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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Social & political philosophy
The idea of toleration as the appropriate response to difference has been central to liberal thought since Locke. Although the subject has been widely and variously explored, there has been reluctance to acknowledge the new meaning that current debates on toleration have when compared with those at its origins in the early modern period and with subsequent discussions about pluralism and freedom of expression. This collection starts from a clear recognition of the new terms of the debate. It recognises that a new academic consensus is slowly emerging on a view of tolerance that is reasonable in two senses. Firstly of reflecting the capacity of seeing the other's viewpoint, secondly on the relatively limited extent to which toleration can be granted. It reflects the cross-thematic and cross-disciplinary nature of such discussions, dissecting a number of debates such as liberalism and communitarianism, public and private, multiculturalism and the politics of identity, and a number of disciplines: moral, legal and political philosophy, historical and educational studies, anthropology, sociology and psychology. A group of distinguished authors explore the complexities emerging from the new debate. They scrutinise, with analytical sophistication, the philosophical foundation, the normative content and the broadly political implications of a new culture of toleration for diverse societies. Specific issues considered include the toleration of religious discrimination in employment, city life and community, social ethos, publicity, justice and reason and ethics. The book is unique in resolutely looking forward to the theoretical and practical challenges posed by commitment to a conception of toleration demanding empathy and understanding in an ever-diversifying world. Catriona Mckinnon is Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of York Dario Castiglione is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Exeter
There are at least three times as many nations as states in the world today. This book addresses some of the special challenges that arise when two or more national communities re the same (multinational) state. As a work in normative political philosophy its principal aim is to evaluate the political and institutional choices of citizens and governments in states with rival nationalist discourses and nation-building projects. The first chapter takes stock of a decade of intense philosophical and sociological debates about the nature of nations and nationalism. Norman identifies points of consensus in these debates, as well as issues that do not have to be definitively resolved in order to proceed with normative theorizing. He recommends thinking of nationalism as a form of discourse, a way of arguing and mobilizing support, and not primarily as a belief in a principle. A liberal nationalist, then, is someone who uses nationalist arguments, or appeals to nationalist sentiments, in order to rally support for liberal policies. The rest of the book is taken up with the three big political and institutional choices in multinational states. First, what can political actors and governments legitimately do to shape citizens' national identity or identities? This is the core question in the ethics of nation-building, or what Norman calls national engineering. Second, how can minority and majority national communities each be given an adequate degree of self-determination, including equal rights to carry out nation-building projects, within a democratic federal state? Finally, even in a world where most national minorities cannot have their own state, how should the constitutions of multinational federations regulate secessionist politics within the rule of law and the ideals of democracy? More than a decade after Yael Tamir's ground-breaking Liberal Nationalism, Norman finds that these three great practical and institutional questions have still rarely been addressed within a comprehensive normative theory of nationalism.
The purpose of the multilevel approach is to understand individual behaviors taking into account the social context in which they occur. This book deals with concepts and methods underlying this approach. This book is of interest to a broad audience of social scientists, statisticians and philosophers concerned with new issues raised by the multilevel approach, and more generally with explanation in the social sciences.
Violence is a central issue of contemporary society at all levels, affecting human relationships from the most intimate to the most impersonal. But what is violence? Is violence justifiable? What relevance does the fate of the victim of violence have to such questions? To address these and similar questions, this volume brings together thinkers from a wide range of philosophical backgrounds who employ a rich variety of methods, ranging from the strictly analytic to the postmodern. They explore issues such as responsibility, provocation, violation, cruelty, self-determination and deception in attempting to understand violence in relation both to the suffering of its victims and the justifications offered by its perpetrators and their supporters. In exploring these issues the essays collected in this volume explore terrorism, rape, genocide and state-sponsored violence.
This book looks back at the meaning and purpose of leisure in the past. But this is not a simple social history of leisure. It is not enough to write a history of leisure on its own in fact, it is impossible without engaging in the debate about what counts as leisure (in the present and in the past). Writing a history of leisure, then, entails writing a philosophy of leisure: and any history needs to be a philosophical history as well. That is the purpose of this book. It provides an account of leisure through historical time, how leisure was constructed and understood by historical actors, how communicative reason and free will interacted with instrumentality at different times, how historians have reconstructed past leisure through historiography, and finally, how writers have perceived the meaning and purpose of leisure in alternative histories. Providing a sweeping overview of the field, Karl Spracklen charts how the concept of leisure was understood in Ancient history, through to modern times, and looks at leisure in different societies and cultures including Byzantium and Asian civilizations, as well as looking at leisure and Islam. Spracklen concludes with a chapter on future histories of leisure.
This book addresses the question: "What should be the appropriate limits to free speech?" The author claims that it is the state, rather than abstract principles, that must provide the answer. The book defends a version of Hobbesian absolutism and rejects the dominant liberal idea that there is a right (human or civil) setting the boundaries of free speech. This liberal view can be known as the "principled defence of free speech", in which speech is established as a constitutional principle that has priority over the state. The author instead offers an "unprincipled approach to free speech", suggesting that the boundaries of speech must necessarily be set by the state, which in liberal democracies means through social and political contestation. The final chapter applies the argument to the topic of hate speech and argues that it is appropriate to limit such speech when it causes harm and offense. The book will be of use to students and scholars across political theory, political science, sociology, philosophy and law.
Negotiating the terrain between techno-optimism and eco-pessimism, this work establishes the political connections between technologies of "the body," property, and the environment. Specific technologies of the body, such as surrogacy and in vitro fertilization, are examined in relation to their political and legal constructions. Next, Shevory analyzes private property as an evolving historical concept that implicates environmental and biological transformations with particular attention given to biotechnology cases. He then considers the body's appearance and its alterations through plastic surgery, dieting, or piercing as political constructions. A theoretical overview specifies technoprogressivist (liberal) and technophobic traditions, especially as they have evolved in the United States during the second half of the 20th-century. Drawing upon critical and feminist theories, Shevory specifies a body politics that negotiates the terrain between these two traditions. Body technologies and markets, he argues, interact to consolidate and reinforce dominant systems of power, while at the same time resisting and sometimes subverting them. "Technology" is often a factor in the fragmentation of evolving political ideological discourses on the "left" and "right; " however, the resulting instabilities create the potential for both the expansion of global capital and its subversion via democratic interventions.
This book expands the sociological canon by introducing non-Western and female voices, and subjects the existing canon itself to critique. Including chapters on both the 'founding fathers' of sociology and neglected thinkers it highlights the biases of Eurocentrism and androcentrism, while also offering much-needed correctives to them. The authors challenge a dominant account of the development of sociological theory which would have us believe that it was only Western European and later North American white males in the nineteenth and early twentieth century who thought in a creative and systematic manner about the origins and nature of the emerging modernity of their time. This integrated and contextualised account seeks to restructure the ways in which we theorise the emergence of the classical sociological canon. This book's global scope fills a significant lacuna and provides a unique teaching resource to students of classical sociological theory.
The substantially revised third edition of this widely-used text introduces nine major theoretical approaches and their key protagonists, including a new chapter on global justice, and assesses their ability to generate clear, consistent and illuminating accounts of justice as a distinctive social, political and legal value.
"Rethinking R.G. Collingwood" reviews Collingwood's thought via his
own rethinking of Hegel. It establishes the revisionary character
of Collingwood's defence of liberal civilization in theory and
practice. Collingwood is seen as avoiding the pitfalls of Hegel's
teleological historicism by developing an open and contestable
reading of the rationality of liberal civilization, which neither
reduces practice to theory nor philosophy to history. The
contemporary relevance of Collingwood's standpoint is demonstrated
by comparing it with those of recent defenders and critics of
liberalism Rawls, Lyotard and MacIntyre.
International Relations scholarship has typically engaged with vulnerability as a problem to be solved through 'rational' attempts to craft a global order marked by universality, predictability and stability. By recovering an awareness of the persistently vulnerable human subject, this book argues that we can re-engage with issues of emotion, relationality, community and history that are often excluded from the study of global politics. This collection proposes an agonistic approach to international ethics and politics, eschewing a rationalism that radically privileges white Western conceptions of the world and that actively oppresses alternative voices. The Vulnerable Subject addresses issues such as trust, judgement, climate change, identity, and post-colonial relations, allowing for a profound rethinking of one of the core driving assumptions at the heart of international politics.
This book treats the critical theory of religion of Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Friedrich Pollock, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, J rgen Habermas and other critical theorists who tried to make sense out of the senseless war experience by exploring the writings of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich W.J. Schelling, Georg W.F. Hegel, Artur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.
A timely contribution from prominent philosophers to the public debate about morality and politics, exploring the fundamental problem of their relation and a string of specific issues. Is political morality more permissive of deception, manipulation and violence? Is there room for morality in international relations? Is patriotism a virtue? What are the moral costs of policies that keep out most of those seeking immigration or asylum? May we use torture in the 'war on terror'? What are the moral hazards of military obedience?
A combination of economic transformation, political transitions and changes in media have substantially, if incrementally, altered the terrain for political participation globally, particularly in Asia, home to several of the most dramatic such shifts over the past two decades. This book explores political participation in Asia and how democracy and authoritarianism function under neoliberal economic relations. It examines changes that coincide seemingly perversely with a participation explosion: with mass street protests and 'occupations', energetic online contention, movements of students and workers, mobilization for and against democracy and more. Organized thematically in three parts - political participation in a 'post-democratic' context, changes in the scope and character of political space and the policing of that space - this book analyzes economic, regime and media shifts and how they function in tandem and both within and across states. Closely integrated, comparative and theoretically driven, this book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners in the fields of civil society, contentious politics or social movements, democratization, political economy/development, media and communications, political geography, sociology, comparative politics and Asian politics.
Thomas Stukeley was one of the most colourful characters of the Elizabethan age, whose exploits brought him fame and notoriety throughout Europe. Described variously as picturesque, quixotic, cloudy minded, remarkable, and (by Evelyn Waugh) as a "preposterous and richly comic figure", Stukeley remains a flamboyant and fascinating character in the imagination of succeeding generations. Yet whilst these portrayals may be accurate, they do not in themselves do full justice to a multifaceted man whose remarkable career included stints as mercenary, pirate, forger, colonial adventurer, political advisor, diplomat and traitor, and who rubbed shoulders with princes, kings and popes. In this new biography, Professor Tazon makes extensive use of previously neglected documents from British, Spanish and Italian archives to produce a much more rounded and complete portrait of Stukeley and the events in which he participated. He brings Stukeley forth as a real figure, urging the reader to view in parallel English, Spanish, Irish and wider European history.
Intimate access to the mind of Francis Fukuyama and his reflections on world politics, his life and career, and the evolution of his thought In his 1992 best-selling book The End of History and the Last Man, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that the dominance of liberal democracy marked the end of humanity's political and ideological development. Thirty years later, with populism on the rise and the number of liberal democracies decreasing worldwide, Fukuyama revisits his classic thesis. A series of in-depth interviews between Fukuyama and editor Mathilde Fasting, After the End of History offers a wide-ranging analysis of liberal democracy today. Drawing on Fukuyama's work on identity, biotechnology, and political order, the book provides essential insight into the rise of authoritarianism and the greatest threats faced by democracy in our present world. Diving into topics like the surprise election of Donald Trump, the destruction of social and political norms, and the rise of China, Fukuyama deftly explains the plight of liberal democracy and explores how we might prevent its further decline. He also covers personal topics, reflects on his life and career, the evolution of his thinking, and some of his most important books. Insightful and important, After the End of History grants unprecedented access to one of the greatest political minds of our time.
Non-knowledge should not be simply regarded as the opposite of knowledge, but as complementary to it: each derives its character and meaning from the other and from their interaction. Knowledge does not colonize the space of ignorance in the progressive march of science; rather, knowledge and ignorance are mutually shaped in social and political domains of partial, shifting, and temporal relationships. This volume's ethnographic analyses provide a theoretical frame through which to consider the production and reproduction of ignorance, non-knowledge, and secrecy, as well as the wider implications these ideas have for anthropology and related disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.
This book explores the foundations and potential of a theory of need-based distributive justice, supported by experimental evidence. The core idea is that need-based distributive justice may have some legitimatory advantages over other important principles of distribution, like equality and equity, and therefore involves less dispute over the distribution and redistribution of scarce resources. In seven chapters, eleven scholars from the fields of philosophy, psychology, sociology, political science and economics outline the normative and positive building blocks of such a theory by critically reviewing the literature on distributive justice from their respective disciplinary perspectives. They address important theoretical and practical issues concerning the rationality of needs identification at the individual level and the recognition of needs at the societal level. They also investigate whether and how the dynamics of distribution procedures that allocate resources according to the need principle leads to social stability, focusing on the economic incentives that arise from need-based redistribution. The final chapter provides a synthesis and outlines a framework for a theory of justice based on ten hypotheses derived from the insights presented.
This title was first published in 2001. When the Chartist leader Ernest Jones emerged from prison in 1850, he was determined to capture the public's attention with a controversial and topical novel. The result of his endeavours was the remarkable Woman's Wrongs, a series of five tales exploring women's oppression at every level of society from the working class to the aristocracy. Each story presents a graphic, often harrowing account of the social, economic and emotional victimisation of women, and taken together the tales comprise a devastating indictment of Victorian patriarchal attitudes and sexual inequalities. But Jones also shows women's refusal to accept this subjugated role, and he creates some of Victorian literature's most subversive and unruly heroines. He draws on sensationalism, reportage, melodrama and political analysis in order to expose the wrongs done by and to women.
Does contemporary anti-capitalism tend towards, as Slavoj Zizek believes, nihilism, or does it tend towards, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri believe, true egalitarian freedom? Within The Cultural Contradictions of Anti-Capitalism, Fletcher presents an answer that manages to tend towards both simultaneously. In entering into contemporary debates on radicalism, this innovative volume proposes a revised conception of Hardt and Negri's philosophy of emancipatory desire. Indeed, Fletcher reassesses Hardt and Negri's history of Western radicalism and challenges their notion of an alter-modernity break from bourgeois modernity. In addition to this, this title proposes the idea of Western anti-capitalism as a spirit within a spirit, exploring how anti-capitalist movements in the West pose a genuine challenge to the capitalist order while remaining dependent on liberalist assumptions about the emancipatory individual. Inspired by post-structuralism and rejecting both revolutionary transcendence and notions of an underlying desiring purity, The Cultural Contradictions of Anti-Capitalism offers new insight into how liberal capitalist society persistently produces its own forms of resistance against itself. This book will appeal to graduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as: Sociology, Politics, International Relations, Cultural Studies, History, and Philosophy.
Understanding Max Weber's contribution to social theory is vital for students and scholars of social science. This insightful text offers critical discussion of Weber's ideas, focusing on their uses - how they have been appropriated and applied to contemporary events. Written by one of the world's leading Weber scholars, this is an essential read.
This volume offers eleven philosophical investigations into our future relations with social robots--robots that are specially designed to engage and connect with human beings. The contributors present cutting edge research that examines whether, and on which terms, robots can become members of human societies. Can our relations to robots be said to be "social"? Can robots enter into normative relationships with human beings? How will human social relations change when we interact with robots at work and at home? The authors of this volume explore these questions from the perspective of philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, and robotics. The first three chapters offer a taxonomy for the classification of simulated social interactions, investigate whether human social interactions with robots can be genuine, and discuss the significance of social relations for the formation of human individuality. Subsequent chapters clarify whether robots could be said to actually follow social norms, whether they could live up to the social meaning of care in caregiving professions, and how we will need to program robots so that they can negotiate the conventions of human social space and collaborate with humans. Can we perform joint actions with robots, where both sides need to honour commitments, and how will such new commitments and practices change our regional cultures? The authors connect research in social robotics and empirical studies in Human-Robot Interaction to recent debates in social ontology, social cognition, as well as ethics and philosophy of technology. The book is a response to the challenge that social robotics presents for our traditional conceptions of social interaction, which presuppose such essential capacities as consciousness, intentionality, agency, and normative understanding. The authors develop insightful answers along new interdisciplinary pathways in "robophilosophy," a new research area that will help us to shape the "robot revolution," the distinctive technological change of the beginning 21st century.
This book draws upon Vygotsky's idea of perezhivanie, emotions and imagination, and introduces the concepts of subjective sense and subjective configuration. These concepts are crucial for explaining and understanding children's development from a cultural-historical perspective. A book which theorises the relations between the social and the individual through a study of a child's perezhivanie, which analyses emotions more holistically, and advances the concepts of subjective sense and subjective configuration, is much needed. This book examines the complexity of human development through a comprehensive elaboration of these concepts, allowing for new insights to be put forward. It doesn't always follow the chronological order of Vygotsky's publications, as many of his works remained in the family archives until the 1980s, when his Selected Works were first published in Russian. There has long been a need for a contemporary book on the scholarly treatment of perezhevanie, emotions, and subjectivity, and as such this book revisits dominant representations of these concepts and then puts forward new ways of conceptualising and using them in empirical research. The chapters cover a broad range of case studies where the concepts of perezhivanie, emotions and imagination and subjective sense and subjective configuration are used to give new empirical and theoretical insights into the study of human development.
How did European imperialism shape the ideas and practices of religion in East and Southeast Asia? "Casting Faiths" brings together eleven scholars to show how Western law, governance, education and mission shaped the basic understanding of what religion is, and what role it should play in society.
This volume sheds new light on Immanuel Kant's conception of anthropology. Neither a careful and widespread search of the sources nor a merely theoretical speculation about Kant's critical path can fully reveal the necessarily wider horizon of his anthropology. This only comes to light by overcoming all traditional schemes within Kantian studies, and consequently reconsidering the traditional divisions within Kant's thought. The goal of this book is to highlight an alternative, yet complementary path followed by Kantian anthropology with regard to transcendental philosophy. The present volume intends to develop this path in order to demonstrate how irreducible it is in what concerns some crucial claims of Kant's philosophy, such as the critical defense of the unity of reason, the search for a new method in metaphysics and the moral outcome of Kant's thought. |
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