In this paper, I argue for two claims. The first is that all social and political thinking lies along a continuum and that the structure of each thought along the continuum is that of a basic desire for self-determination. Self-determination, I argued, occurs in a variety of ways including, importantly, at a variety of levels of intention. On the one hand, there are the relatively unreflective ways of understanding oneself as autonomous. I attributed this way of thinking of the Neo-Aristotelian (...) conception of practical reason which is characteristic of conservatism. On the other side of the continuum, there is a rigoristic version of Kantian moral philosophy in which, to be autonomous, one must act exclusively from duty or from purely economic motivation. The second claims is that populism can be understood as a clash between different practical conceptions of autonomy which are brought into conflict as a result of the process of modern rationalization. This clash can, I argued, be clarified and also alleviated by appreciating that what the values which stand opposed in the “us vs. them” of populism and liberalism are based on a fundamentally similar conception of the value of autonomy but have come into conflict by sometime contingent historical processes which can be undone or steered in a different direction. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 28, Issue 4, Page 522-536, December 2021.

Spanish translation of Field, S. L. (2012). 'Democracy and the multitude: Spinoza against Negri'. Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, 59(131), 21-40. Translated by María Cecilia Padilla and Gonzalo Ricci Cernadas. Negri celebra una concepción de la democracia en la que los poderes concretos de los individuos humanos no se alienan sino que se agregan: una democracia de la multitud. Pero ¿cómo puede actuar la multitud sin alienar el poder de nadie? Para contestar esta dificultad, Negri explícitamente apela (...) a Spinoza. Sin embargo, en este trabajo, sostengo que la filosofía de Spinoza no respalda el proyecto de Negri. Por el contrario, argumento que la multitud spinozista evita la jerarquía interna por medio de la mediación de las instituciones políticas y no a pesar de ellas; de la misma manera, estas instituciones tampoco simplemente emanan de la multitud tal cual es, sino que estructuran, contienen y canalizan sus pasiones. En particular, las instituciones requeridas no son las de la democracia simple y directa. Puede ser que existan otros argumentos no spinozistas en los cuales Negri pueda basar su teoría, pero no puede defender legítimamente su concepción de la multitud democrática apelando a Spinoza. (shrink)

Current radical democratic politics is characterized by new participatory spaces for citizens’ engagement, which aim at facilitating the democratic ideals of freedom and equality. These spaces are, however, situated in the context of deep societal inequalities. Modes of discrimination are carried over into participatory interaction. The democratic subject is judged by its physically embodied appearance, which replicates external hierarchies and impedes the freedom of self-expression. To tackle this problem, this article seeks to identify ways to increase the freedom of the (...) subject to explore its multiple self. Understanding the self as inherently fugitive, the article investigates participatory, deliberative and agonistic concepts of self-transformation. As all of them appear limited, it introduces a transformative perspective in democratic thought. Enriching the transformative perspective with queer and gender theory, the article generates the concept of a politics of becoming, which, through radical democratic practices of disidentification, advances the freedom of the subject to change. (shrink)

Ethics is enabling of agency, but also normative and conventional. At the moment a gendered ethics, or the gendering of ethics, is a helpful approach because it is concerned with issues to do with people often peripheral to and excluded from power. At the moment it can work to keep ethics responsive, but how do we halt the drift into the normative, both as prescriptive and as ideological? A feminist ethics maintains the responsive and undermines prescriptive categories, and is committed (...) to involving disempowered voices in the conversation. The article is particularly concerned with the articulation of the situated, and raises questions about attending to, learning how to listen to and learning how to speak, so that many people from different places can get involved in ethics. Otherwise ethics isn’t ethical. (shrink)

Recent studies of peacebuilding highlight the importance of attending to people’s local experiences of conflict and cooperation. This trend, however, raises the fundamental questions of how the local is and should be constituted and what the relationship is between institutions and individual actors of peace at the local level of politics. I turn to Hannah Arendt’s thoughts to address these issues. Arendt’s thinking provides a distinctive form of realism that calls for stable institutions but never depletes the spirit of resistance. (...) Peacebuilding guided by this insight seeks to enable parties in conflict to voice their competing opinions by acting agonistically in public and to help them align their disruptive yet creative voices with a desire to establish and sustain common institutions. Thus, Arendt’s thinking not only offers a way to increase sensitivity to local differences but also to provide direction to the politics of resistance. In the end, it offers a balanced insight into peacebuilding and local agency beyond the contemporary liberal and critical approaches to peace. (shrink)

Sheldon S. Wolin’s ‘fugitive democracy’ is arguably his most provocative contribution to political theory. Breaking with the understanding of democracy as a constitutional form whose origins he locates in the work of Aristotle, Wolin claims democracy is better understood not as a constitution, but as a ‘rebellious moment,’ making democracy dependent on cultural rather than institutional characteristics. This formulation poses a problem for democracy as a political phenomenon, as political power today tends to be concentrated within institutions. Without institutional expression, (...) democracy is alienated from political power and hence a contradiction in terms. I reconstruct an understanding of Wolin’s fugitive democracy that can avoid such problems, while also being adequate to the current political juncture. I argue that Aristotle’s conception of the practice of justice, read through the lens of Wolin’s ‘fugitive democracy,’ becomes ‘fugitive justice,’ the cultivation of a democratic ethos that might support and sustain fortuitous democratic moments, connecting democratic culture to political institutions. In this way, Aristotle’s work is split: not simply the founder of constitutionalism, through ‘fugitive justice’ Aristotle becomes a resource for radical democrats, and a complement to Wolin’s concept of democracy. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 1, February 2019, Page 20-39.

ABSTRACTIn this article, I argue that resistance and radical democracy can be used to the good of representative democracy. I submit that resistance is about the popular power – the freedom as power – to create better institutions. I argue that the conflict and resistance that is at the core of radical democracy enables freedom and democracy and resists domination best if it is institutionalized. This counterintuitive claim is substantiated by an argument for freedom as power through representation and how (...) the power to resist is linked to at least four domains of freedom. This builds on the work of Machiavelli, Marx and Foucault, amongst others, and insights drawn from resistance struggles across the globe. I end by proposing institutional changes to representative democracy that, I suggest, would allow us to conceive of democracy as both a form of government and a constantly destabilizing transgressive practice. (shrink)

If, today, ‘politics is in culture and culture is relentlessly political’ (Brown, 2002), if the domains of ‘the political’ and ‘the cultural’ can no longer be easily distinguished or kept separate, then contemporary political theory requires an understanding and analysis of cultural politics. This essay undertakes the first stages of such a project by trying to theorize ‘cultural politics’. I argue that ‘cultural politics’ proves to be an object of discourse — it indeed has a certain discursive existence — but (...) not an object of discipline, since no single field or discipline produces it as an object of knowledge. I read this disciplinary failure optimistically, arguing that the study of cultural politics requires a reorientation of theory. The sort of interdisciplinary and multiple-genre work needed to study cultural politics produces a conception of theory as fugitive. Fugitive theory must travel among disciplines, calling on a variety of theoretical and political resources to sustain itself; it refuses the very notion of ‘applied’ theory, insisting that theory ‘is already at work’ in politics (Butler, 1997). To link politics to culture is to practise fugitive theory. And the practice of fugitive theory therefore has the capacity to reveal and explore the workings of cultural politics. (shrink)

These essays suggest a number of answers to the question: Why Nietzsche still? They show that Nietzsche still has a great deal to say to those who read him with an eye toward developing critical responses to the present and the future that will follow.

This article examines the role of social theory in Cornel West's account of radical democracy. I explicate and extend the critical implications of Richard Rorty's views for the revolutionary impulses in West's project, and then I examine West's use of Sheldon Wolin's notion of "fugitive democracy" as a potential instance of the "theoretical resentment" against which Rorty cautions. Drawing from John Howard Yoder and Karl Barth, I conclude by demonstrating how West's account of the Black Church contains resources to chasten (...) the detrimental excesses in Wolin's account, while maintaining a robust sense of radical democracy. (shrink)

Democracy and the state are two political notions that have come under considerable duress in late modernity. This paper considers a prominent critic of both, Sheldon Wolin. The paper examines three elements that figure in Wolin's analyses of democracy and the modern state in a central way: community, memory, and the culture of history. A theorisation of these elements can illuminate what is at stake in the articulation of political conceptions that yield communal forms through the constitution of political space. (...) Wolin's analyses of democracy, the state, and modern power can be of help, first, in elucidating the political valences of the three elements themselves; second, in specifying relationships of mutuality among them; and third, in theorising what is at issue in the transposition of these elements from the domestic sphere to the international. The paper speaks mainly to the first and second concerns. A path is explored for thinking what is at stake in the third, namely, locating in and then transposing from the domestic sphere a ‘we’ which does not enjoy a precise ontology, but which is nonetheless capable of giving collaborative efforts in world-political spheres another political ground. (shrink)

Negri celebrates a conception of democracy in which the concrete powers of individual humans are not alienated away, but rather are added together: this is a democracy of the multitude. But how can the multitude act without alienating anyone’s power? To answer this difficulty, Negri explicitly appeals to Spinoza. Nonetheless, in this paper, I argue that Spinoza’s philosophy does not support Negri’s project. I argue that the Spinozist multitude avoids internal hierarchy through the mediation of political institutions and not in (...) spite of them; nor do these institutions merely emanate from the multitude as it is, but rather they structure, restrain and channel its passions. In particular, the required institutions are not those of a simple direct democracy. There may be other non-Spinozist arguments on which Negri can ground his theory, but he cannot legitimately defend his conception of the democratic multitude by appeal to Spinoza. (shrink)

This article considers how reconciliation might be understood as a democratic undertaking. It does so by examining the implications of the debate between theorists of ‘deliberative’ and ‘agonistic’ democracy for the practice of democracy in divided societies. I argue that, in taking consensus as a regulative idea, deliberative democracy tends to conflate moral and political community thereby representing conflict as already communal. In contrast, an agonistic theory of democracy provides a critical perspective from which to discern what is at stake (...) in the politics of reconciliation since it understands community as a contingent achievement of political action. As such, an agonistic account of democracy suggests the possibility of retrieving the concept of reconciliation from a statesanctioned project of nation-building for a democratic politics centred on the possibilities of self-determination and solidarity among citizens divided by a history of state violence. Key Words: agonism • deliberation • democracy • reconciliation • transitional justice. (shrink)

Examines the political significance of ideas about happiness through the work of utilitarian philosophers William Thompson and Jeremy Bentham. Happiness is political. The way we think about happiness affects what we do, how we relate to other people and the world around us, our moral principles, and even our ideas about how society should be organized. Utilitarianism, a political theory based on hedonistic and individualistic ideas of happiness, has been dominated for more than two-hundred years by its founder, Jeremy Bentham. (...) In Happiness, Democracy, and the Cooperative Movement, Mark J. Kaswan examines the work of William Thompson, a friend of Bentham’s who nonetheless offers a very different utilitarian philosophy and political theory based on a different conception of happiness, but whose work has been largely overlooked. Kaswan reveals the importance of our ideas about happiness for our understanding of the basic principles and nature of democracy, its role in society and its character as a social institution. In what is the closest examination of Thompson’s political theory to date, Kaswan moves from philosophy to theory to practice, starting with conceptions of happiness before moving to theories of utility, then to democratic theory, and finally to practice in the first detailed account of how Thompson’s ideas laid the foundations for the cooperative movement, which is now the world’s largest democratic social movement. Mark J. Kaswan is Assistant Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Brownsville and J. Robert Beyster and Michael W. Huber Fellow, Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations. (shrink)

When we participate in political debate or protests, we are judged by how we look, which clothes we wear, by our skin colour, gender and body language. This results in exclusions and limits our freedom of expression. The Politics of Becoming explores radical democratic acts of disidentification to counter this problem. Anonymity in masked protest, graffiti, and online de-bate interrupts our everyday identities. This allows us to live our multiple selves. In the digital age, anonymity becomes an inherent part of (...) everyday communication. Through our smart devices we express our selves differently. As cyborgs, our identities are disrupted and reassembled. We curate self-representations on social media, create avatars, share selfies and choose the skin colour of our emojis. The Politics of Becoming encourages us to engage in a revolution of the self. Democratic pluralism is not only a matter of institutional design but also about how we express our identities. Inner revolutions change our personal realities and plant a seed for democratic futures. (shrink)

Radical democratic thinking is becoming intrigued by the material situatedness of its political agents and by the role of nonhuman participants in political interaction. At stake here is the displacement of narrow anthropocentrism that currently guides democratic theory and practice, and its repositioning into what we call ‘the nonhuman condition’. This Critical Exchange explores the nonhuman condition. It asks: What are the implications of decentering the human subject via a new materialist reading of radical democracy? Does this reading dilute political (...) agency? Or should this be seen, on the contrary, as an invitation for new voices and demands to enter into democratic assemblages? How might engagement with the more-than-human disrupt or extend theories of radical democracy? Hans Asenbaum and Amanda Machin discuss the human democratic subject both through radical democratic and new materialist lenses. They suggest that a new materialist decentred subject does not lose agency but further gains political responsibility in radical democracy. Jean-Paul Gagnon highlights the possibility of becoming through loss. In losing our anthropocentric arrogance—our understanding of being other and better than animal—we become more connected and discover our place in human-nonhuman assemblages. Melissa Orlie agrees that something can be gained through renouncing dominant human fantasies and presents a ‘radical democratic naturalism’. By renouncing land violence and acknowledging nature’s subjectivity, we can further nonexploitative radical democratic politics. This is where the notion of ‘tidalectic’ processes introduced by James L. Smith is helpful. Focusing on water and the Indigenous knowledges around rivers, he considers how democracy and community can be reimagined as plural, cyclical and attentive to the nonhuman with which the human is inevitably entangled. Diana Leong offers a different approach. Considering the nonhuman from the perspective of Black Studies demands an awareness to how blackness has long been constituted as non- or partially human. (shrink)

In this article the nature of Bruno Latour’s relation to Carl Schmitt is discussed, considering the point by point revisions of Schmitt offered by Latour and his references to Schmitt. These turn out to be plentiful and illuminating. Yet the nature of Latour’s revision and its implications are obscure. The implications of his notion of cosmopolitics for political theory are minimal, and in other respects the Schmittian picture is unchanged. Unlike Schmitt, who embeds political theory in political theology, and presents (...) a political theology in order to problematize political theory, but provides a meta-theology, Latour presents an alternative political theology, and not a meta-theology. (shrink)

Global capitalism is a transnational “operational space” which is produced by the practices of states, policy- and issue-specific government networks, and private organizations such as transnational corporations, global law firms, and standard-setting agencies. This “operational space,” which I call the transnational constellation, works through and beyond distinct spatial settings, endowing them with a global financial capitalistic logic and limiting the scope of democratic self-determination. In the second section, I analyze political protest against this transnational constellation in terms of democratic theory. (...) I argue that transnational protest and activism have to be appreciated for their reshaping of spaces of the political, for developing and delivering a genuinely global perspective on political problems, and for their politicization of the transnational constellation by revealing and contesting structures and strategies of domination. However,... (shrink)

This article compares the theories of democracy of John Dewey and Claude Lefort, identifying some common themes in their otherwise radically different philosophical outlooks. In so doing, it attempts to analyze the philosophical implications of a ‘democracy first’ approach to politics. It then explains in what sense Dewey’s idea of ‘democracy as a way of life’ and Claude Lefort’s conception of ‘democracy as a form of society’ provide the cornerstone of an original and so far insufficiently explored approach to political (...) philosophy. Such an approach offers an alternative both to the classical-liberal and to the critical-radical projects which still dominate contemporary political philosophy. It then indicates some of the potential advantages of such a ‘wide view’ for contemporary debates in democratic theory. (shrink)

Where are democratic mores cultivated? Amid contemporary worries about democratic backsliding and authoritarian siren calls, this article advances the Tocquevillian point that discussions of seemingly mundane questions in formalized contexts, such as neighborhoods meetings, are excellent sites to foster democratic “habits of the heart.” Grounding the normative argument in ethnographic observations carried out in Paris, I contend that quotidian spaces such as these, often dismissed as procedural or trivial, are meaningful sites of democratic practice that nurture democratic affects and a (...) democratic ethos. While seemingly too localized to be significant for the wider democratic society, the topics considered in these neighborhood meetings pertain to political concerns such as the distribution of public goods, the possibilities of collective action, the limits of private property, and the ability of the law to compel behavior. However, the discussions’ democratic potential is undermined by the difficulty of getting past the doors of the meetings, not because of exclusionary formal rules but because of informal practices often taxing for newcomers. (shrink)

This article explores how people can come to experience constitutional conversations as meaningful. To this end, I reinterpret Habermas’s account of deliberative constitutionalism. For Habermas, constitutional discourses are not only rational procedures of opinion- and will-formation, but also sites at which a “world” gets generated. Deliberative politics, therefore, involves unruly and uncontrollable efforts to solicit others into the roles, orientations, and principles of constitutional practices. The result is a novel account of the relationship between constitutional procedures and the “anarchistic” politics (...) that radical democrats celebrate. Ungovernable inventions of and affective identifications with roles, images, and peoples occur within articulate forms, including constitutional procedures. These aspects of Habermas’s thought push past binary oppositions between legitimate constitutional procedure and radical democratic uprisings. Habermas provides a framework for examining the forms of attentiveness by which actors can come to experience constitutional rules, roles, principles, and procedures as part of their world. (shrink)

Organized across national boundaries and with millions of supporters worldwide, transnational environmental activist groups such as Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, and Friends of the Earth play a central role in the way the world addresses environmental issues. This book provides the most systematic and theoretically informed study to date of the strategies these organizations use to advance global environmental protection. Based on case studies of three transnational groups, it argues that in addition to lobbying governments, activists operate within and (...) across societies to effect widespread change. They work through transnational social, economic, and cultural networks to alter corporate practices, educate vast numbers of people, pressure multilateral development banks, and shift standards of good conduct. Wapner argues that because this activity takes place outside the formal arena of inter-state politics, environmental activists practice "world civic politics"; they politicize global civil society. The theoretical import of this book is to bring the practice of world civic politics into sharp relief and generalize its significance beyond environmental affairs to explain the efforts of all NGOs in world politics. (shrink)

This article approaches the recent Wonder Woman film as a presentation of the tensions traditionally associated with the paradox of democratic foundations. Steeped in classical mythology, Wonder Woman adapts two origin myths from the Athenian polis: the myth of Pandora and the myth of the heroic colonizing demigod. Through its adaptation of these myths I argue that Wonder Woman offers two competing responses to the democratic paradox of founding. One is exceptionalist, where sovereign interventions by extraordinary ‘super-agents’ like Wonder Woman (...) are justified by their unique origins and identities. The second response subverts this narrative, however, offering a tragic depiction of democratic agency. Through the relationships formed with Diana’s human companions, I argue that Wonder Woman shows the insufficiency of a politics of heroic origins, suggesting agents must continually struggle to establish communities which do not ignore their historical failures or their powers to address these. Wonder Woman therefore provides important imaginative resources for resisting the kinds of seductive, exceptionalist political narrative it also presents. (shrink)

If, today, ‘politics is in culture and culture is relentlessly political’ (Brown, 2002), if the domains of ‘the political’ and ‘the cultural’ can no longer be easily distinguished or kept separate, then contemporary political theory requires an understanding and analysis of cultural politics. This essay undertakes the first stages of such a project by trying to theorize ‘cultural politics’. I argue that ‘cultural politics’ proves to be an object of discourse — it indeed has a certain discursive existence — but (...) not an object of discipline, since no single field or discipline produces it as an object of knowledge. I read this disciplinary failure optimistically, arguing that the study of cultural politics requires a reorientation of theory. The sort of interdisciplinary and multiple-genre work needed to study cultural politics produces a conception of theory as fugitive. Fugitive theory must travel among disciplines, calling on a variety of theoretical and political resources to sustain itself; it refuses the very notion of ‘applied’ theory, insisting that theory ‘is already at work’ in politics (Butler, 1997). To link politics to culture is to practise fugitive theory. And the practice of fugitive theory therefore has the capacity to reveal and explore the workings of cultural politics. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the importance of practices of disidentification and imagination for democratic progress and change. To this end, I bring together certain aspects of Stanley Cavell’s and Richard Rorty’s reflections on democracy, aesthetics, and morality with Jacques Rancière’s account of the importance of appearance for democratic participation. With Rancière, it can be shown that any public–political order always involves the possibility (and often the reality) of exclusion or oppression of those who “have no part” in the current (...) order through a particular order of perceptibility, and that democratic action, therefore, requires rupturing acts of political agency on the part of self-proclaimed political actors through which disidentifications and constructions of difference against such existing orders become possible. With Cavell and Rorty, in turn, it can be shown that these rupturing moments, in order to actually become politically effective, require a responsive disposition and a willingness to engage in practices of imagination on the part of those who occupy dominant positions on existing orders, insofar as they must acknowledge the expression of others’ sense of injustice. The upshot of my discussion is that a comprehensive account of the aesthetic dimension of democratic politics must simultaneously address the interruption of political action on the one hand and responsiveness on the other, and that Rancière and the neo-pragmatists Rorty and Cavell complement each other insofar as they illuminate the blind spots of their respective approaches. (shrink)

What kind of polity is justified by classic Confucian values? Adopting an interpretive approach, this paper explores the idea of leadership democracy being expressive of classic Confucian values by first introducing the models of leadership democracy associated with Weber and Schumpeter and second connecting Confucian elitist values to them. I argue that leadership democracy best realizes the Confucian emphasis on the people as the source of legitimacy and the ruler as the engine of good governance. The Confucian idea of people-rootedness (...) is borne out by citizens behaving as democratic plebeians who are empowered to choose their leader but devoid of moral and intellectual capabilities for collective decision-making. The Confucian idea of rulership is expressed by democratic leaders displaying competent statesmanship and compensating for intra-elite tensions within the Confucian tradition. (shrink)

This book explores an often neglected current in contemporary French political thought that challenges the limits of the concept of democracy. It situates the projects of Jacques Ranciere, Claude Lefort and Miguel Abensour in relation to each other, as well as to the larger philosophical question of the nature of democracy itself. In doing so, Bryan Nelson illuminates democracy's potential as a profound emancipatory and transformative project, offering an unprecedented challenge to modes of domination, strategies of inequality and hierarchies of (...) all kinds. Against prevailing interpretations, the author draws on the central concepts, problems and polemics in the works of Ranciere, Lefort and Abensour to develop a bold conception of democracy that allows us to rethink its character, power and broader social and political implications. (shrink)

In this thesis I outline a view of primary legislation from a systems perspective. I suggest that systems theory and, in particular, autopoietic theory, as modified by field theory, is a mechanism for understanding how society operates. The description of primary legislation that I outline differs markedly from any conventional definition in that I argue that primary legislation is not, and indeed cannot be, either a law or any of the euphemisms that are usually accorded to an enactment by a (...) parliament. I cite two reasons for such a conclusion. The primary reason for my conclusion is that I see primary legislation as being an output of a particular subsystem of society, while the law is the output of another subsystem of society. I argue that these outputs are the discrete products of separate subsystems of society. I argue that primary legislation should be viewed as a trinity. The first state of this trinity is that, upon enactment, primary legislation is a brute fact in that it is but a thing and the only property of this thing is that of being a text. The second state of this trinity is that following the act of enactment, the thing enacted will be reproduced and this reproduction is a separate thing that will sit in some repository until used. The third state of this trinity is that, upon use, this thing that is primary legislation will be transformed into an object and the user will attribute such functions and attributes to that object as are appropriate to the context within which the object is used. The thing has therefore become an object and an institutional fact. The second reason for my conclusion that primary legislation is not a law relates to the fact that the thing that is primary legislation is a text and the only function of a text is that it is available to be read. That is to say, of itself, a text is incapable of doing anything: it is the reader who defines the status of the text and attributes functions and attributes. Upon use, primary legislation thus becomes a censored input for future action and one of these actions may be some statement by a court of law. I assert that the view of primary legislation that has been accepted within the body politic is the product of the discourse of a particular subsystem of society that I have designated 'the legal practice', and I outline why and how this has occurred. Outlining a view about primary legislation also necessitates outlining a view as to the nature of the law. I assert that the law is a myth and I see this myth as a product of the discourse of the legal practice. I have asserted that although it is the judges that state the law, such statements flow from the discourse of those who practise the law. (shrink)

Offers a careful analysis of how Aristotle understands civil war, partisanship, distrust in government, disagreement, and competition, and explores ways in which these views are relevant to contemporary political theory. Do only modern thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes accept that conflict plays a significant role in the origin and maintenance of political community? In this book, Steven Skultety argues that Aristotle not only took conflict to be an inevitable aspect of political life, but further recognized ways in which conflict promotes (...) the common good. While many scholars treat Aristotelian conflict as an absence of substantive communal ideals, Skultety argues that Aristotle articulated a view of politics that theorizes profoundly different kinds of conflict. Aristotle comprehended the subtle factors that can lead otherwise peaceful citizens to contemplate outright civil war, grasped the unique conditions that create hopelessly implacable partisans, and systematized tactics rulers could use to control regrettable, but still manageable, levels of civic distrust. Moreover, Aristotle conceived of debate, enduring disagreement, social rivalries, and competitions for leadership as an indispensable part of how human beings live well together in successful political life. By exploring the ways in which citizens can be at odds with one another, Conflict in Aristotle’s Political Philosophy presents a dimension of ancient Greek thought that is startlingly relevant to contemporary concerns about social divisions, constitutional crises, and the range of acceptable conflict in healthy democracies. “Through debate with other scholars, this book clarifies the meaning of stasis, a central term in Aristotle’s Politics; speculates about the limits of Aristotle’s notion of practical wisdom; and puts in dialogue Aristotle’s historical thought with contemporary debates about the nature of political conflict.” — Thornton Lockwood, Quinnipiac University. (shrink)

‘The political’ is much talked about today, but its invocation in international political theory is all but entirely dismissed. Yet, moral-ethical articulations do impact theorizing about international life, albeit in a most peculiar and often concealed fashion. In this paper I investigate the modernity of sovereignty in political and international theory and explain why invocations of the moral-ethical are so forcefully liquidated from international relations theory. I examine the constitutive effects of the sovereignty imperative and explain how modern notions of (...) ethics, politics and community are delimited by the need to effect what can be made to count as the pre-political ground of will-formation. A peculiar modernist strategy delimits the imagination of the politically possible in international life. I argue that critique must attend and not dispense with a fundamental paradoxicality (which is transfigured as modernity’s very metaphysical embodiment) that structures a distinctively modern manner of reflecting on ethics and community. The paradoxicality is sovereignty. It is accommodated by a liberal politics that works to conceal a restive anxiety of the modern ‘condition’. This anxiety is in turn productive of a politics with which we must grapple as we elaborate governance in global life. (shrink)