Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> Essays

-I am enthusiastically European; no informed person could seriously wish to return to the embattled, mutually antagonistic circle of suspicious and introverted nations that was the European continent in the quite recent past. But it is one thing to think an outcome desirable, quite another to suppose it is possible. It is my contention that a truly united Europe is sufficiently unlikely for it to be unwise and self-defeating to insist upon it. I am thus, I suppose, a Euro-pessimist.- --Tony Judt

One hundred years ago, most Westerners felt tremendous pride and confidence in their civilisation. They knew what it stood for, and they believed in it. Today that sense has gone. That is largely because the six principal ideas which underpinned Western confidence - those of Christianity, optimism, science, economic growth, liberalism and individualism - have suffered a century of sustained attack. These ideas no longer inspire or unite the West as they once did.

The contributors to Suicide of the West believe that, in theory, a more sophisticated synthesis of the six ideas...

Inspired by his parents' love for the written word, former Speaker of the House Jim Wright developed a passion for books and writing at a young age. During his thirty-four years as a US Congressman and two years as Speaker of the House, written communication continued to play an integral role in Wright's life as he developed an increased understanding of the power of words.
Through a sampling of some of Wright's finest work, "The Wright Stuff" follows the major elements in Wright's political career, ideological development, and philosophical thought. A prolific and accomplished...

Politics and the Emotions is a unique collection of essays that reflects the affective turn in the analysis of today's political world.

Contributed by both prominent and younger scholars from Europe, US, and Australia, the book aims to advance the debate on the relation between politics and the emotions. To do so, essays are organized around five key thematic areas: emotion, antagonism and deliberation, the politics of fear, the affective dimension of political mobilization, the politics of reparation, and politics and the triumph of the therapeutic. In addition, each chapter...

The 2008 global crisis, unemployment, lack of retirement funds, bank bailouts... today, the "economy" is on everyone's mind. But what makes this rather opaque concept work? This collection of essays seeks out the answer by exploring contemporary capitalism from a variety of theoretical perspectives and by confronting the economy as a cultural system, a theory, and a driving force of every day life in the West. The first part of the book discusses past and present representation of capitalism (from Hegel and Marx to Negri and Florida) along with their continuing impact. The second part...

This Critical Theory and Contemporary Society volume offers an original analysis of the role of the digital in today's society. It rearticulates critical theory by engaging it with the challenges of the digital revolution to show how the digital is changing the ways in which we lead our politics, societies, economies, media, and even private lives. In particular, the work examines how the enlightenment values embedded within the culture and materiality of digital technology can be used to explain the changes that are occurring across society.

Critical Theory and the Digital draws...

Politics and the Emotions is a unique collection of essays that reflects the affective turn in the analysis of today's political world.

Contributed by both prominent and younger scholars from Europe, US, and Australia, the book aims to advance the debate on the relation between politics and the emotions. To do so, essays are organized around five key thematic areas: emotion, antagonism and deliberation, the politics of fear, the affective dimension of political mobilization, the politics of reparation, and politics and the triumph of the therapeutic. In addition, each chapter...

This volume in the Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy series examines one of the most important topics in contemporary political theory: how to conceptualize the relationship between the one and the many.

The essays discuss how to reconcile multiple ontologies without subsuming them to a totalitarian unity. While one school of thought (Deleuze, Negri) seeks to create a new ontology based on the many instead of the one, (which, politically, is close to anarchy), another proposes to understand the "one" as the "ultra-one" of the event (Badiou). In this groundbreaking work,...

In an increasingly multi-religious and multi-ethnic world, identity has become something actively chosen rather than merely acquired at birth. This book essentially analyzes the resources available to make such a choice.

Looking into the world of intellectual India, this unique comparative survey focuses on the identity resources offered by India's traditions of reasoning and public debate. Arguing that identity is a formation of reason, it draws on Indian theory to claim that identities are constructed from exercises of reason as derivation from exemplary cases. The book...

In these beautiful essays, Wallace Shawn takes us on a revelatory journey in which the personal and political become one.

Whether writing about the genesis of his plays, such as Aunt Dan and Lemon; discussing how the privileged world of arts and letters takes for granted the work of the...