Previously published as a special issue of British Journal of Middle East Studies, this volume focuses on leading figures within Iran between 1997-2007 and their visions and works that are related to Iranian society.

A cross section of opinion is investigated, including the clerical ( Ali Khameneh i, Muhammad Khatami and Mohsen Kadivar), the dissident (Mohsen Makhmalbaf), and the poetic (Qaysar Aminpour) and cinematic. The past decade has been a traumatic one in Iran, and the essays in this volume testify to the vibrancy of the responses from Iranian thinkers. It may be a surprise to some observers that in some senses, Ali Khameneh i may be considered a liberal whereas Muhammad Khatami s own credentials as an advocate of rapprochement with the West needs to be qualified. Responses to Western culture continue to remain centre-stage, and this is also nowhere more apparent than in the complex relationship between the directors of Iranian films (perhaps Iran s most celebrated export these days) and their audiences, both Iranian and Western. Despite some viewing Iran as a pariah state, it remains firmly connected to the West and to modern technology, typified in the practice of blogging that is enjoyed by so many Iranians, which has provided a new space for expression and thinking."

Why do some states and societies thrive while others do not? What awaits us in the future? Is there a universal model that can guide our success? The author, Vadim Makhov believes that there is and that it can be found by means of careful analysis of the past. In this truly big-idea book, he presents his `lucky clover' theory in which, when four critical elements - science, society, innovation and wealth - are present, interacting and developing simultaneously, culminate in success. Having studied hundreds of sources, scrutinized numerous tangled intricacies in world history, and found interesting correlations between various events and phenomena, the author sets out to demonstrate that, through careful analysis of the past, we can find the right path to success.

Tajikistan is a key state in Central Asia, and will become crucial to the regional power balance as it transitions away from Soviet government systems and responds to the rise of Chinese financial power alongside the continuing presence of Russian military might and instability in neighboring Afghanistan. This book demonstrates how the Soviet atheist legacy continues to influence current state structures, the regulation of religion, the formation of national identities, and the understanding of the place of religion in society. Helene Thibault focuses on the differences between secular nationhood in Tajikistan, and an increasingly popular and influential Muslim identity. Featuring extensive and original primary-source material, including 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, Thibault demonstrates the profound and lasting influence of Soviet power structures and attitudes, and how secular and religious identities clash in a context of tightening authoritarianism.

Since its publication twenty years ago, Brian Massumi's pioneering Parables for the Virtual has become an essential text for interdisciplinary scholars across the humanities. Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the internet as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation. Renewing and assessing William James's radical empiricism and Henri Bergson's philosophy of perception through the filter of the postwar French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, Massumi tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan's acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multifaceted argument. This twentieth anniversary edition includes a new preface in which Massumi situates the book in relation to developments since its publication and outlines the evolution of its main concepts. It also includes two short texts, "Keywords for Affect" and "Missed Conceptions about Affect," in which Massumi explicates his approach to affect in ways that emphasize the book's political and philosophical stakes.

Mendacity in Early Modern Literature and Culture examines the historical, cultural, and epistemological underpinnings of lying and deception in early modern England, including the political, religious, aesthetic, and philosophical discourses that governed the codes of lying and truth-telling from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. The contributions to this collection draw on a wide range of early modern English literature from Shakespeare to Swift, and from travel writing to poetry, in order to explore the extent to which plays, poems, and narrative texts in this period were sites of negotiation, and, at times, of ideological warfare between the moral imperative of truth-telling and the expediency of telling lies. What were the cultural norms of truthfulness and lying, and on what basis were they constructed? What were the consequences when someone did not share the assumed common project of truth-telling? And which forms of communication were exempt from the pragmatic strictures on mendacious discourse? This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

Kantian transcendental idealism is the thesis that fundamental aspects of experience are contributed by the perceiving subject rather than by the things experienced, and are not features of things as they exist independently of sensible perceivers. This is undoubtedly the most striking and at the same time the most puzzling of Kant's Critical views. It is striking because nothing could be less commonsensical than the beliefthat things as we perceive them have nothing in common with things as they are independently ofbeing per ceived. From a more technical point of viewthe doctrine is puzzling because Kant apparently does not support it very well. Beginning with Kant's con temporaries, critics have pointed out that among all the arguments for the theory in the CritiqueofPureReason, none entails the conclusion that things in themselves cannot be like objects of sense experience in any way. So, for example, although transcendental idealism is compatible with Kant's theory of synthetic a priori knowledge, there is nothing in the analysis of the syn thetic a priori ruling out the possibility that features contributed to experi ence by the perceiving subject correspond to characteristics of things in them selves, although we might never know this to be so. And even though Kant sees transcendental idealism as a solution to the Antinomies, this is at best indirect support for the view;there are undoubtedly other ways to get around these traditional metaphysical puzzles."

This fifth volume in John Pocock's acclaimed sequence on Barbarism and Religion turns to the controversy caused by Edward Gibbon's treatment of the early Christian church. Examining this controversy in unprecedented depth, Pocock challenges the assumption that Gibbon wrote with the intention of destroying belief in the Christian revelation, and questions our understanding of the character of 'enlightenment'. Reconsidering the genesis, inception and reception of these crucial chapters of Decline and Fall, Pocock explores the response of Gibbon's critics, affirming that his reputation as an unbeliever was established before his history of the Church had been written. The magnitude of Barbarism and Religion is already apparent. Religion: The First Triumph will be read not just as a remarkable analysis of the making of Decline and Fall, but also as a comment on the collision of belief and disbelief, a subject as pertinent now as it was to Gibbon's eighteenth-century readers.

What is the role of language in human cognition? Could we attain self-consciousness and construct our civilisation without language? Such were the questions at the basis of eighteenth-century debates on the joint evolution of language, mind, and culture. Language and Enlightenment highlights the importance of language in the social theory, epistemology, and aesthetics of the Enlightenment. While focusing on the Berlin Academy under Frederick the Great, Avi Lifschitz situates the Berlin debates within a larger temporal and geographical framework. He argues that awareness of the historicity and linguistic rootedness of all forms of life was a mainstream Enlightenment notion rather than a feature of the so-called 'Counter-Enlightenment'.
Enlightenment authors of different persuasions investigated whether speechless human beings could have developed their language and society on their own. Such inquiries usually pondered the difficult shift from natural signs like cries and gestures to the artificial, articulate words of human language. This transition from nature to artifice was mirrored in other domains of inquiry, such as the origins of social relations, inequality, the arts and the sciences. By examining a wide variety of authors - Leibniz, Wolff, Condillac, Rousseau, Michaelis, and Herder, among others - Language andEnlightenment emphasises the open and malleable character of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. The language debates demonstrate that German theories of culture and language were not merely a rejection of French ideas. New notions of the genius of language and its role in cognition were constructed through a complex interaction with cross-European currents, especially via the prize contests at the Berlin Academy.

Featuring over eighty essays, Cultural Theory: The Key Thinkers is a seminal guide to the literary critics, sociologists, historians, artists, philosophers and writers who have shaped culture and society, and the way in which we view them. Ranging from Arnold to Le Corbusier, from Eco to Marx, the entries offer a lucid analysis of the work of influential figures in the study of cultural theory, making this the perfect introduction for the student and general reader alike.

The Essential Davidson compiles the most celebrated papers of one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers. It distills Donald Davidson's seminal contributions to our understanding of ourselves, from three decades of essays, into one thematically organized collection. A new, specially written introduction by Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig, two of the world's leading authorities on his work, offers a guide through the ideas and arguments, shows how they interconnect, and reveals the systematic coherence of Davidson's worldview.
Davidson's philosophical program is organized around two connected projects. The first is that of understanding the nature of human agency. The second is that of understanding the nature and function of language, and its relation to the world. Accordingly, the first part of the book presents Davidson's investigation of reasons, causes, and intentions, which revolutionized the philosophy of action. This leads to his notable doctrine of anomalous monism, the view that all mental events are physical events, but that the mental cannot be reduced to the physical. The second part of the book presents the famous essays in which Davidson set out his highly original and influential philosophy of language, which founds the theory of meaning on the theory of truth.
These fifteen classic essays will be invaluable for anyone interested in the study of mind and language. Fascinating though they are individually, it is only when drawn together that there emerges a compelling picture of man as a rational linguistic animal whose thoughts, though not reducible to the material, are part of the fabric of the world, and whose knowledge of his own mind, the minds ofothers, and the world around him is as fundamental to his nature as the power of thought and speech itself.

The Battle of Maldon is an Old English poem depicting a bloody skirmish along the banks of the tidal river Blackwater in 991 and poignantly conjures the lore and language of a nation with its collective back to the wall when faced by the depredations of a ruthless and relentless enemy. But, as Mark Atherton reveals, this poem is more than a heroic tale designed to inspire courage and valour: rather, it was a pioneering event which determined wider culture and polity in England. Using his own vivid translations from Old English, The Battle of Maldon: War and Peace in Tenth Century England evokes the chaotic ebb and flow of the battle while also placing Maldon in the context of its age. Seeking to reconstruct the culture and worldview of the original audience, Atherton examines how and why the poem encouraged readers to relive and experience the battle - from its brutal hand-to-hand fighting to the slaying of Byrthnoth - for themselves in order to impact the destiny of England. With this study, Mark Atherton provides the authoritative treatment of this iconic text, its history and its legacy. As such, this book will be a vital resource for all scholars of Old English literature, the Anglo-Saxons and early medieval history more generally.

This encylopedic study illuminates the hidden web of connections between the Victorian fascinations with the fairies and the dominant obsessions of the larger culture. Drawing on anthropological, folkloric, historical and medical sources, Silver anatomizes a world of strange beings -real and imaginary - who infiltrate the literary and visual masterpieces of the era.

English Philosophy in the Age of Locke presents a set of new essays investigating key issues in English philosophical, political, and religious thought in the second half of the seventeenth century. Particular emphasis is given to the interaction between philosophy and religion in the leading political thinkers of the period, and to connections between philosophical debate on personhood, certainty, and the foundations of faith, and new conceptions of biblical exegesis.

We are multiple, fragmented, and changing selves who, nevertheless, believe we have unique and consistent identities. What accounts for this illusion? Why has the problem of identity become so central in post-war scholarship, fiction, and the media? Following Hegel, Richard Ned Lebow contends that the defining psychological feature of modernity is the tension between our reflexive and social selves. To address this problem Westerners have developed four generic strategies of identity construction that are associated with four distinct political orientations. Lebow develops his arguments through comparative analysis of ancient and modern literary, philosophical, religious, and musical texts. He asks how we might come to terms with the fragmented and illusionary nature of our identities and explores some political and ethical implications of doing so.

Challenging widespread misunderstandings, this book shows that central to key enlightenment texts was the practice of estranging taken-for-granted prejudices by adopting the perspective of Others. The enlightenment's key progenitors, led by Montesquieu, Voltaire and Diderot, were more empiricist than rationalist, and more critical than utopian. Moreover, each was an artful exponent of the 'proto-postmodernist' practice of asking Europeans to review what they considered unquestionable through the eyes of Others: Persians, women, Tahitians, Londoners, natives and naives, the blind, and even imaginary extra-terrestrials. This book aims to show that this self-estrangement, as a means to gain critical distance from one's taken-for-granted assumptions, was central to the enlightenment, and remains vital for critical and constructive sociopolitical thinking today.

An Encyclopedia of Communication Ethics: Goods in Contention complements existing communication ethics scholarship with an examination of 103 scholars who explicitly and implicitly contributed to our understanding of this crucial subject matter. The purpose of this collection is to give an overview of key figures whose work assists our understanding of the development and influence of communication ethics. We selected voices on communication ethics after considering an individual author's contribution to the following coordinates: (1) dialectical and dialogical engagement with other scholars and perspectives; (2) the performative praxis of ethics in the interplay of theory and the public domain; and (3) examination of the connection between history and questions with a constitutive ethical theory offering a connecting response. Dialogical and dialectical engagement, performative praxis of ethics, and the intimate relationship between historical moments and ethical reflection provide a background for understanding author selection for this volume.

This edited collection brings together literary scholars and art historians, and maps how satire became a less genre-driven and increasingly visual medium in the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. Changing satire demonstrates how satire proliferated in various formats, and discusses a wide range of material from canonical authors like Swift to little known manuscript sources and prints. As the book emphasises, satire was a frame of reference for well-known authors and artists ranging from Milton to Bernini and Goya. It was moreover a broad European phenomenon: while the book focuses on English satire, it also considers France, Italy, The Netherlands and Spain, and discusses how satirical texts and artwork could move between countries and languages. In its wide sweep across time and formats, Changing satire brings out the importance that satire had as a transgressor of borders. -- .

George Herbert (1593-1633), the celebrated devotional poet, and his brother Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648), often described as the father of English deism, are rarely considered together. This collection explores connections between the full range of the brothers' writings and activities, despite the apparent differences both in what they wrote and in how they lived their lives. More specifically, the volume demonstrates that despite these differences, each conceived of their extended republic of letters as militating against a violent and exclusive catholicity; theirs was a communion in which contention (or disputation) served to develop more dynamic forms of comprehensiveness. The literary, philosophical and musical production of the Herbert brothers appears here in its full European context, connected as they were with the Sidney clan and its investment in international Protestantism. The disciplinary boundaries between poetry, philosophy, politics and theology in modern universities are a stark contrast to the deep interconnectedness of these pursuits in the seventeenth century. Crossing disciplinary and territorial borders, contributors discuss a variety of texts and media, including poetry, musical practices, autobiography, letters, council literature, orations, philosophy, history and nascent religious anthropology, all serving as agents of the circulation and construction of transregionally inspired and collective responses to human conflict and violence. We see as never before the profound connections, face-to-face as well as textual, linking early modern British literary culture with the continent. -- .

Writing War in Contemporary Iran offers a complete account of Esma'il Fasih's life, works, and position in contemporary Iranian literature. This book uses a text-based analysis of Fasih's wartime novel Zemestan-e 62 (The Winter of '83, 1985) as a case study, and illustrates how the book set a precedent for anti-war novels that appeared in the period following the Iran-Iraq War. Unlike the many one-dimensional novels of the time which focused only on state ideology, Fasih's novel grapples with broader issues, such as the state's war rhetoric and the socio-political realities of life in wartime, including the impact of the War of the Cities on the daily lives of Iranians, government policies and their enactment, and the contribution of the upper class to war efforts. In this vein, The Winter of '83 was the first Persian anti-war novel that was different in that it did not present a glorified or heroic vision of the war and its participants. Furthermore, the book deals with the analysis of Fasih's postwar novels, which emphasized the roles and sacrifices of Iranian women during the war-a neglected theme in Persian war novels-marking him as one of the most culturally important war writers in contemporary Iran.

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"Brown argues convincingly that alien abduction stories speak to several key issues in our culture, from environmentalism to changing ideas about reproduction. Extending far beyond textual readings, she instead tells the stories of individual people, treating them with respect, but with a critical lens as well. Her analysis of the role of 'experts' in alien abduction-their power and the misuses of that power-is utterly compelling."
--Melani McAlister, George Washington University

aBrownas brilliant study is so much more than a book about alien abduction--it is a flesh-and-blood inquiry into the nature of belief in a technologically advanced society.a
--Andrew Ross, author of "Fast Boat to China"

Since its emergence in the 1960s, belief in alien abduction has saturated popular culture, with the ubiquitous image of the almond-eyed alien appearing on everything from bumper stickers to bars of soap. Drawing on interviews with alleged abductees from the New York area, Bridget Brown suggests a new way for people to think about the alien phenomenon, one that is concerned not with establishing whether aliens actually exist, but with understanding what belief in aliens in America may tell us about our changing understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.

They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves looks at how the belief in abduction by extraterrestrials is constituted by and through popular discourse and the images provided by print, film, and television. Brown contends that the abduction phenomenon is symptomatic of a period during which people have come to feel increasingly divested of the ability to know whatis real or true about themselves and the world in which they live. The alien abduction phenomenon helps us think about how people who feel left out create their own stories and fashion truths that square with their own experience of the world.

George F. Kennan's strategic thought was instrumental in the formulation of the American grand strategy of containment of the Soviet Union. As Dr. Russell points out, Kennan's strategic thought was forged in the diplomatic practice and scholarship of the time. Russell looks beyond containment, however, to sift through Kennan's work to illuminate the worldview that informed his analysis of international relations and American foreign policy.

Kennan's realist worldview contained principles for governing American diplomacy and the use of force to achieve national interests within the bounds set by the international competition for power between nation-states. Kennan's worldview illuminates the continuities of international politics that are often overlooked because of the massive changes in the post-Cold War world. Ironically, Kennan's worldview continues to provide a theoretical footing for guiding American foreign policy after containment. This is an important study for scholars, policymakers, and concerned citizens interested in international relations, American foreign policy, diplomatic history, and strategic studies.

Quentin Skinner's classic study The Foundations of Modern Political Thought was first published by Cambridge in 1978. This was the first of a series of outstanding publications that have changed forever the way the history of political thought is taught and practised. Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought looks afresh at the impact of the original work, asks why it still matters, and considers a number of significant agendas that it still inspires. A very distinguished international team of contributors has been assembled, including John Pocock, RichardTuck and David Armitage, and the result is an unusually powerful and cohesive contribution to the history of ideas, of interest to large numbers of students of early modern history and political thought. In conclusion, Skinner replies to each chapter and presents his own thoughts on the latest trends and the future direction of the history of political thought.

Quentin Skinner is one of the foremost historians in the world, and in Hobbes and Republican Liberty he offers a dazzling comparison of two rival theories about the nature of human liberty. The first originated in classical antiquity, and lay at the heart of the Roman republican tradition of public life. Thomas Hobbes was the most formidable enemy of this pattern of thought, and his successive attempts to discredit it constitute a truly epochal moment in the history of Anglophone political thought. Hobbes and Republican Liberty develops several of the themes announced by Quentin Skinner in his celebrated inaugural lecture on Liberty before Liberalism of 1997. Cogent, engaged, accessible, and indeed exhilarating, this new book will appeal to readers of history, politics, and philosophy at all levels from upper-undergraduate upwards, and provides an excellent introduction to the work of one of the most celebrated thinkers of our time.

This book deconstructs the whole lineage of political philosophy, showing the ways democracy abuts and regularly undermines the sovereignist tradition across a range of texts from the Iliad to contemporary philosophy. Politics is an object of perennial difficulty for philosophy-as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery as is philosophy's traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty makes it an attractive topic for any deconstructive approach to the tradition from which we inherit our language and our concepts. Scatter 2 pursues that deconstruction, often starting with, and sometimes departing from, the work of Jacques Derrida by attending to the concepts of sovereignty on the one hand and democracy on the other. The book begins by following the fate of a line from Homer's Iliad, where Odysseus asserts that "the rule of many is no good thing, let there be one ruler, one king." The line, Bennington shows, is quoted, misquoted, and progressively Christianized by Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de la Boetie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials, before being discussed by Derrida himself. In the book's second half, Bennington begins again with Plato and Aristotle and tracks the concept of democracy as it regularly abuts and undermines that sovereignist tradition. In detailed readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, Bennington develops a notion of "proto-democracy" as a possible name for the scatter that underlies and drives the political as such and that will always prevent politics from achieving its aim of bringing itself to an end.