Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie, 2021

Auctoritas, non veritas, facit legem – ‘authority and not truth creates law’: the statement, taken from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and cited by legal scholar Carl Schmitt (2005, p. xix), could be interpreted in a naïve fashion as belonging to a rather cynical tradition of politician thought in early European modernity. While it would certainly be possible to nd a parallel thread between the political views of the former with the latter, such a connection would fall short in taking into account the respective political and social climates and audiences in which these texts were written. The grand tradition, however, to which both authors contributed could be called ›political theology‹. Both Hobbes and Machiavelli might agree on the idea that since the king is the sole ruler on top of a hierarchy and its responsibilities parallel that of theological rule. The notion of political theology and its origins are complicated and closely connected to the notion of monarchia, i.e. monarchy. In this essay, we will critically follow the lines of argumentation of this term by Erik Peterson, Jacob Taubes and Carl Schmitt.

Journal of Law and Religion, 2001

The heretical claim of this book is that "democracy depends on a divine purpose." (ix) Franklin Gamwell's argument challenges head on the modem dogmatic consensus that "morality and politics are independent of a divine reality." (ix) Although the argument of this book stands on its own, Gamwell's prior work has prepared the way for this argument by arguing that moral claims depend upon theistic affirmations 1 and that religious freedom is not merely one constitutional principle among many but "is the only constitutional principle." 2 In Democracy on Purpose, Gamwell seeks to extend these arguments further to establish that the presumed separation of politics and theism puts democracy on an incoherent intellectual foundation. By contrast, he articulates ."a theistic conception of what makes life distinctively human" (ix) and demonstrates how this provides a coherent account of human freedom that supports our democratic commitment. The novelty of Gamwell's challenge to the modem consensus is not his agreement with the pre-modem claim that all human life (including politics) is properly directed to an all-inclusive divine purpose or comprehensive telos but his rejection of authority as the grounding for comprehensive teleology. Gamwell considers modernity's "commitment to the autonomy of reason" "non-negotiable" so that claims about God, morality, and politics must be rationally redeemed. (4) The mistake of modem thought has been to dismiss comprehensive teleology by merely assuming that it cannot be rationally redeemed. Thus, Gamwell's position that democracy depends on a comprehensive teleology that can be rationally redeemed constitutes a unique alternative to the medieval

Public Reason seems to be constitutively incomplete, indefinite, unable to provide normative conclusions about a particular issue. Concepts and contents related to Public Reason could also be related to Vagueness. Vagueness is since a few years (Endicott 2000) understood as a resource for legal theorists but it is also a serious burden for the general normative project of political philosophy, because, although it is acknowledged that Public Reason is inconclusive. This finding could be fatal to the very possibility to have Public Reason as a deliberative frame in the process of seeking a final justification for the liberal polity intended as a whole. Another issue connected to the constitutive Vagueness of Public Reason is the constitutive inefficiency of the capacity to judge possessed by single citizens. This is also a starting premise of the contemporary debate on liberal paternalism, recently going in new directions trough Kramer 2017 and the work Sunstein started in the last decade at the intersection of behavioral economics and legal theory. It is possible to try to give a new kind of foundation of the intervention of the liberal state on the behavior of the citizens, interacting with the moral and political proposals on Liberal Excellence and Idealization by Kramer 2017 and Gaus 2016. Rawls' ideal of Public Reason applies to officials when they engage in political advocacy in a public forum; it also governs the decisions that officials make. Shapiro’s theory is focused on legal interpretation as a shared planning activity. If this activity is considred as something concerning and developed mainly by officials the planning output should be considered as separated from connections to political normative considerations. Legal theory in Shapiro’s interpretation should be restricted to social facts, and the coherence in the planning activity could be observed as the unique truth-makers of positive laws. This distrust of deliberative Democracy bring to an antiperfectionism that is also a paradoxical distrust of Public Reason, a contradiction rooted in this and other similar recent versions of Exclusive Positivism in Jurisprudence, as we will try to show it could be derived from the proposal developed in Kramer 2017. This paradigm is aimed to fail, as was recently suggested in Coleman 2011, arguing from different perspectives on the necessity of expanding the notion of legal fact and legal architecture. Critics of the publicity of liberal Public Reason stress the importance of the public element. The concerns elaborated by these critics and revisionists are relevant, but the aspiration to consensus on substantive principles of justice, shared forms of reasoning, and a shared rationale for these principles might see hopelessly unrealistic and excessive. Gaus argues that the most important issue is that laws could be justified to all, not that citizens engage in deliberative exercises. Gaus interprets the requirements of public justification by asking whether all citizens with very diverse beliefs have conclusive reasons to accept proposed laws. Political Liberalism as developed in Quong 2011 allow a legislation with an outcome of laws that cannot be justified to the whole of citizenship and therefore must be rejected: this seems to allow anarchy, because it’s difficult to imagine any system of law to be justifiable according to these structures. Dissent is a constituent of liberal and republican democracies, and also the will not to justify everything to everyone could be intended as a form of resistance to the interference of the political liberal reasoning in the shared practices of a sub-community. Coleman assess this approach from yet another perspective: “The better approach is to accommodate the fact that liberty is valuable by imposing an adequacy condition on a theory of the nature of liberty to the effect that in order to be adequate or persuasive, an account of the nature of liberty must have the resources to explain what is valuable about liberty.” (Coleman 2011 p 39) We would like to suggest that a revised Liberal Perfectionism could give trough a moderate Paternalistic Attitude a slight foundation for their normative hope that citizens might converge on a shared political agreement and maybe on the way for citizens to flourish, to grow in excellence or to became better off, through a mix of Exemplarist Principles and a perfectionist political conception. J. L. Coleman. The Architecture of Jurisprudence, 121:2 Yale Law Journal 2011 T. Endicott, Vagueness in Law, Oxford University Press 2000 G. Gaus, The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society, Princeton University Press 2016 M. H. Kramer, Liberalism with excellence, Oxford University Press 2017 J. Quong, Liberalism without Perfection, Oxford University Press 2011 L. Zagzebski, Exemplarist Moral Theory, Oxford University Press 2017

Polity and Society , 2024

Lord Acton’s famous aphorism, “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” (Lazarski, 2012, p.11), carries profound humanistic implications. It serves as a warning to those who advocate for true freedom and those pursuing positive axiological aims in life. As we will discuss in this paper, many thinkers have shared and supported Acton’s saying in diverse ways. Their existential agony is simple: reflecting on dreadful historical events leads us to question who most negatively impacts society when holding excessive power—often the so-called utopian regimes. While some argue that not all state structures are corrupt, this paper challenges the foundational proposition of a perfect state. It questions the optimism in utopian states, exploring strategies like cultural relativism, deceitful propaganda, and romantic fantasies. By examining historical events qualitatively, the paper encourages philosophical and moral reflection on the challenges to achieving the values essential for a healthy society. Precisely, the author aims to provoke thought on the ideal regime, considering historical flaws and the need to overcome challenges in pursuing humanistic values.

Challenging Theocracy. Ancient Lessons for Global Politics, eds. Tabachnik, Koivukoski, et al., (University of Toronto Press, 2017)., 2017

The paper defends a version of theocracy against liberalism and liberalism's self justifications. Theocracy, or at least a political system where the spiritual authority is independent of and a necessary counter to the secular authority, fits better both the historical facts and human needs.

2015

I am very grateful to FTL and Ruth Padilla for their kind invitation to share with you all today. The sessions yesterday and today have been very interesting and thought provoking. This presentation is arranged in three parts. Part I briefly examines the biblical and theological foundations of my vision of a desired society from a political perspective. Part II presents the reasons why I believe representative democracy is an appropriate system of government for a desired society. Part III describes an empirical problem that Christian churches are currently experiencing in Latin America. While my expertise as a comparative political scientist is limited to the Latin American region, I honestly believe that this is a problem that can affect Christians in any region, particularly in many countries of the two thirds world, where democracy remains fragile. The last part of the essay explores the insights that democratic theory provides to address this particular challenge.

In the last decade or so Christian theologians have expended considerable time and effort debating whether their discipline qualifies as a form of public discourse, and if so, how it should properly submit its claims to the scrutiny of a public ostensibly "constituted by open conversations, plural discourse, and diverse communities." 1 But rather than simply weighing in on one side or the other of this debate, I propose that we direct our attention first to the historical context within which the question of the public nature of theology emerges as an important issue. In order to clarify this history, we should begin with Richard Rorty's provocative assessment of the relationship between philosophical inquiry and the habits, relations, and structures of liberal democracy. Rorty states that in the early years of the American experiment with liberal democracy (exemplified for Rorty in the writings of Thomas Jefferson), when a citizen found in her conscience personal religious beliefs that were related to public matters but which could not be defended on the basis of beliefs common to all, she could safely be asked to sacrifice her conscience " o n the altar of public expediency." There was no perceived tension in making this request, according to Rorty's midrash on Jefferson, due to the latter's adherence to the Enlightenment's conception of "reason", which held that "there is a relation between the ahistorical essence of the human soul and moral truth that ensures that free and open discussion will produce 'one right answer' to moral as well as to scientific questions. Such a theory guarantees that a moral belief which cannot be justified to the mass of mankind is 'irrational', and thus is not really a product of our moral faculty at all."