Volume 5, Number 3
November 2011
SYMPOSIUM

Democratic Authority from the Outside Looking In: States, Common Worlds and Wrongful Connections

Volume 5, Number 3, November 2011, Pages 1–16
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v5i3.116
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Abstract

In The Constitution of Equality, Thomas Christiano takes on the question of why decisions that have been democratically arrived at should be treated as authoritative even if we do not agree with them. A key element of that argument is the concept of a “common world.” Christiano takes the connections between people produced by subjection to the same state as the paradigmatic case of a common world, and seems to assume that state-based common worlds take normative priority over common-world-like connections produced by other social and institutional structures. This identification of the worlds created by states and other groupings is not necessary to the function that common worlds perform in Christiano’s argument, and there are good reasons for resisting such identification. These reasons become most apparent when we consider that the problems that minorities within a state face typically reflect ongoing injustice in the terms of their incorporation into the common world produced by the state that encompasses them. States’ capacities to produce and maintain common worlds depends on an international institutional context that accepts and reinforces exclusive jurisdiction with respect to a territory and population. This international context raises several questions: whether state-based groupings ought to be privileged in this way; how boundaries must be drawn for such privilege to be defensible; and what the proper relationship is between decisions by state-based and other groupings. The Constitution of Equality offers interesting resources for grappling with these questions. But we must be willing to think beyond the state.
Copyright © 2011 Cindy Holder
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
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