The virtue of mercy is widely admired, but is now marginalized in contemporary public life. Yet for centuries it held a secure place in western public discourse without implying a necessary contradiction with justice. Alex Tuckness and John M. Parrish ask how and why this changed. Examining Christian and non-Christian ancient traditions, along with Kantian and utilitarian strains of thought, they offer a persuasive account of how our perception of mercy has been transformed by Enlightenment conceptions of impartiality and equality that place justice and mercy in tension. Understanding the logic of this decline, they argue, will make it possible to promote and defend a more robust role for mercy in public life. Their study ranges from Homer to the late Enlightenment and from ancient tragedies to medieval theologies to contemporary philosophical texts, and will be valuable to readers in political philosophy, political theory, and the philosophy of law.

Focusing on why neoliberalism gained such a unique strong hold in the United States, philosopher Bruce N. Waller in this book traces the source back to the country's origins and the entwined core values of the nation's Founding Fathers. Their extreme commitment to private property rights (as evinced in a unanimous vote for the Constitution's Fugitive Slave Clause), an aversion to widespread democracy, and a deep belief in the uniquely just nature of their new country together created the ideal conditions for neoliberalism's growth and success. Waller also provides a clear analysis of the moral and psychological conditions so hospitable to neoliberalism, including the compatibility of a faith in the "invisible hand" of the free market with the widespread belief - which remains prevalent in the United States - that the world is just and people generally get what they deserve. Waller examines how the ideal of moral responsibility in the United States provides the core belief that holds in place the basic principles of American neoliberalism. The book ends by shedding light on the deleterious effects of neoliberalism and shows that its replacement requires not only the amelioration of enormous inequity in wealth, but also the opportunity for all citizens to exercise autonomy, control, and critical thought in their lives and workplaces. Key Features Traces neoliberal values deep into American history and culture Uses empirical psychological research to explain the broad appeal of neoliberalism Describes the strong interconnected neoliberal value system of belief in a just world, personal responsibility, and radical individualism, and their combined influence on American culture Examines the influence of neoliberal values on the American criminal justice and educational systems

This book develops a contemporary theory of nationalism that addresses 21st century political challenges, exploring theoretical and empirical understandings of the concepts of 'the nation' and 'nationalism' and the failure of various theoretical accounts to decipher the diverse manner by which nationalism comes to be embedded in our social and political world. Accounting for the dynamism and 'intertextuality' of nationalism, Nationalism and Hegemony shows how 'the nation' and 'nationalism' come to be consolidated as conceptual and experiential power structures and how the interests of political groups are advanced through diverse nationalist modalities, which can at any time be activated for political purposes. A critique of the various and diverse manifestations of nationalism, this contribution to both theory and political practice will appeal to scholars working in the fields of sociology and social and political theory.

This book argues that the Russian thinker Petr Kropotkin's anarchism was a bio-political revolutionary project. It shows how Kropotkin drew on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European and Russian bio-social-medical scientific thought to the extent that ideas about health, sickness, insanity, degeneration, and hygiene were for him not metaphors but rather key political concerns. It goes on to discuss how for Kropotkin's bio-political anarchism, the state, capitalism, and revolution were medical concerns whose effects on the individual and society were measurable by social statistics and explainable by bio-social-medical knowledge. Overall, the book provides a refreshing, innovative approach to understanding Kropotkin's anarchism.

Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays presents a defense of universalism as the foundation of moral and political arguments and commitments. Consisting of five intertwined essays, the book claims that centering such arguments and commitments on a particular place, in this instance the African world, is entirely compatible with that foundational universalism. Ato Sekyi-Otu thus proposes a less conventional mode of Africacentrism, one that rejects the usual hostility to universalism as an imperialist Eurocentric hoax. Sekyi-Otu argues that universalism is an inescapable presupposition of ethical judgment in general and critique in particular, and that it is especially indispensable for radical criticism of conditions of existence in postcolonial society and for vindicating visions of social regeneration. The constituent chapters of the book are exhibits of that argument and question some fashionable conceptual oppositions and value apartheids. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the fields of social and political philosophy, contemporary political theory, postcolonial studies, African philosophy and social thought.

An essential read for anyone who has encountered a crisis of confidence. Where does self-confidence come from? How does it work? Why are some people more confident than others? On the surface, these seem like simple questions - but answers can feel hard to come by when we need them most. In this bestselling book, Charles Pepin brings to light the strange alchemy that is self-confidence. Pepin examines the role confidence plays in the lives of our most respected public figures including the likes of Madonna, Mozart, Frieda Kahlo, Martin Luther King and Serena Williams, and argues that above all, to live a life of confidence is to live a life of action. Drawing on the collective wisdom of philosophers, psychologists and the lives of people we encounter on a daily basis, Pepin invites us to probe the mystery and mastery of self-confidence.

This book explores the legal dimension of the Islamic State, an aspect which has hitherto been neglected in the literature. ISIS' dystopian experience, intended as a short-lived territorial and political governance, has been analyzed from multiple points of view, including the geopolitical, social and religious ones. However, its legal dimension has never been properly dealt with in a comprehensive way, assuming as a point of reference both the Islamic and the Western legal tradition. This book analyzes ISIS as the expression of a potential though never fully realized legal order. The book does not describe ISIS' possible classifications according to the standards and the criteria of international law, such as its possible statehood or proto-statehood, issues that are however touched upon. Rather, it analyzes ISIS' own legal awareness, based on the group's literary materials, which show a considerable amount of juridical work. Such material, mainly propagandistic in its nature, is essential in understanding which kind of legal order ISIS aimed at establishing. The book will be of interest to students and academics in the fields of Law, International Relations, Political Sciences, Terrorism Studies, Religion and Middle Eastern Studies.

This book argues that citizens have a moral right to decide by which criteria they grant migrants citizenship, as well as to control access to their territory in the first place. In developing and defending this argument, it critically engages numerous objections, thus providing the reader with a thorough overview of the current debate on the ethics of immigration and exclusion. The author's argument is based on a straightforwardly individualist and liberal starting point. One of the rights granted by liberalism is freedom of association, which also comprises the right not to associate with people with whom one does not want to associate. While this is an individual right, it can be exercised collectively like many other individual rights. Thus, people can decide to collectively organize into an association pursuing certain goals; and subject to certain provisos, this gives rise to legitimate claims to space and territory in which they pursue these goals. The author shows that this right is far-reaching and robust, which entails an equally far-reaching and robust right to exclude. Moreover, he demonstrates that large-scale immigration from illiberal cultures tends to severely compromise the way of life, the values, and the institutions of liberal democracies in ways routinely ignored by apologists for multiculturalism. Freedom, Culture, and the Right to Exclude will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in applied ethics, political philosophy, political theory, and law.

This book examines and investigates the legitimacy of the European Union by acknowledging the importance of variation across actors, institutions, audiences, and context. Case studies reveal how different actors have contributed to the politics of (re)legitimating the European Union in response to multiple recent problems in European integration. The case studies look specifically at stakeholder interests, social groups, officials, judges, the media and other actors external to the Union. With this, the book develops a better understanding of how the politics of legitimating the Union are actor-dependent, context-dependent and problem-dependent. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of European integration, as well as those interested in legitimacy and democracy beyond the state from a point of view of political science, political sociology and the social sciences more broadly.

This book reveals how the critique of the domination of capitalism inaugurated by the Frankfurt School becomes pluriversal, motivating the historical Critical Theory of Coloniality (CTC) dialogue between the Global South and the Global North. CTC expresses the emergence and historical actuality of a set of intellectual fields aimed at denouncing domination and promoting emancipatory ideas at the borders of colonial capitalism. The book argues that the actuality of the CTC relies on the importance of valuing theoretical and methodological pluralism in the context of the necessary redefinition of the directions of global society. It reveals a plural reflection of scientific, moral, and aesthetic character in different areas of former planetary colonisation such as Asia, Africa, and America but also on the borders of Europe. This book is aimed at researchers and students in the social sciences as well as in interdisciplinary studies. It is attractive to those who are interested in the plural development of theoretical criticism outside the European universe and who seek to understand how capitalist power has metamorphosed with planetary coloniality. Considering this book implies important reflections on topics such as development, modernity, tradition, imperialism, dependency, and democracy, it is interesting to specialists in development issues, international relations, and policymakers.

This book highlights the problem of one-dimensional, reductionistic life of the modern individual. An expression of crisis in our world, it discusses the imperative need to have a more comprehensive, non-reductionist life where the Other is incorporated, especially the relationship between the Other and the Self, based on virtues like love, empathy, equality, and compassion. The volume sheds light on how the world has forgone the art of living for a mutilated sense of well-being, the rise of conformity and complacency in human thought, and the lack of democratic dissent and citizenry responsibility in our contemporary societies, which is now characterized by mass immaturity, propelled by a process of thoughtlessness. It discusses how humans need to be aware of the life they lead, to think about Otherness of the Other not just as another virtue but also as a crucial element in the survival of humanity, for people to coexist with the world around them as equals. Furthermore, it advocates meaningful and thoughtful existence, in touch with the Nature we coexist with, to ensure that humanity is not robbed of its noble spirit as we live to survive in our techno-capitalist societies. An introspective read, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of moral and ethical philosophy, political philosophy, and political science.

This book explores the evolution of British identity and participatory politics in the 1790s. Wil Verhoeven argues that in the course of the French Revolution debate in Britain, the idea of 'America' came to represent for the British people the choice between two diametrically opposed models of social justice and political participation. Yet the American Revolution controversy in the 1790s was by no means an isolated phenomenon. The controversy began with the American crisis debate of the 1760s and 1770s, which overlapped with a wider Enlightenment debate about transatlantic utopianism. All of these debates were based in the material world on the availability of vast quantities of cheap American land. Verhoeven investigates the relation that existed throughout the eighteenth century between American soil and the discourse of transatlantic utopianism: between America as a physical, geographical space, and 'America' as a utopian/dystopian idea-image.

Offers new insights into the history of right-wing extremism and violence in Europe, East and West, from 1900 until the present day. Examines various forms of organizational and ideological interconnectedness and what inspires right-wing terrorism. In addition to several empirical chapters on prewar extreme-right political violence, the book features extensive coverage of postwar right-wing terrorism including the recent resurgence in attacks.

This book discusses the active relationship among the mechanics of memory, visual practices, and historical narratives. Reflection on memory and its ties with historical narratives cannot be separated from reflection on the visual and the image as its points of reference which function in time. This volume addresses precisely that temporal aspect of the image, without reducing it to a neutral trace of the past, a mnemotechnical support of memory. As a commemorative device, the image fixes, structures, and crystalizes memory, turning the view of the past into myth. It may, however, also stimulate, transform, and update memory, functioning as a matrix of interpretation and understanding the past. The book questions whether the functioning of the visual matrices of memory can be related to a particular historical and geographical scope, that is, to Central and Eastern Europe, and whether it is possible to find their origin and decide if they are just local and regional or perhaps also Western European and universal. It focuses on the artistic reflection on time and history, in the reconstructions of memory due to change of frontiers and political regimes, as well as endeavours to impose some specific political structure on territories which were complex and mixed in terms of national identity, religion and social composition. The volume is ideal for students and scholars of memory studies, history and visual studies.

Since the 1980s, neoliberals have openly contested the idea that the state should protect the socio-economic well-being of its citizens, making 'privatization' their mantra. Yet, as historians and social scientists have shown, welfare has always been a 'mixed economy', wherein private and public actors dynamically interacted, collaborating or competing with each other in the provision of welfare services. This book will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners of welfare by developing three innovative approaches. Firstly, it illuminates the productive nature of public/private entanglements. Far from amounting to a zero-sum game, the interactions between the two sectors have changed over time what welfare encompasses, its contents and targets, often engendering the creation of new fields of intervention. Secondly, this book departs from a well-established tradition of comparison between Western nation-states by using and mixing various scales of analysis (local, national, international and global) and by covering case studies from Spain to Poland and France to Greece in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thirdly, this book goes beyond state centrism in welfare studies by bringing back a host of public and private actors, from municipalities to international organizations, from older charities to modern NGOs. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This unique book presents various ways in which evolutionary theory can contribute to the analysis of key legal-philosophical problems. Wojciech Zaluski explores three central questions; the ontological question - what is the nature of law?; the teleological-axiological question - what are the main values to be realized by law?; the normativity question, which has two aspects; normative: what explains the fact that legal norms provide reasons for action?, and motivational: what explains the fact that humans can be motivated by legal norms? It is argued that evolutionary theory suggests non-trivial answers to these questions, and that these answers can become the building blocks of a new - evolutionary - paradigm in legal philosophy. Being the first study entirely devoted to the analysis of fundamental legal-philosophical problems from the standpoint of evolutionary theory, this book is a must-read for graduate and postgraduate students, practitioners and philosophers in the field of legal philosophy.

This new textbook provides an introduction to humanitarian protection, a field of study concerned with international responses to armed conflict, political violence, and humanitarian crisis. The book engages with a wide range of empirical and normative questions, providing an overview of the academic literature whilst simultaneously discussing the policies and practices associated with protective responses to conflict and humanitarian emergencies that put the lives and livelihoods of vulnerable populations, including civilians, refugees, and minority groups, at risk. Divided into three parts, covering the origins of the humanitarian protection regime, the range of actors involved, and the responsibilities of these actors, the book offers an accessible entry point into the major contemporary debates, providing readers with the conceptual tools for understanding core issues. Key points are reinforced and illustrated through the deployment of selected case studies, and a comprehensive glossary is provided for key terms. Each chapter ends with a summary of key points, questions for further reflection, and a list of recommended reading. This book will be of much interest to students of human protection, humanitarianism, the Responsibility to Protect, human security, peacekeeping, and International Relations in general.

This vibrant and significantly revised new edition is a comprehensive and accessible text for studying political theory in a changing world. Bringing together classic and contemporary political concepts and ideologies into one book, it introduces the major approaches to political issues that have shaped our world, and the ideas that form the currency of political debate. Consistently, it relates political ideas to political realities through effective use of examples and case studies making theory lively, contentious, and relevant. With significant revisions which reflect the latest questions facing political theory in an increasingly international context, key features and updates include: Two brand new chapters on Migration and Freedom of Speech and a significant new section on the radical right; Thought-provoking case studies to bring the theory to life including social media and internet regulation, Brexit and the EU, anti-vaxxer campaigns, surrogacy tourism, and autonomous anarchist zones; A revamped website, including podcasts, to aid study of, and reading around, the subject. Introduction to Political Theory, Fourth Edition is the perfect accompaniment to undergraduate study in political theory, political philosophy, concepts and ideologies, and more broadly to the social sciences and philosophy.

This pioneering book delivers a systematic account of agonistic democracy, and a much-needed analysis of the core components of agonism: pluralism, tragedy, and the value of conflict. It also traces the history of these ideas, identifying the connections with republicanism and with Greek antiquity. Mark Wenman presents a critical appraisal of the leading contemporary proponents of agonism and, in a series of well-crafted and comprehensive discussions, brings these thinkers into debate with one another, as well as with the post-structuralist and continental theorists who influence them. Wenman draws extensively on Hannah Arendt, and stresses the creative power of human action as augmentation and revolution. He also reworks Arendt's discussion of reflective judgement to present an alternative style of agonism, one where the democratic contest is linked to the emergence of a militant form of cosmopolitanism, and to prospects for historical change in the context of neoliberal globalisation.

How does Martin Luther King, Jr., understand race philosophically and how did this understanding lead him to develop an ontological conception of racist police violence? In this important new work, Mark Christian Thompson attempts to answer these questions, examining ontology in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s philosophy. Specifically, the book reads King through 1920s German academic debates between Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Bultmann, Hans Jonas, Carl Schmitt, Eric Voegelin, Hannah Arendt, and others on Being, gnosticism, existentialism, political theology, and sovereignty. It further examines King's dissertation about Tillich, as well other key texts from his speculative writings, sermons, and speeches, positing King's understanding of divine love as a form of Heideggerian ontology articulated in beloved community. Tracking the presence of twentieth-century German philosophy and theology in his thought, the book situates King's ontology conceptually and socially in nonviolent protest. In so doing, The Critique of Nonviolence reads King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (1963) with Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" (1921) to reveal the depth of King's political-theological critique of police violence as the illegitimate appropriation of the racialized state of exception. As Thompson argues, it is in part through its appropriation of German philosophy and theology that King's ontology condemns the perpetual American state of racial exception that permits unlimited police violence against Black lives.

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 book differs from books for the US Criminal Justice market, by offering an upper level, and philosophical introduction to Criminal Justice Ethics. Its focus on Anglo-American models of justice, means this has a market across western jurisdictions. This book has a market across criminology and criminal justice, philosophy and political science.

This book examines the working procedures of parliamentary party groups within specialised committees - the backstage but primary means for MPs to influence policy. It explains which MPs specialise in particular policy areas, how they make policy choices in committees, and, subsequently, how these individual decisions are aggregated and 'unified' within and via parliamentary party groups. In doing so, the book expertly reveals the internal working procedures of parliaments and the role of individual MPs vis-a-vis the parliamentary party group leadership. Based on an analysis of more than 3,000 committee assignments and over 100 in-depth interviews with MPs, it shows that individual experts in committees have a central role and decision-making power which is more varied and decentralised from the leadership than commonly assumed. It demonstrates that most policy decisions are prepared bottom-up rather than dictated top-down and that parliamentary party groups are not strictly hierarchical organisations dominated by elites. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of legislative and parliamentary studies, representative democracy, comparative politics, and journalists and practitioners within parliaments.

Provides a systematic and future-oriented account of global political economy dynamics since the industrial revolution. Argues that major changes and conflicting processes can be understood through the concept of three fields. Analyses the generic dynamics of these three fields of global political economy and explores their most significant causal effects, such as growth, employment, distribution of income and wealth, wars, and ecological effects.

In this book, Hannes Charen presents an alternative examination of kinship structures in political theory. Employing a radically transdisciplinary approach, On the Politics of Kinship is structured in a series of six theoretical vignettes or frames. Each chapter frames a figure, aspect, or relational context of the family or kinship. Some chapters are focused on a critique of the family as a state-sanctioned institution, while others cautiously attempt to recast kinship in a way to reimagine mutual obligation through the generation of kinship practices understood as a perpetually evolving set of relational responses to finitude. In doing so, Charen considers the ways in which kinship is a plastic social response to embodied exposure, both concealed and made more evident in the bloated, feeble, and broken individualities and nationalities that seem to dominate our social and political landscape today. On the Politics of Kinship will be of interest to political theorists, feminists, anthropologists, and social scientists in general.