Political Creativity intervenes in the lively debate currently underway in the social sciences on institutional change. Editors Gerald Berk, Dennis C. Galvan, and Victoria Hattam, along with the contributors to the volume, show how institutions inevitably combine order and change, because formal rules and roles are always available for reconfiguration. Creative action is not the exception but the very process through which all political formations are built, promulgated and changed. Drawing on the rich cache of antidualist theoretical traditions, from poststructuralism and ecological theory to constructivism and pragmatism, a diverse group of scholars probes acts of social innovation in many locations: land boards in Botswana, Russian labor relations, international statistics, global supply chains, Islamic economics in Algeria, Islamic sects and state authority in Senegal, and civil rights reform, colonization, industrial policy, and political consulting in the United States. These political scientists reconceptualize agency as a relational process that continually reorders the nature and meaning of people and things, order as an assemblage that necessitates creative tinkering and interpretation, and change as the unruly politics of time that confounds the conventional ordering of past, present, and future. Political Creativity offers analytical tools for reimagining order and change as entangled processes. Contributors: Stephen Amberg, Chris Ansell, Gerald Berk, Kevin Bruyneel, Dennis C. Galvan, Deborah Harrold, Victoria Hattam, Yoshiko M. Herrera, Gary Herrigel, Joseph Lowndes, Ato Kwamena Onoma, Adam Sheingate, Rudra Sil, Ulrich Voskamp, Volker Wittke.

For several decades, Antonio Gramsci has been one of the most studied and discussed political theorists; however, his originality as a political thinker has not yet been fully understood. In this incisive book, Sakari Hänninen explores Gramsci’s political theory of transformation and posits that he was altogether too creative a thinker to be simply categorized as an adherent of a certain school of thought or tradition.

This book explores the politics of artistic creativity, examining how black artists in Africa and the diaspora create art as a procedure of self-making. Essays cross continents to uncover the efflorescence of black culture in national and global contexts and in literature, film, performance, music, and visual art. Contributors place the concerns of black artists and their works within national and transnational conversations on anti-black racism, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, migration, resettlement, resistance, and transnational feminisms. Does art by the subaltern fulfill the liberatory potential that critics have ascribed to it? What other possibilities does political art offer? Together, these essays sort through the aesthetics of daily life to build a thesis that reflects the desire of black artists and cultures to remake themselves and their world.

Most scholars link the origin of politics to the formation of human societies, but in this innovative work, Tilo Schabert takes it even further back: to our very births. Drawing on mythical, philosophical, religious, and political thought from around the globe—including America, Europe, the Middle East, and China—The Second Birth proposes a transhistorical and transcultural theory of politics rooted in political cosmology. With impressive erudition, Schabert explores the physical fundamentals of political life, unveiling a profound new insight: our bodies actually teach us politics. Schabert traces different figurations of power inherent to our singular existence, things such as numbers, time, thought, and desire, showing how they render our lives political ones—and, thus, how politics exists in us individually, long before it plays a role in the establishment of societies and institutions. Through these figurations of power, Schabert argues, we learn how to institute our own government within the political forces that already surround us—to create our own world within the one into which we have been born. In a stunning vision of human agency, this book ultimately sketches a political cosmos in which we are all builders, in which we can be at once political and free.

No detailed description available for "Writings in the Social Philosophy and Ethics / Sozialphilosophische und ethische Schriften".

Mark Berry explores the political and religious ideas expounded in Wagner's Ring through close attention to the text and drama, the multifarious intellectual influences upon the composer during the work's lengthy gestation and composition, and the wealth of Wagner source material. Many of his writings are explicitly political in their concerns, for Wagner was emphatically not a revolutionary solely for the sake of art. Yet it would be misleading to see even the most 'political' tracts as somehow divorced from the aesthetic realm; Wagner's radical challenge to liberal-democratic politics makes no such distinction. This book considers Wagner's treatment of various worlds: nature, politics, economics, and metaphysics, in order to explain just how radical that challenge is. Classical interpretations have tended to opt either for an 'optimistic' view of the Ring, centred upon the influence of Young Hegelian thought - in particular the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach - and Wagner's concomitant revolutionary politics, or for the 'pessimistic' option, removing the disillusioned Wagner-in-Swiss-exile from the political sphere and stressing the undoubtedly important role of Arthur Schopenhauer. Such an 'either-or' approach seriously misrepresents not only Wagner's compositional method but also his intellectual method. It also sidelines inconvenient aspects of the dramas that fail to 'fit' whichever interpretation is selected. Wagner's tendency is not progressively to recant previous 'errors' in his oeuvre. Radical ideas are not completely replaced by a Schopenhauerian world-view, however loudly the composer might come to trumpet his apparent 'conversion'. Nor is Wagner's truly an Hegelian method, although Hegelian dialectic plays an important role. In fact, Wagner is in many ways not really a systematic thinker at all (which is not to portray him as self-consciously unsystematic in a Nietzschean, let alone 'post-modernist' fashion). His tendency, rather, is agglomerative,

This book presents the creative industries as a suite of practices intimately connected to political, economic, and cultural power. Seeking to illuminate the creative industries through critical cultural analysis it shows the extent to which creative labour shapes our shared cultural and political realities, good and bad. The author presents creative labour as a form of employment which typically operates well outside conventional industrial relationships, highlighting the importance of cultural as well as political and economic value. The aim of doing so is to provide a view of the broader creative economy that shows up the effects and trends of its strange industrial relationships. It recognises new forms of audience labour as significant creative, political, cultural, and commercial forces, and frames cultures as preceptual systems, as systems of rules, conventions, morés, and laws. In so doing, the author provides a new cultural framework through which scholars, students, and reflective practitioners can make critical judgements about the creative economy and its creative acts.

This book will appeal to researchers and scholars interested in entrepreneurship and creativity issues, coming from a wide range of academic disciplines. These readers will find an up-to-date presentation of existing and new directions for research in

Politics in Europe, Seventh Edition introduces students to the power of the European Union as well as seven political systems—the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Russia, Poland—within a common analytical framework that enables students to conduct both single-case and cross-national analysis. Each case addresses the most relevant questions of comparative political analysis: who governs, on behalf of what values, with the collaboration of what groups, in the face of what kind of opposition, and with what socioeconomic and political consequences? Packed with captivating photos and robust country descriptions from regional specialists, the Seventh Edition enables students to think critically about these questions and make meaningful cross-national comparisons.