European Journal of Political Theory

This article argues that there is a discrepancy between Jürgen Habermas's initial plea for critical and rational identities and his more recent glorification of the European model. Initially, Constitutional Patriotism could be apprehended as a critical standard for existing political practices. However, Habermas's recent political texts tend to lose all kind of reflexive distance in their apprehension of the European identity — which is presented as distinct and even superior to its counter-model, the US. Such a `Europatriotic' temptation should be resisted. The `thick' European identity advocated by Habermas has no truly federative dimension and could undermine the unique normative potential of a political entity composed of distinct identities. Consequently, the article suggests an elucidation of liberal postnationalism with a view to explaining its refusal to tie Europe's legitimacy to an identification logic.

Most scholarly interpretations of Hannah Arendt's political writings account for her idiosyncratic understanding of politics and freedom in one of two ways. They interpret Arendt's more sensational claims about politics either literally or figuratively, but not in both ways. This essay proposes a new interpretation of Arendt's political writings based on a neglected, dichotomous pattern of metaphors in her collected works. That pattern, once mapped, yields insights into the meaning, applications, and limitations of Arendt's controversial political ideals and rhetoric. Neither a wholly literal nor a wholly figurative interpretation will do; I propose a reading that makes use of both strategies and gives Arendt her due while acknowledging her challenges.

Is Honneth's theory sufficiently sensitive to practices of recognition that have historically emerged? This article answers in the negative by revisiting his ground-breaking study The Struggle for Recognition. The first two sections of this article reconstruct the connection he draws between the practices of recognition, the psychological damage experienced in its absence and the motivation for social conflict that results. In doing so, we discover the paradox of recognition: Honneth makes psychological and moral development depend on precisely the `legally' instantiated system that is the source of disrespect in the first instance. Correspondingly, the paradox of recognition denies other alternative ways oppressed groups have achieved and sustained psychological and moral development. The third section offers the contrasting example of how black Americans used their religious imagination to overcome the effects of slavery. In doing so, they developed structures of mutuality to affirm self and community against misrecognition.

Hobbes's defense of absolutism involves the dual claims that consent is the foundation of legitimate authority and that sovereignty is necessarily absolute. It is a paradoxical combination of claims: If absolute government is the product of choice how can it also be the sole possible constitution? While all of Hobbes's contractarian successors have rejected his preference for absolutism, his dual claims have become commonplace. Since Hobbes, contract thinkers routinely assert that people will choose their preferred constitution and that it is the only possible one. The essay examines the genesis of this paradoxical argumentation: Hobbes's genius lay in merging Grotius's contractarian rationale with Bodin's analytic view that sovereignty must be absolute. The final section discusses related criticisms of Rawls's contract theory. Rawls inherited a genre already flawed by the impluse to combine voluntarist with non-voluntarist reasoning.

The recent `religious turn' within Locke scholarship has stressed the need to understand his theological commitments when approaching his political thought. One area of interpretation that has been completely transformed by this heightened sensitivity to the religious roots of Locke's thought is his account of property ownership which, it is claimed, contains a `right to charity' — a subsistence entitlement that trumps established ownership rights. However, this increasingly accepted interpretive claim has been made without significant attention to the way in which charity is deployed throughout Locke's writing. The aim of this article is to try and get to grips with Locke's various usages of the term and determine whether the concept he deploys is a consistent one. After discussion of the uncertain role charity plays in his account of property, we examine how it is defined in the Essay Concerning Human /nderstanding, and then turn to the crucial position it occupies in his theological corpus. Though Locke's understanding of charity seems fraught with ambiguities, the reason for these ambiguities relate to his configuration of charity as a disposition rather than a mere act , a configuration linked inextricably to his account of toleration.