Democracy and Its Others

by Epstein, Jeffrey H.; Marder, Michael

• ISBN13: 9781501312007
• ISBN10: 1501312006
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-02-25
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Today's unprecedented levels of human migration present urgent challenges to traditional conceptualizations of national identity, nation-state sovereignty, and democratic citizenship. Foreigners are commonly viewed to be outsiders whose inclusion within or exclusion from “the people” of the democratic state rests upon whether they benefit or threaten the unity of the nation.

Against this commonly-held view, this book traces the historical development of the concepts of sovereignty through the thought of philosophers such as Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau in order to argue that the foreigner, and foreignness as such, are better understood as originary and ineliminable structural features of democracy that can never be purged or assimilated. Without calling for an end to the sovereign self-determination of the state, the structural necessity of foreignness to democracy shatters the links among nationality, citizenship, and democratic rights. Thus, foreignness provides the basis for a post-nationalist cosmopolitanism that challenges democratic states to remain open to its foreign others as the very meaning of democratic citizenship is perpetually re-imagined in ways that guarantee all human beings-foreign or otherwise-to belong to a political community.

Author Biography

Jeffrey H. Epstein is Visiting Assistant Professor at Cal State University, Fullerton, USA.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: Ethnos, Demos, and Foreignness
1.1. Playing Politics: Ethnos and the (Re)Unification of the Demos

Chapter 2: Hospitality or War? A Foreigner Approaches
2.1. The Piraeus
2.2. Cephalus, the Metic
2.3. Polemarchus, the Metic
2.4. Thrasymachus, the Indecidable Foreigner

Chapter 3: The Fearful Origins of Sovereignty in the Social Contract Tradition
3.1. The Fearful Origins of Sovereignty in Hobbes
3.2. The Fearful Origins of Sovereignty in Locke
3.3. The Fearful Origins of Sovereignty in Rousseau

Chapter 4: The Qualities of Sovereignty in the Social Contract Tradition
4.1. Hobbes' Absolute Sovereign
4.2. Locke's Neutral Umpire
4.3. Rousseau's General Will
4.4. A Brief Summary of Sovereignty

Chapter 5: Foreignness, Sovereignty, and the Social Contract Tradition
5.1. Territorial Exclusions
5.2. Homogeneous Unity and the Sovereign Exclusion of Foreignness
5.3. Foreignness in Hobbes' Theorization of Sovereignty
5.4. Foreignness in Locke's Theorization of Sovereignty
5.5. Foreignness in Rousseau's Theorization of Sovereignty

Chapter 6: The Naturalization of Artificial Sovereignty and Foreignness
6.1. Hobbes' Naturalization of Artificial Sovereignty
6.2. Locke's Naturalization of Artificial Sovereignty
6.3. Rousseau's Naturalization of Artificial Sovereignty
6.4. The Naturalization of Artificial Foreignness

Chapter 7: The Foreign-Sovereign
7.1. The Quasi-Regime

Chapter 8: Foreign Unto It-self, The Democratic Nation-State
8.1. Democracy's Others and the Protection of the Democratic Nation-State
8.2. Foreign Unto It-Self: Autoimmune Democracy
8.3. Democracy to Come and the Foreign-Sovereign

Chapter 9: The Foreign-Citizen at the Threshold of Democratic Cosmopolitanism
9.1. Universal Hospitality at the Border Between the Moral and Legal
9.2. Unconditional Hospitality and the Cosmopolitanism to Come
9.3. Democratic Iterations
9.4. The Foreign-Citizen

Bibliography
Index