Political Contingency
Author: Ian Shapiro
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2009-08
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 0814740960
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Political science & theory.
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Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
Author: Richard Rorty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1989-02-24
Total Pages: 222
ISBN-13: 9780521367813
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this 1989 book Rorty argues that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein have enabled societies to see themselves as historical contingencies, rather than as expressions of underlying, ahistorical human nature or as realizations of suprahistorical goals. This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable on a private level, although it cannot advance the social or political goals of liberalism. In fact Rorty believes that it is literature not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense of human solidarity. A truly liberal culture, acutely aware of its own historical contingency, would fuse the private, individual freedom of the ironic, philosophical perspective with the public project of human solidarity as it is engendered through the insights and sensibilities of great writers. The book has a characteristically wide range of reference from philosophy through social theory to literary criticism. It confirms Rorty's status as a uniquely subtle theorist, whose writing will prove absorbing to academic and nonacademic readers alike.
Contingency and the Limits of History
Author: Liane Carlson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2019-07-30
Total Pages: 232
ISBN-13: 0231548974
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Central to the historicizing work of recent decades has been the concept of contingency, the realm of chance, change, and the unnecessary. Following Nietzsche and Foucault, genealogists have deployed contingency to show that all institutions and ideas could have been otherwise as a critique of the status quo. Yet scholars have spent very little time considering the genealogy of contingency itself—or what its history means for its role in politics. In Contingency and the Limits of History, Liane Carlson historicizes contingency by tying it to its theological and etymological roots in “touch,” contending that much of its critical, disruptive power is specific to our current historical moment. She returns to an older definition of contingency found in Christian theology that understands it as the lot of mortal creatures, who suffer, feel, bleed, and change, in contrast to a necessary, unchanging, impassible God. Far from dying out, Carlson reveals, this theological past persists in continental philosophy, where thinkers such as Novalis, Schelling, Merleau-Ponty, and Serres have imagined contingency as a type of radical destabilization brought about by the body’s collision with a changing world. Through studies of sickness, loneliness, violation, and love, she shows that different experiences of contingency can lead to dramatically dissimilar ethical and political projects. A strikingly original reconsideration of one of continental philosophy and critical theory’s most cherished concepts, this book reveals the limits of historicist accounts.
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality
Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2011-01-10
Total Pages: 337
ISBN-13: 1844676684
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →What is the contemporary legacy of Gramsci’s notion of Hegemony? How can universality be reformulated now that its spurious versions have been so thoroughly criticized? In this ground-breaking project, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek engage in a dialogue on central questions of contemporary philosophy and politics. Their essays, organized as separate contributions that respond to one another, range over the Hegelian legacy in contemporary critical theory, the theoretical dilemmas of multiculturalism, the universalism-versus-particularism debate, the strategies of the Left in a globalized economy, and the relative merits of post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis for a critical social theory. While the rigor and intelligence with which these writers approach their work is formidable, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality benefits additionally from their clear sense of energy and enjoyment in a revealing and often unpredictable exchange.
Time, Memory, and the Politics of Contingency
Author: Smita A. Rahman
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-07-11
Total Pages: 128
ISBN-13: 1317668324
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In recent years, there has been an increased attention to temporality in political theory, and such attention is sorely needed. For too long political theory, with the exception of occasional phenomenological forays, has remained grounded in a particular experience of time as linear and sequential. This book aims to unsettle the dominant framework by putting time itself, and the experience of time in everyday life, at the center of its critical analysis. Smita Rahman focuses on the experience of time as one where past, present, and future intermingle with each other and refuse to adhere to a sequential structure. Rather than trying to tame the flux of time, this book places this "out of joint" experience of time at the center of its analysis of global politics. Rahman takes the highly abstract concept of time and decenters it to speak to a wide range of political issues across disciplines. She does so by exposing the cultural construction of the foundational concept of time in political theory and attending closely to the challenges of cultural incommensurability that it encounters in a globalized world of difference. Specifically, the book looks at interrogation practices in Afghanistan, the challenges of coping with the burdens of collective memory in Algeria, South Africa, and Rwanda, the difficulty of uncritically applying such a framework to the Muslim world through the language of secularism, and finally at the beginnings of democratic emergence in Bangladesh to explore a politics of contingency. By focusing on issues of contemporary global politics through the lens of political theory, this book draws on literature across disciplines and explores the complex image of time by engaging the work of thinkers for whom time and memory have emerged as a critical issue of analysis, and unpacking the politics of contingency that emerge from such a reading. The book’s new insights on political temporality will interest scholars of contemporary political theory, comparative political theory, critical theory, human rights, conflict studies, and religion and politics.
Politics of Divination
Author: Joshua Ramey
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2016-09-26
Total Pages: 192
ISBN-13: 178348554X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Offers an interpretation of neoliberal ideology as a political theology of chance that both justifies and dissembles risk-laden market processes as obscure divination tools used both to determine fate and fortune and yet to deny that such determination is taking place by any accountable authority.
Polemicization
Author: Benjamín Arditi
Publisher:
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 188
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This 1st volume in the Taking on Political series and opens up space to the political (polemcization). Chapters cover themes such as social structure, ethical arguments, and political organization. This book aims to change ways of thinking about the subject in terms of both teaching and research.
From a 'Necessary Evil' to the Art of Contingency
Author: Suvi Soininen
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
Published: 2015-10-15
Total Pages: 298
ISBN-13: 1845405242
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book presents a comprehensive study of Oakeshott's conception of political activity. The author first examines Oakeshott in the contexts of liberal, conservative and Idealist thought, and then presents a detailed interpretation of the change in his conception of politics in the context of British postwar political thought. It is argued that Oakeshott's conception of political activity shifted from a near contempt of politics towards the applauding of politics as a deliberative and reflective activity. The development is disclosed by examining the change in his key concepts, such as authority and tradition. Accordingly, some rather unexpected aspects of Oakeshott's thought, such as his close relationship to the linguistic turn, appear. The author argues that although Oakeshott cannot exactly be classified as belonging to that group of political philosophers for whom politics represents a superior human activity, his later work presents an important and original view of politics as an art of contingency.
Constitutional Equilibria
Author: John J. Janssen
Publisher: University Press of America
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 178
ISBN-13: 9780761818748
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →If we define the term 'constitutional' to mean rules, procedures, or substantive laws fundamental to the republic by way of widespread political agreement or consensus, then what is considered constitutional by way of original text and formal amendment is not necessarily qualitatively superior to that which is considered constitutional merely by way of case law and institutional practices held in place by partisan balances of power. One analytical yardstick for assessing the legitimacy of latter constructs is whether the party or parties responsible for them have made sufficiently successful democratic overtures in the process of pursuing their policy agenda and in securing support for it. In Constitutional Equilibria, John J. Janssen tests this theory of examining the partisan policy agendas in place early in the history of the republic and examining how partisan realignments have shaped and re-shaped what has amounted to constitutional policy.
The Misguided Search for the Political
Author: Lois McNay
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2014-06-05
Total Pages: 354
ISBN-13: 0745681158
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →There has been a lively debate amongst political theorists about whether certain liberal concepts of democracy are so idealized that they lack relevance to ‘real’ politics. Echoing these debates, Lois McNay examines in this book some theories of radical democracy and argues that they too tend to rely on troubling abstractions - or what she terms ‘socially weightless’ thinking. They often propose ideas of the political that are so far removed from the logic of everyday practice that, ultimately, their supposed emancipatory potential is thrown into question. Radical democrats frequently maintain that what distinguishes their ideas of the political from others is the fundamental concern with unmasking and challenging unrecognized forms of inequality and domination that distort everyday life. But this supposed attentiveness to power is undermined by the invocation of rarefied models of political action that treat agency as an unproblematic given and overlook certain features of the embodied experience of oppression. The tendency of radical democrats to define democratic agency in terms of dynamics of perpetual flux, mobility and agonism passes over too swiftly the way in which objective structures of oppression are often taken into the body as subjective dispositions, leaving individuals with the feeling that they are unable to do little more than endure a state of affairs beyond their control. Drawing on the work of Adorno, Bourdieu and Honneth, amongst others, McNay argues that in order to make good the critique of power, radical democratic theory should attend more closely to a phenomenology of negative social experience and what it can reveal about the social conditions necessary for effective political agency.
