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Reconstructing Political Economy

Author: William K. Tabb

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-01-22

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1134621639

This volume offers an original perspective on the questions the great economists have asked and looks at their significance for todays world. Written in a provocative and accessible style, it examines how the diverse traditions of political economy have conceptualised economic issues, events and theory. Going beyond the orthodoxies of mainstream economics it shows the relevance of political economy to the debates on the economic meaning of our times. Reconstructing Political Economy is a timely and thought-provoking contribution to a political economy for our time. In this light it offers fresh insights into such issues as modern theories of growth, the historic relations between state and market and the significance of globalisation for modern societies.

Reconstructing the Roman Republic

Author: Karl-J. Hölkeskamp

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2010-04-11

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 0691140383

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In recent decades, scholars have argued that the Roman Republic's political culture was essentially democratic in nature, stressing the central role of the 'sovereign' people and their assemblies. Karl-J. Hölkeskamp challenges this view in Reconstructing the Roman Republic, warning that this scholarly trend threatens to become the new orthodoxy, and defending the position that the republic was in fact a uniquely Roman, dominantly oligarchic and aristocratic political form. Hölkeskamp offers a comprehensive, in-depth survey of the modern debate surrounding the Roman Republic. He looks at the ongoing controversy first triggered in the 1980s when the 'oligarchic orthodoxy' was called into question by the idea that the republic's political culture was a form of Greek-style democracy, and he considers the important theoretical and methodological advances of the 1960s and 1970s that prepared the ground for this debate. Hölkeskamp renews and refines the 'elitist' view, showing how the republic was a unique kind of premodern city-state political culture shaped by a specific variant of a political class. He covers a host of fascinating topics, including the Roman value system; the senatorial aristocracy; competition in war and politics within this aristocracy; and the symbolic language of public rituals and ceremonies, monuments, architecture, and urban topography. Certain to inspire continued debate, Reconstructing the Roman Republic offers fresh approaches to the study of the republic while attesting to the field's enduring vitality.

Reconstructing Public Reason

Author: Eric MacGilvray

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2004-12-30

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 9780674015425

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MacGilvray argues that we should shift our attention away from the problem of identifying uncontroversial public ends in the present and toward the problem of evaluating potentially controversial public ends through collective inquiry over time.

The Practice of Political Theory

Author: Clayton Chin

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2018-08-28

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0231547994

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Recent political thought has grappled with a crisis in philosophical foundations: how do we justify the explicit and implicit normative claims and assumptions that guide political decisions and social criticism? In The Practice of Political Theory, Clayton Chin presents a critical reconstruction of the work of Richard Rorty that intervenes in the current surge of methodological debates in political thought, arguing that Rorty provides us with unrecognized tools for resolving key foundational issues. Chin illustrates the significance of Rorty’s thought for contemporary political thinking, casting his conception of “philosophy as cultural politics” as a resource for new models of sociopolitical criticism. He juxtaposes Rorty’s pragmatism with the ontological turn, illuminating them as alternative interventions in the current debate over the crisis of foundations in philosophy. Chin places Rorty in dialogue with continental philosophy and those working within its legacy. Focused on both important questions in pragmatist scholarship and central issues in contemporary political thought, The Practice of Political Theory is an important response to the vexed questions of justification and pluralism.

Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory

Author: Mickey Lauria

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0761901515

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Urban regime theory has gained a dominant position in the literature on local politics in the United States and its use in comparative cross-national research despite its cited shortcomings. In Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory, editor Mickey Lauria presents a challenging argument for the need to reconceptualize urban regime's middle-level abstraction by interpreting it through the lens of the higher-level abstraction of regulationist theory. The noted contributors to this volume propose stronger conceptual linkages between local agents and institutions, regime transformation, and the restructuring of urban space. The blend of empirical and case-study chapters provide an excellent mix of theory and practice that makes Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory well suited to a broad spectrum of upper-level undergraduate courses covering urban studies, political science, sociology, and geography as well as a rich resource for academics and researchers in these fields.

Reconstructing Political Pluralism

Author: Avigail I. Eisenberg

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 1995-08-17

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1438401922

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This reappraisal of the pluralist tradition systematically explores accounts of political pluralism offered by James, Dewey, Figgis, Cole, Laski, Follett, and Dahl and shows how each variant contains a distinct account of the relation between group power, individual interest, and self-development. These historical accounts provide the resources with which Eisenberg reconstructs a democratic theory of political pluralism. At the center of political pluralism, she argues, is a pluralist approach to self-development that can address the key ambiguities of identity politics and provide a more effective means to balance the power relations between individuals and communities than can individualist or communitarian approaches.

Reconstructing Rawls

Author: Robert S. Taylor

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-11-10

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0271056711

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Reconstructing Rawls has one overarching goal: to reclaim Rawls for the Enlightenment—more specifically, the Prussian Enlightenment. Rawls’s so-called political turn in the 1980s, motivated by a newfound interest in pluralism and the accommodation of difference, has been unhealthy for autonomy-based liberalism and has led liberalism more broadly toward cultural relativism, be it in the guise of liberal multiculturalism or critiques of cosmopolitan distributive-justice theories. Robert Taylor believes that it is time to redeem A Theory of Justice’s implicit promise of a universalistic, comprehensive Kantian liberalism. Reconstructing Rawls on Kantian foundations leads to some unorthodox conclusions about justice as fairness, to be sure: for example, it yields a more civic-humanist reading of the priority of political liberty, a more Marxist reading of the priority of fair equality of opportunity, and a more ascetic or antimaterialist reading of the difference principle. It nonetheless leaves us with a theory that is still recognizably Rawlsian and reveals a previously untraveled road out of Theory—a road very different from the one Rawls himself ultimately followed.

Freedom Beyond Sovereignty

Author: Sharon R. Krause

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-03-13

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 022623472X

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What does it mean to be free? We invoke the word frequently, yet the freedom of countless Americans is compromised by social inequalities that systematically undercut what they are able to do and to become. If we are to remedy these failures of freedom, we must move beyond the common assumption, prevalent in political theory and American public life, that individual agency is best conceived as a kind of personal sovereignty, or as self-determination or control over one’s actions. In Freedom Beyond Sovereignty, Sharon R. Krause shows that individual agency is best conceived as a non-sovereign experience because our ability to act and affect the world depends on how other people interpret and respond to what we do. The intersubjective character of agency makes it vulnerable to the effects of social inequality, but it is never in a strict sense socially determined. The agency of the oppressed sometimes surprises us with its vitality. Only by understanding the deep dynamics of agency as simultaneously non-sovereign and robust can we remediate the failed freedom of those on the losing end of persistent inequalities and grasp the scope of our own responsibility for social change. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty brings the experiences of the oppressed to the center of political theory and the study of freedom. It fundamentally reconstructs liberal individualism and enables us to see human action, personal responsibility, and the meaning of liberty in a totally new light.

Reconstructing the Classics

Author: Edward Bryan Portis

Publisher: CQ Press

Published: 2007-06-07

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13:

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To truly understand the substance and value of any great philosopher’s work, students must examine political theory against the backdrop of history, the surrounding literature, and the individual theorist’s views on human nature and rational motivation. In this third edition of his classic text, Edward Portis provides students with the framework they need to fully appreciate the original texts they are reading and apply the concepts they are learning. Fully updated since the previous edition almost a decade ago, Portis expands his coverage to include a complete chapter on Max Weber. Further, Portis strengthens his lucid introductions to the greatest theorists of Western political thought, proving them indispensable guides for both the politically engaged citizen and the practicing social scientist. He also provides suggestions, updated for this edition, for further reading in political theory.