Living without freedom: Cosmopolitanism at home and the rule of law

Political Theory

Volumn 37, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 539-561

  Bohman, James ^a  

^a SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Democracy; Legal status; Nondomination; Republicanism; Rule of law

Indexed keywords

EID: 69249224448     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591709335180     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. See James Bohman, Transnational Democracy and Nondomination in Republicanism and Political Theory, ed. Cécile Laborde and J. Maynor (London: Basil Blackwell, 2008), 190-216.
2. See also Bohman, Democracy across Borders (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), chap. 2.
3. See Daniel Deudney's fascinating discussion of the Philadelphian system of American federalism in his recovery of the republican tradition of international relations in Bounding Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), chap. 6.
4. See also John Tomasi, Sovereignty, Commerce, and Cosmopolitanism, Social Philosophy and Policy (2003): 223-46.
5. For these criticism of the incompleteness of nondomination as the "overarching" category for the injustice of unfreedom, see Patchen Markell, The Insufficiency of Nondomination, Political Theory 36 (2008): 9-36. In the case of migrants without status, any a revision of the republican conception of nondomination ought to reflect the new circumstances in which large numbers of noncitizens live in the midst of citizens and are thus vulnerable to domination by them.
6. For a normative conception of domination, see Henry Richardson, Democratic Autonomy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 2 and 3. As he puts it, domination is the capacity to make people's lives and situations worse by arbitrarily imposing duties on them, or by arbitrarily purporting to impose duties on them (p. 34). However, by assuming that dominated and the dominator share a common civil status within a democratic society, Richardson's account cannot solve the problem of the domination of noncitizens by citizens. Furthermore, in contrast to my view, Richardson sees domination with respect to rights only in their violation, rather than also in the denial or absence of their status.
7. Philip Pettit, Republicanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 39.
8. Ibid., 82.
9. Ibid., 69; also 132.
10. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971), 297-98.
11. Ibid., 296-97.
12. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. M. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 30.
13. Ibid., 241.
14. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 32.
15. Rawls, Kantian Constructivism and Moral Theory, in Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 331.
16. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 30-31.
17. Ibid., 241.
18. For this reason, the voluntary surrender of one's freedom entirely to another is impossible for Kant, since it is only as a person that one may enter into a contract. Thus, the right to freedom is imprescriptible and unalienable. See Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 104. Hegel similarly argues that "my right to my distinct personality in general and to my universal freedom of the will" are all imprescriptible and inalienable.
19. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 92
20. Pettit, Republicanism, 124.
21. See Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
22. See also Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
23. Iris Young, Equality of Whom? Social Groups and Judgments of Injustice, Journal of Political Philosophy 9 (2001): 1-18.
24. Otfried Höffe, Kant's Cosmopolitan Theory of Law and Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 121. The pun "Recht auf Recht" that Höffe employs exploits the well-known ambiguity of Recht as both right and law; it is thus both the right to right and the right to law, where the latter specifies the meaning of the former.
25. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 105-06.
26. See John Bowe, Nobodies: American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the Global Economy (New York: Random House, 2007).
27. Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed (Columbia, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004), 40.
28. H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 212.
29. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famine (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986), 165-66.
30. See Mark Walters, The Common Law Constitution and Legal Cosmopolitanism, in The Unity of Public Law, ed. David Dyzenhaus (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2004), 413-54. Along these lines, Blackstone argued that "the law of nations is part of common law".
31. See Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), in which such principles "include no one should benefit from his fraud and that courts should not be the instruments of injustice".
32. Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 308.
33. Charles Sabel, Constitutional Orders: Trust Building and Response to Change, in Contemporary Capitalism, ed. J. R. Hollingsworth and R. Boyer (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1997), 159.
34. Joseph Weiler points to the case of Gaygusuz versus Austria that went to the European Court of Human Rights and led to the extension of social security benefits to third country nationals. See J. H. Weiler, An 'Ever Closer Union' in Need of a Human Rights Policy, European Journal of International Law 9 (1998): 658-723.
35. On the rights of immigrants, regardless of status, to political participation in the EU, see Iseult Honohan, Civic Republicanism (London: Routledge, 2002), 238-39.
36. Besides grounding the universal legal status of all persons in the cosmopolitan constitutions, the extension of political status to all human beings could be fulfilled on in the political community of humanity. While such a conception can be shown to be desirable on republican grounds, I will not offer such a defense here.See James Bohman, Democracy across Borders, chap. 3.
37. See also Bohman, Transnational Democracy and Nondomination, 190-216.
38. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999), 184.