Kaveh Pourvand

This paper argues that the notion of interstitial transformation, whereby new social practices emerge within the gaps of existing orders and gain prominence, is crucial for understanding social change in a complex world. Our work builds on the contributions of two distinct scholarly groups who have explored social complexity. The first are emancipatory radicals who look to bottom-up interstitial change to achieve radical social change. The second is classical or “Open Society” liberals who wish to leverage interstitial complexity within civil society and the economy against a stable background of liberal rules. This paper brings these distinct literatures into conversation with one another, aiming to reconcile their insights and identify weaknesses in their approaches. We argue that both groups overestimate the feasibility of instrumentalising interstitial complexity for their goals. Using a stylised model of interstitial social struggle, we explore the social dynamics occurring in a world populated by both emancipatory radicals and Open Society liberals. We posit an emergent strategic struggle between emancipatory radicals who use prefigurative strategies to affect the fundamental transformation of the liberal legal order and the Open Society governors who resist them. We stress that the overall result of this struggle will likely exceed the intentions of both parties. Our model should provide valuable insights for socialists, anarchists, radicals, and liberals concerned with social transformation and the robustness of the liberal Open Society.

A perennial question of political thought is how to stabilize a just regime in the face of disagreement. The importance of this question has been heightened with the Weberian state that monopolizes the power of coercion and anchors society under a single governance structure. This political form has given us both liberal democracy and totalitarianism. The stakes could not be higher in ensuring stability without dismantling pluralism. This paper provides a novel solution to the stability problem by focusing on dynamic stability reached through polycentric democracy. Plural and overlapping centers of governance characterize such democracy. This renders a polycentric system more resilient to changing views than a monocentric one and superior on political risk-management grounds by diffusing decision-making risks. A polycentric system also fosters antifragility in society by avoiding seeking a single and fixed point equilibrium, thereby eluding the pitfalls currently afflicting liberal democracy.

Joseph Raz’s service conception of authority holds that citizens are obligated to obey the state if doing so enables them to better comply with reason than they would by acting independently. This article highlights a difficulty facing Raz’s theory and other accounts of legitimacy that include a service component. Citizens’ self-governing ability to determine for themselves how to comply with reason is endogenous to state authority. The more citizens defer their decision-making to the state, the less competent they may be at making decisions themselves. This means the state could meet the requirements of a service theory via a self-fulfilling dynamic, whereby citizens need state authority to best comply with reason only because that very authority has undermined or inhibited their capacity to do so by themselves. I highlight the problem and suggest that service theories adopt a “diachronic” mode of evaluation in response.

This paper develops an interpretation of political realism centred on strategic rationality. It contends that political agents have instrumental reason to anticipate how their rivals will respond to their decisions. A strategic focus has various payoffs for realists. First, strategic rationality is superior to the Hobbesian desire for peace, which is the instrumental norm already prevalent among realists. Second, strategic rationality reveals how a realist theory can be centrally concerned with feasibility while remaining distinct from non-ideal theory. Third, strategic dynamics lay the basis for a distinctively realist account of moral progress.

Many political philosophers assume the state can coherently reform a society's legal system to realize just, society-wide distributive outcomes. Gerald Gaus invoked social complexity to highlight the limitations of this ambition. Complexity theory holds that interdependent social interaction in large-scale societies leads to unpredictable outcomes. For Gaus, complexity constrains what the state can accomplish. The state does not know how to reform the legal system to achieve ambitious distributive goals. However, Gaus did not model the state itself as a complex system. This is the contribution of this paper. I argue that the state is not a unitary agent that comprehensively oversees the legal system. Rather, the state is a network of interaction between myriad political agents and the legal system is an emergent outcome of this interaction—the result of human action but not an overall design.

It is widely accepted among political philosophers that distributive justice should be promoted by the state. This essay challenges this presumption by making two key claims. First, the state is not the only possible mechanism for attaining distributive justice. We could rely alternatively on the voluntary efforts and interactions of individuals and associations in civil society. The question of what mechanism we should rely on is a comparative and empirical one. What matters is which mechanism better promotes distributive justice. We cannot settle the question a priori in favor of the state. Second, several considerations suggest a presumption in favor of relying on civil society.

The nature of state governance in consolidated liberal democracies has important implications for the ideal theory debate. The states of these societies are polycentric. Decision-making power within them is disaggregated across multiple sites. This rules out one major justification for ideal theory. On this influential view, the ideal furnishes a blueprint of the morally perfect society that we should strive to realise. This justification is not viable in consolidated liberal democracies because their states lack an Archimedean point from which the institutional structure as a whole can be designed to accord with the true ideal – whichever it might be. However, knowledge of the ideal can still aid agents in those societies to determine the worth of more modest political objectives other than the ideal itself.