`Representing and Being Represented in Turn’ - A Symposium on Hélène Landemore’s Open Democracy.”

Hélene Landemore’s Open Democracy challenges today’s democracies to meet their legitimacy deficits by opening up a wide array of participatory opportunities, from enhanced forms of direct democracy, to internet crowdsourcing, to representation through random selection to a citizens’ assembly: “representing and being represented in turn” (p. xvii).  Her aim: to replace citizen consent with citizen power.  The critics advance both praise and misgivings.  Joshua Cohen would prefer Landemore’s proffered innovations as supplements, not alternatives, to the current system. Daniela Cammack would prefer more emphasis on the many forms of mass gathering, not representation.  Peter Stone considers citizens’ assemblies inadequate for popular sovereignty.  Christopher Achen warns of problems inaccurate representation, through both self-selection into the lottery and domination in the discussion. Ethan Lieb argues that particular innovations are useful only in some contexts, and that in each citizens should learn their appropriate role responsibilities. Landemore responds by agreeing, clarifying and rebutting.

Cross Scripts: Inscribing Hebrew into Jewish American Literature

Most Jewish immigrants to America during the early 20th century arrived speaking Yiddish or Ladino and using Hebrew and Aramaic for liturgical purposes. When subsequent generations abandoned the first two languages, Hebrew and Aramaic were retained, used primarily for liturgy and rites of passage. Jewish American writers have often inserted Hebrew into their English texts by either reproducing the original alphabet or transliterating into Latin letters. This essay focuses on diverse strategies for representing liturgical Hebrew with an emphasis on the poetic, thematic, and sociolinguistic aspects of these expressions of both home and the foreign. Hebrew transliteration is discussed for its literary (rather than phonetic) rendering, for its multilingual creative contact with the other languages and cultures of each narrative. Among the authors whose works are discussed are Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Joshua Cohen, Achy Obejas, and Gary Shteyngart.

Incoherent but Reasonable

A strength of liberal political institutions is their ability to accommodate pluralism, both allowing divergent comprehensive doctrines as well as constructing the common ground necessary for diverse people to live together. A pressing question is how far such pluralism extends. Which comprehensive doctrines are simply beyond the pale and need not be accommodated by a political consensus? Rawls attempted to keep the boundaries of reasonable disagreement quite broad by infamously denying that political liberalism need make reference to the concept of truth, a claim that has been criticized by Joseph Raz, Joshua Cohen, and David Estlund. In this paper, we argue that these criticisms fail due to the fact that political liberalism can remain non-committal on the nature of truth, leaving the concept of truth in the domain of comprehensive doctrines while still avoiding the issues raised by Raz, Cohen, and Estlund. Further substantiating this point is the fact that Rawls would, and should, include parties in the overlapping consensus whose views on truth may be incoherent. Once it is seen that political liberalism allows such incoherence to reasonable parties, it is clear that the inclusion of truth and the requirement of coherence urged by Raz, Cohen, and Estlund requires more of reasonable people than is necessary for a political consensus.

Ideas That Matter

In this book, leading philosophers take up three ideas that are prominent in the work of Joshua Cohen. The first idea relates to reinvigorating democracy—improving collective decision-making by free and equal citizens. The second idea found in this volume relates to confronting injustice. What reason do those who have been systematically excluded from democracy’s promise have to obey the law or work together with others who have turned a blind eye on their situation? The third idea might be understood loosely in terms of political principles in an interdependent world. Where traditionally, theories of justice took the nation or the state to set the scope of principles of distributive justice, the rise of new institutions has put pressure on that bounded conception. This collection includes work by Martha Nussbaum, Charles Sabel, Stuart White, Archon Fung, and Chris Lebron, among others.

Introduction

The introduction to this collection of essays by leading academic scholars in the field of contemporary political philosophy presents the main themes of the book as these relate to, and are inspired by, the work of Joshua Cohen. As described, the book is divided into three parts. Part I, with chapters by Archon Fung, Assaf Sharon, and Stuart White, explores ways of reinvigorating democracy. Part II, with chapters by Christopher Lebron, Richard Locke, and Martha Nussbaum, tackles ways of confronting injustice. Part III, with chapters by Helena De Bres, Charles Sabel, and Annabelle Lever, offers principles for an interdependent world. There is also a brief afterword by Joshua Cohen and a list of his publications.

Authorial Enchantments in the Fictions of Henry James, Philip Roth, and Joshua Cohen

Print literature has always existed in an ecosystem of media forms, among which the attention of audiences have been shared. Periodically, however, novelists have expressed concerns for the charms of literature in relation to its competitors. This article explores three interrelated experiments that harness the effects of authorial presence to revive the capacity of literary fiction to detain readers. Henry James's ‘The Death of the Lion’ (1894), Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer (1979) and Joshua Cohen's Book of Numbers (2015) speak to each other by mobilising the trope of the author in ways that probe the fault lines in under-nuanced accounts of the author's coercive role in delimiting the meaning of a literary work. These texts, I offer, reimagine the author not as a disciplining force but as a compelling figure, working in distinctive ways to summon readerly attention.