A first-of-its-kind book that seriously and profoundly examines what it means philosophically to be Latino and where Latinos fit in American society. Offers a fresh perspective and clearer understanding of Latin American thought and culture, rejecting answers based on stereotypes and fear Takes an interdisciplinary approach to the philosophical, social, and political elements of Hispanic/Latino identity, touching upon anthropology, history, cultural studies and sociology, as well as philosophy Written by Jorge J. E. Gracia, one of the most influential (...) thinkers of Hispanic/Latino descent. (shrink)

Summary This article focuses on the relevance of Alexander von Humboldt's correspondence in the formation of transatlantic scientific networks at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Apart from connecting Humboldt with scientists and scholars worldwide, his correspondence turned out to be a fundamental tool for assuring the material conditions and the social and scientific connections he needed to carry out his research on the Spanish colonies and to simultaneously diffuse his achievements on the European side of the Atlantic. (...) His contact with Hispanic American scientists and with the local elites enabled him to build a broad social network, gaining access to key material, human and intellectual resources. The letters sent to scientists, scientific institutions and noblemen in Europe, for their part, kept Humboldt's European correspondents informed about his activities in Hispanic America, contributing to the validation of his work before the scientific community and the fulfilment of the duties resulting from the political and institutional support he received both before and during his travels. This stresses the importance of strategic social groups and their cooperation in the framework of exploratory travels as a means to gaining access to resources in the peripheries. It also reveals the scientist's dependence on all those who supported his research: kings, barons, botanical gardens, universities, and academies. (shrink)

The author of this study has a single-minded goal--the construction of a social ethic for the Hispanic Pentecostal Church in America that both coheres with the ...

Propaganda has been historically used for the benefit of certain social groups faced up to another. This propaganda is not always ethical at all. It is based on misconceptions, lies, and fallacies. We have analyzed (by using an experimental Psychology task) the presence and cognitive weight of certain mental footnotes and their influence on the Reasoning of Hispanic-Americans (Ecuadorian). These mental footnotes have been extracted from the classical work “A brief account of the destruction of the Indies” (...) of Bartolomé de las Casas in 1552. The most relevant and significant finding of this study is the clear evidence that nowadays we can still find these historical falsehoods in the current cognitive system of Ecuadorian people which are product of a well-planned and maliciously orchestrated propaganda. We conclude that all the contents of the Spanish black legend are the consequences of the aspirations of some social sectors to boycott the Spanish culture. (shrink)

__Forging People __explores the way in which Hispanic American thinkers in Latin America and Latino/a philosophers in the United States have posed and thought about questions of race, ethnicity, and nationality, and how they have interpreted the most significant racial and ethnic labels used in Hispanic America in connection with issues of rights, nationalism, power, and identity. Following the first introductory chapter, each of the essays addresses one or more influential thinkers, ranging from Bartolomé de Las Casas on (...) race and the rights of Amerindians; to Simon Bolívar's struggle with questions of how to forge a nation from disparate populations; to modern and contemporary thinkers on issues of race, unity, assimilation, and diversity. Each essay carefully and clearly presents the views of key authors in their historical and philosophical context and provides brief biographical sketches and reading lists, as aids to students and other readers. “Latin American philosophy has a long history of engagement with issues of race, ethnicity, and nationality. To date, however, there has been no volume that focused on the contributions of the major figures in the Latin American tradition, to illustrate their connections, and to illuminate the context in which much of their work occurred. This volume fills that gap and takes an important step in remedying this shortcoming in the existing philosophical literature, and also in the literature of related fields such as Latin American studies, ethnic studies, and the cross-disciplinary work of race, ethnicity, and nationality.” —_Manuel Vargas, University of San Francisco _. (shrink)

The rapidly changing field of genetics affects society through advances in health-care and through implications of genetic research. This study addresses the impacts of new genetic discoveries and technologies on different segments of today's society. The book begins with a chapter on genetic complexity, and subsequent chapters discuss moral and ethical questions arising from today's genetics from the perspectives of health care professionals, the media, the general public, special interest groups and commercial interests.

Latin American social protection systems show that the fundamental ambivalence of modernity is captured by the twin notion of liberty and discipline in the context of a plurality of modes of socio-political organization. According to this understanding, this article analyses the potential of the so-called Conditional Cash Transfer programmes, which are widespread in the region, to strength or reduce personal autonomy. These programmes are promoted by claiming their virtues to reduce poverty and impose good behaviour on poor people in (...) order to improve the ‘human capital’ of future generations. However, numerous elements challenge these alleged virtues: arbitrary selection of beneficiaries, interference in people’s lives, stigmatization of recipients, inability to achieve universal coverage and act in a preventive manner with regards to urgent needs, the creation of poverty traps and informal working, etc. Taking these elements into account, this article explains how these programmes do not improve people’s autonomy and political independence. (shrink)

The hermeneutic resources necessary for understanding Indigenous women’s lives in Latin America have been obscured by the tools of Western feminist philosophical practices and their travel in North-South contexts. Not only have ongoing practices of European colonization disrupted pre-colonial ways of knowing, but colonial lineages create contemporary public policies, institutions, and political structures that reify and solidify colonial epistemologies as the only legitimate forms of knowledge. I argue that understanding this foreclosure of Amerindian linguistic communities’ ability to collectively engage in (...) interpretive processes of culture and be heard and understood as coherent is an essential background condition to conceiving and theorizing the multiplicity of social oppressions and their intersections in contemporary Latin American contexts. Further, the work of disrupting and disobeying colonial interpretive frameworks has long been practiced by Indigenous women in Latin America, whose testimonies and expressions have been made sub-audible by design in colonial systems of meaning-making. This is part of the extensive legacy of the long quillwork of communal alphabets of survival. (shrink)

Contemporary genetic and biomedical research on race and ethnicity has reignited the debate over the biological significance of these categories. This article provides an overview of the critical literature concerning the categorization of Hispanic and Hispanic populations within these research programs. More specifically, this article focuses on issues regarding: The conceptualization of Hispanic identity, issues of data collection and generalization (e.g., the use of a specific Hispanic nationality as a stand‐in for all Hispanics), the tension between (...) social and biological classifications of ethnic populations, and the social, political, and scientific implications of genetic research for Latin America. (shrink)

In the last third of the twentieth century, humanists and social scientists argued that attention to genetics would heighten already‐existing genetic determinism, which in turn would intensify negative social outcomes, especially sexism, racism, ableism, and harshness to criminals. They assumed that laypeople are at risk of becoming genetic essentialists. I will call this the “laypeople are genetic essentialists model.” This model has not accurately predicted psychosocial impacts of findings from genetics research. I will be arguing that the failure (...) of the model can be traced to its inability to recognize the complexity of laypeople’s attitudes; its incorrect theory of how beliefs, attitudes, and discourse function; and its blindness to how academics’ own interests can override the available evidence. More specifically, I suggest that the substantial data about laypeople’s deployment of genetics supports what I will call the “laypeople are strategic essentialists model” better than the “laypeople are genetic essentialists model.” The strategic essentialists model holds that people tend to store multiple categories, including multiple causal forces, that they deploy “strategically” to serve context‐dependent goals. It will be difficult for academics to reorient ourselves to model laypeople as sophisticated strategic essentialists rather than as naïve genetic essentialists. Perhaps a little shift, however, will be of value. (shrink)

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, in the lands that are now the United States (the forty-eight contiguous states, Alaska and Hawaii), there must have been many hundreds of distinct languages. Fewer than two hundred remain, and the future of these is decidedly insecure, even where the remoteness of the location (in the case of Inuit in Northern Alaska) or the large size of the speech community (in the case of Navajo in the Southwest) might seem to protect the (...) community from language loss. Yet even this vastly reduced reservoir of linguistic diversity constitutes one of the great treasures of humanity, an enormous storehouse of expressive power and profound understandings of the universe. The loss of the hundreds of languages that have already passed into history is an intellectual catastrophe in every way comparable in magnitude to the ecological catastrophe we face today as the earth's tropical forests are swept by fire. Each language still spoken is fundamental to the personal, social and - a key term in the discourse of indigenous peoples - spiritual identity of its speakers. They know that without these languages they would be less than they are, and they are engaged in the most urgent struggles to protect their linguistic heritage. The goal of this paper is to review the contexts and practices of this struggle, in the hope that people everywhere will support it. (shrink)

ABSTRACT “Lockdown!” has articulated our collective and individual fear response to the novel coronavirus. Two regnant specialized discourses fostered by the academy—science and ideology critique—could not redirect this inadequate response nor generate their own adequately broad and focused social responses. This suggests the desirability of the academy adding phronesis as a goal for its pedagogical practices.

The human propensity for casting our social worlds as "us against them" is perhaps the primary impediment to deep and broadly inclusive understandings of the workings of rhetoric. Many decades ago, Kenneth Burke assailed that barrier with regard to Adolf Hitler. Surrounded by the satisfactions of vituperation against the leader of one of the world's most heinous social movements, Burke begged his readers to make space for understanding how Hitler's rhetoric brought about what it did. Philippe-Joseph Salazar's Words (...) Are Weapons makes a similar contribution for our era. He asks us to resist the gratifications generated by dismissing as "Islamaphobic" any critical analysis of what he calls "caliphal"... (shrink)

Health equity can be defined as the absence of disadvantage to individuals and communities in health outcomes, access to health care, and quality of health care regardless of one’s race, gender, nationality, age, ethnicity, religion, and socioeconomic status. Health equity concerns those disparities in public health that can be traced to unequal, systemic economic, and social conditions. Despite significant improvements in the health of the overall population, health inequities in America persist. Racial and ethnic minorities continue to experience (...) higher rates of morbidity and mortality than non-minorities across a range of health issues. For example, African-American children with asthma have a seven times greater mortality rate than Non-Hispanic white children with the illness. While cancer is the second leading cause of death among all populations in the U.S., ethnic minorities are especially burdened with the disease. (shrink)

Health equity can be defined as the absence of disadvantage to individuals and communities in health outcomes, access to health care, and quality of health care regardless of one’s race, gender, nationality, age, ethnicity, religion, and socioeconomic status. Health equity concerns those disparities in public health that can be traced to unequal, systemic economic, and social conditions. Despite significant improvements in the health of the overall population, health inequities in America persist. Racial and ethnic minorities continue to experience (...) higher rates of morbidity and mortality than non-minorities across a range of health issues. For example, African-American children with asthma have a seven times greater mortality rate than Non-Hispanic white children with the illness. While cancer is the second leading cause of death among all populations in the U.S., ethnic minorities are especially burdened with the disease. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hispanic Utopian Studies and Activism as a PromptJulia Ramírez-Blanco (bio)In the last few years I have come to the Utopian Studies Societýs yearly conference as part of a smaller group, one that has its own parallel history in the left corner of the South of Europe and is networked mostly with Latin America. I am referring to the interdisciplinary research group Histopia, which has its base in Madrid́s (...) Autónoma University, is comprised of twenty-seven researchers from different institutions, and is coordinated by historian Juan Pro. As the name Histopia suggests, it was founded by historians. From the beginning there have been people from other fields, such as political science, architecture, cultural studies, and art history. The aim was always understanding utopianism beyond the study of texts, and centering research in everything that utopianism produces, such as social movements, political programs, and urban programs. In this sense, a premise was to understand utopias not as a footnote in history or a series of eccentric events, but as a guiding force that drives a [End Page 510] history. This placing of utopianism in history was clearly announced in the grouṕs website:Histopia seeks to go beyond the philological approach that predominates in Utopian Studies and to historicize the study of contemporary utopias and dystopias, showing how they respond to the contexts in which they arise, since they reflect the problems and frustrations of a society as well as the aspirations for change it contains, and the conditions of possibility that a particular cultural and emotional framework offers for developing them.1Together with this focus on history, which departs from the more text-centered traditions of an important part of utopian studies, the other main particularity of Histopia is its decentralizing of utopian studies towards the Spanish-speaking world. And to this end, the group also founded the Transatlantic Network for the Study of Utopias, which was created in 2015 to put in communication over 250 researchers, most of them from Latin America, but also from other places such as Australia or Japan.2The Spanish statés research funding programs have provided the bureaucratic framework and the material resources for the research group since 2015. Together with seminars, conferences, or workshops, the resulting publications have been linked with utopian literature, with dystopia, and with a focus on viewing history through the lens of utopia. One of the most recent endeavors has been a radically collective one, articulating a Dictionary of Utopian Places written by a multitude of authors.3 Histopia has also initiated several projects with schools, for the most part ongoing, and there have been many attempts to disseminate its work through radio and video projects. And since its founding, Histopia has tried reaching out beyond the Academy—an effort that is finally gaining success. In 2021 the international conference Intentional Communities: Concrete Utopias in History was extremely fruitful: we saw involved participation both in various interventions, and through activities such as streaming. Participants included people and organizations from social movements and from intentional communities.I want to argue here that the very formation of Histopia was a logical development from certain political triggers—and in particular, the so-called 15M Movement, a series of anti-austerity protests and direct-democracy initiatives that ignited antigovernment activism throughout Spain from 2011 on, culminating in the occupation of urban spaces (“encampments”) and in very large political assemblies. It is not just that the forces of activism were [End Page 511] reignited after 2011, and that its inheritors came together with the Histopia research group; the very existence of Histopia, I am arguing, can be read as a consequence of the 15M encampment and its aftermath.Prefigurative PracticesIn May 2011, following the example of the Arab world, Madrid’s Puerta del Sol was populated by a crowd armed with posters, slogans, and self-made banners. On the inhospitable ground of the square, anonymous persons erected an encampment so complex that it functioned as a miniature city, with spaces for preparing food, for nursery care, for rest, for legal consultation, for anti-racist and/or feminist activity. All work was voluntary, and materials were... (shrink)

Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change. By Celeste Michelle Condit.

The politics of ethnic names, such as ‘Latino’ and ‘Hispanic’, raises legitimate issues for three reasons: because non-political considerations of descriptive adequacy are insufficient to determine absolutely the question of names; political considerations may be germane to an ethnic name’s descriptive adequacy; and naming opens up the political question of a chosen furture, to which we are accountable. The history of colonial and neo-colonial conditions structuring the relations of the North, Central and South Americas is both critical in (...) understanding the political condition of Latinos in the USA and relevant in current colonial relations. Key Words: ascriptive class segment • colonialism • ethnic names • Hispanic • Latino • neo-colonialism • political contestation. (shrink)

Much media attention has been given to the potentially shifting voting patterns of the U.S. Hispanic population in the 2020 election. However, far less attention has been given to the implications...

The politics of ethnic names, such as ‘Latino’ and ‘Hispanic’, raises legitimate issues for three reasons: because non-political considerations of descriptive adequacy are insufficient to determine absolutely the question of names; political considerations may be germane to an ethnic name’s descriptive adequacy; and naming opens up the political question of a chosen furture, to which we are accountable. The history of colonial and neo-colonial conditions structuring the relations of the North, Central and South Americas is both critical in (...) understanding the political condition of Latinos in the USA and relevant in current colonial relations. (shrink)

This anthology brings together a selection of historical and contemporary writings on topics in African-American Philosophy. Questions regarding a wide range of issues--including slavery and freedom, social progress, self-respect, alienation, sexuality, cultural identity, nationalism, feminism, Marxism and violence--are critically examined from different perspectives by well-known philosophers and by non-philosophers from many disciplines. It emphasizes the historical significance of the philosophical arguments within very specific social and political contexts. Features substantial extracts, and in some cases complete works by important (...) 19th- and 20th-century social and political thinkers--organized under sections on Antebellem Critical Thought, Emigrationist and Diaspora Thought, Assimilation and Social Uplift, Contemporary Black Feminist Thought, Civil Rights and Civil Disobedience, Marxism and Social Progress, Rebellion and Radical Thought, Social Activism Reconsidered, Black Women Writers on Rape, and Alienation and Self-Respect. For anyone interested in the African-American experience and American history. (shrink)

Insights into the problem of our relation to language Kenneth Burke and Contemporary European Thought: A Rhetoric in Transition reflects the present transitional nature of rhetoric and society. Its purpose is to relate the rhetorical theory of Burke to the theories of four major European philosophers--Jürgen Habermas, Ernesto Grassi, Foucault, and Jacques Derrida--as they discuss the nature of language and its central role in society. This book describes a rhetorical world in transition but not a world in chaos. It points (...) to the centrality of symbolism in theories of language and rhetoric and illustrates Burke's influence as a pivotal things and theorist in the communication arts and sciences, suggesting that the observations regarding shifting paradigms and perspectives made by other scholars are indeed emergent in the realm of rhetoric. It also regards the powerful impact of language and symbolic action in both the critique and construction of human knowledge and augurs a central role for rhetoric in the intellectual and social transformations of this and the next century. (shrink)

Policy decisions during and after the New Deal tied the U.S. social contract to the employment contract, by conditioning eligibility and benefit levels for core welfare-state programs on work status and performance. The resulting system of social provision, however, embodied a set of assumptions about labor-market conditions that began to unravel with the structural economic shifts that began in the mid-1970s. Work was expected to provide open doors to employment, stable floors of security and stability over time, (...) income ladders promising adequate and rising earnings, and safety nets providing public and/or private protections against unforeseen or unavoidable hardships. Each of these assumptions was undermined by fundamental changes in the market, and this, in turn, has redefined patterns of social provision. As a result, core welfare-state programs have become less effective at meeting their own objectives of providing adequate social protections for rising numbers of working Americans. These trends preceded the recent recession and weak recovery, and cannot be reversed by the return of robust growth or pre-recession employment levels, in the absence of more fundamental change in the social contract. The roots of the current dilemma lie in the 1930s-40s, when politically mobilized employers fought alongside conservative policymakers to constrain the scope of the original system of social protections during and after the New Deal. In recent decades, they have battled to keep even this limited system from reaching those it was intended to assist, by blocking or limiting reform initiatives in areas such as employment policy, the minimum wage, health and pension insurance and modernization of the unemployment compensation system. (shrink)

Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change. By Celeste Michelle Condit.

The present book seeks to present a comprehensive picture of one on the most important stages in Hispanic-American thought, a stage during which there were ardent discussions of the problems presented by the incorporation of Hispanic America into the new social, political, and educational currents, once political independence had been won from Spain. This period was regarded as the incorporation of Hispanic America into civilization. There followed a discussion of the problems arising from the formation of (...) a new order that was to be a worthy substitute for the repudiated colonial order. (shrink)

This article is a critical race theology analysis that asserts that Catholic social teaching established in documents such as the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Populorum progressio, Caritas in veritate, and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace’s Contribution to the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance justifies reparations for the state of oppression commonly called Jim Crow, or segregation society, from the US government because it denied African Americans “truly human conditions.”.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Names Alive Are Like the Names in GravesBlack Life and Black Social Death in Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future AssassinLee Spinks"After blackness was invented / people began seeing ghosts."1One of the most powerful and provoking responses to the political rise of Donald Trump appeared with the 2018 publication of Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. Hayes began writing these (...) poems straight after Trump's remarkable triumph in the 2016 presidential election, and they race to keep pace with the rapidly metastasizing effects of the Trump phenomenon, from his relentless radicalization of the modes and mores of political speech ("Newshounds ponder the tweets of a bullhorn"), his continuous assault on American democratic institutions, and his singular success in marshalling a newly cohesive political constituency seduced by the reactionary allure of resurgent white nationalism or what Hayes caustically calls "a mandate for whiteness, virility, sovereignty / stupidity" (AS: 38).2 As the phrase "mandate for whiteness" suggests, integral to the story of Trump's ascendancy in American Sonnets is another story, a story about race and social authority in the time of Black Lives Matter when blackness remains "the color of this country's current threat / advisory" (AS: 10). At home and abroad the appalling incandescence of Hayes's contemporary American political moment is reflected by the names of its black victims, names like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and, perhaps most explosively of all, George Floyd, whose May 2020 police killing on a Minneapolis street reprised such a familiar configuration of racial power that Hayes had already glimpsed its spectral outline two years earlier: "A [End Page 60] brother has to know how to time travel & doctor / himself when a knee or shoe stalls against his neck" (AS: 77).3Without compromising the intensity of Hayes's focus on this contemporary social emergency, I want in what follows to expand our sense of the historical and metaphysical scene of his writing by reading it as an imaginative response to a larger and more fundamental question: What does it mean to live a black life in an antiblack world? I'm moved to do so by the double register of his writing vividly exemplified by the penultimate sonnet in the sequence which memorializes "All the black people I'm tired of losing / All the dead from parts of Florida, Ferguson / Brooklyn, Charleston, Cleveland, Chicago / Baltimore, where the names alive are / Like the names in graves" (AS: 81). What's remarkable, to my mind at least, about the phrase "the names alive are / like the names in graves" is its fusion of a directly contemporary perception of the precariousness of black existence within a culture of white supremacy (the perception that every black life could share the social fate of Tamir Rice at any particular moment) with an encompassing metaphysical vision of blackness as the embodiment of social death and the continuing afterlife of slavery. Paying close attention to several of Hayes's poems, I will trace this double register to explore a number of ideas central to his thinking in American Sonnets including the foundational role of antiblackness in organizing American reality for both black and white identities, the dialectical relationship between antiblackness and the libidinal economy of white supremacy, and the hope of imagining new possibilities of life capable of contesting the antiblack conditions of contemporary social existence.4 In doing so I will place particular emphasis on Hayes's development of a distinctively dialectical and dialogical style of poetic address that reimagines lyric subjectivity as a drama of racial becoming focused on the relationship between black social death and the culture of white supremacy.5Black Social Death and the Libidinal Economy of WhitenessBefore continuing let me briefly develop three ideas above which help shape my reading of American Sonnets: the social life of social death, the continuing afterlife of slavery, and what Hayes calls in my epigraph "the [End Page 61] invention of blackness." The first draws on the Afropessimist radicalization of Orlando Patterson's famous redescription of slavery as social death that sees the slave as a "social nonperson" whose relation to... (shrink)

SummaryBoth Iberian and Spanish American liberals in the early decades of the nineteenth century based their political stances upon a particular vision of Spanish history. This vision, nourished by the stereotypes of the so-called ‘black legend’, correspond to an extremely gloomy picture of the main events and processes that had been taking place in the Hispanic monarchy since the late fifteenth century, such as the discovery and conquest of America and the outcome of the Comunidades of Castile war. This (...) essay shows how those first Hispanic liberals, many of whom spent several years in exile, hoping to make sense of that period of uncertainty and revolutionary crisis, sought inspiration in the philosophies of history which were beginning to spread from Northern Europe regarding the decisive role of Protestantism in the origins of modernity. In endorsing such a derogatory vision of the history of their own countries, which included an evaluation of Catholicism as a retrograde factor, those liberal writers and politicians bequeathed to their descendants an interpretative framework that would prove to be very long lasting. In fact, much of the political and intellectual historiography on the Iberian world would be conditioned for a long time by a paradigm which described its past as an anomaly in the Euroamerican context, and assumed the subordinate and peripheral position of the region, portrayed as a kind of ‘interior Orient’—that is, as an aberration of Western civilisation. (shrink)

This book offers geographical perspectives on the condition of the United States at the outset of the twenty-first century. It compares the American ideals of liberty, equality, individual opportunity, and social improvement with the contemporary condition of the regions, states and localities - the ideal American space with its reality as a place. It uses the public standard provided by the official ideology of the United States to see how well things are really going. The authors consider the contrast (...) between ideal and reality at local, state, and national levels in education, health, and welfare, in community, race, gender, and class relations, in economic and industrial development, and in the use and exploitation of America's landscape. Each chapter addresses the issues through evidence of long-term and recent trends, and grounds its arguments in information. American Space/American Place provides a series of compelling insights into the current condition of American society, its natural environment, and its place within the world. (shrink)

From the most prominent thinkers in Latin American philosophy, literature, politics, and social science comes a challenge to conventional theories of globalization. The contributors to this volume imagine a discourse in which revolution requires no temporalized march of progress or takeovers of state power but instead aims at local control and the material conditions for human dignity.

The American Catholic Church has attempted to apply and extend the social teachings of the Universal Church in light of American conditions and political culture, most recently in the 1986 Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy, promulgated after six: years of analysis, debate, and amendment. Moving from an emphasis on government responsibilities for economic well-being and social welfare to a family-centered social vision stressing mediating groups and voluntary service, the American Church (...) asserted a perennial social doctrine reaffirmed and extended in Pope John Paul II's Centesimus Annus. The latter calls on a century of experience that has demonstrated the failures of the bureaucratic state and "real socialism," the utility of a market economy in allocating resources efficiently, and the shift from a land-based social economy to one founded on knowledge and skill. (shrink)

The polarization of the individual and the community that underlies much of the debate between individualists and communitarians is made possible in part by the literal vanishingof civil society—the domain whose middling terms mediate the stark opposition of state and private sectors and offer women and men a space for activity that is both voluntary and public. Modern democratic ideology and the reality of our political practices sometimesseem to yield only a choice between elephantine and paternalistic government or a radically (...) solipsistic and nearly anarchic private market sector—overnment gargantuanism or private greed. Americans do not much like either one. President Clinton's callfor national service draws us out of our selfishness without kindling any affection for government. Private markets service our avarice without causing us to like ourselves. The question of how America's decentralized and multi-vocal public can secure a coherentvoice in debates over public policy under the conditions precipitated by so hollow and disjunctive a dichotomy is perhaps the most important issue facing both the political theory and social science of democracy and the practice of democratic politics in America today. Two recent stories out of Washington suggest just how grave the situation has become. Health-care reform failed in a paroxysm of mutual recrimination highlighted by the successful campaign of the private sector against a presidential program that seemed to be widely misunderstood. The public at large simply went missing in the debates. (shrink)

Humanitarian interventions defined as “peace-keeping” missions are becoming an increasingly common occurrence. This paper will consider the relationship between the idea of human rights and the concept of legitimate intervention into the affairs of sovereign nations. I will argue that implicit within the concept of human rights are standards of political legitimacy which render all claims to sovereignty “conditional” upon adherence to these standards. After analyzing how both critics and supporters have viewed human rights interventions, I will consider how the (...) “war on terrorism” may contribute to a further extension of the concept of legitimate intervention. I will conclude with reflections on the implications of these interventions for cosmopolitan democracy and the conditions under which it can be realized. (shrink)