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44The Representation of Hobbesian Sovereignty: Leviathan as MythologyIn S. A. Lloyd (ed.), Hobbes Today, Cambridge University Press. 2013.Readers of Hobbes have often seen his Leviathan as a deeply paradoxical work. On one hand, recognizing that no sovereign could ever wield enough coercive power to maintain social order, the text recommends that the state enhance its power ideologically, by tightly controlling the apparatuses of public discourse and socialization. The state must cultivate an image of itself as a mortal god of nearly unlimited power, to overpower its subjects and instil enough fear to win obedience. On the other h…Read more
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116Does Liberal Democracy Presuppose a Cultural Nation? Four ArgumentsAmerican Political Science Review 96 (3): 495-509. 2002.This paper subjects to critical analysis four common arguments in the sociopolitical theory literature supporting the cultural nationalist thesis that liberal democracy is viable only against the background of a single national public culture: the arguments that (1) social integration in a liberal democracy requires shared norms and beliefs (Schnapper); (2) the levels of trust that democratic politics requires can be attained only among conationals (Miller); (3) democratic deliberation requires …Read more
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99The Radical Hobbes: The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, by Jeffrey R. Collins. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005. 326 pp. $125.00 , $55.00 . Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat, by James Martel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 240 pp. $34.50 (review)Political Theory 37 (5): 706-712. 2009.
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95In defence of the universalization principle in discourse ethicsPhilosophical Forum 36 (2). 2005.
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335Cooperation, pervasive impact, and coercion: On the scope of distributive justicePhilosophy and Public Affairs 35 (4). 2007.Many anticosmopolitan Rawlsians argue that since the primary subject of justice is society's basic structure, and since there is no global basic structure, the scope of justice is domestic. This paper challenges the anticosmopolitan basic structure argument by distinguishing three interpretations of what Rawls meant by the basic structure and its relation to justice, corresponding to the cooperation, pervasive impact, and coercion theories of distributive justice. On the cooperation theory, it i…Read more
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595Publicity, Privacy, and Religious Toleration in Hobbes's LeviathanModern Intellectual History 10 (2): 261-291. 2013.What motivated an absolutist Erastian who rejected religious freedom, defended uniform public worship, and deemed the public expression of disagreement a catalyst for war to endorse a movement known to history as the champion of toleration, no coercion in religion, and separation of church and state? At least three factors motivated Hobbes’s 1651 endorsement of Independency: the Erastianism of Cromwellian Independency, the influence of the politique tradition, and, paradoxically, the contributio…Read more
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266Closed Borders, Human Rights, and Democratic LegitimationIn David Hollenbach (ed.), Driven From Home: Human Rights and the New Realities of Forced Migration, Georgetown University Press. 2010.Critics of state sovereignty have typically challenged the state’s right to close its borders to foreigners by appeal to the liberal egalitarian discourse of human rights. According to the liberty argument, freedom of movement is a basic human right; according to the equality or justice argument, open borders are necessary to reduce global poverty and inequality, both matters of global justice. I argue that human rights considerations do indeed mandate borders considerably more open than is the …Read more
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3Rhetoric, the Passions, and Difference in Discursive DemocracyDissertation, Harvard University. 2001.How can liberal democracies mobilize their citizens and effect their social integration, while accommodating their tremendous heterogeneity and respecting their freedom? Neo-Kantian liberals and cosmopolitans such as Habermas reject appeals to shared ethnicity, culture, or nation, for fear that they effect the suppression of difference; communitarian critics retort that theories like Habermas's are impotent to motivate social integration. My goal is to show that this theoretical impasse is an ar…Read more
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73Hobbes’s agnostic theology before LeviathanCanadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (5): 714-737. 2017.Prior to 1651, Hobbes was agnostic about the existence of God. Hobbes argued that God’s existence could neither be demonstrated nor proved, so that those who reason about God’s existence will systematically vacillate, sometimes thinking God exists, sometimes not, which for Hobbes is to say they will doubt God’s existence. Because this vacillation or doubt is inherent to the subject, reasoners like himself will judge that settling on one belief rather than another is epistemically unjustified. Ho…Read more
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467A Critique of the “Common Ownership of the Earth” ThesisLes ateliers de l'éthique/The Ethics Forum 8 (2): 33-40. 2013.In On Global Justice, Mathias Risse claims that the earth’s original resources are collectively owned by all human beings in common, such that each individual has a moral right to use the original resources necessary for satisfying her basic needs. He also rejects the rival views that original resources are by nature owned by no one, owned by each human in equal shares, or owned and co-managed jointly by all humans. I argue that Risse’s arguments fail to establish a form of ownership at all and,…Read more
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235Hobbes on the Causes of War: A Disagreement TheoryAmerican Political Science Review 105 (02): 298-315. 2011.Hobbesian war primarily arises not because material resources are scarce; or because humans ruthlessly seek survival before all else; or because we are naturally selfish, competitive, or aggressive brutes. Rather, it arises because we are fragile, fearful, impressionable, and psychologically prickly creatures susceptible to ideological manipulation, whose anger can become irrationally inflamed by even trivial slights to our glory. The primary source of war, according to Hobbes, is disagreement, …Read more
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117The Special-Obligations Challenge to More Open BordersIn Sarah Fine & Lea Ypi (eds.), Migration in Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and Membership, Oxford University Press. 2016.According to the special-obligations challenge to the justice argument for more open borders, immigration restrictions to wealthier polities are justified because of special obligations owed to disadvantaged compatriots. I interrogate this challenge by considering three types of ground for special obligations amongst compatriots. First, the social relations that come with shared residence, such as participation in a territorially bounded, mutually beneficial scheme of cooperation; having fundame…Read more
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230Liberal Egalitarian Arguments for Closed Borders: Some Preliminary Critical ReflectionsCentre de Recherche En Éthique de l'UdeM (Créum). 2006.There are at least five important arguments for why liberal egalitarianism permits states, under today's circumstances, to close their borders to foreigners: the public order, domestic economy, social integration, political threat, and domestic welfare arguments. Critical examination of these arguments suggests that liberal egalitarianism, rather than supporting a right to close one's borders to foreigners, mandates borders considerably more open than is the practice of today's self-styled libe…Read more
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324Democratic Legitimacy and State Coercion: A Reply to David MillerPolitical Theory 38 (1): 121-130. 2010.
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74Hobbes’s Conventionalist Theology, the Trinity, and God as an Artificial Person by FictionHistorical Journal 60 (4): 915-941. 2018.By the time Hobbes wrote Leviathan, he was a theist, but not in the sense presumed by either side of the present-day debate concerning the sincerity of his professed theism. On the one hand, Hobbes’s expressed theology was neither merely deistic, nor confined to natural theology: the Hobbesian God is not merely a first mover, but a person who counsels, commands, and threatens. On the other hand, the Hobbesian God’s existence depends on being constructed artificially by human convention. The Hobb…Read more
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88Does Collective Identity Presuppose an Other: On the Alleged Incoherence of Global SolidarityAmerican Political Science Review 99 (1): 45-60. 2005.Two arguments apparently support the thesis that collective identity presupposes an Other: the recognition argument, according to which seeing myself as a self requires recognition by an other whom I also recognize as a self (Hegel); and the dialogic argument, according to which my sense of self can only develop dialogically (Taylor). But applying these arguments to collective identity involves a compositional fallacy. Two modern ideologies mask the particularist thesis’s falsehood. The ideology…Read more
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104The Absence of Reference in Hobbes’ Philosophy of LanguagePhilosophers' Imprint 15. 2015.Against the dominant view in contemporary Hobbes scholarship, I argue that Hobbes’ philosophy of language implicitly denies that linguistic expressions refer to anything. I defend this thesis both textually, in light of what Hobbes actually said, and contextually, in light of Hobbes’ desertion of the vocabulary of suppositio, which was prevalent in semantics leading up to Hobbes. Hobbes explained away the apparent fact of linguistic reference via a reductive analysis: the relation between words …Read more
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64Hobbes on Mind: Practical Deliberation, Reasoning, and LanguageJournal of the History of Philosophy 55 (1): 1-34. 2017.Readers of Hobbes usually take his account of practical deliberation to be a passive process that does not respond to agents’ judgements about what normative reasons they have. This is ostensibly because deliberation is purely conative and/or excludes reasoning, or because Hobbesian reasoning is itself a process in which reasoners merely experience a succession of mental states (e.g. according to purely associative mental structures). I argue to the contrary that for Hobbes deliberation (and hen…Read more
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56Liberal Nationalist versus Postnational Social Integration: On the Nation's Ethno-Cultural Particularity and ‘Concreteness’Nations and Nationalism 10 (3): 231-250. 2004.Liberal nationalists advance two claims: (1) an empirical claim that nationalism is functionally indispensable to the viability of liberal democracy (because it is necessary to social integration) and (2) a normative claim that some forms of nationalism are compatible with liberal democratic norms. The empirical claim is often supported, against postnationalists’ view that social integration can bypass ethnicity and nationality, by pointing to the inevitable ethnic and cultural particularities o…Read more
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111Wage competition and the special-obligations challenge to more open bordersPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 14 (3): 255-269. 2015.According to the special-obligations challenge to the justice argument for more open borders, immigration restrictions to wealthier polities are justified because of special obligations owed to disadvantaged compatriots negatively impacted by the immigration of low-skilled foreign workers. We refute the special-obligations challenge by refuting its empirical premise and draw out the normative implications of the empirical evidence for border policies. We show that immigration to wealthier politi…Read more
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McGill UniversityRegular Faculty
Montreal, Canada
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |