The World Soul in American Transcendentalism

American Transcendentalism, a religious, literary, and social reform movement whose acknowledged leader was Ralph Waldo Emerson, characteristically deployed world soul thinking to harmonize Protestant individualism with Deist rationalism and modern science. Emerson’s “Over-Soul,” whose sources include Platonism, German Idealism, and the transcendental anatomy of Georges Cuvier, enabled the Transcendentalists to distance themselves from orthodox theism by turning God’s magisterial law from outer command into inner creative principle, based on the fundamental concept that all human beings (and, for some, all life) share an inner divine principle that radiates meaning into the world. This chapter draws on William James, who analyzed world soul thinking in terms of the varieties of transcendentalism: this lens suggests that for many Transcendentalists, Emerson’s idealist, absolute monism yielded to a range of pluralist and materialist variants, as seen in Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and the radical pluralism of William James himself.

‘Zones of contention’ in industrial relations: Framing pluralism as praxis

This article addresses debates in contemporary industrial relations about practical application of pluralism. We compare the potential efficacy of ‘radical-pluralism’ and ‘neo-pluralism’. Data comes from analysis of employment relationships in two unionised public transport sector organisations, in the comparative country contexts of the UK and Republic of Ireland. It is argued that radical-pluralist framing of the employment relationship is better equipped than neo-pluralism to provide deeper and contextually sensitive understandings of the realities of unequal employment relationships. Desired (pluralist) democratic values differ from real world application of joint regulation (praxis). This raises implications regarding constraints on state regulation and public policy goals institutionalising pluralism as fluid and uneven praxis.

Introduction

Chapter abstract: The Introduction explains why it is worth reading Santi Romano’s, Carl Schmitt’s, and Costantino Mortati’s theories against each other. They advanced prototypical solutions to the problem of radical pluralism and how the state could deal with nonstate normative entities. Theirs were seminal reflections on the destiny of the state vis-à-vis the rise of nonstate bodies that rejected the myth of modern statehood and claimed jurisdictional and legislative autonomy. On one hand, these authors’ theories are related to each other as they recognize that the proliferation of normativity is an intrinsic dynamic of social life. On the other, they came to altogether different conclusions on how this dynamic should be governed in order for a political community to come into existence and continue to exist. The Introduction finally elucidates why and in what sense these eminent versions of classic legal institutionalism are key to understanding today’s pluralism.

The Legacy of Pluralism

Book Abstract: How should the state face the challenge of radical pluralism? How could constitutional orders be changed when they prove unable to regulate society? Santi Romano, Carl Schmitt, and Costantino Mortati, the leading figures of Continental legal institutionalism, provided three responses that deserve our full attention today. Mariano Croce and Marco Goldoni introduce and analyze these three towering figures for a modern audience. Romano thought pluralism to be an inherent feature of legality and envisaged a far-reaching reform of the state for it to be a platform of negotiation between autonomous normative regimes. Schmitt believed pluralism to be a dangerous deviation that should be curbed through the juridical exclusion of alternative institutional formations. Mortati held an idea of the constitution as the outcome of a basic agreement among hegemonic forces that should shape a shared form of life. The Legacy of Pluralism explores the convergences and divergences of these towering jurists to take stock of their ground-breaking analyses of the origin of the legal order and to show how these help us cope with the current crisis of national constitutional systems.

Dualism

This chapter discusses the general relationship of EU law with domestic law. The positivist account of law produces two paradoxical accounts of EU law. The first account is the theory of European ‘monism’, supposing that the EU is the foundation of all law in the member states. The second is ‘radical pluralism’ which says that there are no legal rules applying to the relations between EU law and domestic law. They are both mistaken, because they are both based on a picture of law as a hierarchy or ‘system’ of rules created by a formal doctrine of legal validity. Under the positivist view, inspired by Kelsen and Hart, all legal ‘systems’ must compete for supremacy of their ‘basic norm’ or ‘rule of recognition’. In this sense EU law must compete with domestic law. Legal positivism is false and must be rejected. Dualism, by contrast, relies on the rival theory of law which says that law is a matter of substantive moral judgment. It has no need for a single ‘ultimate’ rule or fact at its foundation. In this analysis, domestic law and international law do not compete because they apply to distinct political questions. The first is an answer to the problems of jurisdiction and the second is the answer to the relations among states. Dualism is the best legal interpretation of the relations between EU law and domestic law.

The Myth of the Given today: Perspectives of realistic epistemology

The article deals with the reception of Wilfrid Sellars’s The Myth of the Given. The Problem consists in the ontological status of reality and the possibility of empirical knowledge. The ideas of well-known representatives of modern analytical epistemology are analyzed: J. Searle, H. Putnam, J. McDowell, G. Evans, C. Peacocke, W. Child, T. Rockmore, etc. An attempt is made in the article to show that The Myth of the Given is losing its relevance in modern humanistic realism where the world is already becoming a symbolic construct within the epistemological framework. Experience as such is no longer deemed as a linguistic phenomenon in modern epistemology. Sellars’s argumentation is convincing only if universalism, in terms of the interpretation of experience and reality, is criticized from the standpoint of radical pluralism of epistemological theories. In this case, indeed, no “Given” exists, viewed as a correlation between the substance of Sensitivity and the only possible world of Reality. It is illustrated that modern analytical epistemology is an arena of competition between two leading positions in the interpretation of the world: externalism and internalism. Despite the contradiction between these theoretical positions, they are in accord in recognizing a pluralistic worldview, which is, moreover, of a “humanistic” nature. These theories address neither “the given” nor “the world of facts”. The main trouble with The Myth of the Given is the lack of criteria of objectivity in any act of experience.

Contractualism and Radical Pluralism

How should contractualists seek to accommodate and respond to the existence of radical pluralism within contemporary liberal states? Ryan Muldoon has recently argued that a) the dominant Kantian liberal model of contractualism is hopelessly ill equipped to do so but that b) there is a particular kind of Hobbesian contractualism that can do much better. I raise some problems concerning the capacity of Muldoonian contractualism to respond appropriately to the problem of radical pluralism. I then propose a very different kind of solution that involves embracing an advice model of contractualism.

On Wittgenstein, Radical Pluralism, and Radical Relativity

In this paper, I introduce the idea of ‘radical relativity’ to elucidate an undervalued justificatory context for Wittgenstein’s affirmation of radical pluralism. I accept D.Z. Phillips’s definition of radical pluralism as the view that certain radical differences between people’s ordinary practices prevent the latter from being reduced to a necessary set of common interests, meanings, or truths. I argue that radical relativity provides this form of pluralism with the logical justification it requires in that it accounts for how pluralism became radical. More specifically, I argue that the contingent, non-causal, and yet non-arbitrary relation between ordinary concepts and the pluralistic world through which they emerge explains the reality of radical pluralism. Radical relativity is suggested in Wittgenstein’s three notions of ‘concept formation’, ‘agreement in reaction’, and ‘world pictures’, I argue, without endorsing traditional forms of relativism. Finally, I show that although D.Z. Phillips and Hilary Putnam promote notions of pluralism indebted to Wittgenstein, neither philosopher utilizes the radical relativity suggested in his work to justify his respective version of pluralism or Wittgenstein’s version of radical pluralism.

Biopower and the politics of contingency

Chapter 3 offers a biopolitical translation of Claude Lefort’s idea of the democratic regime as characterized by ontological contingency and epistemic indeterminacy. Lefort’s powerful image of the void at the heart of democracy is in the context of biopolitics specified in terms of the absence of any proper form of life and the affirmation of radical pluralism of contingent ways of living. This contingency is, moreover, not itself contingent but is a necessary consequence of the disarticulation of truth, power and ethics in the democratic regime. From this necessary contingency Prozorov infers the principles of freedom, equality and community that are universal conditions of legitimacy for all forms of life in a democracy.