Acknowledgements Preface 1. Kant's Republicanism and the Cosmopolitan Persuasion Kant's Republicanism and the 'Moral Personality' of States The Sovereign Equality of States, Peaceful Coexistence and the International Constitution Kant's Cosmopolitanism Cicero's Republicanism and Stoic Cosmopolitanism: Kant in Comparison John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas: Alternative Ways of Understanding Kant's Cosmopolitanism 2. The Languages of Human Rights and the Liberal Dialect The Many Voices of the Human Rights Discourse Human Rights as the New Standard of Civilisation Human Rights and Democracy: Liberal Perspectives 3. The Globalisation of Democracy: The Right to Democratic Governance The Entitlement to Democratic Governance in International Law and International Politics The Ideology of Democracy Promotion Excursus: Prerequisites and Causes of Democratisation 4. Sovereignty and Democracy Conceptual Distinctions The Politics of the Sovereignty Discourse 'Domestic Sovereignty' as 'Popular Sovereignty' 5. Liberal Democracy between Multiculturalism and Globalisation From 'Demos' to 'Demoi': Multiculturalism and Democracy Globalisation and Democracy Bibliography Index.

Democracy: Problems and Perspectives

This thesis seeks to show how the reassessment of Arendt’s thought for contemporary international political theory must be grounded in her first major published work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and, more specifically, in the concept of the political she outlines therein. The thesis begins by examining how Arendt interprets the political sui generis. It shows how this concept, which influences much of her scholarship from the 1950s onwards and serves as a critical measure against which she assesses modern-day events, is disclosed for the first time in Part II of Origins through her engagement with particular topics and phenomena related to European colonial imperialism. Using this somewhat neglected text as a point of departure, the main body of the thesis examines Arendt’s thoughts on three ‘anti-political’ impulses of the contemporary world that have clear international ramifications: sovereignty, nationalism and imperialism. The work is divided into three corresponding sections. Each contains a chapter providing an interpretive study of Arendt’s text on the subject, followed by a chapter applying the key themes, insights and dangers previously highlighted to some of the most intractable global situations today such as the international human rights regime, atomic weaponry and war, biopolitical control, genocide studies and neoliberal globalisation. In so doing, the thesis does not aim to ‘find’ in Arendt’s work determinate answers to the crises of our time, but rather to use her perceptions as critical inspiration to think about them differently.

Hannah Arendt and the political : the contemporary challenges posed by sovereignty, nationalism and imperialism

This article revisits the tension between sovereignty and intervention through the philosophical lenses of three classical realists — Machiavelli, Hobbes and Bodin. A close reading of their studies of sovereignty reveals that they have been animated by a common philosophical search for order and preservation by state authorities amidst the arbitrariness inherent in politics. Their quest for these goals was premised upon the construction of sovereignty in tandem with intervention. Explaining the realist premises of intervention also requires the co-constitution of a third idea: the logic of expedience intrinsic to sovereignty itself. This holds implications for the way one views sovereignty in contemporary international relations discourses.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpalgrave.jird.1800055.pdf

Classical realism and the tension between sovereignty and intervention: constructions of expediency from Machiavelli, Hobbes and Bodin

State sovereignty is often thought to be and seen as absolute, unlimited. However, there is no such a thing as absolute state sovereignty. Indeed, absolute or unlimited sovereignty is impossible because all sovereignty is necessarily underpinned by its conditions of possibility. The present chapter consists of two main parts. Firstly, and in order to show more clearly how sovereignty is limited, two kinds of agents are introduced: (a) individuals; and (b) states. The aim is to demonstrate how different sorts of constraints or limitations operate in relation to individuals and states without diminishing their respective sovereignties. Secondly, the chapter identifies specific theorists that take sovereignty to be absolute in the modern era, focusing in particular on two bodies of literature that constitute the roots for current legal positivism—i.e. Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes—and argues that in both cases they introduce conceptual, substantial, and contextual limitations. I argue that the modern era starts with a relative essence of sovereignty that has its origin in the working logic of fragmented regulatory governance. With this early and disjointed background of a national and transnational plurality of sources both Bodin and Hobbes aim to bring together these heterogeneous elements under the contextualisation of the paradox of sovereignty. The implications of understanding state sovereignty as limited rather than absolute are several, both directly and indirectly. A main immediate consequence is that sovereign states can cooperate together, limit their sovereignty and still be considered sovereign.

/pdf/about-the-impossibility-of-absolute-state-sovereignty-the-yfd2fbb295.pdf

About the Impossibility of Absolute State Sovereignty. The Modern Era and the Early Legal Positivist Claim

By looking at political thought in historical periods that mirror our own, we can discern patterns of thought which clairvoyantly recognise the new and fearfully retreat to established patterns of thought. Sixteenth-century thought confronts us with the search for newly emerging political orders. Focusing on four thinkers, this paper explicates the emerging pattern. It reflects on the contemporary relevance of sixteenth-century thought and the relevance of the history of ideas.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Feps.2010.29.pdf

Thinking in Turbulent Times: On the Relevance of Sixteenth-Century Political Thought

IN our age people more often than not think of law as the ‘command of a definite will or group of wills endowed with legitimate authority’, and of the limits of law as being set by the volitions of men, expressed either formally in a constitution or by the ‘unchartered limitations of public consent’.l This view is reflected in the ‘authoritarian model of law’,2 and can be traced to the Roman dictum that ‘the preference of the ruler is what has the force of law. . . .’3 So widely is it accepted as an accurate and illuminating account of what law is that in some quarters, especially where analytical jurisprudence with its attendant disinterest in legal history holds sway,4 the notion that legal authority is to be anchored to the obligation to command what should be commanded-that authority is to be exercised sub lege, as Bracton put it5-is thought to be incomprehensible. In many minds the phrase sit pro voluntute ratio, which explains that the sovereign’s will must coincide with reason, is thought to have been wrongly quoted; that what one meant to say was sitpro rutione voluntus-the will of the sovereign takes the place of reason.6 The predominance of voluntaristic theories of law, however, is a relatively modern phenomenon. Indeed it was only with John Austin in the nineteenth century that the balance shifted decisively in favour of such theories.7 For throughout the Middle Ages and well on up into the modern period the argument over whether law is an act of will or rule of reason was evenly fought.8

J. U. Lewis

Papers

Jean bodin's ‘logic of sovereignty’