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This paper considers ways in which rulers can respond to, generate, or exploit fear of COVID-19 infection for various ends, and in particular distinguishes between ‘fear-invoking’ and ‘fear-minimising’ strategies. It examines historical precedent for executive overreach in crises and then moves on to look in more detail at some specific areas where fear is being mobilised or generated: in ways that lead to the suspension of civil liberties; that foster discrimination against minorities; and that boost the personality cult of leaders and limit criticism or competition. Finally, in the Appendix, we present empirical work, based on the results of an original survey in Brazil, that provides support for the conjectures in the previous sections. While it is too early to tell what the longer-term outcomes of the changes we note will be, our purpose here is simply to identify some warning signs that threaten the key institutions and values of democracy.
Disagreement among philosophers over the proper justification for political institutions is far from a new phenomenon. Thus, it should not come as a surprise that there is substantial room for dissent on this matter within democratic theory. As is well known, instrumentalism and proceduralism represent the two primary viewpoints that democrats can adopt to vindicate democratic legitimacy. While the former notoriously derives the value of democracy from its outcomes, the latter claims that a democratic decision-making process is inherently valuable. This article has two aims. First, it introduces three variables with which we can thoroughly categorise the aforementioned approaches. Second, it argues that the more promising version of proceduralism is extrinsic, rather than intrinsic, and that extrinsically procedural accounts can appeal to other values in the justification of democracy without translating into instrumentalism. This article is organised as follows. I present what I consider to be the ‘implicit view’ in the justification of democracy. Then, I analyse each of the three variables in a different section. Finally, I raise an objection against procedural views grounded in relational equality, which cannot account for the idea that democracy is a necessary condition for political legitimacy.
Questo saggio descrive il progetto ambizioso del costituzionalismo moderno e lo distingue dalla mera giuridicizzazione del potere pubblico. Esso mostra le sfide del costituzionalismo derivanti dalla perdita di identità del potere statale e del potere pubblico. Il saggio afferma la persistenza della necessità di regolare il potere pubblico, indipendentemente dal fatto che sia esercitato dalle autorità statali o da organizzazioni internazionali. Tuttavia, esso solleva dubbi sul fatto che il potere pubblico frammentato a livello internazionale possa essere regolato in modo tale da soddisfare le richieste del costituzionalismo. È in corso una giuridicizzazione che manca delle caratteristiche fondamentali del costituzionalismo. Come realizzare una compensazione in questo senso resta una domanda aperta.
Within democratic orders, it is the declared aim of a state of exception to secure or restore the endangered foundation of democracy. The provided measures are, however, undemocratic insofar they directly affect individual rights as the principle on which democracy is based: By suspending rights, the state of exception treats individuals not as members of a democratic community (demos), but as parts of a population which has to be secured. Whereas individual rights enable individuals to be part of the demos, the state of exception – by restraining rights – enforces a politics of population. In my article, I show in what way individual rights, too, are used as a strategy of governing the population. Referring to the history of individual rights in the early modern period, I describe a specific form of alienation of individual rights. I argue that this alienation consists in the separation of a private from the political component of individual rights. This alienation is the reason for a dialectical shift from demos to population which occurs in an extreme form in the state of exception. Against this background, the question of the state of exception and the question of individual rights appear in an unfamiliar but crucial relation. In order to oppose the dialectical shift and the misuse of exceptional measures, I claim it necessary to insist on the inextricable link between the private and the political component of individual rights – that is to extend the domain of democracy.
No presente artigo analisamos a ideia de solidariedade na teoria da justiça de Axel Honneth. Honneth em sua obra atualiza a teoria hegeliana da eticidade e concebe a existência de esferas de liberdade, sendo que uma delas é a liberdade social, na qual se situam relações pessoais, mercado e instituições políticas. Em O Direito da Liberdade Honneth desenvolve uma teoria em que busca analisar os problemas de desenvolvimento da democracia nas sociedades contemporâneas, e erige a solidariedade como um dos pressupostos normativos para a construção de uma democracia virtuosa, ancorada na participação cidadã.
O Direito liberal procede da ideia kantiana de um acordo de arbítrios conforme uma lei de liberdade externa, assegurando a ideia de um radicalismo pós-religioso de legitimidade e sem fundamentos metafísicos (Nozick). Habermas aproveita os sentidos do Direito liberal de Nozick e Kant, liberdade e não fundacionismo e associa a crítica ao Direito socialista a uma visão construtiva que, assim como Rawls (e seu pluralismo razoável), busca pensar as pretensões de um Direito democrático no espaço público. Superando a dicotomia socialista-liberal do século XX, Habermas busca manter a democracia e a pós-metafísica como elementos de um Direito pluralista que através do procedimentalismo institucionalizador das conquistas do espaço público movido pela razão comunicativa, possa assegurar as pretensões de legitimação da liberdade com as necessárias visões da “Teoria Crítica” sobre a legitimação da democracia no capitalismo tardio, preservando as autonomias pública e privada da tradição republicana e liberal de Kant.
The evolution of Critical Theory in the thought of Jürgen Habermas has important consequences for political questions, influencing the actual intellectual debate. This paper examines the main works and studies of Habermas about the epistemology of social sciences, the critique of late capitalist society, the public sphere and democracy, and proposes a comparison with the positions of Jacques Derrida, to have a better comprehension of this evolution.
In the last few years, Myanmar has undergone a severe and unexpected change. The military-led country has been starting to open up its borders and economy, enhance citizens’ rights and, allegedly, democratize. While the EU and US were quick to celebrate the changes and lift sanctions in return, a number of questions remain: Will the changes be sustainable? Does the opening-up indicate a movement towards democracy? What were the reasons for the military to relinquish some of its power – and has it actually done so in the first place?
La educación y el espacio público democrático. Un capítulo descuidado en la filosofía política
(2013)
En este trabajo se examina la relación interna entre educación y democracia, así como la razón por la cual, pese a su papel crucial en la formación de culturas democráticas, esta relación se ha hecho problemática. Con el fin de mostrar, en primer lugar, qué consecuencias negativas tiene para la vida política contemporánea esta ruptura entre pedagogía y filosofía política y, en segundo lugar, cómo superarlas, este artículo explora algunos malentendidos básicos en torno a las condiciones culturales para la democracia y el papel neutral del Estado, finalizando con la propuesta de un programa renovado de educación democrática.
Este artigo busca aliar as leituras de Adorno e Dewey acerca do papel da educação frente o fenômeno da alienação social, focando principalmente a experiência dentro do processo de emancipação. Ao final, busca-se identificar os ideais de coletividade e compromisso como premissas falsas dos processos educacionais.
Technologies carry politics since they embed values. It is therefore surprising that mainstream political and legal theory have taken the issue so lightly. Compared to what has been going on over the past few decades in the other branches of practical thought, namely ethics, economics and the law, political theory lags behind. Yet the current emphasis on Internet politics that polarizes the apologists holding the web to overcome the one-to-many architecture of opinion-building in traditional representative democracy, and the critics that warn cyber-optimism entails authoritarian technocracy has acted as a wake up call. This paper sets the problem – “What is it about ICTs, as opposed to previous technical devices, that impact on politics and determine uncertainty about democratic matters?” – into the broad context of practical philosophy, by offering a conceptual map of clusters of micro-problems and concrete examples relating to “e-democracy”. The point is to highlight when and why the hyphen of e-democracy has a conjunctive or a disjunctive function, in respect to stocktaking from past experiences and settled democratic theories. My claim is that there is considerable scope to analyse how and why online politics fails or succeeds. The field needs both further empirical and theoretical work.
As is well known, the 2nd Spanish Republic (1931-1936) was toppled by a military uprising which, after a cruel Civil War, set up an autocratic regime led by General Franco which lasted until his natural death in 1975. According to the contemporary theory of the legal system, a legal order exists on the sole condition that it is efficient in general terms and this was the case for both the Republic and the Dictatorship. In turn, the validity of the legal norms of all legal orders is based on its respective rules of recognition. Thus, neither the existence of the legal order nor the validity of its respective legal norms depends on moral considerations. In this paper, we call this affirmation into question on the base of the fact that the compensatory methods adopted from the Transition to Democracy show an evident concern to repair the damage of taking away a person’s basic rights (life, health, freedom, expression, association etc) although the Spanish Constitution, with its catalogue of fundamental rights was not in force at that time. But these measures would not have much sense if, as Raz says, there was no shared content which is common to all legal systems. Like Nino, we claim that one must discriminate between a democratic legal order and an autocratic one to establish the level of validity of its respective legal norms. Thus it can be assigned a presumption of justice to democratic norms. Finally, we state that the criteria to weigh up the justice or injustice of legal norms, as that of legal orders, takes root in the level of respect they show towards human rights.
The normative position of the judiciary under the traditional conception of democracy as self-legislation by the people is too weak to protect in an effective way the rights of suspects in the global War on Terror. Drawing on arguments elaborated by Hans Kelsen and Karl Popper, we shall attempt to devise in this paper an alternative democracy conception that could serve as a much more solid foundation for the judicial branch of government in a democratic state. Through this jurisprudential strategy, we hope to be able to maintain the balance of normative power among the Trias Politica, which, in turn, may contribute to the preservation of the legal rights of every person during the struggle against terrorists.
In assessing the aftermath of the fraudulent presidential election of 2009 in Iran, one question has received less critical analysis than other complexities of this event: What can explain the remarkable non-violent character of the Green Movement in Iran? I propose that the answer, inter alia, lies with the following three learning experiences: 1) The experience of loss brought about by the Iran/Iraq war; 2) the experience of relative opening during Khatami’s presidency; and 3) the experience of modernization of faith in the work of the post-Islamist thinkers that aimed to make political Islam compatible with democracy. Together, these learning processes fostered a new mode of thinking that is civil and non-violent in character.
The revolution will be tweeted : how the internet can stimulate the public exercise of freedoms
(2012)
This article discusses how new technologies of communication, especially the Internet and, more specifically, social network services, can interfere in social interactions and in political relations. The main objective is to problematize the concept of public liberty and verify how the new technologies can promote the reoccupation of public spaces and the recovery of public life, in opposition to the tendency to valorize the private sphere, observed in the second half of the twentieth century. The theoretical benchmark adopted for the investigation is Hannah Arendt's theory about the exercise of fundamental political capacities in order to establish a public space of freedom, as presented in “On Revolution”. The “Praia da Estação” (“Station Beach”) case is chosen to test the hypothesis. In 2010 in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, different individuals articulated a movement through blogs, Twitter and facebook, in order to protest against the Mayor’s act that banned the assembling of cultural events in one of the main public places of the city, the “Praça da Estação” (Station Square). By applying Arendt's concepts to the selected case, it is possible to demonstrate that the Internet can assume an important role against governmental arbitrariness and abuse of power, as it can stimulate the public exercise of fundamental freedoms, such as freedom of assembly and manifestation.
This paper aims to assess the arguments that claim representative democracy may be enhanced or replaced by an updated electronic version. Focusing on the dimension of elections and electioneering as the core mechanism of representative democracy I will discuss: (1) the proximity argument used to claim the necessity of filling the gap between decision-makers and stakeholders; (2) the transparency argument, which claims to remove obstacles to the publicity of power; (3) the bottom-up argument, which calls for a new form of legitimacy that goes beyond classical mediation of parties or unions; (4) the public sphere argument, referred to the problem of hierarchical relation between voters and their representatives; (5) the disintermediation argument, used to describe the (supposed) new form of democracy following the massive use of ICTs. The first way of conceptualizing e-democracy as different from mainstream 20th century representative democracy regimes is to imagine it as a new form direct democracy: this conception is often underlying contemporary studies of e-voting. To avoid some of the ingenuousness of this conception of e-democracy, we should take a step back and consider a broader range of issues than mere gerrymandering around the electoral moment. Therefore I shall problematize the abovementioned approach by analyzing a wider range of problems connected to election and electioneering in their relation with ICTs.
This work intends to analysis the philosophy of history and to discuss the consequences of this death to the Critical Theory. The concept of reason and the devices of democracy and human rights are discussed in a revision of the historical debate about the end of history operates the life in the interior of the modern society, especially about the intellectual condition at the information society.
Civil Society became an important theme in the recent discussion of political or social theory. Civil Society is playing a substantial role for the legislation process. We can find it especially in the activities of international NGO. It gives a new aspect of the relationship between state and society, and legal philosophically speaking, of validity of law. Activities of Civil Society are socially recognized and their support systems are gradually institutionalized also domestic in Japan. But Japanese NPO has its own weak point, which arises from the political structure of our society.
Die Rassenmischung bekam in der Entwicklung der Sozialwissenschaften in Brasilien immer wieder neue Bedeutungen, um sich an jeden politischen Zusammenhang anzupassen. Sie wurde von den Männern des Wissens als Problem und später als Lösung angesehen – nämlich durch die Aufhellung – gemäß der evolutionären Rassentheorien Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts. Aber vor allem in den 1930er Jahren betrachteten einige Intellektuelle Brasiliens, wie Gilberto Freyre, die Mischung der drei Rassen, die das Volk Brasiliens bilden, als Bestandteil der Nation. Eine solche Vorstellung brachte juristische und politische, manchmal unmerkliche Folgen für den Platz des Mischlings innerhalb der brasilianischen Gesellschaft. Dieser wird als Notausstieg Mulatte nach Carl Degler oder als epistemologisches Hindernis nach Eduardo de Oliveira e Oliveira verstanden. Der Zweck dieser Arbeit besteht darin, aufzuzeigen, inwiefern jene Tradition eine tiefe Auseinandersetzung verbirgt und wie sie juristische Auswirkungen in der Gegenwart hervorruft, z.B. in Bezug auf die Debatte über Rassenquoten an öffentlichen Universitäten.
The past thirty years have seen dramatic changes to the character of state membership regimes in which practices of easing access to membership for resident non-citizens, extending the franchise to expatriate citizens as well as, albeit in typically more limited ways, to resident non-citizens and an increasing toleration of dual nationality have become widespread. These processes of democratic inclusion, while variously motivated, represent an important trend in the contemporary political order in which we can discern two distinct shifts. The first concerns membership as a status and is characterised in terms of the movement from a simple distinction between single-nationality citizens and single-nationality aliens to a more complex structure of state membership in which we also find dual nationals and denizens (Baubock, 2007a:2395-6). The second shift relates to voting rights and is marked by the movement from the requirement that voting rights are grounded in both citizenship and residence to the relaxing of the joint character of this requirement such that citizenship or residence now increasingly serve as a basis for, at least partial, enfranchisement. In the light of these transformations, it is unsurprising that normative engagement with transnational citizenship – conceived in terms of the enjoyment of membership statuses in two (or more) states – has focused on the issues of access to, and maintenance of, national citizenship, on the one hand, and entitlement to voting rights, on the other hand.
The title I have chosen seems to signal a tension, even a contradiction, in a number of respects. Democracy appears to be a form of political organisation and government in which, through general and public participatory procedures, a sufficiently legitimate political will is formed which acquires the force of law. Justice, by contrast, appears to be a value external to this context which is not so much linked to procedures of “input” or “throughput” legitimation but is understood instead as an output- or outcome-oriented concept. At times, justice is even understood as an otherworldly idea which, when transported into the Platonic cave, merely causes trouble and ends up as an undemocratic elite project. In methodological terms, too, this difference is sometimes signalled in terms of a contrast between a form of “worldly” political thought and “abstract” and otherworldly philosophical reflection on justice. In my view, we are bound to talk past the issues to be discussed under the heading “transnational justice and democracy” unless we first root out false dichotomies such as the ones mentioned. My thesis will be that justice must be “secularised” or “grounded” both with regard to how we understand it and to its application to relations beyond the state.
Natural resources in sub-Saharan Africa suffer from a bad reputation. Oil and diamonds, particularly, have been blamed for a number of Africa’s illnesses such as poverty, corruption, dictatorship and war. This paper outlines the different areas and transmission channels of how this so-called “resource curse” is said to materialize. By assessing empirical evidence on sub-Saharan Africa it concludes that the resource curse theory fails to sufficiently explain why and how several countries have not or only partly been affected by the “curse”. Theoretically, the paper argues that whether or not natural resources are detrimental to a country’s socio-economic and political development depends on a number of contextual variables, divided into country-specific conditions and resource-specific conditions (type, degree/level of abundance and dependence, resource revenue management, involved companies etc.). Methodologically, a future research agenda needs to examine the complex interplay of these contextual variables by adding sophisticated comparative research designs, especially “small and medium N” comparisons, to the tool box which has been widely confined to the juxtaposition of “large N” and country case studies.