Political Liberalism or Empire

Political Liberalism (Columbia Classics in Philosophy Series)

Author: John Rawls

This book continues and revises the ideas of justice as fairness that John Rawls presented in A Theory of Justice but changes its philosophical interpretation in a fundamental way. That previous work assumed what Rawls calls a "well-ordered society," one that is stable and relatively homogenous in its basic moral beliefs and in which there is broad agreement about what constitutes the good life. Yet in modern democratic society a plurality of incompatible and irreconcilable doctrines -- religious, philosophical, and moral -- coexist within the framework of democratic institutions. Recognizing this as a permanent condition of democracy, Rawls asks how a stable and just society of free and equal citizens can live in concord when divided by reasonable but incompatible doctrines?

This edition includes the essay "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," which outlines Rawls' plans to revise Political Liberalism, which were cut short by his death.

"An extraordinary well-reasoned commentary on A Theory of Justice...a decisive turn towards political philosophy."

-- Times Literary Supplement

Times Literary Supplement

An extraordinary well-reasoned commentary on A Theory of Justice. . . . a decisive turn towards political philosophy, as opposed to normative philosophizing on public affairs.

Library Journal

This expanded edition of Rawls's 1993 text includes a new essay, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, completed before his death. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Booknews

Rawls (philosophy, Harvard) presents eight lectures on the basic elements of political liberalism, its three main ideas, and the institutional framework, continuing and revising the idea of justice as fairness as presented in his earlier work, A Theory of Justice (1971). He redefines a well-ordered society, no longer seeing it as united in its basic moral beliefs, but in its political conception of justice. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

Pt. 1	Political liberalism : basic elements	1
Lecture I	Fundamental ideas	3
Lecture II	The powers of citizens and their representation	47
Lecture III	Political constructivism	89
Pt. 2	Political liberalism : three main ideas	131
Lecture IV	The idea of an overlapping consensus	133
Lecture V	Priority of right and ideas of the good	173
Lecture VI	The idea of public reason	212
Pt. 3	Institutional framework	255
Lecture VII	The basic structure as subject	257
Lecture VIII	The basic liberties and their priority	289
Lecture IX	Reply to Habermas	372
Pt. 4	The idea of public reason revisited	435
	Introduction to "The idea of public reason revisited"	437
	The idea of public reason revisited (1997)	440

Look this: Jesus the Village Psychiatrist or There Are No Secrets

Empire

Author: Michael Hardt

Imperialism as we knew it may be no more, but Empire is alive and well. It is, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri demonstrate in this bold work, the new political order of globalization. It is easy to recognize the contemporary economic, cultural, and legal transformations taking place across the globe but difficult to understand them. Hardt and Negri contend that they should be seen in line with our historical understanding of Empire as a universal order that accepts no boundaries or limits. Their book shows how this emerging Empire is fundamentally different from the imperialism of European dominance and capitalist expansion in previous eras. Rather, today's Empire draws on elements of U.S. constitutionalism, with its tradition of hybrid identities and expanding frontiers.

Empire identifies a radical shift in concepts that form the philosophical basis of modern politics, concepts such as sovereignty, nation, and people. Hardt and Negri link this philosophical transformation to cultural and economic changes in postmodern society-to new forms of racism, new conceptions of identity and difference, new networks of communication and control, and new paths of migration. They also show how the power of transnational corporations and the increasing predominance of postindustrial forms of labor and production help to define the new imperial global order.

More than analysis, Empire is also an unabashedly utopian work of political philosophy, a new Communist Manifesto. Looking beyond the regimes of exploitation and control that characterize today's world order, it seeks an alternative political paradigm-the basis for a truly democratic global society. Michael Hardt is Assistant Professor in the Literature Program at Duke University. Antonio Negri is an independent researcher and writer and an inmate at Rebibbia Prison, Rome. He has been a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Paris and a Professor of Political Science at the University of Padua.

The Nation - Stanley Aronowitz

Empire...is a bold move away from established doctrine.

Time - Michael Elliott

Globalization's positive side is, intriguingly, a message of a hot new book.

The Observer [UK] - Ed Vulliamy

How often [is a] book...swept off the shelves until you can't find [copies] in N.Y. for love nor money?

New York Times - Emily Eakin

[This] book is full of...bravura passages...[F]or the moment, Empire is filling a void in the humanities.

Sunday Times [UK]

Empire presents a philosophical vision that some have greeted as the 'next big thing' in the field of the humanities.

Stanley Aronowitz

...a bold move away from established doctrine. Hardt and Negri's insistence that there really is a new world is promulgated with energy and conviction. Especially striking is their renunciation of the tendency of many writers on globalization to focus exclusively on the top, leaving the impression that what happens down below, to ordinary people, follows automatically from what the great powers do.Nation

Sueddeutsche Zeitung - Slavoj Zizek

Today, in the midst of a difficult revolution of the forces of production, one attempts to revive the old ignominious and half-forgotten Marxist dialectic of forces of production and relations of production. How does the digitalization and the globalization of our lives influence not only the conditions of production in the narrow sense, but also our social existence, our customs and our (ideological) experience of social interaction? Marx readily paralleled revolutionary changes in production processes with a political revolution. His leitmotif was that the steam engine and other technical innovations of the 18th Century contributed considerably more to the revolution of the social quality of life than spectacular political events. Considering the unimaginable changes in production that are being accompanied by a sort of lethargy in today's political realm, isn't this guiding idea more relevant then ever? Because we are located in the midst of a radical transformation of society, of which we cannot clearly recognize the final consequences, many radical thinkers despair at the impossibility of taking adequate political measures.

Furthermore, the concepts that we use to describe the new constellation of forces of production and relations of production (post-industrial society, information society) continue to lack the form of true concepts. They remain theoretical emergency solutions: Instead of enabling us to reflect on historical reality (which these concepts create), they actually relieve us of our duty to think, even prevent us from thinking. The standard answer of postmodern trendsetters from Alvin Toffler to Jean Baudrillard is that we cannot think in this "new" way because we are stuck in the old industrial "paradigm." One would like to state against this commonplace that exactly the opposite is true: don't these attempts to overcome or to efface the concept of material production, in which one classifies the current transformation as a transition from production to information, in the end allow one to avoid the difficulty of reflecting on how this transformation itself is connected to the structure of collective production? In other words, isn't it actually the task at hand to, wherever possible, introduce the new developments into the concept of collective material production?

This is exactly what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri try to do in their new book Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge)--a book that attempts to write the communist manifesto anew for the 21st Century. Hardt and Negri describe globalization as an ambiguous "deterritorialization": victorious global capitalism penetrates into every pore of our social lives, into the most intimate of spheres, and installs a never-present dynamic, which no longer is based on patriarchal or other hierarchic structures of dominance. Instead, it creates a flowing, hybrid identity. On the other hand, this fundamental corrosion of all important social connections lets the genie out of the bottle: it sets in motion potential centrifugal forces that the capitalist system is no longer able to fully control. It is exactly because of the global triumph of the capitalist system that that system is today more vulnerable than ever. The old formula of Marx is still valid: Capitalism digs its own grave. Hardt and Negri describe this process as the transition from the nation-state to global empire, a transnational space which is comparable to Rome, where hybrid masses of scattered identities develop.

These postmodern politics concentrate on "cultural wars" and fight for their own recognition: their foundation is sexual, ethnic and religious tolerance--they preach the multicultural gospel. When one reads these authors work, it is often difficult to ward off the impression that we would exploit Turks and other immigrants because we are unable to tolerate their "otherness." Cultural and sexual intolerance serves as the key for economic tensions, not vice versa as it used to be explained in the good old days of orthodox Marxism. Thus, Hardt and Negri deserve much praise, since they enlighten us about the contradictory nature of today's turbocapitalism and attempt to identify the dynamic of the progressive powers at work. Their heroic attempt sets itself against the standard view of the left, who are struggling to limit the destructive powers of globalization and to rescue what there remains to rescue of the welfare state. This standard left wing view is imbued with a, perhaps too deeply, conservative mistrust of the dynamics of globalization and digitalization, which is quite contrary to the Marxist belief in the powers of progress.

Nevertheless, one immediately gets a foretaste, as a result of the authors' style, of the boundaries of Hardt and Negri's analysis. In their socio-economic analysis there is simply a lack of concrete, precise insight which is concealed in the Deleuzean jargon of multiplicity, deterritorialization, etc. It is no wonder that the three "practical" suggestions with which this book ends seem anticlimactic. The authors propose the political struggle for three global rights: The right to global citizenship, the right to social income, and the re-appropriation of the new means of production" (i.e. the access to and control of education, information, and communication). It is paradoxical that Hardt and Negri, the poets of mobility, multiplicity, hybridization, etc. call for three demands that are phrased in the current terminology of universal "human rights."

The problem with these demands is that they fluctuate between formal emptiness and impossible radicalization. Let's take the right to global citizenship: with that, one can in principle only agree-nevertheless, if this demand were meant to be taken more seriously than a celebratory formal declaration in typical UN style, then it would mean the total "destruction" of the carrying out of global laws and even the abolition of state borders. Under the present conditions, such steps would trigger an invasion of the USA and western Europe by cheap labor from India, China and Africa, which would result in a people's revolt against immigrants with figures like Haider appearing as their example for multicultural tolerance. The same is true with regards to the other two demands: for instance, the universal right to social income--naturally, why not? But how should one create the necessary socio-economic conditions for such a transformation?

This critique is not only aimed at secondary empirical details. The main problem with "Empire", is that the book falls short in its fundamental analysis of how (if at all) the present global socio-economic process will create the needed space for such radical measures like the ones that Marx tried to develop in his explanation of how the proletarian revolution would eliminate the basic antagonism of the capitalist means of production. In this respect, Empire remains a pre-Marxist book.

Bad Subjects - Aaron Shuman

[T]he real value of Empire, besides its restoration of people power to the center of Marxist historiography, lies in the intellectual credence and weight it gives the forms of political organizing and protest emerging now. When they hit you with Victorian novels like Das Kapital, you hit them with Empire.

What People Are Saying

Leslie Marmon Silko
By way of Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Marx, the Vietnam War, and even Bill Gates, Empire offers an irresistible, iconoclastic analysis of the 'globalized' world. Revolutionary, even visionary, Empire identifies the imminent new power of the multitude to free themselves from capitalist bondage.
— (Leslie Marmon Silko, author of Almanac of the Dead)

Stanley Aronowitz
Michael Hardt and Tony Negri have given us an original, suggestive and provocative assessment of the international economic and political moment we have entered. Abandoning many of the propositions of conventional marxism such as imperialism, the centrality of the national contexts of social struggle and a cardboard notion of the working class, the authors nonetheless show the salience of the marxist framework as a tool of explanation. This book is bound to stimulate a new debate about globalization and the possibilities for social transformation in the 21st century.
— (Stanley Aronowitz, author of False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness)

Saskia Sassen
An extraordinary book, with enormous intellectual depth and a keen sense of the history-making transformation that is beginning to take shape--a new system of rule Hardt and Negri name Empire imperialism.
— (Saskia Sassen, author of Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization)

Slavoj Zizek
After reading Empire, one cannot escape the impression that if this book were not written, it would have to be invented. What Hardt and Negri offer is nothing less than a rewriting of The Communist Manifesto for our time: Empire conclusively demonstrates how global capitalism generates antagonisms that will finally explode its form. This book rings the death-bell not only for the complacent liberal advocates of the 'end of history,' but also for pseudo-radical Cultural Studies which avoid the full confrontation with today's capitalism.
— (Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology)

Etienne Balibar
The new book by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire, is an amazing tour de force. Written with communicative enthusiasm, extensive historical knowledge, systematic organization, it basically combines a kojevian notion of global market as post-history (in this sense akin to Fukuyama's eschatology) with a foucauldian and deleuzian notion of bio-politics (in this sense crossing the road of a Sloterdijk who also poses the question of a coming techniques of the production of the human species). But it clearly outbids its rivals in philosophical skill. And, above all, it reverses their grim prospects of political stagnation or the return to zoology. By identifying the new advances of technology and the division of labor that underlies the globalization of the market and the corresponding de-centered structure of sovereignty with a deep tructure of power located within the multitude's intellectual and affective corporeity, it seeks to identify the indestructible sources of resistance and constitution that frame our future. It claims to lay the foundations for a teleology of class struggles and militancy even more substantially "communist" than the classical Marxist one. This will no doubt trigger a lasting and passionate discussion among philosophers, political scientists and socialists. Whatever their conclusions, the benefits will be enormous for intelligence.
— (Etienne Balibar, author of Spinoza and Politics)

Lawrence Grossberg
Empire is a stunningly original attempt to come to grips with the cultural, political, and economic transformations of the contemporary world. While refusing to ignore history, Hardt and Negri question the adequacy of existing theoretical categories, and offer new concepts for approaching the practices and regimes of power of the emergent world order. Whether one agrees with it or not, it is an all too rare effort to engage with the most basic and pressing questions facing political intellectuals today.
— (Lawrence Grossberg, author of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture)

Dipesh Chakrabarty
Empire is one of the most brilliant, erudite, and yet incisively political interpretations available to date of the phenomenon called 'globalization.' Engaging critically with postcolonial and postmodern theories, and mindful throughout of the plural histories of modernity and capitalism, Hardt and Negri rework Marxism to develop a vision of politics that is both original and timely. This very impressive book will be debated and discussed for a long time.
— (Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Provincializing Europe