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57Introduction to Hobbes and the Two Faces of EthicsOnline Colloquium of the European Hobbes Society. 2018.Overview of "Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics" to kick off online colloquium on book, with responses by Sandra Field, Michael LeBuffe, and Daniel Eggers, ending with reply from Arash Abizadeh.
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55Liberal 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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47The scope of the All-Subjected Principle: On the logical structure of coercive lawsAnalysis 81 (4): 603-610. 2022.According to the democratic borders argument, the democratic legitimacy of a state's regime of border control requires granting foreigners a right to participate in the procedures determining it. This argument appeals to the All-Subjected Principle, which implies that democratic legitimacy requires that all those subject to political power have a right to participate in determining the laws governing its exercise. The scope objection claims that this argument presupposes an implausible account o…Read more
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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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41Democratic Elections without Campaigns? Normative Foundations of National Baha'i Elections.World Order 37 (1): 7-49. 2005.National Baha’i elections, conducted world-wide without nominations, competitive campaigns, or parties, challenge the emerging consensus that the only truly democratic elections are multiparty elections in which each party’s candidates compete freely for votes. National Baha’i electoral institutions are based on three core values: respect for the inherent dignity of each person, the unity and solidarity of persons collectively, and the justice and fairness of institutions. While liberal politica…Read more
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38Glory and the Evolution of Hobbes’s Disagreement Theory of War: From Elements to LeviathanHistory of Political Thought 41 (2): 265-298. 2020.The centrality of glory, contempt, and revengefulness to Leviathan’s account of war is highlighted by three contextual features: Hobbes’s displacement of the traditional conception of glory as intrinsically intersubjective and comparative; his incorporation of the Aristotelian view that revengefulness is provoked by expressions of mere contempt; and the evolution of his account between 1640 and 1651. An archeology of Leviathan’s famous chapter thirteen confirms that Hobbes’s thesis throughout hi…Read more
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36The Grammar of Social Power: Power-to, Power-with, Power-despite and Power-overPolitical Studies 71 (1): 3-19. 2023.There are two rival conceptions of power in modern sociopolitical thought. According to one, all social power reduces to power-over-others. According to another, the core notion is power-to-effect-outcomes, to which even power-over reduces. This article defends seven theses. First, agential social power consists in a relation between agent and outcomes (power-to). Second, not all social power reduces to power-over and, third, the contrary view stems from conflating power-over with a distinct not…Read more
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30Reply to Critics of Hobbes and the Two Faces of EthicsOnline Colloquium of the European Hobbes Society. 2019.Author's reply to reviews of "Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics" Sandra Field, Michael LeBuffe, and Daniel Eggers, in online colloquium on book.
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27Consequences, Conscience, and Fallibility: Early Modern Roots of TolerationCritical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 34 (1): 16-27. 2022.The transition away from the highly intolerant and persecutory regimes of late-medieval and early-modern Europe was facilitated by four important developments. First, Europeans learned that social order and cohesion are threatened less by diversity than by intolerance of it. Second, the traditionally paternalist vision of the state’s role was called into question by a new valuation of the individual conscience and consequently of individual liberties. Third, the assumption that the meaning of sy…Read more
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26Which Procedure for Deciding Election Procedures?In Andrew Potter, Daniel Marc Weinstock & Peter Loewen (eds.), Should We Change How We Vote? Evaluating Canada's Electoral System, Montreal: Mcgill-queen's University Press, 2017.. pp. 188-196. 2017.One way to evaluate electoral rules is instrumental: we ask what effects they tend to produce. A second way is constitutive: we ask what kinds of values they embody, or whether the procedures they effect respect people's rights or moral status. A third way is genetic: we ask by what procedure the electoral rules were adopted. I shall argue that in judging the value or the legitimacy of electoral rules, we must consider not only (1) the values they serve instrumentally and (2) the values, rights,…Read more
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24A Recursive Measure of Voting Power with Partial Decisiveness or EfficacyJournal of Politics 84 (3): 1652-1666. 2022.The current literature standardly conceives of voting power in terms of decisiveness: the ability to change the voting outcome by unilaterally changing one’s vote. I argue that this classic conception of voting power, which fails to account for partial decisiveness or efficacy, produces erroneous results because it saddles the concept of voting power with implausible microfoundations. This failure in the measure of voting power in turn reflects a philosophical mistake about the concept of social…Read more
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17Hobbes and the Two Faces of EthicsCambridge University Press. 2018.Reading Hobbes in light of both the history of ethics and the conceptual apparatus developed in recent work on normativity, this book challenges received interpretations of Hobbes and his historical significance. Arash Abizadeh uncovers the fundamental distinction underwriting Hobbes's ethics: between prudential reasons of the good, articulated via natural laws prescribing the means of self-preservation, and reasons of the right or justice, comprising contractual obligations for which we are acc…Read more
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15Les signes religieux, la laïcité et la mentalité médiévale : du débat public sur la Charte des valeursIn Alain-G. Gagnon & Jean-Charles St-Louis (eds.), Les Conditions du dialogue au Québec : Laïcité, réciprocité, pluralisme, Québec Amérique. pp. 29-41. 2016.Our public debate over secularism has suffered from a kind of amnesia about the historical genesis of the modern, secular, and tolerant state. The transition away from the highly intolerant and persecutory regimes of late-medieval and early-modern Europe was greatly facilitated by four important developments. First, Europeans learned that social order and cohesion are threatened less by diversity than by intolerance of diversity. Second, the traditionally paternalist vision of the state’s role w…Read more
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10What toleration is notCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. forthcoming.Following Andrew Jason Cohen, Lucia Rafanelli construes toleration to consist in not merely limiting one’s interference with others’ behaviour, but doing so because of a principled commitment to respecting others’ independent choices. I argue that this conflates toleration with distinctly liberal ideals such as freedom of conscience or autonomy. This conflation not only impoverishes our conceptual vocabulary by using ‘toleration’ to label concepts or phenomena for which there are already perfect…Read more
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8Hobbes's Theory of the GoodIn Marcus P. Adams (ed.), A Companion to Hobbes, Wiley-blackwell. 2021.One of the central assumptions of ancient Greek ethics is that human beings have a single supreme and ultimate good – eudaimonia or “well‐being” – which includes and integrates all other final goods into an account of the good life. Thomas Hobbes was a eudaimonist who held that felicity is an overarching good giving coherence to a valuable life; he therefore agreed with the Epicureans that it is good to forgo lesser pleasures for greater future ones. Hobbes held that felicity consists primarily …Read more
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6The Blocker Postulates for Measures of Voting PowerSocial Choice and Welfare 60 (4): 595-623. 2022.A proposed measure of voting power should satisfy two conditions to be plausible: first, it must be conceptually justified, capturing the intuitive meaning of what voting power is; second, it must satisfy reasonable postulates. This paper studies a set of postulates, appropriate for a priori voting power, concerning blockers (or vetoers) in a binary voting game. We specify and motivate five such postulates, namely, two subadditivity blocker postulates, two minimum-power blocker postulates, each …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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2In Defence of Imperfection: An Election-Sortition CompromiseIn John Gastil & Erik Olin Wright (eds.), Legislature by Lot. pp. 249-255. 2019.
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1Démocratie, nation et ethnie : le problème des frontièresRaison Publique. 2013.Democratic theory claims that the exercise of political power is legitimate only to the extent that it conforms to the will of the people; cultural nationalism claims that it is legitimate only to the extent that it conforms to the pre-political culture of the nation. But democracy and cultural nationalism both face a parallel problem: How to determine the boundaries of the collectivity that is supposed to legitimize political power? This problem explains why democracy is disposed to collapse in…Read more
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McGill UniversityRegular Faculty
Montreal, Canada
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |