Lea Ypi

Matteo Bonotti’s book on Partisanship and Public Reason in Diverse Societies is grounded on a theory of partisanship that sees the demands of public reason as internal to the very definition of a party. Bonotti suggests that partisanship is not only compatible with but essential to the stability and legitimacy of a well-ordered liberal society. My paper aims to raise some questions internal to the liberal account of partisanship so as to probe the methodological foundations and plausibility of the liberal framework taken as a whole. My argument is that the assumption of a sufficiently just liberal society on which the book grounds its defence of partisanship makes us ill-equipped to face some of the most critical challenges that liberal societies face in the world that we live.

Reflection on the historical injustice suffered by many formerly colonized groups has left us with a peculiar account of their claims to material objects. One important upshot of that account, relevant to present day justice, is that many people seem to think that members of indigenous groups have special claims to the use of particular external objects by virtue of their attachment to them. In the first part of this paper I argue against that attachment-based claim. In the second part I suggest that, to provide a normatively defensible account of why sometimes agents who are attached to certain external objects might also have special claims over them, the most important consideration is whether the agents making such claims suffer from structural injustice in the present. In the third part I try to explain why structural injustice matters, in what way attachment-based claims relate to it and when they count.

This article contributes to studies in democratic theory and civic engagement by critically reflecting on the role of contemporary art for the transformation of the public sphere. It begins with a short assessment of the role of art during the Enlightenment, when the communicative function and the public role of art were most clearly articulated. It refers in particular to the analogies between aesthetic and political judgement in order to understand the emancipatory role of artistic production within a philosophical project centred on reason’s capacity to liberate itself from the dogmatism of authority and from the errors of superstition, both elements considered crucial to the development of a functioning public sphere. The article then discusses the historical transformation of art following a number of philosophical and sociological critiques to a similar project of the Enlightenment and assesses the attempt of historical avant-gardes to appropriate this critique yet maintain art’s emancipatory function in society. Having examined some problems raised by these attempts, the article turns to the analogies with contemporary artistic production. It examines the role of contemporary visual art in the public sphere and shows how the anti-rationalist theories articulated to reflect on contemporary works of art, and the works themselves, both fail to develop art’s emancipatory role in society. Without rethinking artistic experience in a way that places emphasis on reason’s capacity for critical and constructive self-understanding and without reconsidering art theory in a way that brings back the emphasis on the emancipatory role of rational communication, contemporary art, far from contributing to the revitalization of the public sphere, will contribute to its decline

The quote that inspires a part of my title will be familiar to most readers. In the concluding paragraphs of the Preface to his Philosophy of Right, Hegel examines the role of philosophy in prescribing principles on how the world ought to be. ‘When philosophy paints its grey in grey’, Hegel writes, citing a part of Goethe’s Faust,'A shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only when the shadows of night are gathering.'

This article explores the tensions between cosmopolitanism and sovereignty as a means to conceptualize the ethics of European foreign policy. It starts by discussing the claim that, in order for the EU to play a meaningful role as an international actor, a definition of the common ethical values orienting its political conduct is required. The question of a European federation of states and its ethical conceptualization emerges clearly in some of the philosophical writings of the 17th and 18th centuries. I seek to provide an outline of the main arguments presented by authors such as Saint Pierre, Rousseau and Kant regarding the implications of the emerging difference between cosmopolitanism and the law of nations in the ethics of international relations. The article focuses on the normative significance of the concept of sovereignty as it emerges in modern political philosophy and highlights its tensions with the ideas of moral and political cosmopolitanism. This exploration serves a double function: theoretical and practical. From the theoretical perspective it leads to a better understanding of the tensions involved in conceptualizing a common ethical orientation for the states of Europe. From the practical standpoint it sheds light on some persistent difficulties the European Union faces in trying to move beyond an intergovernmental political arrangement in the field of foreign policy

This article explores the justification of states' territorial rights. It starts by introducing three questions that all current theories of territorial rights attempt to answer: how to justify the right to settle, the right to exclude, and the right to settle and exclude with reference to a particular territory. It proposes a ‘permissive’ theory of territorial rights, arguing that the citizens of each state are entitled to the particular territory they collectively occupy, if and only if they are also politically committed to the establishment of a global political authority realizing just reciprocal relations. The article is developed by introducing some key features of the permissive theory and by explaining how such an account addresses the questions of settlement, exclusion and particularity in ways that significantly improve on existing rival accounts (most prominently: acquisition theories, legitimacy-based theories and nationalist theories)

For a century at least, parties have been central to the study of politics. Yet their typical conceptual reduction to a network of power-seeking elites has left many to wonder why parties were ever thought crucial to democracy. This book seeks to retrieve a richer conception of partisanship, drawing on modern political thought and extending it in the light of contemporary democratic theory and practice. Looking beyond the party as organization, the book develops an original account of what it is to be a partisan. It examines the ideas, orientations, obligations, and practices constitutive of partisanship properly understood, and how these intersect with the core features of democratic life. Such an account serves to underline in distinctive fashion why democracy needs its partisans, and puts in relief some of the key trends of contemporary politics.

Libertarians often invoke the principle of self-ownership to discredit distributive interventions authorized by the more-than-minimal state. But if one takes a democratic approach to the justification of ownership claims, including claims of ownership over oneself, the validity of the self-ownership principle is theoretically inseparable from the normative justification of the state. Since the idea of the state is essential to the very assertion (not just the positive enforcement) of the principle of self-ownership, invoking the principle to discredit a distribution of ownership authorized by the state commits libertarians also to weakening that principle's validity. Put differently, appealing to the self-ownership principle to circumscribe the state's power to distribute property is problematic when the state is necessary to assert the validity of that principle. This is because anytime the self-ownership principle is used to undermine a state-based distribution of property it is also implicitly eroding the ground for asserting its own validity.1

This article analyses the teleological argument justifying historical progress in Kant's Guarantee of Perpetual Peace. It starts by examining the controversies produced by Kant's claim that the teleology of nature supports the idea of a providential development of humanity towards moral progress and the possibility of achieving a cosmopolitan political constitution. It further illustrates how Kant's teleological argument in Perpetual Peace needs to be assessed with reference to two systematically relevant issues: first, the problem of coordination linked to the necessity of realizing the ‘highest good’ as a historical end of practical reason, and secondly the problem of continuity posed by the temporal limitation of all individual efforts to cultivate moral dispositions. To illustrate the implications of both issues for the teleological argument in Perpetual Peace, the article draws attention to some important developments in Kant's analysis of teleology following the Critique of Judgment