Columbia International Affairs Online

CIAO DATE: 10/07

Theoria

Vol. 49, No. 1, Issue 99 (June 2002)

Articles

• The Role of Intellectuals Today
  Pierre Bourdieu

  In my book, The Rules of Art,[2] I demonstrated that the intellectual world is an autonomous world within the social world, a microcosm which constituted itself progressively through a series of struggles. In the history of the West, the first to acquire their autonomy with regard to power were the jurists, who in twelfth century Bologna succeeded in asserting their collective independence in relation to the Prince, and, simultaneously, their rivalry amongst themselves. As soon as a field is constituted and asserts its existence, it asserts itself into the internal struggle. It is one of the properties of "fields" that the question of belongingness to this universe is at stake in the very midst of these universes.

• Membership and Justice
  David Archard

  In his famous poem "Mending Wall" Robert Frost's narrator builds, alongside his neighbour, a stone wall that divides their respective lands (Frost 1947: 47-8). The narrator can see this joint activity as no more than a "kind of out-door game" for, "There where it is we do not need the wall" and he wonders, "What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offence". His taciturn neigh-bour can only repeat his own father's thought that "Good fences make good neighbours".

• Self-Constituting Constituencies to Enhance Freedom, Equality, and Participation in Democratic Procedures
  Thomas W. Pogge

  Winston Churchill is quoted as saying that "democracy is the worst possible form of government except - all the others that have been tried". This thought may stimulate efforts to overcome the defects of democracy through the exploration of as yet untried alternatives superior to democracy. In our time, however, an effort to overcome these defects through the exploration of as yet untried superior forms of democracy seems far more promising.

• Which Public Sphere for a Democratic Society?
  Chantal Mouffe

  My aim in this presentation is to offer some reflections concerning the kind of public sphere that a vibrant democratic society requires. I want to scrutinize the dominant discourse which announces the "end of the adversarial model of politics" and the need to go beyond left and right towards a consensual politics of the centre. The thesis that I want to put forward is that, contrary to what its defenders argue, this type of discourse has very negative consequences for democratic politics. Indeed it has contributed to the weakening of the "democratic political public sphere", and it has led to the increasing dominance of juridical and moral discourse, dominance which I take to be inimical to democracy. I submit that the increasing moralization and juridification of politics, far from being seen as progress, a further step in the development of democracy, should be envisaged as a threat for its future.

• Market Socialism in Africa
  Paul Nursey-Bray

  Within European debates on the left about the future of the socialist project, particularly within the United Kingdom, market socialism has been enjoying a certain vogue over the last decade. It represents one of a number of approaches that have been canvassed in pursuit of a Third Way that would steer a course between the old authoritarian, state-controlled socialism of Soviet and Eastern European practice and the untrammelled excesses of a free market capitalist approach. It has claimed some influential supporters, as well as vehement critics who aver that in surrendering to the market and the law of value market socialism vitiates its socialist credentials.

• A Truth that is Justice, a Writhing that is Truth
  Adam Sitze

  The thesis I consider in this essay takes the form of a chiasmus. Just as Heidegger's Nazism requires us to re-evaluate his 1943 interpretation of Nietzsche as an instance of what Michel Foucault, in a 1978 interview, called a "regime of truth" (Foucault 1980: 133), so too does Foucault's 1983 claim that a Heideggerian reading of Nietzsche determined his philosophical development (Foucault 1996: 430) call for us to inquire into the "unthought" of Foucault's philosophical project. To re-read Heidegger by way of Foucault, I submit, is also to re-read Foucault by way of Heidegger.