Theoria

The contributions to this issue of Theoria address, among other issues, the broad themes of trust, democracy and justice. In particular, they focus on the nature of, and the problems associated with the transition to, and consolidation of, liberal democracy in the contemporary global context. They address, too, some aspects of this context that bear upon the roles of, and challenges that confront, both the university as an institution and the endeavours of scholarship and research.

It is hard to predict how future historians will characterise our era. Perhaps the end of the Cold War will be mentioned, although negative labels (such as also those of ‘post-modernism’ or ‘post-industrial society’) are not very conducive to understanding. ‘Globalisation’ might also be considered something typical for our epoch – even if it is mysterious how this term, which is so overloaded with diverse meanings, could ever capture the minds of the contemporaries so thoroughly. A more plausible characterisation of the changes in the status of global society which took place in the fourth quarter of the twentieth century appears to be the reference to the triumphant transition to liberal democracy. This regime form has become the ‘normal’ form of government. In 1974, scarcely 30 per cent of the existing states could qualify as democracies; today these comprise more than 60 per cent.

This article examines the question of justice in democratic constitutional states from the standpoint of a theory of deliberative democracy. Its aim is to show that the validity of a conception of justice and the legitimacy of political institutions and public policies based upon it can best be defended on the basis of a normative theory of deliberative democracy. This theory, I shall argue, is superior to the two main normative models of justification that appeal to the ideal of neutrality (Rawls, Larmore, Nagel) or to the ideal of perfectionism (Raz, Galston).

Within the liberal academic mainstream, normative political theory has in recent years been struggling to come to terms with the increasingly forceful demands of cultural justice. It has become evident that if liberalism is to address in a constructive way political controversies associated with multiculturalism and particularly those conflicts related to deep ethnonational conflicts, then it will have to reframe its commitment to individual freedom. Controversies arising from the politics of cultural pluralism reveal the inadequacy of any normative framework that fails to acknowledge the inextricable connection between individual freedom and the recognition of particular group identities. Individual freedom is conditional on the cultural freedom of those groups to which a specific individual feels a strong affiliation or sense of belonging. A group is culturally free if its members can express and celebrate their distinctiveness without cost to their status as equal citizens. In most Western democracies at least, gay and lesbian citizens, for example, have achieved much in recent decades by securing cultural freedom through the public celebration of their difference. For most of the individuals involved this has been a liberating experience in terms of the recognition by others of their freedom and equality as citizens. This experience of freedom is to be contrasted with the experience of alienation that results when citizens are unjustly forced to choose between the expression of their cultural distinctiveness and the achievement of equal status as members of the political community.

The following paper is a discussion of justice as a sign in transition, a sign whose meanings in post-apartheid South Africa must be legitimated by appeal to conditions radically different from those that prevailed under apartheid. I wish to explore the nature of the transformation of justice from the context of apartheid to emergent postapartheid conditions and to do so by focusing on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (the TRC) as an example of what can be called ‘transitional justice’. A common view of the TRC is that its rules for the implementation of amnesty and other related matters should be evaluated in the light of ‘ideal types’ of justice. The TRC must fall short of such ideal types, since its offer of qualified amnesty to perpetrators of gross human rights violations in exchange for complete honesty about such violations will be understood as an exigency which dispenses with a crucial feature of justice, namely retribution.

Thinking about the ‘identity crisis’ of the modern institution of the university, I was wondering about the following most general questions: does the current passage to late modernity and to the information age, the decline of the role of the nation-state and the increasing power of processes of globalisation mean the inevitability of the radical reformulation of the social mission and tasks of the institution of the university? Does the university (in North America and Central Europe alike) come through the transitory crisis of public trust and of its founding values or through the dramatic crisis of its own identity in a radically new global order? Is it so that in the face of globalisation and its social practices the process of the ‘corporatization’ of the university and the account of its activities in terms of business rather than education are irresistible? Is the response to the decreasing public trust in and decreasing financial support of higher education generally on the part of the state to be found in new ideas (by reformulating once again the philosophical foundations of the modern university) or in its new organisation (by following the explicit recommendations provided by such supranational organisations as the OECD, the World Bank, or UNESCO)? Surprisingly enough, these questions are of equal significance to North America and to a Central and Eastern Europe experiencing vast social and economic transformation. In both parts of the world the most common reflection upon the future functioning of higher education is the following: ‘things will never be the same’.

How is it possible to reconcile what I learn in the field with what I teach for a living? This paper shows how an answer seems to have formulated itself in practice. The reconciliation is fractured. The problem could have been more easily solved if I had decided to ‘teach’ (transcode for academic use) what I learned in the field. I hope you will work out from what follows why this is not an option for my stereotype of myself, why that solution would have been more a part of the problem, for me, than this incoherence. I give you the dilemma, as its reconciliation. The first section is about what I learn in the field: other women. The second about how that has changed what I teach for a living: literary criticism.

Raymond Martin’s Self-Concern (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)1 sets out to put the debate around personal identity on to a new footing. He acknowledges the ground-breaking work of Derek Parfit which shifted the general focus from questions of strict identity to the question of what it is that really should matter in survival, but he thinks the focus should shift further than just this. His book sets out to endorse ‘a shift in the philosophical debate from the normative question of whether this or that should matter in survival to the largely descriptive question of what … actually does or might be brought to matter’ (x).

The Authority of Reason, by Jean E. Hampton (ed. by Richard Healey). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Reviewed by Douglas Farland

Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault, edited by J.R. Carrette. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999, with a Foreword by James Bernauer. Reviewed by Roger Deacon

Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies and Social Change, edited by David Howarth, Aletta J. Norval and Yannis Stavrakakis. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Reviewed by Torgeir Fjeld

Notes on the Contributors