Report 8th Political Philosophy Workshop, November 17, 2017: " The Republican Tradition Reconsidered"

Report 8th Political Philosophy Workshop, November 17, 2017: " The Republican Tradition Reconsidered"

Dr. Hugo El KHOLI

On Thursday 17 November, 2017, the Political Philosophy Workshop of the Department of Philosophy (Zhuhai) hosted Richard Bellamy, Professor of Political Science at University College London (University of London), and Director of the Max Weber Programme at the European University Institute in Florence.

After a brief introduction by Professor Jun-Hyeok Kwak, who served as a moderator, Professor Bellamy presented a paper entitled “The Republican Tradition Reconsidered”. In the first part of his presentation, Professor Bellamy criticized the liberal egalitarian accounts of justice for conceiving justice as prior to politics. The problem with this approach, he argued, is that it subordinates the question of the form that political institutions should take to the question of the ideal of justice we should pursue. Professor Bellamy claimed that politics is in fact prior to justice, so that we should be able to determine the form that legitimate political institutions should take without having to refer to a certain ideal of justice. In the second part of his presentation, Professor Bellamy drew the consequences of this claim by elaborating on the form that legitimate institutions should take if they are to show equal respect to everyone involved.

In his response, Dr. Hugo El Kholi drew a parallel between Professor Bellamy’s account of the emergence of the political and Kant’s account of the emergence of the civil condition in the Metaphysics of Morals. He pointed out that the central idea of the Doctrine of Right is also that equal freedom is a form of standing constituted by (rather than realized through) the public legal order, so that freedom as independence and the civil condition are in fact co-constitutive.

The ensuing Q&A session gave the audience an opportunity to question Professor Bellamy on a variety of subjects, including his conception of the political; his justification of the non-arbitrariness of borders and his conception of the relation between normative and descriptive in political philosophy.

Professor Bellamy replied to all these questions in an accessible, though greatly detailed way. The department of philosophy would like to thank him for this enlightening discussion and for his kind participation in the 8th session of the Political Philosophy Workshop.