Truth versus ignorance in democratic politics: An existentialist perspective on the democratic promise of political freedom

Democratic Freedom of Expression

This paper suggests the democratic direction in which the right of freedom of expression should be conceived and applied. In the first two sections it suggests some counter-examples to, and diagnoses of, the libertarian and liberal conceptions of freedom of expression, taking Scanlon (1972) and Scanlon (1979), respectively, to be their chief proponents. The paper suggests that these conceptions...

Preventive War and Democratic Politics

I define the concept of preventive war, distinguish it from preemption and other sources of better-now-than-later logic, and examine numerous conceptual issues that confound theoretical and empirical analyses of prevention. I then consider the argument that democracies rarely if ever adopt preventive war strategies because such strategies are contrary to the preferences of democratic publics an...

Democratic Political Socialization on University Campuses

This paper intends to contextualize early research on political socialization with recent developments that provide new considerations for the transmission of democratic political learning at a more advanced learning stage. It attempts to demonstrate this literature on political socialization as the foundation for evaluating the continuing research of the Penn Democracy Project in the field of ...

What Can Political Freedom Mean in a Multicultural Democracy? On Deliberation, Difference, and Democratic Governance

This essay takes as its starting point an apparent tension between theories of democratic deliberation and democratic theories of multicultural accommodation and makes the case that many multiculturalists and deliberative democrats converge on an ideal of political freedom, understood as nondomination. It argues for distinguishing two dimensions of nondomination: inter-agentive nondomination, w...

Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India