Political Theory

Situated at the intersection of democratic theory and international studies, Accountability and Democracy provides an in-depth critical analysis of the concept “democratic accountability.” The book proceeds with separate chapters on accountability as found in the U.S. Ratification debates, agency theory, ancient Athenian democracy, theories of deliberative democracy, capitalist markets, and cosmopolitan democracy. Through an engagement with these different traditions and contexts, the book paints a picture of democratic accountability as a multidimensional concept harboring competing imperatives and diverse instantiations. It both engages conventional electoral models of accountability and moves beyond them by situating democratic accountability within more deliberative, participatory and agonistic contexts. Contrary to dominant views that emphasize discipline and control, the book describes democratic accountability as a source of mutuality, community, and political transformation. The book also challenges deep-seated understandings of democratic accountability as an expression of popular sovereignty. It instead argues that accountable governance is incompatible with all claims to ultimate authority, regardless of whether they refer to the demos, the state, or cosmopolitan public law. Rather than conceiving of democratic accountability as a way to legitimize a secure and sovereign political order, the book contends that destabilization and democratic insurgence are indispensable and often neglected facets of democratic accountability practices.

Given the almost universal assumption that democracy is a ‘good thing’, the goal of mankind, it is easy to forget that ‘rule by the people’ has been vehemently opposed by some of the most distinguished thinkers in the Western tradition. The book attempts to combat collective amnesia by systematically exploring the evaluating anti‐democratic thought since the French Revolution. Using categories first introduced by A. O. Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction, it examines the various arguments under the headings of ‘perversity’, ‘futility’, and ‘jeopardy’. This classification scheme makes it possible to highlight the fatalism and pessimism of anti‐democratic thinkers, their conviction that democratic reform would be either pointless or destructive. They failed to understand the adaptability of democracy, its ability to coexist with traditional and elitist values. Nevertheless, it must be granted that some of their predictions and observations have been confirmed by history.

This book studies war in the thought of one of the 20th-century's most important and original political thinkers, Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt's writing was fundamentally rooted in her understanding of war and its political significance. But this element of her work has surprisingly been neglected in international and political theory. This book assesses the full range of Arendt's historical and conceptual writing on war and introduces to international theory the distinct language she used to talk about war and the political world. It builds on her re-thinking of old concepts such as power, violence, greatness, world, imperialism, evil, hypocrisy, and humanity and introduces some that are new to international thought like plurality, action, agonism, natality, and political immortality. Chapters engage Arendt's writing in dialogue with various schools of political and international theory, including realism, liberalism, constructivism, post-structuralism, post-colonial thought, neoconservatism, and Habermas-inspired critical theory. Re-reading Arendt's writing — forged through firsthand experience of occupation and struggles for liberation, political founding, and resistance in time of war — reveals a more serious engagement with war than her earlier readers have recognised. Arendt's political theory makes more sense when it is understood in the context of her thinking about war and we can think about the history and theory of warfare, and international politics in new ways by thinking with Arendt.

This book is a collection of 11 essays written from a perspective that is at once sympathetic towards, and critical of, liberalism and liberal political philosophy. The essays explore the capacity of liberal thought, and of the moral traditions on which it draws, to accommodate a variety of challenges posed by the changing circumstances of the modern world. Scheffler considers how, in an era of rapid globalization, we can best conceive of the responsibilities of individual agents and the normative significance of people's diverse commitments and allegiances. Some of the essays are primarily concerned with the role of individual desert in liberal theory. Others focus on the nature of people's special responsibilities to their families, communities, and societies, and assess the compatibility of such responsibilities with liberal ideas of justice and equality. Still others deal with the possibility of developing a liberal conception of justice that acknowledges the normative significance of social and global interdependencies, while reaffirming the values of personal life and the continuing importance of ideas of individual responsibility.

This book explores recent work by Western liberal theorists on ethnocultural pluralism, and shows Western liberals that conventional ways of distinguishing between ethnic relations in the East and West do not help in understanding or responding to ethnic conflicts in the post-Communist world. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 presents a paper by Will Kymlicka entitled ‘Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe’. Part 2 features 15 replies and commentaries on this paper, mostly by scholars and writers in Eastern Europe. Part 3 presents a reply by Kymlicka, which examines some of the specific issues raised in the commentaries, and reflects on the exportability of Western political theory to newly-democratizing countries.

The essays in the volume address educational issues that arise when national, sub-national, and supra-national identities compete. These include: how to determine the limits to parental educational rights when liberalism’s concern to protect and promote children’s autonomy conflicts with the desire to maintain communal integrity; whether, given the advances made by the forces of globalization, the liberal–democratic state can morally justify its traditional purpose of forging a cohesive national identity or whether increasing globalization has rendered this educational aim obsolete and morally corrupt; and whether liberal education should instead seek to foster a sense of global citizenship, even if doing so would suppress patriotic identification. In addressing these and many other questions, the volume examines the theoretical and practical issues at stake between nationalists, multiculturalists, and cosmopolitans in the field of education. The 15 essays included (which were originally presented at a symposium on ‘Collective Identities and Cosmopolitan Values: Group Rights and Public Education in Liberal–Democratic Societies’, held in Montreal from June 22 to 25, 2000), and an introductory essay by the editors, provide a genuine, productive dialogue between political and legal philosophers and educational theorists. The essays are arranged in three parts: I: Cosmopolitanism, Liberalism and Common Education (six chapters); II: Liberalism and Traditionalist Education (four chapters); and III: Liberal Constraints on Traditionalist Education (five chapters).