Editorial

摘要

This issue opens with an email conversation between Amy Allen, Rainer Forst and Mark Haugaard, which explores the relationship between the dyads of power and reason, on one hand, and justice and domination, on the other. In the Weberian tradition (1978) (and in everyday discourse), power is usually coupled with domination, and both are considered the opposite of reason. In this respect, Pettit's formulation (1997) of power as arbitrary interference would be paradigmatic - arbitrary suggesting unreason. However, as the Allen, Forst and Haugaard agree, power works through the reasoned agency of other. Nietzsche and Foucault also observe this link and conclude that reason is a subtle ruse of domination. However, to Allen, Forst and Haugaard this constitutes an over-simplification. Reason can be emancipatory, and power is not necessarily normatively negative. As a social phenomenon, power is normatively neutral, thus the couplet power/reason can either lead to justice or to domination. The institutionalization of normatively just power entails a system of justice, while the institutionalization of unjust power constitutes domination. If reason is the tool of power with the potential for either justice or domination, how do we normatively distinguish the two uses of reason-to-power?