By the late twentieth century, the liberal definition of a citizen as an individual with equal rights under the protection of the law has failed to respond to the demands of the members of contemporary plural societies. The recent discussions in political philosophy between Kantian liberal approaches and their communitarian and republican critics are relevant to this challenge. These criticisms are, in one way or another, related to the main principles of Western liberal thought. The communitarians take a stand against the priority of rights over conceptions of the good in liberal politics. They also criticize the ontological assumption of the individual as an "unencumbered" self. The absence of a substantive common good and the separation of politics and morality are the shortcomings of liberalism that are stressed by both communitarians and republicans. In contrast to liberals' emphasis on rights, republicans underline the role of duties and active participation as the constitutive elements of citizenship. In fact, they reverse the relation between rights and politics as it is understood in liberalism: they regard rights as the products of the political process, rather than its presuppositions.

In transitional societies, a search for ethnic identity becomes the most common form of personal response to the destruction of customary forms of social life. The sense of ethnic unity can arise spontaneously or be formed by ideologists. Ethnic stereotypes play a crucial role in embedding national myths into people's consciousness, and the effectiveness of their influence is practically independent of their accuracy. The system of perception stereotypes of a nation almost always adds up to a holistic myth of that nation that includes mythologems of different levels (from routine perceptions to historical-philosophical theories). Thus, one can say that turning mass consciousness towards a national myth is the main method of the formation of national identity.

In this short paper I would like to open discussion on the prevalence of political and ideological considerations in most of contemporary social theory in and pertaining to the Southeastern European context. With the significant political changes in this region the relevance of ideology has grown significantly.

This paper examines two conflicts that emerge in the engagement between monotheism, especially as it is expressed in its fundamentalist form in both Christianity and Islam, and the separation of church and state. The first conflict involves intellectual compartmentalizing. The second conflict concerns the possibility that the contract may require that all "absolute truths" be assigned metaphorical status.

This paper provides a structural and comparative analysis of two sets of concepts in social and political philosophy: the Russian Eurasian school of the 18th,19th, and early 20th centuries, on the one hand, and the concepts of American Exceptionalism and American Destiny, on the other. Both sets of concepts guided the social and especially foreign policies of Russia and the United States as semi-official political doctrines at certain stages of their history.

This paper discusses various social simulacra or real illusions as a substitution for traditional ideologies. Unlike ideologies, simulacra do not pretend to give a true explanation of reality but take its place. They rely on sign codes that create a totality erasing any distinction between the original reality and its copies or interpretations. The new reality principle itself is a product of the simulacrum. Nevertheless, there is a way to go beyond this enchantment; it consists of three steps: irony, parody, and grotesque. The grotesque is the final level of the dissolution of the simulacrum, disclosing the ugly realm hidden by the real illusion.

The purpose of this paper is to argue against a certain view of what terrorism is. In particular, I wish to dispute the definition of terrorism used by philosophers Andrew Vails and Angelo Corlett who separately put forward arguments defending the possibility of morally legitimate acts of terrorism. In support of this conclusion, they each employ a broad definition of terrorism that makes room for highly discriminate, i.e., precisely targeted, acts of political violence to count as terrorism. Defending a broad definition of terrorism requires the inclusion of such cases. I argue in defense of a more narrow definition of terrorism, one that associates terrorism with more indiscriminate acts of violence. I believe that this definition better accords with common usage and commonsense.

This article aims to elaborate two meanings of the category of the political in relation to the question of legitimacy in constitutional regimes: John Rawls's conception constructed on the regulative ideal of political neutrality and Carl Schmitt's notion of the political as friend-enemy distinction relying on a logic of exclusion. A comparative textual examination explicates that these two approaches imply opposed meanings to be attributed to the nature, essence, and boundary of the political, although both thinkers have the common aim of developing a theory of the political realm free of religious, metaphysical, and ideological connotations.

"Justice" has been, since Plato and Aristotle, a concept of central importance in European philosophy. It is also a concept in everyday speech and in political discourse. As an inter-discursive concept, its value is not culturally limited, so that it seems particularly apt for use in discussions about achieving "globalization with a human face" (as one might say). For such processes of communication it is, however, necessary to reflect on the different uses made of this concept, which is claimed by very different, even contrasting political-ethical projects.

One of the major political problems the world faces at the moment of its so-called globalization concerns the possibilities of maintaining, transforming, and expanding democracy. Globalization, as the extension of neo-liberal markets, the formation of multi-national, non-democratic economic powers, and the ubiquitous use of teletechnologies, threatens the modus vivendi of older democracies in ways that call for the reinvention of an old idea. Inasmuch as teletechnical globalization transforms space and time so as to put into question their very presence, and inasmuch as deconstruction has always sought to rethink the constitution as well as deconstitution of the metaphysics of presence, I will here examine the concept of democracy that Jacques Derrida developed over the last few years of his life.

Poststructuralist theories of identity have been accused of restricting the political efficacy of the subject. However, it could be argued that poststructuralist theory, as a philosophical method that insists upon a critical resignification of the traditional understanding of agency and critique, may actually enlarge the scope for activism.