An exciting reinterpretation of Social Darwinism, questioning conventional assumptions and proffering an alternative reading of a discourse of 'peace biology'.

An analysis of the ideological influence of Social Darwinists in Europe and America.

"An extensively-researched novel about the role of science in modern life, set against the backdrop of the 1925 Scopes Trial"--

Accounts of the 'historical avant-garde' and of 'high modernism' often celebrate the former for its revolutionary aesthetics or denigrate the latter for its 'proto-fascist' politics. In Literature, Politics and the English Avant-Garde, Paul Peppis shows how neither interpretation explains the writings of avant-gardists in early twentieth-century England. Peppis reads texts by writers such as Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Dora Marsden, and Ezra Pound alongside English political discourse between the death of Victoria and the end of the Great War. He traces the impact of nation and empire on the avant-garde, arguing that Vorticism, England's foremost avant-garde movement, used nationalism to advance literature and avant-garde literature to advance empire. Peppis's study demonstrates that these ambitions were enabled by a period conception of nationality as an essence and construct. By recovering these neglected aspects of avant-garde politics, Peppis's book opens important avenues for assessing modernist politics after the war.

An innovative study of the pre-history of the League of Nations, tracing the pro-League movement's unexpected development.

Charles Darwin and the Church of William Wordsworth is a study of the cultural connections between two of the nineteenth century's most influential figures, Charles Darwin and William Wordsworth. When Darwin published On the Origin of Species, his reading public's affective response to the natural world had already been profoundly influenced by William Wordsworth. Wordsworth presented nature as benign, harmonious, a source of moral inspiration and spiritual blessing, and a medium through which one might enter into communion with the Divine. Long after his death, he continued to be revered throughout the English-speaking world, not only as a great poet, but as a theologian with a broader following than any prelate and an appeal that transcended or ignored sectarian differences. For believers and skeptics alike, Wordsworth's poetry offered a readily accessible and intellectually respectable counterweight to Darwin's vision of a material universe evolving by fixed laws in which Divinity played no discernible role and where concepts like beauty and harmony were material conditions to be explained in scientific terms. Wordsworth's theology of nature became for many readers a more effective counterforce to Darwin's ideas than Biblical orthodoxy, but it also provided an enriching context for the reception of evolutionary theory, aiding theists in their effort to reach an accommodation with the new science. As the nineteenth century's two most prominent theoreticians of nature's life, Wordsworth and Darwin competed for attention among those seeking to understand humanity's relationship with the natural world, and their disciples engaged in a productive, mutually transformative dialogue in which the poet's cultural authority influenced the way Darwin was received, and Darwinian science adjusted interpretation and evaluation of the poetry. Charles Darwin and the Church of William Wordsworth explores the broad cultural relationship between Wordsworth, Darwin, and their disciples, contextualizing them within wider discussions about the relationship between religion and science in the nineteenth century.

This concise Companion offers an innovative approach tounderstanding the Modernist literary mind in Britain, focusing onthe intellectual and cultural contexts, which shaped it. Offers an innovative approach to understanding the Modernistliterary mind in Britain. Helps readers to grasp the intellectual and cultural contextsof literary Modernism. Organised around contemporary ideas such as Freudianism andeugenics rather than literary genres. Relates literary Modernism to the overarching issues of theperiod, such as feminism, imperialism and war.

A comparative exploration of Western and Chinese understandings of justice and their possible use to reframe Sino-American relations and international governance. The concept of justice is central to politics: it justifies the ordering of society and the distribution of rewards. In Justice and International Order, Richard Ned Lebow and Feng Zhang compare and contrast Western and Chinese conceptions of justice. They argue that justice can almost invariably be reduced to the principles of fairness and equality, although they are developed and expressed differently in the two cultures. Lebow and Zhang show that there has been a noticeable shift in both in favoring equality over fairness in the modern era. They analyze the growing conflict between China and the West in the light of these conceptions of justice and show how they might be deployed to ameliorate it. The authors also offer a critique of what passes for global order and explore ways in which fairness and equality, and trade-offs between them, offer pathways to better and more peaceful worlds.

This volume offers an accessible and wide-ranging introduction to the history of international political thought. Taking as its starting-point the various concepts people have used to think about differences between political communities, the book explores changing perceptions of international politics from antiquity to the twentieth century. As well as discussing well-known themes such as relations between independent sovereign states and the tension between raison d'état and a universal code of natural law, it also examines less familiar ideas which have influenced the development of international political thought such as the distinction between civilization, national culture and barbarism, religious attitudes towards infidels, and theories about racial difference and imperialism. Among the key thinkers covered are Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Kant, Marx and Morgenthau, alongside less commonly studied figures such as Herodotus, Pope Innocent IV, Herder, Constant and Zimmern. Each chapter concludes with a guide to further reading which will help students to develop a more detailed understanding of the subject. Written with the beginner student in mind, this lively textbook is an ideal introduction for anyone studying international political thought.

outside the continent. --Book Jacket.