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A Critique of Sovereignty
In this important new book, Daniel Loick argues that in order to become sensible to the violence imbedded in our political routines, philosophy must question the current forms of political community – the ways in which it organizes and executes its decisions, in which it creates and interprets its laws – much more radically than before. It must become a critical theory of sovereignty and in doing so eliminate coercion from the law. The book opens with a historical reconstruction of the concept of sovereignty in Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant. Loick applies Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of a ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ to the political sphere, demonstrating that whenever humani...
At the End of Property
Recent decades have witnessed the creation of new types of property systems, ranging from data ownership to national control over genetic resources. This trend has significant implications for wealth distribution and our understanding of who can own what. This book explores the idea of ownership in the realm of plant breeding, revealing how plants have been legally and materially transformed into property. It highlights the controversial aspects of turning seeds, plants and genes into property and how this endangers the viability of the seed industry. Examining ownership not simply as a legal concept, but as a bundle of laws, practices and technologies, this is a valuable contribution that will interest scholars of intellectual property studies, the anthropology of markets, science and technology studies and related fields.
The French Revolution in Theory
It is time to re-examine the French Revolution as a political resource. The historiography has so far ignored the question of popular sovereignty and emancipation; instead the Revolution has been vilified as a matrix of totalitarianisms by the liberals and as an ethnocentric phenomenon by postcolonial studies. This book examines why. More so than historians, it is philosophers that have played the leading role in the portrayal of this major event in French political history. The philosophical quarrels of the 1960s placed the French Revolution at the heart of their debates. The most well-documented among these is the conflict between Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Lévi-Strauss and subsequently, Michel Foucault. Do we need an ethics of the history of the French Revolution? Rancière, Derrida, Balibar, Lefort, Robin, and Loraux can help answer this question, in an epistemological approach to history. These successive explorations allow us to move away from a myth of identity and to rediscover a real Revolution, capable of offering Enlightenment and political utility and interrogating what democracy and emancipation mean for us today.
Capitalism's Future
Capitalisms’ Future: Alienation, Emancipation and Critique frames 21st century economic and social possibilities in a dialogue between two forms of critical social theory: Marx’s critique of political economy that analyzes capitalism and the critique of political psychology that analyzes authoritarianism. Contributions from social theorists in sociology, philosophy, and cultural studies are brought together to dissect and critique capitalist crises, left-liberalism, left-Thatcherism, resistance to risk-pooling, idealist philosophy, undemocratic social character, status wages and authoritarian spectacles. Throughout, Marx’s centrality to critical social theory is confirmed, both alone and in in powerful combination with Adorno, Durkheim, Dubois, Lacan, Veblen, Weber and others. This book outlines conjoined critiques of commodity-fetishism and authority fetishism as the emancipatory agenda of 21st century critical theory. Contributors are: Kevin S. Amidon, Graham Cassano, Tony A. Feldmann, Daniel Krier, Christian Lotz, Patrick Murray, David Norman Smith, Tony Smith, William J. Swart, and Mark P. Worrell.
Naturalism and Social Philosophy
Can societies fall ill? Can institutions die, or social practices degenerate? Must social norms be embodied? To what extent is social action habitual? Is social life part of nature or does it transcend it? This book explores the meaning and many facets of naturalism in social philosophy. It investigates the consequences of concepts such as 'second nature' and 'forms of life' for social philosophy. It analyses the ways in which social action, gender, work and morality are embodied. It surveys the conceptions of nature at play in social criticism. It provides students and experts of social philosophy with both an overview and critical analyses of the many facets of naturalism in social philosophy from Hegel to contemporary critical theory. Contributors: Louis Carré, Fabian Freyenhagen, Martin Hartmann, Axel Honneth, Thomas Khurana, Steven Levine, Sabina Lovibond, Arvi Särkelä, Barbara Stiegler, Mariana Teixeira, Italo Testa
The Poverty of Our Freedom
There is no normative concept more appealing today than the idea of individual freedom. Political party manifestos are drawn up, legal reforms are defended, military interventions are undertaken, even decisions in personal relationships are justified – all in the name of individual freedom. But our understanding of freedom is impoverished if we try to grasp its essence merely in terms of the subjective rights of the individual. In his new book, Axel Honneth shows that we still have a lot to learn from the tradition of philosophy about a rational concept of freedom. Honneth begins by re-examining the work of Hegel and Marx in order to clarify the concept of freedom. He then explores various social problem areas in which the ideals of freedom are directly confronted by contemporary obstacles. Honneth ends by examining potential forces which could give new impetus to our struggle for freedom. This new book by one of the leading social and political philosophers writing today will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy, political theory, social theory, and the social sciences and humanities generally.
Rethinking Global Governance
This book argues that long-ignored, non-western political systems from the distant and more recent past can provide critical insights into improving global governance. These societies show how successful collection action can occur by dividing sovereignty, consensus building, power from below, and other mechanisms. For a better tomorrow, we need to free ourselves of the colonial constraints on our political imagination. A pandemic, war in Europe, and another year of climatic anomalies are among the many indications of the limits of global governance today. To meet these challenges, we must look far beyond the status quo to the thousands of successful mechanisms for collective action that hav...
The Piracy Years
The Piracy Years: Internet File Sharing in a Global Context is the first collection to provide an overview of digital piracy’s recent past and its potential futures. Combining research essays, interviews, and overviews, the volume brings together leading scholars and infamous digital pirates from China, Germany, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In June 1999, the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing website Napster transformed the availability of online content, but the site was quickly sued into oblivion. Despite the highly publicised shutdowns of a number of P2P websites, many continue to thrive, and digital piracy has become a global phenomenon. Thi...
From Alienation to Forms of Life
The wide-ranging work of Rahel Jaeggi, a leading voice of the new generation of critical theorists, demonstrates how core concepts and methodological approaches in the tradition of the Frankfurt School can be updated, stripped of their dubious metaphysical baggage, and made fruitful for critical theory in the twenty-first century. In this thorough introduction to Jaeggi’s work for English-speaking audiences, scholars assess and critique her efforts to revitalize critical theory. Jaeggi’s innovative work reclaims key concepts of Hegelian-Marxist social philosophy and reads them through the lens of such thinkers as Adorno, Heidegger, and Dewey, while simultaneously putting them into dialog...
The Abuse of Property
"In The Abuse of Property, Daniel Loick offers a multifaceted philosophical critique of property, arguing that property rights are not conditions of freedom or justice, but deficient, dysfunctional, and harmful ways of interacting with other people and the natural environment"--
