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864 results in Political theory

Page 1 of 44

Global Crisis and Insecurity
  • The Human Condition, Darkly
  • Paul James
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • From the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, to the escalating effects of climate change, public consciousness of existential threat waxes and wanes. Despite the occasional intense capacity to imagine the global consequences of our cumulative actions, we seem to lack a collective will to act alternatively and systematically to conserve the fundamental conditions for human life. This book confronts the basic challenges of insecurity, violence, genocide, refugee displacement and technoscientific intrusions on embodiment and identity – but it also points to alternative ways of thinking and practicing in an unsettled world. It argues for an engaged cosmopolitanism, grounded in place and guided by local and global debates around principles of what constitutes good ways of living. In order to create a positive change, we must better understand the human condition in crisis, the causes of the global crisis and the possible pathways to human flourishing.

The Social Contract
  • Political Equality from Putney to Rawls
  • William A. Edmundson
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 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.

The Cambridge Handbook of Constitutional Theory
  • Edited by Richard Bellamy, Jeff King
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2025
    Print publication:
    24 April 2025
  • This Handbook brings together contributions from leading scholars of constitutionaltheory, with backgrounds in law, philosophy and political science. Its sixty chapters not only offer an exceptional survey of the field but also provide a major contribution to it. The book explores three main areas. First, the values upheld by a constitution, including rights, freedom, equality, dignity and well-being. Second, the modalities of a constitutional system, such as the separation of powers, democratic representation and the rule of law. Finally, the institutions through which it operates, both legal and political, including courts, elections, parliaments and international organisations. It also considers the challenges confronting constitutional arrangements from growing inequality, populism, climate change and migration.

In the Shadow of Minority Rights
  • Decolonising Gender, Liberalism and the Politics of Difference
  • Sagnik Dutta
  • Published online:
    15 March 2025
    Print publication:
    30 April 2025
  • How and where do religious minorities claim their rights? This book challenges abstract liberal approaches to minority rights and colonial constructions of the minority. It charts a new way of understanding minority rights based on an exploration of the everyday life of Muslim women's activism in Mumbai and its intersection with transnational feminist networks and a global politics of Islamic reform. It shows how women deploy everyday ideas of ethics and bodily practices to challenge inequality in Muslim family law. They construct a just community based upon the ethical ideals of the Quran and rights guaranteed by the Indian Constitution and negotiate for rights within homes, police stations, and neighbourhoods in ghettoes. Everyday familiarity is interlaced with violence in women's interactions with the state and non-state actors as they claim their rights, and practices of ethics and intimate negotiations with processes of ghettoisation and violence shape the everyday life of rights.

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.

The Communist Manifesto
  • New Interpretations
  • Mark Cowling
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    28 February 2025
    Print publication:
    28 February 1998
  • Organised into four thematic sections covering issues of text and context, revolution, the working class and other social groups, and the relevance of the Manifesto today, this useful book introduces the Manifesto for students just coming to Marxism. Providing an historical background to the writing of the Manifesto, it highlights the main political and philosophical issues raised in the text, and opens upcurrent debates for which the Manifesto has relevance. Includes an all-new translation of the Manifesto itself.

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.

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.

Lawless Zones, Rightless Subjects
  • Migration, Asylum, and Shifting Borders
  • Edited by Seyla Benhabib, Ayelet Shachar
  • Published online:
    02 January 2025
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025
  • Responding to ever-increasing pressures of migration, states, supranational, and subnational actors deploy complex moves and maneuvers to reconfigure borders, rights, and territory, giving rise to a changing legal cartography of international relations and international law. The purpose of this volume is to study this new reconfiguration of rights, territoriality, and jurisdiction at the empirical and normative levels and to examine its implications for the future of democratic governance within and across borders. Written by a diverse and accomplished group of scholars, the chapters in this volume employ legal, historical, philosophical, critical, discursive, and postcolonial perspectives to explore how the territoriality of the modern states – ostensibly, the most stable and unquestionable element undergirding the current international system – has been rewritten and dramatically reimagined. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

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.

Common Boundaries
  • The Theory and Practice of Environmental Property
  • Michael Cox
  • Published by:
    Agenda Publishing
    Published online:
    19 December 2024
    Print publication:
    22 February 2024
  • How do we - and how should we - engage with the natural environment through the concepts of rights and responsibilities? In this book, Michael Cox develops the theory and practice of environmental property rights, moving beyond simplistic assumptions that do not reflect the diversity of arrangements we see in the world. Recognizing this diversity will help us craft better responses to environmental problems in the future with an interdisciplinary foundation in what has worked, or not worked, in the past. Synthesizing a variety of methods and disciplines, Cox explores rights-based environmental policies as well as different cultural approaches to environmental ownership. The result is a book that helps the reader understand the full range of possibilities when it comes to environmental ownership.

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.

A More Perfect Union
  • Federal Union in Political Theory and Practice, 1500-1951
  • Joshua Livestro
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    17 December 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024
  • This book tells the history of the 'federal union', a concept that may be traced from the early Renaissance to the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (1951) - the predecessor of today's European Union. It is a story of three federal canons: of greater and lesser thinkers, of utopian peace plans, and of practical experiences with federal unions. Together they shaped the concepts that created the ECSC.

    This book unlocks the past of the EU - a union that always thought it didn't have a past, but was, on the contrary, 'sui generis', without examples or predecessors. Although there was nothing inevitable about the founding of the EU, A More Perfect Union shows that it was plausible and perhaps even predictable that such a union would be formed at some point - and that the aftermath of the Second World War was exactly the kind of founding moment about which federal theorists in previous centuries had speculated.

The Constitution of Science
  • C. Mantzavinos
  • Published online:
    05 December 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024
  • How can science be protected, by whom and at what level? If science is valued positively as the incubator of the most successful solutions to representational problems of reality as well as the basis of the most effective interventions in the natural and social world, then its constitutional foundations must be protected. This book develops a specific normative outlook on science by introducing the idea of a 'Constitution of Science'. Scientific activities are special kinds of epistemic problem-solving activities unfolding in an institutional context. The scientific enterprise is a social process unfolding within an intricate institutional framework that structures the daily activities of scientists and shapes their outcomes. Those institutions of science which are of the highest generality make up the 'Constitution of Science' and are of fundamental importance for channelling the scientific process effectively.

Experimental Sociology
  • Outline of a Scientific Field
  • Davide Barrera, Klarita Gërxhani, Bernhard Kittel, Luis Miller, Tobias Wolbring
  • Published online:
    23 November 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024
  • Experiments have gained prominence in sociology in recent years. Increased interest in testing causal theories through experimental designs has ignited a debate about which experimental designs can facilitate scientific progress in sociology. This book discusses the implications of research interests for the design of experiments, identifies points of commonality and disagreement among the different perspectives within sociology, and elaborates on the rationales of each. It helps experimental sociologists find appropriate designs for answering specific research questions while alerting them to the challenges. Offering more than just a guide, this book explores both the historical roots of experimental sociology and the cutting-edge techniques of rigorous sociology. It concludes with a tantalizing peek into the future and provides a roadmap to the exciting prospects and uncharted territories of experimental sociology.

Brexitspeak
  • Demagoguery and the Decline of Democracy
  • Paul Chilton
  • Published online:
    22 November 2024
    Print publication:
    05 December 2024
  • Were we talked into Brexit? And who is 'we'? It's impossible to do politics without words and a context to use them in. And it's impossible to make sense of the phenomenon of Brexit without understanding how language was used – and misused – in the historical context that produced the 2016 referendum result. This interdisciplinary book shows how the particular idea of 'the British people' was maintained through text and talk at different levels of society over the years following World War II, and mobilised by Brexit propagandists in a socially, economically and culturally divided polity. The author argues that we need the well-defined tools of linguistics and language philosophy, tied in with a political science framework, to understand a serious, modern concept of demagoguery. Written in an accessible manner, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to probe the social, political and ideational contexts that generated Brexit.

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.

Polls, Pollsters, and Public Opinion
  • A Guide for Decision-Makers
  • Clifford Young, Kathryn Ziemer
  • Published online:
    01 November 2024
    Print publication:
    04 July 2024
  • A vast literature exists on theories of public opinion - how to measure, analyze, predict, and influence it; however, there is no synthesis of best practices for interpreting public opinion: existing knowledge is disparate and spread across many disciplines. Polls, Pollsters, and Public Opinion presents a systematic analytical approach for understanding, predicting, and engaging public opinion. It tells the story through the eyes of the pollster and draws an analytical road map for examining public opinion, both conceptually and practically. Providing a theoretical and conceptual foundation, as well as debunking popular myths, this book delves into the science of polling, offering tools analysts can use to assess the quality of polls. It also introduces methods that can be used to predict elections and other socio-political outcomes while understanding the nuances of messaging, engaging, and moving public opinion.

Conversations with the Turtles
  • On the Ideological Conundrums of Our Times
  • Nilson Ariel Espino
  • Published online:
    26 September 2024
    Print publication:
    13 June 2024
  • Polarization often results from deficient forms of social belonging, caused primarily by stark social inequalities. These inequalities then generate psychological responses that both create and worsen polarization. Yet social stability is possible. In this provocative and original book, Nilson Ariel Espino argues that our current ideological polarizations can be best analysed as springing from the contradictions of modernity and its obsessions. Using culture as a founding and organizing dimension, the author disassembles the typical dichotomies of left versus right, or conservatism versus progressivism, and reveals the opposing sides as mutually interdependent positions that struggle with cultural paradoxes they are ill-suited to address. Written with clarity and verve for the general reader, this book brings classic concepts of cultural anthropology to bear on the key preoccupations of today's world, from poverty and inequality, to political instability and the environmental crisis.

Page 1 of 44