We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
The chapter explores the rich resonances of Bergson’s philosophy in the field of politics and political thought, demonstrating how Bergson’s later thought provides crucial insights for contemporary problems and debates. It shows how Bergson takes up a Rousseauian strand of political theory that exploits the productive inconsistencies of the republican tradition and situates him within a realist tradition going back to early Christianity (with Pascal as his central reference) that resonates with current realist conceptions of the political. The chapter then moves to consider ways in which Bergson’s conceptions speak to - and disrupt - debates concerning nationalism and cosmopolitanism in political theory today, and in particular, debates between partialists, cosmopolitans, and dualists. Highlighting Bergson’s own participation in politics, the chapter then discusses Bergson’s contribution to the thinking of human rights via one of his early readers, the Canadian diplomat John Humphrey, whose notion of process serves as the motif of the essay’s concluding critical assessment of Bergson’s notion of democracy as a work in progress.
Theories of toleration maintain that people sometimes have good reasons not to act on their convictions, however strong. Theories of latitude maintain that one should doubt the strength of one's convictions. While toleration has often been taken to be foundational for the liberal tradition, another view (made fully explicit by Brian Barry's Justice as Impartiality) is that we should look, rather, to the idea of latitude, as exemplified in late seventeenth-century Anglican writings. Taking these writings as its initial point of reference, the article maintains that toleration, rather than latitude, should be seen as foundational for the liberal tradition, which is better understood in terms of what one person owes to another than in terms of the relative validity of their beliefs.
“Subsidiarity” views of crime against humanity propose that state crime is at the core of the idea, thus necessitating a further level of authority. That proposal can be given a strong moral justification in terms of the enormous risks that arise from a state’s authority and territorial control. Discussions of crime against humanity by Larry May and Norman Geras, however, offer different views of the idea, May proposing that it be seen as group-based crime (in one or both of two senses), Geras proposing that it be seen as a serious violation of human rights. Those views are questioned on the basis of their fit with either the nature of the crimes involved or the moral basis of their condemnation, and the subsidiarity view is restated.
While Rawls himself put contractualism to work at the national level, his more cosmopolitan followers have argued that the full requirements of international justice can be reached only by way of a global contractualist argument. Both positions neglect a resource from within the contractualist tradition, The need for iteration of the nation-level contract gives rise to strong and reasonably definite moral requirements. A good-faith adoption of the contractual argument entails, first, a duty to assist those whose potential recourse to just arrangements is blocked by tyranny or political collapse. Second, understood as a net risk-reducing project, a nation-level contract entails a duty not to impede the iterated risk-reduction projects of other national soceties. Envisaging the duty in this contractualist way avoids problems that beset both "natural duty" and "interactionist" approaches to international justice. The non-impedance requirement bears especially on international economic arrangements. The institutional representation of those affected by such arrangements would connect this abstract requirement with practical conclusions.
Ideas of collective responsibility challenge the doctrine of individual responsibility that is the dominant paradigm in law and liberal political theory. But little attention is given to the consequences of holding groups accountable for wrongdoing. Groups are not amenable to punishment in the way that individuals are. Can they be punished – and if so, how – or are other remedies available? The topic crosses the borders of law, philosophy and political science, and in this volume specialists in all three areas contribute their perspectives. They examine the limits of individual criminal liability in addressing atrocity, the meanings of punishment and responsibility, the distribution of group punishment to a group's members, and the means by which collective accountability can be expressed. In doing so, they reflect on the legacy of the Nuremberg Trials, on the philosophical understanding of collective responsibility, and on the place of collective accountability in international political relations.
John Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) is one of the most widely-read texts in the political theory of toleration, and a key text for the liberal tradition. However, Locke also defended toleration more extensively in three subsequent Letters, which he wrote in response to criticism by an Anglican cleric, Jonas Proast. This edition, which includes a new translation of the original Letter, by Michael Silverthorne, enables readers to assess John Locke's theory of toleration by studying both his classic work and essential extracts from the later Letters. An introduction by Richard Vernon sets Locke's theory in its historical context and examines the key questions for contemporary political theorists which arise from this major work in the history of political thought.
Recent cosmopolitan thinking attempts to find a place for local (including national) attachment, but all of the proposals offered have been exposed to telling critique. There are objections to the claim that local obligations are only instances of cosmopolitan duty, and to the claim that we can give a moral justification to national societies as networks of mutual benefit. This article argues that it is not mutual benefit but mutual risk that grounds compatriot preference. While exposure to coercion as such does not track national boundaries, exposure to the risks of state abuse, political choice, and social conformity provide us with a reason to take our compatriots' interests seriously. The same argument, however, displays the limits of this reasoning, and also grounds a demanding obligation to aid other societies.
The idea of collective liability comes into play because it seems right to attribute acts to collectives that cannot plausibly be seen as acts of their members, or even as a simple aggregation of their members' actions. To the extent that liability can be individually assigned, or to the extent that some or all members contributed personally to some portion of a blamable action, individual liability (selective or across the board) is all we need. However, as all of the chapters in this book have argued, individual liability often fails to match reality. As several chapters have noted, that point was perhaps most strikingly made by Arendt's “banality of evil” construct: not all or even most of those whose complicity is essential to evil acts are themselves essentially evil. If they were, the right retributive response would be to try them, one by one, for their deeds, if one could. (If the number of offenders is high, the problem, although severe, is practical, not conceptual.) The reason for not doing so is that collectives have features that their members do not have: first, individual behavior is profoundly conditioned by the collective context; second, collective action has consequences that are not the intended consequences of many of those who contribute to it. Both causes and effects are latent, as it were, in the agents' social and political context.