Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary
Although the modern age is often described as the age of democratic revolutions, the subject of popular founding has not captured the imagination of contemporary political thought. Most of the time, democratic theory and political science treat as the object of their inquiry normal politics, institutionalized power, and consolidated democracies. This study shows why it is important for democratic theory to rethink the question of democracy's beginnings. Is there a founding unique to democracies? Can a democracy be democratically established? What are the implications of expanding democratic politics in light of the question of whether and how to address democracy's beginnings? Kalyvas addresses these questions and scrutinizes the possibility of democratic beginnings in terms of the category of the extraordinary, as he reconstructs it from the writings of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt and their views on the creation of new political, symbolic, and constitutional orders.
Ex Captivitate Salus
When Germany was defeated in 1945, both the Russians and the Americans undertook mass internments in the territories they occupied. The Americans called their approach “automatic arrest.” Carl Schmitt, although not belonging in the circles subject to automatic arrest, was held in one of these camps in the years 1945–6 and then, in March 1947, in the prison of the international tribunal in Nuremberg, as witness and “possible defendant.” A formal charge was never brought against him. Schmitt’s way of coping throughout the years of isolation was to write this book. In Ex Captivitate Salus, or Deliverance from Captivity, Schmitt considers a range of issues relating to history and pol...
Politics, Metaphysics, and Death
The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is having an increasingly significant impact on Anglo-American political theory. His most prominent intervention to date is the powerful reassessment of sovereignty and the politics of life and death laid out in his multivolume Homo Sacer project. Agamben argues that in both the modern world and the ancient, politics inevitably involves a sovereign decision that bans some individuals from the political and human communities. For Agamben, the Nazi concentration camps—in which some inmates are reduced to a form of living death—are not a political aberration but instead the place where this essential political decision about life most clearly reveals ...
The Wannabe Fascists
Meet today's almost fascists and learn the warning signs to intercept them on the road from populism to dictatorship. With The Wannabe Fascists, historian Federico Finchelstein offers a precise explanation of why Trumpism and similar movements across the world belong to a new political breed, the last outcome of the combined histories of fascism and populism: the wannabe fascists. This new type of populist politician is typically a legally elected leader who, unlike previous populists who were eager to distance themselves from fascism, turns to totalitarian lies, racism, and illegal means to destroy democracy from within. Drawing on almost three decades of research on the histories of fascis...
Paradigm Lost
With increasing globalization, the meaning and role of the nation-state are in flux. At the same time, state theory, which might help to explain such a trend, has fallen victim to the general decline of radical movements, particularly the crisis in Marxism. This volume seeks to enrich and complicate current political debates by bringing state theory back to the fore and assessing its relevance to the social phenomena and thought of our day. Throughout, it becomes clear that, whether confronting the challenges of postmodern and neo-institutionalist theory or the crisis of the welfare state and globalization, state theory still has great analytical and strategic value.
Dialogues on Power and Space
Written in the early stages of the Cold War by one of the most controversial political and legal thinkers of the twentieth century, Carl Schmitts two short dialogues on power and space bring together several dimensions of his work in new ways. The dialogues renew Schmitts engagement with the questions of political power and geo-politics that had been a persistent concern throughout his intellectual life. As a basis on which to think through the historical role of human agency in relation to power and its new geographies, the dialogues condense and rework key concepts in Schmitts political theory during a transitional period between his Weimar and fascist years to the post-war writings. In this book, Schmitt develops a new dialectics of modern power and an original understanding of the global spatial transformations of the Cold War period. Equally important, the dialogues anticipate the debates on the new geo-political possibilities and threats related to cosmic spaces, overpowering technological advances, and the existential predicament of the human in an increasingly multipolar world.
POLITICAL CONCEPTS.
None
Weak Constitutionalism
It has been frequently argued that democracy is protected and realized under constitutions that protect certain rights and establish the conditions for a functioning representative democracy. However, some democrats still find something profoundly unsettling about contemporary constitutional regimes. The participation of ordinary citizens in constitutional change in the world's most "advanced" democracies (such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom) is weak at best: the power of constitutional reform usually lies in the exclusive hands of legislatures. How can constitutions that can only be altered by those occupying positions of power be considered democratically legitimate? ...
Narrating Evil
Conceptions of evil have changed dramatically over time, and though humans continue to commit acts of cruelty against one another, today we possess a clearer, more moral way of analyzing them. In Narrating Evil, María Pía Lara explores what has changed in our understanding of evil, why the transformation matters, and how we can learn from this specific historical development. Drawing on Immanuel Kant's and Hannah Arendt's ideas about reflective judgment, Lara argues that narrative plays a key role in helping societies acknowledge their pasts. Particular stories haunt our consciousness and lead to a kind of examination and dialogue that shape notions of morality. A powerful description of a...
The Crisis of German Historicism
A comparative intellectual history of the political thought of Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, two influential and controversial German-Jewish-American political philosophers.
