Global Justice and Two Conceptions of Practice-Dependence

Practice-dependence has recently gotten a lot of press in political theory, not only for methodological reasons, but also because of its ostensible support for statism – the view that the scope of principles of justice is limited to the nation-state. This article aims to refute the claim that practice-dependence necessarily entails statism. It distinguishes two senses of practice-dependence in Rawls’s work in order to elucidate how statism follows not from Rawls’s practice-dependence methodologyas such , but from the kind of practices on which his conception depends. By distinguishing basic practices from institutionalised practices, we can identify a conception of practice-dependence, realised in the work of Jürgen Habermas, which entails cosmopolitanism. Finally, the article contrasts Rawls’s internal criticism of the nation-state with Habermas’s external criticism and argues in favour of the latter approach.