This paper addresses the question of the constitution of ‘the people’. It argues that J.L. Austin’s concept of the ‘perlocutionary’ speech act gives us a framework for understanding the constitutive force of a specific constitutional document: the American Declaration of Independence. It does so through responding to Derrida’s analysis of the Declaration, which itself draws on Austin’s work. Derrida argues that the Declaration’s constitutive force lies in the fact that it cannot be simply understood as either ‘performative’ or ‘constative’, in (...) Austin’s terminology. According to Derrida, ‘the people’ do not pre-exist the Declaration, but are constituted in the act of declaration itself. In response, I argue that while Derrida’s insight regarding the constitution of ‘the people’ is sound, his analysis misses two key aspects of the Declaration. These two lacunae point the way to an understanding of the constitutive force of the Declaration in terms of Austin’s ‘perlocutionary’ speech act. (shrink)

Critics have charged Dewey with a failure to recognize the tragic dimension of human existence. Randolph Bourne argued that Dewey's pragmatism "has never been confronted with the pathless and the inexorable". For Bourne, Dewey's support of America's entry into World War I "subordinates idea to technique" in service of undemocratic ends. Raymond Boisvert accuses Dewey of a hubristic Baconian scientism in thinking that technical intelligence could solve all social problems. Cornel West claims that Dewey "has not come to terms with (...) the sense of the tragic" in failing to "confront candidly individual and collective experiences of evil". As we can see from this selection of... (shrink)

Bai Tongdong’s Against Political Equality argues for Confucian meritocracy over a pure democracy of equals. His arguments draw on a multiple modernities comparison between the Spring and Autumn Warring States period in China and early modernity in the West, and rest on a Mencian conception of human nature according to which humans are equal in moral potential but not in moral actuality. I argue that there is a crucial disanalogy between this Chinese early modernity and Western early modernity: the role (...) of capitalism. In a similarly comparativist and modernist spirit, drawing on B. R. Ambedkar and M. K. Gandhi, I argue that this disanalogy challenges both Bai’s critique of democracy and his positive account. Bai’s failure to take into account the role of capitalism in Western modernity raises a challenge to the explanatory power of his Mencian conception of human nature with regard to the failings of contemporary democracies, namely that capitalism fosters the relevant features of our moral psychology that cause those failings. Further, without that grounding assumption, Bai’s arguments against democracy cut equally against his Confucian meritocracy. The disanalogy also creates challenges for his positive proposal. Bai, I argue, provides an ideal theory of Confucian meritocracy at the same time as he provides a non-ideal theory of democracy. But, taking into account the non-ideal cultural and moral psychological features of capitalism, Bai’s Confucian meritocracy is likely to fall into an unjust and oligarchic hierarchy. (shrink)

In his recent book, Why I Am Not a Buddhist, Evan Thompson argues that inter-tradition or cross-cultural philosophical dialogue ought to be governed by cosmopolitan conversational norms that do not subsume any one tradition’s deep commitments under those of any other tradition, but rather bring those commitments into the discussion so that they can be challenged and defended. He argues on this basis for the application of a deeply contextualist and historicist interpretive methodology to Buddhist texts, concepts, and theories in (...) dialogue with philosophy and contemporary cognitive sciences. Buddhist modernism, in eschewing that deeply contextualist and historicist methodology, falls short of those cosmopolitan commitments. We argue that Thompson’s cosmopolitan commitments do not mandate the deeply contextualist and historicist methodology he recommends. As an alternative, we propose a creolizing methodology that finds value in mixing, reinterpreting, and reinventing cultural traditions and other forms of belonging to address the complex problems the world faces. We suggest that such a creolizing methodology can be found in other forms of Buddhist modernism than those Thompson criticizes. We provide, as two examples, the thought of the Chinese monk Taixu and the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. (shrink)

What structure do paradigm cases of oppression and domination, like racism and capitalism, have? Most theories of oppression and domination take them to have a binary structure. There are the oppressors and the oppressed, the dominators and the dominated. I argue that a better model for many paradigm cases of oppression and domination is a structure of graded inequality. Such a structure comprises multiple groups arranged in hierarchically ascending and descending order. A model of graded inequality has both descriptive and (...) normative advantages over a binary model. It better illuminates some mechanisms by which oppression and domination stabilize themselves. Understanding those mechanisms allows us better to destabilize them. Yet there still may be, I suggest, some good reasons for adopting the binary model in certain situations for certain purposes. The larger methodological upshot of the paper is to connect more closely social philosophy to moral psychology. (shrink)