Böcker av Ian Shapiro

A spirited defense of the Enlightenment against assaults from both the left and the right that explains its urgent implications for our contemporary politics

Ian Shapiro makes a compelling case that the purpose of politics should be to combat domination, and he shows what this means in practice at home and abroad. This is a major work of applied political theory, a profound challenge to utopian visions, and a guide to fundamental problems of justice and distribution.

Democracy and justice are often mutually antagonistic ideas, but this work demonstrates how and why they should be pursued together. Justice must be sought democratically if it is to garner legitimacy, and democracy must be justice-promoting if it is to sustain allegiance over time.

A text in the Yale University Press Series on Basic Documents in World Politics

Since the 1960s, a resurgence of interest in the moral foundations of politics has fueled debates about the appropriate sources of our political judgments. This title defends a view of politics called critical naturalism as a third way between the neo-Kantian theory of John Rawl's and the contextual arguments of Richard Rorty and others.

When do governments merit our allegiance, and when should they be denied it? Ian Shapiro investigates this most enduring of political dilemmas in this innovative and engaging book.Shapiro discusses the different answers that have been proposed by the major political theorists in the utilitarian, Marxist, and social contract traditions over the past four centuries. Showing how these political philosophies have all been decisively shaped by the core values of the Enlightenment, he demonstrates that each one contains useful insights that survive their failures as comprehensive doctrines and that should inform our thinking about political legitimacy. Shapiro then turns to the democratic tradition. Exploring the main arguments for and against democracy from Plato’s time until our own, he argues that democracy offers the best resources for realizing the Enlightenment’s promise and managing its internal tensions. As such, democracy supplies the most attractive available basis for political legitimacy.

In this book Ian Shapiro offers a systematic comparative evaluation of the writings of contemporary liberal rights theorists and those of their seventeenth-century predecessors. He shows how contemporary arguments about rights and justice evolved out of the contractarian tradition of the seventeenth century but he argues that they are lethal mutation of that tradition.