Best political philosophy/theory papers, a decade later

Bernard Williams, “Realism and Moralism in Political Theory”, in In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, ed. G. Hawthorn, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Some papers in public reason liberalism:

Cohen, J., 2008, “Truth and Public Reason,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 37(1): 2–42.

Lister, A. “Public Justification and the Limits of State Action” Politics, Philosophy, Economics, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2010, pp. 151-176.

Quong, J. ‘The Scope of Public Reason.’ Political Studies 52 (2004): 233-250.

Quong, J. “Political Liberalism Without Skepticism.” Ratio Volume 20, Issue 3, pages 320–340, September 2007.

Schwartzman, M., 2004, “The Completeness of Public Reason,” Politics, Philosophy, & Economics, 3(2): 191–220.

Wall, S. “On Justificatory Liberalism,” Politics, Philosophy and Economics (2010)

Wolterstorff, N. “The Paradoxical Role of Coercion in the Theory of Political Liberalism,” in Journal of Law, Philosophy, and Culture (Vol. I, No. 1; Spring 2007), 135-158.

And a selection of many great Gaus papers:

Gaus, G. “On the Appropriate Mode of Justifying a Public Moral Constitution.” The Harvard Review of Philosophy, vol. 19 (2013): 4-22.

Gaus, G. “Coercion, Ownership, and the Redistributive State: Justificatory Liberalism’s
Classical Tilt.” Social Philosophy & Policy, vol. 27 (Winter 2010): 233-275. Reprinted in
Ownership and Justice, edited by Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller and Jeffrey Paul
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 233-75.

Gaus, G. “On Justifying the Liberties of the Moderns: A Case of Old Wine in New Bottles.” Social Philosophy & Policy, vol. 25 (2007): 84-119. Republished in Liberalism: Old and New, edited by Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller and Jeffrey Paul. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007. [2009 winner of the American Philosophical
Association’s Kavka Prize.]

There are various books and book chapters that I’d include, but we’re focusing on journal articles. I’m also probably forgetting some stuff.

Don’t read PT journals, but I have learned a lot in recent years from books by Partha Chatterjee, Wendy Brown, Raymond Plant, Etienne Balibar, Amartya Sen, Boltanski and Thevenot, and Axel Honneth. Haven’t yet read James Scott’s Two Cheers for Anarchism.

Ranciere’s and Badiou’s idea that politics is the public action that renders visible groups of individuals who though unseen are part of a situation is interesting.

Recently couldn’t put down a popular book by Mark Weiner The Rule of the Clan of which I am very critical–no explicit place in this defense of liberalism for labor unions or labor parties, plus an unjustified faith in the ability of the (bourgeois) state to secure the something more than formal autonomy of individuals without the need for strong associations which Weiner seems think threatens to raise from the dead oppressive, pre-modern kinship-based clans in new form.

Jeremy Waldron (2008), “The Concept and the Rule of Law,” Georgia Law Review 43(1): 1-61
Lars Vinx (2010), “Constitutional Indifferentism and Republican Freedom,” Political Theory 38(6): 809-837
Rainer Forst (2012), “The Justification of Justice: Rawls’s Political Liberalism and Habermas’s Discourse Theory in Dialogue,” in Forst, The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice, trans. by Jeffrey Flynn (Columbia University Press)
Andrew Lister (2013), “The ‘Mirage’ of Social Justice: Hayek Against (and For) Rawls,” Critical Review 25(3-4): 409-444
Katrina Forrester (2014), “Citizenship, War and the Origins of International Ethics in American Political Philosophy 1960-1975,” Historical Journal 57(3): 773-801

This seems to be a good candidate
http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2010/08/rousseau-democrat.html
finally just picked up Martha Nussbaum’s Creating Capabilities.
Kaushik Basu’s “Contract, Coercion and Intervention” is a stimulating essay in his book Beyond the Invisible Hand.

Awesome! Here’s a top five for me, just in order of how quickly I recalled them once the question was asked:
1. Anna Carastathis, “Basements and Intersections,” Hypatia 28 (2013), 698-715.
2. Iris Marion Young, “Responsibility and Global Justice: A Social Connection Model,” Social Philosophy & Policy 23 (2006), 102-30.
3. Tim Hayward, “International Political Theory and the Global Environment: Some Critical Questions for Cosmopolitans,” Journal of Social Philosophy 40 (2009), 276-95; as well as 4. “Global Justice and the Distribution of Natural Resources,” Political Studies 54 (2006), 349-69.
5. Samuel Arnold, “The Difference Principle at Work,” Journal of Political Philosophy 20 (2012), 94-118.

Everything by Wolfgang Streek.

There’s really a lot of global justice stuff in the lists so far. Do the best global justice pieces really rank high in the “best overall” journal articles in social and political? My sense is that while they address critically important issues, the innovation and illumination involved is qualified vis-a-vis other more pure sub-subjects, like perfectionism, public reason, distributive justice, distributive principles (priority, equality, sufficiency) and ideal/nonideal theory. Global justice pieces are powerful when they apply more general insights in political philosophy to particular issues, but I’d think the pieces advancing the insights have greater import. It’s why you don’t rank The Law of Peoples against A Theory of Justice. There’s not much of a contest, as the former is the global application of the insights of the latter.

This sounds a lot like what I’ve been saying:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/opinion/sunday/the-paradox-of-the-free-market-liberal.html

I really do encourage anyone reading here to read the link I submitted up at 10. One of the best things I have read in years. Anything Matt Bruenig writes is worth a read and he doesn’t get nearly the attention he deserves.

Chris is definitely right about that. I think that the fact that some of the papers might look like being ‘just’ about global justice is partly because the idea that justice has global scope is has been controversial, and hence has to be explicitly argued for rather than assumed (and so the papers often do that). But by no means are these papers ‘just’ about that question, and by now means do they simply apply extant ideas from normative debates. Along the way, they’ve helped clarify questions about what it is that makes invoking the language of justice appropriate; how and when collective responsibility might be attributed to an agent; what the responsibilities of individuals might be in light of complex injustices; and so on. Along with debates on migration, they’ve also helped trigger a much more explicit debate about fundamental issues concerning territorial rights which was very long overdue. I think it’s important that ‘global justice stuff’ doesn’t get assigned to a pigeonhole of fairly ‘applied’ political theory, simply because there are so many people doing such good work in that field these days.

In addition to many already listed, a few other contenders:

Arash Abizadeh, On the Demos and its Kin: Nationalism, Democracy and the Boundary Problem APSR 2012

Sophia Nasstrom, The Legitimacy of the People, Political Theory 2007

Andrew Rehfeld, Toward a General Theory of Political Representation, Journal of Politics 2005

Robert Goodin, Global Democracy: In the Beginning, International Theory 2010.

#24 MPAV

I personally thought it was an excellent and interestingly argued piece that took on libertarianism from a new and ,to me, unique angle.

I agree that it was excellently argued.

My only complaint is that the people it argues against cannot understand the argument because they already know they are right. And so an argument that starts out assuming moral equivalence between two points of view cannot make sense to them. Anybody who disagrees with them cannot be morally equivalent to them, but instead must be wrong.

This is not a flaw in the argument itself.

Anyway thank you clicking through and reading the link J.

Limiting myself to 5 articles from 2004-2014 (after roughly 2 minutes of reflection) I would recommend:
• Carter, I. 2011. “Respect and the Basis of Equality.” Ethics 121.
• Baehr, A. 2008. “Perfectionism, Feminism, and Public Reason.” Law and Philosophy 27.
• Heath, J. 2006. “The Benefits of Cooperation.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 34.
• Lister, A. 2011. “The ‘Mirage’ of Social Justice: Hayek Against (and For) Rawls.” Critical Review.
• Simmons, A. J. 2010. “Ideal and Nonideal Theory.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 38.

I also would recommend: Cohen, G. A. 2011. “Freedom and Money.” However, I think that the original article version of this piece predates 2004.

Any rec’s for those into critical theory?

Interesting that beginning with Chris’ opening salvo, the literature on “methods and approaches” in political theory/philosophy (realism, ideal/nonideal theory, etc…) has been quite well represented. A few more of my favorites on this topic that have come out in the last few years and deserve more notice:

Lawford‐Smith, Holly (2013). Understanding Political Feasibility*. Journal of Political Philosophy, 21(3), 243-259.

McTernan, Emily (2014). How to make citizens behave: Social psychology, liberal virtues, and social norms. Journal of Political Philosophy, 22(1), 84-104.

Hendrix, Burke (2013). Where Should We Expect Social Change in Non-Ideal Theory?. Political Theory, 41(1), 116-143.

QS @34
Anyone familiar with IR theory will roll their eyes re: the realist/idealist stuff in PT. It’s like back to the 1940s. Who’s up for some E.H. Carr?

I’m breaking my resolution, which I stated in a different thread, not to comment again at Crooked Timber because I want to mention to QS that the discussion of “ideal theory” versus “non-ideal theory” in political theory bears, I think, only a very tangential relationship, if any at all, to the (so-called) “realist-idealist” debate in IR in the interwar and postwar period. (A lot of work in recent years on the disciplinary history of IR shows that the so-called ‘first debate’ is more nuanced and complicated than its presentation in what used to be the standard accounts, but that’s a different point.)

I’m considerably more familiar with IR theory than with the literature in contemp. political theory that is the focus of the OP and many of the comments, so if what I’ve said here is wrong, someone will correct me. However, my impression is that, e.g., the issues famously discussed by Carr in The Twenty Years’ Crisis are really not the issues being raised in the contemporary PT discussions of ideal vs. non-ideal theory. (Again, corrections or qualifications welcome.)

LFC I hope you keep commenting at least sometimes since you are very solid with facts and sources and would be missed. I have spare time right now – but upon revision commenting took up too much time last year, so my resolution is fewer comments especially where it is just arguing without learning.

On critical theory I read some on Habermas’ tech/admin systems vs life worlds and his idea of science controversies for an assignment on renewable energy technology wind farms. Some was sort of useful – particularly that windfarms are just part of the larger science controversy of climate change so dealing with wind farm objections as a discrete issue is problematic. In general I find the critical theorists not really to my way of thinking since they are Marxist materialists so only a bit above constructivists in my hierarchy. I also looked at works on windfarms and emplacement /place attachment which I found helpful , I first came across emplacement in relation to refugee settlement and integration as they recover from displacement .

P Devine-Wright has the most work on place attachment and wind farms , such as

Devine-Wright, P. (2009), Rethinking NIMBYism: The role of place attachment and place identity in explaining place-protective action. J. Community. Appl. Soc. Psychol., 19: 426–441. doi: 10.1002/casp.1004

I am reading

D’Arcy Wood : Eco-historicism (2008) Journal For Early Modern Studies, 8, 2,

which looks at a turn to looking at environment/climatic interactions with human so cities and their histories after a turn away from such interest due to the racism of crude geographic/climatic determinism in the past. This would be in favour of E H Carr’s argument that we examine past events through the lens of history with an eye to contemporary interests and problems ;)

One more that I forgot (surprisingly, as it’s one of my favorite papers):

Tommie Shelby: Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto: Philosophy and Public Affairs 35 (2):126–160 (2007) .

It’s really a great piece with real examples relating to moral and political obligation to obey the law, among other things. That’s not all it does, but it’s one reason why I really liked it.

Any thoughts on what were the worst?