James Bohman

(1954 - 2021)

Democracy and human rights have long been strongly connected in international covenants. In documents such as 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, democracy is justified both intrinsically in terms of popular sovereignty and instrumentally as the best way to “foster the full realization of all human rights.” Yet, even though they are human and thus universal rights, political rights are often surprisingly specific. In the Covenant, for example, “the right to take part in the conduct of public affairs” is equated with “the right to vote and to be elected.” More often then not, their realization is left to states and their constitutions, as for example in the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights. Political rights have a “peculiar” status among enumerated human rights, and this difficulty has to do with deep assumptions about the nature and scope of democracy and political community that remain unexamined by the drafters of these important declarations.

Political liberals now defend what Rawls calls the "inclusive view" of public reason with the appropriate ideal of reasonable pluralism. Against the application of such a liberal conception of toleration to deliberative democracy "the open view of toleration is with no constraints" is the only regime of toleration that can be democratically justified. Recent debates about the public or nonpublic character of religious reasons provide a good test case and show why liberal deliberative theories are intolerant and fail to live up to democratic obligations to provide justifications to all members of the deliberative community. In a deliberative democracy, accommodations to religious minorities must be based on transformations in the current reflective equilibrium among the norms that make up the complex democratic ideal. This is not merely a conceptual enterprise of commensuration, since the need for any such transformation in standards of justification is due to changes in the nature of the polity itself, changes that in turn modify its regime of toleration

Error and Inference discusses Deborah Mayo’s theory that connects the reliability of science to scientific evidence. She sees it as an essential supplement to the negative principles of critical rationalism. She and Aris Spanos, her co-editor, declare that the discussions in the book amount to tremendous progress. Yet most contributors to the book misconstrue the Socratic character of critical rationalism because they ignore a principal tenet: criticism in and of itself comprises progress, and empirical refutation comprises learning from experience. Critical rationalism should be recommended in the critical spirit, not as dogma.

My goal here is to come to terms with the Enlightenment as the horizon of critical social science. First, I consider in more detail the understanding of the Enlightenment in Critical Theory, particularly in its conception of the sociality of reason. Second, I develop an account of freedom in terms of human powers, along the lines of recent capability conceptions that link freedom to the development of human powers, including the power to interpret and create norms. Finally, I show the ways in which the social sciences can be moral sciences in the Enlightenment sense. This account provides us with a coherent Enlightenment standard by which to judge institutions as promoting development, understood in terms of the capabilities necessary for freedom. The relevant social science in this area might include the robust generalization that there has never been a famine in a democratic society.

In this paper, I consider the recent resurgence of “evolutionary economics”—the idea that evolutionary theory can be very useful to push forward key debates in economics—and assess the extent to which it rests on a plausible foundation. To do this, I first distinguish two ways in which evolutionary theory can, in principle, be brought to bear on an economic problem—namely, evidentially and heuristically—and then apply this distinction to the three major hypotheses that evolutionary economists have come to defend: the implausibility of rational choice theory as an account of economic rationality, the idea that firms are autonomous economic agents, and the need for a more dynamic, less equilibrium-focused economic methodology. In each of these cases, I conclude negatively: the relevant evolutionary considerations neither suggest interesting and novel hypotheses to investigate further (the hallmark of heuristic devices) nor are backed up by the needed data to constitute genuine evidence. I end by distinguishing this criticism of evolutionary economics from others that have been put forward in the literature: in particular, I make clear that, unlike those of other critics, the arguments of this paper are based on epistemic—not structural—considerations and therefore leave more room for a plausible form of evolutionary economics to come about in the future.

It is a distinctive feature of the global political order that democracy is no longer confined to nation-states, characterized by extensive and overlapping constituencies. It is important to think of the significance of these developments for individuals’ self-determination, which may be undermined in different ways. Here it is argued that democracy must serve to delegate power to complex units of decision making which favour self-determination. Contestability is part of this form of self-determination, allowing forms of politics to emerge based on the democratic rights and powers of self-determining, non-dominated citizens

As developed by Sabel, Dorf and Cohen, and John Dewey before them, democratic experimentalism is based on the premise that current democratic practices are no longer able to deal with central and pressing social and political problems. Beginning with the criticism of democracy as command and control, Dorf and Sabel show how current democratic practices are part of the problem rather than the solution. Even as democratic experimentalists have successfully explored democracy beyond the state in the European Union, I argue that they have not fully transnationalized democracy or fully appreciated “the new circumstances of politics.” With the emergence of pervasive forms of interdependence, Rousseau’s conception of democracy as self legislation is no longer adequate, despite its cogent normative assumptions. Instead, the new transnational circumstances of justice suggest a stronger conception of democracy as self determination. In order to minimize domination and maximize self determination, cross-cutting constituencies must achieve a shared democratic minimum, through which democracy may once again become a means to justice.

This article defends methodological and theoretical pluralism in the social sciences. While pluralistic, such a philosophy of social science is both pragmatic and normative. Only by facing the problems of such pluralism, including how to resolve the potential conflicts between various methods and theories, is it possible to discover appropriate criteria of adequacy for social scientific explanations and interpretations. So conceived, the social sciences do not give us fixed and universal features of the social world, but rather contribute to the task of improving upon our practical knowledge of on-going social life. After arguing for such a thorough-going pluralism based on the indeterminacy of social action, I defend it from the post-modern and hermeneutic objections by suggesting the possibility of an epistemology of interpretive social science as a form of practical knowledge

Although eighteenth-century Federalists, including James Madison, have been associated with the very contemporary idea of a transnational political order, the argument that the modern state with its centralised authority and supreme power poses a threat to liberty was already a subject of discussions during the period. The American Constitution was intended to establish a new political order, rather than a loose federation or an enlarged state. The Framers were not alone in their preoccupation with a transnational order; the German philosopher Immanuel Kant struggled with the same issues of liberty and security in his political essays. This chapter examines how Madison and Kant grapppled with the problem of transnational order in the context of democracy and republicanism. It looks at the issues addressed by Kant and Madison that are closely related to those discussed today, including diversity, popular sovereignty and political violence. The chapter suggests that Kant and Madison, along with many other republicans of the time, explored the idea of government without resorting to the models of small-scale, ancient republics.

The debate about Habermas' use of the system and lifeworld distinction has not focused on the explanation of social pathologies that he offers, but rather only on conceptual problems with the theories that he uses. Twill argue that the explanation offered by his thesis that "systems colonize the lifeworld" fits the main criterion for adequacy for macro-micro explanation: because it establishes macro-micro linkage, it is at least potentially complete. Such an analysis fits the empirical approach to traditional debates between collectivists and individualists among macrosociologists. I shall apply this approach here in three steps. First, I shall use the controversy about functionalist explanation in the social sciences to develop the criterion of completeness for macrosociological explanations (1). Second, I shall generalize the conditions of adequacy for functionalist explanations to macrosociology as a whole and show that Habermas'explanation of the colonization of the lifeworld is at least potentially complete, as an explanation sketch that lacks empirical detail (2). Third, I shall show that this approach also requires that Habermas modify his overly Weberian claims about the effects of bureaucracy, since his stronger notion of reification is based on the incompletness in his explanation of this aspect of the micromacrolinkage (3). Moreover; a more complete account has clearer practical consequences for agency in the form of collective action.