The complex figure of Theodor Adorno has made a lasting impact on modern political and philosphical development. Deeply interested in the flowering of modern art and an accomplished musician who was close to Schoenberg's circle, he was profoundly affected by revolutionary Marxism, although he always resisted its institutionalized manifestations. Adorno sought to highlight the negative characteristics of the Enlightenment while at the same time emphasizing its positive and empancipatory aspects. In both politics and philosophy he preferred the spontaneous to the orthodox, the experimental to the conventional. His life's work rejects the capitalist system of the twentieth-century while at the same time acknowledging and affirming its creative cultural achievements. Hauke Brunkhorst's book is the first English-language assessment of Adorno's life and work. He stresses the links between Adorno and the dialectical thinking of Hegel and Marx, but also emphasizes the connection between Kant and Adorno. The book sheds new light on Adorno's negative dialectic and is an important contribution to the debate on this celebrated philosopher.

This innovative study focuses on the Kantian theory of international relations, a subject which has frequently been either ignored or misunderstood. Kant was criticized by contemporaries who asserted that his political ideas were idealistic and impractical. He countered this accusation by evolving a political philosophy which formed a link between the theoretical doctrine of pure law and the actualities of the real world. The author argues that Kant’s theory of international relations can be read as an attempt to bring reason and history together. Kant tries to apply the a priori principles of reason to history in general, and to the political conditions of the late eighteenth century in particular, and this volume examines the way in which he attempts to mediate between theory and practice. In this stimulating and lucid work, Cavallar provides one of the first comprehensive examinations in English of Kant’s theory of international right.

In Michael Walzer on War and Justice Brian Orend offers the first clear and comprehensive look at Walzer's entire body of work. He deals with controversial subjects - from bullets, blood, and bombs to the distribution of money, political power, and health care - and surveys both the national and the international fields of justice. This is an important book that provides a thought-provoking and critical look at some of the most pressing and controversial topics of our time.

For many years, William Morris’s utopian novel, News From Nowhere, has been considered a socialist classic. In it, he describes a future society in which poverty and hardship have been overcome and where individuals are free to express their creativity. For many readers it has been an inspirational text but, at the same time, scholars have openly admitted that the society it describes is impractical. Indeed, in recent years, writers and politicians sympathetic to Morris’s socialism have tended to defend the relevance of his political thought by passing over the details of his vision and translating his ideas to a set of familiar values or freedom, equality, fraternity, ecology, environmentalism. In this stimulating study, Ruth Kinna reviews the debates that have surrounded Morris’s work and suggests that the romanticism and utopianism of News From Nowhere have been treated wrongly as a weakness of his thought. By analyzing the impact that Morris’s understanding of art had on his political thought, she argues that his socialism was driven by a deeply romantic impulse and that this impulse underpinned his central contribution to socialist thought. In today’s political climate, the assumptions that Morris made about the revolution and his idea about the socialist economy and the role of women appear impractical and outdated. Nevertheless, this study suggests that there is a role for utopian thought in practical politics and that Morris’s image of the good society remains relevant today.

If human rights express the equal claim of every person to the recognition and protection of their vital interests, they necessarily assert universal obligations of justice that cross borders. Sharon Anderson-Gold asks here whether there is a normative consensus on human rights and articulates the role of a cosmopolitan or global community in shaping the theory and practice of international politics. She considers several important works in the field of universal human rights and discusses whether a cosmopolitan system of law is a necessary condition for the stable association of nation states. Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights presents an ethical foundation for the idea of human development and attempts to demonstrate the normative character of universal human rights. It claims that Kant's idea of a federation of nations based upon principles of international right remains highly relevant to contemporary aspirations for global justice, and concludes by suggesting that a ‘cosmopolitan community’ is the locus of a global democratic order and is the necessary framework for the maintenance of human rights.

Providing a comprehensive discussion of the polymathic writer and thinker Ernest Gellner, this book presents a lucid exposition of his thought, making clear both his major contributions to the diverse areas in which he worked and the underlying consistency and unity of his thought. Examined is how Gellner's analysis of the social, economic, and cognitive forms intrinsic to modernity carries forward the work of Max Weber and Karl Popper and also enables him to develop a profound and original philosophy of science which is at the same time a political philosophy.

At the beginning of the 21st century, there is a pressing need to develop new forms of citizenship to meet demands for self-determination advanced by substate nations and indigenous peoples. In Defence of Multinational Citizenship responds to this challenge by making a compelling case for a new form of multinational citizenship. Such a conception would provide equal recognition to the citizenship regimes of state and substate nations through a democratic argument for self-determination at the substate level, and a revised conception of state sovereignty that is divided and shared.

While Hegel’s political philosophy has been attacked on the left by republican democrats and on the right by feudalist reactionaries, his apologists see him as a liberal reformer, a moderate who theorized about the development of a free-market society within the bounds of a stabilizing constitutional state. This centrist view has gained ascendancy since the end of the Second World War, enshrining Hegel within the liberal tradition. In this book, Renato Cristi argues that, like the Prussian liberal reformers of his time, Hegel was committed to expand the scope of a free economy and concurrently to ensure that the social practice of subjective freedom did not endanger political stability and order. Aware that a system of mutual advantage failed to integrate the members of civil society and that profound social disharmonies were ineradicable, Hegel adopted the views of the French liberal doctrinaires, who sought to realize the principles of the French Revolution by supporting Louis XVIII’s sovereign assertion of the monarchical principle. Not surprisingly, Hegel hailed the French Charte of June 1814 as a beacon of freedom. Endorsement of the monarchical principle was meant to prevent the atomized individuals of civil society from gaining control of the state through appeals to popular sovereignty. This challenges most conventional interpretations of Hegel’s theory of the state and draws it closer to the conservative-authoritarian end of the political spectrum than is usual.

This analysis explores the use of metaphors of monstrosity and death in the work in some of the most prominent political theorists. In particular, the crucial role of monster metaphors in the works of Hobbes, Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt is examined, as well as the role of these metaphors in various political systems, such as conservatism, Marxism, and fascism. The image of the vampire in Marx and its relation to his concept of dead labor and capital is also addressed along with a remarkable investigation of the contemporary construction of modern day social and political "monsters."

Offering a contemporary perspective on the theory of modernity that differentiates it from its predecessors, this reconstruction has been expanded to include a fourth instrumental aspect. In addition to the recognition of the three parts of traditional modernity―freedom, equality, and solidarity―that follow the basic ideas of the constitutional revolutions of the 18th century, this updated vision introduces responsibility. Concerning itself with what the sociology of development, risk, and ecological crisis have added to these classical ideas, the addition of the fourth part, responsibility, seeks to recognize the experiences of successive eras, and the 20th century in particular.

Ideology draws on the social, political and cultural theory of Jurgen Habermas, Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj Žižek in order to explore the possibility of developing a 'critical conception of ideology'. The book is concerned with two main themes: the relationship of ideology to the 'real' and the relationship between ideology and the 'ethical'. Although these three writers are often assumed to have little in common, Porter demonstrates a formal homology between them by showing that they all offer an idea of critique that pivots around two central intuitions. Firstly, they insist that a substantive critical distinction can be drawn between the ideological and the real. And, secondly, Habermas, Deleuze and Žižek all offer an image of ideology critique that is importantly grounded on ethical terms. By engaging, among other things, with Habermas' sociological work on the public sphere, Žižek’s forays into popular culture, and Deleuze's analysis of political cinema, Ideology strives to concretely animate how each of these figures provide the critical tools necessary to challenge the kinds of ideological practice that pervade the contemporary social world.

Political philosopher Richard Rorty’s influence on contemporary thought has increased in tandem with the controversy his outspoken views have provoked. His rejection of the grand, metaphysical questions of traditional philosophy has made him the most prominent living thinker in social and political theory. By declaring himself a pragmatist Rorty has attempted to shift the direction of modern philosophy toward the question of how to achieve a better, more humane, and more tolerant society. Redescription—a process through which we invent novel, attractive depictions of our current social situation as well as our future options—is the name that Rorty has given the means to achieve this goal. In Rorty’s Politics of Redescription, Gideon Calder scrutinizes Rorty’s writings in order to tease out their wider political and social implications, while also giving us an evaluation of Rorty’s entire body of work. Calder attempts to draw out inconsistencies in Rorty’s work by identifying where he has failed to escape the modern philosophical agenda that he opposes, and his astute appraisal will engross anyone interested in Rorty or philosophy’s impact on politics.

As recent controversies over satirical religious cartoons in Denmark and the wearing of traditional dress in France attest, multiculturalism is an increasingly contentious issue for contemporary democracies. The question of how to achieve a balance between a tolerant and open society and a just nation with a strong identity has become one of the most heated debates in the academic community—and a matter of immediate political urgency for many countries. Multiculturalism and the Law brings together some of the sharpest and most influential scholars of our time, including Jürgen Habermas and Thomas McCarthy, to explore the pacifying role that democratic lawmaking offers as a solution to the instability and divisiveness fostered by cultural diversity. Can the law promote equality, inclusion, and solidarity? The emerging consensus among many political philosophers that it can is debated here by a distinguished group of thinkers, and their contributions are essential reading for both policy makers and a wide range of scholars.

Groups in Conflict addresses the conflict and tensions that exist between impartiality and partiality in political philosophy, ordinary thought, and practice by setting theoretical arguments in the context of contemporary issues such as immigration and public policy. Donald Franklin asserts that two camps of ethicists—those concerned with political philosophy and those concerned with personal morality—have been ignoring the implications of inconsistency in their mutual approaches. Far more than just exposing these irreconcilable differences, Franklin also proposes the modifications necessary to approach the nature of human equality.

This book explores the work of John Gray, controversial and widely read contemporary philosopher. This comprehensive volume links a critique of Gray’s views on Marxism, humanism, and the Enlightenment—as well as his deep pessimism—with his position that attempts to tackle the core of issues like globalization and multiculturalism are hopelessly utopian. Challenging these and other assumptions in Gray’s work in a clear and accessible way, John Hoffman focuses his criticism on the philosopher’s traditionalist and problematic conception of utopia in the modern world.

This volume examines the relationship between aesthetics and politics at the forefront of the philosophies espoused by Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) and Pierre-Félix Guattari (1930–92), especially in their famous collaborative works Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Robert Porter analyzes the relationship between art and socio-political life, considering the ways the aesthetic and political draw from each other. Particular attention is paid to how Deleuze and Guattari, in their belief that political theory can take on aesthetic form and vice-versa, forced us to confront the fact that art always has the potential to become political, not in the least because of its ability to name and give shape to the order of our world, rather than its representation.

In current political debates, the term “cosmopolitanism” is often used in quite vague ways, as part of sweeping generalizations that might not hold up to closer scrutiny. Imperfect Cosmopolis aims to clarify the meaning of the term by approaching it from a decidedly historical perspective—distinguishing, for example, between types of cosmopolitanism and the development of the concept through the centuries.

This volume features thirteen all-new, cutting-edge essays that explore the relationship between politics and metaphysics in Kant and Kantian political philosophy. The contributors engage closely with contemporary theories that derive from Kant and ultimately revisit the question of the very role of metaphysics and moral and political philosophy.

Poverty violates fundamental human values through its impact on individuals and on human environments, and it goes against the core values of democratic societies. Drawing on numerous scientific studies as well as his own experience witnessing the systematic poverty in his home country of South Africa, H. P. P. \[Hennie\] Lötter presents a holistic profile of poverty and its effects on human lives all the while accounting for the complexity of each individual case. He argues that shared ethical values must guide the planning and distribution of aid and that our society must reevaluate our notions of justice and reimagine the role of the state in order to enable collective human responsibility for poverty’s successful eradication.

Kant on Sublimity and Morality provides an argument to the essential moral significance of the Kantian sublime and situates this argument within the history of the relationship between sublimity and morality.

Identity, Politics and the Novel is a diverse and wide-ranging book that offers an innovative and unique approach to several works by four critically acclaimed novelists: Milan Kundera, Ian McEwan, Michel Houellebecq, and J. M. Coetzee. Drawing from classical and contemporary political, philosophical, and social theory—including foundational texts by Adorno, Aquinas, Camus, Hegel, and Nietzsche—Ian Fraser tracks these novelists’ use of the aesthetic self and, in turn, develops the notion of a Marxist aesthetic identity through the medium of contemporary fiction.

The fourteen essays in this volume, by leading scholars in the field, explore the relationship between teleology and politics in Kant’s corpus. Among the topics discussed are Kant’s normative political theory and legal philosophy; his cosmopolitanism and views on international relations; his theory of history; his theory of natural teleology; and the broader relationship between morality, history, nature, and politics. Politics and Teleology in Kant will be of interest to a wide audience, including Kant scholars; scholars and students working in moral and political philosophy, the philosophy of history, and political theory and political science; legal scholars; and international relations theorists.