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577 results in Political philosophy

Page 1 of 29

Political Responsibility and Tech Governance
  • AI, Repro-tech and Structural Injustice
  • Jude Browne
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2025
    Print publication:
    31 January 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.

Nations before the Nation-State
  • Between City-State and Empire from Antiquity to the Present
  • Anna Marisa Schön
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2024
    Print publication:
    31 December 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.

Can Democracy Recover?

Glory, Humiliation, and the Drive to War
  • Nir Eisikovits
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2024
    Print publication:
    30 November 2024
  • 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.

Empowering Affected Interests
  • Democratic Inclusion in a Globalized World
  • Edited by Archon Fung, Sean W. D. Gray
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2024
    Print publication:
    30 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.

The Right to Punish
  • Political Authority and International Criminal Justice
  • Luise Müller
  • Published online:
    16 May 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
  • What gives international courts the authority to punish individuals for international crimes? Through the lens of political philosophy, Luise Müller provides an original perspective on the justification of the authority of international criminal courts and tribunals. She argues that institutions of international criminal justice are permitted to pierce the sovereignty of states in order to punish high-profile politicians for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and other mass human rights violations. Their right to punish is justified by virtue of their function to deter mass violations of fundamental human rights. However, to legitimately exercise that right, international criminal justice institutions must fulfil two conditions: first, they must conduct criminal trials with the highest level of fairness; second, they must treat those who are subject to their authority as equals. This last condition can be satisfied by international criminal justice institutions by including procedures of democratic decision-making and democratic accountability.

On Helping One's Neighbor
  • Severe Poverty and the Religious Ethics of Obligation
  • Bharat Ranganathan
  • Published online:
    04 April 2024
    Print publication:
    14 March 2024
  • Exploring what he calls 'the moral horror that is severe poverty,' Bharat Ranganathan develops a demanding account of the obligations that affluent people have to assist severely impoverished people. He argues that this is an immediate ethical as much as a social or structural imperative. Noting that developmental economists and moral and political philosophers have focused on wealth inequalities in increasingly sophisticated ways, Ranganathan observes that – within religious ethics – normative issues around severe poverty have nevertheless received insufficient attention. Bringing together general moral, religious, and philosophical principles with particular economic, social, and political realities, and engaging constructively with the writings of John Rawls and Peter Singer, this passionately argued book boldly challenges deleterious trends within ethics by unpacking, in a much more systematic way than hitherto, the pressing dilemmas around acute impoverishment. It will find an eager readership among scholars of religion, ethics, developmental studies, and theology.

Social Choice, Agency, Inclusiveness and Capabilities
  • Edited by Flavio Comim, P. B. Anand, Shailaja Fennell
  • Published online:
    28 March 2024
    Print publication:
    14 March 2024
  • The capability approach is a versatile framework rooted on issues of justice and multidimensional assessment of quality of life developed in the 1980s as an alternative approach to prevailing mainstream development ideas focused narrowly on economic development. Most closely associated with the work of Amartya Sen, it has become of great interest to development scholars from a variety of different disciplines. Much has already been done exploring the conceptual foundations of the capability approach and discussing Sen's contribution to the field, but few books have explored the links between social choice (another field with rich contributions by Sen) and human development issues. Featuring many of the world's leading experts on social choice theory and capability indicators, Social Choice, Agency, Inclusiveness and Capabilities combines these interrelated themes into one volume and fully explores the relevance of social choice to human development.

Intercultural Philosophy and Environmental Justice between Generations
  • Indigenous, African, Asian, and Western Perspectives
  • Edited by Hiroshi Abe, Matthias Fritsch, Mario Wenning
  • Published online:
    14 March 2024
    Print publication:
    21 March 2024
  • This anthology combines an intercultural approach with intergenerational ethics to address critical environmental challenges. Written by scholars from all over the world, including Canada, the US, New Zealand, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Japan, the UK, China, and Spain, this book offers new perspectives on how to foster sustainable societal practises that draw on the past and are fair to future generations. It introduces the Māori idea that views all things and human generations in layered relations; Indigenous accounts of spiralling time and reciprocities among ancestors and descendants; the philosophical dimensions of Chinese conceptions of ancestor spirits and future ghosts; and African accounts of anamnestic solidarity among generations. These ideas influence proposals for how to confront ending worlds and address the environmental future of humanity, making this book a valuable resource for scholars and students of environmental law and policy, environmental humanities, political science, and intercultural and comparative philosophy, as well as policymakers.

The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau's Social Contract
  • Edited by David Lay Williams, Matthew W. Maguire
  • Published online:
    28 March 2024
    Print publication:
    22 February 2024
  • What is freedom? What is equality? And what is sovereignty? A foundational text of modern political philosophy, Rousseau's Social Contract has generated much debate and exerted extraordinary influence not only on political thought, but also modern political history, by way of the French Revolution and other political events, ideals, and practices. The Social Contract is regularly studied in undergraduate courses of philosophy, political thought, and modern intellectual history, as well as being the subject of graduate seminars in numerous disciplines. The book inspires an ongoing flow of scholarly articles and monographs. Few texts have offered more influential and important answers to research questions than Rousseau's Social Contract, and in this new Cambridge Companion, a multidisciplinary team of contributors provides new ways to navigate this masterpiece of political philosophy- and its animating questions.

The Duty to Secure
  • From Just to Mandatory Securitization
  • Rita Floyd
  • Published online:
    15 February 2024
    Print publication:
    22 February 2024
  • States have social contractual duties to provide security for their people, but just what measures are morally required? Should states be obligated to address real/objective existential threats via securitization (i.e., threat-specific, often liberty defying, rigorously enforced and sometimes forcible emergency measures)? Do non-state actors or international organizations also have a moral duty to securitize and, if so, why, when, and to whom? Would such duties pertain only to populations of one's own state or also to people in other states? 'The Duty to Secure' offers answers to these and other questions, setting out a rigorous theory of morally mandatory securitization that examines the duties of actors at all levels of analysis. Morally mandatory securitization has practical implications, including for NATO's Article 5 and the responsibility to protect norm, both of which currently take account of only a narrow range of threats.

The Coerced Conscience
  • Amy Gais
  • Published online:
    07 December 2023
    Print publication:
    21 December 2023
  • The Coerced Conscience examines liberty of conscience, the freedom to live one's life in accordance with the dictates of conscience, especially in religion. It offers a new perspective on the politics of conscience through the eyes of some of its most influential advocates and critics in Western history, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Pierre Bayle. By tracing how these four philosophers, revolutionaries, and heretics envisioned, defended, and condemned this crucial freedom, Amy Gais argues that liberty of conscience has a more controversial history than we often acknowledge today. Rather than defend or condemn a static, monolithic view of liberty conscience, these figures disagreed profoundly on what protecting this fundamental principle entails in practice, as well as the threat of hypocrisy and conformity to freedom. This revisionist account of liberty of conscience challenges our intuitions about what it means to be free today.

The Third Sword
  • On The Political Role of Prophets
  • James Bernard Murphy
  • Published online:
    23 November 2023
    Print publication:
    07 December 2023
  • Prophets are wild cards in the game of politics, James Bernard Murphy writes in this startling new book. They risk their lives by calling out the abuses of political and religious leaders, forcing us to confront evils we would prefer to ignore. By setting moral limits on political leaders, prophets chasten our political pretensions and remind us there are values that transcend politics. They wield a third sword—distinct from the familiar swords of state and church power—their sword is the word of God. The Third Sword offers a new take on political history, illustrating a theory of prophetic politics through tales of political crises, interspersed with direct dialogue between the prophets and their persecutors. With chapters on Socrates, Jesus, Joan of Arc, Thomas More, and Martin Luther King, Murphy brings these prophets to life with storytelling that blends biography, history, and political theory.

Political Rhetoric in Theory and Practice
  • A Reader
  • Edited by Robert C. Bartlett, Nasser Behnegar
  • Published online:
    02 November 2023
    Print publication:
    16 November 2023
  • Political Rhetoric in Theory and Practice is an introduction to the art of rhetoric or persuasive speaking. A collection of primary sources, it combines classic statements of the theory of political rhetoric (Aristotle, Isocrates, Demosthenes, Cicero) with a rich array of political speeches, from Socrates to Martin Luther King Jr., Pericles to Richard Nixon, Sojourner Truth to Phyllis Schlafly. These speeches exemplify not only the three principal kinds of rhetoric – judicial, deliberative, and epideictic – but also the principal rhetorical proofs. Grouped thematically, the speeches boast a diversity of speakers, subject matters, and themes. At a time when the practice of democracy and democratic deliberation are much in question, this book seeks to encourage the serious study of rhetoric by making available important examples of it, in both its noblest and its most scurrilous forms.

Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Moral Tyranny
  • Jesse Spafford
  • Published online:
    19 October 2023
    Print publication:
    02 November 2023
  • Outside philosophy departments, most self-identified anarchists are social anarchists who reject both the legitimacy of the state and private property. By contrast, most anarchist philosophers are of the pro-market variety. As a result, a philosopher has yet to write an analytic defence of social anarchism. Jesse Spafford fills this gap by arguing that social anarchism is a coherent philosophical position that follows from a more basic, plausible principle that constrains which moral theories are acceptable. In the process of articulating and defending social anarchism Spafford stakes out a number of bold and original positions (e.g. that people own themselves and nothing else), while providing novel solutions to some of classic problems of political philosophy (e.g. luck egalitarianism's problem of stakes). His distinctive study offers an overarching, unified political theory while also advancing many of the more fine-grained debates that occupy political philosophers. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Why Not Moderation?
  • Letters to Young Radicals
  • Aurelian Craiutu
  • Published online:
    12 October 2023
    Print publication:
    12 October 2023
  • Moderation is often presented as a simple virtue for lukewarm and indecisive minds, searching for a fuzzy center between the extremes. Not surprisingly, many politicians do not want to be labelled 'moderates' for fear of losing elections. Why Not Moderation? challenges this conventional image and shows that moderation is a complex virtue with a rich tradition and unexplored radical sides. Through a series of imaginary letters between a passionate moderate and two young radicals, the book outlines the distinctive political vision undergirding moderation and makes a case for why we need this virtue today in America. Drawing on clearly written and compelling sources, Craiutu offers an opportunity to rethink moderation and participate in the important public debate on what kind of society we want to live in. His book reminds us that we cannot afford to bargain away the liberal civilization and open society we have inherited from our forefathers.

Machiavelli's Effectual Truth
  • Creating the Modern World
  • Harvey C. Mansfield
  • Published online:
    07 September 2023
    Print publication:
    21 September 2023
  • Machiavelli is said to be a Renaissance thinker, yet in a notable phrase he invented, 'the effectual truth,' he attacked the high-sounding humanism typical of the Renaissance, while mounting a conspiracy against the classical and Christian values of his time. In Machiavelli's Effectual Truth this overlooked phrase is studied and explained for the first time. The upshot of 'effectual truth' for any individual is to not depend on anyone or anything outside yourself to keep you free and secure. Mansfield argues that this phrase reveals Machiavelli's approach to modern science, with its focus on the efficient cause and concern for fact. He inquires into the effect Machiavelli expected from his own writings, who believed his philosophy would have an effect that future philosophers could not ignore. His plan, according to Mansfield, was to bring about a desired effect and thus to create his own future and ours.

On Global Learning
  • Pragmatic Constructivism, International Practice and the Challenge of Global Governance
  • Jason Ralph
  • Published online:
    07 September 2023
    Print publication:
    21 September 2023
  • Global security, climate and health challenges have all created a deep-seated unease about international society's capacity to cope with change. International Relations should help practitioners develop appropriate responses, but Jason Ralph argues that IR would be better positioned to do so if it drew more explicitly on the insights of classical Pragmatism. By bringing this tradition in from the margins, Ralph comprehensively engages norm, practice, realist and global IR theory to extend the 'new constructivist' research agenda in a normative direction. He develops a 'Pragmatic Constructivist' approach to assess how well communities of practice facilitate the learning that mitigates emergent social problems and improves lived experiences. This normative assessment focuses on the extent to which communities of practice are characterized by inclusive reflexivity and deliberative practical judgment. These two tests are then applied to critique existing communities of practice, including the UN Security Council, the UNFCCC and the WHO.

Stanley Cavell's Democratic Perfectionism
  • Community, Individuality, and Post-Truth Politics
  • Jonathan Havercroft
  • Published online:
    17 August 2023
    Print publication:
    31 August 2023
  • Post-truth politics is both a result of a democratic culture in which each person is encouraged to voice their opinion, and a threat to the continuation of democracy as partisans seek to deny political standing to those with incommensurate world views. Are there resources within political theory for overcoming this tension? This book argues that Stanley Cavell's philosophy provides a conceptual framework for responding to post-truth politics. Jonathan Havercroft develops an original interpretation of Stanley Cavell as a theorist of democratic perfectionism. By placing Cavell's writings in conversation with political theorists on debates about the social contract, interpretive methods, democratic theory and political aesthetics, Stanley Cavell's Democratic Perfectionism cultivates modes of responsiveness that strengthen our democratic culture and help us resist the contemporary crisis of democratic backsliding. Each chapter diagnoses a sceptical crisis in contemporary politics and a mode of responsiveness in Cavell's thought that can respond to that crisis.

The Authority of International Criminal Law
  • A Controversial Concept
  • Clare Frances Moran
  • Published online:
    27 July 2023
    Print publication:
    07 September 2023
  • Despite a wealth of literature exploring the issues surrounding it, the legitimacy and authority of international criminal law remain in question. Adopting a perspective informed by legal and political philosophy, Clare Frances Moran considers the authority of international criminal law, why it can be conceived of as more than simply an exercise of power and how that power may be exercised legitimately. Advancing existing scholarship on the subject, Moran explores the roots of the authority of law at the domestic level and tests these ideas in an international context. She examines sovereignty, complementarity and postcolonial issues, and how each impact international criminal law. By developing a theory on the authority of international law, Moran considers how it might be possible to adjudicate more effectively at the international level.

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