Political Science

In the wake of health and economic crises across the world, solidarity is emerging as both a moral imperative and urgent social goal. This book approaches solidarity as a political good, both a framework of power structures and grounds for moral motivation. The distinct approaches to public goods and social value demonstrate how social connectedness is intricately tied to the distribution of public goods, and the moral commitments that grow out of them.

The essays in this book explore different features of the political, moral and civic approaches to solidarity. They offer moral justification for solidarity, grounded in the intrinsic value of social connectedness and epistemic deference; propose structural accounts of solidarity as action against racial oppression, or as an effective non-moral framework; propose to redefine property relations, so as to capture and redistribute property’s social value, and envision public goods as both an instrument of civic relations and as a condition to well-rounded, meaningful human lives. By providing a series of thought-provoking debates about social obligations and justice, the book reestablishes solidarity and public goods as an urgent and timely topic.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

The city is a paradoxical space, in theory belonging to everyone, in practice inaccessible to people who cannot afford the high price of urban real estate. Why should access to public and social goods be tied to the ability to acquire private property? When people lose access to the urban commons, they are dispossessed of something to which they have a rightful claim. What kind of right is the right to the city? Political theory has much to say about individual rights, equality, and redistribution, but has largely ignored the city. In order to fill this lacuna, this book draws on a largely forgotten political theory called solidarism. Solidarism’s justification of social rights is particularly relevant to conflicts about urban space. The book uses solidarism to interpret the city as a form of common-wealth, a concentration of value created by past generations and current residents. This approach helps us rethink struggles over gentrification, public housing, transit, and public space.

Recent scholarship in political theory has focused on the treatment of colonialism in the writings of canonical thinkers such as Locke, Burke, Mill, Diderot, Tocqueville, Smith, and Kant, revealing the extent to which the subject of colonialism and imperialism dominated the minds of great thinkers as the colonial project took place. While such scholarship provides fascinating insight into the possible problems of enlightenment thought, it tends to ignore the voices of thinkers who spoke from the position of the colonized. This book fills a gap in postcolonial political critique by serving as an introduction to theorists who struggled with the question of how to found a new political order when the existing ideas and institutions were implicated in a history of domination. Looking at the writings of Gandhi, Ngugi, al-Afghani, and Mariategui, among several others, the book aims to explain how the work of these thinkers engage in thematic continuities—constituting “postcolonial political thought”—and add to liberal democratic understandings of political power, as well as illuminate how many of the central questions of political theory are imaginatively explored by postcolonial writers.

Fighting for First Amendment rights is as popular a pastime as ever, but just because you can get on your soapbox doesn't mean anyone will be there to listen. Town squares have emptied out as shoppers decamp for the megamalls; gated communities keep pesky signature gathering activists away; even most internet chatrooms are run by the major media companies. Brave New Neighborhood sconsiders what can be done to protect and revitalize our public spaces.

Epoch-making political events are often remembered for their spatial markers: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the storming of the Bastille, the occupation of Tiananmen Square. Until recently, however, political theory has overlooked the power of place. In Radical Space, Margaret Kohn puts space at the center of democratic theory. Kohn examines different sites of working-class mobilization in Europe and explains how these sites destabilized the existing patterns of social life, economic activity, and political participation. Her approach suggests new ways to understand the popular public sphere of the early twentieth century.

This book imaginatively integrates a range of sources, including critical theory, social history, and spatial analysis. Drawing on the historical record of cooperatives, houses of the people, and chambers of labor, Kohn shows how the built environment shaped people's actions, identities, and political behavior. She illustrates how the symbolic and social dimensions of these places were mobilized as resources for resisting oppressive political relations. The author shows that while many such sites of resistance were destroyed under fascism, they created geographies of popular power that endure to the present.

This article explains how 19th-century radical republicans answered the following question: how is it possible to be free in a social order that fosters economic dependence on others? I focus on the writings of a group of French thinkers called the solidarists who advocated “liberty organized for everyone.” Mutualism and social right were two components of the solidarist strategy for limiting domination in commercial/industrial society. While the doctrine of mutualism was rooted in pre-industrial artisan culture, social right was a novel idea that built on Durkheim’s analysis of the division of labour. In this article, I describe the main features of the solidarist account: solidarity, social property, quasi-contractual debt, and restorative justice. Classical republicanism was deeply concerned with citizen participation and the balance between popular and elite power, but 19th-century radical republicans thought that these goals must be approached differently in market societies in which enormous power is exercised outside the state. The solidarists cautiously embraced the state as a mechanism for regulating the market in order to ensure equal liberty. Social right and mutualism were also conceived as ways of limiting the centralization of state power.

Why should the state provide public goods? I explore this question by focusing on the example of public parks. It examines the three most influential approaches to public goods (the market failures, the normative, and the democratic) and concludes that they fail to explain why parks should be public. I propose an alternative that I call solidarism, a social justice-based approach that provides a response to liberal arguments about the neutrality of the state. Solidarism emphasizes that modernity gives rise to growing levels of interdependence that generate benefits and burdens that are not shared fairly. Public goods as such are a way of compensating for the negative externalities of urbanization and industrialization. Left libertarians argue that such compensation should exclusively take the form of individual benefits. I challenge this view and provide three reasons for building public infrastructure that is shared among people who live together in a physical space: solidarity, decommodification, and politics. Exploring the publicness of parks provides a window into the broader question about the limits of the market and the importance of public space for democracy.

I am grateful to all the contributors to this interventions forum for their thoughtful commentaries on my book. While I can only briefly respond to their most challenging critiques, their reflections will enrich my own work and the broader theoretical debates about the urban commonwealth, the right to the city and social justice in cities.

The paper argues that the liberal approach to social rights is contradictory and provides an alternative account that draws on solidarism, a strand of nineteenth-century French Republican thought. Solidarism links together a normative theory of social obligation and a descriptive account of social value, debt and unearned increment. The theory of social property provides a distinctive foundation for social rights.

This essay investigates a strand of left-republicanism that emerged in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The solidarists developed a distinctive theory of social property and a thorough critique of the liberal, republican, and socialist alternatives. Solidarism rests on the claim that the modern division of labor creates a social product that does not naturally belong to the individuals who control it as their private property; property, therefore, should be conceived as "common wealth," divided into individual and public shares. When the wealthy appropriate a disproportionate share, they have a quasi-contractual debt to society that they are obliged to repay. The concepts of social debt, common-wealth, reparations, and rent ("unearned increment") played an important role in legitimizing egalitarian policies, but they have been largely forgotten today. This article resuscitates the theoretical arguments introduced by the solidarists and explains their relevance for contemporary debates about alternative economic arrangements.

This chapter poses the question, “What is wrong with gentrification?” It explores five harms that are associated with gentrification: residential displacement; exclusion; transformation of public and commercial space; polarization; and homogenization. The strongest normative argument against gentrification, the chapter argues, is based upon the wrong of displacement. Drawing on luck egalitarianism, the chapter explains why we should adopt policies that limit displacement, even though such policies are inconsistent with market allocations. The desire to remain in a gentrifying neighborhood is one example of what philosophers call “the problem of expensive tastes” and luck egalitarian theory provides reasons to accommodate this preference. The transformation of public/social space, exclusion, polarization, and homogenization may be harmful or beneficial depending on the composition of the city as a whole and the power dynamics involved in the transformations.

This paper examines the rhetorical dimension of arguments about global justice. It draws on postcolonial theory, an approach that has explored the relationship between knowledge and power. The global justice literature has elaborated critiques of global inequality and advanced arguments about how to overcome the legacies of domination. These concerns are also shared by critics of colonialism, yet there are also epistemological differences that separate the two scholarly communities. Despite these differences, I argue that bringing the two literatures into conversation generates important benefits. Postcolonial theory draws attention to the way that abstract concepts can function as metaphors that have the unintended consequence of reinforcing power relations. Normative theory will be more effective at promoting global justice if it pays more attention to the politics of representation.

This article examines the legal and normative debates about the Occupy Toronto movement in order to illuminate the issues raised by Occupy Wall Street. It challenges the view that the occupation of parks and plazas was an illegitimate privatization of public space. In both New York City and Toronto, the courts relied on a theory that Habermas called “German Hobbesianism.” This sovereigntist theory of the public was used to justify removing the protesters and disbanding the encampments. The alternative is what I call the populist model of the public, a term which describes the political mobilization of the people outside the institutional structures of the state. While my focus is on public space, I suggest the appropriation of space was the most visible aspect of a broader call for collective control of the common wealth of society. In other words, we should understand the occupations synecdochally as struggles over the meaning and power of public and private.

On May 1, 2006 Charles Grapski was arrested, handcuffed, and taken to jail where he was charged with a felony. His crime had taken place a few days earlier during an interview with Alachua City Manager Clovis Watson. Grapski had met with Watson in order to request public records related to a lawsuit challenging the results of a recent election. According to Grapski, his cell phone recorder was in plain sight and, at one point during the conversation, Watson directly asked if he was being recorded. When Grapski returned the following Monday to retrieve the requested documents, he was met by the police chief. 1 Grapski was charged under a state statute that requires consent when tape-recording conversations. This statute is considerably more stringent than the federal statute, which requires one-party rather than two-party consent. Grapski argued that he was not violating the state statute for two reasons. First, he claimed that participating in a conversation that is obviously being recorded constitutes tacit consent. Second, he insisted that a conversation with a public official about public business could not possibly be construed as private.

This paper explores the adaptive reuse of the Gooderham and Worts Distillery, a 13-acre historical site located adjacent to downtown Toronto. It asks what our fascination with industrial ruins tells us about North American and European cities in the twenty-first century. The transformation of the world's largest distillery into an upscale leisure destination illustrates many of the forces that are reconfiguring cities: commodification, gentrification, the city as theme park and spectacle, post-industrialism, and the consumer preferences of the creative class. But it would be wrong to dismiss the Distillery District simply as a Disneyified version of industrial history. Whereas typical urban entertainment destinations are places that ‘synergize’ nationally branded products, chain restaurants, and multiplex movie theatres, the Distillery District is a site for serious theatre, art galleries, and local artisanal production. The image promoted by the Distillery District could be described as the commodification of decommodification. Drawing on the concepts of nostalgia and ruin, this article suggests that the Distillery District is best understood not only as a strategy for maximizing the returns on investment capital but also as a cultural response to globalization and de-industrialization.

This essay provides an interpretation of Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn al-Afghānī, a controversial figure in nineteenth-century Islamic political thought. One aspect of this controversy is the tension between "Refutation of the Materialists," Afghānī's well-known defense of religious orthodoxy, and a short newspaper article entitled "Reply to Renan" that dismisses prophetic religion as dogmatic and intellectually stifling. In this essay I argue that close attention to Afghānī's theory of civilization helps resolve this apparent contradiction. Afghānī's interest in Ibn Khaldūn and the French historian Guizot is well known, but has not been fully explored in the literature. I suggest that understanding Guizot's distinctive approach to the concept of civilization illuminates Afghānī's writings on the political utility of religion. Afghānī was an ardent anti-imperialist and his goal was to encourage reform in Islamic countries while resisting Western hegemony. He concluded that the tension between prophetic religion and critical thought could help Islamic civilization to flourish.

Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the images and artifacts of nineteenth century collective life. The dra of his earliest essay on the Parisian arcades (1927), however, opened with a depiction of a gleaming new arcade on the Champs-Elysées. Located between two modern hotels, the newest Parisian passage displayed luxury automobiles, leather goods, and imported kimonos that were meant to entice fashionable Paris. Benjamin's real interest in the essay, however, was one of the oldest arcades in the citythe Passage de l'Opera-a place where "a past becomes space." Crammed with the

This article develops a novel approach to the relationship between public space and democracy. It employs the concept of the spectacle to show how public space can serve to destroy or weaken solidarity just as easily as it can foster a democratic ethos of equality. A close reading of Rousseau's Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theatre helps illuminate the political implications of modern public life, which increasingly takes the form of passive individuals assembling in order to view a spectacle. According to Rousseau, spectacles like the theater are depoliticizing because they undermine the opportunity for active participation and interaction with other citizens. By habituating the audience to theatrical modes of self-presentation, they also weaken the capacity for empathy. This article concludes by showing how contemporary theorists including Sennett, Debord and Habermas also contribute to our understanding of the concept of the spectacle.

In recent years there has been a debate about how to evaluate Alexis de Tocqueville's defense of colonialism. Some scholars have argued that there is a tension between the key doctrines of Tocqueville's political theory and his enthusiastic promotion of the French conquest and colonization of Algeria. Others have concluded that the apparent contradiction can be explained by paying careful attention to the nuances of his work or the logic of liberalism. This article advances this debate by reconstructing Tocqueville's theory of martial law, a dimension of his work that has been frequently overlooked. In a series of letters, notes and parliamentary reports on Algeria, Tocqueville criticized of the use of martial law in governing French citizens and defended its use against native Algerians. Tocqueville's writings on Algeria make it clear that he treated the rule of law not as a natural right held by all people but rather as a technique of government that was appropriate in communities already united by social ties.