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A fierce critique of productivity and sovereignty in the world of labor and everyday life, Bruno Gullì’s Earthly Plenitudes asks, can labor exist without sovereignty and without capitalism? He introduces the concept of dignity of individuation to prompt a rethinking of categories of political ontology. Dignity of individuation stresses the notion that the dignity of each and any individual being lies in its being individuated as such; dignity is the irreducible and most essential character of any being. Singularity is a more universal quality.

Gullì first reviews approaches to sovereignty by philosophers as varied as Gottfried Leibniz and Georges Bataille, and then looks at concrete examples where the alliance of sovereignty and capital cracks under the potency of living labor. He examines contingent academic labor as an example of the super-exploitation of labor, which has become a global phenomenon, and as such, a clear threat to the sovereign logic of capital. Gullì also looks at disability to assert that a new measure of humanity can only be found outside the schemes of sovereignty, productivity, efficiency, and independence, through care and caring for others, in solidarity and interdependence.

Debates about obesity are really about the meaning of responsibility. The trend toward local foods reflects the changing nature of space due to new communication technologies. Vegetarian theory capitalizes on biotechnology’s challenge to the meaning of species. And food politics, as this book makes powerfully clear, is actually about the political anxieties surrounding globalization.

In Eating Anxiety, Chad Lavin argues that our culture’s obsession with diet, obesity, meat, and local foods enacts ideological and biopolitical responses to perceived threats to both individual and national sovereignty. Using the occasion of eating to examine assumptions about identity, objectivity, and sovereignty that underwrite so much political order, Lavin explains how food functions to help structure popular and philosophical understandings of the world and the place of humans within it. He introduces the concept of digestive subjectivity and shows how this offers valuable resources for rethinking cherished political ideals surrounding knowledge, democracy, and power.

Exploring discourses of food politics, Eating Anxiety links the concerns of food—especially issues of sustainability, public health, and inequality—to the evolution of the world order and the possibilities for democratic rule. It forces us to question the significance of consumerist politics and—simultaneously—the relationship between politics and ethics, public and private.

Education is a contested topic, and not just politically. For years scholars have approached it from two different points of view: one empirical, focused on explanations for student and school success and failure, and the other philosophical, focused on education’s value and purpose within the larger society. Rarely have these separate approaches been brought into the same conversation. Education, Justice, and Democracy does just that, offering an intensive discussion by highly respected scholars across empirical and philosophical disciplines.

 

The contributors explore how the institutions and practices of education can support democracy, by creating the conditions for equal citizenship and egalitarian empowerment, and how they can advance justice, by securing social mobility and cultivating the talents and interests of every individual. Then the authors evaluate constraints on achieving the goals of democracy and justice in the educational arena and identify strategies that we can employ to work through or around those constraints. More than a thorough compendium on a timely and contested topic, Education, Justice, and Democracy exhibits an entirely new, more deeply composed way of thinking about education as a whole and its importance to a good society.

David Mayhew’s 1974 thesis on the “electoral connection” and its impact on legislative behavior is the theoretical foundation for research on the modern U.S. Congress. Mayhew contends that once in office, legislators pursue the actions that put them in the best position for reelection. Carson and Sievert examine how electoral incentives shaped legislative behavior throughout the nineteenth century by looking at patterns of turnover in Congress; the renomination of candidates; the roles of parties in recruiting candidates and their broader effects on candidate competition; and, finally by examining legislators’ accountability. The results have wide-ranging implications for the evolution of Congress and the development of legislative institutions over time.

In the 1990s, interventionist policies challenged the rights of individual states to self-governance. Today, non-Western states are more likely to be feted by international institutions offering programs of poverty-reduction, democratization and good governance. States without the right to self-government will always lack legitimate authority. The international policy agenda focuses on bureaucratic mechanisms, which can only institutionalize divisions between the West and the non-West and are unable to overcome the social and political divisions of post-conflict states. Highlighting the dangers of current policy—including the redefinition of sovereignty, and the subsequent erosion of ties linking power and accountability—David Chandler offers a critical look at state-building that will be of interest to all students of international affairs.

Empires, Nations, and Natives is a groundbreaking comparative analysis of the interplay between the practice of anthropology and the politics of empires and nation-states in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. It brings together essays that demonstrate how the production of social-science knowledge about the “other” has been inextricably linked to the crafting of government policies. Subverting established boundaries between national and imperial anthropologies, the contributors explore the role of anthropology in the shifting categorizations of race in southern Africa, the identification of Indians in Brazil, the implementation of development plans in Africa and Latin America, the construction of Mexican and Portuguese nationalism, the genesis of “national character” studies in the United States during World War II, the modernizing efforts of the French colonial administration in Africa, and postcolonial architecture.

The contributors—social and cultural anthropologists from the Americas and Europe—report on both historical and contemporary processes. Moving beyond controversies that cast the relationship between scholarship and politics in binary terms of complicity or autonomy, they bring into focus a dynamic process in which states, anthropological knowledge, and population groups themselves are mutually constructed. Such a reflexive endeavor is an essential contribution to a critical anthropological understanding of a changing world.

Contributors: Alban Bensa, Marcio Goldman, Adam Kuper, Benoît de L’Estoile, Claudio Lomnitz, David Mills, Federico Neiburg, João Pacheco de Oliveira, Jorge Pantaleón, Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, Lygia Sigaud, Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, Florence Weber

Throughout four millennia of recorded history there has been no end to empire, but instead an endless succession of empires. After five centuries of sustained expansion, the half-dozen European powers that ruled half of humanity collapsed with stunning speed after World War II, creating a hundred emerging nations in Asia and Africa. Amid this imperial transition, the United States became the new global hegemon, dominating this world order with an array of power that closely resembled that of its European predecessors.

 

As Brazil, Russia, India, China, and the European Union now rise in global influence, twenty leading historians from four continents take a timely look backward and forward to discover patterns of eclipse in past empires that are already shaping a decline in U.S. global power, including:

First published in French in 2010, Equaliberty brings together essays by Étienne Balibar, one of the preeminent political theorists of our time. The book is organized around equaliberty, a term coined by Balibar to connote the tension between the two ideals of modern democracy: equality (social rights and political representation) and liberty (the freedom citizens have to contest the social contract). He finds the tension between these different kinds of rights to be ingrained in the constitution of the modern nation-state and the contemporary welfare state. At the same time, he seeks to keep rights discourse open, eschewing natural entitlements in favor of a deterritorialized citizenship that could be expanded and invented anew in the age of globalization. Deeply engaged with other thinkers, including Arendt, Rancière, and Laclau, he posits a theory of the polity based on social relations. In Equaliberty Balibar brings both the continental and analytic philosophical traditions to bear on the conflicted relations between humanity and citizenship.

This important new work is a major analysis of the foundation of Eric Voegelin's political science. Barry Cooper maintains that the writings Voegelin undertook in the 1940s provide the groundwork for the brilliant book that is one of his best known, The New Science of Politics. At the time of that book's publication, however, few were aware of the enormous knowledge and accomplished scholarship that lay behind its illuminating, although sometimes baffling, formulations.

By focusing on several of the key chapters in Voegelin's eight- volume History of Political Ideas, especially the studies of Bodin, Vico, and Schelling, Cooper shows how those studies provide the basis for Voegelin's thought. Investigating Voegelin's study of Oriental influences on Western political "ideas," especially Mongol constitutional law, and his study of Toynbee, Cooper seeks to demonstrate the vast range of materials Voegelin used.

Cooper contends that, as with other great thinkers, political crisis, specifically the world war of 1939-1945, stimulated Voegelin's intellectual and spiritual achievement. He provides an analysis of Voegelin's immediate concern with the course of World War II, his ability to understand those dramatic events in a large context, and his ability to provide an insightful account of the causes, the significance, and the consequences of the spiritual and political disorder that was evident all around him.

In Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science, Cooper makes the connection between Voegelin's political writings of the 1940s and the meditative interpretations that began to appear with the publication of Anamnesis and with the later volumes of Order and History much more intelligible than does any existing discussion of Voegelin. Scholars in intellectual history and political science will benefit enormously from this valuable new addition to Voegelin studies.

  Although some critics of Eric Voegelin’s later work have faulted his failure to deal with the historical Jesus and to address the implications of Christianity for social and political life, the recent publication of Voegelin’s History of Political Ideas has allowed a more complete assessment of his position regarding the Christian political order. This book addresses that criticism through an analysis of Voegelin’s early work.

            In Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order, Jeffrey C. Herndon analyzes the development of Voegelin’s thought regarding the origins of Christianity in the person of Jesus, the development of the church in the works of Paul, and the relationship between an immanent institutional order symbolizing the divine presence and the struggle for social and political order. Focusing on the tension between a spiritual phenomenon based on Pauline faith and the institutionalization of that experience in the church, Herndon offers one of the first examinations of the relationship of the History of Political Ideas to Voegelin’s larger body of work.

            In his wide-ranging study, Herndon explores Voegelin’s examination of the problem of Christian political order from the inception of Christianity through the Great Reformation. He also presents a clarification of Voegelin’s theory of civilizational foundation and of Voegelin’s philosophy of history with regard to Christianity and Western political order.

            Herndon addresses not only the nagging problem in Voegelin scholarship regarding his relationship with the historical Jesus but also the “Pauline compromises with the world” that enabled Christianity to become the instrument by which the West was civilized. He also shows that Voegelin’s interpretation of the historical pressures released by the Great Reformation is important to an understanding of his later work regarding the negative effect of Christian symbols in the creation of ideological disorder.

            Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order clarifies issues in Voegelin studies regarding the intersection between political theory and Christian concerns, addressing the relation of religious experience to the public sphere of political life in the West and helping to explain Voegelin’s contention that the death of the spirit is the price of progress. It offers scholars a perspective heretofore lacking in Voegelin scholarship and a clearer view of Voegelin’s understanding of the Christian dispensation and its influence on the course of Western development, history, and philosophy.

As a political philosopher, Kant has until recently been
overshadowed by his compatriots Hegel and Marx. With his
strong defense of the rights of the person and his deep
insight into the strengths and weaknesses of modern society
Kant, possibly more than any other political thinker,
anticipated the problems of the late twentieth century.
Kant's political philosophy, wedded as it is to rights,
reform and gradual progress, is emerging from the shadows
cast by Hegelian and Marxist thinking about the state.

In this volume, thirteen distinguished contributors from the
United States, Canada, Britain, and Germany cast light on
important aspects of Kant's liberal thinking. Key topics
covered include Kant's liberal reformism, his relation with
Hegel, his attitude to women, the use of reason, revolution,
Kant's optimism and his moral and legal rigorism.

Howard Williams is a reader in political theory in the
Department of International Politics, University College of
Wales, Aberystwyth. His previous publications include
Kant's Political Philosophy, Concepts of
Ideology, and Hegel, Heraclitus, and Marx's
Dialectic.

For thousands of years, critics have attacked rhetoric and the actual practice of politics as unprincipled, insincere, and manipulative. In Ethics and the Orator, Gary A. Remer disagrees, offering the Ciceronian rhetorical tradition as a rejoinder. He argues that the Ciceronian tradition is based on practical or “rhetorical” politics, rather than on idealistic visions of a politics-that-never-was—a response that is ethically sound, if not altogether morally pure.

Remer’s study is distinct from other works on political morality in that it turns to Cicero, not Aristotle, as the progenitor of an ethical rhetorical perspective. Contrary to many, if not most, studies of Cicero since the mid-nineteenth century, which have either attacked him as morally indifferent or have only taken his persuasive ends seriously (setting his moral concerns to the side), Ethics and the Orator demonstrates how Cicero presents his ideal orator as exemplary not only in his ability to persuade, but in his capacity as an ethical person. Remer makes a compelling case that Ciceronian values—balancing the moral and the useful, prudential reasoning, and decorum—are not particular only to the philosopher himself, but are distinctive of a broader Ciceronian rhetorical tradition that runs through the history of Western political thought post-Cicero, including the writings of Quintilian, John of Salisbury, Justus Lipsius, Edmund Burke, the authors of The Federalist, and John Stuart Mill.

Who is to be included in a political community and on what terms? William A. Barbieri Jr. seeks answers to these questions in this exploration of the controversial concept of citizenship rights—a concept directly related to the nature of democracy, equality, and cultural identity. Through an examination of the case of Germany’s settled “guestworkers” and their families, Ethics of Citizenship investigates the pressing problem of political membership in a world marked by increased migration, rising nationalist sentiment, and the ongoing reorganization of states through both peaceful and violent means.
Although some of Germany’s foreign workers have gradually attained a degree of social and economic legitimacy, Barbieri explains how they remain effectively excluded from true German citizenship. Describing how this exclusion has occurred and assessing current attitudes toward political membership in Germany, he argues for a just and democratic policy toward the tax-paying, migrant worker minority, one that would combine the extension of the individual rights of citizenship with the establishment of certain group rights. Through a dissection of ongoing public “membership debates” over issues such as suffrage, dual citizenship, and immigration and refugee policy, Barbieri identifies a range of competing responses to the question of who “belongs” in Germany. After critiquing these views, he proposes an alternative ethic of membership rooted in an account of domination and human rights that seeks to balance individual and group rights within the context of a commitment to democracy and equal citizenship.
Indispensable for scholars of German studies, Ethics of Citizenship also raises questions that will attract moral philosophers, constitutional scholars, and those interested in the continuing, global problems associated with migration.

Since 1991, Ethiopia has gone further than any other country in using ethnicity as the fundamental organizing principle of a federal system of government. And yet this pioneering experiment in “ethnic federalism” has been largely ignored in the growing literature on democratization and ethnicity in Africa and on the accommodation of ethnic diversity in democratic states. Ethnic Federalism brings a much-needed comparative dimension to the discussion of this experiment in Ethiopia.

Ethnic Federalism closely examines aspects of the Ethiopean case and asks why the use of territorial decentralism to accommodate ethnic differences has been generally unpopular in Africa, while it is growing in popularity in the West.

The book includes case studies of Nigerian and Indian federalism and suggests how Ethiopia might learn from both the failures and successes of these older federations. In the light of these broader issues and cases, it identifies the main challenges facing Ethiopia in the next few years, as it struggles to bring political practice into line with constitutional theory and thereby achieve a genuinely federal division of powers.

Europe has long imagined itself as the centre of the universe, although its precise geographical, cultural and social terrains have always been amorphous. Exploring the fear and fascination associated with the continent as an allegory, Hamid Dabashi considers Europe to be a historically formed barricade against the world.

Frantz Fanon’s assessment that 'Europe is literally the creation of the Third World' is still true today; but in more than one sense for the colonial has always been embedded in the capital, and the capital within the colonial. As the condition of coloniality shifts, so have the dividing lines between coloniser and colonised, and this shift calls for a reappraisal of our understanding of nationalism, xenophobia and sectarianism as the dangerous indices of the emerging worlds.

As the far-right populists captivate minds across Europe and Brexit upsets the balance of power in the European Union, this book, from a major scholar of postcolonial thought, is a timely and transformative intervention.

Europe’s Indians forces a rethinking of key assumptions regarding difference—particularly racial difference—and its centrality to contemporary social and political theory. Tracing shifts in European representations of two different colonial spaces, the New World and India, from the late fifteenth century through the late nineteenth, Vanita Seth demonstrates that the classification of humans into racial categories or binaries of self–other is a product of modernity. Part historical, part philosophical, and part a history of science, her account exposes the epistemic conditions that enabled the thinking of difference at distinct historical junctures. Seth’s examination of Renaissance, Classical Age, and nineteenth-century representations of difference reveals radically diverging forms of knowing, reasoning, organizing thought, and authorizing truth. It encompasses stories of monsters, new worlds, and ancient lands; the theories of individual agency expounded by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; and the physiological sciences of the nineteenth century. European knowledge, Seth argues, does not reflect a singular history of Reason, but rather multiple traditions of reasoning, of historically bounded and contingent forms of knowledge. Europe’s Indians shows that a history of colonialism and racism must also be an investigation into the historical production of subjectivity, agency, epistemology, and the body.

This is a personal story of a multinational research programme that, instead of explaining conflict, has sought to explain peace, and to gauge its quality and sustainability. The Uppsala Conflict Data Programme has shown a dramatic drop in East Asian battle deaths between the 1970s and ’80s, just as wars got worse in the rest of the world. Since 1989, East Asia has been exceptionally peaceful. The book recounts heated discussions over how to explain a regional transition to peace. Was it due to a changing power balance? The ASEAN Way? China’s ‘peaceful development’ doctrine? Growing economic interdependence? Or, as the author contends, a series of national priority shifts by powerful Asian leaders who prioritized economic growth and thus needed external and internal stability? The book deals with civil as well as international conflict, and discusses why Thailand, Myanmar and the Philippines have not yet achieved internal peace. The author recounts his debates with colleagues who find it difficult to accept that a region with several unresolved militarized disputes, still ongoing civil wars, rising arms expenditures, massive human rights violations, and high levels of domestic violence can be called ‘peaceful’. East Asia, they say, has just a ‘negative peace’ or relative absence of war. Tønnesson, who holds that a ‘negative peace’ has tremendous positive value, includes a discussion of how to predict its future – can China keep peace with its neighbours? A rare combination of detached analysis and personal narrative, the book examines developments in the world’s most important region while also telling the story of how researchers with different assumptions develop rival theories and predictions.