Seyla Benhabib

Twilight of Sovereignty or the Emergence of Cosmopolitan Norms? Rethinking Citizenship in Volatile Times

This essay examines recent debates concerning the emergence of cosmopolitan norms such as those pertaining to universal human rights, crimes against humanity as well as refugee, immigrant and asylum status. What some see as the spread of a new human rights regime and a new world order others denounce as the “spread of empire” or characterize as “law without a state”. In contrast, by focusing on the relationship of global capitalism to deterritorialized law this essay distinguishes between the spread of human rights norms and deterritorialized legal regimes. Although both cosmopolitan norms and deterritorialized law challenge the nation-state and threaten to escape control by democratic legislatures, it argues that cosmopolitan norms enhance popular sovereignty while many other forms of global law undermine it. It concludes by pleading for a vision of “republican federalism” and “democratic iterations”, which would enhance popular sovereignty by establishing interconnections across the local, the national and the global.

Claiming Rights across Borders: International Human Rights and Democratic Sovereignty

The status of international law and transnational legal agreements with respect to the sovereignty claims of liberal democracies has become a highly contentious theoretical and political issue. Although recent European discussions focus on global constitutionalism, there is increasing reticence on the part of many that prospects of a world constitution are neither desirable nor salutary. This article more closely considers criticisms of these legal transformations by distinguishing the nationalist from democratic sovereigntiste positions, and both, from diagnoses that see the universalization of human rights norms either as the Trojan horse of a global empire or as neocolonialist intentions to assert imperial control over the world. These critics ignore “the jurisgenerativity of law.” Although democratic sovereigntistes are wrong in minimizing how human rights norms improve democratic self-rule; global constitutionalists are also wrong in minimizing the extent to which cosmopolitan norms require local contextualization, interpretation, and vernacularization by self-governing peoples.

Borders, Boundaries, and Citizenship

Modern liberal democracies owe their stability and relative success to the coming together of two ideals which originate in distinct historical periods: the ideals of self-governance and territorially circumscribed nation-state. Self-governance defines freedom as the rule of law among a community of equals who are citizens of the polis and who have the right to rule and to be ruled. This ideal emerges in 5 th -century Athens and is revived throughout history in episodes such as the experience of self-governing city-states in the Renaissance, the Paris commune of 1871, the anarchist and socialist communes of the Russian Revolution, and the Spanish Civil War.

Transformations of Citizenship: The Case of Contemporary Europe

IN THE MID-MORNING HOURS OF 11 SEPTEMBER 2001, SHORTLY AFTER the second Twin Tower of the World Trade Center had collapsed, amidst the fog surrounding us all — who, when, why — I heard a brief item of news on the radio. Canada had closed its airspace to all American planes still en route; since US airports were also closed for several hours on that day, these pilots would have no choice but to return to their destinations or to circle the airs in search of ‘safe haven’. This news was not repeated. Canada eventually did permit US airplanes to land and many transatlantic passengers found safety in Iceland’s Reykjavik airport for a period of time, up to several days in some cases. This small incident is one among the many in recent years that have made increasingly transparent the fragility of the territorially bounded and state-centric international order. For a few brief hours, the passengers of the airplanes that could not obtain landing permission were like refugees without first admittance claims. The same logic that permits states to deny first admittance to certain refugees and asylees, and often contrary to the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees, was operative in this instance as well. Invoking national security concerns, the USA’s closest neighbour could, even if brief ly, follow the imperatives of sovereign statehood and close its airspace as well as landing privileges to passengers who had now become ‘refugees in orbit’ in the heavens. Countless other similar dramas have unfolded before our eyes: illegal aliens crossing the Channel at Dover and perishing in meat

The utopian dimension in communicative ethics

Recorded in Ithaca, NY by Cornell University., Sponsored by: German Literature, Department of,Womens Studies Program., Lecture, March 16, 1985.

Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem

Among all of Hannah Arendts writings, Eichmann in Jerusalem generated by far the most acrimonious and tangled controversy, which has since cast a long shadow on her eventful but otherwise respectable and illustrious career as a public intellectual and academic. The Eichmann “affair” raised a host of questions about Arendt not only as a political thinker but as an individual Jew. Gershom Scholems cruel phrase that Arendt lacked “Ahabath Israel” (love of the Jewish people) captures this collective bitterness. Ironically this book is Hannah Arendt’s most intensely Jewish work, in which she identifies herself morally and epistemologically with the Jewish people. It is as if some of the deepest paradoxes of retaining a Jewish identity under conditions of modernity came to the fore in Arendt’s search for the moral, political, and jurisprudential bases on which the trial and sentencing of Adolf Eichmann could take place. Arendt had struggled to bring together the universal and the particular, her modernist cosmopolitanism and her belief in some form of collective Jewish self-determination all her life. Precisely because this work was so close to who she truly was, it distracted from her equanimity and exhibited at times an astonishing lack of perspective, balance of judgment, and judicious expression.

The legitimacy of human rights

Dædalus Summer 2008 In recent years, the language of human rights has become ubiquitous around the world, shaping such nascent transnational institutions as the International Criminal Court, and justifying international interventions to halt genocide.1 Yet there is wide-ranging disagreement among philosophers and jurists about the nature and scope of supposedly universal human rights. Some argue that human rights constitute the “core of a universal thin morality” (Michael Walzer), while others claim that they form “reasonable conditions of a worldpolitical consensus” (Martha Nussbaum). Still others narrow the concept of human rights “to a minimum standard of well-ordered political institutions for all peoples”2 (John Rawls), and caution that there needs to be a sharp distinction between this minimum standard and the much longer list of rights that the United Nations enumerated in its Universal Declaration of Human Rights (udhr) of 1948. Such disagreements inevitably raise doubts about what, precisely, should count as a human right. Walzer, for one, suggests that a comparison of the moral codes of various societies may produce a set of standards, a “thin” list of human rights, “to which all societies can be held–negative injunctions, most likely, Seyla Benhabib

On Max Horkheimer : new perspectives

Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), one of the founders of critical theory and a sometime colleague of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin, has become a subject of renewed attention and appreciation in Germany in the last decade. This collection of essays by German and American scholars will help familiarize English-speaking readers with the most important results of this recent work and, in conjunction with a companion volume of Horkheimers essays, Between Philosophy and Social Science, should provide a much fuller and deeper picture of his role in the history of modern social theory.

Modernity and the Aporias of Critical Theory

Since Webers analysis of modernity through the category of rationalization, diagnosing the irrationality of this rationalization had been a central preoccupation of critical theory. Marcuse ended his “Industrialization and Capitalism in the Work of Max Weber” with the question: “Is there perhaps already in Max Webers concept of reason that irony that understands but disavows? Does he by any chance mean to say: And this you call ‘reason’?” Marcuses question was not unjustified, for it pointed to an unresolved ambivalence in Webers own work on modernity. In diagnosing that societal rationalization processes would inevitably result in a loss of freedom (Freiheitsverlust), whereas Western cultural rationalism would lead to an irreversible loss of meaning (Sinnverlust), Weber provided a highly ambivalent evaluation of the significance of modernity in the West.

In Defense of Universalism. Yet Again! A Response to Critics of Situating the Self

L Towards a Post-Metaphysical Universalism Universalism has fallen on hard times. After nearly two decades of postmodernist, feminist, deconstructionist and other versions of contextualist criticism, universalist ideals in ethics and politics sound anachronistic and indefensible. Yet paradoxically, the political realities of our time ranging from ethnic cleansing and mass rapes of Moslem women in Bosnia to the crushing of the democratic opposition in Tienanmen Square in China and to the defense of the civil and political rights of all minorities in the successor states of the former Soviet Union have placed the necessity for universalist ideals on the global agenda. By universalism I mean the principle that all human beings, by virtue of their humanity, are entitled to moral respect from others, and that such universal moral respect minimally entails the entitlement of individuals to basic human, civil, and political rights. Since the Enlightenment, philosophers have been disputing the normative grounds upon which such universal moral respect can be rationally defended. The content and extent of minimal rights entailed by such moral respect are also the source of disagreement and contention. What has become increasingly difficult to defend in the last two decades is not so much the minimal content associated with these two principles of universal moral respect and human rights as the possibility of justifying them rationally. A number of theorists, from neo-pragmatists like Richard Rorty to democratic-contestation theorists like William Connolly, would concede that some version of these principles is both desirable