James Turner Johnson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3780923 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James Turner Johnson |
| GIVEN NAMES | James Turner |
| FAMILY NAME | Johnson |
| SIGNATURE | JOHNSON J T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Rochester |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3555-169X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 87 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 477 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 87 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1971 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Political economy, institutional reconstruction, and ‘realistic utopia’: A pragmatist view
The Cambridge Companion to Religion and War
This Companion offers a global, comparative history of the interplay between religion and war from ancient times to the present. Moving beyond sensationalist theories that seek to explain why 'religion causes war,' the volume takes a thoughtful look at the connection between religion and war through a variety of lenses - historical, literary, and sociological-as well as the particular features of religious war. The twenty-three carefully nuanced …
Formal Models
Advocates of deliberative democracy generally do not see much for formal models of political interaction. This is a mistake both historically and analytically. It reflects a common misunderstanding of formal models of collective choice and strategic interaction and their uses. Like political scientists more generally, political theorists use formal models for conceptual rather than directly empirical purposes. Indeed, empirical inquiry cannot get…
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy is the first book that brings together a wide range of methods used in the study of deliberative democracy. It offers thirty-one different methods that scholars use for theorizing, measuring, exploring, or applying deliberative democracy. Each chapter presents one method by explaining its utility in deliberative democracy research and providing guidance on its application by drawing on examples from prev…
Grumpy Old Men: Reconsidering Rational Choice & Political Power
A new, expanded edition of Keith Dowding’s Rational Choice & Political Power (PC&PP) provides an opportunity to examine the uses of game theoretic models in political inquiry. Specifically, it raises questions about the apparent discontinuities between the way bargaining models are used in RC&PP and the way he defends formal models in more recent work. I prefer what I take to be his earlier view
Models-As-Fables: An Alternative to the Standard Rationale for Using Formal Models in Political Science
Political scientists invoke the standard rationale to justify making and using formal models. It goes like this: (1) we rely on formal models to generate predictions, (2) we treat these predictions as empirical hypotheses, and (3) we seek to test these hypotheses against evidence derived from the “real world.” I show that this interpretation of formal models as directly empirical is inadequate just insofar as it fails to capture the way we actual…
Formal Models in Political Science: Conceptual, Not Empirical
What’s a Political Theorist to Do
John Rawls famously distinguishes between ideal and nonideal theory, according priority to the former. He depicts his own efforts to articulate the conception of justice as fairness as an instance of ideal theory. Subsequent political theorists have taken Rawls’s distinction as a template for how we should understand the tasks of political theory. Yet they also have struggled to clarify the underlying distinction with notable lack of success. We …
The Great War and International Law on War
While much writing on the Great War centers on its destructiveness, less attention has been given to the steps taken over the half-century before that war to limit the destructiveness of warfare by positive international agreement, the early steps in the creation of a body of international law on warfare and armed conflict. Though some, if not all, of these early efforts failed during the Great War, that failure gave rise to renewed efforts in th…
Religion and the Human Rights Idea
Three recent books focus, in different ways, on the idea of human rights and its relation to religion and religious ethics. All three books discussed here address criticisms of the human rights idea and seek to establish the relationship of religion and human rights with regard to the field of policy. The present discussion begins with an overview that places these three books in the larger context of the development of the human rights idea and …
The Quest for Peace: Three Moral Traditions in Western Cultural History
James Turner Johnson goes beyond the examination of moral restraints on the occasion and conduct of war to a critical study of the moral thinking that has aimed at its prevention. This scrutiny of the peace issue" in Western society covers nearly two thousand years of history and three traditions of the search for peace: the just war tradition of setting limits to war, the sectarian pacifism of withdrawal from the world and its evils, and the Uto…
Quest for Peace: Three Moral Traditions in Western Cultural History
The Broken Tradition
This chapter traces briefly the essential elements and philosophical bedrock of just-war theory, and shows how it has changed over the last century—and especially over the past three decades. It argues that recent changes reflect contingent judgments on the nature of modern war that do not match the character of contemporary armed conflicts. The chapter suggests that, in its original form, just-war theory remains relevant to the challenges faced …
Cooperative Democracy and Political-Economic Development: The Civic Potential of Worker Coops
Worker Cooperatives have emerged as integral to political-economic development proposals in various jurisdictions across the U.S. in recent years. We connect these proposals to extant empirical research on the effect of participation in the workplace on conventional civic and political participation. And we suggest how commonalities in the work of Amartya Sen and Elinor Ostrom afford theoretical resources for designing and assessing such policy i…
A Practically Informed Morality of War: Just War, International Law, and a Changing World Order
Just war, international law, and world order are all historically conditioned realities that interrelate with one another in complex ways. This paper explores their historical development and current status while critically examining their interrelationship. It begins with exploring just war as a basic frame for analysis and interconnection with the other two realities. Just war is not an abstract body of moral thought but instead a practically i…
The Ethics of Insurgency
In the latter half of the twentieth century, lasting memories of two world wars and astonishment over the power of nuclear weapons left both policymakers and scholars of war largely preoccupied with the possibility of a catastrophic World War III. Instead, however, the face of war since 1945 has been that of regionally limited small wars and insurgencies fought with conventional weapons. Many of these conflicts began as armed rebellions against c…
Three perspectives on just war
This essay critically examines three recent books on just war by noted scholars in different fields of study related to International Relations. Not only are their perspectives different, but each understands the idea of just war somewhat differently, and each draws the meaning of this idea out differently for thinking about international relations. Rengger and Biggar, in distinctive ways, draw on history to develop their thinking, while Fabre of…
Ideology, Reason, and the Limitation of War: Religious and Secular Concepts, 1200-1740
Getting it Right
In addition to noting significant differences of interpretation between me and K ristopher N orris on understanding classic just war thought and judging its importance, this Comment flags errors of fact and faulty logic in the N orris essay
On Attempts to Gerrymander “Positive” and “Normative” Political Theory
We aim to cast doubt on the now conventional distinction between “positive” and “normative political theory by shifting the burden of argument. We do not claim it is impossible to categorically differentiate political theory into “positive” and “normative” varieties. We do suggest the most familiar, extant strategies for approaching that task are implausible. We hope in the process to show that there are perfectly good reasons to set the task asi…
The Tradition on Jihad of the Sword, Counter-Narratives, and Policy
This article addresses two sets of issues, one historical and thematic, the other contemporary. The first is the normative tradition on jihad of the sword and its expression in different contexts. The second is the relation of religion to the formation of policy, where historical Muslim doctrine and practice has produced a significantly different perspective on this relationship from that in the West. This complicates efforts at mutual understand…
Simon Hug's Retrospective on Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Dissent
In a recent paper in this journal Simon Hug (2014) offers a retrospective on the impact, over the course of two decades, the publication of Green and Shapiro's Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory has had on the discipline of political science.1 While in some ways critical of the argument Green and Shapiro advance, Hug ultimately concludes that their work – albeit “indirectly” – has had a broadly “salutary” impact by “rendering rational choice s…
Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry
Ethics, Law, and Humanitarian Intervention
Nigel Biggar begins his chapter 6, subtitled “Legality, Morality, and Kosovo,” with these words: Law is given before it is made. Legal statutes and social contracts are not crafted in a moral wasteland. They are born accountable to a higher, natural law.... Such is the moral realism that the Christian doctrine of just war, both early and late, takes for granted. It assumes that there is a universal moral order that transcends national legal syste…
Models Among the Political Theorists
Political theorists rely on models in ways that typically are neglected. They do so for largely the same reasons other political scientists do. Those reasons have little to do with the standard rationale political scientists advance, namely, that they use models to deduce predictions that, treated as hypotheses, can be tested against the “real world.” Starting from Thomas Schelling's view of models, I show how John Rawls and Michel Foucault each …
Aggregation and Deliberation: On the Possibility of Democratic Legitimacy
Is Talk Really Cheap? Prompting Conversation between Critical Theory and Rational Choice
Critical theory and rational choice theory share both overlapping concerns and parallel theoretical weaknesses. Specifically, both critical theorists and rational choice theorists are preoccupied with determining whatrationalcan mean in the realm of social and political interaction. I show in a provisional way how game theory extends and deepens the critical theorists' basic intuition that unembellished strategic rationality cannot adequately sus…
Habermas on Strategic and Communicative Action
In The Theory of Communicative Action, Jurgen Habermas articulates an expansive critical social theory.' He anchors his project in a comprehensive of communicative rationality intended to remedy what he takes to be limitations in the concept of cognitive-instrumental rationality informing much of traditional social and political thought.2 I wish to question whether Habermas's project is conceptually well-founded. My concerns are analytical.3 Alth…
Consequences of Positivism: A Pragmatist Assessment
The aim of this article is to highlight the baleful consequences of positivism in contemporary political science. The author focuses on Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba's Designing Social Inquirybecause it clearly and consistently articulates positivist commitments that tacitly and so often inconsistently, animate much work in the discipline. The author first establishes the positivist commitments that animate King, Keohane, and Verba'…
Howconceptualproblemsmigrate: Rational Choice, Interpretation, and the Hazards of Pluralism
When they assess competing theories, political scientists typically rely almost exclusively and rather naively on criteria of empirical performance. They have correspondingly little to say about conceptual problems and seem generally unaware of the extent to which their assessments of empirical performance are parasitic on conceptual commitments. This blind spot, in turn, hinders their ability both to persuasively conduct and critically assess su…
Models Among the Political Theorists
Political theorists rely on models in ways that typically are neglected. They do so for largely the same reasons other political scientists do. Those reasons have little to do with the standard rationale political scientists advance, namely, that they use models to deduce predictions that, treated as hypotheses, can be tested against the “real world.” Starting from Thomas Schelling's view of models, I show how John Rawls and Michel Foucault each …
The Priority of Democracy: A Pragmatist Approach to Political-Economic Institutions and the Burden of Justification
Politics reflects a seemingly incontrovertible condition-any imaginable human population is diverse across multiple, overlapping dimensions including material interests, moral and ethical commitments, and cultural attachments. Such diversity means, in turn, that disagreement and conflict are unavoidable. Under these circumstances politics largely consists in contests over the contours of shared institutional arrangements. Given that there almost …
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy
Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy is the first book that brings together a wide range of methods used in the study of deliberative democracy. It offers thirty-one different methods that scholars use for theorizing, measuring, exploring, or applying deliberative democracy. Each chapter presents one method by explaining its utility in deliberative democracy research and providing guidance on its application by drawing on examples from prev…
Conceptual Problems as Obstacles to Progress in Political Science: Four Decades of Political Culture Research
When they assess competing theories political scientists typically rely exclusively and naively on criteria of empirical performance. They have correspondingly little to say about conceptual problems and seem generally unaware of the extent to which their assessments of empirical performance are parasitic on conceptual commitments. This, in turn, hinders their ability to both persuasively conduct and critically assess substantive research. I use …
Models-As-Fables: An Alternative to the Standard Rationale for Using Formal Models in Political Science
Political scientists invoke the standard rationale to justify making and using formal models. It goes like this: (1) we rely on formal models to generate predictions, (2) we treat these predictions as empirical hypotheses, and (3) we seek to test these hypotheses against evidence derived from the “real world.” I show that this interpretation of formal models as directly empirical is inadequate just insofar as it fails to capture the way we actual…
Inquiry into Democracy: What Might a Pragmatist Make of Rational Choice Theories
We begin by positing a conception of pragmatism that is characterized by three basic philosophical commitments: consequentialism, fallibilism, and anti-skepticism. In light of that conception we challenge prevalent views that hold that pragmatism entails no particular moral and political positions. We argue instead that pragmatism generally has democratic implications and, more specifically, that it has implications for the assessment and justifi…
What Rationality Assumption? or, How ‘Positive Political Theory’ Rests on a Mistake
In this article I address the reception of game-theoretic methods in political science. In particular I challenge the notion that such methods afford a plausible basis for what is commonly called ‘positive political theory’ (PPT). The standard rationale for PPT suggests that the point of formal models is, starting from ‘the’ rationality assumption, to derive predictions that can then be tested empirically. I argue that this standard rationale is …
How Not to Criticize Rational Choice Theory: "Pathologies of "Common Sense
Critique de l'ouvrage de D. Green et I. Shapiro intitule «Pathologies of rational choice theory: a critique of application in political science» (1994) qui, au lieu de chercher le remede aux pathologies methodologiques qui creusent l'abime entre l'aspect theorique et l'aspect pratique de la recherche du choix rationnel, tente de definir ce que peut etre une bonne science sociale au regard du sens commun
Political Consequences of Pragmatism
Etude des consequences politiques du pragmatisme a travers l'analyse de la theorie pragmatique du droit developpee par R. Posner. Distinguant pragmatisme juridique et realisme juridique, l'A. examine la conception activiste du droit et la definition d'une jurisprudence pragmatique chez Posner, a la lumiere de la theorie judiciaire de la decision apprehendee dans le cadre du droit commun et de l'interpretation statutaire
The evolution of the timber sector in lowland Bolivia: Examining the influence of three disparate policy approaches
Why Respect Culture
do not have moral reasons respect culture in any direct sense. he tensions that surround culture and normative claims made for it in political debate pervade western press coverage. In 1994, for instance, The New York Times opened year with an ominous warning about need protect indigenous peoples from impending extinction that threatens them in face of relentless political and economic development (Wilford 1994). This basically was a plea protect…
From large to small: Reorienting rural development policies in response to climate change, food security and poverty
The Arithmetic of Compassion: Rethinking the Politics of Photography
Compassion, theorists from Arendt to Nussbaum suggest, carries an ineluctable pressure to identify with individual suffering. The very idea of a politics of compassion verges on incoherence. Politics typically demands attention to the aggregate and it is just there that compassion falters. This is a problem for critics addressing the politics of photography, who typically presume that the point of photographs must be to elicit compassion among vi…
Contemporary Just War Thinking: Which Is Worse, to Have Friends or Critics
The increasingly widespread and energetic engagement with the idea of just war over the last fifty years of thinking on morality and armed conflict—especially in English-speaking countries—presents a striking contrast to the previous several centuries, going back to the early 1600s, in which thinkers addressing moral issues related to war did so without reference to the just war idea
Communication, Criticism, and the Postmodern Consensus: An Unfashionable Interpretation of Michel Foucault
A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought, the practices that we accept rest.... Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accept…
On Attempts to Gerrymander “Positive” and “Normative” Political Theory
We aim to cast doubt on the now conventional distinction between “positive” and “normative political theory by shifting the burden of argument. We do not claim it is impossible to categorically differentiate political theory into “positive” and “normative” varieties. We do suggest the most familiar, extant strategies for approaching that task are implausible. We hope in the process to show that there are perfectly good reasons to set the task asi…
Formal Models in Political Science: Conceptual, Not Empirical
Maintaining the Protection of Non-Combatants
This article brings moral analysis to bear on the distinctive problem of maintaining the protection of non-combatants in contemporary warfare. While all warfare imposes burdens on non-combatants, moral tradition and the law of armed conflicts distinguish combatants from non-combatants and seek to protect the latter from direct, intended attacks. Much contemporary warfare rejects the two premises on which these efforts are based: that it is right …
The Meaning of Non-Combatant Immunity in the Just War/Limited War Tradition
Journal Article The Meaning of Non-Combatant Immunity in the Just War/Limited War Tradition Get access JAMES T. JOHNSON JAMES T. JOHNSON JAMES T. JOHNSON (Ph.D., Princeton) is Assistant Professor of Religion in Douglass College of Rutgers University. An ethicist with interest in both historical and systematic questions, he is author of A Society Ordained by God (Abingdon, 1970), a study of English Puritan marriage doctrine, and articles in Church…
Cooperative Democracy and Political-Economic Development: The Civic Potential of Worker Coops
Worker Cooperatives have emerged as integral to political-economic development proposals in various jurisdictions across the U.S. in recent years. We connect these proposals to extant empirical research on the effect of participation in the workplace on conventional civic and political participation. And we suggest how commonalities in the work of Amartya Sen and Elinor Ostrom afford theoretical resources for designing and assessing such policy i…
The Meaning of Non-Combatant Immunity in the Just War/Limited War Tradition
Journal Article The Meaning of Non-Combatant Immunity in the Just War/Limited War Tradition Get access JAMES T. JOHNSON JAMES T. JOHNSON JAMES T. JOHNSON (Ph.D., Princeton) is Assistant Professor of Religion in Douglass College of Rutgers University. An ethicist with interest in both historical and systematic questions, he is author of A Society Ordained by God (Abingdon, 1970), a study of English Puritan marriage doctrine, and articles in Church…
The Covenant Idea and the Puritan View of Marriage
A Society Ordained by God: English Puritan Marriage Doctrine in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century
Ideology and the Jus Ad Bellum: Justice in the Initiation of War
Ideology and the Jus Ad Bellum: Justice in the Initiation of War Get access JAMES T. JOHNSON JAMES T. JOHNSON JAMES T. JOHNSON (Ph.D., Princeton) is Assistant Professor of Religion at Douglass College, Rutgers University He is author of A Society Ordained by God (Abingdon, 1970), a study of English Puritan marriage doctrine, and several articles in learned journals. The Present article was presented as an address, in slightly different form, in t…
A Society Ordained by God: English Puritan Marriage Doctrine in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century
Can War Be Justified (And Restrained)
Book reviewed in this article: Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry. By James Turner Johnson
Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century, by Leo Kuper
Humanity in Warfare
Historical Tradition and Moral Judgment: The Case of Just War Tradition
Threats, Values, and Defense: Does Defense of Values by Force Remain a Possibility
Moral Responsibility in Conflicts: Essays on Nonviolence, War, and Conscience . James F. Childress
The Church and War: Papers Read at the Twenty-First Summer Meeting and the Twenty-Second Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society . W. J. Sheils
Recent Strategic Developments: A Critical Overview From A Just War Perspective
Beginning with a sketch of the major moral ideas contained in just war tradition, this essay applies them to three controverted issues in contemporary military debate: nuclear deterrence strategy, the strategic defense initiative, and the possibility of building and deploying fractional megatonnage nuclear weapons on delivery vehicles of extremely high accuracy. It is argued that, in terms of the criteria of just war tradition, deterrence in its …
Just war thinking and its contemporary application: The moral significance of the Weinberger Doctrine
(1990). Just war thinking and its contemporary application: The moral significance of the Weinberger Doctrine. Small Wars & Insurgencies: Vol. 1, The Recourse to War: An Appraisal of the ‘Weinberger Doctrine’, pp. 146-170
Is Democracy an Ethical Standard
This article explores the Western cultural traditions of democracy and freedom which form a political ethic deeply rooted in the underlying philosophical and theological American heritage. Theories of Machiavelli, Montesqieu, and Niebuhr support the notion that the potential for virtue is found in all individuals, who, through their undeniable freedoms, responsibilities, and participation, have the capability to establish a political community ba…
Habermas on Strategic and Communicative Action
In The Theory of Communicative Action, Jurgen Habermas articulates an expansive critical social theory.' He anchors his project in a comprehensive of communicative rationality intended to remedy what he takes to be limitations in the concept of cognitive-instrumental rationality informing much of traditional social and political thought.2 I wish to question whether Habermas's project is conceptually well-founded. My concerns are analytical.3 Alth…
Cross, Crescent, and Sword: The Justification and Limitation of War in Western and Islamic Tradition
Does Democracy “Travel”? Some Thoughts on Democracy and Its Cultural Context
The fundamental question is whether the non-Western world is capable of developing our form of liberal democratic self-government, despite our differences in tradition and culture. The author taps on several critical differences of interpretation of what we consider to be integral to our form of government, such as John Locke's concept of “civil society”; the idea of “pluralism”; and the concept of “inherent human rights” counsel, which have dist…
Is Talk Really Cheap? Prompting Conversation between Critical Theory and Rational Choice
Critical theory and rational choice theory share both overlapping concerns and parallel theoretical weaknesses. Specifically, both critical theorists and rational choice theorists are preoccupied with determining whatrationalcan mean in the realm of social and political interaction. I show in a provisional way how game theory extends and deepens the critical theorists' basic intuition that unembellished strategic rationality cannot adequately sus…
Aggregation and Deliberation: On the Possibility of Democratic Legitimacy
Public Sphere, Postmodernism and Polemic
Theories of the public sphere, as standardly formulated, aim to specify the minimal, necessary conditions for a discursive realm free of coercion or manipulation. In his article in this Review in September 1992, Dana Villa urged us to reconsider this standard account. He argued that when read in light of postmodernist theory, Hannah Arendt provides the basis for a revised conception of the public sphere that privileges plurality and difference ov…
How Not to Criticize Rational Choice Theory: "Pathologies of "Common Sense
Critique de l'ouvrage de D. Green et I. Shapiro intitule «Pathologies of rational choice theory: a critique of application in political science» (1994) qui, au lieu de chercher le remede aux pathologies methodologiques qui creusent l'abime entre l'aspect theorique et l'aspect pratique de la recherche du choix rationnel, tente de definir ce que peut etre une bonne science sociale au regard du sens commun
Political Consequences of Pragmatism
Etude des consequences politiques du pragmatisme a travers l'analyse de la theorie pragmatique du droit developpee par R. Posner. Distinguant pragmatisme juridique et realisme juridique, l'A. examine la conception activiste du droit et la definition d'une jurisprudence pragmatique chez Posner, a la lumiere de la theorie judiciaire de la decision apprehendee dans le cadre du droit commun et de l'interpretation statutaire
Justice as Impartiality. Brian Barry
Communication, Criticism, and the Postmodern Consensus: An Unfashionable Interpretation of Michel Foucault
A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought, the practices that we accept rest.... Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accept…
Political science (74 works) · Law (65 works) · Sociology (55 works) · Philosophy (51 works) · Politics (48 works) · Law (43 works) · Epistemology (35 works) · Philosophy (30 works) · War, Ethics, and Justification (25 works) · Global Peace and Security Dynamics (20 works)