1. In praise of Tocqueville. The young United States was lucky – and deserving of its luck – to find as profound an interpreter of its principles as Alexis de Tocqueville. So deeply, so philosophically, did he comprehend this country in Democracy in America 1 that today's reflections on liberty and equality in America either copy Tocqueville or fall short of understanding. The following reflections will be guilty of both plagiarism and superficiality but they do intend to capture something of (...) Tocqueville's spirit. He gave this nation its due. He brought to his endeavors some advantages we no longer enjoy. For example, he had first-hand experience of democracy's great alternative and predecessor, aristocracy; he knew both sides because he was both sides. Of course, some advantages accrue to those of us who have come after him, even apart from having Democracy in America to study. The United States may not be old but it is older now; we can take later developments into account. Thus, we no longer lack poets or poetry; we probably suffer as much from crime as from vice; and juries do not function all that well. But no dwarfish ability to climb the shoulders of a giant nor special dispensation from history can compensate us for the lack of Tocqueville's genius: the breadth of vision that recalls Montesquieu and even Aristotle, an intimacy, reminiscent of Rousseau, with modernity's demons, a sad coming to terms with human contingency that puts one in mind of Thucydides. All honor to Alexis de Tocqueville. (shrink)

Fincher & Thornhill's (F&T's) central hypothesis is that strong in-group norms were formed in part to foster parochial social alliances so as to enable cultural groups to adaptively respond to parasite stress. Applied to ancestral hominid environments, the story fits with evolutionary theory and the fragmentary data available on early hominid social formations and their geographical distributions. Applied to modern social formations, however, the arguments and inferences from data are problematic.

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is (...) substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

Americans claim to be the most religious people in the Christian world. Religion has informed their politics ever since the Pilgrim Fathers, who began the tyranny of the majority which Tocqueville outlined in Democracy in America (1985), his version of Aristotle's ‘ochlocracy’. In recent times this has taken the form of the ‘moral majority’ institutionalized by Jerry Falwell and the fundamentalists who set out to capture the Republican Party under Nixon and Reagan. In fact, it was never a majority: ‘born (...) again’ Christians, not all of the right‐wing in politics, were less than one fifth of a national sample in 1980 ‐ a third of African Americans, who voted ten to one against Reagan. Nonetheless they influenced every President from Eisenhower to Bush, and they are the major force behind the move to impeach Clinton. Since they failed, they may now give way for a more moderate politics of Christian forgiveness. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the dominant view of reflexivity in contemporary social science is overly decontextualized, despite the value that reflexivity scholars have placed on the dynamic and active nature of individual thought and action. While this problem has been highlighted before, in terms of how habitual actions shape the way that individuals engage in reflexive thought, little attention has been given to the ways in which non-internalized elements of the environment condition this process. I illustrate my argument (...) with examples from Tocqueville’s classic text Democracy in America. I demonstrate how Tocqueville provided a framework for analyzing the way that societal-level norms and opportunity structures impact personal reflexive capacities. In this respect, his work is unparalleled and as such remains relevant to contemporary debates. I therefore argue for the application of Tocqueville’s work into arenas it has seldom entered. (shrink)

Abstract:Total Quality Management (TQM) has been the object of extensive discussion within the popular literature and is increasingly of interest among management scholars. Recent scholarship has focused on the theoretical foundations of TQM, particularly what makes it work, why so many firms have had problems implementing it, and under what circumstances it may create a sustainable advantage for individual firms. This paper extends the work in theory development regarding TQM and offers an empirically testable theoretical model of its function. The (...) central claim of the paper is that embedded within TQM there are a set of moral values (“value dynamics”) that must be developed and maintained if it is to work, and that seeing them as moral values has significant theoretical and practical implications. That is, how TQM is understood and “enacted” (Weick 1979) by managers plays a significant role in determining its success. The discussion is linked to the ethics literature, normative implications of the model are explored, and directions for future research are outlined. (shrink)

Weiming’s notion of transcendence in terms both of its legitimacy as an interpretation of Confucianism and of its viability as an answer to modern challenges. An examination of Tu’s hermeneutical assumptions in his Zhongyong commentary leads to a discussion of his locating transcendence in the subjectivity of the junzi, the profound person. Calling the self-cultivation self-knowledge, Tu makes explicit the religious character of the xin, the basis of self-cultivation, and its transcendent character, because it is endowed from heaven. However, because (...) the xin is irreducibly human, this transcendence is also immanentized. From the xin a fiduciary community is formed, hence the covenantal nature of Confucian religiousness. The essay ends with the question: Because Tu does not elaborate on cultivating a community’s intersubjectivity, does it make the realization of the transcendent xin a deferred potentiality, without mooring in the actual formation of human community? (shrink)

Courts are sometimes called upon to review a law or some other official act of government to determine its constitutionality, its reasonableness, rationality, or its compatibility with fundamental principles of justice. In some jurisdictions, this power of judicial review includes the ability to ‘strike down’ or nullify a law duly passed by a legislature body. This article examines this practice and various criticisms of it, including the charge that it is fundamentally undemocratic. The focus is on the powerful critique mounted (...) by Jeremy Waldron, the foremost philosophical opponent of judicial review. (shrink)

A common opinion is that power has shifted from states to companies. This article discusses quantitative and qualitative aspects of power possessed by companies and by states. A more adequate comparison than that between company sales and gross national product is the one between company value added and GNP. Also more adequate is the comparison between the public sector and company net profit. These rival measures take down company power to about a tenth of the sales measure. Also in qualitative (...) terms the "exit power" of the company gives a low impact compared to governmental action and the article concludes that company power by common measures is overestimated. However, the aggregated long-term effect of the market economy on the development of society is most significant. But it is a mistake to use that judgment as an argument for the opinion that business executives are the major power holders in modern societies. Perceptions of power also have an impact on which expectations and commitments that can be judged as realistic and therefore the issue of power is central for the normative discussion about corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

The article enters a heated debate about the ideals and organization of the postmodern left. Hardt and Negri, two key figures in this debate, claim that their concept of the multitude — a revolutionary, proletarian body that organizes singularities — integrates the insights of Deleuze and Lenin. I argue, however, that Deleuze anticipated and resisted a Leninist appropriation of his political theory. This essay challenges the widely accepted assumption that Hardt and Negri carry forth Deleuze’s legacy. At the same time, (...) the essay advocates Deleuze’s concept of left assemblages — protean political bodies working for freedom and equality — as a valuable but underappreciated contribution to the liberal-democratic tradition. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the theoretical foundations of collective interest in the sufferings of strangers. Concern with the suffering of others, accompanied by the urge to help, is compassion. This study develops the social and historical conditions under which public compassion emerges. Two broad interpretations of these developments are suggested. The democratization perspective suggests that with the lessening of profoundly categorical and corporate social distinctions, compassion becomes more extensive. A second perspective is linked to the emergence of market society. By defining (...) a universal field of others with whom contracts and exchanges can be made, market perspectives extend the sphere of moral concern as well: however unintentionally. Public compassion is part of the language of modernity. This gives compassion the possibility to be also part of a newly emerging ‘Second Modernity’. (shrink)

This article focuses on an area of study that may be called folk economics and that is currently not on the social science agenda. Folk economics has as its task to analyze and explain how people view the economy and how it works; what categories they use in doing so; and what effect this has on the economy and society. Existing studies in economics and sociology that are relevant to this type of study are presented and discussed. A theoretical framework (...) for analyzing folk economic issues is suggested, centered on the distinction between episteme and doxa or between scientific knowledge, on the one hand, and everyday knowledge, on the other. This is then applied to an exploratory case study of the role that folk economics played in Trump’s presidential campaign. It is shown that Trump and his voters thought in a parallel way on key economic issues, especially protectionism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article posits an interpersonal ethical commitment to combat dangers to democracy in current times. Largely within an American context, two complementary pillars of ethics are presented. The first is from Nel Noddings and the ethics of care and the second developed primarily from Richard Rorty in a neo-pragmatist view. The contexts of present dangers, worldwide, especially in the USA, and then of this nation’s schooling, situate the ethics. A suggestion for teachers, students, and their schools as ‘citizen educators’ to (...) be active in their communities offers one road forward. (shrink)

Abstract If voters do not understand the programs of rival candidates or their likely consequences, they cannot rationally exercise control over government. An ignorant electorate cannot achieve true democratic control over public policy. The immense size and scope of modern government makes it virtually impossible for voters to acquire sufficient knowledge to exercise such control. The problem is exacerbated by voters? strong incentive to be ?rationally ignorant? of politics. This danger to democracy cannot readily be circumvented through ?shortcut? methods of (...) economizing on voter knowledge costs. A truly democratic government must, therefore, be strictly limited in scope. (shrink)

Abstract Democratic control of public policy is nearly impossible in the presence of extreme voter ignorance, and this ignorance is in part caused by the vast size and scope of modern government. Only a government limited in its scope can be meaningfully democratic. David Ciepley's response to my article does not seriously challenge this conclusion, and his attempts to show that limited government is inherently undemocratic fail. Ciepley's alternative vision of a ?democracy? that does not require informed voters turns out (...) to be not a defense of democracy at all, but a rationalization for any form of government that achieves a high level of leadership skill and bureaucratic efficiency. (shrink)

Despite a plethora of empirical evidence on the potential role of senior management in the success of corporate social responsibility in Western-dominated organizational contexts, little attempt has been made to document the various managerial mindsets toward CSR in organizations in Muslim-dominated countries in the Middle East region. To address this existing lacuna of theoretical and empirical research in CSR management, this paper offers a qualitative case study of CSR in three manufacturing firms operating in Iran’s auto industry. Based on an (...) inductive analysis of the qualitative data, three types of managerial mindset toward CSR are identified: conformist, self-seeker, and satisfier. While it is evident that these different mindsets of Iranian managers seek to serve managerial ends and short-term self-interests, they fall short of core values of Islamic ethics and CSR. (shrink)

A proper sense of history and the past is often held to be essential to democracy. Current attitudes to history and the past in the United Kingdom, particularly but not only in the context of formal education, show signs of strain, just as many other aspects of democracy do. Conceptions of history as heritage or as a site for the exercise of skills deserve critical examination. We need to look for a fresh basis for the relationship of democracies with their (...) past. Perhaps this can be found in the essentially oppositional or ironical structure that both democracy and remembering require for their full flourishing. (shrink)

In this empirical paper, we present a model of the dynamic legitimizing processes involved in the receiving and giving of compassion. We focus on the idea of being ‘worthy of compassion’ and show how ideas on giving and receiving compassion are highly contestable. Recognition of a worthy recipient or giver of compassion constitutes a socially recognized claim to privilege, which has ethical managerial and organizational implications. We offer a model that assists managers in fostering ethical strength in their performance by (...) encouraging reflection on the ethical complexity involved in compassion relations. The model emphasizes the dynamics of both the givers and receivers of compassion and so can also be used by organizations to both assess how others may view the legitimacy of their compassion relations and also to develop a positive organizational ethic of compassionate conduct. (shrink)

Visual academies were unique social formations in the ancien régime, so distinctive that they are best studied as prototype professions. Alone among academies, they were responsible for offering instruction. Alone among educational institutions, they linked liberal instruction to occupational practice. Alone among ‘learned’ occupations, they accommodated an irreducible manual component. The visual Académie in Paris in particular established literally the first ‘graduate school’ in any field of activity and admitted students on the basis of anonymously scored student competitions. Equivalent activities (...) will not begin to emerge in medicine or law until the mid-19th century. Our historical case, in short, calls into question the received orthodoxy regarding the time and place of the first professionalism projects. Instead of focusing on 19th-century Britain, we are now considering mid-17th-century France and thereby preparing the way for a new start in the sociology of professions. (shrink)

Philanthropic venture capital (PhVC) is a financing option available for social enterprises that, like traditional venture capital, provides capital and value-added services to portfolio organizations. Differently from venture capital, PhVC has an ethical dimension as it aims at maximizing the social return on the investment. This article examines the deal structuring phase of PhVC investments in terms of instrument used (from equity to grant), valuation, and covenants included in the contractual agreement. By content analyzing a set of semistructured interviews and (...) thereafter surveying the entire population of PhVC funds that are active in Europe and in the United States, findings indicate that the non-distribution constraint holding for non-profit social enterprises is an effective tool to align the interests of both investor and investee. This makes the investor behaving as a steward rather than as a principal. Conversely, while backing non-profit social ventures, philanthropic venture capitalists structure their deal similarly as traditional venture capital, as the absence of the non-distribution constraint makes such investments subject to moral hazard risk both in terms of perks and stealing and social impact focus. (shrink)

Alexis de Tocqueville is known for his strange liberalism. One of the reasons therefore has to be found in his lesser known strange religious belief. The three main elements that determined his belief were his aristocratic and profoundly religious education, the dramatic loss of his faith after reading eighteenth century French philosophers and his conviction that the stability of the American democracy was mainly due to religious mores. These elements explain why Tocqueville appeared in his publications as an obvious believer, (...) hardly bothered by any dubiety, while internally he was a restless doubter, sometimes a panicky infidel and occasionally some sort of believer anyway. The focus of this article is a meticulous dissection of Tocqueville’s personal belief by contrasting it with approaches of religion that look familiar at first sight. Although Tocqueville had the highest esteem for Pascal, his wager was not really tempting to him. James’ will to believe seemed far more attractive, yet Tocqueville’s thinking was too empirical to fit with it. Kant furnished strong arguments to overcome this obstacle, and in that respect he offered a solid philosophical ground to consider Tocqueville’s outlook on religion as an authentic religious belief. But what Tocqueville has never found was a religious ground to Christianity. As a matter of fact, Christianity was Tocqueville’s philosophical belief, rather than his religious belief. (shrink)

In matters of discontinuation of life-sustaining treatment, traditional role of the family to speak on behalf of the incompetent patient is questionable. We explore the reasons why physicians perceive patient autonomy to be transferrable to family members. Principle of patient autonomy may not suffice when futile treatment is demanded and may serve to erode the ethical integrity of medical profession. An enhanced role for bioethics committees is proposed when physicians propose to discontinue life-sustaining treatment against the wishes of the patient (...) or their families. (shrink)

This collection brings together a strong ethnographic and theoretical field. The volume includes chapters that address issues of identity formation and change in relation to ‘educational’ political projects and politically coloured notions of citizenship. Drawing on their different ethnographies and on comparative analysis, the contributors address the problematic of the relationship between rulers and the ruled and between élite and non-élite groups, critically raising issues of legitimacy and responsibility in the management of power and political decision-making. The empirically based analyses (...) offered here graphically demonstrate that urban issues are at the forefront of political and social debates. More specifically, the contributors address, from different perspectives, the more or less successful attempts of the state to legitimise its approach and authority through urban policies. A collective reading of the chapters provides a powerful analytical framework for the study of the processes that underlie ideologically biased definitions of citizenship and of their effects on urban dynamics. (shrink)

Economic progress in the United States has been attributed to the successful combination of two social structures — capitalism as an economic system and democracy as a political system. At the heart of this interaction is a particular work ethic in which hard work is considered the path to both immediate and future rewards. This article examines the evolution of work ethic in the United States, as well as the returns experienced through various adaptations in the country's history. From this (...) grounding, the information is structured into a proposal that key messages contained in the current, accepted work ethic are subject to distortions that may contribute to unethical decision making. These distortions result from two potentials: (1) efforts to reconcile the work ethic with contradictory messages and (2) exaggerations of the work ethic that become dysfunctional. The intent is to provide a framework that may explain to organizational leaders how people with the same basic work ethic can behave differently in terms of ethical work. Along with this understanding comes the potential to offset possible distortions and to encourage more ethical behavior. (shrink)

From 1922 to 1924, the Iroquois Confederacy — a federal union of six aboriginal nations — sought resolution of a dispute between themselves and Canada at the League of Nations. In this paper, the historical events of the 1920s League are employed as a case study to explore the development of the international society of states in the early 20th century as it relates to the indigenous peoples of North America. Specifically, it will be argued that the early modern practice (...) of excluding Amerindians from international political forums is related to the negative representation of indigenous peoples in the dominant theoretical discourse of the time: social contract theory. The diplomatic activities of the Iroquois, and the members of the League during this time period, demonstrate exactly how social contract theory has relied on presenting indigenous peoples as residing in a non-political and non-sovereign form, thus denying them the right to participate at the international level on par with other peoples. (shrink)

One of the more perplexing terms to appear across Claude Lefort’s later oeuvre, ‘wild’ or ‘savage’ democracy has proved a difficult and divisive facet of Lefort’s political phi...

Any workable ideal of deliberative democracy that includes elections will need modern democracy's ever-present ally, parties. Since the primary function of parties is to win office rather than to reflect on public questions, parties are potential problems for the deliberative enterprise. They are more at home in aggregative models of democracy than in deliberative models. While deliberative democracy will need its moments of aggregation—and therefore, must have parties—partisans as they actually arise in the political world possess traits that undermine the (...) deliberative ideal. If partisans of partisanship are to be unembarrassed by (or are to correct) these defects, even workable ideals of deliberative democracy need to stand at some distance from the partisan imperative. (shrink)

Recent conflicts both within Europe and between Europe and the United States suggest that Europe's current political arrangements need to be adjusted. F.A. Hayek and Jürgen Habermas argued, albeit on very different grounds, for European political integration. Their arguments ultimately are not persuasive, but a “United States of Europe” can be justified—on the basis of its contribution to European security.

Joseph Medill's Chicago Tribune was an influential voice for civil rights and equality in the age of slavery. By 1883, however, when the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the Tribune 's commitment to its moral principles had been compromised. The paper abandoned its editorial support for equality in favor of shoring up the declining fortunes of the Republican Party in the post-Reconstruction era. A content analysis of Tribune news and editorial items on the civil rights (...) law shows strong support for the statute in 1875 when it was passed, and an equally strong support for the Supreme Court decision that annulled it in 1883. (shrink)

Tocqueville’s incomplete, conflicted reflections on whether honor and war have been safely consigned to the past should alert us to the psychological, not merely sociological, difficulty of adjusting to modernity. His thoughts about memory suggest that one form of adjustment is the attempt to re‐enchant the world. Among such attempts are both the European ideologies that have spread to the Middle East—nationalism, communism, and fascism—and religious fundamentalism. The latter, in particular, responds not only to the loss of premodern enchantment, but (...) to the complexity that makes the modern world so chaotically contingent and changeable—deepening the allure of simple precepts, imposed from above, experienced directly, and adhered to inflexibly. (shrink)

The modern presidency emerged not from an effort to escape constitutional propriety, as Tulis argues, but, rather, to emancipate presidents from the localized political parties of the nineteenth century, which had come to be viewed as sites of provincial and corrupt forms of popular rule. As the troubled tenure of George W. Bush suggests, contemporary presidents are torn between the public expectation that they stand apart from party politics and act as the chief executive of the administrative state; and their (...) role as party leaders, which links them to political allies in Congress and loyalists in the electorate. In its contribution to the development of a “new” national programmatic party system, the Bush administration reveals the potential for a novel, disturbing meld of party and administration, in which presidents seek to exploit the powers of the modern executive office for partisan gain. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The need to cooperate in countless ways in a democracy raises the fundamental question posed by the prisoner's dilemma: How can self‐interested individuals cooperate? Tocqueville recognized this problem and anticipated the most convincing solution to date: Robert Frank's conception of emotions as “commitment devices.” Tocqueville's analysis of the miscalculations of modern “individualism,” which lead people first into isolation and then into servitude, mirrors the failure of conscious rationality in the prisoner's dilemma. Conversely, Tocqueville emphasizes emotional “habits of the heart” (...) as the key to resisting the blandishments of individualism. (shrink)

This study compares findings from the author's survey of 310 French newspaper journalists in France with a simultaneous survey done in the United States. In both studies, journalists replied to the same battery of questions about ethical standards in reporting. Results provide evidence of shared values among French journalists and, to a much lesser extent, between French and U.S. journalists. The highest agreement was found in support of keeping a promise of source confidentiality. French results further indicated support for the (...) notion that journalists differentiate between the justification of active and passive deception. The study calls for polling of nonjournalists in similar future studies to aid in sorting out cultural from occupational differences and similarities. (shrink)

This article looks at how various political cultures and imaginaries occlude the public’s deeply democratic political role, especially the currently reigning anti-political culture of neo-liberalism. Even in an era when millions of people the world over take to the streets in protest, dominant political imaginaries position most of the world’s people as largely powerless. What is needed is a radical political imaginary along the lines that Cornelius Castoriadis suggests. This imaginary foregrounds the ways in which all social and political formations (...) are already constituted by human beings’ ability to create new formations in the absence of foundations. But ignorant of this power, people are trapped in imaginaries where it seems that power resides elsewhere, only in halls of state or corporate boardrooms. This article offers an account that identifies where power originates and how it can be reclaimed through a more radical democratic political imaginary. The article proceeds as follows: the first two sec... (shrink)

This article discusses three main orientations in recent works of legal and political theory about the family-contract-based, community-based, and rights-based-and argues that none of these takes adequate account of two paradoxical features of family life and of the family's relationship to the state. A coherent political and legal theory of the family in the contemporary United States requires recognition of the relational rights and responsibilities intrinsic to family life.

This article is an assessment of the moral problems that beset cultural relativism, that is, the belief that the nature of human existence and value is strictly dependent on, and therefore autonomously proper to, each particular culture. According to this view, the human experience never transcends its native ground. It is, hence, no use judging one form of the human experience against another since no universal non-local yardstick exists to measure them by. After exposing the flaws and contradictions inherent in (...) this view, the author draws a picture of the consequences of upholding cultural relativism, particularly as it shapes the moral self-understanding of its followers in this instance and, for illustrative purpose, Richard Rorty. Finally, the article sketches an argument for a humanistic understanding of culture, a theory that allows us to hold that human existence does vary according to local and historical communities, and yet holds to a moral centre valid across all human culture. (shrink)

Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people. (de Tocqueville 1990, 7)There are significant inequalities in the lives of America's children, including inequalities in the education that these children receive. These educational inequalities include not only disparities in funding per pupil but also in class size, teacher qualification, and resources such as books, labs, libraries, computers, and curriculum, as well (...) as the physical condition of the school and the safety of students within it. While not all schools attended by poor children are bad schools, and not all schools attended by well-off children are good schools, there are clear patterns. Poor children are more likely to attend crowded and poorly equipped schools with less qualified teachers than the children of more affluent families. They are less likely to have computers, books, and advanced placement academic courses. (Satz 2007, 623). (shrink)

Abstract:In this article we first review the development of the concept of global business citizenship and show how the libertarian political philosophy of free-market capitalism must give way to a communitarian view in order for the voluntaristic, local notion of “corporate citizenship” to take root. We then distinguish the concept of global business citizenship from “corporate citizenship” by showing how the former concept requires a transition from communitarian thinking to a position of universal human rights. In addition, we link global (...) business citizenship to global business strategy and to three analytical levels of ethical norms. Finally, we trace a process whereby global businesses can implement fundamental norms and learn to accommodate to legitimate cultural differences. (shrink)

Shifts in the national cultural identity of the US have been reflected in shifts in the US’ dominant constitutional narratives. For the United States, “inter-legality” has been less a matter of dealing with alternative non-state legal narratives than of contending with constantly arising and competing narratives about the “correct” nature of the “official” legal order of the state. The US Supreme Court has claimed to have the “last word” in resolving these arguments but because that Court is so often sharply (...) divided and because the Court membership and the nature of its “last words” changes so often, where a significant element of the society seeks to advance its ideas and interests, it will often do so in legal and constitutional terms. As the national culture undergoes changes, a competing constitutional narrative may gain ground and even ultimately prevail, at least for a time, and achieve Supreme Court “endorsement” for its claims. (shrink)

Does the wide distribution of political power in democracies, relative to other modes of government, result in better decisions? Specifically, do we have any reason to believe that they are better qualitatively – more reasoned, better supported by the available evidence, more deserving of support – than those which have been made by other means? In order to answer this question we examine the recent effort by Talisse and Misak to show that democracy is epistemically justified. Highlighting the strengths and (...) weaknesses of their arguments, we conclude that the differences between an epistemic conception of democracy and an epistemic justification of democracy are fundamental to determining the relative attractions of different arguments for democracy, and their implications for actual forms of government. -/- . (shrink)

Does the wide distribution of political power in democracies, relative to other modes of government, result in better decisions? Specifically, do we have any reason to believe that they are better qualitatively – more reasoned, better supported by the available evidence, more deserving of support – than those which have been made by other means? In order to answer this question we examine the recent effort by Talisse and Misak to show that democracy is epistemically justified. Highlighting the strengths and (...) weaknesses of their arguments, we conclude that the differences between an epistemic conception of democracy and an epistemic justification of democracy are fundamental to determining the relative attractions of different arguments for democracy, and their implications for actual forms of government. (shrink)

During the Cold War, the spread and fear of communism furnished the overarching ideological rationale for American foreign policy and for the deployment of United States military forces and resources. Subscribing to the domino theory and its potential impact on Southeast Asia, the Johnson Administration committed the United States to the Vietnam War. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, and the commencement of the Global War on Terrorism, Washington once again set a national agenda rooted in (...) a simplistic analysis reminiscent of Vietnam and the domino theory. Ignorant of Iraq’s mammoth sectarian, historical, ethnic, and global strategic complexities, the Bush Administration launched Operation Iraqi Freedom. The absence of critical analysis, contrarian viewpoints, and sound judgment characterized the US policy and strategy for both the Vietnam War and OIF, exhibiting the lack of moral courage that the national security enterprise seeks, but seldom attains. Faced with this challenge, this article draws attention to the ethical lessons we can learn from the dissent of William Fulbright and Andrew Bacevich. (shrink)

In contrast to most literature on cosmopolitanism, which focuses on its elite forms, this article analyzes how ordinary people bridge racial boundaries in everyday life. It is based on interviews with 150 non-college-educated white and black workers in the United States and white and North African workers in France. The comparison of the four groups shows how differences in cultural repertoires across national context and structural location shape distinct anti-racist rhetorics. Market-based arguments are salient among American workers, while arguments based (...) on solidarity and egalitarianism are used by French, but not by American, workers. Minority workers in both countries employ a more extensive toolkit of anti-racist rhetoric as compared to whites. The interviewed men privilege evidence grounded in everyday experience, and their claims of human equality are articulated in terms of universal human nature and, in the case of blacks and North Africans, universal morality. Workers' conceptual frameworks have little in common with multiculturalism that occupies a central place in the literature on cosmopolitanism. We argue that for the discussion and practice of cosmopolitanism to move forward we should shift our attention to the study of multiple ordinary cosmopolitanisms. (shrink)