Discusses how cultural and economic changes around the world have caused a shift in the concepts that shape modern politics and defined the new global order.

In an exciting study of ideas accompanying the rise of the West, Thomas McCarthy analyzes the ideologies of race and empire that were integral to European-American expansion. He highlights the central role that conceptions of human development played in answering challenges to legitimacy through a hierarchical ordering of difference. Focusing on Kant and natural history in the eighteenth century, Mill and social Darwinism in the nineteenth, and theories of development and modernization in the twentieth, he proposes a critical theory (...) of development which can counter contemporary neoracism and neoimperialism, and can accommodate the multiple modernities now taking shape. Offering an unusual perspective on the past and present of our globalizing world, this book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of philosophy, political theory, the history of ideas, racial and ethnic studies, social theory, and cultural studies. (shrink)

With incisiveness and lucid style, Dworkin has written a masterful explanation of how the Anglo-American legal system works and on what principles it is grounded. Law’s Empire is a full-length presentation of his theory of law that will be studied and debated for years to come.

This essay brings together political theories of empire and racial capitalism to clarify the entanglements between socialist and imperial discourse at the turn of the twentieth century. I show that white labor activists and intellectuals in the United States and the British settler colonies borrowed from imperial scripts to mark non-white workers as a threat. This discourse was thus both imperial and popular, because it absorbed the white working class into settler projects and enlisted its support in defense of (...) imperial logics of labor control. While white workers’ demands of enfranchisement were part of a transnational imagination that was both imperial and narrowly emancipatory, this discourse reemerged as one of popular sovereignty and found channels and paths to institutionalization through national states. These institutional formations arose out of the encounter between capitalists interested in facilitating mobility of racialized laboring subjects around the globe, elite projects invested in sheltering settler spaces, and white workers concerned with protecting their own labor from competition by excluding exploitable non-white workers. White labor’s embrace of racial prejudice and the exclusion of workers of color created segregated labor spaces that fit neatly with both capitalist goals of labor control and the protection of the settler status of emerging polities. Bringing to the forefront the imperial genealogy of popular sovereignty and immigration control disrupts liberal political theory frameworks that condemn restrictions as well as those that find migration restrictions permissible. The analysis also illuminates contemporary immigration politics. (shrink)

Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this important new account of decolonization reveals the (...) full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world. Adom Getachew shows that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were not solely or even primarily nation-builders. Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality, dramatized by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers and politicians challenged international racial hierarchy and articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to transcend legal, political, and economic hierarchies by securing a right to self-determination within the newly founded United Nations, constituting regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and creating the New International Economic Order. Using archival sources from Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, Worldmaking after Empire recasts the history of decolonization, reconsiders the failure of anticolonial nationalism, and offers a new perspective on debates about today’s international order. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is not to define empire for all purposes, but to examine the most plausible and, arguably, influential arguments for a new imperial policy, chiefly in the realms of political and military power.

This essay examines the sanitary policies for the protection of overseas communities that Italian fascism employed during the empire. From 1935–1936, the vast scale of the Ethiopian campaign, as well as intensive colonisation programmes, gave new political visibility to the issue of safeguarding Italian settlers from the risks of the tropical climate. In this period, the problem of how Italians could adapt to overseas environments moved beyond the boundaries of scientific discussion to become a major concern of colonial rule. (...) Analysing both the medical literature and archival sources, this essay examines the concepts and practices that underpinned the fascist project for the “reclamation” of the empire: from the intensification of hygienic propaganda, to the redefinition of the medical-geographical boundaries of tropical risk, and to the expansion of social security benefits, which were extended to harms caused by tropical diseases. Finally, it investigates how the notion of acclimatisation was transformed within the context of the regime's imperial ideology, showing how the conception of the tropics as a pathogenic space remained widespread, fuelled by the regime's organicistic vision and its concerns for upholding the racial prestige of Italians in the colony. (shrink)

An outgrowth of Dosse's History of Structuralism, Empire of Meaning is an extended encounter with some of the most influential French intellectuals.

Place-based education is founded on the idea that the student’s local community is one of their primary learning resources. Place-based education’s underlying educational principle is that students need to first have an experiential understanding of the history, culture, and ecology of the environment in which they are situated before tackling broader national and global issues. Such attempts are a step in the right direction in dealing with controversial issues in a democracy by providing resources for synthesising curriculum though theory (curriculum (...) content, including traditional subjects) and practice (practical learning as experiential education). Nevertheless, many place-based accounts discount Indigenous conceptions of place, which are integral to Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing, especially in relation to the ontological relationship to Land and Country. Indigenous philosophy has the potential to inform what place-based education means by students developing a ‘sense of place’ when engaging with local communities as their ‘own’ place. In this article we re-imagine the community of inquiry as a place-responsive pedagogy by learning from Indigenous philosophy, and recentring Indigenous notions of place in experiential learning. In addition to exploring the pedagogical potential of a place-responsive account of the community of inquiry, we look to the implications for teacher preparation. (shrink)

A dramatic shift in British and French ideas about empire unfolded in the sixty years straddling the turn of the nineteenth century. As Jennifer Pitts shows in A Turn to Empire, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Jeremy Bentham were among many at the start of this period to criticize European empires as unjust as well as politically and economically disastrous for the conquering nations. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the most prominent British and French liberal thinkers, including John (...) Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, vigorously supported the conquest of non-European peoples. Pitts explains that this reflected a rise in civilizational self-confidence, as theories of human progress became more triumphalist, less nuanced, and less tolerant of cultural difference. At the same time, imperial expansion abroad came to be seen as a political project that might assist the emergence of stable liberal democracies within Europe. Pitts shows that liberal thinkers usually celebrated for respecting not only human equality and liberty but also pluralism supported an inegalitarian and decidedly nonhumanitarian international politics. Yet such moments represent not a necessary feature of liberal thought but a striking departure from views shared by precisely those late-eighteenth-century thinkers whom Mill and Tocqueville saw as their forebears. Fluently written, A Turn to Empire offers a novel assessment of modern political thought and international justice, and an illuminating perspective on continuing debates over empire, intervention, and liberal political commitments. (shrink)

This essay reconsiders David Hume’s thinking on the fate of the British Empire and the future of established religion. It provides a detailed reconstruction of the development of Hume’s views on Britain’s successive attempts to impose or regain its authority over its North American colonies and compares these views with the stance taken during the American Crisis by Adam Smith and Josiah Tucker. Fresh light is shed on this area of Hume’s later political thought by a new letter, appended (...) to the essay, which at the same time provides an illuminating glimpse of his abiding preoccupation with the future of established religion. It is argued that this evidence of Hume’s privately held views belies the notion that his thinking on political and religious matters was fundamentally opposed to that of his friends among the philosophes. It is consequently misleading to regard Hume as an opponent of the more radical wing of the Enlightenment. (shrink)

Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works roots the danger of undermining propaganda in an ideology based account of politics, treating individuals’ beliefs and social belief systems as the primary target and mechanism of undermining propaganda. In this paper I suggest a theoretical alternative to the role ideology plays in Stanley’s theory and theories like it, which I call practice first. A practice first account instead treats public behavior as the primary target of propaganda, and analyzes undermining propaganda as altering the incentive (...) structure that sets the terms for public behavior. (shrink)

Shedding light on a fundamental tension in liberal theory, Liberalism and Empire reaches beyond post-colonial studies to revise our conception of the grand liberal tradition and the conception of experience with which it is associated.

In the final section of their work Empire, Hardt and Negri discuss the coming into being of the multitude, the unified force that overthrows the system of ‘Empire’. Absent from the account of this unification of the multitude is the influence of religion. I endeavor to show that contrary to Hardt’s and Negri’s assumption, religion is not dissipating among the multitude and that its impact will be contrary to the creation of a unified multitude. Thus the creation of (...) the unified multitude requires an absence of religion, but the creation of the multitude under the system of Empire entails a creation of more theists, leading to a seeming contradiction in the process of creating a unified multitude. In order for the creation of the multitude envisioned by Hardt and Negri to be complete, the issue of religion must be addressed, it cannot simply be assumed away as unimportant or non-existent. (shrink)

During the seventeenth century there were different ways of opposing the new mechanical philosophy and the old Aristotelian philosophy. Remarkably enough, one of this way succeeded in becoming stable beyond the moment of its formulation, one according to which Descartes would be the benchmark by which the works of other natural philosophers of the seventeenth century fall either on the side of the old or the new. I consequently examine the French debate where this representation emerges, a debate that took (...) place along with the development of a Cartesian propaganda in the 1660s and the ensuing official condemnations of the philosophy of Descartes, which was said to constitute a danger for the mystery of Eucharist. But these condemnations pronounced in the name of theology, as numerous and radical as they were, were not considered to be sufficient. They were assisted by numerous polemical works, the audience of which were learned companies of courteous honnêtes gens, and the object of which was to defend a certain way of proceeding in natural philosophy. I consequently concentrate on two correlated questions, the question of what kind of ontological entities are necessary for the establishment of a good physics, and the correlated question of what norms should be adopted in natural philosophy. I show quite systematically that the criticisms of Cartesian philosophers by the Oratorian Jean-Baptiste de La Grange, the bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet, and various Jesuits, Ignace Pardies, Antoine Rochon, Louis Le Valois, Gabriel Daniel, René Rapin, and Honoré Fabri respond to the mockeries of Gérauld de Cordemoy, Jacques Rohault, Louis de La Forge, Bernard Lamy, Nicolas Malebranche or Antoine Arnauld concerning the scholastic entities. Not only do I contrast their philosophical arguments concerning ontological entities and the norms to be respected in physics, but also their ways of defining the philosophical enterprise and its public. (shrink)

John Pocock's The First Decline and Fall (2003) presents a novel argument for drawing a clear distinction between medieval and early modern varieties of political thinking and writing that implicitly challenges the current historiographical trend that "softens" the dividing line between the two. The present paper critically examines Pocock's claim, which is based on the appearance of the theme of the historicity of the Roman Empire (imperial decline and fall) in early modern (and especially Florentine) political theory. In particular, (...) the works of Marsiglio of Padua and Nicholas of Cusa are surveyed to demonstrate that Pocock's thesis, while useful, fails to capture fully the historical complexity of the medieval / modern divide in European thought. (shrink)

The paper discusses the philosophical and historical doctrine of the Russian philosopher and historian George Petrovich Fedotov. The author focuses on the analysis of imperial issues in the works of G.P. Fedotov, especially of his views on the cultural history of the Russian empire and the essence of imperial project in Russia. Fedotov reconsiders the historical experience and revolutionary catastrophe of Russia and searches for the foundations of the social and cultural processes determining the events of Russian history. Fedotov’s (...) works offer a variety of interpretations of the political and cultural phenomenon of empire. This reflects his evolution as a philosopher of history: the focus of his vision shifts from the Medieval Rus to the Empire of Peter the Great, then to the collapsed empire of Nicholas II and finally to the USSR. Fedotov’s concept of Empire evolves into a timeless cultural-philosophical phenomenon but originates from the historical description of the centralization of power in the feudal monarchy of Ivan the Terrible. The evolution of the philosophical and historical views of Fedotov is influenced by the changes of his attitude to the historical conception of Klyuchevsky. In the 1940s Fedotov considers the empire as a universal idea. The concept of empire proposed by Fedotov gives an understanding of the Russian historical development, especially the causes of the decline and fall of the Russian Empire. Fedotov associates the cause of the salvation of Russia with the study of ancient Russian culture, in which he founds a moral and political ideal of the “Republic of Saint Sophia.” The paper shows heuristic potential of Fedotov’s cultural and philosophical ideas on the vocation of spiritual elite and the creative role of personality in the process of nation-building. (shrink)

This article shows that longstanding connections established through inclusion in the British Empire were maintained in significant ways after individual countries became independent, but remained within the Commonwealth. Although Britain declined as an international power, and largely lost its empire, it reveals ongoing British soft-power in academic cultures. The article provides a new scholarly analysis, moving away from presumptions about the anglicised university ideal in the Global South. How did British ideas transfer themselves to former colonial universities? Who (...) was involved in the process? To answer to these questions, this research focuses on the transnational activities of the Inter-University Council, the University of London and African and Caribbean universities during the late and post-colonial eras. Liberal, elite and residential education, a balance of teaching and research schemes were combined; institutional autonomy was a further added important elements in the classic British university cultures. However, the notion of Britain’s institutional autonomy differed in colonial universities, but functioned well for protecting their academic freedom. The circulation of British ideas for universities was a means of anglicising overseas universities at the end of empire. Britain succeeded in keeping alive the bonds of the Commonwealth universities across the wider world. (shrink)

Vladimir Putin’s legitimation of Russia’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine raises questions about traditional understandings of nation and empire. Should we contrast the two in terms of values and practices? In this case, Putin uses both nationalist and Imperialist rhetoric to justify his actions. My essay questions how we understand nation and empire using the example of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. How did this empire develop laws, institutions and administrative practices to manage conflicts and claims around (...) language use and nationalism? How did Austria’s governments rule a multi-lingual, multi-confessional society effectively, without resorting to brutal policies of nationalization? When nationalist conflicts arose in different settings, how and why did they originate? I conclude that in European terms, Imperial Austria and even nationalist Hungary apparently managed daily-life issues around diverse language use and religious practice far more humanely and effectively than did the successor nation states after 1918. (shrink)

This paper maps Hardt and Negri’s use of Deleuze philosophical commitment to the control society as a temporal phenomena in the context of education. Education is important because it is pushed and pulled by those vectors that Hardt and Negri see as central tensions in late capitalism: localism vs globalisation, discipline vs control, codes vs axioms, metrics vs expertise and so on. In Empire, Hardt and Negri represent Empire as a form of governance that responds to the passing (...) from disciplinary societies to societies of control. The societies of control are central to their concept of Empire defined “as a regime of the production of identity and difference, or really of homogenization and heterogenization”. Empire, then, is a macropolitics that produces, or infiltrates, subjectivation as a means to affect the self within globalising and localising regimes. This paper takes up Hardt and Negri’s challenge in two areas. First concerns what appears to be the collapse of the ideal of publicness within public school systems. The second provocation concerns the digital, or presumptive, economy of online and adaptive learning systems. (shrink)

From Machiavellian city officials to big-time mobsters, corrupt beat cops, and overzealous G-men, Boardwalk Empire is replete with philosophically compelling characters who find themselves in philosophically interesting situations. This book is directed at thoughtful fans of the show. Here, readers discover parallels between the events in Boardwalk Empire and contemporary political events. Twenty philosophers address issues in political philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, feminism, and metaphysics. Is Nucky Thomson a Machiavellian prince or a Nietzschean superman? Is Jimmy's resentment towards Nucky (...) justified, given that Jimmy would never have come into existence had his parents not met? What can be said about the ethics of lying in the seedy world of bootlegging? Agent Van Alden’s unique religious attitudes bring a warped sense of morality to the Boardwalk universe. One chapter brings to light the moral character of Van Alden’s God. Other chapters explores the roles that storytelling, deception, and gender play in the show. (shrink)

L. T. Hobhouse (1864–1929) is most familiar today as a leading theorist of British new liberalism. This article recovers and examines his overlooked commentary on the concept and rhetoric of race, which constituted part of his better-known project of advancing an authoritative account of liberal doctrine. His writings during and after the South African War, I argue, represent a prominent effort to cast liberalism as compatible with both imperial rule and what he called ‘the idea of racial equality’. A properly (...) liberal empire, he asserted, would dissolve the colour line. This article traces the arguments Hobhouse advanced to make this claim, and explores his motivations for doing so. I contend that Hobhouse drew on the idiom of race as a form of exclusionary rhetoric, to delegitimise rival accounts of liberal empire and to cast his own as properly cosmopolitan. This recovery, I suggest, offers payoffs for our understanding of both Hobhouse's political thought and, more broadly, the uses of ‘race’ in twentieth-century liberalism. (shrink)

Theorizing resistance -- Hellenistic rule in Judea : setting the stage for resistance -- Interaction and identity in Seleucid Judea : 188-173 BCE 78 -- Recreating the empire : the sixth Syrian war, Jason's revolt, and the reconquest of Jerusalem -- Seleucid state terror -- The edict of Antiochus : persecution and the unmaking of the Judean world -- Daniel -- Enochic authority -- The apocalypse of weeks : witness and transformation -- The book of dreams : see and (...) cry out. (shrink)

In the late eighteenth century, an array of European political thinkers attacked the very foundations of imperialism, arguing passionately that empire-building was not only unworkable, costly, and dangerous, but manifestly unjust. Enlightenment against Empire is the first book devoted to the anti-imperialist political philosophies of an age often regarded as affirming imperial ambitions. Sankar Muthu argues that thinkers such as Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder developed an understanding of humans as inherently cultural agents and therefore (...) necessarily diverse. These thinkers rejected the conception of a culture-free "natural man." They held that moral judgments of superiority or inferiority could be made neither about entire peoples nor about many distinctive cultural institutions and practices.Muthu shows how such arguments enabled the era's anti-imperialists to defend the freedom of non-European peoples to order their own societies. In contrast to those who praise "the Enlightenment" as the triumph of a universal morality and critics who view it as an imperializing ideology that denigrated cultural pluralism, Muthu argues instead that eighteenth-century political thought included multiple Enlightenments. He reveals a distinctive and underappreciated strand of Enlightenment thinking that interweaves commitments to universal moral principles and incommensurable ways of life, and that links the concept of a shared human nature with the idea that humans are fundamentally diverse. Such an intellectual temperament, Muthu contends, can broaden our own perspectives about international justice and the relationship between human unity and diversity. (shrink)

Despite (or perhaps because of) growing recognition of empire’s problematic definition, scholarly interest in the subject has recently revived. Newly opened perspectives notably take in the diverse symbolic powers underpinning state rule : forms of administration, modes of territorial appropriation, degrees of sovereignty, spatial markings of domination, etc. An heuristic model is provided by Charles V’s empire, wherein the emperor rapidly found himself confronted with the challenge of governing distant territories, with different statuses, assembled under the banner of (...) a universal Christian empire. (shrink)

The Korean Buddhist Empire: A Transnational History, 1910–1945 by Hwansoo Ilmee Kim. Harvard University Asia Center, 2019. 358pp. HB. $45.00, ISBN-13: 9780674987197.

Erudite and timely, this book is a key contribution to the renewal of radical theory and politics.

This book provides a clear and nuanced appraisal of Hegel's treatment of Africa, India, and Islam, and of the implications of this treatment for postcolonial and global studies. Analyzing Hegel's master-slave dialectic and his views on Africa, India, and Islam, it situates these views not only within Hegel's historical scheme but also within a broader European philosophical context and the debates they have provoked within Hegel scholarship. Each chapter explores various in depth readings of Hegel by postcolonial critics, investigating both (...) the Eurocentric and potentially global nature of his dialectic. Ultimately, the book shows both where of this profoundly influential thinker archetypally embodies certain Eurocentric traits that have characterized modernity and how, ironically, he himself gives us the tools for working towards a more global vision. Offering a concise introduction not only to an important dimension of Hegel's thought - his orientation towards "empire" - but also to the various issues raised by postcolonial theory and global studies, this book will be of use to philosophers as well as advanced students of literary and cultural theory alike. (shrink)

In the still highly politicized question of rupture or continuity between the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, elements of continuity are not hard to find, nor should this be a surprise, since a new state arose in the same geographical space and made use of the economic, intellectual, and demographic resources inherited from the Russian Empire. At the same time, the Soviet Union could not have been more different than the Russian Empire. It rejected a number (...) of key elements of the sociopolitical project that underlay the nationalizing tsarist empire and introduced radically new political and social principles for organizing that space. In particular, the Bolsheviks purposefully engaged in dismantling the tsarist efforts to build a great ethnic-Russian nation to stand at the center of the Russian Empire’s nationalities policy. The irreversible disintegration of post-Soviet space into separate nationalizing states became possible only toward the end of the twentieth century. At the same time, the imperial nature of the modern post-Soviet Russian core permits us to say that the imperial logic has survived. This is where we can find an element of inescapable continuity. We present studies of “continuities” and “ruptures” in modern academic discourse and in an updated format, gravitating toward “empirically nuanced” tools for analyzing multiple historical temporalities. (shrink)

In her book Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, Judith Butler reads the figure of Antigone, who exists as an impossible aberration of kinship, as a challenge to the very terms of livability that are established by the reigning symbolic rules of Western thought. In this article I extend Butler's argument to reach beyond gender. I argue that African feminist scholarship shows that the kinship norms shaping the reigning symbolic rules of Western thought not only render certain gendered lives (...) unlivable, but through the gendered working thereof also become key to the colonial process of the racial dehumanization of the colonized and the violent expansion of Eurocentric capitalism. I show how Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí, in her work on the Yorùbá people of Nigeria, provides, in a way analogous to Antigone, a glimpse of an order structured by kinship formations that are remarkably different from, and thereby bring into crisis, the normative versions of kinship that are posited as timeless truths. Through a reimagining or reconstruction of precolonial Yorùbá kinship formations, Oyĕwùmí articulates a different scheme of intelligibility, which enables radically different ways of being human and existing in the world. (shrink)

Subsequent to the end of the Cold War, analysts groped for an understanding of the overall structures of world politics that marked the emergence of a new epoch. As a result, the concept of empire became a major preoccupation, with the economic and military power of the United States considered sufficient for regarding it as an empire. Due to the proliferation of new microelectronic technologies and for a variety of other specified reasons, however, the constraints inherent in the (...) new epoch make it seem highly unlikely that the U.S. or any other country can ever achieve the status of an empire. In effect, the substantial shrinkage of time and distance in the current period has led to the replacement of the age of the nation-state that originated with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 with the age of the networked individual. It is an age that has developed on a global scale and that has brought an end to the history of empires. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between understandings of Indigenous government and the development of early-modern European, and especially British, political thought. It will be argued that a range of British political thinkers represented Indigenous peoples as being in want of effective government and regular conduct due to the absence of sufficiently developed property relations among them. In particular, British political thinkers framed the ‘deficiencies’ of Indigenous people by ideas of civilization in which key assumptions connected ‘property’, ‘government’, and ‘society’ as (...) the attainments of civilized polities and societies. Accordingly, Indigenous peoples in Australia and elsewhere were perceived to live in associations (rather than ‘societies’) bound by custom and tradition (rather than ‘government’). The paper will thus identify conceptual connections made between property, polity, and sovereignty in European and British political thought, and argue that such understandings provide a useful resource for understanding colonial attitudes to Indigenous people in Australia down to the present day. (shrink)