New book on the democratic legitimacy of international law

The Democratic Legitimacy of International Lawby Steven Wheatley(Hart, June 2010)424 pagesDescriptionThe objective of this work is to restate the requirements of democratic legitimacy in terms of the deliberative ideal developed by Jürgen Habermas, and apply the understanding to the systems of global governance. The idea of democracy requires that the people decide, through democratic procedures, all policy issues that are politically decidable. But the state is not a voluntary association of free and equal citizens; it is a construct of international law, and subject to international law norms. Political self-determination takes places within...

Read more »

Critical essays on Sen/Nussbaum's capabilities approach

Capabilities, Power, and InstitutionsToward a More Critical Development EthicsEd. by Stephen L. Esquith & Fred Gifford(Pennsylvania State University Press, June 2010)216 pagesDevelopment economics, political theory, and ethics long carried on their own scholarly dialogues and investigations with almost no interaction among them. Only in the mid-1990s did this situation begin to change, primarily as a result of the pioneering work of an economist, Amartya Sen, and a philosopher who doubled as a classicist and legal scholar, Martha Nussbaum. Sen’s Development as Freedom (1999) [preview] and Nussbaum's Women and Human Development (2000) [preview]...

Read more »

Bloomsday June 16, 2010 - Video from UCD

Video from Bloomsday June 16 at University College Dublin with Jürgen Habermas and the ten recipients of honorary degrees:"Bloomsday 2010 at UCD"(video, 15 minutes)Jürgen Habermas received the UCD Ulysses Medal.See Maeve Cooke's laudatio for Habermas here (pdf).The honorary degrees were conferred on Broadcaster and historian, John Bowman; Internationally acclaimed author, Colm Tóibín; NGO anti-hunger campaigner, Tom Arnold; Journalist and agriculture expert, Matt Dempsey; Medical researcher and physician, Martin Carey; Chemist, Tadhg Begley; French novelist, playwright and feminist theorist, Hélène Cixous; French medical scientist, Laurent Perret;...

Read more »

Report from the Frankfurt conference on human rights

On the blog "theorieblog.de", Franziska Dübgen summarizes the content of the main contributions at the recent conference in Frankfurt on "Human Rights Today":"Zwischen Ambivalenz und Ordnung: Die Politik der Menschenrechte"The speakers at the conference were Rainer Forst, Christoph Menke, Charles Beitz, John Tasioulas, Abdullahi Ahmes An-Na’im, Jürgen Habermas, Susanne Baer, Hans Joas, Seyla Benhabib, Étienne Balibar, and Costas Douzinas.See my previous posts here and he...

Read more »

Amartya Sen & David Held discuss "The Idea of Justice"

At London School of Economics on July 8, 2010:Amartya Sen and David Held will discuss Sen's new book, The Idea of Justice (Harvard University Press, 2009).The event is free but a ticket is required. More information here.David Held is Professor of Political Science at LSE.Amartya Sen is Lamont University Professor at Harvard University and an honorary fellow of LSE. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 19...

Read more »