This second volume continues the story told in the first by focusing on the writings of a selection of seminal thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in England, the German speaking world and in France, ending with the debate around the French Revolution of 1789. Tony Burns discusses the work of Thomas Hobbes, John Selden, Sir Matthew Hale, John Locke, Samuel Clarke, Johannes Althusius, Samuel Pufendorf, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Jean Barbeyrac, the anonymous author of Militaire...
Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (The University Center for Human Values, #39)
by Michael Ignatieff
Michael Ignatieff draws on his extensive experience as a writer and commentator on world affairs to present a penetrating account of the successes, failures, and prospects of the human rights revolution. Since the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, this revolution has brought the world moral progress and broken the nation-state's monopoly on the conduct of international affairs. But it has also faced challenges. Ignatieff argues that human rights activists...
This book is a philosophers' attempt to bring together ideas put forward by economists, sociologists and political theorists. The author begins by exploring the economist's assumption that action is rational if it helps to achieve the agent's goals as efficiently as possible. The assumption is explored with the aid of rational-choice theory and game-theory, but it is rejected in the end for failing to account for the elements of trust and morality which rational social life requires. A discussio...
Hobbes's Behemoth
Hobbes's Behemoth has always been overshadowed by his more famous Leviathan, which is arguably his masterpiece and is one of the greatest works of political philosophy. Behemoth, Hobbes's "booke of the Civill Warr," on the other hand, is most often seen as little more than a history of the English Civil War and Interregnum. This volume contains analyses and interpretations of the Behemoth: the structure of its argument, its relation to Hobbes's other writings, and its place in its philosophical,...
Social Contract Theories (Studies in Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy)
by Vicente Medina
This book provides a clear exposition and succinct assessment of the outstanding representatives of the contractarian tradition-such as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls-and anti-contractarian arguments advanced by conservatives such as Hume and Hegel, and liberals such as T.H. Green.
Building upon his previous books about Marx, Hayek, and Rand, Total Freedom completes what Lingua Franca has called Sciabarra's "epic scholarly quest" to reclaim dialectics, usually associated with the Marxian left, as a methodology that can revivify libertarian thought. Part One surveys the history of dialectics from the ancient Greeks through the Austrian school of economics. Part Two investigates in detail the work of Murray Rothbard as a leading modern libertarian, in whose thought Sciabarra...
Performing Antagonism (Performance Philosophy)
This book combines performance analysis with contemporary political philosophy to advance new ways of understanding both political performance and the performativity of the politics of the street. Our times are pre-eminently political times and have drawn radical responses from many theatre and performance practitioners. However, a decade of conflict in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the eruption of new social movements around the world, the growth of anti-capitalist and anti-globalisat...
"By one of the 20th century's great psychological and social thinkers, a pocket-sized collection on the importance of disobedience and the authentic voice of the individual"--
Mario Tronti was the principal theorist of the radical political movement of the 1960s known in Italy as operaismo and in the Anglophone world as Italian workerism, a current which went on to inform the development of autonomist Marxism. His "Copernican revolution"-the proposal that working class struggles against exploitation propel capitalist development, which can only be understood as a reaction that seeks to harness this antagonism-has inspired dissident leftists around the world. Tronti's...
This comparative study of Defoe's and Swift's treatments of liberty embraces what seemed the most significant parts of their vast, multifaceted oeuvres, both non-fictional and fictional. Defoe's and Swift's positions with regard to the English constitution and liberties are assessed here through a close examination of their views on contemporary religious and political issues. Moreover, their involvement in the debates on the liberties and constitutions of Scotland and Ireland, respectively, cou...
The Justice of War: Its Foundations in Ethics and Natural Law puts normative ethical theory at the forefront in its discussion of the justice of war. Situating the modern theory of just war in its historical context, Richard A. S. Hall gives full attention to natural law, a mainstay of just war theory. Hall considers the American philosopher Josiah Royce’s implicit theory of just war with its suggestion of a fourth component of just war theory (in addition to jus ad bellum and jus in bello), na...
The Business of Consumption
In this important book, a host of noted environmentalists and business ethicists examine ethical issues in consumption from the points of view of environmental sustainability, economic development, and free enterprise. These issues are at the forefront of international concerns about global legislation and regulation. The contributors challenge the reader to think carefully about how environmental sustainability, global economic development, and free enterprise might or might not be compatible v...
How ideas such as civilization and progress have been used as a smoke screen for Western dominance, by the world-renowned sociologist Ever since the Enlightenment, Western intervention around the world has been justified by appeals to notions of civilization, development, and progress. The assumption has been that such ideas are universal, encrusted in natural law. But, as Immanuel Wallerstein argues in this short and elegant philippic, these concepts are, in fact, not global. Rather, their g...
Abolishing Boundaries (SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture)
by Peter Zarrow
Anerkennung ist einer der bedeutendsten philosophischen Begriffe uberhaupt. Es kann behauptet werden, dass heutzutage ein Paradigmawechsel von der Kategorie der Gerechtigkeit zur Kategorie der Anerkennung stattfindet. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht Hegels Begriff der Anerkennung in drei Texten aus seiner Jenaer Zeit, namlich dem System der Sittlichkeit (1802-03), der Jenaer Realphilosophie (1805-06) - heutzutage bekannt als "Systementwurf III" - und der Phanomenologie des Geistes (1807), in l...
Theory as Critique: Essays on Capital (Historical Materialism Book)
by Paul Mattick
For the Love of Words (Idiom Inventing Writing Theory)
In this volume thirteen scholars of literature and philosophy take up the challenge presented by Werner Hamacher's 95 Theses on Philology. At the close, he responds to them. It might seem unlikely at first that his brief initial publication on such a venerable scholarly discipline as philology should be heard as an unmistakable challenge, issued to us students and teachers of language and literature today, calling attention to the institutional constraints that bear on our work now and to the da...
Universities in the Service of Truth and Utility
This book offers an introduction to liberal political philosophy, adopting an analytical form of presentation. I consider arguments which inform contemporary debates; by articulating paradigmatic ways of thinking and reviewing competing conceptions of justice and democracy, I hope to present a characterisation of contemporary liberal thought which allows the reader to gauge its potentiality and relevance, and to comprehend in a systematic way some of the many disagreements between liberal writer...