Political Theory Today
Edited by David Held
Polity Press - Uk - 1995
This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the central questions and debates in contemporary political thought and offers guidelines for the reformulation of political theory in the light of the philosophical and substantive problems it faces today.
The book includes discussion of the nature of political obligation; the interrelation of equality and liberty; gender; the public and the private; principles of justice and the conditions of their realization; democratic politics and the forms of representation; sovereignty, the nation-state and the international system; the role of international law; and war and the legitimate use of force.
The volume is composed of major new essays by leading scholars in political theory from Europe, Africa and the United States: John Dunn, Stephen Lukes, Susan Moller Okin, Andrew Reeve, Jon Elster, Claus Offe, Ulrich Preuss, Iain McLean, David Held, Charles Beitz, Antonio Cassese, Onora O'Neill, Samir Amin and Agnes Heller. Students and academics in political theory, and those in the social sciences concerned with contemporary political thought, will all be interested in this book.
Endgames - Questions In Late Modern Political Thought
by John Gray
Polity press - UK - 1997
In this book John Gray argues that we live in a time of endings for the ideologies that governed the modern period. The Enlightenment projects of universal emancipation animates all the political doctrines and movements that are central in contemporary western societies. Yet it does not reflect the reality of the plural world in which we live. The western cultural hegemony which the Enlightenment embodied is coming to a close. Western liberal societies are not precursors of a universal civilization, but only one form of life among many in the late modern world. Our inherited stock of political ideas no longer tracks that world. The crisis of New Right thought is as profound as that of the Left. Green theorists and communitarian thinkers have not understood the deep diversity and intractable conflicts of contemporary societies. And postmodernists, whose thought is ruled by the dated utopias of the modern period, do not engage with the real conditions of the world's emerging postmodern societies. Late modern thought occurs in an interregnum between modern projects that are no longer credible and postmodern realities that many find intolerable. John Gray suggests that some Enlightenment hopes of progress must be extinguished if we are to learn to respect cultural diversity and accept ecological limits. Respect for the Earth and for other species and cultures means abandoning the utopian and arcadian projects that haunt modern thought. We should aim to moderate the impact of human activity on the Earth while alleviating the unavoidable evils of human life. Yet the hubris which treats the Earth as an instrument of human purposes, and which regards other cultures as approximations to a universal civilization, embodies ancient and powerful traditions. John Gray's aim is to question these traditions and thereby to prepare our thinking for a time of beginnings.
The Anatomy of Antiliberalism
by Stephen Holmes
Harvard university press - USA - 1996
Liberal: spoken in a certain tone, heard more and more often lately, it summons up permissiveness, materialism, rootlessness, skepticism, relativism run rampant. How has liberalism, the grand democratic ideal, come to be a dirty word? This hook shows us what antiliberalism means in the modern world--where it comes from, whom it serves, and why it speaks with such a forceful, if everchanging, voice.
In the past, in a battle pitting one offspring of eighteenth-century rationalism against another, Marxism has been liberalism's best known and most vociferous opponent. But with the fall of communism, the voices of ethnic particularism, communitarianism, and religious fundamentalism--a tradition Holmes traces to Joseph de Maistre--have become louder in rejection of the Enlightenment, failing to distinguish between the descendants of Karl Marx and Adam Smith. Stephen Holmes uses the tools of the political theorist and the intellectual historian to expose the philosophical underpinnings of antiliberalism in its nonmarxist guise. Examining the works of some of liberalism's severest critics--including Maistre, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Alasdair Maclntyre--Holmes provides, in effect, a reader's guide to antiliberal culture, in all its colorful and often seductive, however nefarious, variety. As much a mindset as a theory, as much a sensibility as an argument, antiliberalism appears here in its diverse efforts to pit "spiritual truths" and "communal bonds" against a perceived cultural decay and moral disintegration. This corrosion of the social fabric--rather than the separation of powers, competitive elections, a free press, religious tolerance, public budgets, and judicial controls on the police--is what the antiliberal forces see as the core of liberal politics. Against this picture, Holmes outlines the classical liberal arguments most often misrepresented by the enemies of liberalism and most essential to the future of democracy.
Constructive as well as critical, this book helps us see what liberalism is and must be, and why it must and always will engender deep misgivings along with passionate commitment.
Capitalism Against Capitalism
by Michel Albert
Whurr Publishers - UK - 1993
Communism has collapsed. Capitalism has rid itself of the competition on which it thrives. But though now victorious, capitalism has become a threat. The future of us all may be shaped by the outcome of the conflict between capitalism as victor and capitalism as threat. Not only in Europe, but also in the US and Japan - and no doubt shortly in the Eastern countries too - the great debate is capitalism versus capitalism.
On the one hand is the "neo-American" model based on individual achievement and short-term profits. On the other is the Rhine model practices in Switzerland, Germany, Benelux, Northern Europe and, partly, in Japan. In the Rhine model collective achievement and public concensus are seen as the keys to long-term success.
The first is more seductive, the second more effective. These two opposing forms of capitalism are engaged in a war which, like all internal conflicts, involves both secrecy and even hypocrisy. The outcome of this struggle could affect the quality of life on all levels of society.
The author of this book aims to provide a synthesis which will force the reader to consider the political and economic issues at stake towards the end of the century.
From the Back Cover
Communism has collapsed. Capitalism has rid itself of the competition on which it thrives. But though now victorious, capitalism has become a threat. The future of us all may be shaped by the outcome of the conflict between capitalism as victor and capitalism as threat. Not only in Europe, but also in the US and Japan - and no doubt shortly in the Eastern countries too - the great debate is capitalism versus capitalism.
On the one hand is the "neo-American" model based on individual achievement and short-term profits. On the other is the Rhine model practices in Switzerland, Germany, Benelux, Northern Europe and, partly, in Japan. In the Rhine model collective achievement and public concensus are seen as the keys to long-term success.
The first is more seductive, the second more effective. These two opposing forms of capitalism are engaged in a war which, like all internal conflicts, involves both secrecy and even hypocrisy. The outcome of this struggle could affect the quality of life on all levels of society.
The author of this book aims to provide a synthesis which will force the reader to consider the political and economic issues at stake towards the end of the century.
Dimensions of radical democracy:
pluralism, citizenship, community
Edited by Chantal Mouffe
VERSO - USA - 1995
The themes of citizenship and community are today at the center of a lively debate as both Left and Right try to mobilize them for their cause. Indeed, such notions are crucial in the current attempt to redefine the project of theLeft in terms of an extension and radicalization of democracy. But, argue the contributors to this volume, these concepts need to be made compatible with the pluralism that marks modern democracy.
The English Tribe
Identity, Nation and Europe
By Stephen Haseler
ESTE EJEMPLAR PRESENTA ALGUNOS SUBRAYADOS
The English Tribe is about the crisis of nation and national identity facing the English - and the British - as we meet the challenges of the global economy and absorption into a federal Europe. It asks: what does it mean to be English - and British - at the very end of the twentieth-century? And it argues that as Britain becomes part of a federal Europe there will be no need for the centralized United Kingdom (monarchy, Westminster and Whitehall) as power is divided upwards to Brussels and downwards to the nations, regions and cities of Britain.
Table of Contents
Preface - Introduction - The Making of Englishness - An Audit of Englishness - Identity-Crisis - True Brits, Real England - A Federal Destiny - Goodbye to All That - References - Index
The Rise of Neoconservatism
Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs 1945-1994 by John Ehrman
Yale University Press - USA - 1995
A small group of neoconservatives—Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Norman Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and others—has had an influence on American politics that far outweighs their numbers. This book is the first discussion of their impact on foreign policy. John Ehrman tells how the neoconservative movement evolved out of the broad anticommunist coalition that dominated American liberalism from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. The neoconservatives continued to advance hardline anticommunism, gradually broke with what they viewed as liberalism's and the Democratic Party's dangerous turn to the left during the 1970s, and regained their influence as part of Reagan's conservative coalition during the 1980s.
John Ehrman traces the neoconservatives' shift from cold-war liberalism to conservatism, focusing on the careers and thinking of the most intellectually and politically important members—especially Moynihan, whose political and intellectual careers are here analyzed for the first time. Ehrman shows how the neoconservatives who held office under President Reagan tried to reinforce the administration's anticommunist outlook while also moving it toward a policy of actively assisting foreign governments and groups trying to develop democratic institutions of their own. Ehrman corrects many misconceptions about neoconservatives, illustrates the differences among them, and traces the consistencies in their foreign policy thinking. He also examines their successes and failures in translating their concepts into political action, and analyzes their place in both modern American liberalism and the conservative movement.
John Ehrman is assistant professorial lecturer in history at George Washington University.
On Nationality
by David Miller
Oxford Political Theory - UK 1995 -
FIRST EDITION
Hardcover
Nationalism is a dominating force in contemporary politics, but political philosophers have been markedly reluctant to discuss, let alone endorse, nationalist ideas. In this book, David Miller defends the principle of nationality, arguing that national identities are valid sources of personal identity; that we are justified in recognizing special obligations to our co-nationals; that nations have good grounds for wanting to be politically self-determining; but that recognizing the claims of nationality does not entail suppressing other sources of personal identity, such as ethnicity. Finally, he considers the claim that national identities are dissolving in the late twentieth century. This timely and provocative book offers the most compelling defense to date of nationality from a radical perspective.
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