Raymond Geuss is one of the most inventive and distinctive voices
in contemporary political philosophy and a trenchant critic of the
field's dominant assumptions. In Reality and Its Dreams, he
challenges the "normative turn" in political philosophy-the idea
that the right approach to politics is to start from thinking
abstractly about our own normative views and then, when they have
been clarified and systematized, apply them to judging political
structures, decisions, and events. Rather, the study of politics
should be focused on the sphere of real politics, not least because
normative judgments always arise from concrete historical
configurations of power, including ideological power. It is
possible to do this without succumbing to a numbing or toxic form
of relativism or abandoning utopianism, although utopianism needs
to be reunderstood. The utopian impulse is not an attempt to
describe a perfect society but an impulse to think the impossible
in politics, to articulate deep-seated desires that cannot be
realized under current conditions, and to imagine how conditions
that seem invariant can be changed. Geuss ranges widely across
philosophy, literature, and art, exploring past and present ideas
about such subjects as envy, love, satire, and evil and the work of
figures as diverse as John Rawls, St. Augustine, Rabelais, and
Russell Brand. His essays provide a bracing critique of ideas, too
often unexamined, that shape and misshape our intellectual and
political worlds.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!