Jeremy Waldron Quotes on Politics
Jeremy Waldron's Law and Disagreement (1999) and The Dignity of Legislation (1999) supply the most sustained contemporary defense of legislative democracy against the prevailing American assumption that constitutional judicial review is the principal protection of rights against majoritarian misjudgment. Waldron's argument is that reasonable disagreement about justice and rights is the ordinary condition of free political life, and that majoritarian legislative procedures — for all their imperfections — are the appropriate response to that disagreement among citizens regarded as one another's equals, in a way that judicial supremacy is not. The more recent The Harm in Hate Speech (2012) and Political Political Theory (2016) extend the framework to free expression, dignity, and the political-theoretical analysis of institutions.
Quotes
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Attributed to Jeremy Waldron:
“Reasonable disagreement on rights is the condition under which any free society must be governed.”
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Attributed to Jeremy Waldron:
“Judicial review of legislation on rights is not the cure for democratic disagreement; it is one of its forms.”
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Attributed to Jeremy Waldron:
“Hate speech is a public dignitary harm, not merely a private offense.”
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Attributed to Jeremy Waldron:
“Basic equality is harder to defend than to assume; the philosophical work is mostly still to be done.”
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Attributed to Jeremy Waldron:
“Rank, in the older meaning, has been generalized; we are all of equal rank now, or we are not equal at all.”
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“As Nozick acknowledges, a modern state should not feel morally constrained by property holdings which might have had a Lockean pedigree but in fact do not. In this regard it is interesting that one of the main uses of Lockean theory these days is in defending the property rights of indigenous people—where a literal claim is being made about who had first possession of a set of resources and about the need to rectify the injustices that accompanied their subsequent expropriation.”
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – "Property and Ownership