the economy. Liberals and cosmopolitans will need to pay greater heed to these problems. This (...) essay also considers why complex supply chains may create problems for a carbon tax and for the notion of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

기독교와 사회주의는 19세기와 20세기에 수용된 종교와 사상이다. 기독교와 사회주의 는 민족해방과 통일이라는 공0동의 목적으로 함께 연대했던 민족해방운동의 사상적 토대 였다. 현재 남한과 북한이 적대와 분열을 넘어 화해와 통일을 지향해야할 때 남한의 기독 교는 사회주의와의 만남이 필요하고 북한의 체제는 다양한 종교의 인정이 필요하다. 이런 맥락에서 김창준은 주목할 만하다. 흔히 김창준은 ‘기독교민족사회주의자’로 평가받지만 월북이라는 과거의 전력 때문에 빨갱이 목사로 매도된 인물이다. 선행 연구는 김창준이 왜 기독교민족사회주의자로 평가받는지에 대해서 입체적으로 연구하지는 못했다. 본 논문은 김창준을 다소 연결되기 어려운 기독교, 민족주의, 사회주의를 연결하여 ‘기독교민족사회 주의자’로 (...) 평가하는 근거를 그의 글을 통해 분석해보려는 시도이다. 과연 그는 어떤 기독 교주의자였고 어떤 민족주의자였으며 어떤 사회주의자였는지 그리고 어떻게 이 3가지는 융합되고 통합될 수 있었는지를 논의하고자 한다. (shrink)

Yugoslavia is unique among East European countries. It is a highly decentralized, multi-national federation with six republics and two autonomous provinces. It is a one party state. At the same time, it has a very sophisticated system of direct political and economic democracy. In theory, it is supposed to be the realization of the society envisioned by libertarian socialists such as Proudhon, Bakunin and Marx. But high inflation, unemployment, national tensions, mass frustration, social immobility and an unrepresentative (...) political system are the reality. Taken together, these problems amount to a deep, structural social crisis. The Yugoslav state was established in the aftermath of WWI as a centralized Kingdom with a tendency to ignore any national particularity of Southern Slavs, and to recognize only limited minority rights to non-Slavs. (shrink)

Politics in America are polarized and trivialized, perhaps as never before. In Congress, the media, and academic debate, opponents from right and left, the Red and the Blue, struggle against one another as if politics were contact sports played to the shouts of cheerleaders. The result, Ronald Dworkin writes, is a deeply depressing political culture, as ill equipped for the perennial challenge of achieving social justice as for the emerging threats of terrorism. Can the hope for change be realized? Dworkin, (...) one the world's leading legal and political philosophers, identifies and defends core principles of personal and political morality that all citizens can share. He shows that recognizing such shared principles can make substantial political argument possible and help replace contempt with mutual respect. Only then can the full promise of democracy be realized in America and elsewhere. Dworkin lays out two core principles that citizens should share: first, that each human life is intrinsically and equally valuable and, second, that each person has an inalienable personal responsibility for identifying and realizing value in his or her own life. He then shows what fidelity to these principles would mean for human rights, the place of religion in public life, economic justice, and the character and value of democracy. Dworkin argues that liberal conclusions flow most naturally from these principles. Properly understood, they collide with the ambitions of religious conservatives, contemporary American tax and social policy, and much of the War on Terror. But his more basic aim is to convince Americans of all political stripes--as well as citizens of other nations with similar cultures--that they can and must defend their own convictions through their own interpretations of these shared values. (shrink)

A political challenge facing constitutional democracies in Africa is the lack of adequate representation and participation of citizens in democratic processes and institutions. This challenge is manifest in the vesting of power solely in, and the exercise of this power by, a sectional group – the majority party – to the exclusion of others; as evinced in the liberal democratic systems extensively practised on the continent. Wiredu proposes as a solution to these challenges the adoption of consensual democracy; (...) an indigenous, non-party democratic system rooted in the traditional African humanist and communitarian conceptions of the individual and the community, in which political decisions are characteristically reached by consensus. In this article, I present a critical exposition of Wiredu’s consensual democracy and defend it against liberal democracy on the one hand, and criticisms levelled against it on the other hand. I also offer some modifications to Wiredu’s theory in a bid to render it more suitable for practice in Africa. (shrink)

The paper examines two recent arguments, by Keith Graham and Richard Norman, to the effect that a liberal individualist foundation is insufficient for a socialist conception of democracy and needs to be replaced or supplemented by collectivist notions [I]. It concludes that these arguments are unsound and that a defensible education for democratic citizenship on socialist lines should be based on liberal values, not least that of personal autonomy. At the same time it concedes to (...) collectivism that socialist democracy needs to operate within a social framework, but sees national communities rather than social classes or smaller-scale groupings as the most promising candidates for this. (shrink)