Nationalism is a dominating force in contemporary politics, but political philosophers have been markedly reluctant to discuss, let alone endorse, nationalist ideas. In this book, David Miller defends the principle of nationality. He argues that national identities are valid sources of personal identity; that we are justified in recognizing special obligations to our co-nationals; that nations have good grounds for wanting to be politically self-determining; but that recognizing the claims of nationality does not entail suppressing other sources of personal identity, such as ethnicity....

This is the first full-length presentation of a republican alternative to the liberal and communitarian theories that have dominated political philosophy in recent years. The latest addition to the acclaimed Oxford Political Theory series, Pettit's eloquent and compelling account opens with an examination of the traditional republican conception of freedom as non-domination, contrasting this with established negative and positive views of liberty.
The first part of the book traces the rise and decline of this conception, displays its many attractions, and makes a case for why it should...

What is the role of political education in liberal democracies? This question, which is at the heart of recent debates in the US over federal funding of private schools, forms the core of this book. The problem of political education is to ensure the constitutive ideals of liberal democracy while remaining open to a diversity of conduct and beliefs that may threaten those ideals. In Creating Citizens, Eamonn Callan, one of the world's foremost philosophers of education, identifies both the principal ends of civic education and the rights that limit their political pursuit. This timely new...

Many governments today are engaged in far-reaching programs of 'welfare reform'. But what would a just program of welfare reform consist in? Is the current emphasis on linking welfare 'rights' to 'responsibilities' justifiable?
In this book, Stuart White reconsiders the principles of economic citizenship appropriate to a democratic society, and explores the radical implications of these principles for public policy.

Democracy used to be seen as a relatively mechanical matter of merely adding up everyone's votes in free and fair elections. That mechanistic model has many virtues, among them allowing democracy to 'track the truth', where purely factual issues are all that is at stake. Political disputes invariably mix facts with values, however, and then it is essential to listen to what people are saying rather than merely note how they are voting. The great challenge is how to implement that deliberative ideal among millions of people at once. In this strikingly original book, Goodin offers a solution:...

In his major new work Chandran Kukathas offers, for the first time, a book-length treatment of this controversial and influential theory of minority rights. The author argues that the free society should not be seen as a hierarchy of superior and subordinate authorities but an archipelago of competing and overlapping jurisdictions.

In The Ethics of Immigration, Joseph Carens synthesizes a lifetime of work to explore and illuminate one of the most pressing issues of our time. Immigration poses practical problems for western democracies and also challenges the ways in which people in democracies think about citizenship and belonging, about rights and responsibilities, and about freedom and equality.

Carens begins by focusing on current immigration controversies in North America and Europe about access to citizenship, the integration of immigrants, temporary workers, irregular migrants and the admission of...

In Europe and throughout the world, competence in English is spreading at a speed never achieved by any language in human history. This apparently irresistible growing dominance of English is frequently perceived and sometimes indignantly denounced as being grossly unjust. Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World starts off arguing that the dissemination of competence in a common lingua franca is a process to be welcomed and accelerated, most fundamentally because it provides the struggle for greater justice in Europe and in the world with an essential weapon: a cheap medium of...

Should character formation be a goal of civic education in a liberal democracy? In addition to teaching knowledge and skills, should civic education shape children's values, beliefs, preferences, habits, identities, and sentiments? Most contemporary political and educational theorists who address these questions respond with a heavily qualified yes. They argue that education for civil character is vital to the survival and flourishing of liberal democracy but its content must be strictly limited to avoid compromising its recipients' ability to think and act as critically autonomous citizens....