Some philosophers hold that trust grows fragile when people become too rational. They advocate a retreat from reason and a return to local, traditional values. Others hold that truly rational people are both trusting and trustworthy. Everything hinges on what we mean by 'reason' and 'rational'. If these are understood in an egocentric, instrumental fashion, then they are indeed incompatible with trust. With the help of game theory, Martin Hollis argues against that narrow definition and in favour of a richer, deeper notion of reason founded on reciprocity and the pursuit of the common good. Within that framework he reconstructs the Enlightenment idea of citizens of the world, rationally encountering, and at the same time finding their identity in, their multiple commitments to communities both local and universal.

This thought-provoking book develops and elaborates on the artifact theory of law, covering a wide range of related theoretical and practical topics. Offering a range of perspectives that flesh out the artifact theory of law, it also introduces criticisms of previous formulations of the theory and inquires into its potential payoffs. Featuring international contributions from both noted and up-and-coming scholars in law and philosophy, the book is divided into two parts. The first part further explores and evaluates the concept of law as an artifact and analyses the background and theoretical basis of the theory. The second part comprises three sections on legal ontology, semantics and legal normativity, specifically in relation to law's artifactual nature. Providing cutting-edge insights at the intersection of law and philosophy, this book will appeal to scholars and students in philosophy of law, empirical legal studies, social ontology and the philosophy of society.

This book examines how ancient myths have developed and still survive in the collective public imagination in order to answer fundamental questions concerning the individual, society and historical heritage: On what basis do we form our opinion and develop attitudes about key issues? What is, and how should, the relationship between ourselves and nature be oriented? And what is the relationship between ourselves and others? Advancing a critical analysis of myths, Andrea Cerroni reveals the inconsistencies and consequences of our contemporary imagination, addressing neoliberalism in particular. The book elaborates a sociological theology from historical reconstruction, drawing together analytical concepts such as political theology and sociological imagination. It brings into focus a cultural matrix comprising ancient myths about nature, society and knowledge, in opposition to modern myths built around reductionism, individualism and relativism. Providing suggestions for deconstructing these myths, Contemporary Sociological Theology explores concepts of reflexive complexity, Gramscian democratic politics and a general relativisation of knowledge. Highly interdisciplinary, this book will be an insightful read for sociology and social policy scholars, for students with a particular interest in sociological theory, cultural sociology and innovation policy and for all those who seek awareness of the imagination that rules our world.

With notes and an apparatus, a new translation of Hegel's essay "Machiavelli's "The Prince" and Italy," and the first pages of "The Prince" in the original Italian

At the end of an industrious political career in conflict-riven Italy, the Florentine diplomat Niccolo Machiavelli composed his masterpiece "The Prince," a classic study of power and politics, and a manual of ruthlessness for any ambitious ruler. Controversial in his own time, the work made Machiavelli's name a byword for manipulative scheming, and had an impact on such major figures as Napoleon and Frederick the Great. It contains principles as true today as when they were first written almost five centuries ago.

This is fundamentally a text about race and antiblack racism and their subsequent production of the problem of alienation (separation) of human beings from one another, from their bodies, and from themselves, globally, but with distinct and conscious focus on the historical context of apartheid and “post”-apartheid South Africa through the psychological lens of one of the country’s first and distinguished clinical psychologists, Noel Chabani Manganyi.

The book is a philosophically critical engagement with his work, and it constitutes, as it were, part of the author’s overarching project of attempting to reclaim and retrieve hitherto overlooked, ignored and invisibilised Black thinkers of the past and present. Although Manganyi has written over 10 books, the most important and popular being Being-Black-in-the-World (1973) and Alienation and the Body in Racist Society (1977), his ideas and work have, for one reason or another, been disregarded by mainstream South African psychology, let alone philosophy. The author foregrounds philosophy as also a culprit because Manganyi himself describes his work as that of “a psychologist who thinks and conceptualises psychological reality in a phenomenological way”.

Manganyi has the distinction of being the first Black clinical psychologist trained in South Africa as the title of his latest book, Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist (2016) indicates. His body of published work reveals that from the beginning he has been involved in an attempt to contextualise his discipline, psychology, to the lived realities of his country, that is, apartheid racism and the alienation it produced on Black people. In other words, his main concern has been to utilise psychological discourse to address issues relevant to what can broadly be called “the Black lived-experience” in an antiblack racist society and their experience of the condition of alienation. As such he stood as a solitary figure whose voice was pushed to the margins of the psychological establishment, which was either silent about or complicit in the oppression of Blacks by the apartheid regime.

By exploring Manganyi’s serious concerns about apartheid racism and its attendant devastating production of alienation among Black people, the author argues that the problem of alienation produced by continuing rampant antiblack racism (even from the hands of a Black government) constitutes itself as a lingering problem of “post”-apartheid South Africa.

The author demonstrates that apartheid and alienation are not only conceptually synonymous but experientially related because what connects antiblack racism (apartheid) and alienation is the fact of our embodied existence in the world and that Black alienation manifests itself through the body. After all, antiblack racism is predicated on bodily appearance and body differences among human beings. Manganyi himself places a high premium on the body precisely because, in his view, the Black subjects have inherited a negative sociological schema of their black bodies as a result of which most of them experience themselves as somethings or objects outside of themselves, that is.

The value of revisiting Manganyi’s contribution can be underlined by reference to imperatives posed in recent incidents of antiblack racism and contemporary approaches to race and embodiment in disciplines such as philosophy (Black existentialism), psychology, sociology, cultural studies and identity politics.

This book's focus spans a wide variety of disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, political philosophy, critical race studies and post-colonialism, and therefore will be of interest to a broad cross-section of undergraduate and graduate students, scholars and activists.