Suchergebnisse

"Contemporary debate over the legacy of racial integration in the United States rests between two positions that are typically seen as irreconcilable. On one side are those who argue that we must pursue racial integration because it is an essential component of racial justice. On the other are those who question the ideal of integration and suggest that its pursuit may damage the very population it was originally intended to liberate. In An Impossible Dream? Sharon A. Stanley shows that much of this apparent disagreement stems from different understandings of the very meaning of integration. In response, she offers a new model of racial integration in the United States that takes seriously the concerns of longstanding skeptics, including black power activists and black nationalists. Stanley reformulates integration to de-emphasize spatial mixing for its own sake and calls instead for an internal, psychic transformation on the part of white Americans and a radical redistribution of power. The goal of her vision is not simply to mix black and white bodies in the same spaces and institutions, but to dismantle white supremacy and create a genuine multiracial democracy. At the same time, however, she argues that achieving this model of integration in the contemporary United States would be extraordinarily challenging, due to the poisonous legacy of Jim Crow and the hidden, self-reinforcing nature of white privilege today. Pursuing integration against a background of persistent racial injustice might well exacerbate black suffering without any guarantee of achieving racial justice or a worthwhile form of integration. As long as the future of integration remains uncertain, its pursuit can neither be prescribed as a moral obligation nor rejected as intrinsically indefensible. In An Impossible Dream? Stanley dissects this vexing moral and political quandary"--

Sharon A. Stanley analyzes cynicism from a political-theoretical perspective, arguing that cynicism isn't unique to our time. Instead, she posits that cynicism emerged in the works of French Enlightenment philosophers, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot. She explains how eighteenth-century theories of epistemology, nature, sociability and commerce converged to form a recognizably modern form of cynicism, foreshadowing postmodernism. While recent scholarship and popular commentary have depicted cynicism as threatening to healthy democracies and political practices, Stanley argues instead that the French philosophes reveal the possibility of a democratically hospitable form of cynicism

AbstractInOn Liberty, John Stuart Mill famously excluded children and so-called barbarians from his otherwise broad grant of liberty to human beings. While many scholars have analyzed and criticized the barbarian exclusion, little attention has been focused on the denial of liberty to children. This article argues that Mill's theory of liberty rests on an untenable dividing line between childhood dependence and adult autonomy. The processes of discipline and socialization to which children are subject render them incapable as adults of achieving the kind of autonomy that Mill prescribes. Using relational autonomy as an alternative to Mill's model of autonomy, I propose that we should neither flatly deny liberty to children nor present absolute independence as a normative ideal for adults.