Force of the Example or Handbook of Public Finance

Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment

Author: Alessandro Ferrara

During the twentieth century, the view that assertions and norms are valid insofar as they respond to principles independent of all local and temporal contexts came under attack from two perspectives: the partiality of translation and the intersubjective constitution of the self, understood as responsive to recognition. Defenses of universalism have by and large taken the form of a thinning out of substantive universalism into various forms of proceduralism.

Alessandro Ferrara instead launches an entirely different strategy for transcending the particularity of context without contradicting our pluralistic intuitions: a strategy centered on the exemplary universalism of judgment. Whereas exemplarity has long been thought to belong to the domain of aesthetics, this book explores the other uses to which it can be put in our philosophical predicament, especially in the field of politics. After defining exemplarity and describing how something unique can possess universal significance, Ferrara addresses the force exerted by exemplarity, the nature of the judgment that discloses exemplarity, and the way in which the force of the example can bridge the difference between various contexts.

Drawing not only on Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment but also on the work of Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Jürgen Habermas, Ferrara outlines a view of exemplary validity that is applicable to today's central philosophical issues, including public reason, human rights, radical evil, sovereignty, republicanism and liberalism, and religion in the public sphere.

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Handbook of Public Finance

Author: J Backhaus

The Handbook of Public Finance provides a definitive source, reference, and text for the field of public finance. In 18 chapters it surveys the state of the art - the tradition and breadth of the field but also its current status and recent developments. The Handbook's intellectual foundation and orientation is truly multidisciplinary. Throughout its examination of the standard material of public finance, it explores the connections between that material and such neighboring fields as political science, sociology, law, and public administration.

The editors and contributors to the Handbook are distinguished scholars who write clearly and accessibly about the political economy of government budgets and their policy implications. To address the needs and interests of international scholars, they place European issues next to the American agenda and give attention to the issues of transformation in Central Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

General Editors: Jürgen G. Backhaus, University of Erfurt
Richard E. Wagner, George Mason University
Contributors: Andy H. Barnett, Charles B. Blankart, Thomas E. Borcherding, Rainald Borck, Geoffrey Brennan, Giuseppe Eusepi, J. Stephen Ferris, Fred E. Folvary, Andrea Garzoni, Heinz Grossekettaler, Walter Hettich, Scott Hinds, Randall G. Holcombe, Jean-Michel Josselin, Carla Marchese, Alain Marciano, William S. Peirce, Nicholas Sanchez, David Schap, A. Allan Schmid, Russell S. Sobel, Stanley L. Winer, Bruce Yandle.