Comparative political theory is at best an embryonic and marginalized endeavor. As practiced in most Western universities, the study of political theory generally involves a rehearsal of the canon of Western political thought from Plato to Marx. Only rarely are practitioners of political thought willing (and professionally encouraged) to transgress the canon and thereby the cultural boundaries of North America and Europe in the direction of genuine comparative investigation. Border Crossings presents an effort to remedy this situation, fully launching a (...) new era in political theory. Thirteen scholars from around the world examine the various political traditions of West, South, and East Asia and engage in a reflective cross-cultural discussion that belies the assumptions of an Asian "essence" and of an unbridgeable gulf between West and non-West. The denial of essential differences does not, however, amount to an endorsement of essential sameness. As viewed and as practiced by contributors to this ground-breaking volume, comparative political theorizing must steer a course between uniformity and radical separation--this is the path of "border crossings.". (shrink)

José Ortega y Gasset not only expressed his views on subjects such as art or mass culture but he was also one of the promoters and founders of a United Europe which he considered a cultural unity. However, his view on the proper functioning of multicultural societies was as skeptical as his attitude towards the possibility of constructing an unified world that could be based on cultural coexistence of the Western World societies.

In ‘Listening to Music Together’, Nick Zangwill offers three arguments which aim to establish that listening to music can never be a joint activity. If any of these arguments were sound, then our experiences of music, qua object of aesthetic attention, would be essentially private. In this paper, I argue that Zangwill’s arguments are unsound and I develop an account of shared musical experience that defends three main conclusions. First, joint listening is not merely possible but a common feature of (...) our socially situated experiences of music. Second, when listening with others our experience of the music and our sense of community with our fellow listeners often reciprocally enhance one another. Third, how deeply and intimately we share a musical experience with others depends upon such factors as our respective backgrounds, interests, and levels of expertise. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the ways in which human bodies, payback, and comestibility become inescapably entangled in cultures in which honor is the prevailing virtue. Shakespeare was deeply sensitive to the social and psychological processes through which these concepts become entwined when honor is at stake—to the ways in which, as a means of corrective response, men who transgress a code of honor can be rightly reduced to their bodies, similar to how those who are not allowed to be (...) full participants in an honor culture (most particularly women) always already are. I begin by examining Shakespeare’s earliest depictions of honor cultures in Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece, and then briefly discusses how the ideas they trade in are further developed and complicated later in his career, focusing specifically on Othello. -/- . (shrink)

Introduction : the politics of our selves -- Foucault, subjectivity, and the enlightenment : a critical reappraisal -- The impurity of practical reason : power and autonomy in Foucault -- Dependency, subordination, and recognition : Butler on subjection -- Empowering the lifeworld? autonomy and power in Habermas -- Contextualizing critical theory -- Engendering critical theory.

Studies the politics of Heidegger in terms of "thrownness" or "existential contingency". Attempts to think through Heidegger's philosophy in a manner that parallels his own dialogue with other key western thinkers.

Why do political philosophers shy away from politics? Glen Newey offers a challenging and original critique of liberalism, the dominant political philosophy of our time, tackling such key issues as state legitimacy, value-pluralism, neutrality, the nature of politics, public reason, and morality in politics. Analyzing major liberal theorists, Newey argues that liberalism bypasses politics because it ignores or misunderstands human motivation, and elevates academic systembuilding over political realities of conflict and power.

In _Locating Politics in Ethiopia's Irreecha Ritual_ Serawit Bekele Debele gives an account of politics and political processes in Ethiopia as manifested in Irreecha celebrations over the years.

Anyone interested in the philosophy of music, especially popular music, should be familiar with Cristyn Magnus, P.D. Magnus, and Christy Mag Uidhir’s contempora.

In Part 1 of this wide-ranging interview Heikki Patomäki discusses his early work and career up to the Global Financial Crisis. He provides comment on his role as a public intellectual and activist, his diverse academic interests and influences, and the many and varied ways he has contributed to critical realism and critical realism has influenced his work. In Part 2 he discusses his later work, the predicament of humanity and the role of futures studies.

_In _Evidence, Politics, and Education Policy_, political scientists Lorraine M. McDonnell and M. Stephen Weatherford provide an original analysis of evidence use in education policymaking to help scholars and advocates shape policy more effectively._ The book shows how multiple types of evidence are combined as elected officials and their staffs work with researchers, advocates, policy entrepreneurs, and intermediary organizations to develop, create, and implement education policies. _Evidence, Politics, and Education Policy_ offers an in-depth understanding of the political environment (...) in which evidence is solicited and used. Two key case studies inform the book’s findings. The primary case—a major, multimethod study—examines the development and early implementation of the Common Core State Standards at the national level and in four states: California, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Tennessee. A comparative case analyzes the evidence used in Congressional hearings over the twenty-year history of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Together, the two cases illustrate the conditions under which different types of evidence are used and, in particular, how federalism, the complexity of the policy problem, and the policy’s maturity shape evidence use. McDonnell and Weatherford focus on three leverage points for strengthening the use of research evidence in education policy: integrating research findings with value-based policy ideas; designing policies with incentives for research use built into their rules and organizational structures; and training policy analysts to promote the use of research in policymaking venues. (shrink)

In this paper I unpack a realistic conception of politics by tightly defining its constitutive features: conflict and order. A conflict emerges when an actor is disposed to impose his/her views against the resistance of others. Conflicts are more problematic than moralists realize because they emerge unilaterally, are potentially violent, impermeable to content-based reason, and unavoidable. Order is then defined as an institutional framework that provides binding collective decisions. Order is deemed necessary because individuals need to cooperate to survive, (...) but groups cannot spontaneously secure collective decisions and are prone to conflicts. Particularly, the fact that potentially violent conflicts emerge unilaterally means that order requires coercion. I conclude that mischaracterizing conflict and order leads to undesirable normative principles, and that this criticism can be leveraged not only against Rawlsian liberals who moralize conflicts away, but also against some agonists who underestimate the need for order and some communitarians who underplay both circumstances. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Genevieve Lloyd argues that when we follow Spinoza in understanding reason as a part of nature, we gain new insights into the human condition. Specifically, we gain a new political insight: we should respond to cultural difference with a pluralist ethos. This is because there is no pure universal reason; human minds find their reason shaped differently by their various embodied social contexts. Furthermore, we can use the resources of the imagination to bring this ethos about. In my response, (...) I offer a friendly challenge to Lloyd’s characterisation of the lessons of Spinoza’s philosophy. I argue that Lloyd’s Spinoza remains excessively unpolitical, even in the moment that he is brought to bear on contemporary politics. An unpluralistic attitude may well be rationally inferior, but is it really explained by insufficient or inappropriate imagination? To the contrary, a properly Spinozist account of reason must include an account of the concrete determinants of reason’s imperfect realisation in the world. In Spinoza’s own oeuvre, this is carried out through an ever-increasing—and ever more sociological—interest in the political structures within which individual reason flourishes or withers. (shrink)

Pepper Culpepper’s seminal Quiet Politics and Business Power has revitalized the study of when business elites can shape policies away from public scrutiny. This article takes the concept of quiet politics to a new, and surprising, set of actors: trade union leaders. Focusing on the case of Denmark, it argues that quiet politics functions through political elite networks and that this way of doing politics favors a particular kind of corporatist coordination between the state, capital, and (...) labor. Rather than showing macrocorporatist coordination between the two classes and governments, it identifies representatives of business and labor that hold privileged positions in political elite networks. Representatives of segments are found in industries important for the Danish economy, specifically, the exporting manufacturing sector. Being at the core of the network requires not only a key position in the Danish economy but also an understanding that politics is often done best without politicians and voters. The analysis shows that trade union and business association representatives work closely on a wide number of issues through quiet politics, using their extensive network to broker and foster agreement between different stakeholders. (shrink)

Feminist thinkers have long criticized liberal theory’s public/private distinction for perpetuating indifference to injustices within the family. Thinkers such as Susan Okin have extended this criticism in evaluating the theory of political liberalism, suggesting that this theory’s reliance on a public conception of citizenship renders it indifferent to the way in which the internal politics of the family can undermine equality.However, I argue in this article that the feminist concern to ensure equality within the domestic sphere can in fact (...) be incorporated into a reconstructed account of political liberalism. Central to my strong public reconstruction is the principle of publicly justifiable privacy, according to which the public/private distinction itselfmust be formulated with reference to the values of free and equal citizenship. On my account, the public values of citizenship should figure prominently in evaluations of family life. This reformulation of the public/private distinction answers feminist critics who suggest that political liberalism fails to offer a politics of the personal. (shrink)

In 1784, the German newspaper Berlinische Monatsschrift asked its audience to reply to the question "What is Enlightenment?" Immanuel Kant took the opportunity to investigate the purported truths and assumptions of his age. Two hundred years later, Michel Foucault wrote a response to Kant's initial essay, positioning Kant as the initiator of the discourse and critique of modernity. The Politics of Truth takes this initial encounter between Foucault and Kant, as a framework for its selection of unpublished essays and (...) transcripts of lectures Foucault gave in America and France between 1978 and 1984, the year of his death. Ranging from reflections on the Enlightenment and revolution to a consideration of the Frankfurt School, this collection offers insight into the topics preoccupying Foucault as he worked on what would be his last body of published work, the three-volume History of Sexuality. It also offers what is in a sense the most "American" moment of Foucault's thinking, for it was in America that he realized the necessity of tying his own thought to that of the Frankfurt School. (shrink)

The commentary raises political questions about the ways in which data has been constituted as an object vested with certain powers, influence, and rationalities. We place the emergence and transformation of professional practices such as ‘data science’, ‘data journalism’, ‘data brokerage’, ‘data mining’, ‘data storage’, and ‘data analysis’ as part of the reconfiguration of a series of fields of power and knowledge in the public and private accumulation of data. Data politics asks questions about the ways in which data (...) has become such an object of power and explores how to critically intervene in its deployment as an object of knowledge. It is concerned with the conditions of possibility of data that involve things, language, and people that together create new worlds. We define ‘data politics’ as both the articulation of political questions about these worlds and the ways in which they provoke subjects to govern themselves and others by making rights claims. We contend that without understanding these conditions of possibility – of worlds, subjects and rights – it would be difficult to intervene in or shape data politics if by that it is meant the transformation of data subjects into data citizens. (shrink)

What is behind the upsurge of virulent nationalism and intransigent politics across the globe today? In Fear of Breakdown, Noëlle McAfee contends that politics needs something that only psychoanalysis has been able to offer: an understanding of how to work through anxieties, ambiguity, fragility, and loss.

Discussion of ecological restoration in environmental ethics has tended to center on issues about the nature and character of the values that may or may not be produced by restored landscapes. In this paper we shift the philosophical discussion to another set of issues: the social and political context in which restorations are performed. We offer first an evaluation of the political issues in the practice of restoration in general and second an assessment of the political context into which restoration (...) is moving. The former focuses on the inherent participatory capacity at the heart of restoration; the latter is concerned with the commodified (primarily in the United States) and nationalized (primarily in Canada) uses to which restoration is being put. By comparing these two areas of inquiry we provide a foundation for a critical assessment of the politics of restoration based on the politics in restoration. (shrink)

Current radical democratic politics is characterized by new participatory spaces for citizens’ engagement, which aim at facilitating the democratic ideals of freedom and equality. These spaces are, however, situated in the context of deep societal inequalities. Modes of discrimination are carried over into participatory interaction. The democratic subject is judged by its physically embodied appearance, which replicates external hierarchies and impedes the freedom of self-expression. To tackle this problem, this article seeks to identify ways to increase the freedom of (...) the subject to explore its multiple self. Understanding the self as inherently fugitive, the article investigates participatory, deliberative and agonistic concepts of self-transformation. As all of them appear limited, it introduces a transformative perspective in democratic thought. Enriching the transformative perspective with queer and gender theory, the article generates the concept of a politics of becoming, which, through radical democratic practices of disidentification, advances the freedom of the subject to change. (shrink)

We contribute to the scientific debate by studying the storylines, discourses and related normative judgments in parliamentary motions by private members of the Swedish parliament from the time period 2010–2019. The paper makes use of an ecofeminist theoretical framework to problematize these storylines, discourses and normative judgments. We conclude that the focus in the material is on economic and technical issues, while issues of justice play a marginal role. None of the important dimensions of energy justice are adequately considered and (...) many of the dominant storylines and discourses are based on the implicit assumption that issues of justice are insignificant. (shrink)

This article analyses some of the governmental issues at stake in contemporary institutional politics in its confrontation with the challenges of digitalisation. Through notions such as algorithmic governmentality (Rouvroy and Berns), platformisation (Bratton, Stiegler), extractivism, and the affect theory (Massumi), and following a symptomatologic method, we will try to establish and discuss some key points that could be useful in order to update certain concepts regarding micro- and biopolitics (Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault), the public sphere, and the management of (...) social and individual bodies. Finally, we will try to understand how the manipulation of affects via the staging of possible catastrophic futures (Parisi) is used as a powerful neurosensory weapon, with performative effects for governing and modelling behaviours. If contemporary capitalism is capable of abstracting and extracting affects, of accumulating them and of creating value through this, which policies should we apply in this situation of uncertainty and of the manipulation of affectivity? Is there any place left for public institutions, or is the market the sole political actor left? (shrink)

The purpose of this research is to investigate the masculinity politics of the ex-gay movement, a loose-knit network of religious, scientific, and political organizations that advocates change for homosexuals. Guided by Risman's gender structure theory, the authors analyze the individual, interactional, and institutional dimensions of gender in ex-gay discourses. The authors employ critical discourse analysis of representative ex-gay texts to deconstruct the movement's gender ideology and to discuss the social implications of its masculinity politics. They argue that gender (...) is one of the ex-gay movement's most potent social movement resources, enabling it to consolidate power by enlisting new populations and to globalize by adapting to cultural contexts beyond the United States. The authors conclude that the ex-gay movement is an antigay countermovement and an antifeminist Christian Right men's movement. (shrink)

Argues that the planetary crisis, which has been produced by modernity, demands a postmodern politics.

Over recent years, science and technology have been reassessed increasingly in ethical terms. Particularly for life science governance, ethics has become the dominant discourse. In the course of this ‘‘ethical turn’’ national ethics councils were set up throughout Europe and in the United States to advice politics in ethically controversial issues such as stem cell research and genetic testing. Ethics experts have become subject to traditional warnings against expertocracy: they are suspected to unduly influence political decision-making. However, any reliable (...) ethics expertise has to reflect societal disagreements in moral issues. Therefore, expert dissent is a normal feature of legitimate ethics expertise. Based on theoretical considerations we argue that in principle, expert dissent does not cause problems for political legitimacy; rather, it enhances the salience of politics: obviously decisions on ethical issues cannot be taken on the basis of expert knowledge alone. We therefore conclude that expert dissent, not consent, supports politics. Focussing on Germany and Austria, we show how politics deal with expert dissent in practice. While in Germany politics acknowledge dissent and use it to foster a fundamental political debate, Austrian politics attribute authoritative power to ethics expertise and try to construct an overall consensus. This illustrates how the drawing of boundaries between politic and expertise differs. (shrink)

Over the last two decades our understanding of the relationship of gender, politics and the state has been transformed almost beyond recognition by the mutual interrogation of feminism and political science. This volume provides an overview of this dynamic and growing field, which reflects both its expanding empirical scope and the accompanying theoretical development and debate. The first three essays focus primarily on conceptual and theoretical issues: the meaning of 'gender'; the state's role in the construction of gender within (...) the public and private sphere; and the political representation of gender differences within liberal democracy. The remaining six provide analyses of more concrete issues of state policy and participation in differeing national political contexts: abortion politics in Ireland; the local politics of prostitution in Britain, the impact on women's political participation of economic change in China, Latin America and political change in Russia, and the gender impact of state programmes of land reform. (shrink)

This book offers a radical reformulation of the pluralist position in 'English School' theory, providing an account of world politics that is normatively progressive and rooted in the significance of multiple community membership to human lives.

An encyclopedia entry providing an overview of the philosophical issues entailed in the theory and practice of "identity politics." Open access and online. Regularly updated.

The notion that management knowledge is universal, culture-neutral, readily transferable to any country or situation, has come under mounting challenge. The Politics of Management Knowledge goes beyond such `broad-brush' assertions to explore in detail the relations between management knowledge, power and practice in a world where globalization highlights, rather than obscures, the locally specific character of many management recipes. The book recognizes the political nature of management knowledge as a discourse produced from, and reproducing, power processes within and between (...) organizations. This theme underpins discussion of the ways in which management ideas and practices `produce' managers of a particular kind. (shrink)

While we should acknowledge the blessings that genetic knowledge, and the biotechnologies it makes possible, have delivered or will deliver soon, there are urgent worries to consider. The first worry is that we may compromise, or further compromise, in both science and politics, the principle that every human being, irrespective of age, size, mental or physical condition, stage of development, or condition of dependency, possesses inherent worth and dignity and a right to life. The second worry, closely related, is (...) that many people are coming to view procreation as akin to manufacture. They also regard children not as gifts to be cherished and loved even when "imperfect," but rather as products that may legitimately be subjected to standards of quality control and discarded or killed in the embryonic, fetal, and even infant stages if they do not measure up. The glory of our political tradition is its affirmation of the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of all human beings. The history of our politics and social practice, our law and economics, and even our medicine is in significant measure the struggle to live up to the demands of this affirmation. What we need is fidelity to the principles of human equality and dignity that have always served us well when we have had the wisdom and fortitude to honor them. (shrink)

In Mabādi’ ārā’ ahl al-madīna al-fādila as well as other major political writings of al-Fārābī, politics is accompanied by metaphysics. However, the co-existence of politics and Neoplatonic metaphysics in al-Fārābī is usually refuted on the basis of two major arguments: one, the Neoplatonic argument, which denies al-Fārābī’s politics; and two, the Straussian argument, which denies al-Fārābī’s Neoplatonic metaphysics. However, this article would show that the two arguments against the co-existence of politics and Neoplatonic metaphysics in al-Fārābī (...) are faulty, and that politics and Neoplatonic metaphysics certainly co-exist in al-Fārābī’s philosophical thought. It would be shown that, in fact, Neoplatonic metaphysics plays an important role in al-Fārābī’s politics and distinguishes his theory of the virtuous city from that of Plato’s Republic. (shrink)

In his essay ‘Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin subjects violence to a critique in order to establish the criterion for violence itself as a principle. His starting point is the distinction between law-positing and law-preserving violence. However, these are for him inseparable and subjected to the law of historical change: the history of the law is nothing but the dialectical rising and falling of legal orders. Benjamin’s analysis of legal violence and his criticism of parliamentary democracies, this article advances, should (...) be related to the critical analysis of the possibilities for alternative politics in contemporary democratic rule of law states, as those advanced by Bernard Noël, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière. For Benjamin, it is only law-destroying divine violence, whose principle is justice, not power, that is able to break this circle and open up a new era. Divine violence is, however, not only a provocative but also an extremely problematic, even dangerous, concept, as Jacques Derrida, among others, has claimed. This article considers, therefore, whether the concept of divine violence has any real political relevance in the contemporary era. (shrink)