Liberal Theory and the Nation

Political Theory

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 221-236

  Laitin, David D ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84992866304     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591798026002005     Document Type: Review

References (12)

1. See Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, forthcoming.
2. Stephen Holmes, Passions & Constraint (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 13. Despite his claim about the practicality of liberalism, an approach to politics that requires a sense of political context before moral judgment is assessed, twice in this volume (pp. 141, 261), nationalism is portrayed as inherently illiberal.
3. Chandran Kukathas, “Are There Any Cultural Rights?” Political Theory 20, no. 1 (1992): 105–39.
4. Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
5. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment under Uncertainty,” Science 185, 4157 (1974): 1124–31.
6. James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Explaining Interethnic Cooperation,” American Political Science Review 90, no. 4 (1996): 715–35.
7. The issue becomes more complex when different cultures frame moral debates within different dimensions, and are thus attuned to different sorts of violations. I address this point in “Political Culture and Political Preferences,” American Political Science Review 82, no. 2 (1988). This goes beyond the recognition by Kymlicka that cultures provide their members with a “range of meaningful options” (p. 89).
8. Ernest Gelmer, “Nationalism in the Vacuum,” in Thinking Theoretically about Sovie Nationalities, ed. Alexander J. Motyl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 243–54 Gellner defines the “potato principle,” suggesting that nationalists claim historic occupancy only if their people held the land at the time in which potatoes were at the frontier of agricultural technology.
9. Geoffrey Brahm Levey, “Equality, Autonomy, and Cultural Rights,” Political Theory 25 no. 2 (1997): 215–48. Levey challenges the national homeland/ethnic immigrant distinction as a basis for a political theory of autonomy. Kymlicka uses this distinction as a way of categorizing typical demands made upon liberal states.
10. There is an advantage to having a viewpoint. It gives the reader a clear sense of how to relativize the argument, coming as it were from a place. Hardin, in contrast, denies belonging to anywhere. This may appear to be an advantage from the point of view of objectivity. But Hardin provides no means by which one is able to get one's bearings. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1968), on seeking absolutely clear-cut propositions, stated: “We have got on to slippery ice where there is not friction, and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!”—of, in the case at hand, Canada.
11. Charles Larmore, The Romantic Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
12. I elaborate on this example in “National Revivals and Violence,” Archives Européennes de Sociologie vol. 36, 1 (spring 1995) pp. 3–43.