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783 books match the query 'History & Theory' and 33 start with i

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Ideas Have Consequences

Richard M. Weaver

University of Chicago Press, 2013

A classic argument for conservative values and the risks of relativism

Originally published in 1948, at the height of post–World War II optimism and confidence in collective security, Ideas Have Consequences uses “words hard as cannonballs” to present an unsparing diagnosis of the ills of the modern age. Widely read and debated at the time of its first publication, the book is now seen as one of the foundational texts of the modern conservative movement.

In its pages, Richard M. Weaver argues that the decline of Western civilization resulted from the rising acceptance of relativism over absolute reality. In spite of increased knowledge, this retreat from the realist intellectual tradition has weakened the Western capacity to reason, with catastrophic consequences for social order and individual rights. But Weaver also offers a realistic remedy. These difficulties are the product not of necessity, but of intelligent choice. And, today, as decades ago, the remedy lies in the renewed acceptance of absolute reality and the recognition that ideas—like actions—have consequences.

This expanded edition of the classic work contains a foreword by New Criterion editor Roger Kimball that offers insight into the rich intellectual and historical contexts of Weaver and his work and an afterword by Ted J. Smith III that relates the remarkable story of the book’s writing and publication.

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Identity and the Failure of America

From Thomas Jefferson to the War on Terror

John Michael

University of Minnesota Press, 2008

From Thomas Jefferson to John Rawls, justice has been at the center of America’s self-image and national creed. At the same time, for many of its peoples-from African slaves and European immigrants to women and the poor-the American experience has been defined by injustice: oppression, disenfranchisement, violence, and prejudice.

In Identity and the Failure of America, John Michael explores the contradictions between a mythic national identity promising justice to all and the realities of a divided, hierarchical, and frequently iniquitous history and social order. Through a series of insightful readings, Michael analyzes such cultural moments as the epic dramatization of the tension between individual ambition and communal complicity in Moby-Dick, attempts to effect social change through sympathy in the novels of Lydia Marie Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s antislavery activism and Frederick Douglass’s long fight for racial equity, and the divisive figures of John Brown and Nat Turner in American letters and memory.

Focusing on exemplary instances when the nature of the United States as an essentially conflicted nation turned to force, Michael ultimately posits the development of a more cosmopolitan American identity, one that is more fully and justly imagined in response to the nation’s ethical failings at home and abroad.

John Michael is professor of English and of visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester. He is the author of Anxious Intellects: Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment Values and Emerson and Skepticism: The Cipher of the World.

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Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism

Franz Jakubowski

Pluto Press, 2002

Ideology and Superstructure was written at a time - in the inter-war years - when Marxism existed almost entirely in its Stalinst form. Franz Jakubowski set out to reintroduce the centrality of the Hegelian dialectic into Marx's method and to elaborate the concept of praxis.

In the same period, only Lukacs and Korsch attempted to deal systemically with these problems, and it is they who are generally recognised as the main inspiration behind what is called Western Marxism, yet Franz Jakubowski is a key figure in the development of Marxist thought. And, unlike the others, Jakubowski was also an activist, and for this reason avoids the unnecessarily dense language of his fellow theoreticians.

Ideology and Superstructure is rare in that it successfully conveys complex problems in a simple and straightforward form. At a time when the literature on Marx has become excessively obscuranist, Jakubowski's work serves as a useful antidote, and is an ideal text for introducing novices to the basics of Marxist theory.

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Ideology, Interrupted

A Theory of Political Precarity

Robin Truth Goodman

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

A powerful argument that the failure of ideology has created political disconnection and apathy

Political institutions increasingly fail to provide representations where citizens can recognize, identify, and imagine themselves as part of the institutions’ democratic project. Robin Truth Goodman argues that this disconnection is because ideology itself has gotten interrupted. Reversing Louis Althusser’s famous formulation of ideology as “calling” to citizens who, in response, turn toward the call, she argues that citizens now believe that ideology has turned away from them and stopped calling, endangering the most basic processes of modern democracies.

Deconstructing the widespread failure of democratic institutions to connect with individuals, Goodman examines recent works by authors such as Claire Vaye Watkins, Colson Whitehead, Ling Ma, Han Kang, and Ruth Ozeki that interrogate subjective agency within three different sites of social struggle: eco-catastrophe, pandemic, and food insecurity. She shows the themes that emerge from the novels reflecting and extending how the privatization and technologization of political decision-making have effectively cut off politicians and political institutions from the people they are supposed to serve.

Basing her study in the political philosophy of Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva, and other prominent feminists, Goodman draws parallels with gender theory and argues that precarity in democratic societies has prevented citizens from finding points of engagement within politics. Diagnosing this widespread inability to translate private struggles into collective responses, Ideology, Interrupted is a powerful and inspiring call for new forms of societal bonds and political engagement to rejuvenate our democratic systems.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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Illiberal Justice

John Rawls vs. the American Political Tradition

David Lewis Schaefer

University of Missouri Press, 2007

Often considered the greatest American political philosopher of the twentieth century, and the most important liberal theorist since John Stuart Mill, John Rawls enjoys a practically sacrosanct status among scholars of political theory, law, and ethics. In Illiberal Justice, David Schaefer offers the most thorough challenge to Rawls’s doctrine yet published, demonstrating how his teachings deviate from the core tradition of constitutional liberalism as exemplified by leading American statesmen from the founders through Lincoln and beyond.

Illiberal Justice is the first comprehensive overview of all of Rawls’s writings, emphasizing the continuity in his thought and intention to a greater extent than other scholars have done. Schaefer offers a fundamental critique of both Rawls’s conception of political philosophy and the policy judgments he derives from his “principles of justice.” Schaefer argues that Rawls’s failure to ground his teaching about justice in a serious analysis of human nature or an empirical grasp of political life is symptomatic of a larger crisis within contemporary liberal political and jurisprudential theorizing.

Although Rawls is commonly viewed as a welfare-state liberal, Schaefer stresses that his writings actually embody a radical transformation of liberalism in the direction of libertarianism that deviates sharply from the American liberal tradition. Citing empirical evidence of the persistence of political and economic opportunity in America, Schaefer challenges Rawls’s allegations that our polity suffers from grave injustices. He points out the strikingly apocalyptic tone of Rawls’s last writings, in which Rawls even questions whether human existence is worthwhile if his principles are not actualized.

Illiberal Justice is not only a critique of Rawls’s political program and philosophic methodology, it is also a defense of the American constitutional order against Rawls’s dogmatic theorizing, which Schaefer argues has exercised an increasing, and detrimental, effect on our jurisprudence. By combining a thorough critical exegesis of Rawls’s texts with a broad engagement with the tradition of political philosophy and American political thought, Schaefer makes an important contribution to both our understanding of Rawls and the enterprise of political philosophy.

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Imaginary Futures

From Thinking Machines to the Global Village

Richard Barbrook

Pluto Press, 2007

This book is a history of the future. It shows how our contemporary understanding of the Net is shaped by visions of the future that were put together in the 1950s and 1960s.

Richard Barbrook argues that at the height of the Cold War the Americans invented the only working model of communism in human history, the Internet. Yet, for all of its libertarian potential, the goal of this high-tech project was geopolitical dominance. The ownership of time was control over the destiny of humanity. The potentially subversive theory of cybernetics was transformed into the military-friendly project of "artificial intelligence." Capitalist growth became the fastest route to the "information society." The rest of the world was expected to follow America's path into the networked future.

Today, we're still being told that the Net is creating the information society---and that America today is everywhere else tomorrow. Barbrook shows how this idea serves a specific geopolitical purpose. Thankfully, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the DIY ethic of the Net shows that people can resist these authoritarian prophecies by shaping information technologies in their own interest. Ultimately, if we don't want the future to be what it used to be, we must invent our own improved and truly revolutionary future.

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Imperial Affects

Sensational Melodrama and the Attractions of American Cinema

Eagle, Jonna

Rutgers University Press, 2017

Imperial Affects is the first sustained account of American action-based cinema as melodrama. From the earliest war films through the Hollywood Western and the late-century action cinema, imperialist violence and mobility have been produced as sites of both visceral pleasure and moral virtue. Suffering and omnipotence operate as twinned affects in this context, inviting identification with an American national subject constituted as both victimized and invincible—a powerful and persistent conjunction traced here across a century of cinema.

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Imperial White

Race, Diaspora, and the British Empire

Radhika Mohanram

University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Radhika Mohanram shows not just how British imperial culture shaped the colonies, but how the imperial rule of colonies shifted—and gave new meanings to—what it meant to be British.

Imperial White looks at literary, social, and cultural texts on the racialization of the British body and investigates British whiteness in the colonies to address such questions as: How was the whiteness in Britishness constructed by the presence of Empire? How was whiteness incorporated into the idea of masculinity? Does heterosexuality have a color? And does domestic race differ from colonial race? In addition to these inquiries on the issues of race, class, and sexuality, Mohanram effectively applies the methods of whiteness studies to British imperial material culture to critically racialize the relationship between the metropole and the peripheral colonies.

Considering whether whiteness, like theory, can travel, Mohanram also provides a new perspective on white diaspora, a phenomenon of the nineteenth century that has been largely absent in diaspora studies, ultimately rereading—and rethinking—British imperial whiteness.

Radhika Mohanram teaches postcolonial cultural studies in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, Wales. She is the author of Black Body: Women, Colonialism, Space (Minnesota, 1999) and edits the journal Social Semiotics.

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Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies

Herman Lebovics

Duke University Press, 2006

In this important volume, Herman Lebovics, a preeminent cultural historian of France, develops a historical argument with striking contemporary relevance: empire abroad inevitably undermines democracy at home. These essays, which Lebovics wrote over the past decade, demonstrate the impressive intellectual range of his work. Focusing primarily on France and to a lesser extent on the United Kingdom, he shows how empire and its repercussions have pervaded—and corroded—Western cultural, intellectual, and social life from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

Some essays explore why modern Western democratic societies needed colonialism. Among these is an examination of the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke’s prescient conclusion that liberalism could only control democratic forces with the promise of greater wealth enabled by empire. In other essays Lebovics considers the relation between overseas rule and domestic life. Discussing George Orwell’s tale “Shooting an Elephant” and the careers of two colonial officers (one British and one French), he contemplates the ruinous authoritarianism that develops among the administrators of empire. Lebovics considers Pierre Bourdieu’s thinking about how colonialism affected metropolitan French life, and he reflects on the split between sociology and ethnology, which was partly based on a desire among intellectuals to think one way about metropolitan populations and another about colonial subjects. Turning to the arts, Lebovics traces how modernists used the colonial “exotic” to escape the politicized and contested modernity of the urban West. Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies is a compelling case for cultural history as a key tool for understanding the injurious effects of imperialism and its present-day manifestations within globalization.

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Imperialism

The Highest Stage of Capitalism

V. I. Lenin

Pluto Press, 1996

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In Defense of Politics

Bernard Crick

University of Chicago Press, 1993

An ever-timely explanation of the work of politics that argues powerfully that political activity is at its heart a kind of moral activity.

It's hard to get excited about politics these days. Polarization is high, getting things done seems all but impossible, and at times it seems like no one is willing to listen to anyone they disagree with. Surely there's a better way.

In Defense of Politics says, loud and proud: Absolutely not. In this classic but still timely work, which recently drew strong praise from Ezra Klein, Bernard Crick argues that politics, with its compromises and frustrations aand power struggles, remains the only tested alternative to government by coercion, making both freedom and order possible in heterogeneous societies. For Crick, politics is messy and complex, and his book defends it against those who would identify it with (and reduce it to) ideology, democracy, nationalism, or technology. “Politics," Crick explains, "involves genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people, not tasks set for our redemption or objects for our philanthropy.”

Clear-eyed and frank yet still capable of inspiring, In Defense of Politics is a rousing call to recommit to the hard work of bringing people together and moving society forward.

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In Search of Goodness

Edited by Ruth W. Grant

University of Chicago Press, 2011

The recent spate of books and articles reflecting on the question of evil might make one forget that the question of just what constitutes goodness is no less urgent or perplexing. Everyone wants to think of him- or herself as good. But what does a good life look like? And how do people become good? Are there multiple, competing possibilities for what counts as a good life, all equally worthy? Or, is there a unified and transcendent conception of the good that should guide our judgment of the possibilities? What does a good life look like when it is guided by God? How is a good life involved with the lives of others? And, finally, how good is good enough?

These questions are the focus of In Search of Goodness, the product of a year-long conversation about goodness. The eight essays in this volume challenge the dichotomies that usually govern how goodness has been discussed in the past: altruism versus egoism; reason versus emotion; or moral choice versus moral character. Instead, the contributors seek to expand the terms of the discussion by coming at goodness from a variety of perspectives: psychological, philosophic, literary, religious, and political. In each case, they emphasize the lived realities and particulars of moral phenomena, taking up examples and illustrations from life, literature, and film. From Achilles and Billy Budd, to Oskar Schindler and Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, to Iris Murdoch and the citizens of Flagstaff, Arizona, readers will find a wealth of thought-provoking insights to help them better understand this most basic, but complex, element of human life and happiness.

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In Search of the Black Panther Party

New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement

Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams, eds.

Duke University Press, 2006

Controversy swirled around the Black Panthers from the moment the revolutionary black nationalist Party was founded in Oakland, California, in 1966. Since that time, the group that J. Edgar Hoover called “the single greatest threat to the nation’s internal security” has been celebrated and denigrated, deified and vilified. Rarely, though, has it received the sort of nuanced analysis offered in this rich interdisciplinary collection. Historians, along with scholars in the fields of political science, English, sociology, and criminal justice, examine the Panthers and their present-day legacy with regard to revolutionary violence, radical ideology, urban politics, popular culture, and the media. The essays consider the Panthers as distinctly American revolutionaries, as the products of specific local conditions, and as parts of other movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

One contributor evaluates the legal basis of the Panthers’ revolutionary struggle, explaining how they utilized and critiqued the language of the Constitution. Others explore the roles of individuals, looking at a one-time Panther imprisoned for a murder he did not commit and an FBI agent who monitored the activities of the Panthers’ Oakland branch. Contributors assess the Panthers’ relations with Students for a Democratic Society, the Young Lords, the Brown Berets, and the Peace and Freedom Party. They discuss the Party’s use of revolutionary aesthetics, and they show how the Panthers manipulated and were manipulated by the media. Illuminating some of the complexities involved in placing the Panthers in historical context, this collection demonstrates that the scholarly search for the Black Panthers has only just begun.

Contributors. Bridgette Baldwin, Davarian L. Baldwin, David Barber, Rod Bush, James T. Campbell, Tim Lake, Jama Lazerow, Edward P. Morgan, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Roz Payne, Robert O. Self, Yohuru Williams, Joel Wilson

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In Time of War

Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq

Adam J. Berinsky

University of Chicago Press, 2009

From World War II to the war in Iraq, periods of international conflict seem like unique moments in U.S. political history—but when it comes to public opinion, they are not. To make this groundbreaking revelation, In Time of War explodes conventional wisdom about American reactions to World War II, as well as the more recent conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Adam Berinsky argues that public response to these crises has been shaped less by their defining characteristics—such as what they cost in lives and resources—than by the same political interests and group affiliations that influence our ideas about domestic issues.

With the help of World War II–era survey data that had gone virtually untouched for the past sixty years, Berinsky begins by disproving the myth of “the good war” that Americans all fell in line to support after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The attack, he reveals, did not significantly alter public opinion but merely punctuated interventionist sentiment that had already risen in response to the ways that political leaders at home had framed the fighting abroad. Weaving his findings into the first general theory of the factors that shape American wartime opinion, Berinsky also sheds new light on our reactions to other crises. He shows, for example, that our attitudes toward restricted civil liberties during Vietnam and after 9/11 stemmed from the same kinds of judgments we make during times of peace.

With Iraq and Afghanistan now competing for attention with urgent issues within the United States, In Time of War offers a timely reminder of the full extent to which foreign and domestic politics profoundly influence—and ultimately illuminate—each other.

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In the Name of History

Joan Wallach Scott

Central European University Press, 2020

In this book Joan Wallach Scott discusses the role history has played as an arbiter of right and wrong and of those who claim to act in its name—"in the name of history." Scott investigates three different instances in which repudiation of the past was conceived as a way to a better future: the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, and the ongoing movement for reparations for slavery in the United States.

Scott shows how in these cases history was not only used to explain the past but to produce a particular future. Yet both past and future were subject to the political realities of their time and defined in terms of moral absolutes, often leading to deep contradictions. These three instances demonstrate that history is not an impartial truth, rather its very meaning is constructed by those who act in its name.

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In the Space of Theory

Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-State

Matthew Sparke

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

How is the meaning of the hyphen in “nation-state” changing in the context of globalization and proliferating political struggles? How can we investigate the transformation of the nation-state by marking the normally unmarked hyphen in “geo-graphy”? Debunking deterritorialization both as a discourse and as an antiessentialist abstraction, Matthew Sparke offers answers to these questions by examining the contemporary geographies of the United States and Canada.

In the Space of Theory details the territorial implications of the Iraq war, NAFTA, welfare reform, constitutional reform, cross-border regional development, and the legal battles of First Nations. In using antiessentialist arguments to elucidate the complexity of these developments, Sparke seeks to ground and critique postfoundational theory itself. He shows how the postfoundational arguments of Homi Bhabha, Arjun Appadurai, Timothy Mitchell, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri obscure politically important processes of reterritorialization at the same time they deterritorialize diverse theoretical assumptions about the nation-state. Engaged with theory and grounded in close study of cultural, political, and economic change, In the Space of Theory explores the geographies of struggle that at once underlie and undermine the hyphen in contemporary nation-states.

Matthew Sparke is associate professor of geography and international studies at the University of Washington.

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Independence and Revolution in Spanish America

Perspectives and Problems

Edited by Eduardo Posada-Carbo and Anthony McFarlane

University of London Press, 1999

The essays in this volume re-examine, from a number of different angles the process of Independence in Spanish America. The focus is to a large extent on the consequences of the wars of Independence for the newly established republics. However the first section deals with a critical review of the historiography the ‘revolutionary’ nature of Independence and the comparative elements of Independence in the Americas. The remainder of the book examines the development of the wars and the impact that Independence had on political instability culture citizenship and the formation of new nations. In addition to general chapters there are individual chapters devoted to New Granada Venezuela Mexico Chile and Argentina.

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India’s New Middle Class

Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform

Leela Fernandes

University of Minnesota Press, 2006

Today India’s middle class numbers more than 250 million people and is growing rapidly. Public reports have focused mainly on the emerging group’s consumer potential, while global views of India’s new economy range from excitement about market prospects to anxieties over outsourcing of service sector jobs. Yet the consequences of India’s economic liberalization and the expansion of the middle class have transformed Indian culture and politics. In India’s New Middle Class, Leela Fernandes digs into the implications of this growth and uncovers—in the media, in electoral politics, and on the streets of urban neighborhoods—the complex politics of caste, religion, and gender that shape this rising population. Using rich ethnographic data, she reveals how the middle class represents the political construction of a social group and how it operates as a proponent of economic democratization. Delineating the tension between consumer culture and outsourcing, Fernandes also examines the roots of India’s middle class and its employment patterns, including shifting skill sets and labor market restructuring. Through this close look at the country’s recent history and reforms, Fernandes develops an original theoretical approach to the nature of politics and class formation in an era of globalization.In this sophisticated analysis of the dynamics of an economic and political group in the making, Fernandes moves beyond reductionist images of India’s new middle class to bring to light the group’s social complexity and profound influence on politics in India and beyond.Leela Fernandes is associate professor of political science at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

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Influx and Efflux

Writing Up with Walt Whitman

Jane Bennett

Duke University Press, 2020

In influx & efflux Jane Bennett pursues a question that was bracketed in her book Vibrant Matter: how to think about human agency in a world teeming with powerful nonhuman influences? “Influx & efflux”—a phrase borrowed from Whitman's "Song of Myself"—refers to everyday movements whereby outside influences enter bodies, infuse and confuse their organization, and then exit, themselves having been transformed into something new. How to describe the human efforts involved in that process? What kinds of “I” and “we” can live well and act effectively in a world of so many other lively materialities? Drawing upon Whitman, Thoreau, Caillois, Whitehead, and other poetic writers, Bennett links a nonanthropocentric model of self to a radically egalitarian pluralism and also to a syntax and style of writing appropriate to the entangled world in which we live. The book tries to enact the uncanny process by which we “write up” influences that pervade, enable, and disrupt us.

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Informing a Nation

The Newspaper Presidency of Thomas Jefferson

Mel Laracey

University of Michigan Press, 2021

During his presidency, Thomas Jefferson both sponsored and wrote for his own newspaper, the National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser. The newspaper spoke on behalf of his policies and those of his Republican, anti-federalist party, the Democratic-Republicans, the precursor to today’s Democrats. Author Mel Laracey focuses on the newspaper’s message during Jefferson’s first term, showing how the third president used media to promote his administration and its goals against their political rivals, the Federalists. Informing a Nation shows how Jefferson and his allies dealt with political challenges, reveals hitherto unexamined aspects of the early presidency, and raises broad questions of the relationship between the presidency and media today.

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Ingenious Citizenship

Recrafting Democracy for Social Change

Charles T. Lee

Duke University Press, 2016

In Ingenious Citizenship Charles T. Lee centers the daily experiences and actions of migrant domestic workers, sex workers, transgender people, and suicide bombers in his rethinking of mainstream models of social change. Bridging cultural and political theory with analyses of film, literature, and ethnographic sources, Lee shows how these abject populations find ingenious and improvisational ways to disrupt and appropriate practices of liberal citizenship. When voting and other forms of civic engagement are unavailable or ineffective, the subversive acts of a domestic worker breaking a dish or a prostitute using the strategies and language of an entrepreneur challenge the accepted norms of political action. Taken to the extreme, a young Palestinian woman blowing herself up in a Jerusalem supermarket questions two of liberal citizenship's most cherished values: life and liberty. Using these examples to critically reinterpret political agency, citizenship practices, and social transformation, Lee reveals the limits of organizing change around a human rights discourse. Moreover, his subjects offer crucial lessons in how to turn even the worst conditions and the most unstable positions in society into footholds for transformative and democratic agency.

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Inner Worlds

Interiority and Capitalist Modernity in Japan

Richard M Reitan

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Inner Worlds examines the emergence and operation of representations of interiority—consciousness, “folk mind,” “spirit”—in Japan from its industrial revolution to the rise of fascism during the interwar period. These representations functioned to reproduce the capitalist system by containing its excesses. Thus, poverty in the 1880s was ostensibly the result of defects in one’s innate mental character. A degenerate “crowd mind” explained the strikes and riots of the early twentieth century. State subversion during the 1930s supposedly reflected an attenuated “folk spirit.” By locating the roots of capitalism’s excesses not within the socioeconomic order itself but within a defective interiority, ideologies of interiority operated to contain disruptions to Japan’s socioeconomic order, conceal its defects, and sustain the capitalist system. Inner Worlds reveals how interiority was constituted in ways consistent with both the demands of the emerging capitalist order of the late nineteenth century and the conditions that coalesced to form a fascist conjecture in the 1930s.

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Insurgencies

Constituent Power And The Modern State

Antonio Negri

University of Minnesota Press, 1999

A modern revolutionary's fresh approach to radical thought. At a time when political paradigms are collapsing, and the death of Marxism and the Left is proclaimed, Insurgencies offers an intellectually invigorating and historically wide-ranging appraisal of the real legacy and promise of revolutionary thought and practice. At the center of this book is the conflict between "constituent power," the democratic force of revolutionary innovation, and "constituted power," the fixed power of formal constitutions and central authority. This conflict, Antonio Negri argues, defines the drama of modern rebellions, from Machiavelli's Florence and Harrington's England to the American, French, and Russian revolutions. Insurgencies leads to a new notion of how power and action must be understood if we are to achieve a radically democratic future. After living in exile in France for nearly fourteen years, Antonio Negri is currently serving a jail sentence in Italy, his home country, for his political activism in the 1970s. His conviction, which was based on the substance of his writings, led Michel Foucault to ask, "Isn't he in prison simply for being an intellectual?" Negri's works in English include The Savage Anomaly (1991) and, with Michael Hardt, Labor of Dionysus (1994). Maurizia Boscagli is associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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Insurgencies

Constituent Power and the Modern State

Antonio Negri

University of Minnesota Press, 2009

New Edition

In the ten years since the initial publication of Insurgencies, Antonio Negri's reputation as one of the world's foremost political philosophers has grown dramatically. An invigorating appraisal of revolutionary thought, Insurgencies is both the precursor to and the historical basis for Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's masterwork, Empire.

At the center of this book is the conflict between "constituent power," the democratic force of revolutionary innovation, and "constituted power," the fixed power of formal constitutions and central authority. This conflict, Negri argues, defines the drama of modern rebellions. Now with a foreword by Michael Hardt, Insurgencies leads to a new notion of how power and action must be understood if we are to achieve a democratic future.

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Insurgent Democracy

The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics

Michael J. Lansing

University of Chicago Press, 2015

In 1915, western farmers mounted one of the most significant challenges to party politics America has seen: the Nonpartisan League, which sought to empower citizens and restrain corporate influence. Before its collapse in the 1920s, the League counted over 250,000 paying members, spread to thirteen states and two Canadian provinces, controlled North Dakota’s state government, and birthed new farmer-labor alliances. Yet today it is all but forgotten, neglected even by scholars.

Michael J. Lansing aims to change that. Insurgent Democracy offers a new look at the Nonpartisan League and a new way to understand its rise and fall in the United States and Canada. Lansing argues that, rather than a spasm of populist rage that inevitably burned itself out, the story of the League is in fact an instructive example of how popular movements can create lasting change. Depicting the League as a transnational response to economic inequity, Lansing not only resurrects its story of citizen activism, but also allows us to see its potential to inform contemporary movements.

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Intellectual Politics in Post-Tiananmen China, Volume 16

Xudong Zhang

Duke University Press, 0

The essays in this special issue of Social Text explore the fields of cultural and intellectual production in post-Tiananmen China and address the discrepancy between the growth in critical studies of China and the virtually untouched terrain of China’s ideological-intellectual dimension.
Creating a platform for further theoretical discussion about the ongoing struggle to bring about a new social system, the contributors grapple with the internal crisis or disorientation of the Chinese intellectual world as a distorted, but telling picture of the complexity of contemporary Chinese economics, politics, society, and culture. Essays offer a critical examination of the current state of Chinese intellectual discourse; a challenge to mainstream liberalism in China today and its commitment to democracy; a summary of reconsiderations of property rights, economic democracy, political participation, and the meaning of socialism in the age of flexible production; a reflection on the handover of Hong Kong in the context of a general discussion of Western colonialism in China; and an analysis of the rise of consumer nationalism and mass culture in China since the early 1990s. Intellectual Politics in Post-Tiananmen China sheds light on the evasive nature of Chinese society, and the contributors engage the Chinese problematic not only as a crisis but also as an ongoing historical dynamic.

Contributors. Rey Chow, Zhiyuan Cui, Wang Hui, Gan Yang, Xudong Zhang

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Intellectuals and Politics in Central Europe

Ivan Bernik

Central European University Press, 1999

Discussing the role of intellectuals in the political transition of the late 1980s and early 1990s and their participation in the political life of the new democracies of Central Europe, this book presents original essays from authors who discuss the eight countries in the region. In the Introduction, the editor gives a historical overview of the tradition of the political involvement of intellectuals in these countries, especially in the nineteenth century. The chapters which follow describe the typical political and social attitude of Central European intellectuals, including writers, poets, artists, and scientists. A unique feature of the book is that it deals not only with the role of intellectuals in the preparation of the peaceful revolutions in the individual countries, but also critically analyzes their role in the transition and their behavior in the emerging democracies. The most striking phenomenon, common to all the countries studied, is the disillusionment of intellectuals and their disappointment in the years following the transition, a period when the role of prophet should be replaced by that of politician for those who have chosen to stay in politics. This phenomenon has, in general, been much less subjected to systematic study than the role of intellectuals in the changes themselves.

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Interpretive Quantification

Methodological Explorations for Critical and Constructivist IR

J. Samuel Barkin and Laura Sjoberg, editors

University of Michigan Press, 2017

Countering the growing divide between positivists who embrace quantitative, numerical approaches and post-positivist scholars who favor qualitative, interpretive approaches, J. Samuel Barkin and Laura Sjoberg argue that both methods are more widely adaptable than is commonly assumed by either camp.

In Interpretive Quantification, ten highly regarded scholars in the field of International Relations apply quantitative methods and formal models to specific constructivist and critical research questions. In this way, each chapter serves not only as evidence that methods can productively be applied across paradigms, but also as a guide as to how this may be done. In sum, the contributors make a compelling case that when researchers cordon off particular methods for merely ideological reasons, they circumscribe their own paradigms and hinder their own research agenda.

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Interspecies Politics

Nature, Borders, States

Rafi Youatt

University of Michigan Press, 2020

This book explores the ways that international politics is a form of interspecies politics, one that involves the interactions, ideas, and practices of multiple species, both human and nonhuman, to generate differences and create commonalities. While we frequently think of having an international politics “of” the environment, a deep and thoroughgoing anthropocentrism guides our idea of what political life can be, which prevents us from thinking about a politics “with” the environment. This anthropocentric assumption about politics drives both ecological degradation and deep forms of interhuman injustice and hierarchy.

Interspecies Politics challenges that assumption, arguing that a truly ecological account of interstate life requires us to think about politics as an activity that crosses species lines. It therefore explores a postanthropocentric account of international politics, focusing on a series of cases and interspecies practices in the American borderlands, ranging from the US-Mexico border in southern Texas, to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, to Isle Royale, near the US-Canadian border. The book draws on international relations, environmental political theory, anthropology, and animal studies, to show how key international dimensions of states—sovereignty, territory, security, rights—are better understood as forms of interspecies assemblage that both generate new forms of multispecies inclusion, and structure forms of violence and hierarchy against human and nonhuman alike.

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Inventing the Ties That Bind

Imagined Relationships in Moral and Political Life

Francesca Polletta

University of Chicago Press, 2020

At a time of deep political divisions, leaders have called on ordinary Americans to talk to one another: to share their stories, listen empathetically, and focus on what they have in common, not what makes them different. In Inventing the Ties that Bind, Francesca Polletta questions this popular solution for healing our rifts. Talking the way that friends do is not the same as equality, she points out. And initiatives that bring strangers together for friendly dialogue may provide fleeting experiences of intimacy, but do not supply the enduring ties that solidarity requires. But Polletta also studies how Americans cooperate outside such initiatives, in social movements, churches, unions, government, and in their everyday lives. She shows that they often act on behalf of people they see as neighbors, not friends, as allies, not intimates, and people with whom they have an imagined relationship, not a real one. To repair our fractured civic landscape, she argues, we should draw on the rich language of solidarity that Americans already have.

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Iran

Beauty and Tyranny

Ramin Jahanbegloo

Gingko, 2026

Ramin Jahanbegloo turns to ancient philosophy as an antidote to contemporary authoritarianism in Iran.

From the rule of Cyrus the Great to the present day, Iran has been plagued by a recurrent syndrome of tyranny. For Ramin Jahanbegloo, the cure for this persistent cycle lies in a reengagement with the idea of a beautiful society. He presents beauty as an antidote to authoritarianism and as a methodology of freedom: one first taught by the philosophers of ancient Greece, who bound beauty and goodness together in the principle of kalokagathia, and later revived by the German Enlightenment.
A work of hope and faith in the people of Iran, this provocative and timely intervention from the author of The Idea of Persia turns to the past in order to imagine a way forward. Drawing on Hegel, Schiller, Arendt, Camus, and more, Jahanbegloo lays out a vision of how Iran and Iranians might come to live in beautiful freedom.

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