Download or read book Origin Stories in Political Thought written by Joanne Harriet Wright and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Origin stories are a recurring motif in the history of political thought. Presented as narratives that describe the beginnings of politics and power, these stories are among the most provocative and politically contentious means by which Western society organizes and represents its experience. Indeed, as scripts of citizenship, origin stories seek to manufacture consent to a preconceived - and hierarchical - political vision. Joanne H. Wright's Origin Stories in Political Thought examines Plato's Timaeus, Hobbes's story of the state of nature and the social contract, and early Second Wave feminist stories about the beginnings of patriarchal social relations. Using a historically sensitive, feminist methodology, Wright documents and deconstructs the tradition of telling origin stories in the larger history of political thought. Although individual tales have been assessed in current scholarship, the motif of the origin story itself has, until now, escaped systematic analysis. With meticulous research and convincing conclusions, Origin Stories in Political Thought makes a groundbreaking and valuable contribution to both feminist and political studies.
Download or read book States of War written by David William Bates and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We fear that the growing threat of violent attack has upset the balance between existential concepts of political power, which emphasize security, and traditional notions of constitutional limits meant to protect civil liberties. We worry that constitutional states cannot, during a time of war, terror, and extreme crisis, maintain legality and preserve civil rights and freedoms. David Williams Bates allays these concerns by revisiting the theoretical origins of the modern constitutional state, which, he argues, recognized and made room for tensions among law, war, and the social order. We traditionally associate the Enlightenment with the taming of absolutist sovereign power through the establishment of a legal state based on the rights of individuals. In his critical rereading, Bates shows instead that Enlightenment thinkers conceived of political autonomy in a systematic, theoretical way. Focusing on the nature of foundational violence, war, and existential crises, eighteenth-century thinkers understood law and constitutional order not as constraints on political power but as the logical implication of that primordial force. Returning to the origin stories that informed the beginnings of political community, Bates reclaims the idea of law, warfare, and the social order as intertwining elements subject to complex historical development. Following an analysis of seminal works by seventeenth-century natural-law theorists, Bates reviews the major canonical thinkers of constitutional theory (Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau) from the perspective of existential security and sovereign power. Countering Carl Schmitt's influential notion of the autonomy of the political, Bates demonstrates that Enlightenment thinkers understood the autonomous political sphere as a space of law protecting individuals according to their political status, not as mere members of a historically contingent social order.
Download or read book Origin Story written by David Christian and published by Little, Brown Spark. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This New York Times bestseller "elegantly weaves evidence and insights . . . into a single, accessible historical narrative" (Bill Gates) and presents a captivating history of the universe -- from the Big Bang to dinosaurs to mass globalization and beyond. Most historians study the smallest slivers of time, emphasizing specific dates, individuals, and documents. But what would it look like to study the whole of history, from the big bang through the present day -- and even into the remote future? How would looking at the full span of time change the way we perceive the universe, the earth, and our very existence? These were the questions David Christian set out to answer when he created the field of "Big History," the most exciting new approach to understanding where we have been, where we are, and where we are going. In Origin Story, Christian takes readers on a wild ride through the entire 13.8 billion years we've come to know as "history." By focusing on defining events (thresholds), major trends, and profound questions about our origins, Christian exposes the hidden threads that tie everything together -- from the creation of the planet to the advent of agriculture, nuclear war, and beyond. With stunning insights into the origin of the universe, the beginning of life, the emergence of humans, and what the future might bring, Origin Story boldly reframes our place in the cosmos.
Download or read book African American Political Thought written by Melvin L. Rogers and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-05-07 with total page 771 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African American Political Thought offers an unprecedented philosophical history of thinkers from the African American community and African diaspora who have addressed the central issues of political life: democracy, race, violence, liberation, solidarity, and mass political action. Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner have brought together leading scholars to reflect on individual intellectuals from the past four centuries, developing their list with an expansive approach to political expression. The collected essays consider such figures as Martin Delany, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, whose works are addressed by scholars such as Farah Jasmin Griffin, Robert Gooding-Williams, Michael Dawson, Nick Bromell, Neil Roberts, and Lawrie Balfour. While African American political thought is inextricable from the historical movement of American political thought, this volume stresses the individuality of Black thinkers, the transnational and diasporic consciousness, and how individual speakers and writers draw on various traditions simultaneously to broaden our conception of African American political ideas. This landmark volume gives us the opportunity to tap into the myriad and nuanced political theories central to Black life. In doing so, African American Political Thought: A Collected History transforms how we understand the past and future of political thinking in the West.
Download or read book Kant s Political Thought written by Hans Saner and published by Chicago : University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1973 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Origins of Political Order written by Francis Fukuyama and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2011-05-12 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nations are not trapped by their pasts, but events that happened hundreds or even thousands of years ago continue to exert huge influence on present-day politics. If we are to understand the politics that we now take for granted, we need to understand its origins. Francis Fukuyama examines the paths that different societies have taken to reach their current forms of political order. This book starts with the very beginning of mankind and comes right up to the eve of the French and American revolutions, spanning such diverse disciplines as economics, anthropology and geography. The Origins of Political Order is a magisterial study on the emergence of mankind as a political animal, by one of the most eminent political thinkers writing today.
Download or read book Sovereignty written by Dieter Grimm and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dieter Grimm's accessible introduction to the concept of sovereignty ties the evolution of the idea to historical events, from the religious conflicts of sixteenth-century Europe to today's trends in globalization and transnational institutions. Grimm wonders whether recent political changes have undermined notions of national sovereignty, comparing manifestations of the concept in different parts of the world. Geared for classroom use, the study maps various notions of sovereignty in relation to the people, the nation, the state, and the federation, distinguishing between internal and external types of sovereignty. Grimm's book will appeal to political theorists and cultural-studies scholars and to readers interested in the role of charisma, power, originality, and individuality in political rule.
Download or read book The Origin of the Political written by Roberto Esposito and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2017-04-03 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Roberto Esposito explores the conceptual trajectories of two of the twentieth century’s most vital thinkers of the political: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. Taking Homer’s Iliad—that “great prism through which every gesture has the possibility of becoming public, precisely by being observed by others”— as the common origin and point of departure for our understanding of Western philosophical and political traditions, Esposito examines the foundational relation between war and the political. Drawing actively and extensively on Arendt’s and Weil’s voluminous writings, but also sparring with thinkers from Marx to Heidegger, The Origin of the Political traverses the relation between polemos and polis, between Greece, Rome, God, force, technicity, evil, and the extension of the Christian imperial tradition, while at the same time delineating the conceptual and hermeneutic ground for the development of Esposito’s notion and practice of “the impolitical.” In Esposito’s account Arendt and Weil emerge “in the inverse of the other’s thought, in the shadow of the other’s light,” to “think what the thought of the other excludes not as something that is foreign, but rather as something that appears unthinkable and, for that very reason, remains to be thought.” Moving slowly toward their conceptualizations of love and heroism, Esposito unravels the West’s illusory metaphysical dream of peace, obliging us to reevaluate ceaselessly what it means to be responsible in the wake of past and contemporary forms of war.
Download or read book On the Origin of Stories written by Brian Boyd and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-30 with total page 555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A century and a half after the publication of Origin of Species, evolutionary thinking has expanded beyond the field of biology to include virtually all human-related subjects—anthropology, archeology, psychology, economics, religion, morality, politics, culture, and art. Now a distinguished scholar offers the first comprehensive account of the evolutionary origins of art and storytelling. Brian Boyd explains why we tell stories, how our minds are shaped to understand them, and what difference an evolutionary understanding of human nature makes to stories we love. Art is a specifically human adaptation, Boyd argues. It offers tangible advantages for human survival, and it derives from play, itself an adaptation widespread among more intelligent animals. More particularly, our fondness for storytelling has sharpened social cognition, encouraged cooperation, and fostered creativity. After considering art as adaptation, Boyd examines Homer’s Odyssey and Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! demonstrating how an evolutionary lens can offer new understanding and appreciation of specific works. What triggers our emotional engagement with these works? What patterns facilitate our responses? The need to hold an audience’s attention, Boyd underscores, is the fundamental problem facing all storytellers. Enduring artists arrive at solutions that appeal to cognitive universals: an insight out of step with contemporary criticism, which obscures both the individual and universal. Published for the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species, Boyd’s study embraces a Darwinian view of human nature and art, and offers a credo for a new humanism.
Download or read book The Roman Republic in Political Thought written by Fergus Millar and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2002 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An experienced scholar explains why the legendary early Republic, rather than the historical Republic of Cicero, has most influenced later political thought.
Download or read book Fear of Diversity written by Arlene W. Saxonhouse and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995-05 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging and provocative book locates the origin of political science in the everyday world of ancient Greek life, thought, and culture. Arlene Saxonhouse contends that the Greeks, confronted by the puzzling diversity of the physical world, sought an unseen and unifying force that would constrain and explain it. This drive toward unity did more than place the mind over the senses: it led the Greeks to play down the very real differences - in particular the female, the family, and sexuality - in both their political and personal lives. While the dramatists and Plato captured the tragic consequences of trying to do so, it was not until Aristotle and his Politics did the Greek world - and its heirs - have a true science of politics, one capable of embracing diversity and accommodating conflict. Much of the book's force derives from Saxonhouse's masterful interweaving of Greek philosophy and drama, her juxtaposition of the thought of the pre-Socratics, Plato, and other philosophers to the cultural life revealed by such dramatists as Aristophanes and Aeschylus. Her approach opens up fresh understandings of such issues as the Greeks' fear of the feminine and their attempts to ignore the demands that gender, reproduction, and the family inevitably make on the individual and the family. The Fear of Diversity represents an important contribution to political philosophy, classics, and gender studies.
Download or read book Revisiting the Political Thought of Ancient India written by Ashok S. Chousalkar and published by SAGE Publications Pvt. Limited. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revisiting the Political Thought of Ancient India: Pre-Kautilyan Arthashastra Tradition rediscovers the political ideas of the original and celebrated schools of thought in ancient India—early Arthashastra and Pre-Kautilyan traditions. This book throws light on hitherto not very well-known aspects of political ideas in ancient India, which flourished during the 5th and 4th centuries before Christ. Kautilya’s Arthashastra is a major text on ancient Indian political thought, wherein he cited views of a number of Arthashastra teachers who had written on political science. Unfortunately, their writings are not available today; only their views are found scattered in different texts. This book brings together these views to prepare a coherent account of their political ideas and reconstructs the pre-Kautilyan Arthashastra tradition with the help of available sources.
Download or read book The Political Origins of Inequality written by Simon Reid-Henry and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-12-23 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Examining the historical experience of different countries, a thought-provoking volume, taking on a global perspective to explain inequality the defining issue of our time reveals that our inability to act in concert, both rich and poor, is what is falling apart, not the world itself, and shows how it is within our power to address it, "--NoveList.
Download or read book A History of Modern Political Thought written by Gary K. Browning and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are we to understand past political thinkers? Is it a matter simply of reading their texts again and again? Do we have to relate past texts of political thought to the contexts in which ideas were composed and in which the aims of past thinkers were formulated? Or should past political theories be deconstructed so as to uncover not what their authors maintain, but what the texts reveal? In this book, theories of interpreting past political thinkers are examined and the interpretive methods of a range of theories are reviewed, including those of Hegel, Marx, Oakeshott, Collingwood, the Cambridge School, Foucault, Derrida and Gadamer. The application of these theories of interpretation to notable modern political theorists, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Bentham, Mill, Nietzsche and Beauvoir is then used as a way of understanding modern political thought and of assessing interpretive theories of past political thought. The result is a book which sees the history of modern political thought as more than a procession of political theories but rather as a reflection on the meaning of past political thought and its interpretation. It provides a way of reading the history of modern political thought, in which the question of interpretation matters both for understanding how we interpret the past but also for considering what it means to undertake political thinking.
Download or read book The Moral Foundations of Politics written by Ian Shapiro and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When do governments merit our allegiance, and when should they be denied it? Ian Shapiro explores this most enduring of political dilemmas in this innovative and engaging book. Building on his highly popular Yale courses, Professor Shapiro evaluates the main contending accounts of the sources of political legitimacy. Starting with theorists of the Enlightenment, he examines the arguments put forward by utilitarians, Marxists, and theorists of the social contract. Next he turns to the anti-Enlightenment tradition that stretches from Edmund Burke to contemporary post-modernists. In the last part of the book Shapiro examines partisans and critics of democracy from Plato’s time until our own. He concludes with an assessment of democracy’s strengths and limitations as the font of political legitimacy. The book offers a lucid and accessible introduction to urgent ongoing conversations about the sources of political allegiance.
Download or read book The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion written by John Zaller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992-08-28 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 1992 book explains how people acquire political information from elites and the mass media and convert it into political preferences.
Download or read book Origins of Moral political Philosophy in Early China written by Tao Jiang and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new narrative and interpretative framework about the origins of moral-political philosophy that tracks how the three core normative values, humaneness, justice, and personal freedom, were formulated, reformulated, and contested by early Chinese philosophers in their effort to negotiate the relationship among three distinct domains, the personal, the familial, and the political. Such efforts took place as those thinkers were reimagining a new moral-political order, debating its guiding norms, and exploring possible sources within the context of an evolving understanding of He
