This essay investigates a strand of left-republicanism that emerged in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The solidarists developed a distinctive theory of social property and a thorough critique of the liberal, republican, and socialist alternatives. Solidarism rests on the claim that the modern division of labor creates a social product that does not naturally belong to the individuals who control it as their private property; property, therefore, should be conceived as “common wealth,” divided into individual and (...) public shares. When the wealthy appropriate a disproportionate share, they have a quasi-contractual debt to society that they are obliged to repay. The concepts of social debt, common-wealth, reparations, and rent played an important role in legitimizing egalitarian policies, but they have been largely forgotten today. This article resuscitates the theoretical arguments introduced by the solidarists and explains their relevance for contemporary debates about alternative economic arrangements. (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Volume 21, Issue 1, Page 25-46, January 2022. This article explains how 19th-century radical republicans answered the following question: how is it possible to be free in a social order that fosters economic dependence on others? I focus on the writings of a group of French thinkers called the solidarists who advocated “liberty organized for everyone.” Mutualism and social right were two components of the solidarist strategy for limiting domination in commercial/industrial society. While the doctrine (...) of mutualism was rooted in pre-industrial artisan culture, social right was a novel idea that built on Durkheim’s analysis of the division of labour. In this article, I describe the main features of the solidarist account: solidarity, social property, quasi-contractual debt, and restorative justice. Classical republicanism was deeply concerned with citizen participation and the balance between popular and elite power, but 19th-century radical republicans thought that these goals must be approached differently in market societies in which enormous power is exercised outside the state. The solidarists cautiously embraced the state as a mechanism for regulating the market in order to ensure equal liberty. Social right and mutualism were also conceived as ways of limiting the centralization of state power. (shrink)

This article explains how 19th-century radical republicans answered the following question: how is it possible to be free in a social order that fosters economic dependence on others? I focus on the writings of a group of French thinkers called the solidarists who advocated “liberty organized for everyone.” Mutualism and social right were two components of the solidarist strategy for limiting domination in commercial/industrial society. While the doctrine of mutualism was rooted in pre-industrial artisan culture, social right was a novel (...) idea that built on Durkheim’s analysis of the division of labour. In this article, I describe the main features of the solidarist account: solidarity, social property, quasi-contractual debt, and restorative justice. Classical republicanism was deeply concerned with citizen participation and the balance between popular and elite power, but 19th-century radical republicans thought that these goals must be approached differently in market societies in which enormous power is exercised outside the state. The solidarists cautiously embraced the state as a mechanism for regulating the market in order to ensure equal liberty. Social right and mutualism were also conceived as ways of limiting the centralization of state power. (shrink)

The past twenty years have witnessed the consolidation of deliberation as the normative basis of democratic theory. Although different versions of deliberative democracy vary in scope and degree of institutionalization, they share the assumption that the rational consensus engendered through discussion should serve as the normative guide for democratic politics. Although this tradition has roots in the birth of bourgeois liberal thought, it has received renewed attention due to Habermas’s reformulation on the basis of discourse ethics. In his middle period, (...) Habermas had attempted to ground rationality in the structure of discourse itself, in the ideal preconditions of intersubjective communication.1 His more pragmatist heirs, however, jettison transcendental truth claims while maintaining that deliberation can enhance the legitimacy of consensual solutions to the moral dilemmas which divide citizens. (shrink)

The paper argues that the liberal approach to social rights is contradictory and provides an alternative account that draws on solidarism, a strand of nineteenth-century French Republican thought. Solidarism links together a normative theory of social obligation and a descriptive account of social value, debt and unearned increment. The theory of social property provides a distinctive foundation for social rights.

This paper examines the rhetorical dimension of arguments about global justice. It draws on postcolonial theory, an approach that has explored the relationship between knowledge and power. The global justice literature has elaborated critiques of global inequality and advanced arguments about how to overcome the legacies of domination. These concerns are also shared by critics of colonialism, yet there are also epistemological differences that separate the two scholarly communities. Despite these differences, I argue that bringing the two literatures into conversation (...) generates important benefits. Postcolonial theory draws attention to the way that abstract concepts can function as metaphors that have the unintended consequence of reinforcing power relations. Normative theory will be more effective at promoting global justice if it pays more attention to the politics of representation. (shrink)

This essay provides an interpretation of Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn al-Afghānī, a controversial figure in nineteenth-century Islamic political thought. One aspect of this controversy is the tension between "Refutation of the Materialists," Afghānī's well-known defense of religious orthodoxy, and a short newspaper article entitled "Reply to Renan" that dismisses prophetic religion as dogmatic and intellectually stifling. In this essay I argue that close attention to Afghānī's theory of civilization helps resolve this apparent contradiction. Afghānī's interest in Ibn Khaldūn and the French (...) historian Guizot is well known, but has not been fully explored in the literature. I suggest that understanding Guizot's distinctive approach to the concept of civilization illuminates Afghānī's writings on the political utility of religion. Afghānī was an ardent anti-imperialist and his goal was to encourage reform in Islamic countries while resisting Western hegemony. He concluded that the tension between prophetic religion and critical thought could help Islamic civilization to flourish. (shrink)

This introductory article summarizes some key elements of Monique Deveaux’s book Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements and situates that book in the philosophical literature on global poverty. It then provides an outline of the symposium contributions by Ashwini Vasanthakumar, Luis Cabrera, Brooke Ackerly, Catherine Lu, and Avery Kolers.

For over forty years, economic inequality and distributive justice have been two of the primary concerns of political philosophers. This volume addresses these issues in a novel way, by focusing on the concepts of solidarity and public goods as both descriptive and normative frameworks. Solidarity links the social, political and moral together, in a distinctively political approach that recognizes the social sources of power on the one hand and sources of moral motivation on the other. Public goods such as education, (...) healthcare, and transport systems are indispensable to the forging of solidarity, but at the same time they may become sources of oppression or injustice, when they fail to respect individual autonomy or when they calcify majoritarian preferences. The essays in this volume explore different features of the political, moral and civic approaches to solidarity. The moral theory of solidarity is advanced in one case as an intrinsically valuable concept of social connectedness and in another as an approach of epistemic deference; a structural account of solidarity theorizes about action against racial oppression, and a power-relations account points at the urgency of the affective, non-rational dimensions of solidarity. The social value of property and its moral implications are articulated through the lens of French 19th Century ‘Solidarism’ and as a complementary theory to left-libertarianism. Public goods are defended as instrumental to solidarity, in one case within a liberal framework and in another within a human-perfectionism framework. By providing a series of thought-provoking debates about social obligations and justice, the volume re-establishes solidarity and public goods as pertinent concepts for theorizing about social justice and inequality. (shrink)

This article develops a novel approach to the relationship between public space and democracy. It employs the concept of the spectacle to show how public space can serve to destroy or weaken solidarity just as easily as it can foster a democratic ethos of equality. A close reading of Rousseau's Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theatre helps illuminate the political implications of modern public life, which increasingly takes the form of passive individuals assembling in order to view a spectacle. (...) According to Rousseau, spectacles like the theater are depoliticizing because they undermine the opportunity for active participation and interaction with other citizens. By habituating the audience to theatrical modes of self-presentation, they also weaken the capacity for empathy. This article concludes by showing how contemporary theorists including Sennett, Debord and Habermas also contribute to our understanding of the concept of the spectacle. Key Words: citizenship • democracy • festival • public space • Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Richard Sennett • spectacle • theater. (shrink)

Colonialism and Its Legacy brings together essays by leading scholars in both the fields of political theory and the history of political thought about European colonialism and its legacies, and postcolonial social and political theory. The essays explore the ways in which European colonial projects structured and shaped much of modern political theory, how concepts from political philosophy affected and were realized in colonial and imperial practice, and how we can understand the intellectual and social world left behind by a (...) half-millennium of European empires. (shrink)

Margaret Kohn argues for a reappraisal of early twentieth-century left-republican French political theory, known as ‘solidarism’. Solidarism recognises private property as legitimate, but at the same time argues that the collective nature of economic production gives rise to a claim to social property. It is social property that should underlie the case for social justice and social rights, not the standard liberal claims to individual autonomy. This paper provides an appraisal of Kohn’s recovery of solidarism, taking as its (...) main theme the relation between property and social justice. The paper first offers a typology of four theories of justice (right- and left-libertarianism, luck and relational egalitarianism) and discusses the relation of each of these to the concept of property. Then it argues that solidarism is akin to left-libertarianism in the way it formulates justice as a claim to social property. Finally, it argues that solidarists cannot escape grounding their theory in a non-property based fundamental principle, which makes the theory much less distinctive from egalitarian theories of justice than may appear at first sight. (shrink)

Margaret Kohn has argued that fin-de-siècle French Solidarists such as Alfred Fouillée developed a “third way” between capitalism and socialism which still provides a powerful justification for “welfare state” institutions and public-goods provision. But how does Solidarism respond to the demands for environmental justice, and against environmental racism, which have emerged in the past 50 years, mostly in Women of Color-led social movements. Distinguishing three elements of environmental justice, and also pinpointing the logic of expendability at the core of (...) environmental racism, the current article shows that Solidarism has more resources than liberal egalitarianism to challenge environmental injustice, but that, in the white supremacist state, environmental racism in particular poses an especially difficult challenge. After discussing the Solidarists’ divergent responses to feminism and Social Darwinism, the paper shows that, provided Solidarists are also in solidarity with social movements of the oppressed, their doctrine can aid the struggle for equal status. (shrink)

This collection for a course in Social Thought and the Critique of Power includes selections from Sandra Bartkey, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Luc Boltanski, Eve Chiapello, Juergin Habermas, Margaret Kohn, Saskia Sassen, Margit Mayer, David Ciavatta, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Jeremy Waldron. Selections include material on the city, neoliberalism, computer-mediated life, precarity, cosmopolitanism, and gender. This packet may still be available as a print-on-demand title at the Ryerson University Bookstore.

This paper focuses on the topic of evaluation of clinical ethics consultation. The concept of evaluation seems to contain an internal tension: On the one hand, evaluation is seen as distorting the conceptual and normative content of the case under scrutiny and, on the other, the evaluative act is the most important use of judgment and an inescapable part of everyday life. As such, we maintain that evaluation is essential.

Fetal ultrasonography has made women's and men's relationship to the fetus more equal. Drawing on information obtained from multiple conjoint interviews with 62 childbearing couples, I suggest that although women and men are both advantaged by fetal ultrasonography, expectant fathers' experience of the fetus is always enhanced, whereas pregnant women's experience may also be attenuated. For men, fetal ultrasonography is like a prosthetic device: an enabling mechanism that permits them access to a female world from which they have been excluded (...) because of their limited biological role in reproduction. For women, fetal ultrasonography is enabling, but it may also be a disabling mechanism that disrupts their privileged access to the fetus. (shrink)

Driven by an impetus to standardize, numerous checklists have been devised to address quality in qualitative research, but these standards and the mindset driving them offer no language with which to speak about taste, or the aesthetic sensibilities that play such a key role in evaluating the goodness of any object. In this article, quality appraisal in qualitative research is considered in the context of taste, that is, in the discernment involved in judging the value of research and in the (...) recognition of the key role reviewer preferences, sensibilities and membership in one or more taste communities play in these judgements. The evaluation of a study is accomplished by evaluating one or more reports from that study, and such reports may be conceived as art forms amenable to the same criteria for appraisal as poems or paintings. Taste implies judgements about the quality of objects and a person's ability to sift through and select from a store of knowledge that knowledge appropriate to judge its value. What binds a community of practitioners (here reviewers of qualitative studies) together is taste‐making, or the constant refinements of judgements concerning what constitutes good and bad practice. (shrink)

Este artigo visa demonstrar como se vem instaurando a formação do cidadão através do Orçamento Participativo, na cidade de Porto Alegre, após 1990.

This paper focuses on philosophical toy objects and neo-pataphysicist disciplines, everyday resistance by futility and play. Contemporary electromagnetic toys, smart objects and the Internet of Things will be compared to the seventeenth-century Wunderkammer objects. Historic naturalia, objects and actual toy gadgetry will all be unveiled as alternate W.A.S.T.E. (Pynchon 1964) communications devices, among Habsburg peers. A proof of evidence for the functions of futile toys as resistance objects is given through the presentation of electronic circuit board designs as new bachelor (...) machines, chindogus (useless objects), subcutaneous Radio Frequency Bijoux (RFID-implants) and game fashion, as introduced by the author. But what are the consequences of the use of futile toys on the streets of everyday life? Do they entail a sustainable nascent practice in arts? Who is allowed to play with the electromagnetic parallel worlds? Do electronic toys offer a parallel communications system in their futility? What is the actual role of electronic toys in an inverse trajectory backwards to their harbingers, which are philosophical toys, jeux bijoux (blingblings to play with), Wunderkammer-toys (for peers to establish links with Potlatch-like gifts to tighten social relations) and the Ludic Spielzeug (a toy which empowers the player to recognize the futile toy as tool of resistance and backtalk to given economic and discourse order)? (shrink)