Ernst Bloch is perhaps best known for his subtle and imaginative investigation of utopias and utopianism, but his work also provides a comprehensive and insightful analysis of western culture, politics and society. Yet, because he has not been one of easiest of writers to read his full contribution has not been widely acknowledged. Block developed a complex conceptual framework, and presented this in a prose style which many have found to verge on the impenetrable.
In this critical and accessible introduction to one of the most fascinating thinkers of the twentieth century, Vincent Geoghegan unravels much of the mystery of the man and his ideas.

This volume is devoted to a critical discussion and re-appraisal of the work of Anglo-American Idealists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Idealism was the dominant philosophy in Britain and the entire English-speaking world during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The British Idealists made important contributions to logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of history, philosophy of religion and philosophy of mind. Their legacy awaits further exploration and reassessment, and this book is a contribution to this task. The essays in this collection display many aspects of contemporary concern with idealistic philosophy: they range from treatments of logic to consideration of the Absolute, personal idealism, the philosophy of religion, philosophy of art, philosophy of action, and moral and political philosophy. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the work of the Anglo-American Idealists has once again been widely discussed and re-considered, and new pathways of research and investigation have been opened.

"Babel is everywhere! Migrant readings from Africa, Europe and Asia" sets out to explore the intersection between religion, identity and migration. It does so by telling entangled histories between diaspora/s and homeland and by analysing biblical in-roads to issues and challenges of migration. It also explores hyphenated identities and takes a close look at the role of migrant religion specifically regarding issues of mission, of identity formation and of ecclesial and societal formation. This book challenges static notions of diaspora, stable identities and Western-centred notions of Christianity and offers kaleidoscopic insights from Pentecostal, migrant and intercultural perspectives.

When a totalitarian group seizes power, one of the first institutions it creates is a secret political police. Since the birth of modern totalitarianism, in country after country, secret political police have been the predominant instruments of power, used to consolidate power, neutralize the opposition, and erect a one-party state. Yet, when these same totalitarian regimes have liberalized or collapsed, the secret political police have often managed to survive and even remain relevant. Dismantling Tyranny: Transitioning Beyond Totalitarian Regimes provides a groundbreaking exploration of this survival tendency in seven formerly communist regimes in the former Soviet Union and Latin America - and the lessons these transformations hold for future democratic revolutions. But Dismantling Tyranny is also much more: it is a guidebook designed to empower, inform, and guide future transitions toward democracy for those political leaders with the initiative, and courage, to embark upon such a visionary path. Published in cooperation with the American Foreign Policy Council.

The authors argue that the potential threat of a resurgence of "fascism" has been consistently exaggerated from 1945 until present day; that the ongoing lack of conceptual and definitional clarity with respect to terms like "fascism," the "radical right," the "alt right," "white supremacism," "populism," "racism," etc., has enabled ill-informed or dishonest commentators to distort their meaning and abusively misapply those labels so as to delegitimize their political opponents-that the political and economic elites in charge of contemporary Western societies are now deliberately exaggerating and exploiting the threat posed by the domestic radical right in order to facilitate vilifying, harassing, de-platforming, censoring, "canceling," and repressing disgruntled citizens (no matter where they may lie along the political spectrum) who openly criticize and vigorously oppose their agendas. They also advocate the use of well-established scholarly methods for carrying out research on the right and provide precise definitions of various terms in order to facilitate the development of more accurate categorizations.

It is commonly observed that behind many of the political and cultural issues that we face today there are impoverished conceptions of freedom, which, according to D. C. Schindler, we have inherited from the classical liberal tradition without a sufficient awareness of its implications. Freedom from Reality presents a critique of the deceptive and ultimately self-subverting character of the modern notion of freedom, retrieving an alternative view through a new interpretation of the ancient tradition. While many have critiqued the inadequacy of identifying freedom with arbitrary choice, this book seeks to penetrate to the metaphysical roots of the modern conception by going back, through an etymological study, to the original sense of freedom. Schindler begins by uncovering a contradiction in John Locke's seminal account of human freedom. Rather than dismissing it as a mere "academic" problem, Schindler takes this contradiction as a key to understanding the strange paradoxes that abound in the contemporary values and institutions founded on the modern notion of liberty: the very mechanisms that intend to protect modern freedom render it empty and ineffectual. In this respect, modern liberty is "diabolical"-a word that means, at its roots, that which "drives apart" and so subverts. This is contrasted with the "symbolical" (a "joining-together"), which, he suggests, most basically characterizes the premodern sense of reality. This book will appeal to students and scholars of political philosophy (especially political theorists), philosophers in the continental or historical traditions, and cultural critics with a philosophical bent.

The third edition of Democratic Latin America retains its classic institutional approach to understand contemporary Latin American politics. Each chapter focuses on a different institution and compares how they are constructed differently across countries. Placing a premium on accessibility, the chapters open with a story and end with a detailed country case study, making use of contemporary examples to feed student interest in current events, with comparison-based tables and box features interspersed throughout to stimulate analysis. Every chapter finishes with a set of questions and recommended readings. This approach allows for a very practical approach to politics that encourages critical analysis. Updates to this new edition include: updated comparison-based tables and box features to stimulate analysis; new "Country in the Spotlight" to include developments unique to each country; and discussions on political change in Cuba, indigenous peoples and political power, neopopulism, impeachment procedures, transitional justice, the 2019 protests, the new militarism, the mobilization of women against violence, LGBT rights, the evangelical movement, and the Colombian peace process. A clear-eyed look at political institutions to provide a roadmap to the political activity in a country, Democratic Latin America continues to offer an original way of teaching and learning about Latin American politics.

The third edition of Democratic Latin America retains its classic institutional approach to understand contemporary Latin American politics. Each chapter focuses on a different institution and compares how they are constructed differently across countries. Placing a premium on accessibility, the chapters open with a story and end with a detailed country case study, making use of contemporary examples to feed student interest in current events, with comparison-based tables and box features interspersed throughout to stimulate analysis. Every chapter finishes with a set of questions and recommended readings. This approach allows for a very practical approach to politics that encourages critical analysis. Updates to this new edition include: updated comparison-based tables and box features to stimulate analysis; new "Country in the Spotlight" to include developments unique to each country; and discussions on political change in Cuba, indigenous peoples and political power, neopopulism, impeachment procedures, transitional justice, the 2019 protests, the new militarism, the mobilization of women against violence, LGBT rights, the evangelical movement, and the Colombian peace process. A clear-eyed look at political institutions to provide a roadmap to the political activity in a country, Democratic Latin America continues to offer an original way of teaching and learning about Latin American politics.

In the current neo-liberal political and economic climate, it is often suggested that a large and strong state stands in opposition to an autonomous and vibrant civil society. However, the simultaneous presence in Sweden of both a famously large public sector and an unusually vital civil society poses an interesting and important theoretical challenge to these views with serious political and policy implications. Studies show that in a comparative context Sweden scores very highly when it comes to the strength and vitality of its civil society as well as social capital, as measured in terms of trust, lack of corruption, and membership of voluntary associations. The "Swedish Model," therefore, offers important insights into the dynamics of state and civil society relations, which go against current trends of undermining the importance of the welfare state, and presents autonomous civic participation as the only way forward.

How ordinary Americans, frustrated by the legal and political wrangling over the Second Amendment, can fight for reforms that will both respect gun owners’ rights and reduce gun violence. Efforts to reduce gun violence in the United States face formidable political and constitutional barriers. Legislation that would ban or broadly restrict firearms runs afoul of the Supreme Court’s current interpretation of the Second Amendment. And gun rights advocates have joined a politically savvy firearms industry in a powerful coalition that stymies reform. Ian Ayres and Fredrick Vars suggest a new way forward. We can decrease the number of gun deaths, they argue, by empowering individual citizens to choose common-sense gun reforms for themselves. Rather than ask politicians to impose one-size-fits-all rules, we can harness a libertarian approach—one that respects and expands individual freedom and personal choice—to combat the scourge of gun violence. Ayres and Vars identify ten policies that can be immediately adopted at the state level to reduce the number of gun-related deaths without affecting the rights of gun owners. For example, Donna’s Law, a voluntary program whereby individuals can choose to restrict their ability to purchase or possess firearms, can significantly decrease suicide rates. Amending red flag statutes, which allow judges to restrict access to guns when an individual has shown evidence of dangerousness, can give police flexible and effective tools to keep people safe. Encouraging the use of unlawful possession petitions can help communities remove guns from more than a million Americans who are legally disqualified from owning them. By embracing these and other new forms of decentralized gun control, the United States can move past partisan gridlock and save lives now.

Allan D. Cooper demonstrates how the resistance to slavery served to unveil the nature of freedom that made possible the abolition movement and anti-colonial struggles. The corpus of human rights law that has evolved over the past two centuries is constructed around the negation of slavery. This book analyzes how slavery mutated into racial identification that governments enforce against their own population to advance more efficient methods of discipline and control. The Shadow that Lingers reveals how race is used to traumatize human beings by embodying inferiority and powerlessness, even for whites that claim privilege under racialized regimes. As an ideology of power, race becomes contextualized to fit local cultures, resulting in contradictory understandings of race from one culture to another. This book focuses attention on how racial hybridity among mixed-race communities poses challenges for racial purists, and how such communities endeavor to construct racial identities that often differentiate themselves from being black. The book concludes with an analysis of how the pursuit of freedom inevitably requires the reification of a non-racial identity.

Reissuing the epic undertaking of Dr S. Maccoby, these volumes cover the story of English Radicalism from its origins right through to its questionable end. By combining new sources with the old and often long forgotten, the volumes provide an impressive history of radicalism and shed light on the course of English political development. The six volumes are arranged chronologically from 1762 through to the perceived end of British Radicalism in the mid-twentieth century.

This book examines the political use of China's traditions by the party-state in contemporary China. It argues that the party-state has taken an official Marxist stance in terms of the political use of tradition. Besides looking at the official Marxist stance, this book also looks at critiques of the party-state's use of traditions by the Liberalists and Neo-traditionalists. The underlying political ideologies of these three camps are Marxism, Liberalism and Neo-traditionalism. These three political ideologies have been the most influential in Chinese politics since the Republican Revolution in 1911. The contemporary political use of China's traditions is a competition between Marxism, Liberalism and Neo-traditionalism. This competition is critical to the future of Chinese politics.This book also examines three cases, representing identical ways of the political use of traditions. The three cases are the children's reading-of-the-classics movement, the construction of a Chinese Cultural Symbolic City, the construction and subsequent removal of a statue of Confucius in and from Tiananmen Square, and the revision of the official list of public holidays. The study of the three cases attempts to shed light on the three ways Chinese traditions have been used politically by the party-state. It also attempts to explore the reasons for the party's use of Chinese traditions, the reasons for the party's scepticism with regard to using Chinese traditions, and more importantly, the competition and/or cooperation between Marxists, Liberalists and Neo-traditionalists.

Democracy and Brazil: Collapse and Regression discusses the de-democratization process underway in contemporary Brazil. The relative political stability that characterized domestic politics in the 2000s ended with the sudden emergence of a series of massive protests in 2013, followed by the controversial impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. In this new, more conservative period in Brazilian politics, a series of institutional reforms deepened the distance between citizens and representatives. Brazil's current political crisis cannot be understood without reference to the continual growth of right-wing and ultra-right discourse, on the one hand, and to the neoliberal ideology that pervades the minds of large parts of the Brazilian elite, on the other. Twenty experts on Brazil across different fields discuss the ongoing political turmoil in the light of distinct problems: geopolitics, gender, religion, media, indigenous populations, right-wing strategies, and new forms of coup, among others. Updated analyses enriched with historical perspective help to illuminate the intricate issues that will determine the country's fate in years to come. Democracy and Brazil: Collapse and Regression will interest students and scholars of Brazilian Politics and History, Latin America, and the broader field of democracy studies.

Historically, Black Americans have easily found common ground on political, social, and economic goals. Yet, there are signs of increasing variety of opinion among Blacks in the United States, due in large part to the influx of Afro-Latino, Afro-Caribbean, and African immigrants to the United States. In fact, the very definition of "African American" as well as who can self-identity as Black is becoming more ambiguous. Should we expect African Americans' shared sense of group identity and high sense of group consciousness to endure as ethnic diversity among the population increases? In Black Mosaic, Candis Watts Smith addresses the effects of this dynamic demographic change on Black identity and Black politics.

Smith explores the numerous ways in which the expanding and rapidly changing demographics of Black communities in the United States call into question the very foundations of political identity that has united African Americans for generations. African Americans' political attitudes and behaviors have evolved due to their historical experiences with American Politics and American racism. Will Black newcomers recognize the inconsistencies between the American creed and American reality in the same way as those who have been in the U.S. for several generations? If so, how might this recognition influence Black immigrants' political attitudes and behaviors? Will race be a site of coalition between Black immigrants and African Americans? In addition to face-to-face interviews with African Americans and Black immigrants, Smith employs nationally representative survey data to examine these shifts in the attitudes of Black Americans. Filling a significant gap in the political science literature to date, Black Mosaic is a groundbreaking study about the state of race, identity, and politics in an ever-changing America.

The Hizmet (Service) Movement of Fethullah Gulen is Turkey's most influential Islamic identity community. Widely praised throughout the early 2000s as a mild and moderate variation on Islamic political identity, the Gulen Movement has long been a topic of both adulation and conspiracy in Turkey, and has become more controversial as it spreads across the world. In Gulen, Joshua D. Hendrick suggests that when analyzed in accordance with its political and economic impact, the Gulen Movement, despite both praise and criticism, should be given credit for playing a significant role in Turkey's rise to global prominence. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey and the U.S., Hendrick examines the Gulen Movement's role in Turkey's recent rise, as well as its strategic relationship with Turkey's Justice and Development Party-led government. He argues that the movement's growth and impact both inside and outside Turkey position both its leader and its followers as indicative of a post political turn in twenty-first century Islamic political identity in general, and as illustrative of Turkey's political, economic, and cultural transformation in particular. Joshua D. Hendrick is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore.

The chapters in this book deal with different, though related, topics concerning the tense relationship between democracy and diversity. On the one hand, social diversity represents an opportunity, widening the horizon of social options and perspectives of innovation, but, on the other hand, it creates problems for the social cohesion and peaceful coexistence of many groups, be they majority or minority. The chapters depart from the intrinsic connection between democracy and diversity - and the unavoidable challenges that pluralism poses to decision-making procedures - investigating, from different perspectives, how the normative requirement of fully respecting agents' reflexive agency impacts the revision of democratic decision-making procedures and the way in which institutions react to citizens' justice-based claims. All the contributions share the theoretical insight that diversity is one of the raisons d'etre of democracy, and, still, all acknowledge that the fact of pluralism poses challenges to the legitimacy of democratic procedures of decision-making. Indeed, if citizens had the same values and preferences, collective decisions would be easily achieved and the institution of democratic procedures would be redundant. Yet the wide pluralism of doctrines, habits, social standards, and conceptions of the goods typical of contemporary societies has often led citizens to challenge the legitimacy of democratic decisions because these choices do not fit their preferences or values. To address these challenges following recent accounts of democratic decision-making, in this volume, different strategies are introduced, defended, and criticized in order to outline a perspective that is able to guide actual decision-making processes (guidance), define standards that everyone has equal opportunity to fulfil (inclusion), and grant that citizens exercise their reflexive control on the whole democratic system (reflexivity). The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

Dragon in Ambush by Jeremy Ingalls is a critique and new translation of the first twenty poems of Mao Zedong's published poetry. This seminal work stands out from previous translations of Mao's poems in seeing them as an expression of his core political beliefs, rather than for their poetic effect. Instead, Dr. Ingalls shows in consummate detail that Mao was careful and deliberate in employing imagery in his poetry to lay out procedures for political supremacy in which the central drive was his will to psychological domination. That is, domination of the minds of others is the unifying theme of Mao's verse-sequence. The crux of Prof. Ingalls' work lies in her focus on the symbolism in the poems. The poems are, in Mao's use of them as a means of communication, meaningless on their surface. No image, however seemingly commonplace, is ever employed for merely lyrical or aesthetic description. Every image functions as a factor in an entirely political calculus. According to Dr. Ingalls, "When Mao mentions streams or mountains, suns or moons, clouds or winds or icicles, horses, elephants, snakes, tigers, leopards or bears, specifies kinds of trees or birds or fish, flies, brooms, mats or bridges, these and all his other images have, as their primary function, neither happenstance descriptions nor whimsical metaphor. They all have politically symbolic functions in Mao's algebra of versified political discourse." Furthermore, in her analysis, Prof. Ingalls downplays the significance of Marxism-Leninism in the Thought of Mao Zedong. She shows that throughout his career, Mao regarded Marxism-Leninism as a political convenience, not as a doctrine permanently essential to his master-plan. Just as Mao used the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek and Stalin's Soviet Union as means to further his own political ambitions, so did he manipulate Marxist-Leninist ideology to hoodwink and attract, at home and abroad, professional revolutionaries to help do his bidding. Mao's aims express, in their worldviews, an entirely Chinese tradition. In his poems Mao's dialectics, his materialism, and his authoritarianism all take their points of reference from within the Chinese cultural order. Dragon in Ambush is a thoroughly unique and revolutionary approach to understanding the Mind of Mao Zedong.

" The three Kentucky presidents -- Abraham Lincoln, Zachary Taylor, and Jefferson Davis -- were profoundly shaped by their experiences in Kentucky, poised as it was on the border between the North and the South, the East and the Western Frontier. Holman Hamilton asserts that these leaders were personally and politically influenced by their connections to the state. The contrasting traits of western frontiersman and southern aristocrat illuminate Kentucky's heritage and affected Taylor, Lincoln, and Davis, presidents during one of America's most troubled eras. Frontier values influenced Lincoln's and Taylor's views on the major issues of their time: extension of slavery, which they opposed, and preservation of the Union, which they supported. Davis's career reflects Southern values, leading him to favor slavery's extension and the Confederacy.

This book provides an historical overview of the Japanese Communist Party from its foundation to the present. It outlines the development of the party, explores its stance on key issues and discusses how the party has set a high moral tone, avoiding compromising coalitions with other parties, being intolerant of corruption within its own ranks, and frequently and consistently opposing the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. The book also considers the internal nature of the party, which continues to have a mass membership, and which in recent years has softened its former somewhat rigid approach. The book emphasizes the importance for Japan of this moral approach as the conscience of the nation, especially as the present Abe government moves Japan to the right, even though the Japanese Communist Party has never gained power and is never likely to.

Why do some individuals from the imagined "non-West" view the "West" favorably and others do not? Grounded in psychological authoritarianism and the psychological reactions to experiences of rejection, Bjoern Goldstein provides a theoretical model to explain and predict attitude toward the "West." Using accounts from high-ranking politicians from different socioeconomic groups in the Tamil Nadu region of India-a region independent from the often too "emotionalized" discourse regarding (political) Islam-Goldstein challenges the conventional narrative that the most important factors for attitude formation toward the West are experiences of disregard and oppression perpetrated by the West. Far beyond the personal characteristics of individuals, differences in attitudes follow a regular pattern of variables influencing opinion and attitude formation toward the West in each society. Scoring high on authoritarianism predicts "anti-Western" attitudes far better than socio-economic status, cultural or moral concerns, or normative differences do.

This book discusses right-wing extremism by analysing Germanophone research on this topic for the first time in English, including unique survey data from Germany and Austria. Highlighting how questions of terminology can become complicated when country cases are compared, the authors analyse theoretical and methodological issues in relation to the question of right-wing extremism. In Anglo-American academia, the term is often associated with fairly rare phenomena in the form of extremist political groups, whereas in Germany the term is often applied to a wide range of attitudes, behaviours and parties, including those which operate more within the mainstream political sphere. Covering an array of sub-fields such as right-wing terrorism, iconography of the extreme right and the Germanophone discussion on the differentiation of right-wing populism and right-wing extremism, the authors account not only for the centrality of right-wing extremist attitudes in Germanophone research, but also point at its often overlooked relevance for the phenomenon in general. Offering an important insight into the nuanced definition of right-wing extremism across Europe and enhancing both international debate and cross-country comparative research, this book will be of interest to students and scholars researching extremism, German politics and European politics more generally.

During the European elections of 2014, one of the main issues raised by the media was the electoral performance of so called 'populist parties'. The electorate confirmed its deep dissatisfaction with mainstream political parties, voting for far right parties in parliamentary elections in Northern Europe (Austria, Denmark, Sweden), Eastern Europe (Hungary, where the deeply anti-Semitic Jobbik party gained votes) and in France (where the French National Front won about a quarter of the vote), while in the Southern European countries, battered by austerity policies, it was the radical right and left in Greece (Golden Dawn and Syriza) and the radical left in Spain (Podemos) that obtained excellent scores. This book examines the growing trend towards far and extreme right populism that has emerged prominently in Northern (Finland), Western (Austria, Denmark, France, the UK), Southern (Greece, Italy) and Central/Eastern Europe (Slovenia, Bulgaria) since the 1990s. Providing a critical understanding of current European trends and analysing the complex phenomena covered by the notion of populism, this book will be of interest to students and scholars researching right-wing politics, as well as European politics more generally.