Mark McNally - Böcker

The aim of this book is to explain and assess the relevance of the ideas of Gramsci to a world fundamentally transformed from that in which his thought was developed. It takes some of Gramsci’s best-known concepts – hegemony, civil society, passive revolution, the national-popular, trasformismo, the integral state - and uses them creatively to analyse features of present-day politics, assessing to what extent his ideas can aid our understanding of the contemporary political world. The book contains essays focused on: aspects of global politics (the development of a global civil society, the validity of the knowledge claims of neo-Gramscian IR specialists and the politics of the WTO and the Alternative Globalisation Movement); contemporary feminism; the problem of adjusting Gramsci’s theory of political agency to modern conditions; Turkish and Israeli politics; and a series of essays on present-day British politics. The book concludes that while there remain considerable problems in applying Gramsci’s concepts to the contemporary world, his political thought still retains an attraction and validity that will continue to inspire political analysts well into the future. Bringing together a range of essays representing some of the latest research in the field, Gramsci and Global Politics: Hegemony and Resistance opens up new perspectives on Gramsci which will be of vital interest to students and scholars in International Relations and Political Science, Sociology and History.

The aim of this book is to explain and assess the relevance of the ideas of Gramsci to a world fundamentally transformed from that in which his thought was developed. It takes some of Gramsci’s best-known concepts – hegemony, civil society, passive revolution, the national-popular, trasformismo, the integral state - and uses them creatively to analyse features of present-day politics, assessing to what extent his ideas can aid our understanding of the contemporary political world. The book contains essays focused on: aspects of global politics (the development of a global civil society, the validity of the knowledge claims of neo-Gramscian IR specialists and the politics of the WTO and the Alternative Globalisation Movement); contemporary feminism; the problem of adjusting Gramsci’s theory of political agency to modern conditions; Turkish and Israeli politics; and a series of essays on present-day British politics. The book concludes that while there remain considerable problems in applying Gramsci’s concepts to the contemporary world, his political thought still retains an attraction and validity that will continue to inspire political analysts well into the future. Bringing together a range of essays representing some of the latest research in the field, Gramsci and Global Politics: Hegemony and Resistance opens up new perspectives on Gramsci which will be of vital interest to students and scholars in International Relations and Political Science, Sociology and History.

Kokugaku, or nativism, was one of the most important intellectual movements from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century in Japan, and its worldview continues to be influential today. This scholarly endeavor represented an attempt to use Japanese antiquity to revitalize what many saw as a society in decline. One important figure in this movement was Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843), a center of controversy in his own lifetime. Even though Atsutane's version of nativism came to be the standard form, many modern scholars dismiss him because of his scholarly shortcomings.The primary goal of this book is to restore historicity to the study of nativism by recognizing Atsutane's role in the creation and perpetuation of an intellectual tradition that remains a significant part of Japanese history and culture. Arguing that conflict among scholars and intellectuals begets ideas, Mark McNally shows that nativism was rife with internal competition. The mid-nineteenth-century suppression of this multiplicity of views led to the emergence of what we now think of as "nativism." By focusing on the competition among the rival strands of nativism, McNally demonstrates that nativism resulted not from Atsutane's conscious attempt to formulate a new intellectual tradition but from his greater political skills at putting his views across.

Like No Other: Exceptionalism and Nativism in Early Modern Japan probes the association of the early modern Japanese intellectual institution called Kokugaku with the phenomenon of nativism. Uncovering profound differences that cast serious doubt on this association, Mark McNally argues that what Japanologists viewed as nativistic about Kokugaku were actually more typical of what Americanists call exceptionalism. By severing the link between Kokugaku and nativism, he is able to explore within early modern Japanese history instances that were more genuinely nativistic, such as the upheaval associated with the intercultural encounters with Westerners during the 1850s and 1860s that culminated in the overthrow of Japan's last shogun. He also documents, for the first time in Japanese studies, the ways in which exceptionalism applies to Japanese history; not by focusing on either Nihonjinron or on Kokugaku—the connection between the former and exceptionalism is one that Americanists have already made, and the connection between the two Japanese institutions is one that Japanologists already know well—but by highlighting the central role of Confucianism. While Americans looked to the Judeo-Christian tradition for their exceptionalist ideas, their counterparts in early modern Japan looked to Confucianism, whose foundational connections to exceptionalism were perhaps stronger than any analogous tradition in the West. Despite the fact that exceptionalism and nativism occupy distinct positions within the historiographical traditions of both the United States and Japan, they also intersect and overlap in the latter case, which strongly suggests that this situation may also be true in other places, including the United States.