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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political science & theory
One of the most influential works in the history of political
theory, Aristotle's Politics is a treatise in practical philosophy,
intended to inform legislators and to create the conditions for
virtuous and self-sufficient lives for the citizens of a state. In
this Companion, distinguished scholars offer new perspectives on
the work and its themes. After an opening exploration of the
relation between Aristotle's ethics and his politics, the central
chapters follow the sequence of the eight books of the Politics,
taking up questions such as the role of reason in legitimizing
rule, the common good, justice, slavery, private property,
citizenship, democracy and deliberation, unity, conflict, law and
authority, and education. The closing chapters discuss the
interaction between Aristotle's political thought and contemporary
democratic theory. The volume will provide a valuable resource for
those studying ancient philosophy, classics, and the history of
political thought.
This unique work analyzes the crisis in modern society, building on
the ideas of the Frankfurt School thinkers. Emphasizing social
evolution and learning processes, it argues that crisis is mediated
by social class conflicts and collective learning, the results of
which are embodied in constitutional and public law. First, the
work outlines a new categorical framework of critical theory in
which it is conceived as a theory of crisis. It shows that the
Marxist focus on economy and on class struggle is too narrow to
deal with the range of social conflicts within modern society, and
posits that a crisis of legitimization is at the core of all
crises. It then discusses the dialectic of revolutionary and
evolutionary developmental processes of modern society and its
legal system. This volume in the Critical Theory and Contemporary
Society by a leading scholar in the field provides a new approach
to critical theory that will appeal to anyone studying political
sociology, political theory, and law.
This original and ambitious work looks anew at a series of
intellectual debates about the meaning of democracy. Clive Barnett
engages with key thinkers in various traditions of democratic
theory and demonstrates the importance of a geographical
imagination in interpreting contemporary political change. Debates
about radical democracy, Barnett argues, have become trapped around
a set of oppositions between deliberative and agonistic theories -
contrasting thinkers who promote the possibility of rational
agreement and those who seek to unmask the role of power or
violence or difference in shaping human affairs. While these
debates are often framed in terms of consensus versus contestation,
Barnett unpacks the assumptions about space and time that underlie
different understandings of the sources of political conflict and
shows how these differences reflect deeper philosophical
commitments to theories of creative action or revived ontologies of
"the political." Rather than developing ideal theories of democracy
or models of proper politics, he argues that attention should turn
toward the practices of claims-making through which political
movements express experiences of injustice and make demands for
recognition, redress, and re pair. By rethinking the spatial
grammar of discussions of public space, democratic inclusion, and
globalization, Barnett develops a conceptual framework for
analyzing the crucial roles played by geographical processes in
generating and processing contentious politics.
This is the first comprehensive journey of its kind throughout the
modern world of ideas and institutions relating to legislative and
other features of sovereignty and state. Following A. London Fell's
previous book on the Western Hemisphere (Volume Seven, Book I),
Origins of Legislative Sovereignty and the Legislative State:
Volume Seven: World Perspectives and Emergent Systems for the New
Order in the New Age, the present Book II: Eastern Hemisphere deals
in sequence with each continent, from Europe to the Middle East,
from Asia to Africa. Taken together, the two books offer an
exhaustive examination of emergent systems for the new order in the
new age. As in Book I, Fell explores numerous issues that bear on
the present world order. For example, he examines how current
fundamentalist "laws" drive Islamic radicals in their ideological
struggles with Western legal systems of democracy. And he shows how
the broad, diverse spectrum of African nations can be viewed from
the common theme of their legislative statehoods. The main subjects
and sources of both halves of Volume Seven revolve around current
news history, with issues and viewpoints uppermost in the public
mind as expressed in the public press.
The theory of justice is one of the most intensely debated areas of
contemporary philosophy. Most theories of justice, however, have
only attained their high level of justification at great cost. By
focusing on purely normative, abstract principles, they become
detached from the sphere that constitutes their field of
application - namely, social reality. Axel Honneth proposes a
different approach. He seeks to derive the currently definitive
criteria of social justice directly from the normative claims that
have developed within Western liberal democratic societies. These
criteria and these claims together make up what he terms democratic
ethical life : a system of morally legitimate norms that are not
only legally anchored, but also institutionally established.
Honneth justifies this far-reaching endeavour by demonstrating that
all essential spheres of action in Western societies share a single
feature, as they all claim to realize a specific aspect of
individual freedom. In the spirit of Hegel s Philosophy of Right
and guided by the theory of recognition, Honneth shows how
principles of individual freedom are generated which constitute the
standard of justice in various concrete social spheres: personal
relationships, economic activity in the market, and the political
public sphere. Honneth seeks thereby to realize a very ambitious
aim: to renew the theory of justice as an analysis of society.
El presente libro sobre Formas de Gobierno, contiene el conjunto de
temas del universo de la teor a pol tica cl sica, moderna y
contempor nea, adem?'s contiene las herramientas de an lisis, con
los cuales se logra identificar los paradigmas de saber pol tico en
las culturas tanto oriental como occidental pues responden
puntualmente a la concepci n de la autoridad y el poder en todos
los tiempos. Es un texto que nos da la referencia y sobre todo las
causas de las formas de gobierno y desgobierno que se contin an
dando en el universo pol tico en todos los pueblos de la tierra.
The book contains the memoirs of Robert van Voren covering the
period 1977-2008 and provides unique insights into the dissident
movement in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, both inside the country
and abroad. As a result of his close friendship with many of the
leading dissidents and his dozens of trips to the USSR as a
courier, he had intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of the
dissident movement and participated in many of the campaigns to
obtain the release of Soviet political prisoners. In the late 1980s
he became involved in building a humane and ethical practice of
psychiatry in Eastern Europe and the (ex-) USSR, based on respect
for the human rights of persons with mental illness. The book
describes the dissident movement and many of the people who formed
it, mental health reformers in Eastern Europe and the response of
the Western psychiatric community, the battle with the World
Psychiatric Association over Soviet, and later, Chinese political
abuse of psychiatry, his contacts with former KGB officers and
problems with the KGB's successor organization, the FSB. It also
vividly describes the emotional effects of serving as a courier for
the dissident movement, the fear of arrest, the pain of seeing
friends disappear for many years into camps and prisons, sometimes
never to return.
The book deals with key ethico-political issues of modernity, that
of responsibility and of the subject(s) that can assume it. Today,
new realities, from global political issues to economic crises and
lack of confidence in governments, show that there is no authority,
institution, or public organism capable of taking charge.A" In
fact, people find themselves less responsible than ever before.
Available for the first time in English, this text by one of the
leading European intellectuals explores why we need to return to a
full personal responsibility. This entails a revisiting of such
concepts as personal identity, tolerance, and action -all essential
components of responsibility. Featuring a preface by Gianni
Vattimo, the book not only analyzes the problem of responsibility
from various perspectives (including Nietzsche, Weber, Arendt,
Sartre), but also confronts today's realities and challenges. As
Cruz puts it, Until now, men attempted to describe the world; the
moment has arrived for them to take it on.A"
C.B. Macpherson occupies an ambiguous place in contemporary
political thought. Though his work is well known, it remains on the
margins of current democratic theory. That marginalization, Phillip
Hansen argues, comes from our failure to appreciate the underlying
philosophical dimension of Macpherson's work. Identifying and
exploring Macpherson's systematic critique of the liberal claim
that the individual is the "proprietor of his own person or
capacities, owing nothing to society for them," Reconsidering C.B.
Macpherson highlights his affinities to Herbert Marcuse, Max
Horkheimer, and the Frankfurt School. This stimulating reappraisal
illustrates the importance of Macpherson's classic books, including
The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism and Democratic
Theory, and demonstrates how much his work has to offer to the
future of political and social thought.
This book analyzes Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels from a
political philosophy perspective. When authors have focused on
politics in Swift's writings, this has usually meant a study of how
Swift located himself on issues of his day such as church and
state, and Ireland. Robertson claims by contrast that Gulliver's
Travels is fundamentally a book about the "ancients" (e.g. Plato,
Aristotle), and the "moderns" (science and technology), and their
contrasting views about the human condition. The claim that the
Travels is "a kind of prolegomena" to political philosophy leaves
open the possibility that it does not achieve, or seek to achieve,
a fusion of various teachings but rather uses the device of alien
societies to point us to uncomfortable aspects of political
philosophy's "larger questions" we are prone to ignore. Swift,
Robertson argues, draws our attention to some version of the
classical republic, as idealized in Aristotle's political writings
and in Plato's Republic, as opposed to a modern regime which, at
its best or most intellectual, emphasizes modern science and
technology in combination as a way to improve the human condition.
A broad-ranging and pluralistic textbook which highlights the rich
variety of approaches to studying politics. Written by an
international team of experts, this fully revised fourth edition
offers cutting-edge coverage from fundamental to contemporary
issues. Integrating guides to further reading and clear examples of
how research methods can be applied, it enables readers to feel
confident about taking their study of politics forward. An ideal
foundation for study and research in political science, this
textbook will be essential to students at any stage of their
degree. It serves as core reading on undergraduate and postgraduate
political analysis, theory and methods courses. In demonstrating
how independent research is undertaken in political science, the
book allows students and early career researchers to begin thinking
about formulating their own research agendas. This new edition: -
Leads the way with fresh new ideas and perspectives with the help
of new co-editor Vivien Lowndes - Includes new chapters on
post-structuralism as a theoretical approach and on 'big data' as a
methodological resource - Offers an international perspective on
political science, with discussion of global as well as domestic
politics and a range of international cases and examples.
This book examines the geography of partisan polarization, or the
Reds and Blues, of the political landscape in the United States. It
places the current schism between Democrats and Republicans within
a historical context and presents a theoretical framework that
offers unique insights into the American electorate. The authors
focus on the demographic and political causes of polarization at
the local level across space and time. This is accomplished with
the aid of a comprehensive dataset that includes the presidential
election results for every county in the continental United States,
from the advent of Jacksonian democracy in 1828 to the 2016
election. In addition, coverage applies spatial diagnostics,
spatial lag models and spatial error models to determine why
contemporary and historical elections in the United States have
exhibited their familiar, but heretofore unexplained, political
geography. Both popular observers and scholars alike have expressed
concern that citizens are becoming increasingly polarized and, as a
consequence, that democratic governance is beginning to break down.
This book argues that once current levels of polarization are
placed within a historical context, the future does not look quite
so bleak. Overall, readers will discover that partisan division is
a dynamic process in large part due to the complex interplay
between changing demographics and changing politics.
"One of the Best Books of the 21st Century." --The Guardian "No
writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril
and exuberance that's marked this new millennium." --Bill McKibben
"An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten,
and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways."
--The New Yorker A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca
Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written
to counter the despair of radicals at a moment when they were
focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories
behind them--and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she
makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world
whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her
decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural,
and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long,
neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive
consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly
knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest
on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next.
Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came
about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act
in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the
darkness of 2016 in an unforgettable new edition of this classic
book. Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author
of eighteen or so books on feminism, western and indigenous
history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering
and walking, hope and disaster, including the books Men Explain
Things to Me and Hope in the Dark, both also with Haymarket; a
trilogy of atlases of American cities; The Faraway Nearby; A
Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in
Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of
Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the
Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the
National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan
Literary Award). A product of the California public education
system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at
Harper's and a regular contributor to the Guardian.
When are legislators inclined to cast votes in cooperation with
their parties, and when do they go their own way? When and why do
nations contend with each other, and when are they more likely to
cooperate? Thematically arranged around the interplay of contention
and cooperation, A Comparative Introduction to Political Science
encourages students to explore causal factors and consequences
related to political phenomena to become knowledgeable and
resourceful citizens of their nations and the world. Alan Smith
covers how patterns of contention and cooperation-and the resulting
government policies-may be affected by such factors as the
surrounding political framework, the distribution of influence, and
political motivation, including values as well as material
interests. To expose students to the politics of specific nations,
each chapter concludes with two country case studies that
illuminate the theme of the chapter. Students emerge with a sense
of what is going on in the world today. Pedagogically, the book
employs careful sequencing of topics and concepts for clarity and
to introduce politics in a natural, logical, synchronized way. At
times Smith goes beyond sharp, night-and-day terminological
distinctions to add accessible, ordinary language-based terminology
that better captures the real-world spectrum between the extremes.
A Comparative Introduction to Political Science: Contention and
Cooperation provides a comprehensive teaching and learning package
including these ancillaries: *Test Bank. Available for adopters to
download, the Test Bank provides multiple-choice, true/false, and
essay questions for each chapter. *Testing Software. This
customizable test bank is available as a Word file or in Respondus
4.0-a powerful tool for creating and managing exams that can be
printed out or published directly to the most popular learning
management systems. Exams can be created offline or moved from one
LMS to another. Respondus LE is available for free and can be used
to automate the process of creating printed tests. Respondus 3.5,
available for purchase or via a school site license, prepares tests
to be uploaded to an LMS. Click here:
http://www.respondus.com/products/testbank/search.php to submit
your request. *Companion Website. The open-access Companion Website
is designed to engage students with the material and reinforce what
they've learned in the classroom. For each chapter, flash cards and
self-quizzes help students master the content and apply that
knowledge to real-life situations. Students can access the
Companion Website from their computers, tablets, or mobile devices.
*eBook. The full-color eBook allows students to access this
textbook anytime, anywhere. The eBook includes the entire print
edition rendered in vibrant color and features direct links to the
Companion Website. *PowerPoint Slides. For every chapter, art
slides of all figures and tables are available for adopters to
download.
The Economics of Restructuring and Intervention carries forward the
work of Marx, Kalecki, Keynes and Kaldor in analysing questions of
growth, distribution and government intervention. It will be
essential reading for all those wishing to understand the massive
economic and political shifts as we enter the 1990s - the
globalization of markets and production, continued growth of the
Third World and East European debt, the emerging digital economy.
Political debates thrown up by these economic, industrial and
technological developments are subject to rigorous scrutiny and
critique - from the employment effects of wage cuts to the calls
for 'supply side socialism'.
The volume gathers theoretical contributions on human rights and
global justice in the context of international migration. It
addresses the need to reconsider human rights and the theories of
justice in connection with the transformation of the social frames
of reference that international migrations foster. The main goal of
this collective volume is to analyze and propose principles of
justice that serve to address two main challenges connected to
international migrations that are analytically differentiable
although inextricably linked in normative terms: to better
distribute the finite resources of the planet among all its
inhabitants; and to ensure the recognition of human rights in
current migration policies. Due to the very nature of the debate on
global justice and the implementation of human rights and migration
policies, this interdisciplinary volume aims at transcending the
academic sphere and appeals to a large public through argumentative
reflections. Challenging the Borders of Justice in the Age of
Migrations represents a fresh and timely contribution. In a time
when national interests are structurally overvalued and borders
increasingly strengthened, it's a breath of fresh air to read a
book in which migration flows are not changed into a threat. We
simply cannot understand the world around us through the lens of
the 'migration crisis'-a message the authors of this book have
perfectly understood. Aimed at a strong link between theories of
global justice and policies of border control, this timely book
combines the normative and empirical to deeply question the way our
territorial boundaries are justified. Professor Ronald Tinnevelt,
Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands This book is essential
reading for those frustrated by the limitations of the dominant
ways of thinking about global justice especially in relation to
migration. By bringing together discussions of global justice,
cosmopolitan political theory and migration, this collection of
essays has the potential to transform the way in which we think and
debate the critical issues of membership and movement. Together
they present a critical interdisciplinary approach to international
migration, human rights and global justice, challenging
disciplinary borders as well as political ones. Professor Phil
Cole, University of the West of England, UK
The millennial generation is quickly becoming more prominent in the
political, economic, and social aspects of modern society. Studying
new techniques which foster positive impact in their engagement
with the outside world can help the millennial generation become
one of the most constructive groups to date. Fostering Positive
Civic Engagement Among Millennials: Emerging Research and
Opportunities is an essential reference source that provides
in-depth discussions on the latest trends among millennial
engagement practices in social and political contexts. Featuring
pertinent topics such as student self-assessments, mentoring roles,
and educational tools, this scholarly resource is ideal for
educational leaders, academicians, students, and researchers that
would like to discover better ways to promote engagement within the
millennial generation.
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