Theoria

Dante's Monarchia has proven to be an enigmatic contribution to the corpus of medieval political theory. Although typically held up as the quintessential statement of the principles of universal imperial authority, the tract does not conform to many of the standard conventions of medieval Latin defences of the supremacy of the Roman Empire, eschewing, for instance, the theme of translatio imperii. In this article, I examine Dante's critique of the Donation of Constantine and related topics in order to argue that, by his own logic, the legitimacy of a universal Roman Empire resides not with the German Holy Roman Emperor in the West but instead with the Byzantine Emperor. By conceiving of the Roman Empire in a way that undermines the possibility of its 'translation', and by rejecting the alienability of imperial authority at the heart of the Donation, Dante leads a careful reader to conclude that the true Empire has its home in Constantinople, not in Germany or elsewhere in Western Europe.

This article examines Locke's slippery notion of consensual taxation. Locke insisted that property right entailed that all taxes be voluntary, requiring the consent of the taxpayer or the consent of a majority of representatives. However, Locke did not think that everyone who paid sales taxes was entitled to vote for the government to which they were subject but claimed that these taxes were passed on to, and borne by, landowners. Taxes on land were voluntary in that they were subject to gentlemanly agreements between landowners, whereas excise taxes fell on all without their consent. Locke did not specify a property qualification for the franchise in his Two Treatise of Government, as he did in other writings, but indicated that political representation should be proportionate to tax burdens. Although Locke's doctrine of taxation and representation is far from clear and unambiguous, the legacy of voluntary taxation continues to haunt us.

I present a critique of deliberative democratic theory by arguing that deliberative and discourse-based theories of democracy suffer from what I term 'deliberative failures', which are the result of cognitive distortions of the capacity of individuals to articulate reasonable claims. I call value irrationality that condition where individuals express arguments and receive information biased by certain values and value-orientations that remain untouched by deliberative encounters. Values are irrational when any agent becomes unable to call them into question and when they come to bias the way we process information about the world as well as our own arguments. This results in what I term 'epistemological warping' or the systemic biasing of our epistemic capacities to evaluate information, the arguments of others, inhibiting our knowledge about the world, ourselves and others. I put forward an alternative direction for democratic theorists to move, back to the questions of social structure, forms of socialisation and their ability to shape the value-orientations of individuals.

In this article, I motivate for the view that the best account of the foundations of morality in the African tradition should be grounded on some relevant spiritual property – a view that I call 'ethical supernaturalism'. In contrast to this position, the literature has been dominated by humanism as the best interpretation of African ethics, which typically is accompanied by a direct rejection of 'ethical supernaturalism' and a veiled rejection of non-naturalism (Gyekye 1995: 129–43; Metz 2007: 328; Wiredu 1992: 194–6). Here primarily, by appeal to methods of analytic philosophy, which privileges analysis and (moral) argumentation, I set out to challenge and repudiate humanism as the best interpretation of African ethics; I leave it for a future project to develop a fully fledged African spiritual meta-ethical theory.

South Africa's Struggle for Human Rights by S. Dubow Intellectual Traditions in South Africa: Ideas, Individuals and Institutions by P. Vale, L. Hamilton and E. Prinsloo (eds). Review by Jonathan Allen