Well-stated modern political or democratic theory is rights-based. Meaningful democracy rests as a precondition on the equal rights of citizens. This idea stems from Rousseau’s distinction between a general will*one which is impersonal and tends toward equality, that is, the equal basic rights of citizens*and a transitory will of all. For instance, absent equal basic rights, one might imagine a possible world in which what I have called a self-undermining series of wills of all, or the results (...) of socalled majority rule, disenfranchises the population. In the USA, one might think, contrahistorically, of a regime in which the women, as a majority, disenfranchise the men, the Black, Latin, and Asian women disenfranchise the White women, and by a series of reductions by further ‘majorities,’ three people still have the suffrage, two of whom disenfranchise one. Based on Rousseau, John Rawls’ Theory of Justice thus emphasizes the priority of the equal liberty principle over an economic difference principle.1 The difference principle permits those inequalities which also benefit the least advantaged. But the priority of the equal liberty principle rules out any inequality, otherwise beneficial to the least advantaged, which enables the rich to control the government. This priority makes equal basic rights the inescapable precondition for any decent majority rule or distribution of income. Note that in principle, such a regime may be international*even a democracy of demoi in James Bohman’s phrase - rather than national. (Published: 5 February 2010) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2010, pp. 55-70. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v3i1.4854. (shrink)

In his path-breaking study, A Colonial Liberalism: The Lost World of Three Victorian Visionaries (1991), Stuart Macintyre makes a case for the distinctiveness of colonial liberalism and its local habitat, with liberals' insistence on the principle of political equality and the democratic right of self-government. Macintyre's three visionaries — Higinbotham, Pearson and Syme — were also leading crusaders against Chinese immigration, which peaked in Victoria in the 1850s, the decade in which self-government and manhood suffrage were introduced. The local (...) habitat wore a racial aspect. In this essay I suggest that it was precisely the democratic ideal of equality, espoused in the context of Chinese immigration and colonial nation-building, that led to the insistence on racial exclusion. Colonial liberals called for racial exclusion because of, not in spite of, their commitment to democracy. The apparent paradox of a policy of exclusion promoted in the name of equality was, I suggest, definitive of the project of colonial liberalism. (shrink)

This review of Madhav Kkhosla’s book, India’s Founding Moment, sees his approach as one of “best lights” understandings, that is, an effort to identify and explain the conceptual underpinnings of India’s founding constitution in their best lights. Khosla emphasizes as key the ways in which the constitution’s requirements of full adult suffrage, its intense specificity of language, and its strongly centralized government form, all contribute conceptually to the creation of the democratic citizen of India—a citizen whose rights across the (...) country were secured by a common constitution and central government, whose knowledge of and ability to exercise rights were enhanced by the constitution’s codified approach, and a citizen whose capacities to participate in democratic processes would be developed by the exercise of democratic rights. The review focuses attention on choices about suffrage, comparing India’s with the less inclusionary founding impulses of the United States constitution. It explores nuances of how codification would and would not promote exercises of citizenship rights, noting the importance of adjudication in the construction of the “common knowledge” to which the founders aspired. And the review argues that today, as more illiberal, authoritarian regimes are on the rise, the book’s emphasis on the importance of ideas, words, and common knowledge in constructing liberal, democratic politics is of urgent contemporary importance. (shrink)

McManus presents an intellectual history of the conservative and reactionary tradition, stretching from Aristotle and Confucius to Ayn Rand and Patrick Deneen. Providing a comprehensive critical genealogy of the intellectual political right, McManus traces its core to a nostalgia for the hierarchical cosmos of antiquarian and scholastic thinking. The yearning for a shared vision of the universe where each part of reality has its place maps onto the conservative admiration for orderly political and social stratification. It stamps even the more (...) moderate forms of liberal conservatism which emerged in the aftermath of the revolutionary 18th century, as the political right struggled to accept and later master first the politics of liberal capitalism and later universal suffrage. In its most radical forms this nostalgia for an orderly and hierarchical existence can harden into a resentment at the perceived shallowness of liberal modernity. McManus argues for those who support the project of modernity to commit themselves to better understanding the depth of the political right's critiques, many of which expose uncomfortable but solvable problems with the quest for equality and freedom. A critical guide to the history of conservative and reactionary thought for students and scholars of political science and political history. (shrink)

SUMMARYThe nineteenth-century Orientalist and ethnologist, John Crawfurd, publicly rejected Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in 1868. Crawfurd was a leading advocate of polygenesis but also a supporter of racial equality. In 1820 he published his History of the Indian Archipelago, where he advocated granting household suffrage to all races in the British colonies. After finishing a career in the East India Company in 1828 he became the foremost expert on South-East Asia in Britain. Crawfurd became a regular writer on (...) ethnology and Asian affairs for the Examiner newspaper and in the 1860s he was President of the Ethnological Society of London. Accounts of nineteenth-century anthropology in Britain characterise debate around race as falling into two camps: advocates of monogenesis and advocates of polygenesis. In the United States of America, advocates of polygenesis were often associated with advocates of slavery and racial inequality. Recent research has demonstrated that Charles Darwin’s hatred of slavery drove him to write Origin of the Species to demonstrate the unity of the human species and reject the polygenesis position. This paper explores Crawfurd’s ideas and demonstrates that a belief in polygenesis in the nineteenth century did not necessarily equate with a belief in racial inequality. (shrink)

The article discusses the problems of development of women’s political rights in Lithuania in the legal historical aspect starting from the 16th century, when some property and individual rights were enshrined in the first codifications of the laws of the Great Duchy of Lithuania. The aim of the article is to show that women’s struggle for political equality and suffrage at the end of the 19th and at the turn of the 20th century correlates with the movement for re-establishment (...) of the independent State of Lithuania. As a result in Lithuania equal suffrage and political rights were ensured from the very beginning of independence. In 1905 the Great Seimas of Vilnius recognized the principles of equality of women and men and declared the principles of equal general election to the Seimas (parliament); women’s suffrage, as one of the elements of legal equality, became constitutionally entrenched already in the first temporary Constitution of the State of Lithuania in 1918. At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century women’s rights have been further developed, moreover, the first woman was elected as President of the Republic in the national elections in May 2009. (shrink)

L’idéal démocratique est accusé d’être irréaliste. Le gouvernement du peuple par le peuple et pour le peuple serait une chimère dans les sociétés contemporaines. Il faudrait lui préférer les visées plus modestes associées à l’élection : un droit de vote égal et la satisfaction du plus grand nombre. La démocratie ne se laisse pourtant pas réduire à la compétition électorale. Les acteurs et les institutions politiques qui s’en réclament invoquent non seulement un marché, où rivalisent des intérêts privés, mais un (...) forum, où s’affrontent des visions adverses de la justice. Ils attendent de la délibération collective qu’elle serve l’autonomie politique et le bien commun, mais savent aussi qu’elle peut les menacer, lorsque la liberté, l’égalité ou la publicité lui font défaut. Cette enquête philosophique interroge la pertinence de l’idéal démocratique pour des sociétés complexes, dotées d’institutions représentatives et soumises à la communication de masse. Elle montre à quelles conditions cet idéal peut aujourd’hui orienter la critique et l’action. Les citoyens peuvent encore aspirer à se gouverner eux-mêmes, donc à délibérer en égaux. -/- The democratic ideal is accused of being unrealistic. Government of the people by the people and for the people would be a chimera in contemporary societies. The more modest aims associated with election should be preferred: equal suffrage and the satisfaction of the greatest number. But democracy cannot be reduced to electoral competition. The political actors and institutions that claim it invoke not only a market, where private interests compete, but also a forum, where opposing visions of justice confront each other. They expect collective deliberation to serve political autonomy and the common good, but they also know that it can threaten them when it lacks freedom, equality or publicity. This philosophical inquiry questions the relevance of the democratic ideal for complex societies with representative institutions and subject to mass communication. It shows under what conditions a deliberative understanding of this ideal can today orient criticism and action. Citizens can still aspire to govern themselves, hence to deliberate as equals. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Basic Human Rights: Rawls's List Basic Human Rights: Their Nature and Function Basic Human Rights: A Rawlsian Justification Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes.

This chapter contains sections titled: Must Liberty and Equality Come Apart? Freedom of Conscience Self‐Ownership and Universal Suffrage Slavery Women's Rights The Cold War Thurgood Marshall Discussion Acknowledgments.

Mill was a progressive thinker whose views on gender and race were well in advance of his times. But although he rejected both the natural or innate superiority of men over women and of whites over blacks, and attributed their differences to their different circumstances, his proposals for social and political changes seem be contrast sharply in the two cases. He argued for “perfect equality” between men and women, including the extension of the suffrage to women and the elimination (...) of the near absolute power of husbands over their wives. On the other hand, Mill justified British imperial rule in India, maintaining that despotism was an appropriate form of government for “barbarians”, provided it was the most effective means of raising them to a higher stage of development where they were capable of ruling themselves. This chapter discusses the complexities of Mill's views on gender and race. (shrink)

Carol Pateman has said that the public/private distinction is what feminism is all about. I tend to be sceptical about categorical pronouncements of this sort, but this book is a work of feminist political philosophy and the public/private distinction is what it is all about. It is motivated by the belief that we lack a philosophical conception of privacy suitable for a democracy; that feminism has exposed this lack; and that by combining feminist analysis with recent developments in political philosophy, (...) we can meet the philosophical and political need for a distinctively democratic conception of privacy. This book then, is an effort to sketch and defend such a conception of privacy. It aims to show that while some conceptions of privacy are inconsistent with democracy, others are not. Indeed, the book asserts, the belief that privacy can be valuable and that it can justify basic legal rights, is implicit in a democratic conception of persons as free and equal beings, and a democratic conception of politics as the self-governing, or regulating, activity of such individuals. Just as we can and should reject undemocratic conceptions of the suffrage in favour of democratic ones, so the book maintains, we can and must reject undemocratic conceptions of privacy in favour of ones that reflect the moral equality of men and women, and a commitment to democratic forms of government. Democracy is often described as government by and for the people. On such a view, democracy is a political regime which can be contrasted with monarchies or aristocracies on the one hand, or with theocracies and despotisms on the other. By contrast with the former, it is a form of government that views individuals as citizens and as equal members of the agency which authorizes the use of political power. By contrast with the latter, it is a form of government whose purposes and aims are established by the common interests of individuals, conceived as free and equal citizens. It is my contention that there is a plausible and attractive conception of privacy implicit in this view of democracy. Hence, I show that individuals have fundamental interests in privacy because privacy enables them to participate in politics freely and as the equal of others and, beyond that, to lead lives that they can each affirm to be reasonable, valuable and right. As I think that the ideal of democratic government is properly associated with this latter and broader goal, as well as with the former one, I call my account of privacy a democratic conception of privacy to signal its connection to a particular ideal of politics, and to the conception of persons that makes this ideal a convincing and inspiring one. As this is a work of political philosophy, however, no effort is made to address the legal merits of competing accounts of the right to privacy, or to resolve legal dispute about the content and justification of particular constitutional rights in the United States. Thus, while I use Supreme Court decisions and works of legal theory to illustrate and support my arguments, my use of these materials is governed by philosophical concerns and my conclusions, therefore, are strictly of a philosophical, not a legal, nature. The book is divided into four chapters, moving from feminist criticisms of privacy to an engagement with the philosophical literature on privacy and an account of the right to privacy in a democratic society. It proceeds as follows. In Chapter 1, I examine feminist concerns about privacy, through a close reading of the work of Catherine MacKinnon. I argue that MacKinnon persuasively shows that protection for privacy has frequently licensed the coercion and subjection of women, and that her arguments are supported both by feminist scholarship, key Supreme Court decisions, and by familiar conceptions of privacy and equality. However, I argue, these criticisms do not imply that privacy, like slavery, can never be democratic, because wholly inconsistent with the equality of individuals. Rather, feminist criticisms of privacy suggest that privacy, like the suffrage, can be necessary to the equality of women and can have a legitimate and important place in a democratic society. In Chapter 2, I examine the philosophical literature on privacy in light of the need to distinguish democratic from undemocratic accounts of its nature and value. This literature, I show, can help us to provide an account of privacy that is sensitive both to its inegalitarian aspects and to its importance for a democratic commitment to the freedom and equality of women. However, I argue, we cannot embrace current philosophical accounts of privacy uncritically, because to a striking extent they are, themselves, indifferent to the ways that privacy has licensed sexual inequality. Thus, in Chapter 2, I set about interpreting privacy as a moral and political value, in light of the strengths and weaknesses of the philosophical literature on privacy. Their strength is that they show that there are many reasons for caring about privacy, or many ways in which we might define it as a democratic value. Their weakness is that they tend to assume that we must choose amongst these different conceptions of privacy, in order to provide a philosophically cogent account of privacy. This, I show, is a mistake and one that can be remedied by remembering that a commitment to the equality of individuals requires us to acknowledge the reasonable differences in value and interest that may characterize their relations in a democracy. When we do so, I show, it is possible to define privacy in terms of its protection for self-definition, intimacy and confidentiality, without having to choose between the three of them. For individuals may legitimately disagree about the differences between privacy and other values, even while holding that privacy is a distinctive and important democratic good; and they may also disagree about the importance of privacy compared to other goods, such as equality, without denying that self-definition, intimacy and confidentiality can be morally and politically desirable in a democracy. In Chapter 2, therefore, I show that we can provide a philosophically adequate account of what privacy is and why it is valuable without supposing that privacy is always sexually egalitarian, or denying that it has a distinctive place in a democratic conception of value. Chapter 3 then extends this account of privacy, by considering the justification for a legal right to privacy. Just as we cannot provide a democratic conception of privacy without attending to the different, though equally valid, concerns that individuals may have so, I show, we cannot provide a democratic account of privacy rights if we forget that individuals can, quite reasonably, differ in the importance that they attach to privacy. The result, I argue, is that we can distinguish two main reasons for protecting privacy by right in a democracy, the one personal and the other political. Whereas the former emphasizes the importance of self-definition, intimacy and confidentiality to the personal freedom and equality of individuals, the latter emphasizes their importance to their prospects for voluntary and equal participation in the processes of collective choice and deliberation that define a democratic government. These two justifications of privacy rights reflect the fact that in a democracy the personal can be political, as feminists have insisted, but need not be in order to merit protection by right. Indeed, I argue, we can distinguish democratic from undemocratic accounts of the right to privacy in this way: for whilst the former acknowledge the variety of individuals’ interests in personal and collective choice, the latter either collapse the political into the personal, or assume that the legitimate claims of individuals are merely a function of collective needs, interests and values. Neither of these is consistent with familiar assumptions about the nature and justification of democratic institutions and rights, nor can they be reconciled with a commitment to sexual equality. Thus, I conclude, though the fact that there are different justifications for privacy rights in a democracy means that individuals may legitimately disagree over the content and justification of basic rights, it is wrong to confuse democratic debate with moral or conceptual confusion and so, arbitrarily, to truncate our accounts of privacy, equality and democracy. Finally, in Chapter 4, I test and develop these claims by examining the justification for abortion rights in a democracy. I argue that women have legitimate interests in abortion, as well as in bearing children, because they have fundamental, and legitimate, interests in privacy and equality. Although safe and legal abortion is necessary to sexual equality, as feminists claim, I show that we can provide a convincing and democratic account of women’s claims to abortion only if we recognize women’s interests in self-definition, intimacy and confidentiality. This is because women have both personal and political interests in abortion and we will be unable adequately to identify these if we overlook their interests in privacy. Indeed, I show, the difference between democratic and undemocratic solutions to conflict over abortion lies precisely in this: that whereas the former acknowledge the importance of privacy to the personal and political equality of women, the latter overlook or deny this. As a result, the latter license both mandated abortions, although women have legitimate interests in bearing and raising children, and prohibitions on abortion that cannot be reconciled with the freedom and equality of women. That is not to say that abortion is not a politically significant matter, or that we can resolve moral conflict over abortion simply by giving women a legal right to abortion. Neither is the case. However, the chapter shows, in a democracy individuals are entitled to make morally and politically controversial decisions for themselves not simply because this is expedient or useful, but because this is right. To overlook this feature of democracy, I argue, is to make moral and political conflict utterly intractable by democratic means. Thus, while controversy over abortion has been held to show that privacy is an incoherent and undemocratic right, this chapter argues that it shows the reverse: for controversy over abortion makes clear that privacy is essential to democracy, and why this should be so. This overview of the book, I hope, makes clear that its concerns are methodological as well as substantive, and moral as well as political. Thus, its central methodological claim is that we cannot reconcile privacy with the equality of individuals unless we make a deliberate effort to do so. Its central moral and political claims are that privacy is compatible with the equality of individuals, and sufficiently important to the latter that, in a democracy, the privacy of individuals merits legal protection by right. However, this summary of the book also exposes its limitations. Chief amongst these, I fear, is that it provides no sustained discussion of the place of property on a democratic conception of privacy, and that the latter, itself, is rather a broad preliminary sketch than a polished and detailed portrait. I regard these limits on the scope and arguments of the book as limitations, albeit ones that I hope to be able to remedy before too long.However, limited though the book clearly is, I believe that it lays out the essential components of a democratic conception of privacy and that, by analysing and synthesizing several diverse bodies of literature, it may help those who are interested in the relations between privacy, equality and democracy. (shrink)

‘Social Purity’ appears in a part of the French and Anglo-Saxon nineteenth-twentieth century’s feminisms, as a mean for many claims: from the full recognition of sexual difference in Hubertine Auclert’s social and ‘differentialist’ republicanism in France to Josephine Butler’s refusal of any purity imposed from above in England, until the absolute turn of the idea of women’s moral superiority and the equal and opposite force to the final exit from ‘the social’ by the American ‘New Womanism’, individualizing and de-feminizing (...) the act of sexual liberation. All this in a continuous play of actions and reactions, sometimes paradoxical, weaving together suffragism and anti-suffragism, contestation of the conjugal complementarity and the never overcome temptations of hetero or self-control. (shrink)

Who is to be included in a political community and on what terms? William A. Barbieri Jr. seeks answers to these questions in this exploration of the controversial concept of citizenship rights—a concept directly related to the nature of democracy, equality, and cultural identity. Through an examination of the case of Germany’s settled “guestworkers” and their families, _Ethics of Citizenship_ investigates the pressing problem of political membership in a world marked by increased migration, rising nationalist sentiment, and the ongoing reorganization (...) of states through both peaceful and violent means. Although some of Germany’s foreign workers have gradually attained a degree of social and economic legitimacy, Barbieri explains how they remain effectively excluded from true German citizenship. Describing how this exclusion has occurred and assessing current attitudes toward political membership in Germany, he argues for a just and democratic policy toward the tax-paying, migrant worker minority, one that would combine the extension of the individual rights of citizenship with the establishment of certain group rights. Through a dissection of ongoing public “membership debates” over issues such as suffrage, dual citizenship, and immigration and refugee policy, Barbieri identifies a range of competing responses to the question of who “belongs” in Germany. After critiquing these views, he proposes an alternative ethic of membership rooted in an account of domination and human rights that seeks to balance individual and group rights within the context of a commitment to democracy and equal citizenship. Indispensable for scholars of German studies, _Ethics of Citizenship_ also raises questions that will attract moral philosophers, constitutional scholars, and those interested in the continuing, global problems associated with migration. (shrink)

In this book, the author attempts to explain the nature of human society and to provide a justification of the democratic system, often charged with favoring numerousness over quality. Starting from his previously published conception of the structure and functioning of human mind, Belfiore derives a set of democratic principles that allow to conceive society as the necessary result of the trend of human actions and moral acts toward universalization, and the democratic system (based on majority rule and universal (...) class='Hi'>suffrage) as the only one through which actions and moral acts can reach the best possible approach to universality. Since evolution toward universality is regarded as part of mind evolution, which in turn is conceived as the objective good, democratic society is given an objective ontological and moral foundation. Likewise, the author provides new insights and offer novel solutions for many issues concerned with the complex functioning of the democratic society, such as: the nature of political parties, the political positions known as right and left, the duality of the forces that drive political activity (egoism/right/freedom versus morality/duties/equality), the voting system, the justification of majority rule, the role of leaders and elected representatives, voters' preferences, political choices, the unity-distinction of the three powers of the State, and still others. Belfiore contrasts his views with those of other thinkers, who are extensively quoted"--Back cover. (shrink)

An unresolved debate in Bentham scholarship concerns the question of the timing and circumstances which led to Bentham's ‘conversion’ to democracy, and thus to political radicalism. In the early stages of the French Revolution, Bentham composed material which appeared to justify equality of suffrage on utilitarian grounds, but there are differing interpretations concerning the extent and depth of Bentham's commitment to democracy at this time. The appearance of Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and other essays on the (...) French Revolution, a new volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, containing definitive texts of Bentham's writings at this crucial period, offers an opportunity to reassess this debate. First, Bentham's most radical proposals for political reform came not in the so-called ‘Essay on Representation’ composed in late 1788 and early 1789, as has traditionally been assumed, but in his ‘Projet of a Constitutional Code for France’ composed in the autumn of 1789, where he advocated universal adult suffrage, subject to a literacy test. Second, it may be doubted if the very question as to whether Bentham was or was not a sincere convert to democracy is particularly helpful. Rather, it may be better to see Bentham as a ‘projector’ during this period of his life. Third, the nature of Bentham's radicalism was very different at this period from what it would become in the 1810s and 1820s, for instance in relation to his commitment to the traditional structures of the British Constitution. Having said that, his attitude to the British Constitution remained complex and ambivalent. At his most radical phase, in the autumn of 1789, he advocated wide-ranging measures of electoral reform while at the same time harbouring aspirations to be returned to Parliament for one of the Marquis of Lansdowne's pocket boroughs. To conclude, it was, arguably, the internal dynamic of Bentham's critical utilitarianism, rather than the events of the French Revolution, which was ultimately responsible for pushing him into a novel form of radical politics. (shrink)

Within recent feminist theorizing the significance of social location has been overestimated, while the power of argument has been underestimated. We do not need to retreat to notions of ‘story-telling’ as the strongest claim to knowledge possible by feminist analysis. Rather, we should draw on the power of argument. This article addresses some dilemmas in debates around the projects of recognition, redistribution and transformation, and the claims to knowledge made in each. Further, it argues for the integration of the concerns (...) of equality and difference. The theoretical argument is supported by examples drawn from practical politics, including the development of democratic procedures, postcolonialism, the UNDP indicators sometimes used in development policy and suffrage movements. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate and highlight the continued suffrage of Latino families as they have struggled to provide their children with an equal education. Through providing an overview of court cases that have directly impacted the interface between Latino families and the American educationaI system, the paper provides the reader with a historical, social and cultural understanding of the politics of educating Latino children. Moreover, this backdrop provides asound foundation for illustrating the educational and (...) family research that has focused on Latino families and school partnerships and its impact on the politics of educattng Latino children. The authors end the paper by providing insight to the future of the Latino Intelegensia and the impIications it has for Latino families, schools and their communities. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate and highlight the continued suffrage of Latino families as they have struggled to provide their children with an equal education. Through providing an overview of court cases that have directly impacted the interface between Latino families and the American educationaI system, the paper provides the reader with a historical, social and cultural understanding of the politics of educating Latino children. Moreover, this backdrop provides asound foundation for illustrating the educational and (...) family research that has focused on Latino families and school partnerships and its impact on the politics of educattng Latino children. The authors end the paper by providing insight to the future of the Latino Intelegensia and the impIications it has for Latino families, schools and their communities. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Jean Monnet was the inventor of the community method; by placing economic integration before the political one, he reversed the criteria of unification that had characterised the development of nation-states in the Old Continent. He was never a government or party leader; despite this, he engaged on an equal footing with the most prestigious statesmen of the twentieth century, influencing their choices: from Viviani in 1914 to Giscard d’Estaing in 1975, passing through Schuman, Spaak, De Gasperi, Adenauer and (...) Kennedy. Monnet favoured the creation of supranational community institutions. Through his foresight he was able to combine ideas and pragmatism and in this way he taught a whole generation of European leaders to debate issues of common interest, thus overcoming national selfishness; from the Schuman Declaration of which he was the main ‘inspirer’ (as he was sarcastically called by Charles de Gaulle) which led to the European Coal and Steel Community (1951) to the first election by universal suffrage of the European Parliament (1979), passing through the failure of the European Defence Community (1954), the Rome Treaties establishing the European Economic Community and Euratom (1957) and his tireless commitment inside the Action Committee for the United States of Europe. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 234-236 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Dreaming Me: An African American Woman's Spiritual Journey Dreaming Me: An African American Woman's Spiritual Journey. By Jan Willis. New York: Riverhead Books, 2001. 321 pp. This book invites comparison with Diana Eck's Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras(Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). Both are by prominent women scholars, both have "spiritual journey" in the subtitle, (...) and both are about Christians who come to terms with a non-Christian religion—Hinduism in Eck's case, Buddhism in Willis's case. But as soon as one gets past the titles, it is the differences that strike one. Where Eck maintains an Olympian poise, hobnobbing with Hindus but remaining a Christian and an objective scholar, interpreting and analyzing as she goes, Willis plunges into Buddhism without rejecting her family's Baptist tradition, becoming a fully participant observer so as to ask how her own history and the history of her fellow African Americans can be healed by an intensely personal internal dialogue. Eck gives us theology. Willis gives us herself. Recognized as "one of the first American scholar-practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism" (294), her students ask her if she practices meditation as well as teaching it. She gives a carefully crafted answer that unifies the practice of Buddhism with the practice of academic teaching as an authentically human activity within the Humanities.The book has the form of a Hindu epic, incidents from Willis's life interrupting the frame story, the dreaming of the title. This dream (whether actual or metaphorical, we are not told) moves with considerable dramatic power from the terror of being pursued by lions to the dreamer's transformation into a lioness who roars the Dharma like Queen Shrimala. Its five parts are called Birth, Odyssey, Choices, Becoming, and Return, taking us from her childhood as a Baptist in Docena, Alabama, to Cornell University, to India and Nepal, and back to Docena, as a self-described Baptist-Buddhist (310).Willis's journey is intimately bound up with her search for self-acceptance as a "white gal"—a noticeably light-complexioned black woman in the Jim Crow South —and for the nobility of African Americans as fully human beings. Her early experiences [End Page 234] were not encouraging. Blacks were not only physically segregated in Docena, they were electronically expunged from television shows by spurious technical difficulties ("trouble along the cable"), and she endured an attack by the Ku Klux Klan on her family's home. The customary but thoroughly illegal suffrage examination administered to her father included such questions as "How many words are there in the U.S. Constitution?" (58, italics in original). He had been specially prepared for such absurdities, and he passed. Midway in her pilgrimage Willis searches for her roots (or "kin," as she says, using the Southern word) in county and federal records, and her initial excitement turns to humiliation as the white historian tells her, with disdainful triumph, that her intelligence must have come from the white slave owner who "everybody says" was her "granddaddy's daddy" (251). A black woman was presumed to be lacking in native intelligence, and Willis's intellectual powers suffered insult not only from whites but from her own mother, who, perhaps having internalized the white folks' contempt, regarded being smart as somehow evil (25). As a student at Cornell, Willis discovered black power and participated in Black Student Alliance (BSA) demonstrations, sometimes involving guns, but she came to believe that direct political action was not for her. She was, she decided, a teacher at heart, and after much soul searching she opted for the "peaceful transformation" (129) that she hoped would come from the study and practice of Buddhism.Although her skin color was a puzzlement to some Indians, who wondered about her caste, her Tibetan teachers in Nepal accepted her as a student who was at least the equal of the white students, and even, perhaps, superior to them. A spot of blonde in her hair was interpreted as the... (shrink)

This work is a survey of the efforts through which women have changed their place in American society from the nation's founding to the present. Examining the historical struggle for suffrage, legal and property rights, and rights in the work place, the authors show how these experiences have shaped a contemporary movement for economic, political, and social equality that has become increasingly independent and less and less likely to place women's issues second to other national concerns. The authors recount (...) a history of women activists who repeatedly set aside their own issues in favor of others that seemed more pressing--from abolition and preserving the Union, to labor solidarity in the 1920s, and civil rights and the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. Male domination of these movements and a lack of support for women's issues have been major factors in creating the contemporary feminist philosophy of going it alone. The book is divided into three topical sections, each of which offers a historical analysis and draws on a variety of sources such as legal statutes and judicial decisions, demographic information, public opinion polls, and biographies and other narrative accounts. It is a richly documented resource for courses and research in women's studies, sociology, politics, and U.S. legal and political history. (shrink)

While recently reading the 1914-1919 Congressional Record debates over woman suffrage, I was struck by the familiarity of the content. The concerns of the early 1900s mirror those of the early 2000s: concentration of wealth within a tiny percentage of the population, equal pay across sex and race lines, the risk of U.S. entanglement in foreign wars, food safety, workers' rights, potable water, taxation, and so on. I also was struck by the familiarity of the debate's form. Much (...) like the rebuttal speeches I was trained to deliver as an intercollegiate debater, the pro-suffrage speeches contain systematic, comprehensive, and specific refutation of anti-suffrage arguments.Yet, it took decades of activism outside of... (shrink)

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics” explores the place of legal agency in the political thought and activities of John Lilburne, one of the leading English Levellers of the seventeenth century. Protection of his rights as a freeborn Englishman was central to his political campaigns and political thought and was an important element of his published Leveller tracts. Much commentary on the Levellers has emphasized their demand for annual parliaments elected on a broad franchise and equal distribution (...) of seats. But these constitutional arrangements were not an endorsement of ideals of universal suffrage, representative democracy, and majoritarianism but instead—along with legal agency—mechanisms for the protection of the people from tyranny. This overlooked feature of Leveller political thought may have something to teach us about the essential purposes of democracy in the face of majoritarian populism. (shrink)

This article shows through Sismonde de Sismondi’s work how peculiarly modern issues like the revolution, equal political rights (universal suffrage) and an industrial and commercial society contributed to renewing the identity of republicanism. That renewal took place in Europe, after the French Revolution, and in a direct confrontation with democracy rather than liberalism. The problem in relation to which Sismondi reflected on the institutions of political liberty, the republican constitution and the role of individual liberty was the unstoppable (...) growth of equality, political and social. In his work, republicanism was intended as an answer against the emergent democratic transformation of society, with a role of moderating equality, dividing and bridling popular sovereignty and containing the immoderate propensities of democracy. The modern threat to liberty did not originate from the power of the few or of the one, but from that of the many. It originated in the majoritarian principle on which democracy relies necessarily. This principle, the republican Sismondi argued, contains the seed of the suppression of minorities, that is to say of individual liberty. (shrink)

In Latin America, rights to local political participation in many indigenous communities are not simply granted, but rather “earned” through acts of labor for the community. This is the case in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, where almost three-fourths of municipalities elect municipal authorities through custom and tradition rather than secret ballot and universal suffrage. The alarmingly low rate of women’s formal participation in these municipalities has garnered attention from policymakers, provoking a series of legislative reforms designed to increase (...) women’s roles in local politics. However, these initiatives often miss their mark. Focused on a liberal model of women as individual rights-bearers, they fail to understand the complex ways in which gendered labor influences political participation in nonliberal contexts. This article examines a case in which indigenous women reject such an initiative because it would exacerbate their exploitation within the local terms of gendered collective labor instead of promoting equality. It thus explains potential barriers to indigenous women’s political leadership at the local level and suggests ways in which gender equality can be promoted in nonliberal contexts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 335 Rachel Lumsden “The Music Between Us”: Ethel Smyth, Emmeline Pankhurst, and “Possession” But limelight is bad for me: the light in which I work best is twilight. —Virginia Woolf to Ethel Smyth1 There are few composers who seemed to seek the glow of public limelight more than Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944). Smyth fearlessly forged a career for (...) herself as a professional composer in Britain during a time when female musicians were largely regarded as inferior to male musicians and lacked equal educational and professional opportunities. Smyth’s brazen personality was evident from her early years; as a teenager, she battled for two years to gain her father’s approval to travel to Leipzig to further her musical studies. Smyth’s struggle for acceptance as a composer continued throughout her career; she composed large-scale works—including six operas—at a time when women were expected to write “feminine,” small-scale compositions (such as solo piano pieces and songs), and she fought unrelentingly to have her music performed. Throughout her career Smyth faced a barrage of sexist criticism, in which she was consistently referred to as a “lady composer” and alternatively praised and derided for writing “masculine” music: if a 1. Virginia Woolf, letter to Ethel Smyth (August 21, 1932), in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 5: 97. 336 Rachel Lumsden critic liked her work, it would be lauded for its “masculine strength,” and if a critic didn’t like her work, it would be admonished for exceeding the bounds of female propriety.2 Yet Smyth rarely flinched from battles. A defiant and prolific writer, Smyth also published an exhaustive array of books and memoirs: Impressions that Remained (1919), Streaks of Life (1921), A Three-Legged Tour in Greece (1927), A Final Burning of Boats (1928), Female Pipings in Eden (1933), Beecham and Pharaoh (1935), As Time Went On (1936), Inordinate (?) Affection (1936), Maurice Baring (1938), and What Happened Next (1940), using her literary works as a means of bringing her own experiences into the limelight. By chronicling the oppression and discrimination she consistently faced, she sought not only to draw attention to herself as a composer—whose works, in her mind, had been consistently and unjustly neglected by the public—but also to highlight the plight of female musicians in general. Smyth’s literary works are wide-ranging and cover a host of different subjects, including recollections about her own life, biographical portraits of close friends, excerpts from letters, reviews of her musical compositions, and her forthright opinions about women’s rights. A number of scholars have explored these different aspects of Ethel Smyth’s fascinating artistic career; however, most research on Smyth has focused either on her literary endeavors or her compositions. What is missing is a thoroughgoing analysis of the connections between the two. One exception is Elizabeth Wood, who has brilliantly discussed Smyth’s writings and music; however, many details of Smyth’s vast array of musical works still remain largely unexplored.3 This article examines 2. Smyth’s operas include Fantasio (1892–1894), Der Wald (1899–1901), The Wreckers (1902–1904), The Boatswain’s Mate (1913–1914), Fête Galante (1921– 1922), and Entente Cordiale (1923–1924). For more information about Smyth and the status of female musicians in Britain during this era, see Jane A. Bernstein, “‘Shout, Shout, Up with Your Song!’ Dame Ethel Smyth and the Changing Role of the British Woman Composer,” in Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950, ed. Jane Bowers and Judith Tick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 304–24; and Eugene Gates, “Damned If You Do and Damned If You Don’t: Sexual Aesthetics and the Music of Dame Ethel Smyth,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 31, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 63–71. 3. See Elizabeth Wood, “Performing Rights: A Sonography of Women’s Suffrage,” The Musical Quarterly 79, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 606–43; and Elizabeth Rachel Lumsden 337 a small, specific slice of Smyth’s oeuvre: her 1913 song “Possession,” dedicated to Emmeline Pankhurst (“E.P”), her friend and leader of... (shrink)

The author analyzes three waves of the crisis of democracy during the 20th and early 21st centuries. The first crisis of democracy in the early 20th century is caused by the emergence and development of public politics, which challenged the possibility to govern the masses having conflict potential, it balanced the power of the people and universal suffrage with the control of the media in order to maintain the stability of political system. The second wave of the crisis of (...) democracy (the last third of the 20th century) is associated with the destruction of the conventional world and the weakening of the nation-state; and its markers were: the imbalance between the branches of government, the domination of economics over politics, the predominance of equality over freedom, the problematic implementation of human rights, and, as a consequence, the inability to put into practice the national form of democracy. The third wave of crisis (early the 21st century) is accompanied by the transformation of democracy into post-democracy, in which the power of the people is replaced by the power of global capital, and the illusion of consent is reinforced by the prohibition of alternative points of view and the narrowing of the space of issues allowed for discussion in the name of public security. The crisis of the policy to achieve peace through the transformation of the balance of powers into a balance of interests called into question the principles of democracy. On the contrary, post-democracies justify the use of force to spread democracy around the world, and they take an active part in contemporary military conflicts, which can rightly be defined as hybrid proxy wars. Drawing on J. Habermas’s concept of communicative rationality, the author concludes that to overcome the crisis of democracy it is necessary to accept the very possibility of an alternative to this form of government and allow to discuss these previously marginalized issues as well as to maintain the return of the majority to genuine communication and politics, contribute to its enlightenment. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Biography: John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) Introduction to Part I, Mill's Moral and Political Philosophy Introduction to Part II, Mill's Logic, Metaphysics, and Epistemology.

Suffrage graphics constitute one of the first collective, ideological, artistic expressions by American women. Premised on the popular view of woman's nature as virtuous, responsible, and nurturant, this art nonetheless challenged traditional practices and demanded political change. Interrelationships between feminism, art, and the historical context are explored in this analysis of women's imagery.

The question of Russell’s engagement with feminist ideas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is helpfully illuminated, I argue, by comparison to some of his feminist contemporaries—namely, Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838–1927) and Emma Goldman (1869–1940). Like Woodhull and Goldman, Russell argues for women’s right to vote, a new sexual ethic, and a significant revision to marriage. These are paradigmatic feminist projects, and so would seem to suggest that Russell, particularly within Marriage and Morals, has significant philosophical overlap with (...) some of the feminist philosophers of his time. His similarities with feminist thinkers and activists Woodhull and Goldman on the classical feminist concerns of sex, suffrage, and marriage suggest that Russell’s views may yet find a place in the history of feminism, even if he does not. (shrink)

2020 marks 100 years of women’s suffrage in the U.S. Considering this anniversary and the Christian presumption in favor of democracy, this essay invites readers to honor all those who worked for women’s suffrage in two specific ways. First, it invites them to tell the whole truth about the movement, both its many moments of grace and its moral failures. Second, it encourages readers to make the connection between this ambiguous legacy and ongoing forms of voter suppression in (...) the U.S. and then to celebrate suffrage by finishing the fight for it. (shrink)

Hillel Steiner’s left-libertarian theory of justice is the most serious recent attempt to reconcile the ideals of (luck-egalitarian) equality and freedom. This attempt consists in an argument that a universal right to equal freedom, which in Steiner’s view means also a universal right to maximal freedom, implies a universal right to self-ownership and to an egalitarian share of the world’s natural resources. In this article, I argue that this argument fails on Steiner’s own terms. I argue that, on Steiner’s (...) conceptions of freedom, self-ownership, and an egalitarian share of the world’s natural resources, insofar as the right to equal freedom implies the right to self-ownership and to an egalitarian share of the world’s natural resources, it is incompatible with (luck-egalitarian) equality. (shrink)

The core of this book is a novel theory of distributive justice premised on the fundamental moral equality of persons. In the light of this theory, Rakowski considers three types of problems which urgently require solutions-- the distribution of resources, property rights, and the saving of life--and provides challenging and unconventional answers. Further, he criticizes the economic analysis of law as a normative theory, and develops an alternative account of tort and property law.

Bringing together the most influential essays in ethical philosophy throughout the twentieth century, this comprehensive collection examines the issues that form the basis of the modern understanding of a democratic society. The carefully selected articles debate the character of human, legal, institutional, and universal equality and justice. Topics and coverage include contemporary notions of justice and social equality; the conceptual foundation for requiring minimum justice and equality; discussions of who is entitled to justice and equality and who is obliged to (...) provide these conditions; and universal, procedural, legal concepts of justice and equality. This collection is a useful survey on timeless issues of interest to students and scholars in philosophy, law, policy, and international relations alike. This volume is available on its own or as part of the six-volume set, Equality and Justice . For a complete list of the volume titles in this set, see the listing for Equality and Justice [ISBN: 0-415-94142-3]. (shrink)

What does it mean to treat people as equals when the legacies of feudalism, religious persecution, authoritarian and oligarchic government have shaped the landscape within which we must construct something better? This question has come to dominate much constitutional practice as well as philosophical inquiry in the past 50 years. The combination of Second Wave Feminism with the continuing struggle for racial equality in the 1970s brought into sharp relief the variety of ways in which people can be treated unequally, (...) while respecting the formalities of constitutional government. Most obviously, the content of laws can mistreat them by wrongfully assuming that they are either threats to others, or that, like children, they need to be protected from harm through paternalistic limitations on their freedom of action. Or, as those concerned with class inequality have long noted, formal equality can create legal requirements, permissions, and prohibitions whose burdens fall predictably, and often solely, on groups who are already marginalised, and most in need of state protection. (Kairys, David 1990) Above all, what these two great political movements made plain, is that a concern for group inequality and, specifically, group injustice must figure in the formulation and adjudication of individual rights, if legal protections for equality are adequately to combat the causes of inequality. Getting to grips with that challenge, it became obvious, required going beyond the familiar analyses of inequality inherited from Liberalism and Marxism, given the many different ways in which people can be equal or unequal.(Hackett and Haslanger 2006, 3 - 15) In the first part of this chapter, I will seek to illustrate these claims, by focusing on efforts to reframe the theory and practice of constitutional equality given demands for sexual and racial equality. I will then show that analytic philosophy has also come to recognise the various non-reducible dimensions of equality in ways that reinforce the claims of critical legal theory, even as philosophers highlight their disconcerting consequences. If equality has multiple irreducible dimensions, conflicts between the legitimate demands of equality are unavoidable features of law and politics, even in the best possible world, and are likely to be particularly painful when set against a background of historical injustice. The chapter concludes with the challenges to democratic constitutionalism, and the scope for constructive responses to those challenges, which the rapprochement between critical and analytic thinking on equality suggests. (shrink)