Soul-blindness, police orders and Black Lives Matter: Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Rancière

What does it mean to see someone as human, as a member of humankind? What kind of call for justice is it to demand that a group be seen as human beings? This article explores a fundamental kind of injustice: one of perception and how we respond to our perceptions. Drawing on Cavell, Wittgenstein and Rancière we elucidate “soul blindness” as a distinct and basic form of injustice. Rancière’s police orders and Cavell’s soul blindness are mutually constitutive; the undoing of police orders entails a politics of soul dawning. Soul dawning entails acknowledging the humanity of others without erasing difference. In the concluding section we consider white obliviousness to the Black Lives Matters (BLM) movement as a case of soul blindness. Part of the political import of BLM is its capacity to illustrate how practices of soul blindness in the U.S. constitute whiteness in a racialized police order

A constitution for the ocean? An agora on ocean governance

This introduction briefly discusses the global constitutional issues raised by ocean governance and introduces the three pieces from our Agora contributors

Climate change and the challenge to liberalism

In this editorial, we consider the ways in which liberal constitutionalism is challenged by and presents challenges to the climate crisis facing the world. Over recent decades, efforts to mitigate the climate crisis have generated a new set of norms for states and non-state actors, including regulatory norms (emission standards, carbon regulations), organising principles (common but differentiated responsibility) and fundamental norms (climate justice, intergenerational rights, human rights). However, like all norms, these remain contested. Particularly in light of their global reach, their specific behavioural implications and interpretations and the related obligations to act remain debatable and the overwhelming institutionalization of the neoliberal market economy makes clear and effective responses to climate change virtually impossible within liberal societies.<br/

Stanley Cavell's democratic perfectionism: community, individuality, and post-truth politics

Post-truth politics is both a result of a democratic culture in which each person is encouraged to voice their opinion, and a threat to the continuation of democracy as partisans seek to deny political standing to those with incommensurate world views. Are there resources within political theory for overcoming this tension? This book argues that Stanley Cavell's philosophy provides a conceptual framework for responding to post-truth politics. Jonathan Havercroft develops an original interpretation of Stanley Cavell as a theorist of democratic perfectionism. By placing Cavell's writings in conversation with political theorists on debates about the social contract, interpretive methods, democratic theory and political aesthetics, Stanley Cavell's Democratic Perfectionism cultivates modes of responsiveness that strengthen our democratic culture and help us resist the contemporary crisis of democratic backsliding. Each chapter diagnoses a sceptical crisis in contemporary politics and a mode of responsiveness in Cavell's thought that can respond to that crisis

The injustices of global justice scholarship

Peer reviewed: True Duncan Bell’s Empire, Race and Global Justice is an edited volume that makes an important intervention in philosophical debates about global justice. Its contributors argue that global justice scholarship has paid insufficient attention to the role of imperialism and racism in generating global hierarchies. This review considers the contributions of this volume from three perspectives: as a critique of the global justice literature, as a guide for what methods global justice scholars should use and as a reconsideration of what texts should be incorporated into the global justice canon. Empire is an important book for anyone who researches and teaches in the area of global justice because it demonstrates both why a different approach to this topic is necessary and how a different approach is possible. </jats:p