Groupe de Recherche Philosophie Politique et Sociale

23. Juni 2008
Centre Marc Bloch, Raum 114

10:00 bis 12:00 Uhr

Anthony LADEN

Democratic Authority: Command or Connection?

Responsable : Ciaran CRONIN

Authority is generally understood as the right to command. This makes the concept of democratic authority, the authority possessed by democratic citizens, somewhat paradoxical. In this conference I try to undo this paradox by offering an alternative conception of authority that I call the authority of connection. Unlike the authority of command, the authority of connection is reciprocal and depends on the uptake of others for its full normative efficacy. The conference begins with a general discussion of the concept of authority, compares two forms of authority: the authority of command and the authority of connection, and then argues that when we act as democratic voters we wield the authority of command while when we participate in reasonable democratic deliberation, we take up and forge the authority of connection. It concludes that since the authority of connection is more fully a democratic form of authority, we should regard deliberation and not voting as the central activity of democratic citizens.

Anthony LADEN is Associate Professor for Philosophy a the University of Illinois at Chicago and currently a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt and the Universität Potsdam. He received his PhD in 1996 from Harvard, where he was a student of John Rawls and Amartya Sen, among others. He has written on democratic theory, feminism and identity politics, Rawls, and practical reason. He is the author of Reasonably Radical (Cornell, 2001) and co-editor, with David Owen, of Multiculturalism and Political Theory (Cambridge, 2007). Amongst his recent articles are: "Radical Liberals, Reasonable Feminists" (J of Pol. Phil., 2003), "Evaluating Social Reasons: Hobbes vs. Hegel" (J Phil 2005), and "Negotiation, Deliberation and the Claims of Politics" (in Laden and Owen, 2007). He is currently at work on a book on practical reasoning that he alternatively describes as deriving the rational from the reasonable and as developing a philosophy of the rational significance of gossip.

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