When social scientists and social theorists turn to the work of philosophers for intellectual and practical authority, they typically assume that truth, reality, and meaning are to be found outside rather than within our conventional discursive practices.

John G. Gunnell argues for conventional realism as a theory of social phenomena and an approach to the study of politics. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s critique of “mentalism” and traditional realism, Gunnell argues that everything we designate as “real” is rendered conventionally, which entails a rejection of the widely accepted distinction between what is natural and what is conventional. The terms “reality” and “world” have no meaning outside the contexts of specific claims and assumptions about what exists and how it behaves. And rather than a mysterious source and repository of prelinguistic meaning, the “mind” is simply our linguistic capacities. Taking readers through contemporary forms of mentalism and realism in both philosophy and American political science and theory, Gunnell also analyzes the philosophical challenges to these positions mounted by Wittgenstein and those who can be construed as his successors.
 

Scott Warren’s ambitious and enduring work sets out to resolve the ongoing identity crisis of contemporary political inquiry. In the Emergence of Dialectical Theory, Warren begins with a careful analysis of the philosophical foundations of dialectical theory in the thought of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. He then examines how the dialectic functions in the major twentieth-century philosophical movements of existentialism, phenomenology, neomarxism, and critical theory. Numerous major and minor philosophers are discussed, but the emphasis falls on two of the greatest dialectical thinkers of the previous century: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jürgen Habermas.

Warren’s shrewd critique is indispensable to those interested in the history of social and political thought and the philosophical foundations of political theory. His work offers an alternative for those who find postmodernism to be at a philosophical impasse.

More than six decades after John Dewey’s death, his political philosophy is undergoing a revival. With renewed interest in pragmatism and its implications for democracy in an age of mass communication, bureaucracy, and ever-increasing social complexities, Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems, first published in 1927, remains vital to any discussion of today’s political issues.

This edition of The Public and Its Problems, meticulously annotated and interpreted with fresh insight by Melvin L. Rogers, radically updates the previous version published by Swallow Press. Rogers’s introduction locates Dewey’s work within its philosophical and historical context and explains its key ideas for a contemporary readership. Biographical information and a detailed bibliography round out this definitive edition, which will be essential to students and scholars both.