MeST Workshop in Political Philosophy

MeST has organized the following workshop in political philosophy:

The keynote of the workshop is Robert Talisse, W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Political Science, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee (USA).

Prof. Talisse’s talk, titled Perils of Democratic Repair, will explore themes from his recent book Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance (OUP).  Here is a description of the talk:

“The cure for democracy’s ills is more democracy.”  This adage, which originates with Jane Addams and John Dewey, animates much of the current work on democratic repair.  Typically, the adage is taken to mean that when addressing a democratic dysfunction, we simply need to incentivize people to begin acting in the ways that they should have been acting all along – doing the things that would have prevented the dysfunction from emerging.  In other words, the Addams/Dewey principle is understood to recommend that the cure for a democratic dysfunction is always to be found in the norms and practices that would have prevented it. This presentation provides reason to think that this mode of reasoning about repairing democracy is often fallacious. The needed restorative interventions are sometimes quite different from the preventative measures.  Consequently, repairing democracy will sometimes call for new habits and practices that stand outside of democratic politics itself.”