| Philosophers from Hobbes to Rawls have attempted to show that, provided certain conditions are met, there can be normatively legitimate political authorities whose laws each citizen or subject ought to obey (and whose institutions they ought to support) for moral reasons, and not simply out of fear of punishment or for personal advantage. Yet actual economic, social, and political interconnectedness imply that, contrary to a traditional assumption of much Western political philosophy, the scope of political authority and obligation should not be limited to the territorial boundaries of modern national states: transnational forms of authority and obligation are justified.;Part One of my dissertation establishes this claim with a convergence argument. In the first three chapters, I set out three paradigms or basic ways of looking at the political condition and the fundamental task of politics: conflict, mutuality, and right. The logic of each paradigm is illustrated by means of exemplary theorists I take to embody them in different ways. Chapter One deploys Hobbes' political philosophy as a model for the conflict paradigm. Chapter Two uses Hume and Rawls to illustrate two variants of the reasoning of the mutuality paradigm. Chapter Three uses Locke and Kant to exemplify two influential versions of the paradigm of right. Part Two seeks to further specify what forms of political authority and political obligation are best suited to the complex, pluralistic environment of world politics. As a first step, Chapter Four introduces Jurgen Habermas' discourse theory of law and democracy as the most promising normative political theory available for this task because of its sophisticated procedural reading of the use of public reason in justifying political action and legitimately resolving conflicts in substantive values at the domestic level. Chapter Five then subjects Habermas' own recent proposals for a legitimate world order to a critical examination. I suggest alterations that bring the proposal more in line with the intrinsically cosmopolitan logic of the discourse theory while linking the modified proposal to the recent emergence of multi-principle or pluralistic theories of political authority and obligation. |
