Rousseau and Critical Theory

An excerpt from Alessandro Ferrara’s latest book

Among the modern philosophers who have shaped the world we inhabit, Rousseau is the one to whom we owe the idea that identity can be a source of normativity (moral and political) and that an identity's potential for playing such a role rests on its capacity for being authentic. The idea ...
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How to Rescue ‘The People’ from Populism

Reviving the law to reclaim liberal democracy

Can Rawls's paradigm of “political liberalism” help us understand populism and cope with it? Should this question sound surprising, think of how much water has flown under the bridges of democracy since the time when advocates of participatory, “strong” democracy like Barber intimated that “the survival of democracy depends on ...
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How to Rescue ‘The People’ from Populism