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594 results in Political philosophy

Page 1 of 30

Vulnerability and Relational Equality
  • Edited by Costanza Porro, Christine Straehle
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 March 2026
  • How should we conceive of the vulnerability which we all experience, and what import does it have for how we think of equality as a political ideal? How should the state express equal respect for its citizens in light of our common vulnerability, and the heightened vulnerability experienced by some citizens? What does it mean for us to treat each other as equals in light of the inevitable dependencies and vulnerabilities which colour our relationship with each other? This volume offers the first systematic exploration of the relationship between two increasingly central concepts in political and moral philosophy and theory, namely vulnerability and relational equality, with essays presenting a range of current philosophical perspectives on the pressing practical question of how to conceive of equality within society in light of vulnerability. It will be valuable for readers interested in political philosophy and theory, ethics, public policy and philosophy of law.

Mandatory Cooperation Under International Law
  • Evan J. Criddle, Evan Fox-Decent
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2026
    Print publication:
    28 February 2026
  • Humanity in the twenty-first century faces serious global challenges and crises, including pandemics, nuclear proliferation, violent extremism, refugee migration, and climate change. None of these calamities can be averted without robust international cooperation. Yet, national leaders often assume that because their states are sovereign under international law, they are free to opt in or out of international cooperation as they see fit. This book challenges conventional wisdom by showing that international law requires states to cooperate with one another to address matters of international concern-even in the absence of treaty-based obligations. Within the past several decades, requirements to cooperate have become firmly embedded in the international legal regimes governing oceans, transboundary rivers, disputed territories, pollution, international security, and human rights, among other topics. Whenever states address matters of common concern, international law requires that they work together as good neighbors for their mutual benefit. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Why Read Wollstonecraft Today?
  • Sandrine Bergès
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2026
    Print publication:
    31 January 2026
  • What relevance does Mary Wollstonecraft's thought have today? In this insightful book, Sandrine Bergès engages Wollstonecraft with contemporary social and political issues, demonstrating how this pioneering eighteenth-century feminist philosopher addressed concerns that resonate strongly with those faced by twenty-first-century feminists. Wollstonecraft's views on oppression, domination, gender, slavery, social equality, political economics, health, and education underscore her commitment to defending the rights of all who are oppressed. Her ideas shed light on challenges we face in social and political philosophy, including intersectionality, health inequalities, universal basic income, and masculinity. Clear and accessible, this book is an invaluable resource for students and anyone interested in discovering who Mary Wollstonecraft was and how her ideas can help us navigate the struggles of today's feminist movement.

A New Theory of Sufficientarian Justice
  • Lasse Nielsen
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2026
    Print publication:
    31 January 2026
  • Sufficientarianism is the view that justice is fulfilled when everyone has enough. But how should we interpret this view as an ideal of distributive justice? This book develops and defends the umbel view as a new theory of sufficientarian justice. The umbel view suggests that justice is fulfilled if, and only if, no one is below the threshold level in any relevant sphere of value, and that below this level, we should give absolute priority to meeting people's basic needs. The book unpacks this new theory of sufficientarian justice as a framework with eight spheres of justice-relevant capabilities. It discusses the theory's implications for discrimination, political feasibility, and public policy and ends by demonstrating how the umbel view shows great potential for policy guidance on issues such as universal basic income, health inequality, and extreme wealth.

Hans Kelsen on Constitutional Democracy
  • Genesis, Theory, Legacies
  • Edited by Sandrine Baume, David Ragazzoni
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    31 December 2025
  • This volume challenges conventional interpretations by demonstrating that Hans Kelsen was far from being a purely formalist thinker. Instead, it highlights his profound and enduring engagement with the threats facing constitutional democracies. The political and institutional upheavals of interwar Europe significantly influenced Kelsen's evolving vision of democracy, as this volume shows. His contributions to 20th-century democratic theory include groundbreaking insights into multiparty systems, mechanisms of moderation, minority protections, and judicial review. Furthermore, Kelsen's reflections on the crises and collapses of democracies during the 1930s remain strikingly relevant, offering valuable perspectives on contemporary challenges such as polarization and populism. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Confronting the Irish Past
  • The 1912-1923 Decade in Light of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement
  • Séamus Murphy
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    14 June 2025
    Print publication:
    10 September 2024
  • The 1998 Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement established power-sharing arrangements between the two divided communities in Northern Ireland. The Agreement is not set in stone but is rather a hopeful yet uncertain project. Making it put down deep cultural roots requires some confrontation with and transformation of the history, and the socially constructed memories, of Ireland's decisive decade 1912-1923, which was violent and divisive.

Cultivating Gardens of God
  • A Paradigm Shift in Faith
  • Edited by Ananta Kumar Giri
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    10 June 2025
    Print publication:
    12 November 2024
  • In self, society, religion and politics we are used to the language and discourse of Kingdom of God. But in this God is presented as an omnipotent king who is also angry at slight deviation. We get glimpses of such powerful and angry God in Old Testament as well as in many other religious traditions of the world. In such a discourse and portrayal of God, we fail to realize that God is mercy, rahim, karuna and compassion. God is our ever-awakened nurturer and He and She is continuously walking and meditating with us with mercy as well as firm challenges for self-development, mutual realizations and responsible cosmic engagement and participation. The vision and discourse of Kingdom of God has many a time been confined within a logic of power where we are prone to valorize God's power in order to valorize our own power on Earth, especially the logic of sovereignty at the level of self and society, rather than realize God's mercy. This book strives to transform this to Gardens of God.

The Social Contract
  • Political Equality from Putney to Rawls
  • William A. Edmundson
  • Published online:
    30 May 2025
    Print publication:
    04 September 2025
  • We are all parties to a social contract and obligated under it. Or is this mere fiction? How is such an agreement possible in a society riven by deep moral disagreement? William Edmundson explains the social-contract tradition from its beginnings in the English Revolution, through Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau to its culmination in the work of John Rawls. The idea that legitimate government rests on the consent of free equals took shape in the seventeenth century and was developed in the eighteenth but fell into disuse in the nineteenth century even as democracy, toleration, and limited government gained ground. Edmundson shows how Rawls revived the idea of a social contract in the mid-twentieth century to secure these gains, as the then-dominant moral theories, such as utilitarianism, could not. The book also defends Rawls's conviction that political equality is integral to the idea of reciprocity at the heart of the tradition.

A Philosopher Looks at Clothes
  • Kate Moran
  • Published online:
    08 May 2025
    Print publication:
    05 June 2025
  • Clothes are much more than just what we put on in the morning. They express our identity; they can be an independent statement or the result of coercion; and they have deeply entrenched historical, political, and social aspects. Kate Moran explores the connections between clothes and philosophy, showing how clothes can illustrate and pose philosophical problems, and how philosophical ideas influence clothing. She discusses what it might mean for an article of clothing to be beautiful; how we communicate with clothes; how we use clothes to navigate our social existence; and how our social existence leaves its mark on our clothes. She also considers the curious relationship between philosophers and children's clothes, legal restrictions on clothing, textile waste, and labor conditions of textile workers. Her absorbing and engaging portrait of our clothes helps us to understand an important and underexplored aspect of our lives.

The Concept and Ethics of Manipulation
  • Shlomo Cohen
  • Published online:
    10 April 2025
    Print publication:
    17 April 2025
  • Everyone is exposed to manipulation daily, and everyone manipulates too. The impact of manipulations in personal, social, and political life is enormous. Is this tragic? Is it avoidable? Is it always morally bad or regrettable? To answer these questions, we need a theory of manipulation. This book is the first comprehensive philosophical theory of manipulation. Shlomo Cohen offers a new theory on what manipulation is, distinguishing it from other kinds of influence, and assesses the basic moral status of manipulation. In contrast to prevailing views, he argues that manipulation, though often morally bad, is not inherently morally bad, and that alongside its dangers, it has a central role as a 'lubricant' of social frictions which helps to regulate social and political relations. His analysis offers a window to better understanding the ethics of the interplay of reason and power in human relations.

Political Theology and the Conflicts of Democracy
  • Nicholas Norman-Krause
  • Published online:
    21 March 2025
    Print publication:
    03 April 2025
  • Nicholas Norman-Krause argues, in this authoritative and sophisticated new treatment of conflict, that contestation is a basic - potentially regenerative - aspect of any flourishing democratic politics. In developing a distinctive 'agonistic theology,' and relating the political theory of agonism to social and democratic life, the author demonstrates that the conflicts of democracy may have a beneficial significance and depend at least in part on faith traditions and communities for their successful negotiation. In making his case, he deftly examines a rich range of religious and secular literatures, whether from the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, and Stanley Cavell or from less familiar voices such as early modern jurist and political thinker Johannes Althusius and twentieth-century Catholic social philosopher Yves Simon. Liberationists including Gustavo Gutiérrez and Martin Luther King, Jr. are similarly recruited for a theological account of conflict read not just as concomitant to, but also as constitutive of, democratic living.

Ideology and Revolution
  • How the Struggle against Domination Drives the Evolution of Morality and Institutions
  • Allen Buchanan
  • Published online:
    13 March 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
  • In our society there is a constant struggle between powerful, institutionalized hierarchies and people who try to resist them. Whether this resistance succeeds (either partially or completely) or fails, the struggle causes large-scale social change, including changes in morality and institutions and in how hierarchy and the struggle itself are conceived. In this book, Allen Buchanan analyzes the complex connections between the struggle for liberation from domination, ideology, and changes in morality and institutions, and develops a conflict theory of social change, which is systematically laid out in five clear components with a chapter dedicated to each. He examines the co-evolutionary and co-dependent nature of the struggle between hierarchs and resisters, and the appeals to morality which are routinely made by both sides. His book will be of interest to a broad readership of students and scholars in philosophy, history, political science, economics, sociology, and law.

Political Responsibility and Tech Governance
  • AI, Repro-tech and Structural Injustice
  • Jude Browne
  • Published online:
    21 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
  • Not a day goes by without a new story on the perils of technology: from increasingly clever machines that surpass human capability and comprehension to genetic technologies capable of altering the human genome in ways we cannot predict. How can we respond? What should we do politically? Focusing on the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), and the impact of new reproductive and genetic technologies (Repro-tech), Jude Browne questions who has political responsibility for the structural impacts of these technologies and how we might go about preparing for the far-reaching societal changes they may bring. This thought-provoking book tackles some of the most pressing issues of our time and offers a compelling vision for how we can respond to these challenges in a way that is both politically feasible and socially responsible.

Trucanini's Stare
  • Reconsidering Dignity in Theory and Practice
  • Susan Marks
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    13 February 2025
  • A central concept in international human rights law and many national constitutions is human dignity. Departing from established approaches to dignity in philosophy and legal theory, Susan Marks takes dignity in everyday life ('dignified care', 'dignity in the workplace', etc.) as a starting point for reconsidering the concept's history and significance. The result is a highly original work which gives particular attention to colonial and post-colonial engagements with dignity, and emphasises the character of human dignity as not just an idea or abstract value, but also a lived experience that cannot be understood without reference to social structures and the inequalities and hierarchies they reproduce. If dignity is an attribute which all human beings possess purely by virtue of being human, Marks shows that it is also an element within the systemic operations of privilege and power.

Can Democracy Recover?
  • The Roots of a Crisis
  • Yaron Ezrahi
  • Edited by Dana Blander
  • Published online:
    02 January 2025
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • 'Can Democracy Recover?' explores the roots of the contemporary democratic crisis. It scrutinizes the evolution and subsequent fragmentation of modern political epistemology, highlighting citizens increasing inability to make sense of the political universe in which they live, their loss of confidence in political causality, distinguishing facts from fiction and objective from partisan attitudes. The book culminates in a speculative discourse on democracy's uncertain future. This work is the final part in Yaron Ezrahi's trilogy. The first, 'The Descent of Icarus' (1990), explored the scientific revolution's role in shaping modern democracy. The second, 'Imagined Democracies' (2012), examined the collective political imagination's impact on the rise and fall of political regimes, emphasizing the modern partnership between science and democracy. 'Can Democracy Recover?' traces the political implications of the erosion of the Nature-Culture dichotomy, the bedrock of modernity's cosmological imagination, and anticipates the emergence of new political imaginaries.

Reconceiving Freedom from the Shadows of Slavery
  • Liberty in a Nonideal World
  • John Christman
  • Published online:
    02 January 2025
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025
  • In a departure from standard approaches to the concept of liberty, in this book John Christman locates and defends the concept of freedom as a fundamental social value that arose out of fights against slavery and oppression. Seen in this light, liberty must be understood as requiring more than mere non-interference or non-domination – it requires the capacity for self-government and the capabilities needed to pursue valued activities, practices, and ways of life. Christman analyses the emergence of freedom as a concept through nineteenth- and twentieth-century struggles against slavery and other oppressive social forms, and argues that a specifically positive conception best reflects its origins and is philosophically defensible in its own right. What results is a model of freedom that captures its fundamental value both as central to the theoretical architecture of constitutional democracies and as an aspiration for those striving for liberation.

Glory, Humiliation, and the Drive to War
  • Nir Eisikovits
  • Published online:
    19 December 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • From Hitler's determination to erase Germany's disgrace after World War I, to Sadat's promise to undo Egypt's humiliation in 1967, to ISIS's proclamations that it would end the “emasculation” of Muslims and restore the glory of the Caliphate, a sense of political humiliation and a desire for martial glory have always been central in the drive to war. Yet although glory and humiliation are the twin engines of conflict, and together they spur individuals and nations to violence, philosophers have shown little interest in these dispositions. In this book Nir Eisikovits offers a philosophical account of political humiliation, martial glory, and the relationship between them. Drawing on philosophy, literature, and psychology, Eisikovits argues that it is impossible to understand why people are drawn to war and how wars are justified without making sense of these two political passions and the ways in which they inflame each other.

Empowering Affected Interests
  • Democratic Inclusion in a Globalized World
  • Edited by Archon Fung, Sean W. D. Gray
  • Published online:
    14 November 2024
    Print publication:
    14 November 2024
  • Many demands for democratic inclusion rest on a simple yet powerful idea. It's a principle of affected interests. The principle states that all those affected by a collective decision should have a say in making that decision. Yet, in today's highly globalized world, the implications of this 'All-Affected Principle' are potentially radical and far-reaching. Empowering Affected Interests brings together a distinguished group of leading democratic theorists and philosophers to debate whether and how to rewrite the rules of democracy to account for the increasing interdependence of states, markets, and peoples. It examines the grounds that justify democratic inclusion across borders of states, localities, and the private sector, on topics ranging from immigration and climate change to labor markets and philanthropy. The result is an original and important reassessment of the All-Affected Principle and its alternatives that advances our understanding of the theory and practice of democracy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Nations before the Nation-State
  • Between City-State and Empire from Antiquity to the Present
  • Anna Marisa Schön
  • Published online:
    14 November 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024
  • Throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages, thinkers understood nations as communities defined by common language, culture, and descent, and sharing strong bonds of belonging and solidarity. Even so, they did not assume that nations would also be appropriate units of government. The recovery of this historical understanding, in turn, yields valuable insights for contemporary political dilemmas. Nations Before the Nation-State offers the first extended study of the idea of the nation in ancient and medieval political thought. It recovers a pre-modern conception of the nation as a cultural and linguistic community, rather than a political association, and examines better means for thinking about nationhood. Offering a historic perspective from which to address challenges of nationalism, this book engages with debates on multiculturalism, liberal nationalism, and constitutional patriotism and argues that contemporary political dilemmas can be resolved more organically by recovering modes of thinking that have resolved similar tensions for centuries.

The Right to Punish
  • Political Authority and International Criminal Justice
  • Luise Müller
  • Published online:
    16 May 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
  • What gives international courts the authority to punish individuals for international crimes? Through the lens of political philosophy, Luise Müller provides an original perspective on the justification of the authority of international criminal courts and tribunals. She argues that institutions of international criminal justice are permitted to pierce the sovereignty of states in order to punish high-profile politicians for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and other mass human rights violations. Their right to punish is justified by virtue of their function to deter mass violations of fundamental human rights. However, to legitimately exercise that right, international criminal justice institutions must fulfil two conditions: first, they must conduct criminal trials with the highest level of fairness; second, they must treat those who are subject to their authority as equals. This last condition can be satisfied by international criminal justice institutions by including procedures of democratic decision-making and democratic accountability.

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