It may seem surprising to many that Madison and the other eighteenth-century Federalists are closely linked to the very contemporary idea of a transnational political order. But the idea that the modern state with its centralized authority and supreme power threaten liberty had already been widely discussed in the eighteenth century. The Constitution of the United States still bears traces of the ambition that it was to establish a new political order that was neither a loose federation nor itself an enlarged state but rather something quite novel. The emergence of a transnational order was, very concretely, the exact intellectual and political problem that the Framers faced. They were not alone in this preoccupation. At the very same time, the German philosopher Kant struggled with the same issues of liberty and security in his political essays. In “Perpetual Peace,” Kant argues for a republic of republics that might be the means by which war could be abolished. To my knowledge no Federalist or Antifederalist ever mentions Kant, even though they shared common republican concerns with freedom, peace and security. While Kant was certainly aware of the American Revolution, he does not take it to be a momentous turning point for modern republics on a par with the French Revolution. But because both the Federalists and Kant shared a conception that was both cosmopolitan and republican, they inevitably occupied the same intellectual and political space, however much they arrived at very different conceptions of the proper transnational order.

Because he consistently rejects the enterprise of traditional moral theory in its entirety, Dewey's own ethics is difficult to characterize. On the one hand, Dewey's endorsement of apparently theoretical statements, such as “judge an act by its consequences,” seems to make him a consequentialist, although not necessarily a utilitarian. When Dewey applies this methodological adage to moral philosophy itself, he seeks to show that moral theories inherently justify social hierarchy by endorsing claims to special access to moral knowledge as a justification of class domination. On the other hand, while Dewey unmasks moral philosophy as a means to social domination, he does not simply debunk moral knowledge as such. Instead he asks us to consider moral thinking and knowledge as empirical phenomena, to be understood primarily through social psychology and history. For this reason, when James Rachels wants to show the vitality of naturalism even after the challenge of Moore's naturalistic fallacy, he cites Dewey as the last “century's most influential naturalist.” In this respect, Dewey would clearly endorse naturalism as it is formulated by C. D. Broad: that “ethics is not an autonomous science,” but rather “a department or an application of one or more of the natural or historical sciences.”

There are many justifications for democracy. Democracy has intrinsic value to the extent that it realizes the freedom and equality for all individual persons demanded by universal human rights, respects the moral worth of each individual human person, and fairly distributes the opportunities for leading a good human life. But these arguments do not exhaust the possible justifications for democracy. It could also be thought to be instrumentally valuable to the extent that democracy is a necessary means to achieve particular valuable ends or to avoid terrible evils. Strong evidence suggests that democracy is instrumentally valuable in preventing great evils, such as war, famine, and human deprivation generally. It also may be the means to attain important moral ends, most importantly peace, both inside and outside its borders. Indeed, social scientists and philosophers have argued on empirical grounds that democracies are inherently more peaceful than nondemocracies, so peace is one of the benefits of a democratic order. The so-called democratic peace hypothesis has often been used by moral cosmopolitans and by liberal nationalists to justify the policy of fostering democracy within states as the best means to create a peaceful international order of autonomous political communities. Recently, democracy has been seen as so valuable that its promotion provides the basis for a just war, or at least a justification for military intervention by democratic states into nondemocratic ones for the sake of establishing more democracies as a means for peace and security.

Two relatively uncontroversial social conditions that have long been widely identified across many different modern theories of democracy: namely, the need for a rich associative life of civil society, and for the technological, institutional, and communicative infrastructure that permits the expression and diffusion of public opinion. Historically, the public sphere as a sphere of public opinion and communication has developed in interaction with a relatively unified structure of political authority: the state and its monopoly powers. Indeed, citizens of modern polities came to regard themselves as members or participants in various publics primarily through the attempts of states to censor and restrict public communication. Along with many other complex factors, the emergence of rights of communication and the democratization of state authority have emerged hand-in-hand. With the advent of new forms of political authority that directly impact the structure of communication across borders, new forms of publicity have also emerged and with them new public spheres.

If new forms of communication and structures of publicity do indeed exist across borders, this would give special salience to deliberation as an important basis for democratization, as well as for transnational institutional design. Given the differences between democratic arrangements that presuppose a singular demos and decentered ones that organize demoi, we should not expect that all democracies have exactly the same communicative infrastructure. This means that transnational civil society and public spheres face different difficulties with regard to independently constituted political authority from those faced by ‘strong,’ or state, public spheres.

As the social sciences began to come into their own in the early part of the twentieth century, the utility of the Neo-Kantian dualism between the human (Geisteswissenschaften) and the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) once again became controversial. Previously philosophers who were in favour of this distinction saw it as the only way to save the human sciences from the encroachment of the natural sciences, especially from positivism’s denial of the status of ‘science’ to enquiries that did not issue in prediction and control. Such dualism demanded strict separation, marked by ontological differences involving distinctive features of the objects of study, such as their particularity rather than generality, or epistemological differences between understanding and empirical observation. After 1915 the participants in the debate changed as it shifted away from a conception of human sciences modelled on history or textual interpretation towards a debate about the social sciences themselves, specifically sociology and its theories of social action. Even those philosophers who maintained weakened versions of dualism did so for a different purpose. Distinctions were now formulated in methodological terms and the issue became how to understand distinct explanatory and interpretive tasks within the social sciences themselves.

Once formulated in methodological rather than ontological or transcendental terms, the divide between the sciences no longer seemed to be an unbridgeable gap. The issue now became not whether or not there are different legitimate methodologies, but whether they can be brought together in some methodological unity or should be left as a heterogeneous plurality of unrelated approaches. Once the discussion of the social sciences included well-developed disciplines as diverse as economics, sociology, and history, the task of distinguishing the human from the natural sciences became less important than that of figuring out how such disciplines and the diverse approaches within each of them might be brought ‘under one roof ’, as Max Weber demanded for sociology.