anotherpanacea

Tag: Political Theory

  • Badiou on the ‘communist hypothesis’

    Infinite Th0ught offers this op-ed by Alain Badiou: The living proof that our societies are obviously in-human is today the foreign undocumented worker: he is the sign, immanent to our situation, that there is only one world. To treat the foreign proletarian as though he came from another world, that is indeed the specific task…

  • Mansfield on Obama

    Generally, I respect Harvey C. Mansfield’s work on classical political theory, and think his attempts at contemporary cultural and political criticism are absurdly small-minded. His piece in The Weekly Standard on Obama’s non-partisanship is a mixture of the good Mansfield and the bad Mansfield, so I recommend it to fans of ambivalence. Here are some…

  • How NOT To Do Law, Philosophy, and Neuroscience

    I’ve just returned from the Understanding Humans through Neuroscience conference at the American Enterprise Institute, where I heard papers by Roger Scruton, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and Stephen Morse. What struck me was how mired the three papers were in defending against a certain kind of agency-undermining determinism that few people take seriously any more. All of…

  • Earthquakes and Providence

    My old boss Ted Kinnaman has a piece in the Huffington Post on Pat Robertson’s claim that Haitians deserved the recent earthquake because they made a pact with the devil in order free themselves from colonial slavery. Others have developed the historical case for such a pact. Where many have taken Robertson to task for…

  • Beyond Utopophobia

    The newest issue of The Good Society has been released, with a symposium my friend Steven Maloney and I put together on epistemic proceduralism. It features contributions by James Bohman, Corey Brettschneider, Noëlle McAfee, and Robert Talisse and Michael Harbour.  The ‘utopophobia’ in the title comes from David Estlund’s book Democratic Authority, which invokes epistemic grounds…

  • Policing Theory

    In a recent report on British policing, Denis O’Connor criticized the growing use of paramilitary policing in the UK: “British police risk losing the battle for the public’s consent if they win public order through tactics that appear to be unfair, aggressive and inconsistent,” he said. “This harms not just the reputation of the individual…

  • “More Light!” Lying, Police Work, and the Exclusionary Rule

    “More Light!” Lying, Police Work, and the Exclusionary Rule

    In the 1961 case Mapp v. Ohio, the Supreme Court declined to protect the the possession of pornographic material, but instead decided to exclude all evidence gained through unconstitutional searches. Last month, the Supreme Court revisited that decision in Herring v. United States, where they reconsidered the rule of evidence that excludes evidence gained unconstitutionally. Exclusion,…

  • Democracy and Coffee

    Jakob Norberg synthesizes some of the thinking on coffeehouses that hangs at the edges of contemporary democratic theory. Without reifying it as a miraculous commodity, he works through some of the ways that Habermas and Carl Schmitt used the figure of the coffeehouse to represent the pretensions and triumphs of the middle-class after the industrial…