Looking for the Good Life

COMMENTARY Looking for the Good Life Bob Brecher It is almost impossible these days to stumble across anything like a vision of the good society lurking even in the background of a left position. From the intellectual void that is the Labour Party, to the labyrinthine morass of postmodern and postfeminist postponements that constitutes the […]

Ecosocialism: Utopian and Scientific

Ecosocial ismUtopian and Scientific Tim Hayward One of the most urgent intellectual tasks of our time is to understand the implications of ecology for social and political theory. Given that environmental degradation is increasingly undermining the biological (and in some ways the psychological) basis of human social life, it is evident that no social theory […]

Constitutional state and democracy: On Jürgen Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms

In his Between Facts and Norms, [1] Jürgen Habermas offers a justification of the ʻdemocratic constitutional stateʼ from the viewpoint of his communicative or discourse theory, and gives a thorough exposition of his conception of democratic politics. In what follows I will attempt to give a general outline of Habermasʼs political philosophy and to suggest […]

On minorities: Cultural rights

Commentary On minorities: cultural rights Homi K. Bhabha After the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we still need to ask: what is the human ʻthing itselfʼ? Who is ʻone of usʼ in the midst of the jurisdictional unsettlements of migration, minoriti-zation, the clamour of multiculturalism? To whom do we turn in […]

The cosmopolitan paradox: Response to Robbins: With Reply to Chandler

Bruce Robbinsʼs excellent article in RP 116 points up the paradox of cosmopolitanism – that it seems ʻperpetually torn between an empirical dimension and a normative dimensionʼ. [1] For Robbins, the paradox of cosmopolitanism is rooted in the limited empirical sense of political community. For genuine democracy people need to belong to the same ʻcommunity […]

Exile, war and democracy: An exemplary sequence

Introduction to Rozitchner León Rozitchner is one of the generation of Argentine intellectuals who emerged in the 1950s around the journal Contorno. As a psychoanalyst and Marxist – and massively influenced, as were all his confrères, by Sartre and the phenomenological tradition – he undertook a lengthy theoretical project that attempted to engage psychoanalytical categories […]