Academic life
Ferrara served as assistant professor in sociology at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” between 1984 and 1998, then associate professor in sociology at the University of Parma between 1998 and 2002. Between 2002 and 2023 Ferrara has been professor of political philosophy, and is presently professor emeritus, at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.
Since 1991, Ferrara has been a co-director of the yearly conference Philosophy and Social Science, initially held within the Interuniversity Centre of Dubrovnik, but since 1993 relocated to Prague, under the auspices of the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Science.
In 1990, he co-founded the Seminario di Teoria Critica (Italy), and up to 2019 he served as a co-director. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Association Reset – Dialogues of Civilizations.
Ferrara is co-editor (with David Rasmussen) of the series Philosophy and Politics – Critical Explorations (Springer), and editorial consultant for a number of journals including Constellations, Philosophy & Social Criticism, Philosophy & Public Issues, Krisis, Balsa de la Medusa, Studies in Social & Political Thought, Berlin Journal of Critical Theory, and Symposion: Theoretical and Applied Inquiries in Philosophy and Social Sciences.
He has taught and lectured in various capacities in a number of universities and institutions, including Boston College, Harvard University, Columbia University, Rice University, Cardozo Law School, Yale University, New School for Social Research, University College London (UCL), Oxford University, the Chinese Academy of Social Science in Beijing, Sapienza University of Rome, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Bilgi University and Sehir University in Istanbul, the National University of Singapore, and the Universities of California (at Berkeley), Paris – Sorbonne, Madrid, Chicago, Potsdam, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Exeter, Manchester, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, London, Exeter, Dublin, Belfast, Coimbra, Lisbon, Frankfurt, Copenhagen, Berne, Bordeaux, Barcelona, Kraków, Lyon III, Tilburg, Luxembourg, Mumbai, Indore, Porto Alegre, Campo Grande, Catholic University of Chile in Santiago, Leuven, Hamburg.
Research
Ferrara's work revolves around an account of normativity centered on authenticity and exemplarity, which incorporates a reconstructed version of Kant's “reflective judgment” and is intended as an alternative both to proceduralist, neo-transcendental approaches to validity and to anti-normative, radical contextualism.
In Reflective Authenticity (1998) exemplary normativity is first outlined and in Justice and Judgment (1999) is developed in the direction of a political-philosophical notion of justice based on reflective judgment. In The Force of the Example (2008), drawing on Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment but also on Arendt, Rawls, Dworkin, and Habermas, Ferrara applies his view of exemplary validity to central themes of contemporary political philosophy, including public reason, human rights, radical evil, sovereignty, republicanism and liberalism, as well as religion in the public sphere.
In The Democratic Horizon. Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism (2014), Ferrara argues that Rawls's “political liberalism” needs to be updated in order to improve its traction in a historical context different from the original one. Four adjustments – conjectural arguments, an enriched notion of the democratic ethos, a decentering of it in several local varieties, as well as the remedial model of a multivariate democratic polity – are suggested in order to enable political liberalism to meet the challenge of hyperpluralism. The sources of normativity investigated in Ferrara's earlier work — exemplarity, judgment, the normativity of identity — are added to the conceptual resources of a revisited political liberalism.
Legitimation by Constitution. A Dialogue on Political Liberalism (2021), co-authored with Frank I. Michelman, addresses the implications of Rawls’s “liberal principle of legitimacy” in three areas: the tension between government by the people and government by consent; the ensuing challenges for judicial treatments of constitutional law; and the magnification of these tensions and challenges when transnational legal ordering comes under consideration.
Sovereignty Across Generations. Constituent Power and Political Liberalism (2023) carries forth Ferrara’s rethinking of political liberalism in the light of exemplary normativity. Rawls’s view of constituent power is reconstructed as bound by the standard of “the most reasonable for us” and as cutting across Kelsen's and Schmitt's paradigms. Rawls's theory of the implicit limits to “amending power” is reformulated on the basis of the notion of “vertical reciprocity”. A newly introduced “political conception of the people” accounts for the self-constitution of “the people”, and – in response to the challenges raised by populism – the distinction is explored of how representing the transgenerational people differs from representing its living segment, the electorate.
