Kirjahaku

Many scholars of American government believe representative democracy is failing more systematically than even the recent spectacle of political extremism suggests. Unprecedented levels of elite polarization, severe partisan gerrymandering, weakened party institutions, easing of restrictions on campaign finance, and other forces-all in the context of rising levels of economic inequality-produce dysfunction that subverts healthy political competition. A gridlocked U.S. Congress offers few solutions to broadly recognized public problems. Legislation favors the interests of elites when they conflict with those of the majority. In his 2022 Berkeley Tanner Lectures, Charles Beitz examines the narrative of dysfunction by reading the literature of political science as democratic theory. The narrative raises two questions. First, are symptoms documented by political scientists really failures? What norms of democratic representation do they infringe? This is a problem of diagnosis. Second, what would successful democratic representation look like? This is a problem of prescription. Beitz's book explores both. The literatures of political scientists, constitutional lawyers, and democratic theorists on norms of democratic representation tend to cross too seldom. They do not agree about the meaning of fair and effective representation. One might look to democratic theory for insight, but for the most part it has been too remote from political practice to illuminate the problems of America's recent institutional history. Beitz's lectures bring the theory of democratic representation into closer contact with its troubled American practice. Emphasizing the constructive role that competition can play in democratic politics, they aim to articulate systemic norms for fair and effective democratic representation through critical engagement with the findings of scholars who have studied it in the wild. The volume includes commentaries by a political scientist, Martin Gilens; a constitutional lawyer, Pamela S. Karlan; and a political theorist, Jane Mansbridge. Their commentaries elaborate themes in the lectures and pose critical questions. Charles Beitz responds in a concluding comment.

The international doctrine of human rights is one of the most ambitious parts of the settlement of World War II. Since then, the language of human rights has become the common language of social criticism in global political life. This book is a theoretical examination of the central idea of that language, the idea of a human right. In contrast to more conventional philosophical studies, the author takes a practical approach, looking at the history and political practice of human rights for guidance in understanding the central idea. The author presents a model of human rights as matters of international concern, whose violation by governments can justify international protective and restorative action ranging from intervention to assistance. He proposes a schema for justifying human rights and applies it to several controversial cases-rights against poverty, rights to democracy, and the human rights of women. Throughout, the book attends to some main reasons why people are sceptical about human rights, including the fear that human rights will be used by strong powers to advance their national interests. The book concludes by observing that contemporary human rights practice is vulnerable to several pathologies and argues the need for international collaboration to avoid them.

In this revised edition of his 1979 classic Political Theory and International Relations, Charles Beitz rejects two highly influential conceptions of international theory as empirically inaccurate and theoretically misleading. In one, international relations is a Hobbesian state of nature in which moral judgments are entirely inappropriate, and in the other, states are analogous to persons in domestic society in having rights of autonomy that insulate them from external moral assessment and political interference. Beitz postulates that a theory of international politics should include a revised principle of state autonomy based on the justice of a state's domestic institutions, and a principle of international distributive justice to establish a fair division of resources and wealth among persons situated in diverse national societies.

The Description for this book, Political Equality: An Essay in Democratic Theory, will be forthcoming.