Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
THE 2ND ANNUAL MEETING AND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE CONSORTIUM FOR RESEARCH IN POLITICAL THEORY THE CRISIS: FUTURE PROSPECTS ON POLITICS, CULTURE AND GOVERNANCE, Ankara, Türkiye, 16 - 20 Temmuz 2018, ss.46
Taking the Republic of Turkey as an example, this paper looks at legal philosophy in relation to political republicanism and theories of judgement. The transition from the Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic and the history of the Republic has not established a properly free judiciary. The judiciary has been limited by the state not by the public sphere. There cannot be a free judiciary without a public sphere of free judgement. The theoretical basis of the free judiciary, public space and free judgement is taken back to Kant, with reference to Arendt’s reading of Kant on judgement. Kant provides an alternative to positivist theories of judgement in which the sovereignty of the state is the only source of law. Kant takes morality as the grounds of law, which includes the idea of the autonomy of the individual and the individual taken as an end. What Arendt emphasises in Kant is the signifcance of aesthetic judgement as a model for political judgement. Judgement of this kind in Kant can be taken as a basis for political judgement and free judicial acts, where there is freedom of judgement. Jurisprudence should take the concrete judicial act as its basis in relation to a political sphere of free judgement and can only understand the concrete judicial act through freedom of judgement. This view of judgement will be completed through Foucault, with regard to the relation of law to sovereignty, the relation of penality to power. Foucault explores the kind of limited autonomy created and disciplined by modern legality and punishment, while also providing suggestions of jurisprudence more concerned with communal peace and reparation of harms rather than imposition of sovereignty. These theoretical concerns provide the framework of discussing the limitations of the judicial function and the public sphere in Turkey.
KEYWORDS: Kant; Arendt; Foucault; public; Turkey