The Rights of Others examines the boundaries of political community by focusing on political membership - the principles and practices for incorporating aliens and strangers, immigrants and ...newcomers, refugees and asylum seekers into existing polities. Boundaries define some as members, others as aliens. But when state sovereignty is becoming frayed, and national citizenship is unravelling, definitions of political membership become much less clear. Indeed few issues in world politics today are more important, or more troubling. In her Seeley Lectures, the distinguished political theorist Seyla Benhabib makes a powerful plea, echoing Immanuel Kant, for moral universalism and cosmopolitan federalism. She advocates not open but porous boundaries, recognising both the admittance rights of refugees and asylum seekers, but also the regulatory rights of democracies. The Rights of Others is a major intervention in contemporary political theory, of interest to large numbers of students and specialists in politics, law, philosophy and international relations.
An examination of the intertwined lives and writings of a group of prominent twentieth-century Jewish thinkers who experienced exile and migration
Exile, Statelessness, and Migrationexplores the ...intertwined lives, careers, and writings of a group of prominent Jewish intellectuals during the mid-twentieth century-in particular, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Hirschman, and Judith Shklar, as well as Hans Kelsen, Emmanuel Levinas, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss. Informed by their Jewish identity and experiences of being outsiders, these thinkers produced one of the most brilliant and effervescent intellectual movements of modernity.
Political philosopher Seyla Benhabib's starting point is that these thinkers faced migration, statelessness, and exile because of their Jewish origins, even if they did not take positions on specifically Jewish issues personally. The sense of belonging and not belonging, of being "eternally half-other," led them to confront essential questions: What does it mean for the individual to be an equal citizen and to wish to retain one's ethnic, cultural, and religious differences, or perhaps even to rid oneself of these differences altogether in modernity? Benhabib isolates four themes in their works: dilemmas of belonging and difference; exile, political voice, and loyalty; legality and legitimacy; and pluralism and the problem of judgment.
Surveying the work of influential intellectuals,Exile, Statelessness, and Migrationrecovers the valuable plurality of their Jewish voices and develops their universal insights in the face of the crises of this new century.
Cristina Lafont gives an impressive defence of deliberative democracy against its critics. This article considers in detail her engagement with the ‘deep pluralist’ position that characterizes Nadia ...Urbinati’s, Jeremy Waldron’s and Richard Bellamy’s positions. After considering Lafont’s threefold argument against the deep pluralists, I contend that she vacillates between a substantialist and recursive-iterative defence of the democratic ideal. Her defence of judicial review does not consider some of the strategic ways in which civil society groups may approach the process. I conclude by arguing that constitutionalization is not always a salutary move for resolving controversial issues in a democracy.
My new book, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration. Playing Chess With History From Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin, considers the intertwined lives and work of Jewish intellectuals as they make their ...escape from war-torn Europe into new countries. Although the group which I consider, including Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Judith Shklar, Albert Hirschman and Isaiah Berlin, have a unique profile as migrants because of their formidable education and intellectual capital, I argue that their lives are still exemplary for many of the dilemmas and risks faced by all migrants. In the reply to critics, I consider such issues as the intellectual relations between Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer; differences between Arendt’s and Adorno’s views of an interpretive social science; and why international law played such an important role in the imagination of Jewish intellectuals. A further question involves the generalizability of the experience of Jewish otherness in European culture. Liberal societies always designate some others as their constitutive exterior. How continuous is the experience of emigré Jewish intellectuals with the exclusion of ethnic and racial minorities in our societies? Finally, if the founding of the State of Israel has by no means resolved the problems of statelessness but re-created it for the Palestinian population, what kind of political stance should we assume vis-à-vis this reality today?
Seyla features Jurgen Habermas, who is celebrating his 90th birthday. During the 2008 presidential debates that would result in Barack Obama's election to the presidency, Jurgen Habermas was giving ...the prestigious "Castle" lectures at Yale University. One evening he joined several of his hosts to watch one of the two debates between Obama and John McCain.
Maintaining that cultures are themselves torn by conflicts about their own boundaries, this book challenges the assumption shared by many theorists and activists that cultures are clearly defined ...wholes. It develops a double-track model of deliberative democracy that permits maximum cultural contestation within the official public sphere.
In A Cosmopolitan Legal Order: Kant, Constitutional Justice and the European Convention on Human Rights, Alec Stone Sweet and Clare Ryan reconstruct Kant’s legal philosophy as a program of ...cosmopolitan legal order (CLO). A CLO is defined as a multi-level, judicialized, transnational system of rights protection that confers on all persons, by virtue of their humanity, the entitlement to challenge the rights-regarding decisions of public officials, who are under an obligation to assure the equal juridical status of all. The authors illustrate this claim with respect to the development of the ECtHR and the Court of Justice of the European Union. While generally agreeing with their argument, I claim that they minimize the republican aspects of Kant’s political philosophy in favour of strong judicial review. After outlining republican and democratic objections, I claim that their book illustrates a model that I call ‘dialogic constitutionalism’. Dialogic constitutionalism does not neglect legislative authority, but places it in a conversation with judicial authority, whether domestic or transnational; such conversations can serve to upgrade standards of rights protection over time and are not frozen precommitments. Constitutions also have a representative function of standing for the intergenerational continuity of the people, whereas legislatures are bound by electoral cycles.
Until now, attempts to identify a meeting point between the preservation of a universal political identity and maintaining national forms of belonging seem to find little application in the policies ...of world governments. Consequently, the idea of the individual as a citizen of the world is exposed to the risk of becoming an aspirational ideal devoid of practical and objective translations. In this regard, Theresa May’s recent criticism of a concept of world citizenship separate from any ethnic or national membership is an ideal starting point for reflecting on the intrinsic tensions of cosmopolitan political thought regarding citizenship.In response to the distant origin of the conflict between the universalist vision of man and the particular dimension of political participation, the article opens with a brief historical excursus of the principles of cosmopolitanism from classical antiquity to modern political thought, before arriving at a series of reflections on the changing of these values in today’s globalized scene. This study allows us to describe the evolution of the long tradition on which the universal human rights enshrined after the end of the Second World War are established. Universal human rights seem to be closely connected to the Age of Enlightenment’s cosmopolitan principles of hospitality and solidarity.Although today’s increasing social and political integration seems to facilitate the observation of the right to Kantian hospitality, it is noted that the right to asylum and the physical vulnerability of the individual are increasingly suspended or canceled by the same States who claim to be custodians of the universal values of man. Well known evidence of these contradictions are the tragic living conditions of migrants hosted in European hotspots, but also the treatment of the so-called Dreamers in the United States. Exploring the worthiness of the problem of the civil and political status of the growing number of migrants in the world, the need to guarantee access of citizenship benefits to foreigners is emphasized, in the hope that international solidarity practices on which cosmopolitan thought is based will continue to find application in current and future societies.
Where do political identities come from, how do they change over time, and what is their impact on political life? This book explores these and related questions in a globalizing world where the ...nation state is being transformed, definitions of citizenship are evolving in unprecedented ways, and people's interests and identities are taking on new local, regional, transnational, cosmopolitan, and even imperial configurations. Pre-eminent scholars examine the changing character of identities, affiliations, and allegiances in a variety of contexts: the evolving character of the European Union and its member countries, the Balkans and other new democracies of the post-1989 world, and debates about citizenship and cultural identity in the modern West. These essays are essential reading for anyone interested in the political and intellectual ferment that surrounds debates about political membership and attachment, and will be of interest to students and scholars in the social sciences, humanities, and law.
The status of international law and transnational legal agreements with respect to the sovereignty claims of liberal democracies has become a highly contentious theoretical and political issue. ...Although recent European discussions focus on global constitutionalism, there is increasing reticence on the part of many that prospects of a world constitution are neither desirable nor salutary. This article more closely considers criticisms of these legal transformations by distinguishing the nationalist from democratic sovereigntiste positions, and both, from diagnoses that see the universalization of human rights norms either as the Trojan horse of a global empire or as neocolonialist intentions to assert imperial control over the world. These critics ignore “the jurisgenerativity of law.” Although democratic sovereigntistes are wrong in minimizing how human rights norms improve democratic self-rule; global constitutionalists are also wrong in minimizing the extent to which cosmopolitan norms require local contextualization, interpretation, and vernacularization by self-governing peoples.
