This post is an update of a previous post on The Charter Cities Debate and Democratic Theory. A new twist on Paul Romer’s idea of charter cities has come to my attention. It is promoted under the name of “free cities.” The home base seems to be the Free Cities Institute headquartered at the Francisco [...]
Archives for Political theory
The Charter Cities Debate and Democratic Theory
The charter cities debate is great for helping to bring out these non-democratic aspects of classical liberalism and conventional economic theory not to mention right-wing libertarianism.
Inalienable Rights: Part III A Litmus Test for Liberalism
Surely it is not too much to ask a modern liberal theory of justice that it provide a coherent account of why some contracts, e.g., self-sale contract, should be deemed invalid and why the rights such contracts would legally alienate are inalienable. In that sense, the theory of inalienable rights provides a historical litmus test for liberalism.
Inalienable Rights: Part I The Basic Argument
What is the inalienable rights theory that descends from the Reformation through the Enlightenment and that answers the classical apologies for slavery and autocracy based on implicit or explicit voluntary contracts?
Inalienable Rights: Part II Intellectual History
Where did the ideas behind the inalienable rights theory emerge in the history of thought?
Why was Slavery Wrong? Involuntariness or Treating Persons as Things?
“Involuntariness” is the usual answer. Indeed, classical liberalism takes the most basic framing of a social question as: “consent or coercion?” In this view, democracy is characterized as government “with the consent of the governed” so slavery and non-democratic government were both condemned for the lack of consent. This common condemnation of slavery on the [...]
Associational speech: Citizens United vs. FEC
What is the basis for the liberal-progressive anathema to corporate speech?