Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a wealth of discussion and controversy about the idea of a ‘postnational’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ politics. But while there are many normative theories of cosmopolitanism, as well as some cosmopolitan theories of globalization, there has been little attempt to grapple systematically with fundamental questions of structure and action from a ‘cosmopolitan point of view.’ Drawing on Kant‘s cosmopolitan writings and Habermas‘s critical theory of society,...

What beliefs are, what they do for us, how we come to hold them, and how to evaluate them.Our beliefs constitute a large part of our knowledge of the world. We have beliefs about objects, about culture, about the past, and about the future. We have beliefs about other people, and we believe that they have beliefs as well. We use beliefs to predict, to explain, to create, to console, to entertain. Some of our beliefs we call theories, and we are extraordinarily crea...

Skillfully deploying a large cast of characters, Sheehan retraces the development of Marxist philosophy of science through detailed and highly readable accounts of the debates that have characterized it. Approaching Marxism from the perspective of the philosophy of science, Sheehan shows how Marx's and Engel's ideas on the development and structure of natural science had a crucial impact on the work of early twentieth-century natural philosophers, historians of science, and natural scienti...

In The Lost Thread, Rancière debunks the notion of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Conrad, Woolf and Keats as reactionary producers of bourgeois mythologies, and instead foregrounds the egalitarian and democratic impulses of modernist literature. Contrary to the canonical interpretation of the relation between modernism and capitalism via the commodification of everyday life, Rancière proposes a radical rethinking of our received ideas regarding the politics of aesthetics in the modern era....

These essays, written between 1949 and 1967, focus on a single theme: the triumph in the twentieth century of the state-bureaucratic apparatus and 'instrumental reason' and the concomitant liquidation of the individual and the basic social institutions and relationships associated with the individual.

Since the publication of Homo Sacer Giorgio Agamben has become one of the world's most revered and controversial thinkers. His ideas on our current political situation have found many supporters as well as garnering strong criticism from some quarters. While his wider thoughts on topics such as language, potentiality, life, law, messianism, power, and aesthetics have had significant impact on such diverse fields as philosophy, law, theology, history, sociology, politics, cultural and liter...

Nobody should really have to point out that political philosophy is political. Yet in this highly original and provocative book Lorna Finlayson argues that in fact it is necessary to do so. Offering a critique of mainstream liberal political philosophy through close, critical engagement with a series of specific debates and arguments, Finlayson analyzes the way in which apparently neutral methodological devices such as “charitable interpretation” and “constructive criticism” function so as...

Political and economic models of society often operate at a level of abstraction so high that the connections between them, and their links to culture, are beyond reach. Bearing Society in Mind challenges these disciplinary boundaries and proposes an alternative framework—the social formation.The theory of social formation demonstrates how the fabric of society is made up of threads that are simultaneously economic, political, and cultural. Drawing on the work of theorists includin...

Human rights and development cannot be understood separately. They are historically connected by the idea of race, and have evolved concomitantly with the latter. As the tools of race, human rights and development have been forged in the effort to legitimize and maintain coloniality.While rights and development can be used as tools to achieve protection, specific political goals, or access in the dominant society, they limit radical social change because they are framed within a sp...

What is the fundamental nature of the filmic object: is it a commodity or is it, can it be, art? What would that mean - can it still matter? This book introduces the thought of Theodor Adorno into film studies to repair the schism that characterizes the field, as historical and cultural modes of analysis displace theoretical and philosophical ones.

When “revolution” becomes a recurring theme in mainstream culture, where do we look for the tools for a critical engagement with the present? Addressing the link between allegory and cultural critique in contemporary culture and resisting the thematic abstraction of sexy, fast, revolutionary content, this book suggests that one way is to pay attention not so much to content as to form.Culture Control Critique provides an analysis of how representations of political systems in conte...

This book explores rhythmanalysis as a philosophy and as a research method for the study of cultural historical experiences. It formulates 'rhythm' as a critical concept which is defined in dialogic relationships to intellectual traditions, yet introducing unique philosophical positions that serve to re-think ways of conceiving and addressing cultural political issues.Engaging with the notion of 'conjunctural shift', which for Stuart Hall captures the ruptured social landscape of B...