Papers by Jonathan Trejo-Mathys
An innovative, provocative and ambitious book I translated. An important contribution to both so... more An innovative, provocative and ambitious book I translated. An important contribution to both sociological theories of modernity and critical social theory as such.
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Rorty was one of the great dissolvers of dualisms, but strangely this
iconoclasm ended when it ca... more Rorty was one of the great dissolvers of dualisms, but strangely this
iconoclasm ended when it came to liberal democracy. Here he held
fast to the most stubborn of dualisms in political thought, a simple
dichotomy of the public and the private, and used it, unsuccessfully,
to resolve questions concerning the place of religion in modern
democratic politics. Yet the philosophical basis of Rorty’s pragmatism
both undercuts two common ways of spelling out the
relationship between religion and the polity in liberalism and makes
his use of the public/private dichotomy impossible. By means of an
internal critique, I argue for a Habermasian corrective.
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This article seeks to develop a critical theory of the WTO in the form of a strong internal criti... more This article seeks to develop a critical theory of the WTO in the form of a strong internal critique. The theoretical means it deploys are drawn from various aspects of the normative theorizing of John Rawls. The hybrid Rawlsian framework is used to derive two principles of trading justice and an account of political authority and obligation for the global trading system. The principles are then used to subject the actually existing global trading structure, the WTO, to strong internal criticism in four dimensions. Remedies for the justice and legitimacy deficits thereby revealed are discussed and the general critique is situated within the historical emergence of a global constitutional imaginary and the project of globalizing critical theory.
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Normative questions concerning political authority and political obligation are widely seen as ce... more Normative questions concerning political authority and political obligation are widely seen as central questions of political philosophy. Current global transformations require an innovative response from normative political thinking about these two topics. In light of a concrete example of the supranational forms of authority and obligation that have been and are emerging beyond the national state and beyond the traditional domains of international law, I lay out what has become the standard approach to authority and obligation and indicate why this approach is inadequate in contemporary circumstances. I sketch an alternative approach and suggest how the most promising exemplar of this kind, Habermas’ discourse theory of law and politics, can better deal with the example. Having thus made plausible the advantages of the discourse theory of the alternative approach, I end with an ‘internal’ critique of Habermas’ own recent writings on the global political order.
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After discussing some of the conceptual and social-theoretical issues involved in extending the c... more After discussing some of the conceptual and social-theoretical issues involved in extending the concepts of communicative power and administrative power to transnational scales and arguing in particular for the claim that administrative power cannot be limited to national legal and political institutions (§1), I outline the normatively relevant aspects of the global apparel industry, including a portrait of the kind of domination that occurs in sweatshops (§2) and the way that, from a normative point of view, responsibility for this always highly localized domination is linked to transnational socio-legal structures and power dynamics and those who participate in them (§3). Then, after giving an account of the way the anti-sweatshop movement utilizes communicative, administrative and a novel kind of ‘counter-disciplinary’ power (§4), I assess the form of transnational communicative power this movement has thus far embodied in terms of criteria of legitimacy and efficacy (§5).
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Papers by Jonathan Trejo-Mathys
iconoclasm ended when it came to liberal democracy. Here he held
fast to the most stubborn of dualisms in political thought, a simple
dichotomy of the public and the private, and used it, unsuccessfully,
to resolve questions concerning the place of religion in modern
democratic politics. Yet the philosophical basis of Rorty’s pragmatism
both undercuts two common ways of spelling out the
relationship between religion and the polity in liberalism and makes
his use of the public/private dichotomy impossible. By means of an
internal critique, I argue for a Habermasian corrective.
iconoclasm ended when it came to liberal democracy. Here he held
fast to the most stubborn of dualisms in political thought, a simple
dichotomy of the public and the private, and used it, unsuccessfully,
to resolve questions concerning the place of religion in modern
democratic politics. Yet the philosophical basis of Rorty’s pragmatism
both undercuts two common ways of spelling out the
relationship between religion and the polity in liberalism and makes
his use of the public/private dichotomy impossible. By means of an
internal critique, I argue for a Habermasian corrective.