Lançamento: Law Ethics and Philosophy (LEAP)

O primeiro número do periódico Law, Ethics and Philosophy (LEAP) já está disponível on-line. O journal (aberto) é dedicado a publicações nas áreas de ética contemporânea, teoria do direito e filosofia política. O conselho editorial é composta pelos filósofos Andrew Williams e Paula Casal. A primeira edição conta com uma troca de artigos entre Thomas Pogge e Lippert-Rasmussen a respeito das responsabilidades dos países ricos pela injustiça global. Trata-se de uma ótima opção para quem pensa em submeter trabalhos em inglês nessas áreas. 

- LEAP Journal (vol. 1)

- Lippert-Rasmussen: Global Injustice and Redistributive Wars

Abstract

On Pogge’s view, we —people living in rich countries— do not just allow the global poor to die. Rather, we interfere with them in such a way that we make them die on a massive scale. If we did the same through military aggression against them, surely, it would be permissible for these people to wage war on us to prevent this. Suppose Pogge’s analysis of the causes of global poverty is correct, and assume the moral permissibility of self-defence by poor people in the hypothetical military action scenario just mentioned. If these assumptions are correct, poor countries could start just and, even possibly, morally permissible redistributive wars against us provided various additional conditions are met. To avoid misunderstanding, I should stress that my main claim is the conditional equivalence claim, namely that if Pogge’s analysis of the causes of global poverty is correct, our relation to poor countries is morally equivalent to one in which we each year killed many of the global poor by military means. I do not claim (i) that Pogge’s analysis is correct; (ii) that as a matter of fact, it is morally permissible for poor countries to wage redistributive wars against rich countries; (iii) that it is not the case that anything that is impermissible for poor countries to do in the latter situation involving military aggression —e.g. deliberately targeting rich civilians— is impermissible in redistributive wars as well.

Keywords
Doing vs. allowing harm, global justice, just ad bellum, just cause, poverty, proportionality, Thomas Pogge.

- Pogge: Poverty and Violence

Abstract

Citizens of affluent countries bear a far greater responsibility for world poverty than they typically realise. This is so because poverty is more severe, more widespread and more avoidable than officially acknowledged and also because it is substantially aggravated by supranational institutional arrangements that are designed and imposed by the governments and elites of the more powerful states. It may seem that this analysis of world poverty implies that citizens of affluent countries have forfeited their right not to be killed in the course of a redistributive war and that such a war would be both just and permissible. In fact, however, it has none of these three implications. This finding should be welcomed insofar as violence and macho talk of violence are in our world highly counterproductive responses to the injustice of poverty.

Keywords
Forfeiture of rights, human rights, inequality, infringement of rights, injustice, just war theory, liability to violence, Lippert-Rasmussen, negative responsibility, redistributive war, remote hypotheticals.

50 Anos do Golpe

A partir desta semana o centro acadêmico do curso de Filosofia (CAF) da USP organizará, em parceria com a editora Boitempo, uma série de palestras e exibições de filmes tendo por tema os 50 anos do golpe militar no Brasil. Entre os destaques da programação, alguns filmes e documentários raros ou até pouco tempo atrás inacessíveis como o documentário censurado Você também pode dar um presunto legal de Sérgio Muniz e Brazil a Report on Torture uma chocante reconstrução das torturas no país de Saul Landau e Haskell Wexler. 

(Infelizmente o evento não conta com um site)

Ensaios e Resenhas de Bernard Williams (1959-2002)

Acaba de sair pela Princeton Press o livro Bernard Williams: Essays and Reviews (1959-2002) contendo a produção jornalística de um dos mais importantes filósofos do último século. Ao longo de toda sua carreira Williams participou ativamente nos principais debates políticos e culturais da Inglaterra  - a ponto de ser nomeado presidente do comitê parlamentar sobre obscenidade e censura, conhecido hoje como "Williams Committee". Ao todo são 71 artigos publicados ao longo de mais de quarenta anos, incluindo resenhas célebres (como a resenha de O Liberalismo Político de Rawls e Razões e Pessoas de Parfit) e uma série de ensaios publicados no final de sua carreira sobre a natureza da atividade filosófica.

- Williams: "A Fair State"

- Williams: "On Hating and Despising Philosophy" 

Bernard Williams: Essays and Reviews (1959-2002)
Foreword by Michael Wood

Bernard Williams was one of the most important philosophers of the last fifty years, but he was also a distinguished critic and essayist with an elegant style and a rare ability to communicate complex ideas to a wide public. This is the first collection of Williams's popular essays and reviews, many of which appeared in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. In these pieces, Williams writes about a broad range of subjects, from philosophy and political philosophy to religion, science, the humanities, economics, socialism, feminism, and pornography.

Included here are reviews of major books such as John Rawls's Theory of Justice, Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Alastair MacIntyre's After Virtue, Richard Rorty's Consequences of Pragmatism, and Martha Nussbaum's Therapy of Desire. But many of these essays extend beyond philosophy and together provide an intellectual tour through the past half century, from C. S. Lewis and Umberto Eco to Noam Chomsky. No matter the subject, Williams probes and challenges arguments, teases out their implications, and connects them to the wider intellectual scene. At the same time, readers see a first-class mind grappling with landmark books in "real time," before critical consensus had formed and ossified.

In his foreword, Michael Wood discusses Williams's style and sensibility and his concern that philosophy contribute to the larger intellectual conversation.

Bernard Williams was Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge (1967-1979) and Provost of King's College. He held the Monroe Deutsch Professorship of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley (1998-2000) and was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford (1990-2003). He was Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford until his death in 2003.

Bolsa de mestrado no University College

O Instituto das Américas sediado no UCL (Londres) abriu um processo seletivo para alunos de mestrado do Brasil e outros 6 países da América Latina. O valor da bolsa é de 5 mil libras e engloba 6 áreas diferentes dentro do instituto (ver a relação de áreas abaixo). O início da bolsa é setembro de 2014 e o deadline para submissão é 1 de março.

Santander Scholarships Awards at UCL - Institute of Americas

UCL - Institute of the Americas (UCL-IA) is delighted to announce the Santander Universities Award of a £5,000 scholarship for our MA and MSc Programmes. This award is for International Students applying from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Uruguay in September 2014, for these programmes:

• International Relations of the Americas MSc
• Globalisation and Latin American Development MSc
• Latin American Politics MSc
• United States Studies: History and Politics MA
• Caribbean and Latin American Studies MA
• Latin American Studies MA

The Santander Universities Master's Scholarships (funded by Santander Universities), aims to assist the most academically able students from leading universities to pursue a Master's programme. UCL is one of the top universities in the world and the Institute of the Americas has the largest teaching programme on the Americas in the UK.
Further information here to be updated shortly.

To Qualify Candidates must: 

• Be residents of one of the Santander Universities network countries listed above.
• Be expected to obtain, or already possess, a Bachelors' degree
• Applications must be made to one of the masters programmes listed above by 1 March 2014 to be considered for the Santander Universities award

Successful applications:

Successful applicants will be notified by March 15, 2014

For more information contact UCL-IA's Postgraduate Officer, Laura Tunstall.

A religião de Dworkin

Micheal Rosen (Harvard) publicou um ensaio na The Nation no qual faz um balanço da carreira de Dworkin a partir de sua última obra, Religion Without God. (o livro já foi matéria no nosso blog). Rosen procura entender a relação entre a (suposta) discussão sobre teologia e uma das teses centrais de sua obra, a objetividade dos valores morais. Segundo Rosen, contrariando as tendências naturalistas da filosofia norte-americana contemporânea, Dworkin corou sua carreira com uma reapresentação forte - porém honesta - das premissas de sua filosofia (agradeço a Roberto Merrill pela matéria!). 

- Rosen: "Beyond Naturalism: On Ronald Dworkin" 

[...]

I think Dworkin took something like Rorty’s position when he published Taking Rights Seriouslyin 1977. But thirty-six years later, by the time of Religion Without God, he held a different and far stronger view: human beings do indeed have a special value that can’t be overridden (religious thinkers commonly call it “human dignity”), though not because it comes from God. To the contrary, values exist independently of God.

If morality were just a matter of God’s will, then presumably whatever God willed would be good for that reason and no more. But if God is indeed just, it must be possible for human beings to recognize independently why his commands are good. Of course, goodness is essential to God, so he could not conceivably will anything that was not good—but, still, it is not his willing something that makes it good. As Seneca once wrote, “I do not obey God; I agree with him.” So, Dworkin argues, any reasonable religion must acknowledge the priority of value over the will of the Deity. But in that case, the supernatural narrative of creation, revelation and prophecy that surrounds the moral teachings of religion is dispensable.

Dworkin still wants to call his attitude “religious” because, although he does not believe in the existence of God, he “accepts the full, independent reality of value” and hence rejects the naturalistic view that nothing is real except what is revealed by the natural sciences or psychology.

Yet if values exist as “fully independent,” how can we have access to them? As Dworkin admits, there are no experiments we can conduct to confirm their existence. Dignity—the “God particle” that sustains the existence of human rights—will not be detected by any scientist. On the contrary, the realm of value is “self-certifying,” so the only evidence for the existence of values is the truth of the things that we say about them. And the evidence for that truth is what, exactly—that we agree about values? But disagreement about values is where we came in. Even if we accept that we carry within ourselves an inner kernel of transcendental value, would it give us a way of telling where the claims of the collective end and the prerogatives of the individual begin?

Dworkin is always wonderfully clear and honest about what is involved in his position—it is part of what makes his book such a pleasure to read—and he concludes his discussion of the nature of value by explaining its limitations:

I will not have convinced some of you. You will think that if all we can do to defend value judgments is appeal to other value judgments, and then finally to declare faith in the whole set of judgments, then our claims to objective truth are just whistles in the dark. But this challenge, however familiar, is not an argument against the religious worldview. It is only a rejection of that worldview. It denies the basic tenets of the religious attitude: it produces, at best, a standoff. You just do not have the religious point of view.

This expresses precisely my own reaction. I cannot see that describing the target of our disagreements about value as existing in a fully independent, objective realm is anything more than religion lite: the religious idea of eternal goodness without the miraculous elements of omnipotent divine will and personal immortality. Yet I am at one with Dworkin in thinking that even a fully secular individual should contemplate the universe not just with curiosity and wonder but with reverence and gratitude. Still, behind me I hear a voice—a Nietzschean one, perhaps—that tells me that what Dworkin and I are looking at is no more than a penumbra, the few rays that remain in the sky after the sun of revealed religion has set. If that is so, then the coming night may be dark indeed.

A ética da imigração

O professor de ciência política da Universidade de Toronto, Joseph Carens publicou neste mês pela  coleção de teoria política da Oxford Press seu livro The Ethics of Immigration. O livro é o resulto de quase 3 décadas de pesquisa (e militância) acerca dos problemas de imigração nos EUA e na Europa. Para Carens, o suposto direito do Estado democrático de controlar as fronteiras e o fluxo de pessoas dentro das fronteiras nacionais não é discricionário do ponto de vista moral. Ao contrário, porque fazem parte, de fato, da sociedade  temos boas razões para estender permanentemente os benefícios da cidadania a novos habitantes - sejam eles nossas crianças ou imigrantes de outros países. Escute abaixo a entrevista do autor para o blog Newbooks: 

- Carens: "The Ethics of Immigration" (Newbooks in Philosophy)

The Ethics of Immigration

Joseph Carens

In The Ethics of Immigration, Joseph Carens synthesizes a lifetime of work to explore and illuminate one of the most pressing issues of our time. Immigration poses practical problems for western democracies and also challenges the ways in which people in democracies think about citizenship and belonging, about rights and responsibilities, and about freedom and equality. 

Carens begins by focusing on current immigration controversies in North America and Europe about access to citizenship, the integration of immigrants, temporary workers, irregular migrants and the admission of family members and refugees. Working within the moral framework provided by liberal democratic values, he argues that some of the practices of democratic states in these areas are morally defensible, while others need to be reformed. In the last part of the book he moves beyond the currently feasible to ask questions about immigration from a more fundamental perspective. He argues that democratic values of freedom and equality ultimately entail a commitment to open borders. Only in a world of open borders, he contends, will we live up to our most basic principles. 

Many will not agree with some of Carens' claims, especially his controversial conclusion, but none will be able to dismiss his views lightly. Powerfully argued by one of the world's leading political philosophers on the issue, The Ethics of Immigration is a landmark work on one of the most important global social trends of our era.

Robert Dahl morre aos 98 anos

Professor emérito de politica ciência de Yale Robert Dahl faleceu aos 98 anos na última semana. Dahl é considerado um dos teóricos da democracia mais importantes do século XX. Sua obra Poliarquia (traduzida pela EDUSP) causou uma pequena revolução nos estudos empíricos dos regimes democráticos - ou "poliárquicos" na linguagem de Dahl. Regimes democráticos não seriam definidos pelo governo do "povo", mas sim pelo processo de competição eleitoral (e contestação pública) entre diferentes grupos políticos. Além disso Dahl ofereceu uma das defesas mais influentes da democracia em A Democracia e Seus Críticos (publicado pela Martins Fontes). Veja abaixo os obituários do NY Times e do Washington Post. 

Robert Dahl 

- Dahl: "Poliarquia: participação e oposição" (Edusp) 

- "A Yale Scholar Defined Politics and Power" (NY Times)

- "Yale professor and political scientist who wrote on democracy" (Washington Post)

Robert A. Dahl Dies at 98; Yale Scholar Defined Politics and Power

Robert A. Dahl, a political scientist who was widely regarded as his profession’s most distinguished student of democratic government, died on Wednesday in Hamden, Conn. He was 98.

His stepdaughter Sara Connor confirmed the death.

In 2002, The New Yorker said Professor Dahl was “about as covered with honors as a scholar can be” and quoted the Cornell scholar Theodore J. Lowi as calling him “the foremost political theorist of this generation.”

Professor Dahl, who taught at Yale for 40 years, provided a definition of power that became a standard: “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.”

In two dozen books and hundreds of articles, Professor Dahl wrote about foreign policy, Congress, welfare, the Constitution and more. He was an early proponent of using real-world data and empirical analysis in the study of politics, but did not shrink from making judgments on large issues.

“Over decades when political scientists focused on increasingly narrow and often technical questions, he’s the one person who brought everybody back to the big picture, the big questions,” James S. Fishkin, a professor of communications and political science at Stanford, said in an interview on Friday. “What is the form of democracy that will live up to democratic aspirations?”

Reforma constitucional e "desmilitarização" da polícia.

O acirramento dos confrontos entre manifestantes e policiais e a crise da segurança pública no Rio de Janeiro (com o trágico caso do menor de idade acorrentado nu a um poste no bairro do Flamengo por moradores) a opnião pública volta mais uma vez ao debate da reforma da segurança pública. Em públicação no Boletim do Instituto Brasileiro de Estudos Criminais, antropólogo Luiz Eduardo Soares (UERJ) explica (e endossa) uma das únicas propostas concretas de reforma presentes na  agenda pública nacional: PEC 51. Entre os principais pontos da emenda constitucional estão a desmilitarização das polícias militares estudais e a "carreira única" na profissão, eliminando a distinção entre oficiais e praças nas policias militares (ou delegados e investigadores na polícia civi). 

- Soares: "PEC-51: Revolução Institucional na Arquitetura da Segurança Pública"

[...]

Por que a PEC-51 me parece decisiva? Por que considero indispensável e urgente a desmilitarização e a mudança do modelo policial? As respostas se apoiam na seguinte tese: o crescimento vertiginoso da população penitenciária no Brasil, a partir de 2002 e 2003, seu perfil social e de cor tão marcado, assim como a perversa seleção dos crimes privilegiados pelo foco repressivo, devem-se, prioritariamente, à arquitetura institucional da segurança pública, em especial à forma de organização das polícias, que dividem entre si o ciclo de trabalho, e ao caráter militar da polícia ostensiva. Devem-se também às políticas de segurança adotadas e não seria possível, no modo em que transcorre, se não vigorasse a desastrosa lei de drogas. Observe-se que a arquitetura institucional inscreve-se no campo mais abrangente da justiça criminal, o que, por sua vez, significa que o funcionamento das polícias, estruturadas nos termos ditados pelo modelo constitucionalmente estipulado, produz resultados na dupla interação: com as políticas criminais e com a linha de montagem que conecta polícia civil, Ministério Público, Justiça e sistema penitenciário. Pretendo demonstrar que a falência do sistema investigativo e a inépcia preventiva –entre cujos efeitos incluem-se a explosão de encarceramentos e seu viés racista e classista– são também os principais responsáveis pela insegurança, em suas duas manifestações mais dramáticas, a explosão de homicídios dolosos e da brutalidade policial letal.

Há pressupostos e implicações teóricas em minha hipótese que devem ser explicitados, assim como uma interlocução subjacente com a tese popularizada por Loic Wacquant, em sua influente obra, As Prisões da Miséria (Jorge Zahar Editora). O autor sugere conexões funcionais entre a adoção do receituário neoliberal nos Estados Unidos e o aumento dramático das taxas de encarceramento, sobretudo de pobres e negros. O neoliberalismo, ao promover o crescimento do desemprego, o esvaziamento de políticas sociais e a desmontagem de garantias individuais, exigiria a criminalização da pobreza para aplacar as demandas populares e evitar a eventual tradução política da exclusão em protagonismo crítico ou insurgente. Se o exército de reserva da força de trabalho não é mais necessário, dadas as peculiaridades do sistema econômico globalizado que transfere a exploração do trabalho para países dependentes, ou apresenta riscos de converter-se em fonte de instabilidade política, torna-se conveniente canalizar contingentes numeros dos descartáveis para o sistema penitenciário. Não por acaso, os EUA viriam a produzir a maior população penitenciária do mundo. Certo ou errado para o caso norte-americano, o diagnóstico não se aplica ao Brasil. Entre nós, a epidemia do encarceramento coincide com os governos do PT, que poderiam merecer todo tipo de crítica, menos as de serem neoliberais, promotores de desemprego e do desmonte de políticas e garantias sociais. Pelo contrário, não resta dúvida quanto às virtudes sociais dos mandatos do presidente Lula, durante os quais houve redução das desigualdades e ampliação do emprego e da renda. Contudo, nunca antes na história desse país prendeu-se tanto. Atribuo a expanção do encarceramento à combinação entre as estruturas organizacionais das polícias, a adoção de políticas de segurança que privilegiaram determinados focos seletivos e a vigência, seguida da potencialização discricionária da Lei de drogas. Tudo isso em um contexto de crescimento econômico e dinamismo social que intensifica as cobranças por elevação do rendimento de todas as instituições. Para demonstrar minha tese, impõe-se um percurso argumentativo.

Human Rights: The Hard Questions

Mathias Risse (Harvard) resenhou o livro Human Rights: The Hard Questions para o periódico on-line Notre Dame Philosophical Review. Editado por Cindy Holder (Victoria) e David Reidy (Tenessee) o livro é um companion dos principais artigos e ensaios sobre a natureza e, principalmente, sobre os os limites normativos do conceito publicados nas últimas décadas. Veja abaixo o conteúdo do livro e a resenha de Risse. 

Human Rights: The Hard Questions
Cindy Holder & David Reidy

- Table of Contents

Human Rights: The Hard Questions

Review by Mathias Risse

This is an anthology of 23 articles organized in seven parts that explore an eponymous set of hard questions about human rights. The titles of the different parts are "What Are Human Rights?," "How Do Human Rights Relate to Group Rights and Culture?," "What Do Human Rights Require of the Global Economy?," "How Do Human Rights Relate to Environmental Policy?," "Is There a Human Right to Democracy?," "What Are the Limits of Rights Enforcement?," and "Are Human Rights Progressive?" Cindy Holder and David Reidy have done a fine job assembling very useful discussions on many of the questions about human rights that keep philosophers, lawyers, political scientists, anthropologists and others busy.

A number of these questions have been around for quite some time, such as the question of whether human rights presuppose an account of human nature, how to think about the relationship between the alleged universality of human rights and cultural difference, and whether there is a human right to democracy. Others have come onto the agenda more recently, such as questions about the responsibility of business for human rights, the connection between climate change and human rights and questions about the localization or vernacularization of human rights. This would not be a great "first book" on human rights for an independent reader. However, many of the articles could serve as useful introductory texts in an advanced undergraduate or master's level course on human rights across disciplines but ideally with an interdisciplinary orientation. In fact, I know of no other book that would be equally useful for that purpose.

The contributors come from different disciplines (mostly the ones mentioned earlier), and one benefit of reading through the volume as a whole is that it provides a refreshing sense of how human rights issues are discussed across different fields. The reader also gets a plethora of welcome literature suggestions in the references. Most (though unfortunately not all) the authors make an effort to discuss their material in a manner that makes it accessible to those who do not share the same disciplinary background. In what follows I briefly discuss each of the seven parts of this anthology, though I will not comment on every article. Which articles I touch on is largely a reflection of my own interests in the human rights domain. One strength of this volume is that it can accommodate students and researchers with multifarious research interests.

Part I includes three essays under the heading of "What are Human Rights?" This is one of the largest topics one could raise in the domain of human rights. It is also a question that has come in for sustained debate in recent times, and that to my mind is the central debate about human rights among philosophers at the moment. The three articles do not even offer a survey of that kind of work (which is one reason why I think this is not a good "first book" on human rights), but instead choose three particular components of that guiding question. Chris Brown's excellent article "Human rights and human nature" argues that a successful theory of human rights needs to integrate an account of human nature. This standpoint has been rejected by Marxist political economists (who, leaving behind Marx's own early reflections on human "species being," insisted that the mode of production makes people who are they are) and Durkheimian sociologists (who sought to limit explanatory power to social facts alone), as well as by philosophers and anthropologist who were often eager to reject the notion of human nature on behalf of increased racial tolerance. But a notion of human rights will remain on thin ice if there is no notion of the "human" that could be used to substantiate those rights. Brown argues, quite sensibly, that at an appropriately abstract level we can indeed make sense of "human nature," and doing so at that level is enough for the purposes of constructing a theory of human rights.

XVI Encontro Nacional da ANPOF

O XVI Encontro da Associação Nacional De Pós-Graduação em Filosofia (ANPOF) será realizado entre os dias 27 e 31 de agosto em Campos do Jordão (SP). Trata-se do evento nacional mais importante do tipo na área de filosofia e conta com dezenas de GTs e mesas-redondas. A novidade dessa edição fica por conta da estipulação de tempo mínimo de apresentação e uma melhor proporção de trabalhos por mesas (fontes constantes de reclamação entre os pesquisadores). 

O prazo para o envio de trabalhos (resumo 1000 a 2000 caracteres) inicia-se dia 17 de fevereiro e termina no dia 28 de abril. As inscrições serão realizadas no novo site da ANPOF (ainda em construção). 

XVI ENCONTRO NACIONAL DA ANPOF

O XVI Encontro Nacional será realizado nos dias 27 a 31 de outubro de 2014, em Campos do Jordão, cidade turística do Estado de São Paulo, situada na Serra da Mantiqueira, a pouco mais de 1 hora do Aeroporto Internacional de Guarulhos.

As atividades do Encontro vão se concentrar na região do Capivari, no centro turístico da cidade, e nossa expectativa é que a qualidade de sua infra-estrutura possibilite um ambiente agradável para nosso trabalho e para nosso convívio durante o Encontro.

A estrutura hoteleira da cidade está sendo preparada, assim como a estrutura de apoio ao transporte e à alimentação, e disponibilizaremos informações detalhadas sobre isto em breve.

Os Encontros Nacionais da ANPOF se consolidaram como o principal evento da agenda de pesquisa em filosofia no país e se apresenta hojecomo um dos três maiores eventos do gênero no mundo. A estrutura que está sendo montada deve comportar a apresentação de mais de 2300 trabalhos, com algo próximo de 40 atividades simultâneas durante toda a semana. Um exemplo da adesão da comunidade às nossas atividades é a presença de quase 80% dos docentes de pós-graduação em filosofia no XV Encontro, em 2012. O grande desafio para o qual temos nos preparado é garantir a qualidade de um evento desta dimensão e possibilitar que ele desempenhe plenamente seu papel de fórum de integração e debate da pesquisa em filosofia, e também de debate sobre a pós-graduação e pesquisa.

Novidades

Há diversas novidades na forma de organização do Encontro, resultado de um extenso debate realizado ao longo de 2013 por meio de 2 Reuniões de Diretoria, 12 Reuniões Regionais com Coordenadores de PPG, Coordenadores de GTs e Editores de Revistas, e, por fim, da Assembleia Geral, realizada nos dias 19 e 20 de novembro em Brasília. Os detalhes destas deliberações estarão disponíveis no site da ANPOF ainda em fevereiro. Dentre as novidades para o XVI Encontro podemos ressaltar:

- Redefinição do tempo de atividades de cada GT no Encontro Nacional, que passa a ser proporcional ao número de trabalhos aprovados, garantindo-se que não ocorram recusas de trabalho por falta de tempo para que fosse apresentado;

- Definição de um tempo mínimo para as apresentações, de maneira a garantir a qualidade do debate acadêmico (o tempo de apresentação é sujeito a ajustes pelo GT, mas o modelo geral é, por exemplo, de 45 a 50 minutos para Doutores);

- Estímulo à participação de estudantes provenientes dos PPGs mais distantes do local do evento, com redução significativa do valor da inscrição (publicaremos em breve uma lista com os PPGs cujos alunos poderão solicitar a redução do valor da inscrição, elaborada a partir do cálculo de custos de viagem);

- Possibilidade de inscrição de participação sem apresentação de trabalho;

- Chamada internacional de inscrição de trabalhos, com especial ênfase para os países da América Latina;

- Realização do II Encontro Nacional de Professores de Filosofia do Ensino Médio paralelamente ao XVI Encontro.

O libertarianismo é uma ideia bem estranha....

Claude Fischer, professor de sociologia da Universidade de Berkeley, escreveu o artigo "Libertarianism is Very Strange" para a Boston Review no qual analisa algumas das teses centrais do libertarianismo político - e colocando em questão a plausibilidade sociológica de algumas delas. A partir de trabalhos de antropologia cultural e psicologia social Fischer procura mostrar que o "indivíduo" - tão caro ao pensamento libertariano - mesmo que valioso é produto de uma forma de vida social específica e não um "dado natural" da vida em sociedade.   

[...] 

I viscerally understand the libertarian mystique, but, outside the fantasy novels of Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein, libertarianism does not make much anthropological or historical sense. As a philosophy, it may; one can build a coherent moral system from almost any starting point, be it God’s breath upon the waters; the first self-replicating, “selfish” gene; or autonomous individuals signing a social contract. And versions of libertarianism have a fierce logical consistency. Robert Nozick’s starting point is the “fact of our separate existences”; “there is no social entity . . . . there are only individual people.” Charles Murray proclaims, “Freedom is first of all our birthright.” America’s founding revolutionists, inhaling the earliest wafts of libertarianism in the 1700s, declared that we are created with “unalienable rights”; that is, people cannot sell themselves into slavery even if they want to, so fundamental is the independence of the individual.

Great ideas, to be sure, but historically odd ones. Clifford Geertz pointed out that “the Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique . . . center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action . . . is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.” For most of history, including Philadelphia, 1776, more humans were effectively property than free. Children, youth, women, slaves, and servants belonged to patriarchs; many patriarchs were themselves serfs to chiefs and lords. And selling oneself into slavery was routine for the poor in many societies. Most world cultures have treated the individual as a limb of the household, lineage, or tribe. We moderns abhor the idea of punishing the brother or child of a wrongdoer, but in many cultures collective punishment makes perfect sense, for each person is just part of the whole.

What difference does this history and anthropology make to libertarian arguments about the good life? Plenty. If libertarians would move real-world policy in their direction, then their premises about humans and human society should be at least remotely plausible; we are not playing SimCity here. Instead, libertarian premises arise from a worldview that was strange at its origin and is strange now, after the global triumph of liberalism.

- Fischer: "Libertarianism is Very Strange"

Reavaliando a teoria da "transição democrática"

Durante o Fórum Internacional de Estudos Democráticos (IFDE), evento organizado pelo think tank norte-americano National Endowment for Democracy,  alguns dos teóricos políticos mais influentes  dos EUA reuniram-se em uma mesa redonda para avaliar a "primavera árabe" do ponto de vista da bibliografia sobre transições democráticas. Entre os participantes estavam Larry Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, Donald Horowitz e Marc Plattner. O debate "Reconsidering the Transitional Paradigm" foi condensado e publicado na edição de janeiro do Journal of Democracy. 

- Diamond, Fukuyama, Horowitz & Plattner: "Reconsidering the Transitional Paradigm"

[...] 

Francis Fukuyama: Actually, I think that most of the transitions over the last decade are not very much like the third-wave transitions, and therefore that this literature is not all that helpful. I think the recent transitions are more like those of the first wave, which began with the French Revolution and continued up until the victory of universal suf- frage in most of Europe. Unlike the late twentieth-century transitions in Latin America and Eastern Europe, which were primarily elite-driven, top-down affairs, the transitions in nineteenth-century Europe were

driven by popular mobilization, especially the pressures created by the revolutions of 1848, which were suppressed but then created the ground for the expansion of the franchise throughout Europe in the succeeding decades.

There’s a literature on what I think is a really important question: Is democracy conquered or granted? Adam Przeworski actually has an article with that question in the title; he does a statistical analysis, and I think he shows pretty clearly that the bulk of the transitions in the first wave were conquered rather than granted. But the Eastern European and the Latin American ones of the third wave all took place in countries that had prior experience of democracy, and in a sense the imposition of either military rule or communism was seen by a lot of those populations as an aberration from what should have been their normal path of development. Therefore there was much more elite willingness to negotiate their way out of that particular form of authoritarianism; that’s why you get all this pact-mak- ing, because the big problem is how do you get these elites to agree with one another and come to some peaceful path toward democracy? In some cases, such as Romania and the Czech Republic, there was popular mobi- lization once the thing got going, but the initial impetus came from Gor- bachev and from within the elite. Similarly, the militaries in Latin America just got tired of ruling, so they were willing to give power back to civilians. 

The Arab Spring was very different, and so were the color revolutions, because those were all based on popular mobilizations. That is something we should not lose sight of. You cannot have democracy unless you have the political mobilization of important social groups. This has happened throughout the Arab world, contradicting all the cultural stereotypes about Arab passivity. Of course, it’s not going to lead to anything like Western liberal democracy anytime soon, but this is really how democ- racy happened in Europe in the nineteenth century: People just couldn’t take it anymore; they got really mad, they went out on the streets, they risked their lives, and they overthrew regimes. That’s something that by and large didn’t happen in a lot of the early third-wave transitions.

And by the way, Larry, the only pacted, elite-driven transition among the recent cases is Burma, which is why you saw so many resonances there with that earlier transitions literature. The transitions in Libya, in Egypt, and in Tunisia didn’t begin with cracks in the elites. They were really the result of very, very heavy pressure from people in the street, and that just didn’t happen in Latin America or Eastern Europe.

Larry Diamond: I don’t think your last sentence is true. There’s a reason that the military got tired of ruling in Brazil and some other places. There was actually much more popular protest than some accounts of these transitions recognize, and I think that it’s hard to make this kind of black-and-white distinction between the earlier transitions of the post-1974 period and the later ones. Clearly, the color revolutions and the Arab Spring cases were based on popular upsurges, but in the Philippines in 1986 there was a “people power” revolution, and in South Korea and in some of the Latin American transitions there was a lot of popular mobilization as well. 

Programação: Summer School 2014

Tem início nesta semana a quinta edição da Summer School on Methods and Concepts in Political Science organizada pelo departamento de ciência política da USP (DCP/USP). Além dos cursos regulares, o evento oferece uma programação de duas semanas com palestras e workshops abertos a todos. Entre os temas das oficinas, como elaborar e submeter uma proposta de pesquisa (Berg-Schlosser), estratégias para publicação no início da carreira (Derek Beach/ Abel Packer) e como aplicar para vagas de pesquisador fora do país (Inaki Sagarzazu/ Patrick Jackson). 

- Programação 5th annual Summer School