This article discusses the Habermasian public sphere as a realm constructed through communication and offers a critique of Jürgen Habermas's concept of an intersubjectively shared lifeworld among the participants as a fundamental prerequisite for communicative rationality in the discursive field. The article contends that the emergence of communicative rationality in the public sphere is unlikely to be facilitated by a singular and unitary modern public whose participants have commensurable languages and worlds. This argument is elaborated through an analysis of a public debate that occurred on August 10, 1888, between the Mahajan (headman) of the Modh Baniya caste council and Mohandas K. Gandhi, a Modh Baniya himself. Even though the discussion involved two people with an intersubjectively shared lifeworld, who were engaged in the deliberation as equals, the dialogue broke down, deepening divides. This article argues that the need to protect the spiritual domain from the polluting touch of the material domain led to the breakdown of communicative rationality.

Comparison is a very common tool for international lawyers. In fact, international law is built around, and draws upon, constructions necessitating an exercise of comparison. In recent years, however, calls have been made to turn the familiar tool of comparison into a central way to engage with international law. This is the idea of those spearheading the rise of a new field called comparative international law. This article critically examines the promotion of comparison as a central mode of engagement with international law and scrutinizes some of the main features of the comparativist project. It particularly shows that the comparativist project, far from laying bare the plurality of international legal thought and practice, enables a thought-colonizing enterprise. The article ends with some reflective observations on the possibility of limiting colonizing thinking in international legal studies. In doing so, it argues that it must remain possible for international lawyers to engage with alterity in a way that does not unilaterally manufacture the “other,” silence it, and speak on its behalf. This approach is called counter-comparability.

The value of civility is grounded upon acceptance of the legitimacy of moral disagreement and the need for mutual respect and cooperation in the face of such disagreement. The distinction between rights and goods plays a fundamental role in the form of civility espoused by liberal society. Current models of constitutional rights and proportionality, in a variety of ways, erode that distinction and thereby place the liberal model of civility in jeopardy.

We develop a theory of commensurability of groups, of rings, and of modules. It allows us, in certain cases, to compare sizes of automorphism groups of modules, even when those are infinite. This work is motivated by the Cohen–Lenstra heuristics on class groups.

Practices within markets are widely regulated and sometimes contested on the basis of moral judgments. Moral entrepreneurs challenge markets and market practices while firms and industry actors defend them, leading to moral struggles opposing different orders of worth. Based on an historical case study, this paper develops a theoretical framework to study moral struggles in markets as social and political processes around commensurability. It identifies three core arenas in which moral struggles play out: ideas, where the morality of specific practices itself is contested and actors ground their moral claims in different institutional orders for legitimation; the economy, where the market viability of changing moral standards is at stake; and politics, where commensuration reflects political power struggles. Through a socio-historical analysis of the fight against battery cages in Swiss egg production in the 1970s and 1980s, the study fleshes out how this moral struggle played out along these dimensions, focusing on the competing discourses, strategies, and tactics of the main moral entrepreneurs and industry associations.

In this paper, we obtain several results on the commensurability of two Kleinian groups and their limit sets. We prove that two finitely generated subgroups G1 and G2 of an infinite co-volume Kleinian group G⊂Isom(H3) having Λ(G1)=Λ(G2) are commensurable. In particular, we prove that any finitely generated subgroup H of a Kleinian group G⊂Isom(H3) with Λ(H)=Λ(G) is of finite index if and only if H is not a virtually fibered subgroup.