Global legal pluralism as fact and norm

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
TURKULER ISIKSEL
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Legal Pluralism ◽  
Value Pluralism ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
Legal Regimes ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Intellectual Foundations ◽  
Pluralistic World

AbstractThis article interrogates the intellectual foundations of global legal pluralism as a descriptive and normative position, and assesses its core claims with reference to the changing status of individuals in the postnational realm. In order to uncover the normative core of the pluralist position, the article turns to the rich tradition of value pluralism in political philosophy, particularly as articulated by Isaiah Berlin. It argues that as a normative position, pluralism – whether applied to the abstract sphere of values or the concrete realm of legal regimes – is normatively underdetermined, offering too little guidance as to how the conflicts endemic to a pluralistic world ought to be resolved. Unless it is supplemented by other, more substantive principles of political legitimacy such as democracy, freedom, equality, or justice, the principle of pluralism applied to the global legal realm is poised to reproduce, even exacerbate, existing inequalities of power and resources among those whom it affects.

Isaiah Berlin

2018 ◽  
pp. 164-184
Author(s):  
Seyla Benhabib
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Value Pluralism ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
Civic Republicanism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Judith Shklar ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter analyzes Isaiah Berlin's work, stating that the relationship of liberalism to Berlin's value pluralism remains fraught, as does the question whether value pluralism can avoid relativism. Notably, Judith Shklar and Berlin admired each other and shared a skeptical temperament as well as a dedication to the study of the history of ideas as the indispensable method of pursuing political philosophy in their time. Neither shared Hannah Arendt's conviction that the legacy of failed revolutions could only be countered by the activist civic republicanism of self-governing communities. The chapter also contextualizes the varying views of Berlin's work and persona through the prism of Max Weber's doctrine of value pluralism.

Value Pluralism and Monotheism

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 818-840
Author(s):  
George Crowder
Keyword(s):  
Modern Society ◽  
Value Pluralism ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
A Value ◽  
Religious Accommodation ◽  
Pluralist Approach

AbstractHow far can monotheism be reconciled with the pluralism characteristic of modern societies? In this article, I focus on the “value pluralism” of Isaiah Berlin, which I suggest captures a deeper level of plurality than Rawls's more familiar version of pluralism. However, some critics have objected that Berlinian pluralism is too controversial an idea in which to ground liberalism because it is profoundly at odds with the monotheism professed by so many citizens of a modern society. I argue that monotheists can be value pluralists as long as they do not insist that their faith is superior to all others. This pluralist position is exemplified by elements of the interfaith movement, according to which many religions are recognized as having roughly equal value. I also argue that a value-pluralist approach to religious accommodation, if it can be achieved, may be more stable than the uneasy combination of disapproval and restraint involved in the more orthodox solution to conflict among religions, toleration.

The Origins of Temporal Legitimacy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andre Santos Campos
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fundamental Distinction ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
Normative Political Theory

Historical analyses of the relations between political theory and time often hinge on two claims. The first is that political theorists have until recently put less emphasis on the future than the past when debating political legitimacy and obligation. The second is that the history of political theory draws a fundamental distinction between theories that invoke time to legitimate political structures and theories that reject temporal considerations in favor of timeless principles. This chapter disputes these two claims by maintaining that competing languages of legitimacy harbor different and interrelated conceptions of temporality. A survey of time conceptions in the history of political philosophy shows that normative political theory is inherently multitemporal, involving double regard for the past and the future. And, since even tenseless principles of legitimacy often depend on temporally related forms of formulation and application, considerations about time seem inescapable in normative political theory.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Nurfadzilah Yahaya
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Legal Pluralism ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Legal Regimes ◽  
The Indian Ocean

This introductory chapter flips the more common historical perspective that European imperialism led to new patterns of legal pluralism across empires that spawned possibilities for interpolity contact and trade, acting as catalysts for the emergence of global legal regimes. It demonstrates how British and Dutch territorial jurisdictions expressed very specific relationships between territory, authority, and forms of law, and it simultaneously puts into stark relief the preponderance of diasporic Arab merchants generating their own jurisdictions across the Indian Ocean in tandem with those of the European colonist. Not only were these Arabs attuned to legal pluralism being the operative condition of law, they were also acutely aware of jurisdictional ordering and the concentration of power across time and space. The chapter proposes a spatial repositioning of the Indian Ocean from the perspective of Southeast Asia outward toward Hadramawt, a region located in present-day Yemen from which most Arabs in Southeast Asia originated. Ultimately, it presents the result of the legislation after members of the Hadhrami diaspora attempted to bring their own regulation with them, inscribing territorial lines across the Indian Ocean through law.

Another Voluntarism

Legitimacy ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 43-66
Author(s):  
Paul Weithman
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Social Contract Theory ◽  
The Public ◽  
Corporate Body ◽  
The Social ◽  
Real Work ◽  
Moral Claims ◽  
Philosophical Questions

John Rawls’s presentation of his famous principle of legitimacy raises a number of exegetical and philosophical questions which his texts leave unresolved. The key to their solution lies in a claim Rawls makes about the character of political power. Rawls uses language familiar from social contract theory to describe that power, saying that it is the power of the public as a corporate body. This chapter considers but ultimately rejects the suggestion that Rawls’s treatment of legitimacy is Lockean. Rather, Rawls follows Kant in thinking that talk of a contractual incorporation is best understood as a way of expressing fundamental moral claims about the object of a constitution, about citizens’ standing, and about legislators’ duties. These are the claims that do the real work in Rawls’s account of legitimacy. To show this, the chapter lays out Kant’s conception of the social contract and argues that we can draw on that conception to understand Rawls’s account of political legitimacy. It then spells out the philosophical pay-offs of the reading offered here by showing how it solves some textual puzzles and how Rawls’s account differs from others that have recently been defended in political philosophy. The chapter concludes by mentioning some lingering questions about Rawlsian legitimacy.

scholarly journals MEMAHAMI SEJARAH INTELEKTUAL ISAIAH BERLIN (1909-1997)

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 279
Author(s):  
Kamaruzzaman Bustamam ◽  
Ahmad Ahmad
Keyword(s):  
Western Thought ◽  
Analytical Philosophy ◽  
The West ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Intellectual Foundations

This article aims to examine the biography of Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), a philosopher from Oxford University. Berlin is a thinker who against the Enlightenment, which he made several criticisms to Western thought. To do this, he has produced some written works that edited by Henry Hardy. The editor has contributed to introduce the ideas of Berlin to the West. This study is an introduction on Berlin by looking his works and his intellectual foundations. Finally, it is argued that Berlin has authored many works and using the analytical philosophy as his intellectual foundations.

scholarly journals Fighting Corruption in the Italian City-State

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Geltner
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
Administrative Records ◽  
Good Government ◽  
Participatory Politics ◽  
Italian City ◽  
The Rich ◽  
City States ◽  
City State

While auditing practices for public officials existed in all the Italian peninsula during the communal era, they had nowhere as prominent a place, or better surviving records, as in the Italian city-states. In this chapter, the author shows that the regulation of sindacato, an end-of-term audit for urban officials, was of a kind with normative and literary discourses about accountability, good government and the common good, but argues that these cannot be seen in isolation from documentary evidence. Based on a detailed analysis of the rich judicial and administrative records from fourteenth-century Perugia, this chapter shows that the connection between accountability of office and political legitimacy implicit in the sindacato is less straightforward than commonly thought. Rather than a marker of transparent, participatory politics, the sindacato was a complex, inherently biased, often slow and ineffectual mechanism, which could conceal as much as it revealed about the administration of the city.

Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 4

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Health Insurance ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
The State ◽  
Luck Egalitarianism ◽  
Institutional Legitimacy ◽  
Mandatory Health Insurance ◽  
Fourth Volume

This is the fourth volume of the continuing series, Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. We collect here new and refereed work by leaders in the field. Authors in this volume are Zofia Stemplowska and Adam Swift, Thomas Sinclair, Allen Buchanan, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Zoltan Miklosi, Ralf M. Bader, Alex Voorhoeve, and Alex Zakaras. The chapters are grouped into three categories: Legitimacy, Egalitarianism, and Liberty and Coercion. They address such various themes as the interaction of justice, equality, and political legitimacy; difficulties in the Kantian account of the state and proposals for removing them; institutional legitimacy reevaluated; luck egalitarianism; relational egalitarianism; the nature of liberty; mandatory health insurance and at what level it might best benefit a population; and the issue of citizens’ complicity in their government’s immoral actions with an analysis of various levels of such possible complicity.

Value Pluralism and Legal Pluralism

2020 ◽  
pp. 403-423
Author(s):  
Sanne Taekema
Keyword(s):  
Legal Pluralism ◽  
Theoretical Explanation ◽  
Value Pluralism ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
Life Choices ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Core Feature ◽  
Variable Content ◽  
Normative Considerations

In this chapter, the focus is on the question how different ideas of pluralism, legal pluralism, and value pluralism, relate. The background to the question is the observation that in normative theories of global legal pluralism liberal principles are a core feature. The liberal emphasis on the need to respect the life choices of individuals shows affinity to the philosophical idea of value pluralism, but then the question arises how a liberal idea of value pluralism relates to legal pluralism. Moreover, we may ask whether there are alternative accounts of value pluralism that can be linked to legal pluralism in a more productive way. This chapter explores one such account: that of German legal philosopher Gustav Radbruch. The chapter sees the existence of various legal orders and value-laden practices as a phenomenon in need of conceptual clarification and theoretical explanation, which involves normative considerations. Both legal and value pluralism are issues on which a theoretical explanation of the phenomenon almost inevitably gives rise to the normative question how to deal with conflicting legal norms or values. Radbruch’s theory of legal values provides a different perspective on the role of values in global legal pluralism than implied by the more commonly used liberal outlook. Radbruch’s work yields a criterion to distinguish law from other normative orders, it accounts for variable content of global legal orders, and it makes sense of the tensions between the basic values of law and the relative importance they have in different legal orders.

The Crucifix Dispute and Value Pluralism

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-320
Author(s):  
Beata Polanowska-Sygulska
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Value Pluralism ◽  
Final Decision ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
European Court ◽  
Ethical Monism

Abstract This article seeks to interpret the striking divergence between the two judgments passed by the European Court of Human Rights in the Lautsi v Italy case in terms of value pluralism. The latter is a hotly debated position in ethics, brought to life in the second half of the twentieth century by Isaiah Berlin. Pluralism elucidates these in interesting ways. First, value pluralism sheds light on three major aspects of the trial before the European Court of Human Rights: the nature of the collision of values, the discrepancy between the two decisions, and the rationale of the final judgment. Secondly, this is my thesis that while the first judgment fits ethical monism, which underlies Dworkin’s ‘one right answer’ theory, the second ruling chimes with pluralism. The pluralist spirit of the Grand Chamber’s final decision turned Europe away from the path of Americanization.

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