There are many books on Kant's accounts of the laws of nature and of the moral law, but there is almost no literature that covers both topics in order to clarify their common grounds and their diff...

McCormick’s book engages with the theoretical and political positions discussed by the Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli about five centuries ago, and, in particular, the creation of the tribunes of the plebs. In ancient Rome, plebeian power had been institutionalised through the creation of tribunes. According to McCormick, a similar institution would offer a legitimate forum for expression to the people in modern democracies. In fact, following Machiavelli’s suggestions, this would contribute to the implementation of a new form of democracy, more (...) respectful of the people and more eager to defend values such as freedom and independence from the influence of the powerful and the rich. In this review, Filippo Del Lucchese comments on McCormick’s book from a Marxist point of view. One of the strongest points of the book is the discussion of the opposition between democracy and republicanism. Over the last decades, the latter has in fact been absorbed into the sphere of influence of the Cambridge School, and neutralised, or at least defused its most interesting and radical aspects. McCormick’s attempt to repoliticise the Machiavellian discourse is indeed praiseworthy, yet, by mainly focusing on the ‘institutionalisation’ of popular power, McCormick fails to discern the most radical elements of Machiavelli’s thought. From this angle, the review discusses McCormick’s use of the category of ‘class’ and offers a different perspective on the revolutionary dimension. (shrink)

Volume 27, Issue 6, December 2019, Page 1251-1254.

The more one reads about the topic of natural kinds, the more one is reminded of that famous scene in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in which Deep Thought—after a mere 7.5 million years of doing calculations—reveals that the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything was 42. Faced with bewildered reactions from the eager audience, Deep Thought explains: “I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what (...) the question is” .In the case of the growing literature on natural kinds, it is easy to get a feeling that something similar is going on. While philosophers keep advancing novel accounts of natural kinds, at the same time there is considerable disagreement about what exactly the problem is that such accounts should solve. To some, natural kinds are real kinds in nature that exist in the world independently of human interests and practices. At the very least, they are human-made kinds that correspon .. (shrink)

Epistemic Responsibility and Democratic Justification Content Type Journal Article Pages 297-302 DOI 10.1007/s11158-011-9147-1 Authors Andrew F. Smith, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA Journal Res Publica Online ISSN 1572-8692 Print ISSN 1356-4765 Journal Volume Volume 17 Journal Issue Volume 17, Number 3.

Over the past two decades, scholarly attention to Enlightenment studies and especially to the roots of Enlightenment ideas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has increased. Against claims t...

Legal Mobilization under Authoritarianism traces and explains the rise of law to a more prominent role in the politics of post-colonial Hong Kong. The author, Waikeung Tam, a political scientist, argues that Hong Kong is a “surprise” case, in the double sense that law is effectively mobilized despite the non-democratic and controlled setting within which the Hong Kong legal system works and also that law is mobilized in ways that different from what China would wish.There is quite a body of (...) scholarship on the legal development of Hong Kong post-1997, with special attention paid to the performances of the relatively young Court of Final Appeal . But most of these works are written by legal scholars, whose concerns are more strictly jurisprudential and court-centered. Legal Mobilization treats the process of legal development within a broader socio-political context. It is, to my knowledge, one of the very few books that examine the post-colonial legal development of Hong Kong from .. (shrink)