Description:
Collecting articles written over the course of this period is not just meant as the testimony of an intellectual journey, but also a way of tracing such a journey in retrospect and mapping the important moments of the intellectual and schol...
Brief description: Richard Bellamy is Director of the Max Weber Programme at the EUI and Professor of Political Science, University College London (UCL), University of London. Recent publications include Liberalism and Pluralism: Towards a Politics of Compromise (Routledge, 1999), Rethinking Liberalism (Continuum, 2000, 2005), Political Constitutionalism: A Republican Defence of the Constitutionality of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Citizenship: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2008), Croce, Gramsci, Bobbio and the Italian Political Tradition (ECPR Press, 2014) and (as co-editor) The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Lineages of European Citizenship (Palgrave, 2004) and Making European Citizens (Palgrave, 2006). His A European Republic of Sovereign States is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
Review Quotes: Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione have authored - together, alone and with others - many essays on European democracy which they now assemble in a rich compilation prefaced by a new essay spanning from Maastricht to Brexit. The challenges that interconnectedness poses to legitimate governance in Europe, at both national and EU level, are addressed from a republican view of politics which puts a premium on freedom as non-domination. Between the contraposed solutions offered by cosmopolitanism and communitarianism that propose, respectively, a leap forward into global governance and a retrenchment into national self-determination, Bellamy and Castiglione advance "cosmopolitan communitarianism" as a normative position that holds together a sense of responsibility vis-à-vis the citizens of other national communities and a sense of ownership of the decisions made on behalf of one's national community in a context of interdependency. It is in the balance between a new and more complex notion of sovereignty and multilevel inter-institutional checks that the idea of the republican mixed government which "removes arbitrary power from any single agent or agency" can be resurrected to yield the solution for legitimate governance in the contemporary EU. A highly readable and remarkably coherent set of essays that contribute sometimes in a conclusive manner to the many normative debates that have characterized European Union studies.--Simona Piattoni, Professor of Political Science, University of Trento