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This book provides a comprehensive account of the phenomenon of identity in politics, featuring for the first time the question of individual emancipation. It addresses the burning questions of our times, viz. nationalism, populism, Islamic fundamentalism, multiculturalism, postsecularism and postcolonialism. The volume repudiates an easy reconciliation between identity and emancipation, such as it occurs in contemporary liberal and multicultural political theories. It shows that we cannot achieve emancipation without Kant’s help, whereas identity relentlessly draws us back to collective values and the community. The book urges for a new understanding of identity and a politics that instead of accommodating identities seeks to govern them. Identity is the buzzword in the humanities and social sciences, but also the most contentious and least conceptualized term. This book intends to bring theoretical clarity into the debate on how identity plays out in politics.
Is pluralism inherent to the human condition? Does it have its origins in the diversity of cultures? Are disagreements among individuals the same as disagreements among societies? Focusing on these critical questions essential to the understanding of modern societies, this book traces the origins of pluralism in contemporary political thought and presents new, original interpretations of the idea by contemporary philosophers. The chapters in the volume bring clarity into an ongoing fractious debate and reveal the underlying roots and fissures in our understanding of a dynamic and contested idea. Drawing on the works of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and other major political philosophers, they delve into the different strands of the concept, their possible real-world political outcomes, and popular misconceptions. A key text, this volume will be essential reading for scholars and researchers of politics, political theory and philosophy, and social theory.
This book offers an extensive comparative analysis of populism and radical democratic theories, tracing the line dividing the respective conceptions of ‘people’ and ‘popular sovereignty’. Whereas populism is often said to intertwine with democracy in some way, the contention of this book is that it significantly departs from democratic theory and practice, and belongs to a distinct conceptual space. It cannot be made to overlap, for instance, with “illiberal democracy”, the “democratic myth”, a crude electoral majoritarianism, nor can it amount to hiding undemocratic policies into properly democratic justifications. These positions, frequent as they are in the literature, are...
This volume combines rigorous empirical and theoretical analyses with political engagement to look beyond reductive short-hands that ignore the historical evolution and varieties of Islamic doctrine and that deny the complexities of Muslim societies' encounters with modernity itself. Are Islam and democracy compatible? Can we shed the language of 'Islam vs. the West' for new political imaginaries? The authors analyze struggles over political legitimacy since the Arab Spring and the rise of Al Qaeda and ISIS in their historical and political complexity across the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. Distinguishing multiculturalism from interculturalism and understanding multiple modernities, philosophers in the volume tease out the complexities of civilizational encounters. The volume also shows how the Paris massacres or the Danish caricature controversy do not remain confined to Europe but influence struggles and confrontations within Muslim societies. Gender and Islam are addressed from a comparative perspective bringing into conversation not only the experience of different Muslim countries with Islamic law but also by analysing Jewish family law.
This volume assembles renowned scholars to address, for the first time, the relationship between minorities and populism in South Asia and Europe from a critical perspective. Despite the very different and to some extent opposite historical and political trajectories, there is today a convergence on nationalist affirmation and on majoritarian politics between South Asia and Europe. In India, the Hindu majority rebels against wide-ranging minority rights anchored in the Constitution. In Europe, the refugee crisis and Islamic radicalization bring to the forefront the postcolonial legacy. Despite all rhetoric, there are obvious dangers of majoritarianism. Populist parties are divisive, partisan...
An examination of the intertwined lives and writings of a group of prominent twentieth-century Jewish thinkers who experienced exile and migration Exile, Statelessness, and Migration explores the intertwined lives, careers, and writings of a group of prominent Jewish intellectuals during the mid-twentieth century—in particular, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Hirschman, and Judith Shklar, as well as Hans Kelsen, Emmanuel Levinas, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss. Informed by their Jewish identity and experiences of being outsiders, these thinkers produced one of the most brilliant and effervescent intellectual movements of modernity. Political philosop...
Religion in Liberal Democracy as a Form of Life advances a theory to deal with the challenges connected to the liberal democratic ideal that all people are free to codetermine the future of their society and equally entitled to their religion and beliefs, given the historical bias towards Christianity in politics and culture within many European societies. Religious diversity and social and political participation are in fact fiercely contested issues. Critical scholars from philosophy and cultural theory contest that liberal political theories of freedom of religion can adequately deal with issues connected to an increasingly diversified and secularized religious field in historically Chris...
This book proposes and defends the practice of urban gardening as an ecologically and socially beneficial, culturally innovative, morally appropriate, ethically uplifting, and politically incisive way for individuals and variously networked collectives to contribute to a successful management of some defining challenges of the Anthropocene – this new epoch in which no earthly place, form, entity, process, or system escapes the reach of human activity – including urban resilience and climate change.
This book offers a rare glimpse into China's Korean minority, which dominates the area bordering North Korea; even as Korea is riven into capitalist and communist societies, China's Koreans register this dilemma as one internal to the society they live in, in China's postindustrial Northeast. As this research makes clear, once driven by state investment in industry, the Northeast is now struggling to define its identity as a post-industrial region; the ethnic Koreans there even more so. This monograph provides a distinctive look at a group shaped by political turmoil, economic transformation, and cultural struggle; the study may offer an idea of what the future of the Korean peninsula itself might be, disentangling the puzzling contradictions and synergies between nationality, locality and development in China.