Jean-Paul Marat's ten-year stay in Britain during the 1760s and 1770s subsequently became the focus of rumour and speculation. It was in this period of his life that crucial aspects of Marat's revolutionary thought and persona were first established. It was during his stay across the Channel, in works written in English, that Marat first expressed some of the moral and political views that would come to characterise his mature thought. It was also while in Britain that Marat became involved in political activism for the first time. Moreover Marat, like d'Eon and d'Holbach, was influenced by both the ideas of the English republican tradition and the model of opposition politics offered by Wilkes and his associates.

This book reviews the historical record of the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP), an understudied and poorly understood phenomenon in Irish political studies. It also questions the orthodox narrative of that party's political fortunes throughout the twentieth century, by arguing that the NILP has suffered from an unfair critique in the scholarly literature. The growing entanglement of the NILP's ideological strands eventually led to dramatic fluctuations in the party's political fortunes. The NILP represented a genuine attempt by Protestants and Catholics to pursue common class interests above and beyond ethnic and religious ones. The competing national identity aspirations of most Protestants and Catholics proved irreconcilable. The NILP's uniqueness in a society divided along ethnic, national, cultural and class lines is only surprising when viewed within the traditional paradigm of Western understanding of political parties as static products of the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.

In Luce Irigaray work there are two distinct treatments of Descartes' ideas. Irigaray introduces the topic of women—a subject that was notably absent from Descartes' own deliberations. In the first essay, she aligns herself with interpretations that associate Descartes' suspension of bodily connections and impulses with the suppression of women. At the same time, her deconstructive mimetic reading of Descartes also seeks to establish a site for women. Women are featured as an instance of otherness that initiates an experience of the passion, wonder, which is nominated by Descartes as a primary passion. Irigaray employs her construct of sexual difference with telling effect. For Irigaray, wonder, as a passion, is inextricably linked with love and the divine. Irigaray does not make any explicit connections between her two essays, though she does recommend that Descartes needs to be reread in the light of his work on the passions.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the developments in warfare in Greece from the Late Bronze Age to the end of the classical period. It has described the Greek concept of war and peace, the patterns of military campaigns and the battlefield engagements during the age of the hoplite. This volume has chronicled the development of siege and naval warfare and explained the connection of war with the economy and religion.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book is concerned with the scope of cultural theory in its modern form. It starts with considering what this concern might mean and why it might be of interest. The book describes the three thinkers, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, as modern cultural theorists. The goal is to claim that they can be understood according to a common thread, an agenda, or a 'genre of inquiry'. Each of these thinkers is guided by particular concerns and each, equally and obviously, have a particular style or working signature. The book seeks to pass their work through the unifying lens of certain, rather basic, principles of reading. The basic principles of reading include maximisation, coherence, redemptive critique, empiricism, and detachment.

After 1848, much political activity in Ireland was directed into the emerging struggle for land reform. Nonetheless, the ideology of the Confederation had taken root, although its strongest advocates were in jail or in exile in France and the United States. This chapter moves the focus of Irish politics outside Ireland. Overseas involvement in the events leading to the 1848 rising was important, even if the much-vaunted Irish Brigade proved to be elusive (both to the authorities and to historians). Following Ballingarry the centre of Irish nationalism moved outside the island of Ireland. The presence of so many Young Irelanders in the United States, particularly New York, and the transportation of the state prisoners to Van Diemen's Land, extended Irish political debate to three continents.

This chapter surveys the multiple dilemmas faced by the supporters of Young Ireland in the early months of 1848, especially in the wake of the French Revolution. The French Revolution had awakened hopes that a similarly quick and bloodless revolution could take place in Ireland: hopes that underestimated the determination of the British government to keep the Empire intact. The visit to Paris in April made it clear that no help could be expected from there, but a new development in Irish nationalism was the support it was evoking in the United States. Just as worrying was the alliance between radicals in Britain and Ireland, linking Chartism with Repeal and democratizing both movements in the process. The Repeal movement had become more divided than ever. The government had in place draconian legislation, a network of informers and a large military and police presence within Ireland. The Chartist petition had ended in fiasco, the Irish delegation to France was rebuffed, and the most radical political figure in Irish politics was about to be successfully convicted and transported to Bermuda.

This chapter develops an account of what is required for the study of political phenomena. Using a largely qualitative method, drawing on writers like C. Wright Mills, Richard Fenno, Clifford Geertz and Hannah Arendt, it argues that political participation cannot be understood from an objective perspective only, and that one needs to study the phenomenon from the inside. An understanding of citizen politics requires that we adopt the perspective of the citizens in question and take seriously their grievances and concerns. It aims to combine the various perspectives of what has been called the ‘sociological imagination’.

Kosovo and Sierra Leone represent significant episodes in Blair's development as a foreign policy decision maker. His style of setting ambitious goals, proactively pursued, and based upon the stark framing of issues, led him in these episodes into exposed positions that constituted gambles over events he did not control. He committed British forces, backing his own judgment against that of others, and was successful. The successful resolution of the conflict strengthened Blair in the foreign policy style he had adopted, and represents also the highpoint of his ‘doctrine of the international community’. Blair learned additional lessons from Kosovo that would be extremely significant in future crises. United Nations support, he discovered, while having huge ability to legitimize foreign policy actions for the domestic British audience, could not be considered a prerequisite for taking action, and its imprimatur was not ultimately necessary in order to get things done. Blair would later note the irony that many who encouraged him to intervene in Kosovo on human rights grounds despite the absence of UN approval would subsequently condemn him for intervening in Iraq—a future occasion where explicit authorization could not be obtained.