Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Brennan
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Central Unit ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Unit Of Analysis ◽  
Moral Problems ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Modern Nation State ◽  
Normative Political Theory

Few political theorists have read Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons or incorporated its insights into their work. At first glance, it may seem to be of interest only to social scientists, with little relevance to purely normative political theory. On the contrary, Ostrom’s work in fact shows a kind of presumptuousness in moral theory. It illustrates that theorists tend to assume rather than prove that the central unit of analysis is the modern nation-state. It further shows that theorists may be unable to design solutions to moral problems or problems of justice; they may, at best, only be able to identify such solutions when they appear.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 239-247
Author(s):  
Santana Khanikar
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The People ◽  
Observable Behaviour ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Normative Political Theory

If the state in democracies like India engages in violence, then is this state still accepted by the people? The conception of legitimacy in this study is about observable behaviour, about if and why people accept power holders as authority, and not about whether it is the ideal way to engage with violent power holders within the discourses of normative political theory. And what we see in both the field-sites of this study, is acceptance, though it may be slow and appear flickering or contextual at time. The specific vision that the nation-state is, marked by geographical boundaries and internal sovereignty often needs to use violence to legitimize its existence. Such use of violence does not appear to be leading to a dis-illusionment with the form or the institutions of the state.

The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary Birth Pangs of Modernity

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wokler ◽  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
Modern Nation State

This chapter's overriding objective is to explain how both the invention of our modern understanding of the social sciences, on the one hand, and the post-Enlightenment establishment of the modern nation-state, on the other, encapsulated doctrines which severed modernity from the Enlightenment philosophy which is presumed to have inspired it. It offers illustrations not so much of the unity of political theory and practice in the modern world as of their disengagement. In providing here some brief remarks on how post-Enlightenment justifications of modernity came to part company from their Enlightenment prefigurations, it hopes to sketch an account of certain links between principles and institutions which bears some relation to both Enlightenment and Hegelian conceptual history.

scholarly journals A postmodern mandala? Moving beyond methodological nationalism

HumaNetten ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 88
Author(s):  
Claire Sutherland
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Central Unit ◽  
Unit Of Analysis ◽  
Methodological Nationalism ◽  
National Centre ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Gravitational Pull ◽  
And Migration

The colonial translation of the “nation-state logic” to Southeast Asia is commonly understood to have superseded what O.W. Wolters called the pre-colonial mandala model, in which power was exerted by a sort of central “sun king” whose gravitational pull weakened with distance and was overlapped by other spheres of power in a complex system of tributary relationships. The historian David Biggs has argued that, in accepting the undeniable importance of national sovereignty in contemporary political analyses of Southeast Asia, there has been too definitive a break with pre-existing understandings of power relations, which may prove useful to explaining the particularities of politics today. In political science, the translation of nationalism and sovereignty to Southeast Asia is reflected in an entrenched “methodological nationalism,” whereby the nation-state is frequently taken for granted as the central unit of analysis. Paying attention to the “margins” of society still implicitly assumes a national centre, for example. Historians of Vietnam, including Keith Taylor and Li Tana, have made significant advances in loosening the “stranglehold” of nationalist historiography. Anthropologists and geographers of cosmopolitanism and migration have also long questioned the analytical usefulness of bordered nation-states.  Building on these insights, the article calls for a paradigm shift in political enquiry and playfully proposes the “post-modern mandala” as an alternative to methodological nationalism applied to Southeast Asia.

What Normative Facts Should Political Theory Be About?

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-220
Author(s):  
Christian List ◽  
Valentini Laura
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Coarse Grained ◽  
The Political ◽  
Similar Question ◽  
Inadmissible Evidence ◽  
Public Reasoning ◽  
Moral Theories ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Normative Political Theory

Just as different sciences deal with different facts—say, physics versus biology—so we may ask a similar question about normative theories. Is normative political theory concerned with the same normative facts as moral theory or different ones? By developing an analogy with the sciences, this chapter argues that the normative facts of political theory belong to a higher—more coarse-grained—level than those of moral theory. The latter are multiply realizable by the former: competing facts at the moral level can underpin the same facts at the political one. Consequently, some questions that moral theories answer are indeterminate at the political level. This proposal offers a novel interpretation of John Rawls’s idea that, in public reasoning, we should abstract away from comprehensive moral doctrines. The chapter contrasts its distinction between facts at different levels with the distinction between admissible and inadmissible evidence, and discusses some implications for the practice of political theory.

George Washington's Romance: Plotting the Federal City, 1791–1800

Prospects ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Sarah Luria
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Modern Nation State

Washington, D.C., was born from the marriage of literary, economic, and political revolutions of the late 18th century, when the expansion of the marketplace, the rise of the novel, and the increased circulation of print spawned a bourgeois public sphere and, with it, the modern nation-state. Washington, D.C., was from the start an imagined city, created through the circulation of booster literature to attract investors and so solidify a rational political order. Washington, D.C., arose precisely from this need to ground the imagined landscapes of the Enlightenment, to turn the visionary into the visible and political theory into fact.

The Riddle of the Sands

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Brayton
Keyword(s):  
Coastal Zone ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Intertidal Zone ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Aesthetic Appeal ◽  
Secret Service ◽  
German Coast ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Modern Nation State

The aesthetic appeal of coasts is due in part to the indeterminacy of the intertidal zone. The imagination finds room to play where land and sea meet. This chapter explores the coastal zone that lies at the heart of a novel considered by many to be the first modern spy thriller, Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service. Childers develops the notion of coastal indeterminacy as a figure for the boundaries, ambitions, and limitations of the modern nation-state. The journey of Childers’s characters through a north Atlantic archipelago that extends from the German coast draws a line of association between Europe and Britain, whose form depends on coastlines, estuaries, and shallows. In following this course, Childers creates a narrative fiction that shifts between charts, borders, and languages.

scholarly journals The Concept of Feasibility: A Multivocal Account

Res Publica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Guillery
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Common View ◽  
The World ◽  
Common Objection ◽  
The Common

AbstractA common objection to a proposal or theory in political philosophy is that it is not feasible to realise what it calls for. This is commonly taken to be sufficient to reject a proposal or theory: feasibility, on this common view, operates as a straightforward constraint on moral and political theory, whatever is not feasible is simply ruled out. This paper seeks to understand what we mean when we say that some proposal or outcome is or is not feasible. It will argue that no single binary definition can be given. Rather, there is a whole range of possible specifications of the term ‘feasible’, each of which selects a range of facts of the world to hold fixed. No single one of these possible specifications, though, is obviously privileged as giving the appropriate understanding of ‘feasibility’ tout court. The upshot of my account of feasibility, then, will be that the common view of feasibility as a straightforward constraint cannot be maintained: in order to reject a moral theory, it will not be sufficient simply to say that it is not feasible.

Normative Political Theory and Global Migration Governance

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. e1176
Author(s):  
Marcelo Santos
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Important Advance ◽  
Global Migration ◽  
United Nations General ◽  
United Nations General Assembly ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Normative Political Theory

Based on the main contributions of normative political theory on global justice and migration ethics, this article assesses the global Compacts on refugees and migration, approved by the United Nations General Assembly in December 2018. The set of conclusions indicates that the Compacts constitute an important advance in global moral and political projects and commitments. However, the application of their predicted terms can bring about problems, distortions, and impasses in the sharing of responsibilities.

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.

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