Duncan Ivison

This article examines the concept of historical injustice in the context of contemporary political theory. It examines the moral consequences of historical injustice for the descendants of both the perpetrators and the victims and outlines the six questions that any plausible defence of the idea of making reparations for past injustices must deal with. It suggests that taking historical injustice seriously is compatible with moral cosmopolitanism and it also helps with the understanding the nature of various kinds of inequalities that persist today.

In Foundations of Modern International Thought, David Armitage provides a genealogy of the multiple foundations of international political thought. But he also enables political theorists to reflect on the nature of the pluralisation of our concepts: that is, the way various components come together in particular circumstances to form a concept that either becomes dominant or is rendered to the margins. Armitage claims that concepts can ‘never entirely escape their origins’. In this paper I explore this claim from the perspective of contemporary debates about the nature of cosmopolitan political thought.

According to an essentially Hobbesian account of political order, the claims of cultural and national minorities within a state to some form of constitutional or institutional recognition are morally suspect and politically undesirable. Underlying this Hobbesian logic is a particular understanding of the relation between law and politics. `Negative constitutionalism' is focused primarily on limiting the damage government can do. However the pursuit of constitutional minimalism runs up against the challenges presented by deeply diverse political communities. By investigating the manner in which Hobbes has been invoked in arguments concerning the relation between the rule of law and the `politics of recognition', I argue (i) that the distinction between the rule of law and politics is fundamentally unstable, and (ii) that in invoking Hobbes, modern theorists have missed an important element of Hobbes's own argument ± namely, his appreciation of this instability. As an example, I examine the way Hobbes is used in some of John Gray's recent writings on pluralism and liberalism.

Aboriginal claims for self-government in the Americas and Australasia are distinctive for being less about secession—at least so far—than about demanding an innovative rethinking of the regulative norms and institutions within and between already established nation-states. Recent cases in Australia (and Canada) provide an opportunity to consider the nature of such claims, and some of the theoretical implications for regulative conceptions of sovereignty and the rule of law. A general question informing the entire discussion here is: how do particular conceptions of the rule of law affect Aboriginal claims? Can a distinctive body of Aboriginal law survive in a liberal constitutional state already constituted in part by regulative ideals of the rule of law?

That consent could wholly explain – either descriptively or normatively – the legitimacy of the structure of political community and it’s most important and influential institutions and practices is deeply implausible. There are two general sorts of considerations adduced against such a proposition. First, history simply refutes it: force is an essential feature of the founding of any political society, and arguably, for its continued existence, and power relations, in all their complexity, are imperfectly tracked by consent. Moreover, there are deep questions about what people are actually consenting to, given the plurality and changing nature of political collectivities over time. Second, in modern societies (perhaps in just any complex human society) our conduct is shaped and governed in so many ways so as to influence not only the options we have, but also the interests, desires and capabilities constitutive of our ability to act in relation to them in the first place. This undermines any easy connection between the presence of consent and my being free. A familiar conundrum for consent as a standard of legitimacy is that if it means literally that individual consent is required for non-arbitrariness in public decision-making, then public decision-making – indeed almost any form of collective action –becomes almost impossible. If only tacit or implicit consent is required, then we can find it everywhere, and thus nowhere, and the standard is empty.

The problem of historical injustice presents a deep challenge to the aspirations of deliberative democrats, especially to those “deliberative activists” who seek to advance deliberation in deeply unjust circumstances (Fung 2005, 399). But the debate over historical injustice can itself benefi t from taking a “democratic turn.” Much of the literature is dominated by arguments over historical entitlement theories of justice or by a legalistic focus on the possibilities for compensation and reparation.1 That much of it is deeply skeptical as well is no surprise given that focus. But what is striking about actual debates over historical injustice in the world today is their intensely political character, and this character needs to be theorized much more explicitly when thinking about the nature and consequences of historical injustice. One crucial aspect of political disagreement, as opposed to moral disagreement, is that it is not just the force of good reasons that is at issue but also the application of force itself, especially by the state. The conclusion of a political deliberation does not necessarily indicate that the other side is..

There have been two distinctive aspects to James Tully’s approach to the study of imperialism over the years, and both are put to work in these remarkable volumes. The first is his belief in two seemingly contradictory claims: (i) that imperialism is much more pervasive than usually thought (conceptually, historically and practically); and yet (ii) that there are many more forms of resistance to it than usually appreciated. (Part of a symposium in Political Theory on James Tully's 'Public Philosophy in a New Key')

Are there any Aboriginal rights? If there are, then what kind of rights are they? Are they human rights adapted and shaped to the circumstances of indigenous peoples? Or are they specific cultural rights, exclusive to members of Aboriginal societies? In recent liberal political theory, aboriginal rights are often conceived of as cultural rights and thus as group rights. As a result, they are vulnerable to at least three kinds of objections: i) that culture is not a primary good relevant to the currency of egalitarian justice; ii) that group rights are inimical to the moral individualism of liberal democratic societies; and iii) that pandering to group interests provides incentives for abuse and undermines the conditions required for promoting liberal egalitarian outcomes. My argument is that a successful defense of aboriginal rights will tie them to the promotion of the equal freedom of Aboriginal people, both in the formal and substantive senses, and thus to improvements in their actual wellbeing, both as ‘peoples’ and individuals. But rights and norms interact in complex ways, and the translation of particular individual and social goods into the language of rights is always fraught with difficulty.