Download or read book A Social History of Western Political Thought written by Ellen Meiksins Wood and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 903 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood rewrites the history of political theory, from Plato to Rousseau. Treating canonical thinkers as passionately engaged human beings, Wood examines their ideas not simply in the context of political languages but as creative responses to the social relations and conflicts of their time and place. She identifies a distinctive relation between property and state in Western history and shows how the canon, while largely the work of members or clients of dominant classes, was shaped by complex interactions among proprietors, labourers and states. Western political theory, Wood argues, owes much of its vigour, and also many ambiguities, to these complex and often contradictory relations. In the first volume, she traces the development of the Western tradition from classical antiquity through to the Middle Ages in the perspective of social history - a significant departure not only from the standard abstract history of ideas but also from other contextual methods. From the Ancient Greek polis of Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus and Sophocles, through the Roman Republic of Cicero and the Empire of St Paul and St Augustine, to the medieval world of Averroes, Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, Wood offers a rich, dynamic exploration of thinkers and ideas that have indelibly stamped our modern world. In the second volume, Wood addresses the formation of the modern state, the rise of capitalism, the Renaissance and Reformation, the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, which have all been attributed to the "early modern" period. Nearly everything about its history remains controversial, but one thing is certain: it left a rich and provocative legacy of political ideas unmatched in Western history. The concepts of liberty, equality, property, human rights and revolution born in those turbulent centuries continue to shape, and to limit, political discourse today. Assessing the work and background of figures such as Machiavelli, Luther, Calvin, Spinoza, the Levellers, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, Ellen Wood vividly explores the ideas of the canonical thinkers, not as philosophical abstractions but as passionately engaged responses to the social conflicts of their day.
Download or read book The History of Political and Social Concepts written by Melvin Richter and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1995 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1960s, German scholars have developed distinctive methods for writing the history of political, social, and philosophical concepts. This work is a critical introduction to this emerging genre: the history of political and social concepts, or Begriffsgeschichte. Systematically surveying political, social, and philosophical discourses and their contexts, historians of concepts track linguistically how the advent, mentalities, and effects of modernity have been conceptualized in contested forms. After assessing the programs and achievements of this genre, and analyzing extended examples of its use, the author argues the need for an analogous project to chart the careers of concepts central to the political and social vocabularies of English-speaking societies.
Download or read book Why Concepts Matter written by Martin Burke and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-05-11 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume explores distinctive issues involved in translating political and social thought. Thirteen contributors consider problems arising from the study of translation and cultural transfers of texts, in particular in terms of translation studies, and the history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte).
Download or read book The History of Political and Social Concepts written by Melvin Richter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-09-07 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1960s, German scholars have developed distinctive methods for writing the history of political, social, and philosophical concepts. Applied to France as well as Germany, their work has set new standards for the historical study of political and social language, Begriffsgeschichte. The questions these scholars address, and the methods they apply systematically to a broad range of sources, differ as much from the styles of Hegel, Dilthey, and Meinecke as from those of A.O. Lovejoy, J.G.A. Pocock, and Quentin Skinner. Begriffsgeschichte treats political language neither as autonomous discourse, nor as the product of ideology, social structure, or elite manipulation. Although conceptual historians agree that the field of action is defined by language, they place concept formation and use within historical contexts. By surveying political and social discourses systematically, this genre traces how the great modern revolutions have been conceptualized in sharply contested forms by competing political and social formations, as well as by individual thinkers. Combining intellectual with social history, historians of concepts track linguistically the advent, mentalities, and effects of modernity. In The History of Political and Social Concepts, Melvin Richter analyzes the theories which have generated conceptual history, and their reinterpretation of key concepts such as Max Weber's three types of legitimate Herrschaft, and that of civilitÖè in France. What is it that we know when we learn the history of a concept? What difference does it make that we know it? After assessing the programs and achievements of Begriffsgeschichte, the author argues the need for an analogous project to chart the careers of political and social concepts used in English-speaking societies. Addressed not only to historians of political and social thought, this work will interest students and scholars of political culture, social historians, and historians of ideas, historiography, law, language, and rhetoric.
Download or read book Logics of History written by William H. Sewell Jr. and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-07-27 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While social scientists and historians have been exchanging ideas for a long time, they have never developed a proper dialogue about social theory. William H. Sewell Jr. observes that on questions of theory the communication has been mostly one way: from social science to history. Logics of History argues that both history and the social sciences have something crucial to offer each other. While historians do not think of themselves as theorists, they know something social scientists do not: how to think about the temporalities of social life. On the other hand, while social scientists’ treatments of temporality are usually clumsy, their theoretical sophistication and penchant for structural accounts of social life could offer much to historians. Renowned for his work at the crossroads of history, sociology, political science, and anthropology, Sewell argues that only by combining a more sophisticated understanding of historical time with a concern for larger theoretical questions can a satisfying social theory emerge. In Logics of History, he reveals the shape such an engagement could take, some of the topics it could illuminate, and how it might affect both sides of the disciplinary divide.
Download or read book Political Concepts written by Richard Bellamy and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2003-08-02 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a sophisticated analysis of central political concepts in the light of recent debates in political theory. It introduces readers to some of the main interpretations, pointing out their strengths and weaknesses, including a broad range of the main concepts used in contemporary debates on political theory. It tackles the principle concepts employed to justify any policy or institution and examines the main domestic purposes and functions of the state. It goes on to study the relationship between state and civil society and finally looks beyond the state to issues of global concern and inter-state relations.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy written by Gerald F. Gaus and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 869 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive work provides an up-to-date survey of social and political philosophy, charting its history and key figures and movements, and addressing enduring questions as well as contemporary research.
Download or read book The History of Political Thought in National Context written by Dario Castiglione and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-06-18 with total page 2 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the history of political thought relates to politics, history and culture of various nations.
Download or read book Political Concepts written by Iain Mackenzie and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This textbook offers both an introduction to and key readings in political concepts. Organised to reflect the broad nature of politics, there are parts on normative political philosophy, democratic theory, political sociology and emergent paradigms such as poststructuralism and feminism.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Political Theory written by Mark Bevir and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2010-03-18 with total page 1585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at the roots of contemporary political theory, this three-volume set examines the global landscape of all the key theories and the theorists behind them, and provides concise, to-the-point definitions of key concepts, ideas, schools and figures.
Download or read book Common Sense written by Sophia Rosenfeld and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Common sense has always been a cornerstone of American politics. In 1776, Tom Paine’s vital pamphlet with that title sparked the American Revolution. And today, common sense—the wisdom of ordinary people, knowledge so self-evident that it is beyond debate—remains a powerful political ideal, utilized alike by George W. Bush’s aw-shucks articulations and Barack Obama’s down-to-earth reasonableness. But far from self-evident is where our faith in common sense comes from and how its populist logic has shaped modern democracy. Common Sense: A Political History is the first book to explore this essential political phenomenon. The story begins in the aftermath of England’s Glorious Revolution, when common sense first became a political ideal worth struggling over. Sophia Rosenfeld’s accessible and insightful account then wends its way across two continents and multiple centuries, revealing the remarkable individuals who appropriated the old, seemingly universal idea of common sense and the new strategic uses they made of it. Paine may have boasted that common sense is always on the side of the people and opposed to the rule of kings, but Rosenfeld demonstrates that common sense has been used to foster demagoguery and exclusivity as well as popular sovereignty. She provides a new account of the transatlantic Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions, and offers a fresh reading on what the eighteenth century bequeathed to the political ferment of our own time. Far from commonsensical, the history of common sense turns out to be rife with paradox and surprise.
Download or read book Authenticity The Cultural History of a Political Concept written by Maiken Umbach and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-23 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authenticity is everywhere: political leaders invoke the idea to gain our support, advertisers use it to sell their products. But is authenticity a dangerous hoax? What is, and is not, authentic has been hotly debated ever since the concept was invented. Many academics have sought to "unmask" authenticity claims as deceptive. This book takes a different approach. In chapters covering historical and contemporary examples, the authors explore why authenticity, real or imagined, exercises such a powerful hold on our imaginations. The chapters trace how invocations of authenticity borrow from one another, across arenas such as philosophy and theology, encounters with nature, leisure, and mass consumption, political and corporate leadership, left-wing and right-wing ideologies. This cultural history of authenticity is of interest to academic and lay readers alike, who are interested in the significance and history of a concept that shapes how we understand ourselves and the world we live in.
Download or read book Political Concepts written by Adi M. Ophir and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deciding what is and what is not political is a fraught, perhaps intractably opaque matter. Just who decides the question; on what grounds; to what ends—these seem like properly political questions themselves. Deciding what is political and what is not can serve to contain and restrain struggles, make existing power relations at once self-evident and opaque, and blur the possibility of reimagining them differently. Political Concepts seeks to revive our common political vocabulary—both everyday and academic—and to do so critically. Its entries take the form of essays in which each contributor presents her or his own original reflection on a concept posed in the traditional Socratic question format “What is X?” and asks what sort of work a rethinking of that concept can do for us now. The explicitness of a radical questioning of this kind gives authors both the freedom and the authority to engage, intervene in, critique, and transform the conceptual terrain they have inherited. Each entry, either implicitly or explicitly, attempts to re-open the question “What is political thinking?” Each is an effort to reinvent political writing. In this setting the political as such may be understood as a property, a field of interest, a dimension of human existence, a set of practices, or a kind of event. Political Concepts does not stand upon a decided concept of the political but returns in practice and in concern to the question “What is the political?” by submitting the question to a field of plural contention. The concepts collected in Political Concepts are “Arche” (Stathis Gourgouris), “Blood” (Gil Anidjar), “Colony” (Ann Laura Stoler), “Concept” (Adi Ophir), “Constituent Power” (Andreas Kalyvas), “Development” (Gayatri Spivak), “Exploitation” (Étienne Balibar), “Federation” (Jean Cohen), “Identity” (Akeel Bilgrami), “Rule of Law” (J. M. Bernstein), “Sexual Difference” (Joan Copjec), and “Translation” (Jacques Lezra)
Download or read book Lectures on the History of Moral and Political Philosophy written by Jonathan Wolff and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-27 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Previously unpublished writings from one of the most important political philosophers of recent times G. A. Cohen was one of the leading political philosophers of recent times. He first came to wide attention in 1978 with the prize-winning book Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence. In subsequent decades his published writings largely turned away from the history of philosophy, focusing instead on equality, freedom, and justice. However, throughout his career he regularly lectured on a wide range of moral and political philosophers of the past. This volume collects these previously unpublished lectures. Starting with a chapter centered on Plato, but also discussing the pre-Socratics as well as Aristotle, the book moves to social contract theory as discussed by Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, and then continues with chapters on Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. The book also contains some previously published but uncollected papers on Marx, Hobbes, and Kant, among other figures. The collection concludes with a memoir of Cohen written by the volume editor, Jonathan Wolff, who was a student of Cohen's. A hallmark of the lectures is Cohen's engagement with the thinkers he discusses. Rather than simply trying to render their thought accessible to the modern reader, he tests whether their arguments and positions are clear, sound, and free from contradiction. Throughout, he homes in on central issues and provides fresh approaches to the philosophers he examines. Ultimately, these lectures teach us not only about some of the great thinkers in the history of moral and political philosophy, but also about one of the great thinkers of our time: Cohen himself.
Download or read book Social Control and Political Order written by Roberto Bergalli and published by SAGE Publications Limited. This book was released on 1997-04-08 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book assesses social control and its prospects into the next century. The concept of political control in Anglo-American and Hispanic sociology is described both historically and politically, and its weaknesses and relevance are discussed.
Download or read book Political Theology written by Carl Schmitt and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-05-14 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in the intense political and intellectual tumult of the early years of the Weimar Republic, Political Theology develops the distinctive theory of sovereignty that made Carl Schmitt one of the most significant and controversial political theorists of the twentieth century. Focusing on the relationships among political leadership, the norms of the legal order, and the state of political emergency, Schmitt argues in Political Theology that legal order ultimately rests upon the decisions of the sovereign. According to Schmitt, only the sovereign can meet the needs of an "exceptional" time and transcend legal order so that order can then be reestablished. Convinced that the state is governed by the ever-present possibility of conflict, Schmitt theorizes that the state exists only to maintain its integrity in order to ensure order and stability. Suggesting that all concepts of modern political thought are secularized theological concepts, Schmitt concludes Political Theology with a critique of liberalism and its attempt to depoliticize political thought by avoiding fundamental political decisions.
Download or read book The People written by Margaret Canovan and published by Polity. This book was released on 2005-09-16 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking study sets out to clarify one of the most influential but least studied of all political concepts. Despite continual talk of popular sovereignty, the idea of the people has been neglected by political theorists who have been deterred by its vagueness. Margaret Canovan argues that it deserves serious analysis, and that it's many ambiguities point to unresolved political issues. The book begins by charting the conflicting meanings of the people, especially in Anglo-American usage, and traces the concept's development from the ancient populus Romanus to the present day. The book's main purpose is, however, to analyse the political issues signalled by the people's ambiguities. In the remaining chapters, Margaret Canovan considers their theoretical and practical aspects: Where are the people's boundaries? Is people equivalent to nation, and how is it related to humanity - people in general? Populists aim to 'give power back to the people'; how is populism related to democracy? How can the sovereign people be an immortal collective body, but at the same time be us as individuals? Can we ever see that sovereign people in action? Political myths surround the figure of the people and help to explain its influence; should the people itself be regarded as fictional? This original and accessible study sheds a fresh light on debates about popular sovereignty, and will be an important resource for students and scholars of political theory.
