Using the historical-materialist method to unravel the promise and limits of critical practice since the Revolutionary Age, John E. O’Brien investigates the problems and prospects of cultural criticism for the 21st century through absorbing studies of the contested perspectives of Voltaire, Friedrich Schiller, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Terry Eagleton and Hayden White. In spite of recurrent crises due to a flawed Western political-economy, why is there so much critical intellectual activity with so little effect? Framing his study with the early work by Max Horkheimer, Luc Boltanski and Teresa Ebert, O’Brien's investigation of resistance in America and Europe challenges the bourgeois philosophy of history, pointing to the urgency of critique as mode of analysis and intervention.

This book analyses the discourses of Orthodox Christianity in Western Europe to demonstrate the emerging discrepancies between the mother Church in the East and its newer Western congregations. Showing the genesis and development of these discourses over the twentieth century, it examines the challenges the Orthodox Church is facing in the modern world. Organised along four different discursive fields, the book uses these fields to analyse the Orthodox Church in Western Europe during the twentieth century. It explores pastoral, ecclesiological, institutional and ecumenical discourses in order to present a holistic view of how the Church views itself and how it seeks to interact with other denominations. Taken together, these four fields reveal a discursive vitality outside of the traditionally Orthodox societies that is, however, only partly reabsorbed by the church hierarchs in core Orthodox regions, like Southeast Europe and Russia. The Orthodox Church is a complex and multi-faceted global reality.Therefore, this book will be a vital guide to scholars studying the Orthodox Church, ecumenism and religion in Europe, as well as those working in religious studies, sociology of religion, and theology more generally.

This book explores how ‘balkanization’ as a discourse underpins the policies of the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) toward the Western Balkans. It shows how EU and NATO policies have emerged from, and led to, the constant reinvention of the unity of the West through ‘balkanizing’ the region and illustrates how this dynamic is maintained by and instrumentalized for the political elites. Through a genealogical analysis that stretches from the Balkans Wars to more recent events such as North Macedonia’s change of name in 2018, the author shows how Western policies have aimed at recreating the united West on the back of the ‘broken’ Balkans. The book will appeal to scholars and students of Southeast Europe, International Relations, Political Science, Peace and Conflict Studies and History.

What is the relationship between theory and practice in the creative arts today? In this book, Martin McQuillan offers a critical interrogation of the idea of practice-led research. He goes beyond the recent vocabulary of research management to consider the more interesting question of the emergence of a cultural space in which philosophy, theory, history and practice are becoming indistinguishable. McQuillan considers the work of a number of writers and thinkers whose work crosses the divide between theoretical (academic) and creative practice, including Alain Badiou and Terry Eagleton, and the longer tradition of 'theory-writing' that runs through the work of H.