Political

Population ethics challenges moral theories we previously considered compelling and throws into relief the practical problems--including those relating to climate change and procreative privacy--moral agents all face. Population ethics has thus emerged...

Civil libertarians characterize prostitution as a "victimless crime," and argue that it ought to be legalized. Feminist critics counter that prostitution is not victimless, since it harms the people who do it. Civil libertarians respond that most women...

A major question for liberal politics and liberal political theory concerns the proper scope of government. Liberalism has always favored limited government, but there has been wide-ranging dispute among liberals about just how extensive the scope of...

Judges sometimes hear cases in which the law, as they honestly understand it, requires results that they consider morally objectionable. Most people assume that, nevertheless, judges have an ethical obligation to apply the law correctly, at least in...

At a time of growing concern over the fate of contemporary democracy this book shows how vast differences between countries in forms of political conduct, and taken for granted assumptions, determine what democracies actually accomplish. In Democratic...

Based on the work of George Herbert Mead, Han Joas, and Axel Honneth, as well as the author’s own personal and academic identities and journeys, Self, Identity, and Collective Action argues that the self and action are strictly related. Reading these...

We make our life with things, surrounded by technical artefacts and technologies. They are fundamental in the way we see and act, but only sometimes we are plenty aware of this. Where do these things come from? How were they produced? How do they define...

Leo Strauss famously asserted that the fundamental, defining debate within Western civilization is that between Jerusalem and Athens, piety and philosophy, the Bible and Plato. And yet, surprisingly, Strauss never published any of his thoughts on Plato's...

Scholars in diverse fields now agree on the importance of investigating the impact of consumption practices on the global environment, quality of life, and international justice. In this comprehensive collection of essays, most of which appear for the...

Is government justified? This perennial question is central to political philosophy and has never been more alive than at the present time, in the midst of continuing political and social upheaval worldwide. This collection of new essays by thirteen...

Critics have claimed that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a primitivist uncritically preoccupied with "noble savages" and that he remained oblivious to the African slave trade. Fugitive Rousseau presents the emancipatory possibilities of Rousseau's thought and...

Antiblack racism avows reason is white while emotion, and thus supposedly unreason, is black. Challenging academic adherence to this notion, Lewis R. Gordon offers a portrait of Martinican-turned-Algerian revolutionary psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz...

Is freedom our most essential belonging, the intimate source of self-mastery, an inalienable right? Or is it something foreign, an other that constitutes subjectivity, a challenge to our notion of autonomy? To Basterra, the subjectivity we call free...

From prehistoric stone tools, to machines, to computers, things have traveled a long road along with human beings. Changing with the times, places, and methods of their production, emerging from diverse histories, and enveloped in multiple layers of...

Tocqueville suggested that "the people reign in the American political world like God over the universe." This intuition anticipates the crisis in the secularization paradigm that has brought theology back as a fundamental part of sociological...

The initial provocation for The Truth of Democracy was the fortieth anniversary of May '68 and the recent criticism (some by French President Nicolas Sarkozy himself) leveled against the ideals and actors at the center of this important but still...

This book offers a comprehensive evaluation of the two preeminent post-WWII political philosophers, John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas. Both men question how we can be free and autonomous under coercive law and how we might collectively use our reason to...

We can no longer speak of a state of war in any traditional sense, yet there is currently no viable theory to account for the manifold internal conflicts, or civil wars, that increasingly afflict the world's populations. Meant as a first step toward such...

This book brings a new perspective-mainly out of German intellectual discussions rooted in Hegel-to bear on the problems of equality as discussed in Anglo-American conceptions of liberalism. Menke argues that the idea of equality is at the heart of...

Giorgio Agamben is a philosopher well known for his brilliance and erudition, as well as for the difficulty and diversity of his seventeen books. The interest which his Homo Sacer sparked in America is likely to continue to grow for a great many years to...

This book investigates the influence of Epicurean physics on the argument developed in Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy. Towards this end, the full philosophical history and origins of atomist philosophy are investigated during the first three chapters...

John Stuart Mill is one of the hallowed figures of the liberal tradition, revered for his defense of liberal principles and expansive personal liberty. By examining Mill's arguments in On Liberty in light of his other writings, however, Joseph Hamburger...

Men and Nations is the fruit of one man's extended effort to solve the philosophical problems that underlie the practical dilemmas of human society. This undertaking began when, as an adviser in the U.S. State Department, Mr. Halle found himself groping...

When social reformers blame the current ills of Western culture on the loss of community, they often evoke an ideal past in which societies were characterized by shared values, respect for tradition, commitment to the common good, and similar attributes...

To scholars of Western intellectual history Hegel is one of the most important of all political thinkers, but politicians and other "down-to-earth" persons see his speculative philosophy as far removed from their immediate concerns. Put off by...

The past fifteen years in France have seen a remarkable flourishing of new work in political philosophy. This anthology brings into English for the first time essays by some of the best young French political thinkers writing today, including Marcel...

Fred Greenstein, an acknowledged authority in this field, lays out conceptual and methodological standards for carrying out personality-and politics inquiries, ranging from psychological case studies of single actors, through multi-case analyses of types...

This book completes A. John Simmons's exploration and development of Lockean moral and political philosophy, a project begun in The Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton paperback edition, 1994). Here Simmons discusses the Lockean view of the nature of,...

This book confronts one of the central questions of political science: how people choose to accept or not to accept particular governments. In contrast to the prevailing view that citizens' decisions about the legitimacy of their governments are strongly...

Tracing the development of French political thought in the seventeenth century, Nannerl Keohane explores a quite different emphasis on the indivisibility of sovereignty and the expression of interests rather than rights. Originally published in 1980. ...

After Sept. 11, 2001, George W. Bush declared, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." Bush's assertion was not simply jingoist bravado-it encapsulates the civilizationalist moralism that has motivated and defined the United States...

Martin Heidegger's ties to Nazism have tarnished his stature as one of the towering figures of twentieth-century philosophy. The publication of the Black Notebooks in 2014, which revealed the full extent of Heidegger's anti-Semitism and enduring sympathy...

Since 9/11, citizens of all nations have been searching for a democratic public philosophy that provides practical and inspiring answers to the problems of the twenty-first century. Drawing on the wisdom of past and present pragmatist thinkers, Judith M...

Democracy Past and Future is the first English-language collection of Pierre Rosanvallon's most important essays on the historical origins, contemporary difficulties, and future prospects of democratic life. One of Europe's leading political thinkers,...

Human rights are one of the most controversial and widely discussed ideas in contemporary politics, ethics, and law. In recent decades, the philosophy of human rights has become one of the most lively areas in philosophy. One of the most significant...

Killing civilians is worse than killing soldiers. If any moral principle commands near universal assent, this one does. It is written into every major historical and religious tradition that has addressed armed conflict. It is uncompromisingly inscribed...

This is the third volume of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. Since its revival in the 1970s political philosophy has been a vibrant field in philosophy, one that intersects with jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political...

This volume collects some of the leading essays in contemporary democratic theory published in the past thirty years. The anthology presents the work of a select group of contributors (including Peter Singer, Joshua Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Richard...

On October 11, 2018, Encounter Books celebrated its twentieth anniversary at an evening gala honoring Rebekah Mercer and Sir Roger Scruton at the Andrew Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C. Rebekah Mercer, who was introduced by the historian Victor...

The Habits of Racism examines some of the complex questions raised by the phenomenon and experience of racism. Helen Ngo draws on the resources of Merleau-Ponty to show how the conceptual reworking of habit as bodily orientation helps to identify the...