ABSTRACTRobert Southey’s fictive travelogue, Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, inspired several imitators, most importantly José María Blanco White with his Letters from Spain. These works rejuvenate a fictional device popularised by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters—the “familiar stranger”—at a crucial juncture when British involvement in the affairs of Europe provoked a reassessment of pre-Revolutionary cosmopolitanism. The stranger as home-interpreter calls attention to an emerging emphasis in European Romantic thought on the contingency of freedom with hybrid, mobile identities, prefiguring the (...) psycho-social-historical terrain in which Jean-François Lyotard and Dean MacCannell link modernity with travel and tourism. This essay argues that the Romantic figure of the foreign traveller expresses a condition of travel, reflecting Lyotard’s critique of human contingency in his essay “Domus and the Megalopolis.” Southey’s sympathetic stranger modulates a conversation with Word... (shrink)

The article elaborates an original intertwined reading of republican theory, deliberative democracy and political equality. It argues that republicans, deliberative democrats and egalitarian scholars have not paid sufficient attention to a number of features present in these bodies of scholarships that relate them in mutually beneficial ways. It shows that republicanism and deliberative democracy are related in mutually beneficial ways, it makes those relations explicit, and it deals with potential objections against them. Additionally, it elaborates an egalitarian principle underpinning the (...) resulting model that I label Equality of Access and Deliberation. The upshot of these considerations is a novel and mutually reinforcing interrelated three-tiered theoretical and institutional proposal. (shrink)

Sometimes established institutions aren’t perfect but cannot be replaced with better solutions. As technological, economic, ecological and other developments might indirectly further impair these imperfect institutions, non-change becomes normatively desirable and a practical challenge for legislators. In contrast to the progressive task of improving the established order, the task of preventing institutional achievements from being lost has been largely neglected by political theorists. To fill this lacuna, the article explores conservation as a mode of political action. It specifies the conditions (...) under which it is reasonable to oppose institutional innovation in politics in order to keep things as they are and develops a formal solution to Edmund Burke’s ‘conservation paradox’ in which existing arrangements can only stay the same if they are changed. The solution construes political conservation as renovative reformism that adapts institutional structures, cultures or mechanisms to changing circumstances in order to prevent indirect transformations of institutional mandates. (shrink)

La primera parte de este artículo discute el poder persuasivo de las narrativas, especialmente en historia de la filosofía, ligándolas con la oposición entre razón y emoción y también con el conocido tema rortiano de las redescripciones. Además, presenta brevemente las líneas generales de la reconstrucción histórica hecha por Rorty y la tipología de géneros historiográficos que establece. La segunda parte muestra ejemplos del modo en que Rorty usa la persuasión al elaborar dos de tales géneros: las reconstrucciones históricas y (...) las reconstrucciones racionales. The first part of this paper discusses the persuasive power of narratives, especially when applied to history of philosophy, linking it with the opposition between reasons and emotions, and with the well-known rortyan theme of redescriptions. It also presents briefly the outlines of the historical reconstruction made by Rorty and the typology of historiographical genres established by him. The second part shows some examples of the way Rorty uses persuasion to develop two such genres: historical reconstructions and rational reconstructions. (shrink)