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Faith and Political Philosophy
The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964
Edited & Intro by Peter Emberley & Barry Cooper
University of Missouri Press, 2004

Faith and Political Philosophy consists of fifty-three letters between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, two of the most important political theorists of the twentieth century. In this correspondence, Strauss and Voegelin explore the nature of their similarities and differences, offering insightful observations about one another's work, about the state of the discipline, and about the influences working on them. The letters shed light on many assumptions made in their published writings, often with an openness that removes all vestiges of uncertainty.

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Fascism, Liberalism and Europeanism in the Political Thought of Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alfred Fabre-Luce
Daniel Knegt
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Despite the recent rise in studies that approach fascism as a transnational phenomenon, the links between fascism and internationalist intellectual currents have only received scant attention. This book explores the political thought of Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alfred Fabre-Luce, two French intellectuals, journalists and political writers who, from 1930 to the mid-1950s, moved between liberalism, fascism and Europeanism. Daniel Knegt argues that their longing for a united Europe was the driving force behind this ideological transformation-and that we can see in their thought the earliest stages of what would become neoliberalism.
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Fear of Diversity
The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought
Arlene W. Saxonhouse
University of Chicago Press, 1992
This wide-ranging book locates the origin of political science in the everyday world of ancient Greek life, thought, and culture. Arlene Saxonhouse contends that the Greeks, confronted by the puzzling diversity of the physical world, sought a force that would unify, constrain, and explain it. This drive toward unity did more than value the mind over the senses: it led the Greeks to play down the very real complexities—particularly regarding women, the family, and sexuality—in both their political and personal lives.

Saxonhouse opens up fresh understandings of such issues as the Greeks' fear of the feminine and their attempts to ignore the demands that gender, reproduction, and the family inevitably make on the individual.
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Felix Guattari
A Critical Introduction
Gary Genosko
Pluto Press, 2009

This is an introduction to the thought of the radical French thinker Félix Guattari. It is ideal for undergraduates and anyone studying political and cultural theory.

Guattari's main works were published in the 1970s and 1980s. His background was in psychoanalysis -- he was trained by Lacan and he practised as a psychoanalyst for much of his life. He developed a distinctive psychoanalytic method informed always by his revolutionary politics.

Guattari was actively involved in numerous political movements, from Trotskyism to Autonomism, tackling ecological and sexual politics along the way. A true believer in collectivity, much of his work was written in collaboration, most famously with Gilles Deleuze, with whom he wrote the hugely influential books Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. He also wrote with Antonio Negri and others.

This accessible introduction explores his highly original ideas -- including his ground-breaking conception of 'transversal politics' -- and the impact his concern with subjectivity had on wider political theory.

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Feminism and Political Theory
Edited by Cass R. Sunstein
University of Chicago Press, 1990
This volume collects some of today's most original and important work at the intersection of feminism and political theory.  A representative and wide-ranging set of readings on feminist political thought, the authors provide large-scale critiques, and in some instances reconstructions, of important strains in  political thought, including notions of equality, rights-based justice, and contract theories.  The  fourteen essays are organized around four major themes:  "The Question of a Different Voice: Care, Justice, and Rights," "Equality and Inequality in Politics and Elsewhere," "Coercion versus Consent, Public versus Private, and Sexuality," and "Trust and Responsibility."
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Foucault, Politics, and Violence
Johnanna Oksala
Northwestern University Press, 2012
In her book, Oksala shows that the arguments for the ineliminability of violence from the political are often based on excessively broad, ontological conceptions of violence distinct from its concrete and physical meaning and, on the other hand, on a restrictively narrow and empirical understanding of politics as the realm of conventional political institutions.
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Foucault's Discipline
The Politics of Subjectivity
John S. Ransom
Duke University Press, 1997
In Foucault’s Discipline, John S. Ransom extracts a distinctive vision of the political world—and oppositional possibilities within it—from the welter of disparate topics and projects Michel Foucault pursued over his lifetime. Uniquely, Ransom presents Foucault as a political theorist in the tradition of Weber and Nietzsche, and specifically examines Foucault’s work in relation to the political tradition of liberalism and the Frankfurt School. By concentrating primarily on Discipline and Punish and the later Foucauldian texts, Ransom provides a fresh interpretation of this controversial philosopher’s perspectives on concepts such as freedom, right, truth, and power.
Foucault’s Discipline demonstrates how Foucault’s valorization of descriptive critique over prescriptive plans of action can be applied to the decisively altered political landscape of the end of this millennium. By reconstructing the philosopher’s arguments concerning the significance of disciplinary institutions, biopower, subjectivity, and forms of resistance in modern society, Ransom shows how Foucault has provided a different way of looking at and responding to contemporary models of government—in short, a new depiction of the political world.
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The Founders and the Classics
Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment
Carl J. Richard
Harvard University Press, 1995

Is our Greek and Roman heritage merely allusive and illusory? Or were our founders, and so our republican beginnings, truly steeped in the stuff of antiquity? So far largely a matter of generalization and speculation, the influence of Greek and Roman authors on our American forefathers finally becomes clear in this fascinating book-the first comprehensive study of the founders’ classical reading.

Carl J. Richard begins by examining how eighteenth-century social institutions in general and the educational system in particular conditioned the founders to venerate the classics. He then explores the founders’ various uses of classical symbolism, models, “antimodels,” mixed government theory, pastoralism, and philosophy, revealing in detail the formative influence exerted by the classics, both directly and through the mediation of Whig and American perspectives. In this analysis, we see how the classics not only supplied the principal basis for the U.S. Constitution but also contributed to the founders’ conception of human nature, their understanding of virtue, and their sense of identity and purpose within a grand universal scheme. At the same time, we learn how the classics inspired obsessive fear of conspiracies against liberty, which poisoned relations between Federalists and Republicans.

The shrewd ancients who molded Western civilization still have much to teach us, Richard suggests. His account of the critical role they played in shaping our nation and our lives provides a valuable lesson in the transcendent power of the classics.

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The Founders, the Constitution, and Public Administration
A Conflict in World Views
Michael W. Spicer
Georgetown University Press, 1995

Viewed alternately as an obstacle to justice, an impediment to efficient government, and a tool by which some groups gain benefits and privileges at the expense of others, public administration threatens to become the whipping boy of American government. In this innovative look at the nation's bureaucracy, Michael W. Spicer revisits the values of the Constitution in order to reconcile the administrative state to its many critics.

Drawing on political and social philosophy, Spicer argues that there is a fundamental philosophical conflict over the role of reason in society between writers in public administration and the designers of the American Constitution. This examination of worldviews illuminates the problem that American government faces in trying to ground a legitimate public administration in the Constitution. Defending and developing the Founders' idea that political power, whatever its source, must be checked, he critically examines existing ideas about the role of public administration in American governance and offers an alternative vision of public administration more in line with the Founders' constitutional design. This book will provide fresh insights for anyone interested in the role of public administration in the United States today.

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A Friendly Companion to Plato's Gorgias
George Kimball Plochmann and Franklin E. Robinson
Southern Illinois University Press, 1987

A comprehensive study of “one of the most elusive and subtle” of all the Platonic dialogues.

The Gorgias begins with a discussion of the nature and value of rhetoric and develops into an impassioned argument for the primacy of absolute right (as expressed by conscience) in the regulation of both public and private life. Plochmann and Robinson closely analyze this great dialogue in the first two-thirds of their book, turning in the final four chapters to a broader discussion of its unity, sweep, and philosophic implications.

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From Many, One
Readings in American Political and Social Thought
Richard C. Sinopoli, Editor
Georgetown University Press, 1997

Unique among readers in American political and social thought, From Many, One is a broad and balanced anthology that explores the problem of diversity and American political identity throughout American history. From the classic texts of the American political tradition to diverse minority writings, this book offers a wide spectrum of ideas about identity, gender, immigration, race, and religion, and addresses how these issues relate to the concept of national unity.

Covering the gamut of viewpoints from majority to minority, from conservative to radical, from assimilationist to separatist, the authors range from the Founding Fathers to Frederick Jackson Turner, from Abigail Adams to bell hooks and Catharine MacKinnon; from Abraham Lincoln to Malcolm X; from Roger Williams to Ralph E. Reed.

Sinopoli's extensive introductory and concluding essays set the context for and draw out the implications of the fifty readings. The conclusion includes case studies of three minority groups—homosexuals, Mexican-Americans, and Chinese-Americans—to illustrate further the themes of the volume. Brief introductions to each reading and to each of the five sections provide background information.

In examining one of the central questions of American public life—the issue of national diversity—From Many, One will be a useful text for courses in American political thought, sociology, American Studies, and American history.

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From Vienna to Chicago and Back
Essays on Intellectual History and Political Thought in Europe and America
Gerald Stourzh
University of Chicago Press, 2007

Spanning both the history of the modern West and his own five-decade journey as a historian, Gerald Stourzh’s sweeping new essay collection covers the same breadth of topics that has characterized his career—from Benjamin Franklin to Gustav Mahler, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Charles Beard, from the notion of constitution in seventeenth-century England to the concept of neutrality in twentieth-century Austria.

This storied career brought him in the 1950s from the University of Vienna to the University of Chicago—of which he draws a brilliant picture—and later took him to Berlin and eventually back to Austria. One of the few prominent scholars equally at home with U.S. history and the history of central Europe, Stourzh has informed these geographically diverse experiences and subjects with the overarching themes of his scholarly achievement: the comparative study of liberal constitutionalism and the struggle for equal rights at the core of Western notions of free government. Composed between 1953 and 2005 and including a new autobiographical essay written especially for this volume, From Vienna to Chicago and Back will delight Stourzh fans, attract new admirers, and make an important contribution to transatlantic history.

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