Agency, political economy, and the transnational democratic ideal

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. See James Bohman, Democracy Across Borders: From Demos to Demoi (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 110.

2. Ibid., 103ff. For the conception of humanity that Bohman constructs using both the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of this concept in discussing its role in normative political theory. Bohman again displays his deep debt to pragmatism, and to Dewey, in including creativity as part of the architecture of the plural democratic subject, and the individual human agent.

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 57. The second quote comes from the opening of Chapter 11, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Press, 1996).

4. See Bohman, Democracy Across Borders, 37ff for this articulation.

5. Ibid., 174–5.

6. See as one among several examples of the relationship between Northern and Southern democracies in the post World War II period Stephen Schlesinger and Howard Kinzer's Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies; Expanded edition, 1999). Indeed, Bohman's theory targets the kind of perverted principal–agent relationships that lead to such situations of domination, but the point I am making here regards the characterization of the post World War II period and more generally, where the facts of this problematic situation lead with regard to the practical and institutional starting point of redressing it.

7. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (London: Blackwell Publishing, 1990).