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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Social & political philosophy
In the world neoliberalism has made, the pervasiveness of injustice
and the scale of inequality can be so overwhelming that meaningful
resistance seems impossible. Disorienting Neoliberalism argues that
combatting the injustices of today's global economy begins with
reorienting our way of seeing so that we can act more effectively.
Within political theory, standard approaches to global justice
envision ideal institutions, but provide little guidance for people
responding to today's most urgent problems. Meanwhile, empirical
and historical research explains how neoliberalism achieved
political and intellectual hegemony, but not how we can imagine its
replacement. Disorienting Neoliberalism argues that people can and
should become disposed to solidarity with each other once they see
global injustices as a limit on their own freedom. Benjamin L.
McKean reorients us by taking us inside the global supply chains
that assemble clothes, electronics, and other goods, revealing the
tension between neoliberal theories of freedom and the
hierarchical, coercive reality of their operations. In this new
approach to global justice, he explains how neoliberal institutions
and ideas constrain the freedom of people throughout the supply
chain from worker to consumer. Rather than a linked set of private
market exchanges, supply chains are political entities that seek to
govern the rest of us. Where neoliberal institutions train us to
see each other as competitors, McKean provides a new orientation to
the global economy in which we can see each other as partners in
resisting a shared obstacle to freedom - and thus be called to
collective action. Drawing from a wide range of thinkers, from
Hegel and John Rawls to W. E. B. Du Bois and Iris Marion Young,
Disorienting Neoliberalism shows how political action today can be
meaningful and promote justice, moving beyond the pity and
resentment global inequality often provokes to a new politics of
solidarity.
In Montaigne: Life without Law, originally published in French in
2014 and now translated for the first time into English by Paul
Seaton, Pierre Manent provides a careful reading of Montaigne's
three-volume work Essays. Although Montaigne's writings resist easy
analysis, Manent finds in them a subtle unity, and demonstrates the
philosophical depth of Montaigne's reflections and the distinctive,
even radical, character of his central ideas. To show Montaigne's
unique contribution to modern philosophy, Manent compares his work
to other modern thinkers, including Machiavelli, Hobbes, Pascal,
and Rousseau. What does human life look like without the imposing
presence of the state? asks Manent. In raising this question about
Montaigne's Essays, Manent poses a question of great relevance to
our contemporary situation. He argues that Montaigne's
philosophical reflections focused on what he famously called la
condition humaine, the human condition. Manent tracks Montaigne's
development of this fundamental concept, focusing especially on his
reworking of pagan and Christian understandings of virtue and
pleasure, disputation and death. Bringing new form and content
together, a new form of thinking and living is presented by
Montaigne's Essays, a new model of a thoughtful life from one of
the unsung founders of modernity. Throughout, Manent suggests
alternatives and criticisms, some by way of contrasts with other
thinkers, some in his own name. This is philosophical engagement at
a very high level. In showing the unity of Montaigne's work,
Manent's study will appeal especially to students and scholars of
political theory, the history of modern philosophy, modern
literature, and the origins of modernity.
In view of the current rhetoric surrounding the global migrant
crisis - with politicians comparing refugees with animals and media
reports warning of migrants swarming like insects or trespassing
like wolves - this timely study explores the cultural origins of
the language and imagery of dehumanization. Situated at the
junction of literature, politics, and ecocriticism, Wolves at the
Door traces the history of the wolf metaphor in discussions of
race, gender, colonialism, fascism, and ecology. How have
'Gypsies', Jews, Native Americans but also 'wayward' women been
'wolfed' in literature and politics? How has the wolf myth been
exploited by Hitler, Mussolini and Turkish ultra-nationalism? How
do right-wing politicians today exploit the reappearance of wolves
in Central Europe in the context of the migration discourse? And
while their reintroduction in places like Yellowstone has fuelled
heated debates, what is the wolf's role in ecological rewilding and
for the restoration of biodiversity? In today's fraught political
climate, Wolves at the Door alerts readers to the links between
stereotypical images, their cultural history, and their political
consequences. It raises awareness about xenophobia and the dangers
of nationalist idolatry, but also highlights how literature and the
visual arts employ the wolf myth for alternative messages of
tolerance and cultural diversity.
How to Critique Authoritarian Populism: Methodologies of the
Frankfurt School offers a comprehensive introduction to the
techniques used by the early Frankfurt School to study and combat
authoritarianism and authoritarian populism. In recent years there
has been a resurgence of interest in the writings of the early
Frankfurt School, at the same time as authoritarian populist
movements are resurging in Europe and the Americas. This volume
shows why and how Frankfurt School methodologies can and should be
used to address the rise of authoritarianism today. Critical theory
scholars are assembled from a variety of disciplines to discuss
Frankfurt School approaches to dialectical philosophy,
psychoanalytic theory, human subjects research, discourse analysis
and media studies. Contributors include: Robert J. Antonio,
Stefanie Baumann, Christopher Craig Brittain, Dustin J. Byrd,
Mariana Caldas Pinto Ferreira, Panayota Gounari, Peter-Erwin
Jansen, Imaculada Kangussu, Douglas Kellner, Dan Krier, Lauren
Langman, Claudia Leeb, Gregory Joseph Menillo, Jeremiah Morelock,
Felipe Ziotti Narita, Michael R. Ott, Charles Reitz, Avery Schatz,
Rudolf J. Siebert, William M. Sipling, David Norman Smith, Daniel
Sullivan, and AK Thompson.
Politics of the Many draws inspiration from Percy Bysshe Shelley's
celebrated call to arms: 'Ye are many - they are few!' This idea of
the Many, as a general form of emancipatory subjectivity that
cannot be erased for the sake of the One, is the philosophical and
political assumption shared by contributors to this book. They
raise questions of collective agency, and its crisis in
contemporary capitalism, via new engagements with Marxist
philosophy, psychoanalysis, theories of social reproduction and
value-form, and post-colonial critiques, and drawing on activist
thought and strategies. This book interrogates both established and
emergent formations of the Many (the people, classes, publics,
crowds, masses, multitudes), tracing their genealogies, their
recent failures and victories, and their potentials to change the
world. The book proposes and explores an intense and provoking
series of new or reinvented concepts, figures, and theoretical
constellations, including dividuality, the centaur, unintentional
vanguard, insomnia at work, always-on capitalism, multitude (from
its 'voiding' to a '(non)emergence'), crowds, necropolitics, and
the link between political subjectivity and value-form. The
contributors to Politics of the Many are both acclaimed and
emergent thinkers including Carina Brand, Rebecca Carson, Luhuna
Carvalho, Lorenzo Chiesa, Jodi Dean, Dario Gentili, Benjamin
Halligan, Marc James Leger, Paul Mazzocchi, Alexei Penzin, Stefano
Pippa, Gerald Raunig, and Stevphen Shukaitis.
Democracy has long been fetishized. Consequently, how we speak
about democracy and what we expect from democratic governance are
at odds with practice. With unflinching resolve, this book probes
the theory of democracy and how the left and right are fascinated
by it. In this innovative multidisciplinary study, Ralph Cintron
provides sustained analysis of our political discourse. He shows
not only how the rhetoric of democracy produces strong desires for
social order, global wealth, and justice but also how these desires
cannot be satisfied. Throughout his discussion, Cintron includes
ethnographic research from fieldwork conducted over the course of
twenty years in the Latino neighborhoods of Chicago, where he
observes both citizens and the undocumented looking to democracy to
fulfill their highest aspirations. Politicians hand out favors to
the elite, developers strong-arm aldermen, and the disenfranchised
have little redress. The problem, Cintron argues, is that the
conditions required to put democracy into practice-territory, a
bordered nation-state, citizens, property-are constituted by
inequality and violence, because there is no inclusivity that does
not also exclude. Drawing on ethnography, economics, political
theory, and rhetorical analysis, Cintron makes his case with
tremendous analytic rigor. This challenge to reassess the
discourses on democracy and to consider democratic politics as
always compromised by oligarchy will be of particular interest to
political and rhetorical theorists.
In her new book, Corine Pelluchon argues that the dichotomy between
nature and culture privileges the latter. She laments that the
political system protects the sovereignty of the human and leaves
them immune to impending environmental disaster. Using the
phenomenological writings of French philosophers like Emmanuel
Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricoeur, Pelluchon contends that
human beings have to recognise humanity's dependence upon the
natural world for survival and adopt a new philosophy of existence
that advocates for animal welfare and ecological preservation. In
an extension of Heidegger's ontology of concern, Pelluchon declares
that this dependence is not negative or a sign of weakness. She
argues instead, that we are nourished by the natural world and that
the very idea of nourishment contains an element of pleasure. This
sustenance comforts humans and gives their lives taste. Pelluchon's
new philosophy claims then, that eating has an affective, social
and cultural dimension, but that most importantly it is a political
act. It solidifies the eternal link between human beings and
animals, and warns that the human consumption of animals and other
natural resources impacts upon humanity's future.
In Marx and Social Justice, George E. McCarthy presents a detailed
and comprehensive overview of the ethical, political, and economic
foundations of Marx's theory of social justice in his early and
later writings. What is distinctive about Marx's theory is that he
rejects the views of justice in liberalism and reform socialism
based on legal rights and fair distribution by balancing ancient
Greek philosophy with nineteenth-century political economy. Relying
on Aristotle's definition of social justice grounded in ethics and
politics, virtue and democracy, Marx applies it to a broader range
of issues, including workers' control and creativity, producer
associations, human rights and human needs, fairness and
reciprocity in exchange, wealth distribution, political
emancipation, economic and ecological crises, and economic
democracy. Each chapter in the book represents a different aspect
of social justice. Unlike Locke and Hegel, Marx is able to
integrate natural law and natural rights, as he constructs a
classical vision of self-government 'of the people, by the people'.
As the economic crash of 2007-8 and its sequels developed,
neoliberal economists often said that economic theory can never
cope with such eruptions, and left-minded economists and political
economists struggled to find answers. This book documents
discussions as they developed; an introduction and an afterword
tell the story of the crisis, and offer syntheses and angles on
some of the debated issues. What were the chief imbalances in the
world economy? Is US hegemony breaking down? Were falling profit
rates at the root of the crash, and if so why were they falling?
How does "financialisation" reshape capitalism? Why did
neoliberalism prove so resilient? How might the repercussions lead
to it being subverted from the right or from the left? Contributors
are Robert Brenner, Dick Bryan, Trevor Evans, Barry Finger, Daniela
Gabor, Andrew Gamble, Michel Husson, Andrew Kliman, Costas
Lapavitsas, Simon Mohun, Fred Moseley, Leo Panitch, Hugo Radice,
and Alfredo Saad-Filho.
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