Legitimacy and Representation beyond Elections (Part Two)

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-127
Author(s):  
Hélène Landemore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Selection Mechanism ◽  
Minimal Form ◽  
Liquid Democracy ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Electoral Representation

This chapter determines whether non-elected bodies with intrinsic democratic credentials, such as mini-publics and self-selected representative groups like social movements, also have the legitimacy to make binding decisions for the rest of the polity. It returns to the question of political legitimacy and proposes that the democratic legitimacy of representatives comes not from individual consent, as eighteenth-century theory of legitimacy understood it, but a plurality of factors, including majoritarian authorization as a necessary but insufficient condition. Majoritarian authorization need not be of directly individual representatives but, instead, of the selection mechanism through which they are selected. The chapter then considers the circumstances under which self-selected representatives can acquire a minimal form of democratic legitimacy even in the absence of any explicit majoritarian authorization of the selection mechanism or of the individual persons thereby selected. It also looks at the problems posed by potential conflicts of legitimacy between different democratic representatives and assesses how these problems may be solved. Finally, the chapter returns to electoral representation and asks whether it could be sufficiently democratized through so-called liquid democracy schemes, which would create a system labelled as “liquid representation.”

DEMOCRATIC LEGITIMACY AND COERCIVELY ENFORCED BORDERS

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Michael Rabinder James
Keyword(s):  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The State ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Border Enforcement ◽  
Plausible Account ◽  
State Coercion ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Do So

Arash Abizadeh argues that all coercive enforcement of borders is democratically illegitimate, since foreigners do not participate in the creation of border laws. It is irrelevant whether the border laws are substantively just or unjust, whether the state enforcing them is affluent or poor, and whether the individual being coerced autonomously chooses to cross the border or is forced by desperate circumstances to do so. His argument involves (1) a foundational commitment to individual autonomy; (2) a normative premise that coercion requires democratic legitimation; (3) and an empirical premise that border enforcement laws subject all foreigners to state coercion. In this essay, I contest each of these components. I challenge the empirical premise through examples illustrating the empirical limits to state coercion over foreigners. I contest the normative premise by showing that state coercion requires democratic legitimation only for those involuntarily and indefinitely subject to it. Finally, I challenge the commitment to individual autonomy as foundational to political legitimacy by distinguishing political legitimacy from political authority. I conclude by demonstrating how my critique renders a more plausible account of the normative limits of border coercion, one that coheres more readily with stances advanced by Javier Hidalgo and Abizadeh himself.

Part I: Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tilman Rodenhäuser
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Basic Principle ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Laws Of War ◽  
Connected Group ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Contemporary Practice

Analysing the development of the concept of non-state parties to an armed conflict from the writings of philosophers in the eighteenth century through international humanitarian law (IHL) treaty law to contemporary practice, three threads can be identified. First, as pointed out by Rousseau almost two and a half centuries ago, one basic principle underlying the laws of war is that war is not a relation between men but between entities. Accordingly, the lawful objective of parties cannot be to harm opponents as individuals but only to overcome the entity for which the individual fights. This necessitates that any party to an armed conflict is a collective, organized entity and not a loosely connected group of individuals. Second, de Vattel already stressed that civil war is fought between two parties who ‘acknowledge no common judge’ and have no ‘common superior’ on earth....

Natural Law Republicanism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Hawley
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The People ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

By any metric, Cicero’s works are some of the most widely read in the history of Western thought. This book suggests that perhaps Cicero’s most lasting and significant contribution to philosophy lies in helping to inspire the development of liberalism. Individual rights, the protection of private property, and political legitimacy based on the consent of the governed are often taken to be among early modern liberalism’s unique innovations and part of its rebellion against classical thought. However, this book demonstrates that Cicero’s thought played a central role in shaping and inspiring the liberal republican project. Cicero argued that liberty for individuals could arise only in a res publica in which the claims of the people to be sovereign were somehow united with a commitment to universal moral law, which limits what the people can rightfully do. Figures such as Hugo Grotius, John Locke, and John Adams sought to work through the tensions in Cicero’s vision, laying the groundwork for a theory of politics in which the freedom of the individual and the people’s collective right to rule were mediated by natural law. This book traces the development of this intellectual tradition from Cicero’s original articulation through the American founding. It concludes by exploring how modern political ideas remain dependent on the conception of just politics first elaborated by Rome’s great philosopher-statesman.

Civil Death

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Dayan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Marginalization ◽  
Social Death ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Civil Death ◽  
Independent Relation

This chapter analyzes what happens to persons in two cases: the free person of property who commits a felony and undergoes civil death and the enslaved person, who, as bearer of “negative personhood,” has undergone social death. In most instances, though the person declared civilly dead has property to lose, the slave who never had property is property in fact, and can never have any independent relation to property. However, both of these characterizations possess juridical significance in so far as they recognize the individual as “a kind of civil ghost.” Rather than focus on the various and sometimes diffuse consequences of social marginalization, the chapter traces instead a developing logic in modern law. By the eighteenth century, Judeo-Christian antecedents and inchoate traditions of punishment were redrawn and fully articulated as a rationale appropriate to the needs of emerging modernity.

Language, Religion, Nation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Abstract Entities ◽  
Individual Character ◽  
Collective Phenomenon ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual

This chapter traces the popular usage of “genius” in the nineteenth century. If genius no longer has the self-evidence that was attributed to it in the eighteenth century, this is due in part to the profligacy with which the word had come to be used. While the term is widely invoked—in fact, ever more widely so—it is rarely the subject of sustained theoretical scrutiny of the type established by aesthetics and philosophy in the previous century. The genius celebrated in this popular usage was, more often than not, a collective phenomenon linking success or supremacy with the individual character of institutional or abstract entities in a way that combined genius as ingenium with genius as the form of superlative excellence.

Individual and Communal Freedom and the Performance History of the St. Matthew Passion by Bach and Mendelssohn

2021 ◽  
pp. 147-179
Author(s):  
Markus Rathey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Liturgical Music ◽  
Original Performance ◽  
Performance History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Felix Mendelssohn ◽  
Performance Conditions

When Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy performed Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in the concert hall of the Berlin Singakademie in 1829, he not only transferred a piece of liturgical music into a secular space, but he also made numerous cuts that changed the theological profile of Bach’s composition. The essay explores the theology of the St. Matthew Passion in the context of early eighteenth-century theology and gives an overview of the original performance conditions and the audiences at the performances in Bach’s time. The second half of the essay analyses how these parameters changed when Mendelssohn conducted the Passion in 1829. It becomes clear that the sociological profile of the audience (educated middle and upper class who had to pay money to attend the performance) remained essentially the same, while the theology shifted from a focus on the freedom of the individual in Bach’s time to an emphasis on the community (congregation, Volk, nation) in the adapted version the Singakademie presented to its listeners in 1829.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
S. Elizabeth Penry
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Common People ◽  
New Towns ◽  
The Common ◽  
Planned Towns ◽  
The Town ◽  
Over Time

In the sixteenth century, Spaniards forcibly resettled Andeans into planned towns called reducciones. Andeans adapted the political and religious institutions of the new towns, the cabildo (town council) and the cofradías (confraternities), and made them their own, organizing them by the Andean social form, the ayllu. Over time, political legitimacy and authority within towns was transferred from traditional native hereditary lords, the caciques, to the common people of the town, who called themselves the común. Although a Spanish word, común took on Andean meaning as it was the word used to translate terms for collective land and the collective people of a town. It became a recognized shorthand for a political philosophy empowering common people. In the late eighteenth-century era of Atlantic Revolutions, the común rose up against its caciques, in an Enlightenment-from-below moment of popular sovereignty.

Costly Signaling and Gendered Social Strategies among Slaves in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake: An Archaeological Perspective

2010 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jillian E. Galle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Costly Signaling ◽  
Behavioral Strategies ◽  
Social Strategies ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Economic Relationships ◽  
Historically Situated ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Enslaved African Americans

Evolutionary approaches to agency offer some of the most promising frameworks for identifying individual agents and their archaeological correlates. Agency theory calls attention to the individual as the fundamental feature of human relations, and evolutionary theory provides historically situated models that allow archaeologists to precisely investigate the complex behavioral strategies that underlie artifact patterns. The following paper offers one such model. Using data from 41 slave-site occupations from eighteenth-century Virginia, I explore how and why enslaved African Americans actively participated in the burgeoning "consumer revolution" that swept across the early modern Atlantic World. Artifact patterning suggests that the acquisition and display of costly imported goods functioned as a form of communication for slaves in both public and private venues. The data show that enslaved women and men used several different consumption strategies to solidify social and economic relationships within precarious and rapidly changing environments. Signaling theory, derived from evolutionary theory, illuminates the contextual factors that structured slaves’ consumer choices and provides a model for understanding their choices as the result of dynamic and mutually beneficial behaviors.

Literary Knowledge

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-43
Author(s):  
Tita Chico
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Fundamental Component ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Tool

Natural philosophy in the long eighteenth century connoted a sense of modernity and enlightenment, attributes that bound science to meanings in excess of its practice and consumption. The pliancy of science as a trope finds support in reflections on language as a scientific tool by Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and other natural philosophers. The two dominant technologies of the experimental imagination are the observed particular and the modest witness. Observed particulars of empirical study are those nuggets of data that disclose themselves and, in their revelation, produce knowledge. The modest witness is the individual who is objective by virtue of erasing himself through his privilege. Tropes are literary tools that not only enable practitioners to describe scientific findings, but also enable an even more fundamental component of experimentalism: literariness makes possible the conceptualization of scientific findings and the individual who produces them.

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