Name Charles Blattberg | ||
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Education University of Toronto, Pantheon-Sorbonne University, McGill University Books From pluralist to patriotic p, Patriotic elaborations, Shall we dance? | ||
Charles Blattberg
Charles Blattberg is a professor of political philosophy at the Universite de Montreal. Educated at Toronto, McGill, the Sorbonne (Universite de Paris I), and Oxford, he has been teaching political philosophy at the Universite de Montreal since 2000, except for 2005–6 and 2012-13 when he was a Lady Davis Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Contents
Blattberg has been developing a political philosophy that he calls 'new patriotism', which he wants to distinguish from nationalism so as to focus on the common good shared by the members of a political as distinct from national community. He has argued that what he calls 'patriotic democracy' is superior to 'deliberative democracy' because of four main flaws with the latter. He accused deliberative democracy of using a systematic set of procedures for conversation which distorts its practice; of being ideologically biased; that the distinction between conversation and negotiation in deliberative democracy is overstated; and because he believes within deliberative democracy the conception of the political community is impoverished. Blattberg is also critical of the relationship between the state and civil sociey, as commonly described within discourse on deliberative democracy.
Commentary
Recent commentary on Blattberg's approach can be found in Eric Montpetit's, in "Easing Dissatisfaction with Canadian Federalism? The Promise of Disjointed Incrementalism," Canadian Political Science Review 2, no. 3 (September 2008), pp. 12–28; Michel Seymour, De la tolerance a la reconnaissance (Montreal: Boreal, 2008), pp. 121–7; and Stephane Courtois, "Une politique du bien commun au Canada est-elle possible?" International Journal of Canadian Studies, no. 42 (2010), pp. 273–82.