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Liberal political analysis is ordinarily based on a sharp distinction between domestic and international politics, and an assumption that domestic politics is the proper arena for democratic self-determination. But self-governing citizens... more
Liberal political analysis is ordinarily based on a sharp distinction between domestic and international politics, and an assumption that domestic politics is the proper arena for democratic self-determination. But self-governing citizens have never exhausted the cast of characters who populate liberal states. Living alongside them there are often domestic aliens – permanent residents who are subject to the law, and may be protected by it, but who do not participate in making it. Refugees and remnants also inhabit liberal states. Whether citizens or not, they tend to bear the historical consciousness of victims or potential victims wherever they may live. A correlative fact is that in many now-liberal societies the meaning of citizenship itself is indelibly marked by the “missing” – the emigrant and the exile, the expelled and the extinct. Such identities – and the historical presence or absence of individuals who claim them – are generally regarded as messy details in the state-cen...
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... identity: Thinking through Marx. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Meister, Robert (b. 1947, d. ----. PUBLISHER: B. Blackwell (Cambridge, Mass., USA). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1991. PUB TYPE: Book (ISBN 0631174176 ). VOLUME/EDITION:... more
... identity: Thinking through Marx. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Meister, Robert (b. 1947, d. ----. PUBLISHER: B. Blackwell (Cambridge, Mass., USA). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1991. PUB TYPE: Book (ISBN 0631174176 ). VOLUME/EDITION: PAGES (INTRO/BODY): ix ...
Research Interests: Sociology and Philosophy
This article examines the limitations of tuition (higher personal debt) as a mode of funding public university systems and, also, the widespread resistance to any tax increase by citizens with falling or stagnant income and growing... more
This article examines the limitations of tuition (higher personal debt) as a mode of funding public university systems and, also, the widespread resistance to any tax increase by citizens with falling or stagnant income and growing burdens of debt. It argues that the questions of debt servitude and tax resistance must be considered together if public universities are to regain taxpayer support and become, once again, drivers of greater economic and social equality.
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The article develops political implications of the late Randy Martin’s idea of “derivative sociality” as the real subsumption of human life under the option form. The option form, beginning with the hedge, allows realized surplus value to... more
The article develops political implications of the late Randy Martin’s idea of “derivative sociality” as the real subsumption of human life under the option form. The option form, beginning with the hedge, allows realized surplus value to be preserved (locked in) and eventually accumulated by securing its convertibility back into money—its “liquidity.” The opposite, financial illiquidity is capital disaccumulation in Marx’s sense. It follows that the acceptability of capital accumulation depends on making financial market illiquidity politically unimaginable. This limitation on political imagination can, however, be largely overcome in the spirit of Marx (and Randy Martin) by using the conceptual resources of options theory itself. In options theory, for example, privately produced financial derivatives are priced as though a component of them is synthetic public debt (“risk-free”). But this can be true only because in crisis scenarios the government guarantees to swap its own debt ...
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... The notion that there were Jews was, as we have seen, essential to a Pauline Christianity that ... there are still Jews, but it now imagines a final answer that is in some sense post-Jewish. ... can recognize that God's promise... more
... The notion that there were Jews was, as we have seen, essential to a Pauline Christianity that ... there are still Jews, but it now imagines a final answer that is in some sense post-Jewish. ... can recognize that God's promise to them as prophecy has now been fulfilled in Christ (Rom 4 ...
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The continuing repression by jurists and scholars of the role of Dred Scott in our constitutional history has given that case a pervasive influence that is rarely, if ever, acknowledged. The following discussion will abstract from the... more
The continuing repression by jurists and scholars of the role of Dred Scott in our constitutional history has given that case a pervasive influence that is rarely, if ever, acknowledged. The following discussion will abstract from the moral embarrassment of Dred Scott in order to treat its jurisprudence as the missing link that connects the underlying framework of Marshallian constitutionalism with later struggles over the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Without such a link the Civil War is left as a constitutional silence, perhaps a second American Revolution, separating two discontinuous systems of government. That silence can be filled only by acknowledging the fundamental continuities between our present conceptions of constitutional equality and the system of government that could permit the existence of slavery.
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In the lexicon of rights, the concept of human rights can play a wide variety of roles. Human rights can be defined as substantive natural rights that transcend politics and culture or as the rights that underlie political and cultural... more
In the lexicon of rights, the concept of human rights can play a wide variety of roles. Human rights can be defined as substantive natural rights that transcend politics and culture or as the rights that underlie political and cultural differences. They can be defined narrowly as rights that could be asserted against enemies in war or, more broadly, as the aspirational goals to which governments are held accountable by their citizens and the world. Despite their lack of recognition in covenant and positive law through much of the twentieth century, human rights are increasingly asserted on the basis of such recognition. To some, human rights are simply the sine qua non (procedural? biological?) for asserting other rights, whatever these may be. In this paper I do not choose among these uses of the concept of human rights by propounding a single definition; neither do I defend or criticize human rights in general.
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... Are they simply manifesting an absence of sophrosurie pleonexia and akolasia at the level of ... the beliefs of another, not just for that person's sake, but in order to save ... In answering the question Tor what good?'... more
... Are they simply manifesting an absence of sophrosurie pleonexia and akolasia at the level of ... the beliefs of another, not just for that person's sake, but in order to save ... In answering the question Tor what good?' even egoists such as Callicles and Thrasymachus were required ...
Research Interests: Philosophy and Apeiron
... covered by this Act had not previously been considered to be full American citizens.30 The category of statelessness also covered the descendants of Africans who entered the country as slaves.31 The great antebellum constitutional... more
... covered by this Act had not previously been considered to be full American citizens.30 The category of statelessness also covered the descendants of Africans who entered the country as slaves.31 The great antebellum constitutional scholar, John Codman Hurd, argued that ...
Much of Catherine Lu's response resonates in tone and substance with my article. Like me, Lu speaks in the language of moral psychology and relies heavily on the later work of that preeminent moral psychologist among liberal... more
Much of Catherine Lu's response resonates in tone and substance with my article. Like me, Lu speaks in the language of moral psychology and relies heavily on the later work of that preeminent moral psychologist among liberal theorists, Judith Shklar. She agrees, moreover, with both Shklar and me that victimhood (and the fear it produces) is morally damaging more often than not, and that the recent literature on human rights, which focuses on the relation of victim and perpetrator, tends to let the beneficiaries of systemic injustice off the hook. Lu and I, thus, share much common ground that other respondents might have contested, and I am grateful that her perceptive criticisms focus on points within my argument that I am pleased to elaborate.