Towards a Democratic Economy
A strange cognitive dissonance is pervading our social life: we regard it as our inalienable right to govern ourselves democratically in one social sphere,...
One Step Back, Two Steps Elsewhere: Exploring the Past to Envision Democratic Futures
It is difficult to write the words "democracy is in crisis" without a sense of reluctance. In many ways, it feels like a trivial...
Executive Orders, Offices, and Laws: Democratic Conundrums in Ancient Greece and Modern America
An executive order is issued by the new ruler of a country. A woman defies the order in the name of higher laws. How...
Democracy and Future Generations: A Philosophical Minefield
Democracy and future generations have a thorny relationship. On the one hand, democratic countries provide better for the well-being of future generations than autocracies...
Taming and Tolerating Uncertainty
Democracy is existential to its core, and the social question is key to its survival. Since large-scale transformations of society—including migration, climate change, war,...
Democracy is Autonomy
Why Democracy?
In a year of election ballots filled with questionable candidates, social media fights over which convention scored points for the best celebrity cameo,...
Cavell and the Grammar of Politics
Stanley Cavell’s writings on skepticism in The Claim of Reason offer a lens through which to interpret the surprising connections between language and politics....
The Hammer and the Orchestra: Democratic Production from Kant to Angela Davis
Many philosophers, from Kant and Marx to Rawls and Angela Davis, take the nature of the economy to be central to the justification of...
Reviving Electoral Democracy
It sometimes seems that we approach the theory and practice of democracy with one hand clasped firmly behind our back. Although reams of ink...
Reconsidering Truth and Politics
In 2016 the sociologist Arlie Hochschild published Strangers in Their Own Land. The book appeared in the final days of that year’s presidential election...