How do we go about imagining different and better worlds for ourselves? Collective Dreams looks at ideals of community, frequently embraced as the basis for reform across the political spectrum, as the predominant form of political imagination in America today. Examining how these ideals circulate without having much real impact on social change provides an opportunity to explore the difficulties of practicing critical theory in a capitalist society.Different chapters inve...

The Church in the Modern World: Fifty Years after Gaudium et Spes commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. Featuring scholars from the Joan and Ralph Lane Center for Catholic Studies and Social Thought, this book offers a future-orientated analysis by highlighting contemporary social issues through the lens of Gaudium et Spes. In part I, authors examine the historical, political, and social significance o...

Political Theories of Decolonization provides an introduction to some of the seminal texts of postcolonial political theory. The difficulty of founding a new regime is an important theme in political theory, and the intellectual history of decolonization provides a rich--albeit overlooked--opportunity to explore it. Many theorists have pointed out that the colonized subject was a divided subject. This book argues that the postcolonial state was a divided state. While postcolonial ...

Today, every continent retains elements of the legal code distributed by the British empire. The British empire created a legal footprint along with political, economic, cultural and racial ones. One of the central problems of political theory is the insurmountable gap between ideas and their realization. Keally McBride argues that understanding the presently fraught state of the concept of the rule of law around the globe relies upon understanding how it was first introduced and then prac...

How Not to Be Governed explores the contemporary debates and questions concerning anarchism in our own time. The authors address the political failures of earlier practices of anarchism, and the claim that anarchism is impracticable, by examining the anarchisms that have been theorized and practiced in the midst of these supposed failures. The authors revive the possibility of anarchism even as they examine it with a critical lens. Rather than breaking with prior anarchist practic...