12 December 2011

NOTICE: Lo Giudice on European Identity and Legitimacy

Our member, Alessio Lo Giudice (Catania) has recently published Istituire il postnazionale: Identità europea e legittimazione (Giappichelli, Torino, 2011):

The historical-conceptual presuppositions of the European Union (EU)’s institutional project excludes either a narrow local perspective or an illusory globalist scheme. To rediscover Europe’s cosmopolitan vocation, a process of political and institutional unification must be developed that overcomes the existing national paradigm. Indeed, the crisis of legitimating the resources of EU Member States opens a post-national horizon of a denationalized and autonomous Europe built around spheres of intense, but not totalizing, political, legal and social unity.

In this context and with the necessity to create conditions for the establishment and legitimacy of a social link between strangers, the question of the institutional identity of the EU has great relevance for scholarship in legal philosophy. ‘Solidarity between strangers’ actually develops within the construction of a web of rules, projects and principles meant to fill reciprocal existential deficits; it develops, in fact, within the construction of a shared identity.

In this book, institutional questions about the construction of a European identity are discussed. But the conditions of the theoretical-semantic visualisation and of the pragmatic possibility of such an identity are also dealt with in order to avoid the reduction of the European ideal to rhetorical illusions or vain emotional compensations.

In addition, I want to draw your attention to the University of Catania's Teoria e Critica della Regolazione Sociale. The journal's programme is discussed in English and Italian here. Each issue begins with a central text, often in English, and responses are solicited. This year's central text is Margaret Gilbert's 'Foundations and consequences of collective moral responsibility'. The last issue and earlier issues are available online.

No comments: