Quote:
Originally Posted by TimMason
There are large stretches of the globe that have not achieved nationhood as yet, and others in which constitutional crisis is virtually constant. Even in the homelands of parliamentary democracy, the idea of the nation is up for grabs: in the UK there is great trouble with Englishness, and what it would mean to be English. Elsewhere, problems are even more acute.
In many lands it not the moral community that is lacking, but the structural institutions that would give that community voice. I would agree that you cannot impose the institutions top down: indeed many of the current problems have their roots in this very mode of proceeding.
But I'll admit that I would not be looking to philosophers from the anglosphere to deal with this kind of question. I'd be looking to the social historians - to Mann and Tilley, for example - to the political anthropologists like James C. Scott or Taussig, or to political sociologists such as Susan Strange. Or to look at Florence's point about how new communication systems have impacted on society and the polity, Manuel Castells or Sennett.
But then philosophy does bleed into these writings. I don't think that there is a single interesting social theorist who has not been influenced by Wittgenstein. Whether she knows it or not.
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Yeah, I see what you're saying. For example, Rawls might be a very important resource for the formation of a constitution in Iraq for example or when European governments are unable to proceed. I do agree that historians, sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists are crucial as well. One can compare, for example, the constitutions of America, China and South Africa to see the definite impact of empirical facts and their interpretations on such fundamental documents. Nevertheless, it takes some philosophy to cross Hume's IS/ OUGHT gap in order to say, finally, what we ought to be doing in light of what we know to be the case.
I would think that you might find Jurgen Habermas very interesting as he sits in a very strange middle position between someone like Rawls and Dewey. He is something of a latter day Kantian in that he believes that political norms can be derived starting from the performative contradictions inherent in communicative practices. That sort of project connects up to anglo-american thought and moves forward toward concerns about procedure and such. He is horrible to read however (maybe worse than Hegel) and i wouldn't wish him on anyone.