Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Political Philosophy

  • on authority [and rousseau’s fork]

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ Hannah Arendt maintained that one has authority, when one commands obedience from others, not by exercising power over them, but because they recognize and respect one’s right to do so. [1] To accept authority, then, is to accept hierarchy, which, in turn, is to accept a substantial if not formal…

  • Immigration and Freedom: A Conversation with Chandran Kukathas

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ Kevin talks with Chandran Kukathas (Singapore Management University) about his new book Immigration and Freedom, as well as his pluralistic approach to political philosophy. In the book, Kukathas argues that immigration restrictions not only problematically restrict the freedom of immigrants but also of citizens, and that many gains that immigration proponents/skeptics…

  • The Common Sense

    Note from the author: this is a non-technical, impressionistic introduction to my PhD dissertation. It doesn’t contain a mountain of technical references or jargon, and is going to be developed much further and with more rigor, when I reach those stages of the project. Think of it as an extended “Provocations” piece for now. To that…

  • Lippmann and Dewey: Debating Democracy in the Age of Metropolis

    By Michael Boyle At the beginning of another presidential election cycle, in which both major parties will spend billions of dollars in an effort to sway the public, it is instructive to revisit the historic clash between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey on the subject of democracy and, specifically, their disagreement as to whether the…

  • This Week’s Special: Charles Tilly’s “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime”

    Michael Boyle Tony Soprano and the Nation State: Charles Tilly’s “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime” http://www.scribd.com/doc/280094995/Tilly-War-Making-and-State-Making-as-Organized-Crime One of the most significant sociologists of the 20th Century, Charles Tilly (1929-2008) is best known for his linkage of war and war-making with the appearance of the nation-state in Europe, especially in his 1990 book,…

  • Constitutional Originalism and Religious Fundamentalism — Two Sides of the Same Coin

    By Steve Snyder “Originalism” has arguably been the most prominent theory of legal interpretation of the U.S. Constitution since Antonin Scalia became an associate justice of the Supreme Court some 30 years ago. Scalia has been a regular lecturer at conservative legal conferences of organizations like the Federalist Society, where he advances the originalist point…