Results by title
1066 books match the query 'Political' and 230 start with t
The World Doesn't Work That Way, but It Could
StoriesYxta Maya Murray
University of Nevada Press, 2025
The Millions' Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half of 2020 Book Preview
The gripping, thought-provoking stories in Yxta Maya Murray’s latest collection find their inspiration in the headlines. Here, ordinary people negotiate tentative paths through wildfire, mass shootings, bureaucratic incompetence, and heedless government policies with vicious impacts on the innocent and helpless. A nurse volunteers to serve in catastrophe-stricken Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and discovers that her skill and compassion are useless in the face of stubborn governmental inertia. An Environmental Protection Agency employee, whose agricultural-worker parents died after long exposure to a deadly pesticide, finds herself forced to find justifications for reversing regulations that had earlier banned the chemical. A Department of Education employee in a dystopic future America visits a highly praised charter school and discovers the horrific consequences of academic failure. A transgender trainer of beauty pageant contestants takes on a beautiful Latina for the Miss USA pageant and brings her to perfection and the brink of victory, only to discover that she has a fatal secret.
The characters in these stories grapple with the consequences of frightening attitudes and policies pervasive in the United States today. The stories explore not only our distressing human capacity for moral numbness in the face of evil, but also reveal our surprising stores of compassion and forgiveness. These brilliantly conceived and beautifully written stories are troubling yet irresistible mirrors of our time.
Theater and Social Change, Volume 31
Alisa Solomon, ed.
Duke University Press, 0
Theater and Social Change not only tracks the historical evolution of political theater but also explores the current state and future prospects of different modes, including agit-prop, demonstrations, solo performance, Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, and community-based production. With such notable contributors as Anna Deavere Smith, Jonathan Kalb, Holly Hughes, and Tony Kushner, the issue offers a diverse assemblage of personal statements, conversations, photographs, interviews, and performance text.
Contributors include: Reverend Billy, Jan Cohen-Cruz, Arlene Goldbard, Sharon Green, Lani Guinier, Holly Hughes, Jonathan Kalb, Tony Kushner, Judith Malina, Robbie McCauley, John O'Neal, Claudia Orenstein, Bill Rauch, Julie Salverson, Anna Deavere Smith, Alisa Solomon, Roberta Uno
Theodore Roosevelt
A Literary LifeThomas Bailey and Katherine Joslin
University Press of New England, 2018
Theology and the Political
The New Debate, sic vCreston Davis, John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek, eds.
Duke University Press, 2005
Contributors. Anthony Baker, Daniel M. Bell Jr., Phillip Blond, Simon Critchley, Conor Cunningham, Creston Davis, William Desmond, Hent de Vries, Terry Eagleton, Rocco Gangle, Philip Goodchild, Karl Hefty, Eleanor Kaufman, Tom McCarthy, John Milbank, Antonio Negri, Catherine Pickstock, Patrick Aaron Riches, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Regina Mara Schwartz, Kenneth Surin, Graham Ward, Rowan Williams, Slavoj Žižek
Theory and Practice
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Theory and Practice is a series of nine lectures that Jacques Derrida delivered at the École Normale Supérieure in 1976 and 1977. The topic of “theory and practice” was associated above all with Marxist discourse and particularly the influential interpretation of Marx by Louis Althusser. Derrida’s many questions to Althusser and other thinkers aim at unsettling the distinction between thinking and acting.
Derrida’s investigations set out from Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” in particular the eleventh thesis, which has often been taken as a mantra for the “end of philosophy,” to be brought about by Marxist practice. Derrida argues, however, that Althusser has no such end in view and that his discourse remains resolutely philosophical, even as it promotes the theory/practice pair as primary values. This seminar also draws fascinating connections between Marxist thought and Heidegger and features Derrida’s signature reconsideration of the dichotomy between doing and thinking. This text, available for the first time in English, shows that Derrida was doing important work on Marx long before Specters of Marx. As with the other volumes in this series, it gives readers an unparalleled glimpse into Derrida’s thinking at its best—spontaneous, unpredictable, and groundbreaking.
There's Hope for the World
The Memoir of Birmingham, Alabama's First African American MayorRichard Arrington
University of Alabama Press, 2008
On a sultry September morning in 1955, a young African American man, the son of share croppers, boarded a Greyhound bus in Birmingham, Alabama, to leave his home state for the first time in his life. He was headed for the University of Detroit on a teaching scholarship from MilesCollege. Richard Arrington could not have guessed then that his future as a teacher would be postponed for decades by big-city politics--and that he would serve a record-setting five terms as chief executive of Alabama’s largest city.
Under Arrington’s leadership, Birmingham rebuilt itself from a foundering, steel-driven industrial center to one of the most diversified metropolitan areas in the Southeast, with an economy fueled by health care, biomedical research, engineering, telecommunications, and banking. As mayor, Arrington’s economic legacy is impressive. When he left office, Birmingham boasted a record number of jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in its history. Additionally, Birmingham had built the strongest tax base in Alabama, expanded its city limits by 60 square miles, reduced crime to its lowest level in 25 years, and funded a $260 million school construction program. Today Birmingham is financially sound and is the only city in the Southeast with a $100 million endowment fund.
They Forged the Signature of God
A NovelViriato Sención
Northwestern University Press, 1995
Sención's novel follows the lives of three seminary students who suffer from church-state oppression. The book also gives a chilling portrait of Dr. Ramos, a sinister autocrat, who manages to survive six terms as president of his country through manipulation and tyranny. This finely textured novel gives a vivid picture of the internal politics of the Dominican Republic.
Thinking - Resisting - Reading the Political
Current Perspectives on Politics and Communities in the Arts Vol. 2Edited by Anneka Esch-van Kan, Stephan Packard, and Philipp Schulte
Diaphanes, 2013
The essays collected in “Thinking Resistances. Current Perspectives on Politics, Community, and Art“ engage with political phenomena in their interrelations with arts as well as with recent theoretical and philosophical perspectives on the very meaning of politics, the political, and community.
Thinking While Black
Translating the Politics and Popular Culture of a Rebel GenerationDaniel McNeil
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Listen along with this Spotify playlist inspired by the book!
For copyright reasons, this book is available in the U.S.A only.
Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition
Norberto Bobbio
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Tracing Hobbes's work through De Cive and Leviathan, Bobbio identifies the philosopher's relation to the tradition of natural law. That Hobbes must now be understood in both this tradition as well as in the seemingly contradictory positivist tradition becomes clear for the first time in Bobbio's account. Bobbio also demonstrates that Hobbes cannot be easily labelled "liberal" or "totalitarian"; in Bobbio's provocative analysis of Hobbes's justification of the state, Hobbes emerges as a true conservative.
Though his primary concern is to reconstruct the inner logic of Hobbes's thought, Bobbio is also attentive to the philosopher's biography and weaves into his analysis details of Hobbes's life and world—his exile in France, his relation with the Mersenne circle, his disputes with Anglican bishops, and accusations of heresy leveled against him. The result is a revealing, thoroughly new portrait of the first theorist of the modern state.
Thomas Kuhn
A Philosophical History for Our TimesSteve Fuller
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Steve Fuller argues that Kuhn actually held a profoundly conservative view of science and how one ought to study its history. Early on, Kuhn came under the influence of Harvard President James Bryant Conant (to whom Structure is dedicated), who had developed an educational program intended to help deflect Cold War unease over science's uncertain future by focusing on its illustrious past. Fuller argues that this rhetoric made its way into Structure, which Fuller sees as preserving and reinforcing the old view that science really is just a steady accumulation of truths about the world (once "paradigm shifts" are resolved).
Fuller suggests that Kuhn, deliberately or not, shared the tendency in Western culture to conceal possible negative effects of new knowledge from the general public. Because it insists on a difference between a history of science for scientists and one suited to historians, Fuller charges that Structure created the awkward divide that has led directly to the "Science Wars" and has stifled much innovative research. In conclusion, Fuller offers a way forward that rejects Kuhn's fixation on paradigms in favor of a conception of science as a social movement designed to empower society's traditionally disenfranchised elements.
Certain to be controversial, Thomas Kuhn must be read by anyone who has adopted, challenged, or otherwise engaged with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
"Structure will never look quite the same again after Fuller. In that sense, he has achieved one of the main aims of his ambitious and impressively executed project."—Jon Turney, Times Higher Education Supplement
"Philosophies like Kuhn's narrow the possible futures of inquiry by politically methodizing and taming them. More republican philosophies will leave the future open. Mr. Fuller has amply succeeded in his program of distinguishing the one from the other."—William R. Everdell, Washington Times
Thought under Threat
On Superstition, Spite, and StupidityMiguel de Beistegui
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Thought under Threat is an attempt to understand the tendencies that threaten thinking from within. These tendencies have always existed. But today they are on the rise and frequently encouraged, even in our democracies. People “disagree” with science and distrust experts. Political leaders appeal to the hearts and guts of “the people,” rather than their critical faculties. Stupidity has become a right, if not a badge of honor; superstition is on the rise; and spite is a major political force. Thinking is considered “elitist.”
To see those obstacles as vices of thought, Miguel de Beistegui argues, we need to understand stupidity not as a lack of intelligence or judgment, but as the tendency to raise false problems and trivial questions. Similarly, we need to see spite not as a moral vice, but as a poison that blurs and distorts our critical faculties. Finally, superstition is best described not as a set of false beliefs, but as a system that neutralizes one’s ability to think for oneself.
For de Beistegui, thinking is intrinsically democratic and a necessary condition for the exercise of freedom. Thought under Threat shows how a training of thought itself can be used to ward off those vices, lead to productive deliberation, and, ultimately, create a thinking community.
Three Discourses
A Critical Modern Edition of Newly Identified Work of the Young HobbesThomas Hobbes
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Saxonhouse and Reynolds present the complete texts of the discourse with full annotations and modernized spellings. These are followed by a lengthy essay analyzing the pieces' significance for Hobbes's intellectual development and modern political thought more generally. The discourses provide the strongest evidence to date for the profound influences of Bacon and Machiavelli on the young Hobbes, and they add a new dimension to the much-debated impact of the scientific method on his thought. The book also contains both introductory and in-depth explanations of statistical "wordprinting."
Three Economies of Transcendence
Andrea Righi
University of Minnesota Press, 2025
Exploring climate change through the interconnections between sociality, theory of money, and a different concept of time
Three Economies of Transcendence offers a sharp critique of how transcendence underpins the symbolic, economic, and environmental crises of the modern world. Andrea Righi identifies three distinct “economies of transcendence” that sustain neoliberal systems of power. Termed the economy of rank, the economy of infinite valorization, and the phallic economy of time, these economies perpetuate hierarchies, sacrifices, and ecological destruction. Through this framework, Righi not only diagnoses the crisis but also proposes an immanent model of economy that fosters solidarity and is expressly pro-social and ecologically responsible.
This thought-provoking book links climate change to Western cultural and symbolic mechanisms, showing that transformative action must address these deep-seated structures. Righi envisions a future rooted in our shared spatio-temporal existence, challenging the atomizing rivalries and endless growth of neoliberalism.
Three Years Our Mayor
George Moscone and the Making of Modern San FranciscoLincoln A. Mitchell
University of Nevada Press, 2025
Moscone was also a very colorful character who, in addition to being a successful politician, was a charming and charismatic bon vivant who was deeply embedded in the fabric and culture of San Francisco. He grew up the only son of a single mother in Cow Hollow when it was a working class, largely Italian American neighborhood, and he became the kind of politician who knew bartenders, playground attendants, small business owners, and neighborhood activists in every corner of the city. Moscone’s life and the history of San Francisco during the middle half of the twentieth century are deeply intertwined.
Through illustrating the life of Moscone, author Lincoln A. Mitchell explores how today’s San Francisco came into being. Moscone—through his work in the State Senate, victory in the very divisive 1975 mayor’s race, and brief tenure as mayor—was a key figure in the city’s evolution. The politics surrounding Moscone’s election as mayor, governance of the city, and tragic death are still relevant issues. Moscone was a groundbreaking politician whose life was cut short, but his influence on San Francisco can still be felt today.
Through the Boondocks and Back
A NovellaAlex DiFrancesco
Northwestern University Press, 2027
A queer, rollicking retelling of The Odyssey
Zane Viaggio’s life has been fraught since leaving New York City for Cleveland. Uprooted and missing his life in the city, he escapes into parties and pills. When he wakes up vomiting several days in a row, he’s convinced by his three drag queen roommates and his best trans-femme friend to get a pregnancy test, learning that not only is he pregnant, but pregnant in an Ohio that has just outlawed abortion. Zane must then embark on an epic journey around Lake Erie and its surrounding towns on a stolen jet ski to find the man who impregnated him, get the money to go back to New York City for an abortion, and get his life back to normal. In this queer and trans retelling of The Odyssey, Zane encounters all sorts of strange and challenging characters—including one-eyed cats, force-femmed prophets, and his own chosen family—who help him discover that, perhaps, finding home is the greatest journey of all.
Times of History
Universal Topics in Islamic HistoriographyAziz Al-Azmeh
Central European University Press, 2007
Tito and His Comrades
Jože Pirjevec, Foreword by Emily Greble
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
With his Partisans he fought Hitler during World War II, and after the war he shrewdly resisted the Soviet Union's grasp. A leader of the non-aligned nations, he long enjoyed a reputation in the West as "the only good Communist" despite a dubious human rights record at home. Jože Pirjevec employs impressive research from archives in eight languages to offer this illuminating, definitive portrait of a complex man in turbulent times.
Pirjevec recounts how Tito, with little schooling but an astute intellect and driving ambition, rose through Communist Party ranks to shape and rule the Yugoslav federation. Surviving multiple assassination attempts by Nazis, Soviet spies, and others, Tito boldly threatened Stalin in return and may have, Pirjevec reveals, contrived Stalin's death. The narrative follows Tito's personal and political life into old age, as the specter of a Soviet invasion haunted him until his death at age eighty-seven. Available in English for the first time, this edition includes new material from Pirjevec and a foreword by Emily Greble.
To Live Is to Resist
The Life of Antonio GramsciJean-Yves Frétigné
University of Chicago Press, 2021
One of the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century, Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) has left an indelible mark on philosophy and critical theory. His innovative work on history, society, power, and the state has influenced several generations of readers and political activists, and even shaped important developments in postcolonial thought. But Gramsci’s thinking is scattered across the thousands of notebook pages he wrote while he was imprisoned by Italy’s fascist government from 1926 until shortly before his death.
To guide readers through Gramsci’s life and works, historian Jean-Yves Frétigné offers To Live Is to Resist, an accessible, compelling, and deeply researched portrait of an extraordinary figure. Throughout the book, Frétigné emphasizes Gramsci’s quiet heroism and his unwavering commitment to political practice and resistance. Most powerfully, he shows how Gramsci never surrendered, even in conditions that stripped him of all power—except, of course, the power to think.
Tocqueville in Arabia
Dilemmas in a Democratic AgeJoshua Mitchell
University of Chicago Press, 2013
In America, more than a half century of scholarship has explored and chronicled our growing isolation and loneliness. What of the Middle East? Does Tocqueville prediction—confirmed already by the American experience—hold true there as well? Americans look to the Middle East and see a rich network of familial and tribal linkages that seem to suggest that Tocqueville’s analysis does not apply. A closer look reveals that this is not true. In the Middle East today, citizens and subjects live amidst a profound tension: familial and tribal linkages hold them fast, and at the same time rapid modernization has left them as isolated and lonely as so many Americans are today. The looming question, anticipated so long ago by Tocqueville, is how they will respond to this isolation and loneliness.
Joshua Mitchell has spent years teaching Tocqueville’s classic account, Democracy in America, in America and the Arab Gulf and, with Tocqueville in Arabia, he offers a profound account of how the crisis of isolation and loneliness is playing out in similar and in different ways, in America and in the Middle East. While American students tend to value individualism and commercial self-interest, Middle Eastern students have grave doubts about individualism and a deep suspicion about capitalism, which they believe risks the destruction of long-held loyalties and obligations. Where American students, in their more reflective moments, long for more durable links than they currently have, the bonds that constrain the freedoms Middle Eastern students imagine the modern world offers at once frighten them and enkindle their imagination. When pondering suffering, American students tend to believe its causes can be engineered away, through better education and the advances of science. Middle Eastern students tend still to offer religious accounts, but are also enticed by the answers Americans give―and wonder if the two accounts can coexist at all. Moving back and forth between self-understandings in America and in the Middle East, Mitchell offers a framework for understanding the common challenges in both regions, and highlights the great temptation both will have to overcome—rejecting the seeming incoherence of the democratic age, and opting for one or another scheme to re-enchant the world. Whether these schemes take the form of various purported Islamic movements in the Middle East, or the form of enchanted nationalism in American and in Europe, the remedy sought will not cure the ailment of the democratic age. About this, Mitchell comes to the defense Tocqueville long ago offered: the dilemmas of the democratic age can be courageously endured, but they cannot resolved.
We live in a time rife with mutual misunderstandings between America and the Middle East. Tocqueville in Arabia offers a guide to the present, troubled times, leavened by the author’s hopes about the future.
Toleration
Nicholas G. Fotion
University of Alabama Press, 1992
A compelling exploration of the idea that enables diverse people to live together with respect, dignity, and understanding.
Most regard toleration as an unattractive fallback position of compromise and so tend to overlook it in favor of such active concepts as freedom, equality, and justice. Fotion and Elfstrom argue that toleration offers us the useful possibility of responding to a difficult situation with a degree of flexibility not possible with the dichotomous concepts of good-bad, right-wrong, ethical-unethical, Right-Left.
Tolerating saturates ordinary human life and infuses public discussions of religion, morality, and politics. It forms a major strand in the history of Western European thought. Yet the word “toleration” and similar terms are rarely used. Unnoticed and unremarked, they are like the air that surrounds us, vitally important yet invisible.The authors seek to address this oversight in several ways. They begin with a thorough conceptual analysis of toleration and its kindred concepts. They are convinced that an appreciation of the importance of the family of toleration concepts must be founded on an understanding of the various ways in which they function in our language and our lives. In addition, they examine the historical development of the concept of toleration and canvass the major arguments people have employed either to urge toleration or to disparage it. They examine the role of toleration in liberal political philosophy and respond to the major critics of liberal toleration.
The authors also discuss a number of factors that cause toleration to be overlooked in political debate and personal reflection and offer evidence to support the view that this omission is unfortunate. In particular, they argue that toleration has the crucial role of helping people live with one another with respect and dignity in the fractious and contentious world we inhabit. With the rise of racism and other forms of religious, political, and social intolerance, people on all sides of the present debates concerning multi-culturalism and diversity will benefit from this timely and lucidly argued philosophical discussion of the concepts of toleration and its possible application in a less-than-perfect world.
Tommy
My Journey of a LifetimeTommy G. Thompson and Doug Moe
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
Personal and revealing stories punctuate the biographical details and policy discussions. Here is Tommy as a young man, just happening to be on the National Mall in 1964 when Dr. Martin Luther King told the nation "I have a dream." Here is Tommy as Wisconsin governor, struggling to start a Harley-Davidson motorcycle before leading "a pack of Hell's Republicans" on a ride through the state. Here is Tommy in Washington after the 9/11 attacks, slipping out of a secure bunker (in defiance of orders) to aid the emergency medical response.
Thompson speaks candidly of his achievements and regrets, including his involvement with welfare reform, school choice, land conservancy, prisons, the financing of Miller Park, stem cell research, and health insurance.
Torture and Dignity
An Essay on Moral InjuryJ. M. Bernstein
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Beginning with the attempts to abolish torture in the eighteenth century, and then sensitively examining what is suffered in torture and related transgressions, such as rape, Bernstein elaborates a powerful new conception of moral injury. Crucially, he shows, moral injury always involves an injury to the status of an individual as a person—it is a violent assault against his or her dignity. Elaborating on this critical element of moral injury, he demonstrates that the mutual recognitions of trust form the invisible substance of our moral lives, that dignity is a fragile social possession, and that the perspective of ourselves as potential victims is an ineliminable feature of everyday moral experience.
Toward "Natural Right and History"
Lectures and Essays by Leo Strauss, 1937–1946Leo Strauss
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Previously unpublished in book form, Strauss’s lectures are presented here in a thematic order that mirrors Natural Right and History and with interpretive essays by J. A. Colen, Christopher Lynch, Svetozar Minkov, Daniel Tanguay, Nathan Tarcov, and Michael Zuckert that establish their relation to the work. Rounding out the book are copious annotations and notes to facilitate further study.
Towards a New Universalism
Boris Groys
University of Minnesota Press, 2026
A dynamic contemporary examination of universalism
Gathering a selection of essays by influential theorist Boris Groys, Towards a New Universalism articulates his sustained engagement with the problem of universality under contemporary conditions shaped by globalization, institutional fragmentation, and digital mediation. Rather than defending classical universalism or abandoning it in favor of cultural particularism, Groys approaches universality as something produced within shared historical, institutional, and technological frameworks.
These essays address topics spanning from identity politics to migration, museums, media, and artificial intelligence, examining how universal claims make their way into social and cultural contexts. Distinct from recent philosophical treatments of universalism, Towards a New Universalism situates the question within aesthetics, media theory, and institutional critique, offering an indispensable collection for anyone interested in the intersections of politics and art.
Distributed for e-flux.
Transcendence and History
The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to PostmodernityGlenn Hughes
University of Missouri Press, 2020
Transforming the Personal, Political, Historical and Sacred in Theory and Practice
Personal, Political, Historical, and SacredManfred Halpern
University of Scranton Press, 2009
Trialectic
The Confluence of Law, Neuroscience, and MoralityPeter A. Alces
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A thought-provoking examination of how insights from neuroscience challenge deeply held assumptions about morality and law.
As emerging neuroscientific insights change our understanding of what it means to be human, the law must grapple with monumental questions, both metaphysical and practical. Recent advances pose significant philosophical challenges: how do neuroscientific revelations redefine our conception of morality, and how should the law adjust accordingly?
Trialectic takes account of those advances, arguing that they will challenge normative theory most profoundly. If all sentient beings are the coincidence of mechanical forces, as science suggests, then it follows that the time has come to reevaluate laws grounded in theories dependent on the immaterial that distinguish the mental and emotional from the physical. Legal expert Peter A. Alces contends that such theories are misguided—so misguided that they undermine law and, ultimately, human thriving.
Building on the foundation outlined in his previous work, The Moral Conflict of Law and Neuroscience, Alces further investigates the implications for legal doctrine and practice.
Trouble the Water
Melvin Dixon
University of Alabama Press, 1989
A haunting and poetic journey of memory, identity, and reconciliation in the heart of the Black South.
Winner of the Excellence in Minority Fiction Award
Trouble the Water moves among finely woven layers of time and place as it takes on a new and controversial theme in contemporary black writing, the search for family reconciliation. Twenty years after running away from home in Pee Dee, North Carolina, Jordan Henry believed he had found success, as a young college professor of history, a married man, and a resident of New England, whose colonial past he knew so well. When Jordan finds his career stymied by local prejudices, his world crumbles. Word of his grandmother's death reaches him, and he returns home to claim the ambiguous legacy of her farmland and face the consequences of his long absence.
Jordan's estranged father also returns to Pee Dee on a quest of his own restoring his good name in a community which blames him for Chloe Henry's death in childbirth. Chloe was Jordan's mother and his grandmother's only child. Unresolved hostility in the family and in the community breaks out, making Jordan the unsuspecting pawn in a plot of revenge against his father. Jordan may be the only one who can free his family from the past and the equally troubled present.
Trouble the Water gains resonance from its unflinching confrontation with dualities common in the Afro-American experience: reality and myth, folklore and sophistication, North and South, rural and cosmopolitan. While sacrificing none of its complexities for the sake of simplicity, it has the relentless movement of a fairy tale that reaches deep into the unconscious roots of behavior. It is intensely lyrical and dense in realism. Trouble the Water is magical in the way it reveals the Afro-American psyche and symbolizes fundamental truths about American life.
the lives & times of hrh
Herman Hochstadt
National University of Singapore Press, 2020