Why should the state provide public goods? I explore this question by focusing on the example of public parks. It examines the three most influential approaches to public goods (the market failures, the normative, and the democratic) and concludes that they fail to explain why parks should be public. I propose an alternative that I call solidarism, a social justice-based approach that provides a response to liberal arguments about the neutrality of the state. Solidarism emphasizes that modernity gives rise to growing levels of interdependence that generate benefits and burdens that are not shared fairly. Public goods as such are a way of compensating for the negative externalities of urbanization and industrialization. Left libertarians argue that such compensation should exclusively take the form of individual benefits. I challenge this view and provide three reasons for building public infrastructure that is shared among people who live together in a physical space: solidarity, decommodification, and politics. Exploring the publicness of parks provides a window into the broader question about the limits of the market and the importance of public space for democracy.

This article examines the legal and normative debates about the Occupy Toronto movement in order to illuminate the issues raised by Occupy Wall Street. It challenges the view that the occupation of parks and plazas was an illegitimate privatization of public space. In both New York City and Toronto, the courts relied on a theory that Habermas called “German Hobbesianism.” This sovereigntist theory of the public was used to justify removing the protesters and disbanding the encampments. The alternative is what I call the populist model of the public, a term which describes the political mobilization of the people outside the institutional structures of the state. While my focus is on public space, I suggest the appropriation of space was the most visible aspect of a broader call for collective control of the common wealth of society. In other words, we should understand the occupations synecdochally as struggles over the meaning and power of public and private.

Abstract. In recent years there has been a debate about how to evaluate Alexis de Tocqueville's defense of colonialism. Some scholars have argued that there is a tension between the key doctrines of Tocqueville's political theory and his enthusiastic promotion of the French conquest and colonization of Algeria. Others have concluded that the apparent contradiction can be explained by paying careful attention to the nuances of his work or the logic of liberalism. This article advances this debate by reconstructing Tocqueville's theory of martial law, a dimension of his work that has been frequently overlooked. In a series of letters, notes and parliamentary reports on Algeria, Tocqueville criticized of the use of martial law in governing French citizens and defended its use against native Algerians. Tocqueville's writings on Algeria make it clear that he treated the rule of law not as a natural right held by all people but rather as a technique of government that was appropriate in communities already united by social ties.

Résumé. Récemment, l'interprétation de la défense du colonialisme par Alexis de Tocqueville est devenue l'objet d'un débat important. Certains auteurs discernent une tension entre les principes centraux de la philosophie politique de Tocqueville et sa promotion enthousiaste de la conquête et la colonisation de l'Algérie par la France. D'autres ont conclu que la contradiction apparente s'explique lorsqu'on regarde de près les nuances de ses écrits sur la logique interne du libéralisme. Cet article contribue à ce débat en reconstruisant la théorie de la loi martiale de Tocqueville – une dimension de son oeuvre trop souvent négligée. Dans une série de lettres, notes et rapports parlementaires sur l'Algérie, Tocqueville a critiqué l'usage de la loi martiale dans le gouvernement des citoyens français, mais l'a défendu contre les indigènes. Ses écrits sur l'Algérie démontrent que Tocqueville considérait l'État de droit non comme un droit naturel inhérent à la personne, mais plutôt comme une technique de gouvernement s'appliquant principalement aux communautés déjà unies par des liens sociaux.

On Populist Reason. By Ernesto Laclau. New York: Verso, 2005. 224p. $26.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

Populism and the Mirror of Democracy. Edited by Francisco Panizza. New York: Verso, 2005. 288p. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

In the wake of Thomas Frank's bestselling book What's the Matter With Kansas (2004), scholars and citizens are turning to the concept of populism as a way to make sense of the strength and popularity of the far Right in the United States. In order to unravel the puzzle of why working-class voters would enthusiastically support a political party that is committed to cutting taxes for the wealthy, dismantling popular social programs, and subsidizing corporate welfare, scholars need to jettison the old Marxist-inspired paradigm that assumes that political identities are products of economic interests. At least that is one of the lessons of Ernesto Laclau's fascinating book.

This article explores the issues of violence, recognition, and freedom in the work of Frederick Douglass. It analyzes the contradiction between Douglass's defense of pacifism in his speeches and articles (before 1847) and his celebration of the redemptive effects of violence in his autobiographies, most notably in his account of his fight with the slave breaker Edward Covey. One thing that distinguishes this article from other interpretations of Douglass is that it draws upon another famous account of the struggle between master and slave—Hegel's dialectic of lordship and bondage—in order to offer a novel resolution to this interpretive puzzle. By reading these two nineteenth-century accounts together we see how the texts illuminate, complicate, and challenge one another.

Until recently space was a highly suspect concept in political theory. The linguistic turn that has dominated the discipline for the past 20 years has multiple roots. Derrida's critique of pure presence, Foucault's discourse analysis, and Habermas's communicative action, in different ways, contributed to an emphasis on language over place. Recent work in geography and cultural studies, however, has begun to reserve this trend.