From Consensus to Dissensus and Back Again: Habermas and Lyotard

The modernism-versus-postmodernism divide has to a large extent emerged from major disagreements among philosophers of both sides whose engagement with one another’s work had otherwise been rather minimal and non-thorough. Jean-François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas’s debate has been a case in point. Despite the fact that Lyotard’s attack on Habermas’s philosophy was limited to a couple of ideas, Lyotardian followers have inflated the attack to a hasty and blanket dismissal of Habermas’s theory. As I argue in this article, this blocks the possibility of a more fruitful exchange and of a less polemical and more balanced response on the part of Habermasians. The article aims precisely to fill this gap by reconstructing some important points of a critical dialogical response to Lyotard’s philosophy along Habermasian lines yet beyond established polemics. These points concern assumptions on language that remain neglected especially in discussions of Habermas and Lyotard that give priority to the issue of legitimation. Hopefully, this reconstruction reinforces neither an impression that a dialogue between Lyotardians and Habermasians is reducible to a differend nor that the charge of a foundationalist “ideal speech situation” is as damning as critics of Habermas assume.     

The History of the Per Curiam Opinion: Consensus and Individual Expression on the Supreme Court

Readers of Supreme Court opinions have become so accustomed in recent years to the multiple concurrences and dissents that accompany important opinions that it is difficult to recall that this is a relatively recent phenomenon. It is only in the past century that the Court's traditional balance of the institutional and the personal has shifted from an insistence on presenting what Learned Hand termed "monolithic solidarity" to the world. That insistence began with Chief Justice Marshall's determination that the Court should resolve its cases, not seriatim, with each Justice writing separately, but instead in a single, unified opinion. The resulting culture of the Court, one that discouraged both dissenting and concurring opinions as assaults on this unified front, persisted from Marshall's day into the 1930s.3 The Court in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thus deliberately submerged the idea of a personal voice in the fiction of a collective voice, one that spoke for the institution rather than for the Justice who served as its designated scribe.     

Critical urban heritage: from palimpsest to brecciation

This paper explores the commonly used metaphor of the palimpsest prevalent in urban studies, and suggests that there are realities in the field that are overshadowed by the dominant use of the metaphor. Whilst the palimpsest is a useful metaphor to illustrate chronological superimposition or traces of the past that remain hidden, it is inadequate in describing sites that feature material, spatial and temporal juxtapositions. To remedy this gap, the paper introduces the concept of brecciation, inspired by Sigmund Freud, to provide an alternative means to consider how the accumulation of materials affects planning in the city. Examples from two specific sites in Rome illustrate how brecciation enhances an understanding of the sites and enables to evaluate the practices of urban heritage in recent urban initiatives. By way of conclusion, the paper highlights the benefits of engaging with a concept that reveals concatenations at a site, and suggests that further work on brecciation could be expanded to include the exploration of intangible entanglements.     

The Responsibility to Protect and the International Criminal Court: counteracting the crisis

The establishment of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) process and the International Criminal Court (ICC) were seen by many to constitute significant progress in the protection of human rights. However, these institutions are now in crisis, due in large part to their failure to prevent or prosecute recent acute human rights abuses in Syria. There have been two responses to this crisis: the first assumes that the crisis is caused by the current structures of international governance, in particular the power of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), and calls for radical reform. The second sees possibilities within the current structure and advocates making R2P and the ICC more closely aligned under UNSC control. The article argues that both responses are mistaken and sets out an argument in favour of refocusing on the complementary nature of each institution. The Court's most successful actions have been in exercising the powers afforded by its complementary jurisdiction in situations such as Colombia. Similarly, R2P works more successfully at preventing conflict and changing expectations of acceptable state behaviour than it does at confronting situations in which large‐scale violence has begun. The article argues that the ICC and R2P should focus on ‘positive complementarity’ agendas, with the ICC devoting more resources to assisting states to build legal capacity in order to deter future conflict through stronger domestic criminal systems, and advocates of R2P focusing less on intervention in live conflict situations and more on building within states the capacity and resources to protect their own populations.