Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory最新文献

In recent years, we can speak of an anti-liberal appropriation of the concepts of religion, tradition, and religious tradition. The label of religious tradition has been used to divide and mobilize voters. With the support of the Russian Orthodox Church, Russian president Vladimir Putin has presented himself as the defender of traditional values against the liberal West (Agadjanian, 2017). In Poland, religious groups have criticized the liberal European project in the name of the Catholic tradition (Szumigalska, 2015). This raises the question of whether and how religious traditions can be addressed in liberal democratic states.

In political philosophy and political theory, religion has often been reconstructed with a focus on beliefs (Asad, 2012). According to this notion of religion, belief has primacy over ritual, which has led to a neglect of religion as an embodied way of life that is manifested in individual behavior, in social practices, and in institutions (Mahmood, 2009). This emphasis on the role of religious beliefs has also led to a neglect of the role of religious traditions. Only few authors have argued that appeals to religious traditions can advance a discussion (Asad, 2009; MacIntyre, 1984; Scruton, 1984). During the last years, however, a group of philosophers has begun to re-evaluate the justificatory role of tradition (Casal, 2021; Cohen, 2011; Heath, 2014; Robson, 2020; Scheffler, 2010; Wall, 2016). These philosophers defend the position that if certain conditions are met, traditions can, to some extent, be valuable. More recently, Bardon (2020) and Laborde (2020) have engaged in a more specific discussion on the value of religious traditions in public deliberation.

Consulting tradition is a prominent practice within religious communities because traditions provide epistemic resources on the basis of which political or ethical problems within the community can be addressed (Audi, 2000, p. 117).¹ March distinguishes between two methods by which religious communities consult tradition to address problems in their communities: an “appeal or reference to traditional religious commitments or practices” and an “appeal to practical wisdom or moral insight found in traditions of religious thought” (March, 2013, p. 527).² Following March's distinction, I differentiate between two strategies of problem-solving. Political and ethical problems can be addressed by reaffirming the tradition and the practical values for maintaining it; alternatively, they can be addressed by consulting one's tradition and its epistemic resources for problem-solving. Consulting a tradition—whether one's own or a tradition in which one does not participate—consists in identifying the epistemi

When the Norwegian Parliament opened the southeastern Barents Sea for petroleum activity in 2013, it did so based on an impact assessment report prepared by the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy (Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum and Energy, 2012–2013). In 2016 the first licenses to drill in this area were awarded, and two environmental organizations sued the Norwegian state for awarding them. To prepare for the court case the organizations commissioned two economists with expertise in resource and environmental economics to review the impact assessment report and these commissioned economists quickly discovered major errors.

For one, the report did not discount the expected costs and future incomes—a standard procedure in such reports. Discounting with a 4% real interest rate would have reduced the estimated net income from opening the area by approximately 38%. This would make the opening a net loss (Greaker & Rosendahl, 2017a, 2017b). The report also estimated the gross income in the scenario with low petroleum findings to be twice what the underlying numbers showed (Greaker & Rosendahl, 2017b). These two mistakes together with optimistic estimates of employment numbers and the future oil price made it seem like there was no economic risk associated with opening, and this may have contributed to the Parliament's decision to open the area in spite of resistance from both environmentalists and the fishing industry (Greaker & Rosendahl, 2017a; NTB, 2017; Tomassen, 2017).

A standard remedy when mistakes are made in political life is to find someone to hold to account. But when experts are involved in governance processes they are rarely held to account for their mistakes. This is sometimes seen as a legitimacy problem of expert-reliant governance, and warnings are given about handing over more power to “unaccountable” experts. So, is the solution to make experts more accountable?

The popularity of “accountability” as a remedy for all kinds of problems has led to inflation and fragmentation of meanings attributed to the term, and also to uncritical uses of accountability measures. Still, this article argues that accountability of experts remains crucial for addressing the legitimacy problems brought up by increasing expert dependency. Yet, instead of proposing a new type of accountability regime applicable to all contexts were experts take part, the article takes a step back and asks: What exactly does it mean to hold experts “accountable”? And what are the distinct challenges of expert accountability?

There are several studies of expert accountability in relation to particular institutions, such as public agencies (e.g., Busuioc, 2013; Schillemans et al, 2021), central banks (e.g., Heldt & Herzog, 2021), judicial review (e.g., Contini & Mohr, 2007), and parliaments (e.g., Crum, 2017<

When John Rawls crowned justice the ‘first virtue’ of social institutions, stability was its necessary presupposition. For what worth is there of just ideals if the social order they structure will flicker out of existence when under pressure? As Rawls (2005) wrote Political Liberalism, stability became a central concern for his theory of justice, and the “overlapping consensus” is his answer to this problem. The same concern about stability can be found in the works of Habermas, another key theorist of liberal democracy. Habermas (1988, 1998) describes how the only viable source of political legitimacy in the modern world is the socially integrating networks of communication. In his more recent works, he even considers liberal democracy the only viable institutional arrangement that can secure stable political coexistence in our conflict-ridden world.

Yet, really existing liberal democracies are far from stable. Followed by decades of neoliberal reform in major liberal democracies, public accountability of governments soon gave way to accountability to private shareholders of multinational capital. Inequalities were staggering, leaving many on the verge of destitution and precarity (Milanović, 2019; Streeck, 2016). Decades after neoliberal reforms have taken root and wreaked havoc, democracies are “undone.” The Left is now disoriented, while angry, disenfranchised masses are ‘re-politicizing’ the privatized world with a vengeance, turning to right-wing populisms of hatred, chauvinism, xenophobia, and misogyny (Brown, 2015; Mouffe, 2018).

For most ideal theorists, the problem with existing democracies is that liberal democratic ideals are misapplied.¹ They believe that as long as we reattune democracies to their ideals, inequalities will be kept in check, toxic populisms will disappear, and democracies will be stable once again. However, this account seems increasingly untenable: First, politically, the rise of populism in the liberal democratic West shows that politics guided by rationalist ideals are becoming unrealistically “utopian.” Second, these populist currents demonstrate how negative affects such as hatred, jealousy, and paranoid anxieties powerfully shape political life, calling into question the negligence of negative (especially antipathic) affects in ideal theories (Mouffe, 2005, 2009). Thus, if one's theory aims for stable democracies, then one must go beyond ideals, and the ‘affective deficit’ of rationalist ideal theories must be addressed.

Some currents in political thought try to overcome this affective deficit. For instance, Nussbaum (2013, 2018) supplements liberal theory with her account of political emotions. She discusses negative emotions such as disgust, anger, and fear, and argues for the need to foster love and forgiveness, redirecting our emotional energies to pro

Few topics in Arendt's corpus have garnered more attention than her analysis of the dangers inherent in Adolf Eichmann's inability to think. Eichmann revealed what Arendt describes as the banality of evil, a new kind of evil born not of monstrous or demonic motives but of thoughtlessness (Arendt, 2006, p. 54).¹ Yet, while Eichmann made clear the urgent need we have to think, scholars remain at odds as to whether Arendt succeeds in demonstrating that thinking itself has a role to play in preventing evildoing (Bernstein, 2000; Biser, 2014; Formosa, 2016). My aim is to give new orientation to these debates by reconsidering Arendt's critical reception of Martin Heidegger in The Life of the Mind in relation to her claim that thinking must be understood terms of the quest for meaning rather than truth (Arendt, 1978, Vol. 1, p. 15).² By developing Arendt's emphasis on meaning this way, I argue that she introduces to thinking a distinctive capacity for critique, one that she takes to be absent in Heidegger and that helps to distinguish her conception of thinking in its ability to intervene in the dangers of thoughtlessness.

While recent commentators have highlighted this capacity for critique in Arendt's notion of thinking, it has yet to be developed in relation to her critical reception of Heidegger in The Life of the Mind (Minnich, 2017; Shuster, 2018; Snir, 2020). Arendt is typically portrayed in her later writings as distancing herself from Heidegger by adding to thinking a worldly or political dimension that prepares the way for judgment (Fine, 2008; Koishikawa, 2018; Maslin, 2020; Taylor, 2002; Zerilli, 2005). Yet, in his well-known and largely unanswered criticism of Arendt, Richard Bernstein argues that this is not enough to show that she has distinguished adequately between the kinds of thinking that can prevent moral and political catastrophe and the kinds that cannot (Bernstein, 2000, p. 291). Afterall, Heidegger's thinking remains close to the world, rooted in concepts like aletheia and Gelassensheit that bring thinking back to earth for the sake of contravening the reductive and dominating will of modern technoscientific rationality. Bernstein thus identifies a decisive problem for Arendt, arguing that while she may demonstrate the moral and political dangers of Eichmann's thoughtlessness, she seems unable to answer the question of why Heidegger's thinking could not condition him against similar vulnerabilities. My aim is to provide a new basis to answer this question by considering the critical distance thinking achieves from the world in its quest for meaning rather than truth, a distance that she suggests Heidegger collapses in his analysis of thinking.

There is much to be said about Heidegger's