In this contribution to contemporary political philosophy, Jensen aims to develop a model of civil society for deliberative democracy. In the course of developing the model, he also provides a thorough account of the meaning and use of "civil society" in contemporary scholarship as well as a critical review of rival models, including those found in the work of scholars such as John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, Michael Walzer, Benjamin Barber, and Nancy Rosenblum. Jensen's own ideal treats civil society as both the context in which citizens live out their comprehensive views of the good life as well as the context in which citizens learn to be good deliberative democrats. According to his idealization, groups of citizens in civil society are actively engaged in a grand conversation about the nature of the good life. Their commitment to this conversation grounds dispositions of epistemic humility, tolerance, curiosity, and moderation. Moreover, their regard for the grand conversation explains their interest in deliberative democracy and their regard for democratic virtues, principles, and practices. Jensen is not a naive utopian, however; he argues that this ideal must be realized in stages, that it faces a variety of barriers, and that it cannot be realized without luck.

Edward Said was an exiled individual – the 'out of place' Palestinian in the USA. He saw the consequences of the 1948 dismantling of Palestine and the establishment of Israel through his parents' experiences and through the collective statelessness imposed on the Palestinians. His own personal experience of exile intensified when he moved to the USA. Yet despite the significance of exile to Said's lifeand work, no scholarship has yet focused on this theme in his writings or traced its ongoing applicability and importance. Rehnuma Sazzad fulfils this pressing need in literary and cultural research by providing the first comprehensive definition of Said's theory of exile and reveals its legacy in relation to five Middle Eastern intellectuals: Naguib Mahfouz, Mahmoud Darwish, Leila Ahmed, Nawal El Saadawi and Youssef Chahine. By selecting a novelist, poet, feminist, filmmaker and essayist, Sazzad shows how, for Said, the ideal intellectual is a metaphorical exile, demonstrating a willing homelessness. This book creates a portrait of redoubtable intellectual practice and in the twenty-first-century context, when the frontiers of belonging are being constantly redrawn, Edward Said's Concept of Exile adds new depths to discourses of resistance, home and identity.

Intended for scholars in the fields of political theory, and the history of political thought, this two-volume examines David Hume's Political Thought (1711-1776) and that of his contemporaries, including Smith, Blackstone, Burke and Robertson. This book is unified by its temporal focus on the middle and later decades of the eighteenth century and hence on what is usually taken to be the core period of the Enlightenment, a somewhat problematic term. Covering topics such as property, contract and resistance theory, religious establishments, the law of nations, the balance of power, demography, and the role of unintended consequences in social life, Frederick G. Whelan convincingly conveys the diversity--and creativity--of the intellectual engagements of even a limited set of Enlightenment thinkers in contrast to dismissive attitudes, in some quarters, toward the Enlightenment and its supposed unitary project. Political Thought of Hume and his Contemporaries: Enlightenment Projects Vol. 1 contains six in-depth studies of issues in eighteenth-century political thought, with an emphasis on topics in normative theory such as property rights, the social contract, resistance to oppressive government, and religious liberty. The central figure is David Hume, with substantial attention to Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and others in the period. The introduction situates the studies in the Enlightenment and considers interpretations of that movement.

What are reason and rationality? How significant are recent postmodernist and neuroscientific challenges to these longheld notions? Should we abandon a belief in reason and an adherence to rationality? Or can reason and rationality be reformulated and reframed? And what does politics have to do with how we think about reason and why we act more or less rationally? The Politics of Rationality differs from other books with "reason" or “rationality” due to its historical, political, depth-psychological, and multidisciplinary approach to understanding reason through history. Charles P. Webel eloquently clarifies the links among ideas, their creators, the relevant mental processes, and the political cultures within which such important concepts as reasons and rationality take hold. He demonstrates how reason and rationality/irrationality have become what they mean for us today and proposes a way to rethink reason and rationality in light of the withering critiques leveled against them. In doing so, he presents a "history of reason and rationality" by examining the intellectual and political contexts of four representative theorists of reason and rationality-- Plato, Machiavelli, Kant, and Weber—and by addressing contemporary challenges posed by postmodernism, depth psychology, and neurophilosophy.

This book focuses on a reading of Frantz Fanon’s work and life, asking how the work of a revolutionary writer such as Fanon might be best appropriated for contemporary political and cultural issues. Separate chapters introduce Fanon’s life and examine the question of Fanon as our contemporary; review the field of “Fanon studies” that has grown up around his work; bring Fanon into conversation with the critical contemporary figures Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Jamaica Kincaid, and Paul Gilroy; and turn to Fanon’s work to think through the contemporary popular uprisings that have come to be known as the “Arab Spring.” The book concludes by arguing that a reevaluation of Fanon’s life and work can provide us with a particular set of lessons about solidarity—lessons that are crucial for the contemporary political struggles that face us today and that will continue to confront us in the future. Finding Something Different: Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics is inspired by Fanon’s unsparing struggle against the depredations of racism and colonialism, and his lifelong commitment to finding something different.

Understanding Barthes, Understanding Modernism is a general assessment of the modern literary and philosophical contributions of Roland Barthes. The first part of the volume focuses on work published prior to Barthes's death in 1980 covering the major periods of his development from Writing Degree Zero (1953) to Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980). The second part focuses both on the posthumously published material and the legacies of his work after his death in 1980. This later work has attracted attention, for example, in conjunction with notions of the neutral, gay writing, and critiques of everyday life. The third part is devoted to some of the critical vocabulary of Barthes in both the work he published during his lifetime, and that which was published posthumously.

In this book, Jeffrey Bercuson presents the immense, and yet for the most part unrecognized, influences of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel on John Rawls, the most important political philosopher of the 20th century. While the well-documented influence of Immanuel Kant on Rawls is deep and profound, Kantian features and interpretation of justice as fairness do not tell the whole story about that doctrine. Drawing on Rawls’s Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy and his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, Bercuson presents the reader with a more nuanced, accurate account of the moral and political philosophy of Rawls in light of these under-appreciated influences. This new, richer image of Rawls’s political philosophy shows that Rawls’s notion of reasonableness – his notion of the kind and extent of our obligations to those fellows with whom we are engaged in social cooperation – is conspicuously more demanding, and therefore more attractive, than most interpreters and critics assume. Rawls turns to Rousseau and to Hegel, both of whom provide attractive images of engaged citizenship worthy of emulation. Written accessibly, and contributing to key contemporary debates of global justice, this book will be read by scholars within the fields of social and political theory, ethics, and philosophy.

What are the psychological factors in operation when we form groups or crowds, and how are these affected by socio-historical circumstances? History offers endless examples of different forms of human collectivity, both private and public, small-scale and large: from the primal horde to the modern nuclear family, from the Athenian polis to virtual internet communities. Within the context of shifting social bonds in global culture, this book brings together debates on the left from political philosophy, psychoanalysis, social psychology and media and cultural studies to explore the logic of the formation of collective identities from a new theoretical perspective. Challenging liberal-capitalist models of individualism, as well as postmodern identity politics, analysts here turn to Continental philosophy (Lacan, Derrida, Agamben, Laclau, Badiou, among others) in order to re-think collectivity in relation to questions of agency, alterity, affect, sovereignty, the national imaginary and the biopolitical. In the aftermath of the great mass movements of the twentieth century (Marxist-Leninism, Mao), which resulted in bureaucratic submission and the cult of the State, the fate of our collective identity today raises urgent questions about the future of collaborative activity, the role of mediating institutions in shaping mass psychology, what is at stake in a radical democracy, and what happens in a crowd.