Important announcement on publication policy

Important announcement on publication policy     

Justice,Political Obligation and Public Reason: Rethinking Partisanship and Political Liberalism

In Partisanship and Political Liberalism in Diverse Societies I examine political parties and partisanship within the context of John Rawls’s (Political Liberalism, expanded edn. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005a) theory of political liberalism. I argue that parties and partisanship are vital to Rawls’s political liberalism, since they offer a distinctive and crucial contribution to the process of public justification that is central to it, which combines the articulation of public reasons with the channelling into the public political realm of the particular values and conceptions of the good emerging from parties’ specific constituencies. Furthermore, I argue, partisanship generates a special kind of political obligations, and this further contributes to state legitimacy under conditions of reasonable pluralism. In this paper, I respond to three commentators who have raised important criticisms against my argument. More specifically, Section 1 provides a response to Lea Ypi’s argument that my normative account of partisanship wrongly presupposes that existing liberal societies are reasonably just. Section 2 answers Daniel Weinstock’s concerns regarding the plausibility and internal consistency of my account of partisan political obligations. Finally, Section 3 addresses Kevin Vallier’s criticisms, which challenge my account of public reason and propose an alternative one.

     

Language,Liberalism and the Critical Religion Challenge

In this article I consider Cécile Laborde's response to the semantic and Protestant critiques of liberalism's approach to religion. In Section 1 I examine the complex relationship between language and religion that emerges from Laborde's response to the semantic critique. In Section 2 I argue that Laborde's response to the Protestant critique either fails on its own terms or is in tension with her response to the semantic critique. Finally, in Section 3 I critically reflect on the negative conception of freedom that underlies Laborde's response to the Protestant critique, and ask how this can be reconciled with the republican understanding of freedom that characterises Laborde's earlier work.     

Cities,Neighbourhoods, and the Challenges of Immigration

This article critically examines four specific aspects of Avner de Shalit’s book Cities and Immigration. First, it argues that the influx of cosmopolitan migrants, which de Shalit considers unproblematic for destination cities, may in fact pose a challenge to some cities’ ethos, and to the ethos of specific neighbourhoods within cities. Second, it contends that gentrification, contrary to what de Shalit suggests, may sometimes hinder rather than promote social mixing and migrants' integration. Third, it claims that most of the examples of mutual assimilation (de Shalit’s preferred model of inclusion) provided by de Shalit concern superficial interactions and exchanges between members of different groups. This raises both the empirical question of whether deeper forms of mutual assimilation are possible and the normative question of whether they are desirable. Fourth, it takes issue with two concrete policy recommendations advanced by de Shalit: the first involves assessing potential matchings between source and destination cities in order to advise migrants where to move; the second concerns prioritizing immigrants who might be better capable than others of facilitating the integration of future immigrants, due to their values, religion, or country of origin.