Introduction. The roots of liberal-democratic theory -- Problems of interpretation -- Hobbe : the political obligation of the market. Philosophy and political theory -- Human nature and the state of nature -- Models of society -- Political obligation -- Penetration and limits of Hobbe's political theory -- The Levellers : franchise and freedom. The problem of franchise -- Types of franchise -- The record -- Theoretical implications -- Harrington : the opportunity state. Unexamined (...) ambiguities -- The balance and the gentry -- The bourgeois society -- The equal commonwealth and the equal agrarian -- The self-cancelling balance principle -- Harrington's stature --Locke : the political theory of appropriation. Interpretations -- The theory of property right -- Class differentials in natural rights and rationality -- The ambiguous state of nature -- The ambiguous civil society -- Unsettled problems reconsidered -- Possessive individualism and liberal democracy. The seventeenth-century foundations -- The twentieth-century dilemma -- Appendix : Social classes and franchise classes in England, circa 1648. (shrink)

In Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, Brooke Ackerly demonstrates the shortcomings of contemporary deliberative democratic theory, relativism and essentialism for guiding the practice of social criticism in the real, imperfect world. Drawing theoretical implications from the activism of Third World feminists who help bring to public audiences the voices of women silenced by coercion, Brooke Ackerly provides a practicable model of social criticism. She argues that feminist critics have managed to achieve in practice what other theorists (...) do only incompletely in theory. Complemented by Third World feminist social criticism, deliberative democratic theory becomes critical theory - actionable, coherent, and self-reflective. While a complement to democratic theory, Third World feminist social criticism also addresses the problem in feminist theory associated with attempts to deal with identity politics. Third World feminist social criticism thus takes feminist theory beyond the critical impasse of the tension between anti-relativist and anti-essentialist feminist theory. (shrink)

This seminal work by political philosopher C.B. Macpherson was first published by the Clarendon Press in 1962, and remains of key importance to the study of liberal-democratic theory half-a-century later. In it, Macpherson argues that the chief difficulty of the notion of individualism that underpins classical liberalism lies in what he calls its "possessive quality" - "its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them." Under such (...) a conception, the essence of humanity becomes freedom from dependence on the wills of others; society is little more than a system of economic relations; and political society becomes a means of safeguarding private property and the system of economic relations rooted in property. As the New Statesman declared: "It is rare for a book to change the intellectual landscape. It is even more unusual for this to happen when the subject is one that has been thoroughly investigated by generations of historians.... Until the appearance of Professor Macpherson's book, it seemed unlikely that anything radically new could be said about so well-worn a topic. The unexpected has happened, and the shock waves are still being absorbed." A new introduction by Frank Cunningham puts the work in a twenty-first-century context. (shrink)

In this book, Stephen Acreman follows the development and reception of a hitherto under-analyzed concept central to modern and postmodern political theory: the Kantian ein erweiterte Denkungsart, or enlarged mentality. -/- While the enlarged mentality plays a major role in a number of key texts underpinning contemporary democratic theory, including works by Arendt, Gadamer, Habermas, and Lyotard, this is the first in-depth study of the concept encompassing and bringing together its full range of expressions. A number of (...) attempts to place the enlarged mentality at the service of particular ideals–the politics of empathy, of consensus, of agonistic contest, or of moral righteousness–are challenged and redirected. In its exploration of the enlarged mentality, the book asks what it means to assume a properly political stance, and, in giving as the answer ‘facing reality together’, it uncovers a political theory attentive to the facts and events that concern us, and uniquely well suited to the ecological politics of our time. (shrink)

Charles Beitz rejects two highly influential conceptions of international theory as empirically inaccurate and theoretically misleading. In one, international relations is a Hobbesian state of nature in which moral judgments are entirely inappropriate, and in the other, states are analogous to persons in domestic society in having rights of autonomy that insulate them from external moral assessment and political interference. Beitz postulates that a theory of international politics should include a revised principle of state autonomy based on (...) the justice of a state's domestic institutions, and a principle of international distributive justice to establish a fair division of resources and wealth among persons situated in diverse national societies. (shrink)

Feminist Political Theory provides both a wide-ranging history of western feminist thought and a lucid analysis of contemporary debates. It offers an accessible and thought-provoking account of complex theories, which it relates to 'real-life' issues such as sexual violence, political representation and the family. This timely new edition has been thoroughly updated to incorporate the most recent developments in feminism and feminist scholarship throughout, in particular taking into account the impact of black and postmodern feminist thought on (...) feminist political theory. (shrink)

In this revised edition of his 1979 classic Political Theory and International Relations, Charles Beitz rejects two highly influential conceptions of international theory as empirically inaccurate and theoretically misleading. In one, international relations is a Hobbesian state of nature in which moral judgments are entirely inappropriate, and in the other, states are analogous to persons in domestic society in having rights of autonomy that insulate them from external moral assessment and political interference. Beitz postulates that a (...) theory of international politics should include a revised principle of state autonomy based on the justice of a state’s domestic institutions, and a principle of international distributive justice to establish a fair division of resources and wealth among persons situated in diverse national societies. (shrink)

This book challenges the dominant approach to problems of justice in global normative theory and offers a radical alternative designed to transform our thinking about what kind of problem injustice is and how political theorists might do better in understanding and addressing it. It argues that the dominant approach, ideal moral theory (IMT), takes a fundamentally wrong-headed approach to the problem of justice. IMT seeks to work out what an ideally just society would look like, and only (...) then outlines our moral obligations in realizing that ideal. In other words, it ignores the realities of everyday politics. As Michael Goodhart asserts, IMT postpones engagement with actually existing injustices and distorts our understanding of them, and it normalizes many problematic features of our world. On the other hand, the leading alternatives to IMT struggle to make sense of the role values play in politics. This book sees justice as an ideology and develops an innovative bifocal theoretical framework for making sense of it. This framework provides two complementary perspectives on justice: a theoretical perspective that situates competing ideological claims about justice in a broader political context and a partisan perspective that evaluates the structure and coherence of particular conceptions of justice. As opposed to IMT, it focuses on barriers to justice and advocates an activist political theory that takes sides in political struggles against injustice. Goodhart argues that theorists can help to generate the countervailing power necessary for social transformation through the work of articulation, translation, and mapping, work which contributes to a more comprehensive social science of injustice. (shrink)

This challenging book focuses on the problem of justice for indigenous peoples – in philosophical, legal, cultural and political contexts – and the ways in which this problem poses key questions for political theory. It includes chapters by leading political theorists and indigenous scholars from Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada and the United States. One of the strengths of this book is the manner in which it shows how the different historical circumstances of colonisation in these countries (...) raise common problems and questions for contemporary political theory. It examines ways in which political theory has contributed to the past subjugation and continuing disadvantage faced by indigenous peoples, while also seeking to identify resources in contemporary political thought that can assist the ongoing processes of 'decolonisation' of relations between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. (shrink)

CHAPTER ONK Negotiating Positions: The Politics of Virtue and Virtu [Virtu] rouses enmity toward order, toward the lies that are concealed in every order, ...

Postmodernism has evoked great controversy and it continues to do so today, as it disseminates into general discourse. Some see its principles, such as its fundamental resistance to metanarratives, as frighteningly disruptive, while a growing number are reaping the benefits of its innovative perspective. In Political Theory and Postmodernism, Stephen K. White outlines a path through the postmodern problematic by distinguishing two distinct ways of thinking about the meaning of responsibility, one prevalent in modern and the other in (...) postmodern perspectives. Using this as a guide, White explores the work of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Habermas, as well as 'difference' feminists, with the goal of showing how postmodernism can inform contemporary ethical-political reflection. In his concluding chapter, White examines how this revisioned postmodern perspective might bear on our thinking about justice. (shrink)

A challenging new work of cultural and political theory rethinks the concept of hegemony.

Margaret Moore offers a comprehensive normative theory of territory.

Translator's Introduction Political Theory in the Welfare State [Politische Theorie im Wohl- fahrtsstaat] was originally published (Olzog, Munich) in. ...

What is neoliberalism? -- The state -- Democracy -- Science -- Politics -- European crises, causes, and consequences -- Ideas, uncertainty, and the ordoliberalization of Europe.

Here is a sketch of a genealogy of political theory for the last century. This is a genealogy in Nietzsche’s sense: therefore, neither unhistorical taxonomy, nor a history of political theory as it is written by historians, but a typology in time. Four types of modern political theory are distinguished. These are called, with some justification, positive, normative, third way and sceptical political theory. Seen from the vantage of the twenty-first century, they (...) form an instructive sequence, emerging as a series of reactions to the canonical political theory that was established in the universities in the late nineteenth century. None of the four should be excluded from our conception of what political theory has been, though most of them, when seen genealogically, reveal their defects more clearly than they do when treated purely theoretically. Since this is a sceptical finding, the genealogy is a polemic against the first three types of modern political theory in favour of the last. (shrink)

With their remarkable electoral successes, Green parties worldwide seized the political imagination of friends and foes alike. Mainstream politicians busily disparage them and imitate them in turn. This new book shows that 'greens' deserve to be taken more seriously than that. This is the first full-length philosophical discussion of the green political programme. Goodin shows that green public policy proposals are unified by a single, coherent moral vision - a 'green theory of value' - that is largely (...) independent of the `green theory of agency' dictating green political mechanisms, strategies and tactics on the one hand, and personal lifestyle recommendations on the other. The upshot is that we demand that politicians implement green public policies, and implement them completely, without committing ourselves to the other often more eccentric aspects of green doctrine that threaten to alienate so many potential supporters. (shrink)

This book is a textbook designed for teaching a new subfield in political science: the emerging field of "comparative political theory". It is the first such textbook. As taught in American universities, political theory has been traditionally confined to the history of Western political thought from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Nietzsche. The editor believes strongly that this limitation is no longer tenable in our globalizing age when different cultures and civilizations are increasingly (...) communicating and interacting with each other. The text focuses on three areas: Islamic civilization, Indian civilization, and Far Eastern civilizations. In each area the text offers an introduction followed by readings dealing with ancient or classical teachings as well as modern and contemporary theoretical developments. In making these selections, the editor has been ably assisted by experts in the respective fields (Roxanne Euben, Anthony Parel, and Theodore deBary). The text is meant mainly for undergraduate classes but can be consulted with benefit also by more advanced students as well as by the general reading public. (shrink)

In a world no longer centered on the West, what should political theory become? Although Western intellectual traditions continue to dominate academic journals and course syllabi in political theory, up-and-coming contributions of 'comparative political theory' are rapidly transforming the field. Deparochializing Political Theory creates a space for conversation amongst leading scholars who differ widely in their approaches to political theory. These scholars converge on the belief that we bear a collective (...) responsibility to engage and support the transformation of political theory. In these exchanges, 'deparochializing' political theory emerges as an intellectual, educational and political practice that cuts across methodological approaches. Because it is also an intergenerational project, this book presses us to re-imagine our teaching and curriculum design. Bearing the marks of its beginnings in East Asia, Deparochializing Political Theory seeks to de-center Western thought and explore the evolving tasks of political theory in an age of global modernity. (shrink)

What, if anything, do the ‘square’ protests and ‘occupy’ movements of 2011 bring to contemporary democratic theory? And how can we, as political theorists, analyse their discourse and do justice to it? We address these questions through an analysis of the Greek and Spanish protest movements of the spring and summer of 2011, the so-called aganaktismenoi and indignados. We trace the centrality of the critique of representation and politics as usual as well as the ideas about horizontality and (...) autonomy in the protesters’ discourse. These ideas are not only important to their critique of the contemporary liberal democratic regimes in the two countries, but also important to the way in which the protesters organise themselves. Nonetheless, as we shall argue, the protesters are caught within a tension between horizontality and verticality, between autonomy and hegemony, or between moving beyond representation and accepting representational structures. Given this tension, we examine how the protesters negotiate it in three key areas: politics, representation and organisation. Drawing on Jacques Rancière, we further argue that the protesters can be seen as making a claim to equal voice. This is what Rancière refers to as politics proper, and the question is then whether such a politics is possible without falling back into traditional forms of politics. (shrink)

Could global government be the answer to global poverty and starvation? Cosmopolitan thinkers challenge the widely held belief that we owe more to our co-citizens than to those in other countries. This book offers a moral argument for world government, claiming that not only do we have strong obligations to people elsewhere, but that accountable integration among nation-states will help ensure that all persons can lead a decent life. Cabrera considers both the views of those political philosophers who say (...) we have much stronger obligations to help our co-citizens than foreigners and those cosmopolitans who say our duties are equally strong to each but resist restructuring. He then outlines his own position, using the European Union as a partial model for the integrated alternative and advocating instituting EU-style supranational government, development aid, and free movement of persons in the Americas and other regions. Over time, Cabrera argues that the transformation of the global system into a cohesive network of democratic institutions would help ensure that anyone born anywhere could lead a decent life. This book will appeal to all those interested in political philosophy and the processes and potential of globalization. (shrink)

With their remarkable electoral successes, Green parties worldwide seized the political imagination of friends and foes alike. Mainstream politicians busily disparage them and imitate them in turn. This new book shows that 'greens' deserve to be taken more seriously than that. This is the first full-length philosophical discussion of the green political programme. Goodin shows that green public policy proposals are unified by a single, coherent moral vision - a 'green theory of value' - that is largely (...) independent of the `green theory of agency' dictating green political mechanisms, strategies and tactics on the one hand, and personal lifestyle recommendations on the other. The upshot is that we demand that politicians implement green public policies, and implement them completely, without committing ourselves to the other often more eccentric aspects of green doctrine that threaten to alienate so many potential supporters. (shrink)

Political theory has been described as an `enterprise of discovery' that carries within it the danger of utopianism. This article explores one aspect of that danger: the question of the paradoxical or circular nature of much political thinking. This seems to be both a necessary and an impossible feature of such theorizing. Political theory itself seems to require an idea of utopia that is, by definition, impossible to achieve.

In this volume, a companion to Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory (Penn State, 1991) edited by Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carole Pateman, leading feminist theorists rethink the traditional concepts of political theory and expand the ...

The principles of liberal political theory are often said to be “freestanding.” Are they indeed sufficiently detached from the cultural setting where they emerged to be intelligible to people with other backgrounds? To answer this question, this essay examines the Indian secularism debate and develops a hypothesis on the process whereby liberal principles crystallized in the West and spread elsewhere. It argues that the secularization of western political thought has not produced independent rational principles, but transformed theological (...) ideas into the “topoi” of a culture. Like all topoi, the principles of liberalism depend on other clusters of ideas present in western societies. When they migrate to new settings, the absence of these surrounding ideas presents fundamental obstacles to the interpretation and elaboration of liberal principles. The case of Indian secularism illustrates the cultural limitations of liberal political theory rather than showing its universal significance. (shrink)

How should political theorists go about their work if they are democrats? Given their democratic commitments, should they develop theories that are responsive to the views and concerns of their fellow citizens at large? Is there a balance to be struck, within political theory, between truth seeking and democratic responsiveness? The article addresses this question about the relationship between political theory, public opinion and democracy. I criticize the way in which some political theorists have (...) appealed to the value of democratic legitimacy in an attempt to justify a more opinion-sensitive approach to their work. Specifically, I identify a problematic model in the existing literature, which I term ‘democratic restraint’: an approach on which the theorist moderates her normative principles in response to evidence about public attitudes in order to enhance the legitimacy of her account. This model renders the discipline newly vulnerable to an otherwise misguided objection that political theory seeks to pre-empt democratic politics. I trace the problem with the democratic restraint model to its flawed underlying conception of democratic legitimacy. The article then outlines a more appealing ‘democratic underlabourer’ view of the status of political theory and draws out the implications of this alternative account for the role of public opinion. (shrink)

In this lively and entertaining book, Terence Ball maintains that 'classic' works in political theory continue to speak to us only if they are periodically re-read and reinterpreted from alternative perspectives. That, the author contends, is how these works became classics, and why they are regarded as such. Ball suggests a way of reading that is both 'pluralist' and 'problem-driven'--pluralist in that there is no one right way to read a text, and problem-driven in that the reinterpretation is (...) motivated by problems that emerge while reading these texts. In addition, the subsequent readings and interpretations become more and more suffused with the interpretations of others. This tour de force, always entertaining and eclectic, focuses on the core problems surrounding many of the major thinkers. Was Machiavelli really amoral? Why did language matter so much to Hobbes--and why should it matter to us? Are the roots of the totalitarian state to be found in Rousseau? Were the utilitarians sexist in their view of the franchise? The author's aim is to show how a pluralist and problem-centered approach can shed new light on old and recent works in political theory, and on the controversies that continue over their meaning and significance. Written in a lively and accessible style, the book will provoke debate among students and scholars alike. (shrink)

Political theory, sometimes also called “normative political theory”, is a subfield of the disciplines of philosophy and political science that addresses conceptual, normative, and evaluative questions concerning politics and society, broadly construed. Examples are: When is a society just? What does it mean for its members to be free? When is one distribution of goods socially preferable to another? What makes a political authority legitimate? How should we trade off different values, such as liberty, (...) prosperity, and security, against one another? What do we owe, not just to our fellow citizens, but to people in the world at large? In this article, we review the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory: the one commonly described as “analytic” political theory. In Section 1, we briefly demarcate the scope of political theory. In Section 2, we comment on the analysis of political concepts. In Section 3, we introduce the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts. In Section 4, we discuss the methods of assessing such principles and theories, for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. In Section 5, we review a recent debate on how abstract and idealized political theory should be. In Section 6, finally, we discuss the significance of disagreement in political theory. Although we cover established ground, we do so from an angle that will be somewhat unfamiliar to at least some political theorists – namely an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. We have chosen this angle with a view to systematizing the activity of analytic political theorizing so as to make its connections with other fields of philosophy and positive science more transparent. (shrink)

One of the exciting developments in political theory in the last decades is that the boundaries of the discipline gradually but vigorously expanded beyond “the West,” as evident in the rise of work that is often labeled “comparative.” Basic to this shift is the recognition that various thinkers, ideas, and contexts—usually marked as “non-Western”—have been peripheral to, and remain marginalized in, the discipline of political theory. However, the discipline’s framing of the “comparative” as the study of (...) “non-Western political thought” tends to take for granted the boundary between “West” and “non-West.” The primacy of this assumed correspondence between “comparative” and “non-Western” is most visible and problematic in the ongoing institutionalization of the “comparative turn.” I understand comparative political theory as an immanent critique of political theory: the discipline presents itself as global, but in practice it is too often confined to studying a few places, histories, and bodies of knowledge. The “comparative” calls for political theorists to more reliably study politics and power anywhere. To take “comparative” to mean the study of equivalent, coherent forms of “non-Western” otherness is to elide the historicity of “the Western” and the ways in which it has been made in relation to non-Europeans. (shrink)

One of the central difficulties for practitioners of cognate disciplines like comparative political theory and comparative philosophy concerns the hermeneutic problem of understanding that which is different. The philosophical challenge, put briefly, is this: Is it possible to bring something of an entirely different order into our world of understanding without imposing our own epistemological categories and civilizational prejudices on it? This essay focuses on recent exemplary work in comparative political theory that has explicitly grappled with (...) this issue. Examined here are three models of encountering and learning from different traditions of thought—the models of existential immersion, conversion, and pilgrimage—as exemplified in the contributions by Farah Godrej, Leigh Jenco, and J. L. Mehta. The essay shows that while the first two authors have sought to resolve the problem of the encounter with difference methodologically (Godrej) and epistemologically (Jenco), their respective solutions remain implicitly bound to a spectator theory of knowledge. This becomes especially evident when their work is contrasted with Mehta’s own. Unlike Godrej and Jenco, Mehta does not view difference as a problem to be resolved. The advantage of his approach, I argue, is that it provides liberation from the rigid subject-object dichotomy which encourages the view that the ‘objects’ of our knowledge exist prior to and wholly apart from the act of knowing. Mehta’s work, therefore, opens the possibility for redirecting our attention to a question that has thus far been thoroughly avoided in the consolidation of the subfield: the question of the very constitution of difference or heterology. (shrink)

Argues that traditional political science is failing to identify and address fundamental political phenomena of our time and proposes an alternative value-based political science.

Comparative political theory is at best an embryonic and marginalized endeavor. As practiced in most Western universities, the study of political theory generally involves a rehearsal of the canon of Western political thought from Plato to Marx. Only rarely are practitioners of political thought willing (and professionally encouraged) to transgress the canon and thereby the cultural boundaries of North America and Europe in the direction of genuine comparative investigation. Border Crossings presents an effort to (...) remedy this situation, fully launching a new era in political theory. Thirteen scholars from around the world examine the various political traditions of West, South, and East Asia and engage in a reflective cross-cultural discussion that belies the assumptions of an Asian essence and of an unbridgeable gulf between West and non-West. The denial of essential differences does not, however, amount to an endorsement of essential sameness. As viewed and as practiced by contributors to this ground-breaking volume, comparative political theorizing must steer a course between uniformity and radical separation--this is the path of border crossings. (shrink)

This article offers some general criticisms of the idea that any political theory can legitimate public health interventions, and then some particular criticisms of Civic Republicanism as a political theory for public health. Civic Republicanism, I argue, legitimizes liberty-infringing public health interventions by demanding high levels of civic engagement in framing and reviewing them; to demand such engagement in pursuit of such a baseline value as health will leave insufficient civic energy for the pursuit of higher (...) values. (shrink)

This volume explores, from a variety of perspectives, the political theory of the man who is arguably the greatest English political thinker. The contributors contend that Hobbes's writings are not mere static artifacts of a particular historical milieu, but rather rich sources of a variety of interpretations and criticisms that spur discussion and debate in their turn.

This book provides an invaluable overview of the competing schools of thought in traditional and contemporary normative international theory and seeks to provide a new basis for doing international political theory and thinking about ethics in world politics today. · Part one explains the role and place of normative theory in the study of international politics before critically examining mainstream approaches in international relations and applied ethics. Here the student is introduced to the central debates between (...) realists and idealists, and cosmopolitans and communitarians. · Part two introduces the conceptual challenges of contemporary perspectives from critical theory, postmodernism and feminism and provides a platform for the author to develop her own Hegelian-Foucauldian approach for doing normative international theory. · In Part three the insights drawn from the first two parts are applied to the study of two key topics in contemporary theoretical debate: the principle of self-determination, and the democratic ideals of political cosmopolitanism. Finally conclusions are made for the future practice of theorizing international politics. Accessibly written and wide-ranging, this text will quickly become essential reading for all students and academics of politics and international relations seeking a deeper understanding of the underlying tensions and future potential of international or global political theory today. (shrink)

In recent years the engagement between the environmental 'agenda' and mainstream political theory has become increasingly widespread and profound. Each has affected the other in palpable and important ways, and it makes increasingly less sense for political theorists in either camp to ignore what the other is doing. This book draws together the threads of this interconnecting enquiry in order to assess its status and meaning. Dobson and Eckersley, two renowned scholars in this field, have commissioned an (...) internationally recognised group of political theory scholars to think through the challenge that political ecology presents to political theory. Looking at fourteen familiar political ideologies and concepts such as liberalism, conservatism, justice, and democracy, the contributors question how they are re-shaped, distorted or transformed from an environmental perspective. Lively, accessible and authoritative, this book will appeal to professional scholars and students alike. (shrink)

When the policies and activities of one country or generation harm both other nations and later generations, they constitute serious injustices. Recognizing the broad threat posed by anthropogenic climate change, advocates for an international climate policy development process have expressly aimed to mitigate this pressing contemporary environmental threat in a manner that promotes justice. Yet, while making justice a primary objective of global climate policy has been the movement's noblest aspiration, it remains an onerous challenge for policymakers. -/- Atmospheric Justice (...) is the first single-authored work of political theory that addresses this pressing challenge via the conceptual frameworks of justice, equality, and responsibility. Throughout this incisive study, Steve Vanderheiden points toward ways to achieve environmental justice by exploring how climate change raises issues of both international and intergenerational justice. In addition, he considers how the design of a global climate regime might take these aims into account. Engaging with the principles of renowned political philosopher John Rawls, he expands on them by factoring in the needs of future generations. Vanderheiden also demonstrates how political theory can contribute to reaching a better understanding of the proper human response to climate change. By showing how climate policy offers insights into resolving contemporary controversies within political theory, he illustrates the ways in which applying normative theory to policy allows us to better understand both. -/- Thoroughly researched and persuasively argued, Atmospheric Justice makes an important step toward providing us with a set of carefully elaborated first principles for achieving environmental justice. (shrink)