Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> Political

The authors of this ambitious book address a fundamental political question: why are leaders who produce peace and prosperity turned out of office while those who preside over corruption, war, and misery endure? Considering this political puzzle, they also answer the related economic question of why some countries experience successful economic development and others do not. The authors construct a provocative theory on the selection of leaders and present specific formal models from which their central claims can be deduced. They show how political leaders allocate resources and how...

Kelvin Knight concludes The MacIntyre Reader with a clear, concise, and insightful overview of the development of MacIntyre's central ideas and how they have developed in his writings....

Realizing that a world remade by techno-science and global capital stands in great need of practical wisdom as an antidote to various forms of modern hubris, scholars across the human sciences have taken a renewed interest in exploring how the classical virtue of prudence can be reformulated as a guide for postmodern practice.

This volume brings together scholars in classics, political philosophy, and rhetoric to analyze prudence as a distinctive and vital form of political intelligence. Through case studies from each of the major periods in the history of prudence, the authors...

Debates over postmodernism, analyses of knowledge and power, and the recurring issue of Heidegger's Nazism have all deepened questions about the relation between philosophy and the social roles of intellectuals. Against such postmodernist rejections of philosophical theory as mounted by Rorty and Lyotard, Richard Peterson argues that precisely reflection on rationality, in appropriate social terms, is needed to confront urgent political issues about intellectuals. After presenting a conception of intellectual mediation set within the modern division of labor, he offers an account of...

The study of the effects of context--defined here as a geographically bounded social unit--on individuals is a new and rapidly developing field. This unique volume reviews this development both quantitatively and qualitatively, examines how and why individual political behavior can be influenced by various contextual characteristics of the locality in which the individual resides, and proposes a conceptual framework to guide future research. A separate chapter is devoted to exploring methodological problems unique to this field of study. This is the first study to integrate and synthesize...

Pluralist democratic systems, according to Philipe Braud, do not do what they claim to do, but rather, serve to channel, diffuse, or reconcile society's conflicts. As one reviewer of the original French edition notes, the book can be seen as part of a long tradition in European political thought that sees democracy as a front for capitalism.

Braud asserts that pluralist democracy is credible only because of the complete failure of communism. There is no government by the people; the rule of law is a tautology. What fundamental changes occur happen because of the forces of economics,...

There is a crisis in America revolving around social and political life, and the contributors to this essay collection believe it has provoked a renewed attention to the issue of community in political thought. The 14 essays approach the question of community and political thought from a variety of perspectives, ranging from political philosophy to social theory. All the essays, however, share the concern of the opening essay by Hertzke and McRorie about moral ecology, or determining what is required for a vital and free social and political life and preserving it from erosion by...

Hoy establishes a basis for a naturalistic political theory that can be sustained as a continuity from Aristotle through the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment contributions of David Hume, John Dewey, Evolutionary Biology, and Deep Ecology.

This entails several contentions. First he argues that the contemporary relevance of Aristotelian naturalism can be defended within the context of a pragmatic realism without recourse to a no-longer-tenable metaphysical biology. Second, he calls for an emphasis on a historicized nature--the human capacities for language, sociality, and habituation...

This book brings to a culmination in later modern times the long and complicated history of ideas on sovereignty and the state that has occupied previous volumes in this series. The 19th and 20th centuries have witnessed the fruition of the legislative state "par excellence" as well as its companion concept, legislative sovereignty. This book tackles the ideas of numerous writers such as Bentham, Austin, Hegel, Marx, Savigny, Kelsen, Lenin, Bosanquet, Rawls, Hart, to mention a few, along with the views of many leaders like Gladstone, Lloyd George, Napoleon III, Bismarck, Cavour, Hitler,...

After critiquing chaos, catastrophe, and complexity theories, showing their limitations in the contemporary era, Rich furthers the development of crisis theory and applies the crisis theory approach to biological and social evolution. Treating evolution in the context of crisis theory, he shows that as evolution is both genetic and social, social evolution is an extension of biological evolution. As physical evolution results from problem solving, social evolution develops from the solving of historically significant problems, bringing about, for instance, the post-World War II era of...