Amy J. Cohen

On Being Anti-Imperial: Consensus Building, Anarchism, and ADR

This article examines the reach and possible limits of “imperial legality” by comparing two kinds of practices intended to enable actors to resolve conflicts and make collective decisions without the force of sovereign impositions: contemporary anarchism, which has become an influential part of the anti-neoliberal globalization movement, on the one hand, and professional consensus building, which is rapidly emerging as part of the alternative dispute resolution (ADR) movement, on the other hand. Although both sets of practices are intensely focused on generating consensus, this comparison highlights the different conceptions of process that they employ. Professional consensus building’s capacity to render itself “merely” procedure – a means to further another set of ends – makes it remarkably easy to scale up to imperial proportions. By contrast, anarchism’s vision of process aspires to collapse distinctions between means and ends, refuses to constrain anyone who does not participate, and seeks transformation deep in the minutia of selves, social practices, and political relations. As a result, it is much more recalcitrant – and, perhaps more to the point, much less desirable – than ADR to redirect for imperial ends. The article thus explores how consensual processes offer their subjects an ideal of legality that is alternatively amenable or hostile to imperial ambitions.

Producing Publics: Dewey, Democratic Experimentalism, and the Idea of Communication

In a volume dedicated to celebrating and interrogating the pragmatic – and especially Deweyan – roots of democratic experimentalism, this essay explores some of the more elusive aspects of Dewey’s ideas of communication. It argues that for Dewey, the question of communication was not how speakers should make their interior thoughts and desires transparent and understandable to others but how they could produce shared social contexts – that is, publics – and with them new forms of democratic self-governance. The essay thus suggests that Dewey’s understanding of communication diverges from one that is more familiar in popular problem-solving discourses in law. For example, in predominant strands of alternative dispute resolution communication is understood primarily as a neutral technique used to bridge the mental properties of individuals whatever their aims, rather than, as Dewey would have described it, a means and end of a good society and thus a deeply normative and political practice. By comparing divergent ideas of communication in law, the essay aims to open up for analysis and debate whether and how democratic experimentalists understand communication not like traditional models of popular legal problem solving, but rather like Dewey: as a method of social life that calls publics into being.