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The European Union plays an increasingly central role in global relations from migration to trade to institutional financial solvency. The formation and continuation of these relations – their narratives and discourses - are rooted in social, political, and economic historical relations emerging at the founding of European states and then substantially augmented in the Post-WWII era. Any rethinking of our European narratives requires a contextualized analysis of the formation of hegemonic discourses. The book contributes to the ongoing process of "rethinking" the European project, identity, and institutions, brought about by the end of the Cold war and the current economic and political cr...
Demonstrating Ireland's central role in European debates about empire and commerce in the global age of revolutions, this pathbreaking book offers a new perspective on the crisis and transformation of the British Empire at the end of the eighteenth century, and restores Ireland to its rightful place at the centre of European intellectual history.
The Italian philosopher and author of Totalitarianism “rescues the concept of evil as an element necessary for guidance in political reflection” (Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review). As long as we care about suffering in the world, says political philosopher Simona Forti, we are compelled to inquire into the question of evil. But is the concept of evil still useful in a postmodern landscape where absolute values have been leveled and relativized by a historicist perspective? Given our current unwillingness to judge others, what signposts remain to guide our ethical behavior? Surveying the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western philosophical debates on evil, Forti concludes that i...
Deconstructing “Ideal Power Europe”: The EU and Arab Change criticizes the dominant discourse on European foreign policy, which represents the EU as a force for good in world politics. Using a poststructuralist approach, it deconstructs the EU’s representation as “an ideal power” through an analysis of European foreign policy on the Southern Mediterranean before and after the Arab uprisings. In this endeavor, it displaces three major discourses which construct the EU as “ideal”: the “postmodern and post-sovereign EU”, “the EU as a model/a virtuous example”, and, “the EU as a normative power” discourses. The major argument of the book is that the “ideal power Europ...
This book is a systematic effort to empirically approach the democratic deficit of CSDP, to understand its social construction and propose ways to remedy it.
This book shows how current and future research on the social history of the Balkans can be integrated into a broader European framework. The contributions look at a range of methodological and empirical issues, and the theme that links the various studies is that of the contrasting, yet, at the same time, entangled ideas of the Balkans as a "mental map" and of Southeast Europe as an "historical region." (Series: Studies on South East Europe - Vol. 10)
During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Scotland and England produced such well-known figures as David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Locke. Ireland’s contribution to this revolution in Western thought has received much less attention. Offering a corrective to the view that Ireland was intellectually stagnant during this period, The Irish Enlightenment considers a range of artists, writers, and philosophers who were full participants in the pan-European experiment that forged the modern world. Michael Brown explores the ideas and innovations percolating in political pamphlets, economic and religious tracts, and literary works. John Toland, Francis Hutcheson, Jonathan Swift, George Berkele...
Aldous Huxley's prophetic novel of ideas warned of a terrible future then 600 years away. Though Brave New World was published less than a century ago in 1932, many elements of the novel's dystopic future now seem an eerily familiar part of life in the 21st century. These essays analyze the influence of Brave New World as a literary and philosophical document and describe how Huxley forecast the problems of late capitalism. Topics include the anti-utopian ideals represented by the rigid caste system depicted, the novel's influence on the philosophy of "culture industry" philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the Nietzschean birth of tragedy in the novel's penultimate scene, and the relationship of the novel to other dystopian works.
With over 30,000 lobbyists in town, Brussels is often called the European capital of lobbying. Despite this, little is known on how this political system works in practice. This book offers an unprecedented window into the everyday relationships between bureaucrats and interest representatives. Where the media only shows lobbyists as they meet MEPs and submit amendments, the book argues that the bulk of their work is done in close contact with EU bureaucrats – a form of ‘quiet politics’ developed by the business community, targeting officials with little public exposure. Based on official archives, the book first sets the historical picture for the emergence of a new layer of bureaucrats; fuelled by European and transatlantic capitalism, it altered the political façade of the business community to fulfil its need for legitimacy. Drawing from observations of internal meetings of the main lobbies operating in Brussels and interviews with lobbyists and Commission officials, the book then shows lobbyists at work. This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of the European Union, interest groups, and more broadly to political science and sociology.
Aldous Huxley: The Political Thought of a Man of Letters argues that Huxley is not a man of letters engaged in politics, but a political thinker who chooses literature to spread his ideas. His preference for the dystopian genre is due to his belief in the tremendous impact of dystopia on twentieth-century political thought. His political thinking is not systematic, but this does not stop his analysis from supplying elements that are original and up-to-date, and that represent fascinating contributions of political theory in all the spheres that he examines from anti-Marxism to anti-positivism, from political realism to elitism, from criticism of mass society to criticism of totalitarianism, ...