Overview
Avigail Eisenberg is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at University of Victoria in British Columbia. She specializes in political theories of diversity and political pluralism in the history of political thought and has published monographs on each of these subjects: Reasons of Identity (2009) and Reconstructing Political Pluralism (1995). She also has written extensively about the relation between the state and religious minorities, Indigenous peoples, and national minorities with a particular focus on Canada. She has held fellowships at Hebrew University, Université de Montréal, and the Rockefeller Centre in Bellagio. Her recent scholarship and teaching interests include dissent and resistance, democratic communication, and reconciliation. She is currently researching and writing a book on pluralist understandings of political authority drawing on examples of authority claims made by Indigenous communities, religious groups, and business corporations.
Research Focus
Arguments for the authority of groups to act independently of public values and state law have recently been invoked in a host of different kinds of conflicts. Religious groups, First Nations communities, universities and business corporations have all claimed to be non-state sites of distinctive authority and have claimed this authority in order to depart from public values and constitutional rights in their treatment of members, employees and students.
Relational Pluralism and Group Authority considers these developments in the context of political theories about group authority in 20th-21st Century. The project has three parts, the first of which considers the progressive and democratic political ideas of early 20th Century political pluralism, especially pluralist ideas that influenced interwar peace movements, early labour movement organization, and feminist pragmatism. The second part examines contemporary case studies of religious, corporate, Indigenous and others groups which claim authority to depart from public values and state regulation. My interest here is to examine both the practices by which these groups establish or enact their authority and the practices of groups (unions, professional associations, businesses and others) that sometimes oppose these enactments of authority through strikes, boycotts, and other forms of non-violent direct action. I am interested in how some of these cases illuminate both the pluralist claim that a group’s authority can be legitimately derived from sources other than state law, and suggest that group authority is relational in the sense that groups rely on other groups to help ‘authorize’ their projects. The third part of the project develops the idea of relational group authority in the context of scholarship about the role of groups in democratic politics and considers the preconditions necessary to support relational group authority from a democratic point of view.