Abstract
This volume brings together a variety of scholars and intellectual disciplines from around the world and across academia. Differences of person, place, culture, history and expertise do not alienate but rather fructify the perspectives of the ongoing conversation of the politics of humanity. The latter is a struggle for justice, for human rights, to be sure, but also for the availability, sustainability and fair distribution of food, clothing, shelter, health care, culture and living environment, and all the concrete conditions necessary to make political rights real and ensure they are flourishing. A politics of humanity therefore demands a humane justice, where everyone universally and each person singularly is accorded respect, where equality, liberty and solidarity intersect supportively. It is not despite differences but because of them that there is discourse, dialogue and conversation, and the aspirations of the present volume. Each author, each chapter raises insights and arguments, solicits a hearing, provokes questions and discussion, while not losing sight of their concrete conditions, the learning, dedication and sensitivity, the cooperation and collegiality that guide research, stimulates truth through constructive criticism, and makes justice possible and worthwhile, despite shortcomings and the great labors—of thought and action—that remain to be done.
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24 June 2022
In chapter 1, page 9, line 12, author name Wong has been replaced with Cheung.
Notes
- 1.
M. K. Gandhi, My Non-Violence (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 1960), 77 [first published in Harijan, December 24, 1938].
- 2.
Eleanor Roosevelt, March 27, 1958, at the United Nations, New York City.
- 3.
Aristotle, Politics, transl. B. Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. II, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 2115; Book VII, chapter 14 (1333a35).
- 4.
Edmund Husserl, founder of contemporary phenomenology, and another subjective idealist like Kant, advocates the same transformation of citizen into scientist; see his “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man” (1935), in Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, transl. and ed. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 149–192.
- 5.
See, Walter Lippmann, The Public Philosophy (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1955). Like many well-intentioned post-war liberal democrats, Lippmann analyzed the rise of fascism and the failure of liberal democracy in ideological terms, as if a shift in mental attitude would be capable of fixing things, but fails thereby to recognize that governments also stand and fall on material conditions, that plutocracy, the rule of money, whatever ideology it espouses, is essentially undemocratic, like the fascism is eventually adopts.
- 6.
See my recent article, Richard A. Cohen, “Judges 19–21: The Failure of the Community of Virtue,” in Religions, 2020.
- 7.
C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).
- 8.
Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, transl. Integer (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978), 9.
References
Aristotle. (1995). Politics (B. Jowett, Trans.). In J. Barnes (Ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle, Revised Oxford Translation (Vol II). Princeton University Press.
Cohen, R. A. (2020, October). Judges 19–21: The Failure of the Community of Virtue. Religions 2020, 11(10). Reconciling the God of Traditional Theism with the World’s Evils. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11100531, Article Number 531, 21pp
Gandhi, M. K. (1960). My Non-Violence. Navajivan Press.
Husserl, E. (1965). Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (Q. Lauer, Trans. and Ed.). Harper & Row.
Lippmann, W. (1955). The Public Philosophy. Little, Brown & Company.
Luxemburg, R. (1978). Reform or Revolution (Integer, Trans.). Pathfinder Press.
Macpherson, C. B. (1962). The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford University Press.
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Cohen, R.A. (2021). Introduction: Politics, Humanity, Power and Justice. In: Cohen, R.A., Marci, T., Scuccimarra, L. (eds) The Politics of Humanity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75957-5_1
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