Stephen Holmes
Is Attention to Injustice Inevitably Selective?
One challenge to Enlightenment universalism is the well-documented history of human concern for some not all victims of injustice. Individuals able to recognize victims on all sides of violent conflicts have always been, and remain today, politically marginal. For similar reasons, there is no popularly supported political party in any country in the world that advocates a “universalistic immigration policy.” The fact that such a policy is politically unfeasible does not weaken the moral truth of universalism. But what does it say about the possibility of an Enlightenment politics?
Stephen Holmes is the Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law at the NYU School of Law. He previously taught at Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Chicago. His fields of specialization include the history of European liberalism, the disappointments of democratization after communism, and the defense against transnational terrorism within the bounds of liberal constitutionalism. He served as a member of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin from 1991 to 1992 and was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2003. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998 for his study of the theoretical foundations of liberal democracy. Holmes is the author of Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (1984), The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (1993), Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (1995), and The Matador’s Cape: America’s Reckless Response to Terror (2007). He is co-author of The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes (with Cass Sunstein, 1999) and of The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel (with Moshe Halbertal, 2017) as well as The Light That Failed: A Reckoning (with Ivan Krastev, 2019), and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism (with András Sajó and Renáta Uitz, 2022).