It has become somewhat a commonplace in recent political philosophy to remark that all plausible political theories must share at least one fundamental premise, ‘that all humans are one another's equals’. One single concept of ‘basic equality’, therefore, is cast as the common touchstone of all contemporary political thought. This paper argues that this claim is false. Virtually all do indeed say that all humans are ‘equals’ in some basic sense. However, this is not the same sense. There are not (...) one but two concepts of basic equality, and they reflect not a grand unity within political philosophy but a deep and striking division. I call these concepts ‘Equal Worth’ and ‘Equal Authority’. The former means that each individual’s good is of equal moral worth. The latter means that no individual is under the natural authority of anyone else. Whilst these two predicates are not in themselves logically inconsistent, I demonstrate that they are inconsistent foundation stones for political theory. A theory that starts from Equal Worth will find it near impossible to justify Equal Authority. And a theory that starts from Equal Authority will find any fact about the true worth of things, including ourselves, irrelevant to justifying legitimate action. This helps us identify the origin of many of our deepest and seemingly intractable disagreements within political philosophy, and directs our attention to the need for a clear debate about the truth and/or relationship between the two concepts. In short, my call to arms can be summed up in the demand that political philosophers never again be allowed to claim ‘that all human beings are equals’ full stop. They must be clear in what dimension they claim that we are equals—Worth or Authority. (shrink)

In this essay, I attempt to measure various prevailing democratic theories against an argument that Carl Schmitt advances in the first chapter of his ‘Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy’. In practice, he claims there, democratic politics is compelled to introduce a distinction between ‘the will of the people’ and the behaviour of the empirical people, thus justifying the bracketing and unlimited suspension of the latter in the name of the former, even to the point of dictatorship. I argue that no contemporary (...) approach to democracy as a fundamental value is able to mount a compelling response to this critique and that we should therefore reconsider the status of democracy as a normative commitment. I proceed by carefully and closely reading Schmitt’s chapter and then by juxtaposing various currents of democratic theory (including liberal, deliberative, epistemic and various hybrids thereof) with the trajectory of Schmitt’s argument. This essay is therefore less of a contribution to Schmitt scholarship, in the sense that it does not take a panoramic view of his corpus to determine his final stance on democracy, and more of an intervention into contemporary democratic theory using Schmitt’s argument as a kind of lever. (shrink)

This thesis explores the meaning and educational implications of respect in liberal multicultural democracies. Significantly, I examine respect from a philosophical perspective as a civic virtue, and hence as a central aim of civic education.

Social democracy based on welfare and the redistribution of social contributions is failing. The accumulation of wealth and the increase in inequalities are the two faces of Janus that social democracy has not been able to contain over the recent decades. In this context, it matters to discuss John Rawls’s influential difference principle. According to the maximin criterion put forth by Rawls, it does not suffice that no one becomes worse off; those who are worse off must also become better (...) off than they are. Here, we note that the existence and growth of inequality find no opposition in the maximin rule. Despite appearances, strictly speaking it merely introduces a factor of social compensation, a sort of “assistencialism” to the victims of the greatest inequality. Even the most robust formulation of the principle of difference, according to which the greatest advantage to the less advantaged is indispensable, does not per se preclude an aggregate growth of inequalities. It seems clear that it was an egalitarian goal what Rawls had in mind in A Theory of Justice. Rawls’s critical comments on welfare capitalism must indeed not be forgotten—especially in his further explanations about the application of the principles of justice in a property-owning democracy. Here, as in liberal socialism, the dispersion of property, capital and resources prevents economic and political powers from being concentrated into the hands of a minority. However, the egalitarian aim does not strictly follow from the difference principle as stated, whether taken literally as an application of the maximin rule or inferring from its strongest formulation. A reformulation that does justice to the egalitarian aim of the principle of difference is, however, possible: namely, a degrowthist reformulation, truly requiring a degrowth in accumulation and inequalities, making explicit a brake clause that hinders the aggregate growth of inequalities. Such a degrowthist conception of the difference principle may justify some concrete rules that are able to enforce the egalitarian commitments of social democracy. (shrink)