My professional passion is the study of the conditions under which a functional human society – that is, a human society that supports the freedom and flourishing of its members - can be created and preserved over time. This fundamental concern has led me to develop a special interest in governance under conditions of complexity, the role of civil society associations in a free society, and normative theories of federalism. I believe my innate curiosity, diverse life experiences (having lived in U.S., Mexico, Europe, and Africa) and intellectual formation (having worked many years in Anglo-American as well as continental European intellectual environments) have afforded me a perspective on social order that is sufficiently broad and versatile to recognize patterns in social life that certain dominant Western narratives tend to conceal. In particular, I have become keenly sensitive to the order-conferring potential of civil society associations and the inability of a State-imposed order to adequately replicate the goods realized in small-scale community and institutional settings.
In my research, I endeavour to reach a deeper understanding of the lived experience of persons who seek to live meaningful and worthy lives in community with others, and to grasp the social and institutional conditions under which this aspiration can be satisfied. Because of the complexity and breadth of these questions, my research necessarily straddles the fields of ethics, political philosophy, social theory, and law. Specific issues I have taken up in my writings include prospects for ethical coherence in public roles, our responsibilities toward the distant needy, the moral justification of human rights, the limits of impartiality as a guide to moral judgment, the ethics of financial trading, and the challenge of building community in an individualistic culture.
The content of my early-career research was shaped, above all, by a desire to better understand the meaning of political order from the standpoint of a responsible person who, as Harry Frankfurt would put it, "takes himself/herself seriously." Two questions were of special interest to me: first, how can individual persons find the knowledge and motivation to contribute to the public life of their communities in a responsible and effective manner; and second, how can individual persons remain faithful to their own ethical commitments as they exercise their social and civic roles? This first phase of my research career gave rise to several journal articles, a book-length study entitled Citizenship and the Pursuit of the Worthy Life (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and an edited volume, The Ethics of Citizenship in the 21st Century (Springer, 2017).
I have now shifted to a new phase of my research, focusing not so much on the ethical standpoint of the individual person as on the standpoint of social order and institutional design. The question that drives my current research agenda is: How can human beings live free and flourishing lives, in a complex, culturally and morally diverse, and interdependent society? More specifically, how can they realize the distinctive goods of associational life and simultaneously submit to an inter-associational order, without becoming colonised by an overarching normative order such as that of the State, or of a multi-national corporation? I have translated this research agenda into several contributions to edited volumes, and most recently, a book (currently in the second round of revisions) entitled Civil Order After the Sovereign State: How Bottom-Up Federalism Undergirds a Free and Flourishing Society.
The basic goal of Civil Order After the Sovereign State is to weaken the grip of ontologically austere, reductively individualist visions of society over the imagination of political theorists, and exhibit the advantages of a style of political theory that is more finely attuned to the complex needs of human associations and their participants. Highly centralised schemes of social cooperation that place an immense amount of regulatory, fiscal, and police power in the hands of a single government, are the contingent historical outcome of protracted struggles between rival powers. This contingent settlement may have contributed to a certain sort of social stability, but it also contains within it a logic of normative and institutional homogenisation that is fundamentally regressive from the perspective of those who wish to enjoy the benefits of a complex and multi-dimensional social ecology. I advocate replacing the principle of State sovereignty with a critical reappropriation of the federalist tradition of polycentric governance.
One of the distinctive contributions of this novel account of civic order is its distinctive manner of engaging with the challenge of forging sustainable civic bonds in a plural social order. My account proposes a "decentered," federated model of governance, consistent with a wider social distribution of governmental functions than distributions permitted by standard state-based accounts. This account has the potential to engage with the problems of community life as they confront ordinary people, in ways that statist and cosmopolitan conceptions of governance have fallen short. As the state comes under pressure from internal fragmentation by political and religious conflict and external usurpation by global economic markets, and communites across the world confront rapid transformations and unprecedented challenges, this project is a timely attempt to develop a fresh model of political community suitable for the social and economic conditions of 21st century societies.
At the heart of the project is the conviction that we need to discover a new form of governance and civic order, rooted less in politics narrowly construed and more in the latent power of civil society organizations to promote and defend a decent and humane civic order, and to exercise a wide range of governance functions traditionally attributed to the sovereign state. Affirming the legitimacy of a federated republic that incorporates diverse and overlapping political communities implies a radical reappraisal of a range of political concepts such as political community, citizenship, popular sovereignty, political representation, democracy, patriotism, and common good, insofar as the modern premise of the unity and supremacy of the State-based regime is put in question.
In my research, I endeavour to reach a deeper understanding of the lived experience of persons who seek to live meaningful and worthy lives in community with others, and to grasp the social and institutional conditions under which this aspiration can be satisfied. Because of the complexity and breadth of these questions, my research necessarily straddles the fields of ethics, political philosophy, social theory, and law. Specific issues I have taken up in my writings include prospects for ethical coherence in public roles, our responsibilities toward the distant needy, the moral justification of human rights, the limits of impartiality as a guide to moral judgment, the ethics of financial trading, and the challenge of building community in an individualistic culture.
The content of my early-career research was shaped, above all, by a desire to better understand the meaning of political order from the standpoint of a responsible person who, as Harry Frankfurt would put it, "takes himself/herself seriously." Two questions were of special interest to me: first, how can individual persons find the knowledge and motivation to contribute to the public life of their communities in a responsible and effective manner; and second, how can individual persons remain faithful to their own ethical commitments as they exercise their social and civic roles? This first phase of my research career gave rise to several journal articles, a book-length study entitled Citizenship and the Pursuit of the Worthy Life (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and an edited volume, The Ethics of Citizenship in the 21st Century (Springer, 2017).
I have now shifted to a new phase of my research, focusing not so much on the ethical standpoint of the individual person as on the standpoint of social order and institutional design. The question that drives my current research agenda is: How can human beings live free and flourishing lives, in a complex, culturally and morally diverse, and interdependent society? More specifically, how can they realize the distinctive goods of associational life and simultaneously submit to an inter-associational order, without becoming colonised by an overarching normative order such as that of the State, or of a multi-national corporation? I have translated this research agenda into several contributions to edited volumes, and most recently, a book (currently in the second round of revisions) entitled Civil Order After the Sovereign State: How Bottom-Up Federalism Undergirds a Free and Flourishing Society.
The basic goal of Civil Order After the Sovereign State is to weaken the grip of ontologically austere, reductively individualist visions of society over the imagination of political theorists, and exhibit the advantages of a style of political theory that is more finely attuned to the complex needs of human associations and their participants. Highly centralised schemes of social cooperation that place an immense amount of regulatory, fiscal, and police power in the hands of a single government, are the contingent historical outcome of protracted struggles between rival powers. This contingent settlement may have contributed to a certain sort of social stability, but it also contains within it a logic of normative and institutional homogenisation that is fundamentally regressive from the perspective of those who wish to enjoy the benefits of a complex and multi-dimensional social ecology. I advocate replacing the principle of State sovereignty with a critical reappropriation of the federalist tradition of polycentric governance.
One of the distinctive contributions of this novel account of civic order is its distinctive manner of engaging with the challenge of forging sustainable civic bonds in a plural social order. My account proposes a "decentered," federated model of governance, consistent with a wider social distribution of governmental functions than distributions permitted by standard state-based accounts. This account has the potential to engage with the problems of community life as they confront ordinary people, in ways that statist and cosmopolitan conceptions of governance have fallen short. As the state comes under pressure from internal fragmentation by political and religious conflict and external usurpation by global economic markets, and communites across the world confront rapid transformations and unprecedented challenges, this project is a timely attempt to develop a fresh model of political community suitable for the social and economic conditions of 21st century societies.
At the heart of the project is the conviction that we need to discover a new form of governance and civic order, rooted less in politics narrowly construed and more in the latent power of civil society organizations to promote and defend a decent and humane civic order, and to exercise a wide range of governance functions traditionally attributed to the sovereign state. Affirming the legitimacy of a federated republic that incorporates diverse and overlapping political communities implies a radical reappraisal of a range of political concepts such as political community, citizenship, popular sovereignty, political representation, democracy, patriotism, and common good, insofar as the modern premise of the unity and supremacy of the State-based regime is put in question.
