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92Sovereign Jurisdiction, Territorial Rights, and Membership in HobbesIn A. Martinich & Kinch Hoekstra (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, Oxford University Press. 2016.Although sovereign jurisdictional authority is not itself a kind of property right for Hobbes, it is the object of the sovereign’s (not the state’s) proprietary rights. Jurisdictional authority for Hobbes is foundationally over persons rather than territory, so that the sovereign’s territorial jurisdiction is parasitic on jurisdiction over persons. Territory nevertheless plays a significant role in determining subjects’ political obligations because the sovereign’s ability to protect subjects is…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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115The Passions of the Wise: Phronêsis, Rhetoric, and Aristotle’s Passionate Practical DeliberationReview of Metaphysics 56 (2). 2002.According to Aristotle, character (êthos) and emotion (pathos) are constitutive features of the process of phronetic practical deliberation: in order to render a determinate action-specific judgement, practical reasoning cannot be simply reduced to logical demonstration (apodeixis). This can be seen by uncovering an important structural parallel between the virtue of phronêsis and the art of rhetoric. This structural parallel helps to show how Aristotle's account of practical reason and delibera…Read more
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163Historical truth, national myths and liberal democracy: On the coherence of liberal nationalismJournal of Political Philosophy 12 (3). 2004.The claim that liberal democratic normative commitments are compatible with nationalism is challenged by the widely acknowledged fact that national identities invariably depend on historical myths: the nationalist defence of such publicly shared myths is in tension with liberal democratic theory’s commitment to norms of publicity, public justification, and freedom of expression. Recent liberal nationalist efforts to meet this challenge by justifying national myths on liberal democratic grounds f…Read more
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305Banishing the particular: Rousseau on rhetoric, patrie, and the passionsPolitical Theory 29 (4): 556-582. 2001.Rousseau initially attempts to secure freedom by grounding political rule in persuasion, rather than coercion. When the spectre of rhetoric undermines this strategy, he is led to ground the volonté générale in the silent and introspective disclosure of the solitary citizen’s inner conscience, which through a sentimentalist transformation of Descartes’s category of bon sens, is recast as an eminently public sentiment. But when rhetorical eloquence turns out to be indispensable to politics, Rousse…Read more
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222On the Demos and its Kin: Nationalism, Democracy, and the Boundary ProblemAmerican Political Science Review 106 (4): 867-882. 2012.Cultural-nationalist and democratic theory both seek to legitimize political power via collective self-rule: their principle of legitimacy refers right back to the very persons over whom political power is exercised. But such self-referential theories are incapable of jointly solving the distinct problems of legitimacy and boundaries, which they necessarily combine, once it is assumed that the self-ruling collectivity must be a pre-political, in-principle bounded, ground of legitimacy. Cultural …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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120Does 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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101The 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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99In defence of the universalization principle in discourse ethicsPhilosophical Forum 36 (2). 2005.
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337Cooperation, 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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608Publicity, 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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77Hobbes’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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478A 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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236Hobbes 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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234Liberal 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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334Democratic Legitimacy and State Coercion: A Reply to David MillerPolitical Theory 38 (1): 121-130. 2010.
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76Hobbes’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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McGill UniversityRegular Faculty
Montreal, Canada
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |