With his writings on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, ideology, and religion, Paul Ricoeur has single-handedly redefined and revitalized the hermeneutic tradition. From Text to Action is an essential companion to the now classic The Conflict of Interpretations. Here, Ricoeur continues and extends his project of constructing a general theory of interpretation, positioning his work in relation to its own philosophical background: Hegel, Husserl, Gadamer, and Weber. He also responds to contemporary figures like K.O. Apel and Jürgen Habermas, connecting his own theorization of ideology to their version of ideology critique.

This is the first collection to bring together leading scholars from diverse disciplines to offer a variety of perspectives on ideology and its analysis, emphasizing the input of different intellectual and scholarly traditions to the meaning of ideology. The articles explore commonalities in the use and understanding of ideology as well as delineating constructive differences in its interpretation, while illuminating the changes that the concept of ideology, as well as the practices it signifies, has undergone in recent years. Contributions are included from the fields of political theory, history, literature, political science, cultural studies, post-Marxism, discourse analysis, language studies, law, and sociology. The Meaning of Ideology advances our understanding of the intricacy and relevance of ideology, and offers the latest theories and insights that currently inform scholarship on the subject. Ideology emerges through the pages of this collection more strongly than ever as a major tool of understanding political language and as a durable and normal phenomenon that is inherent in the many ways we conceive the world around us. This book was previously published as a special issue of The Journal of Political Ideologies and will be of interest to students of political ideologies and political and social theory.

A natural heir of the Renaissance and once tightly conjoined to its study, continental philosophy broke from Renaissance studies around the time of World War II. In The Other Renaissance, Rocco Rubini achieves what many have attempted to do since: bring them back together. Telling the story of modern Italian philosophy through the lens of Renaissance scholarship, he recovers a strand of philosophic history that sought to reactivate the humanist ideals of the Renaissance, even as philosophy elsewhere progressed toward decidedly antihumanist sentiments. Bookended by Giambattista Vico and Antonio Gramsci, this strand of Renaissance-influenced philosophy rose in reaction to the major revolutions of the time in Italy, such as national unity, fascism, and democracy. Exploring the ways its thinkers critically assimilated the thought of their northern counterparts, Rubini uncovers new possibilities in our intellectual history: that antihumanism could have been forestalled, and that our postmodern condition could have been entirely different. In doing so, he offers an important new way of thinking about the origins of modernity, one that renews a trust in human dignity and the Western legacy as a whole.

This book is about the ways that ordinary people in town and country creatively define themselves, their families and their social networks. It explores inheritance strategies, personal possessions, attitudes to commemoration after death, the daily fashioning of identity and the interactions between imagination and daily life.

Hermeneutics has frequently been dismissed as useful only for literary and textual analysis. Some consider it to be Eurocentric or inherently relativistic and thus unsuited to social critique. Lorenzo C. Simpson offers a persuasive and powerful argument that hermeneutics is a valuable tool not only for critical theory but also for robustly addressing many of the urgent issues of today. Simpson demonstrates that hermeneutics exhibits significant interpretive advantages compared to competing explanatory modalities. While it shares with pragmatism a suspicion of essentialism, an understanding that disagreements are situated, and an insistence on the dialogical nature of understanding, it nevertheless resolutely rejects the relativistic accounts of rationality that are often associated with pragmatism. In the tradition of Gadamer, Simpson firmly establishes hermeneutics as a resource for both philosophy and the social sciences. He shows its utility for unpacking intractable issues in the philosophy of science, multiculturalism, social epistemology, and racial and social justice in the global arena. Simpson addresses fraught questions such as why recent claims that “race” has a biological basis lack grounding, whether female genital excision can be critically addressed without invidious ethnocentrism, and how to lay the foundations for meaningful cross-cultural dialogue and reparative justice. This book reveals how hermeneutics can be a worthy partner with critical theory in achieving emancipatory aims.