Populism entails a unique claim for recognition, which sets it at odds with the democratic ideal of respect for the equal standing of every citizen. This claim arises from a totalizing framing of political conflict, according to which one can and should understand one uniform group in society as the worst-off group for all political purposes. The populist claim for recognition is an exclusionary claim: We are something that you are not, “the people.” In contrast, this chapter argues that in order to show equal respect for everyone, as well as solidaristic concern for diverse marginalized groups, it is imperative to focus on particular struggles for recognition and discuss who actually suffers the greatest injustice in each case separately. The chapter goes on to contrast the populist claim for recognition and its illiberalism with the kind of respect, which Joel Feinberg argues is expressed in and through “the activity of claim-making” characteristic of a society with rights. Adopting a participant attitude and seeing rights claims as an intersubjective activity, we can better appreciate how rights contribute to democratic respect.

The question of what kind of recognition populism supplies to the people connects to the question of how populists understand and practice “democracy.” This chapter disputes the widespread assumption that populism is committed to a procedural conception of democracy, which rejects all substantive standards and constraints on popular decision-making. It argues that populism cannot be regarded as essentially democratic, while it is only against liberal constitutionalism. Indeed, from the perspective of democratic respect, the fault with populism is not that its understanding of democracy lacks substantive constraints on popular decision-making, but that it fails to appreciate the procedural value of democracy. The populist understanding of democracy fails to appreciate the importance of “procedural respect,” while it promotes “outcome respect” and “identification recognition.” However, outcome respect as a form of correspondence between public policy and people’s opinions is incompatible with the circumstance of disagreement, and populist leader-people identification has equally anti-pluralist implications. Finally, populism has a very limited understanding of democratic procedures, focusing on aggregative mechanisms such as referendums and elections, while it excludes a more expansive understanding of democracy, which includes free opinion-formation, activism, and deliberation in civil and political society.

By utilizing the notions of the communal sphere and segmented urban society developed in Chapter 1, this chapter investigates the relationship between society and the state as mediated through the spatiality of the city. It studies Iranians’ political practices in public spaces that contested the state during the 1905–6 Constitutional Revolution. It seeks to better understand the troubled relationship between society and the state and its geographical manifestations. As a result of this troubled relationship, Iranian society managed to delimitate the absolutist monarchy and bind it to certain political and social norms. Two theoretical concepts stand out in this context: the public sphere and the political public space. This chapter deals with the relationship between these two concepts in a different geography, beyond the dominance of Western European and North American narratives. Drawing in part on Jürgen Habermas’s discussion in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, here I understand the public sphere as a medium between society and the state that enables the former to exert influence on the latter. Political public spaces provide unique platforms for people’s collective political activities, and do so in ways that intersect with other aspects of urban life.

This chapter introduces the idea of a distinctively moral form of recognition by considering J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, a work of literature that exemplifies the recognitive tensions in which Hegel is interested, showing how moral disagreement can undermine the experience of the integrity of one’s own selfhood. I then turn to presenting a general account of the issue of recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, by situating the role that the idea of the self plays in addressing that issue. I show that recognition addresses a challenge about self-knowledge, so that an adequate conception of what the self is is necessary to secure relations of recognition. After clarifying the interpretive method that I follow in the book by contrasting with my own approach to extant interpretations, I conclude with a chapter-by-chapter outline of the rest of the monograph.

The contemporary world seems obsessed with stuff: how to get it, what to do with it, how to get rid of it. Although historians long assumed that rising consumption began with industrialization, we now know that the pace of consumption accelerated in the early modern world well before the age of mass production. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, women and men began to accumulate more clothing, carry more personal accessories, fill their households with more furnishings, and wear, smoke, snort, eat, and drink prodigious quantities of colonial products. Although scholars debate whether to call this growth in consumption “revolutionary” or “evolutionary,” they agree that is was transformational. It changed how people looked, ate, socialized, and thought, giving rise to debates about moral progress and ushering in new forms of revolutionary political activism. This book has offered a new interpretation of the consumer revolution by incorporating questions of empire, political economy, global trade, slavery, material culture, philosophy, politics, and revolution. One important theme that remains to be explored, however, is the relationship between consumption and the environment. Any solution to the climate crisis will require a revolution in how humans think about – and practice – consumption. Although today nothing seems more natural than relentless consumption, it, too, has a history. Heightening awareness of the fact that consumption in the contemporary world is a historical construct, an outcome of contingent historical factors, is an important first step toward resolving the climate crisis. For any invention of human society can be reinvented.

In 1960 Hans-Georg Gadamer, then a sixty-year-old German philosophy professor at Heidelberg, published Truth and Method ( Wahrheit und Methode). Although he had authored many essays, articles, and reviews, to this point Gadamer had published only one other book, his habilitation on Plato in 1931: Plato’s Dialectical Ethics. As a title for this work on a theory of interpretation, he first proposed to his publisher, Mohr Siebeck, “Philosophical Hermeneutics.” The publisher responded that “hermeneutics” was too obscure a term. Gadamer then proposed “Truth and Method” for a work that found, over time, great resonance and made “hermeneutics” and Gadamer’s name commonplace in intellectual circles worldwide. Truth and Method has been translated into many languages, including Chinese and Japanese. It found and still finds a receptive readership, in part, because, as the title suggests, it addresses large and central philosophical issues in an attempt to find a way between or beyond objectivism and relativism, and scientism and irrationalism. He accomplishes this by developing an account of what he takes to be the universal hermeneutic experience of understanding. Understanding, for Gadamer, is itself always a matter of interpretation. Understanding is also always a matter of language.

Hermeneutics, critical theory, and deconstruction designate three intellectual orientations that have dominated debates in continental philosophy. All three exhibit the “linguistic turn.” The debate between Habermas and Gadamer brought Gadamer to prominence. Important for both is the Aristotelian distinction between the practical and the technical. Gadamer is more negatively critical of the Enlightenment than is Habermas. Both are concerned with the instrumentalization of reason in modernity. Yet Gadamer sees Habermas as too utopian. Habermas sees Gadamer as insensitive to the way dialogue is distorted by social forces and political power. This chapter concludes with a consideration of Gadamer in relation to Derrida and deconstruction. Both were profoundly influenced by Heidegger. Yet Gadamer emphasizes continuity, while Derrida emphasizes rupture and break. Gadamer shows us the achievement of understanding, while Derrida is preoccupied with the ways we misunderstand. Derrida and Gadamer serve as correctives of the other, just as Habermas and Gadamer serve as correctives of the other.

This chapter provides a biography of Gadamer and includes an overview of the philosophical work that Gadamer produced. It provides an account of his youth and education, his early career in Nazi Germany, and his career after World War II. He was named Rektor of Leipzig University in East Germany but gave up the position and came to West Germany, first to Frankfurt and then to Heidelberg. In 1960 he published Truth and Method, which slowly became recognized world-wide. He retired in 1968 and was very productive throughout his old age.

In Chapter 1, I lay out the paradox of “intolerance” as analyzed in the work of Chantal Mouffe. Her understanding of the incompatibility between liberalism and democracy illuminates the complex relationship between pluralism and intolerance. Of crucial concern is how Mouffe’s pluralism requires what I describe as apophatic intolerance, a refusal to lay hold of the Absolute and a refusal of political closure and pure tolerance.

Models the structure and content for the five following jurisdiction-specific chapters, pointing out that the separation of church and state was established as an explicit requirement and explains the context that gave rise to the free exercise and anti-establishment clauses. Explores the policy background, outlines the contemporary relevant legal framework, as governed by statutory and constitutional provisions, noting the extent to which the country is a signatory state to relevant international law. Considers the genesis of the state neutrality principle in the anti-establishment clause as confirmed by decisions of the US Supreme Court. It delves into the religion-related case law to identify the principle’s bearing on the rights to freedom of religion, of conscience, expression and association, examines how it relates to equality law. It focuses on the various tests successively applied by the USSC in its efforts to police the church–state boundary. It identifies and discuses some different academic views, including the Habermas argument that “the principle of separation of Church and State demands that the institution of the State operates with strict impartiality”.

This chapter proposes the historical analysis of the formation, expression and impact of public opinion as an alternative to a Habermasian interpretation of the public sphere. This approach focuses on opinion politics to capture contemporary efforts to influence and make claims about extra-institutional opinions for political ends, paying particular attention to social participation and contemporary language. Attempting to avoid structural limitations and teleology, this assessment of Scottish public politics will show how religious and constitutional tensions created by the 1560 Protestant Reformation and 1603 union of the Scottish and English crowns motivated the crown and its opponents to harness the power of opinion at large, creating new ways to describe, assert, recognise and control collective opinion.

This chapter shows that in the German intellectual tradition, Kant, followed by Fichte and Hegel, saw the reliance upon the opinion of others (“recognition”) in a completely different way than the French and British traditions. Specifically, in Germany recognition was seen as a condition not only for self-control, but also for individual self-determination. The chapter provides a detailed explanation of how this shift in orientation became possible, its connection with the “idealistic” presuppositions of German philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century, and the broader political claims of this new interpretation of “recognition”.

This chapter discusses the remaining three conceptions of the political philosopher, and adopts a version of the Rawlsian view organized around a notion of public reason. Political philosophy has four distinct tasks. The first is to help create societies that decide about constitutional essentials and justice from a standpoint of public reason. The second task involves making substantive proposals. This might involve anything from proposing principles of justice to commenting on policy. Most philosophical writing aimed at the public is part of this task. The third task is to ponder concepts such as common good, rights, and justice. This task involves philosophical background work concerning the merits of different conceptions of justice. The fourth task occurs within comprehensive doctrines. Full justification requires integration of a conception of justice within a doctrine. How, and whether, this is possible requires philosophical debate. Combining the first three roles, philosophers emerge as theory-providing citizen-discussants.