Nicholas Tampio

In Political Liberalism, J. Rawls describes a meta-ethical procedure — political constructivism — whereby political theorists formulate political principles by assembling and reworking ideas from the public political culture. To many of his moral realist and moral constructivist critics, Rawls's procedure is simply a recent version of the “popular moral philosophy” that Kant excoriates in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. I defend the idea of political constructivism on philosophical and political grounds. I argue that political constructivism is the best available methodology for self-legislating, socially embedded and fallible human beings; then I show that political constructivism may produce principles that could garner the principled assent of Euro-American Muslims such as Taha Jabir Al-Alwani. The article considers how political constructivism might be employed to formulate new political principles for Euro-American societies experiencing and confronting the Islamic revival. [R]

The article enters a heated debate about the ideals and organization of the postmodern left. Hardt and Negri, two key figures in this debate, claim that their concept of the multitude — a revolutionary, proletarian body that organizes singularities — integrates the insights of Deleuze and Lenin. I argue, however, that Deleuze anticipated and resisted a Leninist appropriation of his political theory. This essay challenges the widely accepted assumption that Hardt and Negri carry forth Deleuze’s legacy. At the same time, the essay advocates Deleuze’s concept of left assemblages — protean political bodies working for freedom and equality — as a valuable but underappreciated contribution to the liberal-democratic tradition.

How can Deleuzians make his philosophy as accessible as possible to political theorists and democratic publics? This essay provides principles to enter Deleuze's political vision, namely, to research the etymology of words, to discover the image beneath concepts, to diagram schemata using rigid lines, supple lines and lines of flight, and to construct rules that balance experimentation and caution. The essay then employs this method to explicate a fecund sentence about politics in A Thousand Plateaus and presents a case why Deleuze deserves greater visibility in the political theory canon.

This essay explores how the garden (in Persian, pairadaeza) may function as an image of flourishing pluralism among theists and naturalists. Initially, the essay draws upon A Thousand Plateaus to formulate the principles of a Deleuzian comparative political theory. Next, the essay interprets and evaluates the work of the Sufi scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the al-Qaeda ideologue Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the Shi'i political reformer 'Abdolkarim Soroush. The essay concludes by considering how diverse existential faiths (or flowers) in the garden may collaborate to address the ecological crisis

A famous Kant scholar once distinguished two faces of the critical philosophy, one facing the past and less interesting and the other looking forward to the future and still fruitful (Strawson 1966). Rawls's work also has two faces and many of his readers look toward the past, wishing, for instance, that Rawls had been able to provide principles of justice that have the ontological status of categorical imperatives. I thank Andrew Valls for inviting me to clarify points where I diverge from many Rawls scholars. Although this is an academic debate, I believe that the stakes are huge: namely, the future of liberalism in an increasingly interconnected, multicultural world. My response will elaborate how I read Rawls, why I engage Islamic political thought, and how liberals living in Europe or North America may converse with fellow citizens such as Taha Jabir Al-Alwani, who orient themselves politically by the Qur'an rather than, say, the United States Constitution

What should political theorists do when they travel beyond the West and find that ordinary people do not want to reflect upon their political commitments? One option is to do rehabilitative political theory and argue that China and Egypt, say, already possess deliberative cultures. A second option is to maintain that China and Egypt favor different, and better, ideals than democratic deliberation. A third option, and the one that I endorse, is to promote Socratic ideals in universities around the world. As Plato recognized in the Republic, it is easier to teach students to love political debate than to change the habits of pious people such as Cephalus.

How do we conceptualize distinctions between religious —political territories in the contemporary world when old categories—such as Islam and the West, or dar al-Islam and dar al-harb—precipitate misunderstandings and conflicts? In this essay, I consider Tariq Ramadan's argument that Muslims must enact an intellectual transformation along the lines of Kant's Copernican revolution and thence create concepts—such as the space of testimony —to facilitate interreligious dialogue, cooperation, and respectful contestation. The essay aims to illuminate the nature of Ramadan's political theory and dispel the claim that he is a Muslim Martin Luther; to imagine the contours of a future political-intellectual movement that integrates elements of the European Enlightenment and the Arab Nahda; and to envision how Muslim and non-Muslim political theorists may combat political Manichaeanism without denying the reality and importance of contending ethical visions and political identities.

How may progressive political theorists advance the Enlightenment after Darwin shifted the conversation about human nature in the 19th century, the Holocaust displayed barbarity at the historical center of the Enlightenment, and 9/11 showed the need to modify the ideals and strategies of the Enlightenment? Kantian Courage considers how several figures in contemporary political theory--including John Rawls, Gilles Deleuze, and Tariq Ramadan--do just this as they continue Immanuel Kant's legacy. Rather than advocate specific Kantian ideas, the book contends that political progressives should embody Kantian courage--a critical and creative disposition to invent new political theories to address the problems of the age. It illuminates Kant's legacy in contemporary intellectual debates; constructs a dialogue among Anglo-American, Continental, and Islamic political theorists; and shows how progressives may forge alliances across political and religious differences by inventing concepts such as the overlapping consensus, the rhizome, and the space of testimony. The book will interest students of the Enlightenment, contemporary political theorists and philosophers, and a general audience concerned about the future of the relationship between Islam and the West.

How may progressive political theorists advance the Enlightenment after Darwin shifted the conversation about human nature in the nineteenth century, the Holocaust displayed barbarity at the historical center of the Enlightenment, and 9/11 showed the need to modify the ideals and strategies of the Enlightenment? Kantian Courage considers how several figures in contemporary political theory--including John Rawls, Gilles Deleuze, and Tariq Ramadan--do just this as they continue Immanuel Kant's legacy.