Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice – serie

Subterranean Politics and Freud's Legacy seeks to reestablish psychoanalysis as an ally to critical theory's efforts to restore subjectivity and oppose systemic domination in modernity. Given critical theory's ongoing crisis of identity and purpose, this project makes a significant contribution to contemporary political theory.

Collection with new contributions to the debate from New Politics concerning the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg. Publishing Stephen Eric Bronner's essay 'Red Dreams and the New Millennium' along with the numerous responses to the piece, a new introduction, and an interview with Bronner stimulates the discussion around Luxemburg's legacy.

Decolonizing Time: Work, Leisure, and Freedom demonstrates the importance of time as a central category for political theory, providing not only a history of the fight for time through political, feminist, and critical theory, but also assessing this tradition in the context of the United States.

This book explores the connection between politics and theatre by looking at the works and lives of Shaw, Brecht, Sartre, and Ionesco, providing a cultural history detailing the changing role of political theatre in twentieth-century Europe.

This work positions Arendt as a political writer attempting to find a way in which humanity, poised between the Holocaust and the atom bomb, might reclaim its position as the creators of a world fit for human habitation.

This book, shortlisted for the British Sociological Association's Philip Abrams Memorial Prize (2015), argues that Fromm is a vital and largely overlooked contribution to twentieth-century intellectual history, and one who offers a refreshingly reconfigured form of humanism that is capable of reintegrating explicitly humanist analytical categories and schemas back into social theoretical (and scientific) considerations.

This book argues that there is an ongoing planetary crisis, in both the social and natural worlds, that is of urgent importance. This demands a new politics, a politics of total liberation, one that grasps the need to unite the disparate movements for human, animal, and earth liberation. In the book, Best outlines a way forward despite challenges.

This work illuminates, identifies, and characterizes the influences and expressions of Bob Dylan's Political World throughout his life and career. An approach nearly as unique as the singer himself, the authors attempt to remove Dylan from the typical Left/Right paradigm and place him into a broader and deeper context.

This book argues that the need for music, and the ability to produce and enjoy it, is an essential element in human nature. Every society in history has produced some characteristic style of music. Music, like the other arts, tells us truths about the world through its impact on our emotional life. There is a structural correspondence between society and music. The emergence of 'modern art music' and its stylistic changes since the rise of capitalist social relations reflect the development of capitalist society since the decline of European feudalism. The leading composers of the different eras expressed in music the aspirations of the dominant or aspiring social classes. Changes in musical style not only reflect but in turn help to shape changes in society. This book analyses the stylistic changes in music from the emergence of ‘tonality’ in the late seventeenth century until the Second World War.

This book makes the case for Marsilio Ficino, a Renaissance philosopher and priest, as a canonical thinker, and provides an introduction for a broad audience.  Sophia Howlett examines him as part of the milieu of Renaissance Florence, part of a history of Platonic philosophy, and as a key figure in the ongoing crisis between classical revivalism and Christian belief.  The author discusses Ficino’s vision of a Platonic Christian universe with multiple worlds inhabited by angels, daemons and pagan gods, as well as our own distinctive role within that universe - climbing the heights to talk with angels yet constantly confused by the evidence of our own senses. Ficino as the “new Socrates” suggests to us that by changing ourselves, we can change our world.

Subterranean Politics and Freud's Legacy seeks to reestablish psychoanalysis as an ally to critical theory's efforts to restore subjectivity and oppose systemic domination in modernity. Given critical theory's ongoing crisis of identity and purpose, this project makes a significant contribution to contemporary political theory.

Collection with new contributions to the debate from New Politics concerning the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg. Publishing Stephen Eric Bronner's essay 'Red Dreams and the New Millennium' along with the numerous responses to the piece, a new introduction, and an interview with Bronner stimulates the discussion around Luxemburg's legacy.

Decolonizing Time: Work, Leisure, and Freedom demonstrates the importance of time as a central category for political theory, providing not only a history of the fight for time through political, feminist, and critical theory, but also assessing this tradition in the context of the United States.

This book explores the connection between politics and theatre by looking at the works and lives of Shaw, Brecht, Sartre, and Ionesco, providing a cultural history detailing the changing role of political theatre in twentieth-century Europe.

This work positions Arendt as a political writer attempting to find a way in which humanity, poised between the Holocaust and the atom bomb, might reclaim its position as the creators of a world fit for human habitation.

This book, shortlisted for the British Sociological Association's Philip Abrams Memorial Prize (2015), argues that Fromm is a vital and largely overlooked contribution to twentieth-century intellectual history, and one who offers a refreshingly reconfigured form of humanism that is capable of reintegrating explicitly humanist analytical categories and schemas back into social theoretical (and scientific) considerations.

This book argues that there is an ongoing planetary crisis, in both the social and natural worlds, that is of urgent importance. This demands a new politics, a politics of total liberation, one that grasps the need to unite the disparate movements for human, animal, and earth liberation. In the book, Best outlines a way forward despite challenges.

This book argues that the need for music, and the ability to produce and enjoy it, is an essential element in human nature. Every society in history has produced some characteristic style of music. Music, like the other arts, tells us truths about the world through its impact on our emotional life. There is a structural correspondence between society and music. The emergence of 'modern art music' and its stylistic changes since the rise of capitalist social relations reflect the development of capitalist society since the decline of European feudalism. The leading composers of the different eras expressed in music the aspirations of the dominant or aspiring social classes. Changes in musical style not only reflect but in turn help to shape changes in society. This book analyses the stylistic changes in music from the emergence of ‘tonality’ in the late seventeenth century until the Second World War.

This work illuminates, identifies, and characterizes the influences and expressions of Bob Dylan's Political World throughout his life and career. An approach nearly as unique as the singer himself, the authors attempt to remove Dylan from the typical Left/Right paradigm and place him into a broader and deeper context.

This book aims to further an understanding of present day America by exploring counter-hegemony to the rule of capital and offering guidelines for strategizing change proceeding from the dialectic of What Is and What Ought to Be. The author analyzes neoliberal global order and its political expressions through discussions of the dominance of finance capital in the late twentieth century, the triumph of ideology, the closing of avenues to reform, the problem of the captive state, and a sociological analysis of rule by “divide and conquer.” The book concludes with a look at the history of movement politics in culture, arts, economics, and politics. It resounds with a hope that challenges to hegemony can use many paths to change, of which the electoral path is but one of many fronts, in the long-term struggle for radical reform.

In 2011, Lawrence Davidson founded his website, tothepointanalyses.com, as a home for his brief essays on contemporary issues touching on US domestic and foreign policy. Over the last few years, Davidson's analytic reflections on contemporary politics have garnered over six million views. Now, for the first time, these essays are collected together to form a coherent, punchy look at American Politics in 2018. Contextualized by a new prologue and new conclusion, as well as updated with new material throughout, these essays provide a cogent demonstration of the power of analytical thinking to create clear and understandable descriptions of issues that impact us all, but are most often obfuscated by propaganda, lying by omission, or other forms of distortion. For those who encounter this work, it is hoped that they will come away with a clearer, if not happier, idea of what sort of world we are all living in.

This book analyzes the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as symptoms of the structural crisis of US capitalism and its class structure. It shows that the protests have to be understood as rooted in the petty bourgeoisie’s lived experience of crisis, which also plays a crucial role in current political developments like the successful presidential campaign of Donald Trump. The book explains the Great Recession as an acute phase of the structural crisis of the finance-dominated accumulation regime, identifies the social classes from which the core-participants of the respective protests recruited themselves and the socioeconomic developments to which they were exposed in the years leading up to the protests, and interprets interviews and group discussions conducted with activists to reconstruct the habitus that structured both their experience of the crisis and their resonance with the respective protest practices. It thereby provides an encompassing understanding of the social logicsnot only of these social movements, but of the current political conjuncture in the US.

This book provides an in-depth, multidisciplinary framework and case-study analysis for understanding the root causes of violence in schooling. Drawing on critical theory, psychology, neuroscience and learning theory, the author provides a holistic analysis of how ‘violent epistemology’ and the ‘non-conducive circumstances’ that it produces can be seen to be at the roots of violence in societies and social institutions such as schools. Chapter 1 outlines how current and historical theories of violence, and interventions based on them, have failed due to their inability to properly conceptualise the root causes of violence. Chapters 2 addresses this by providing a new epistemic and methodological framework for studying violence. Chapters 3 and 4 then demonstrate how violence can be best conceptualised as a problem of specifically ‘violent’ epistemology and the ‘non-conducive social circumstances’ that it fosters. Chapters 5-7 demonstrate in practice how violent epistemology results in multiple manifestations of violence at the global, national, local, and ultimately classroom level. Chapter 8 concludes the book by presenting an early conceptualisation of ‘non-violent’ epistemology, and what fostering this might look like in practice.

This book provides an in-depth, multidisciplinary framework and case-study analysis for understanding the root causes of violence in schooling. Drawing on critical theory, psychology, neuroscience and learning theory, the author provides a holistic analysis of how ‘violent epistemology’ and the ‘non-conducive circumstances’ that it produces can be seen to be at the roots of violence in societies and social institutions such as schools. Chapter 1 outlines how current and historical theories of violence, and interventions based on them, have failed due to their inability to properly conceptualise the root causes of violence. Chapters 2 addresses this by providing a new epistemic and methodological framework for studying violence. Chapters 3 and 4 then demonstrate how violence can be best conceptualised as a problem of specifically ‘violent’ epistemology and the ‘non-conducive social circumstances’ that it fosters. Chapters 5-7 demonstrate in practice how violent epistemology results in multiple manifestations of violence at the global, national, local, and ultimately classroom level. Chapter 8 concludes the book by presenting an early conceptualisation of ‘non-violent’ epistemology, and what fostering this might look like in practice.

This volume aims to commemorate, criticize, scrutinize and assess the undoubted significance of the Russian Revolution both retrospectively and prospectively in three parts. Part I consists of a palimpsest of the different representations that the Russian Revolution underwent through its turbulent history, going back to its actors, agents, theorists and propagandists to consider whether it is at all possible to revisit the Russian Revolution as an event. With this problematic as a backbone, the chapters of this section scrutinize the ambivalences of revolution in four distinctive phenomena (sexual morality, religion, law and forms of life) that pertain to the revolution’s historicity. Part II concentrates on how the revolution was retold in the aftermath of its accomplishment not only by its sympathizers but also its opponents. These chapters not only bring to light the ways in which the revolution triggered critical theorists to pave new paths of radical thinking that were conceived as methods to overcome the revolution’s failures and impasses, but also how the Revolution was subverted in order to inspire reactionary politics and legitimize conservative theoretical undertakings. Even commemorating the Russian Revolution, then, still poses a threat to every well-established political order. In Part III, this volume interprets how the Russian Revolution can spur a rethinking of the idea of revolution. Acknowledging the suffocating burden that the notion of revolution as such entails, the final chapters of this book ultimately address the content and form of future revolution(s). It is therein, in such critical political thought and such radical form of action, where the Russian Revolution’s legacy ought to be sought and can still be found.

This volume aims to commemorate, criticize, scrutinize and assess the undoubted significance of the Russian Revolution both retrospectively and prospectively in three parts. Part I consists of a palimpsest of the different representations that the Russian Revolution underwent through its turbulent history, going back to its actors, agents, theorists and propagandists to consider whether it is at all possible to revisit the Russian Revolution as an event. With this problematic as a backbone, the chapters of this section scrutinize the ambivalences of revolution in four distinctive phenomena (sexual morality, religion, law and forms of life) that pertain to the revolution’s historicity. Part II concentrates on how the revolution was retold in the aftermath of its accomplishment not only by its sympathizers but also its opponents. These chapters not only bring to light the ways in which the revolution triggered critical theorists to pave new paths of radical thinking that were conceived as methods to overcome the revolution’s failures and impasses, but also how the Revolution was subverted in order to inspire reactionary politics and legitimize conservative theoretical undertakings. Even commemorating the Russian Revolution, then, still poses a threat to every well-established political order. In Part III, this volume interprets how the Russian Revolution can spur a rethinking of the idea of revolution. Acknowledging the suffocating burden that the notion of revolution as such entails, the final chapters of this book ultimately address the content and form of future revolution(s). It is therein, in such critical political thought and such radical form of action, where the Russian Revolution’s legacy ought to be sought and can still be found.

Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Bourgeois Liberalism introduces readers to the East Asian Enlightenment led by Fukuzawa Yukichi, one of the most important figures in the intellectual history of modern Japan. Despite his impact on political theory and modern Japanese history, Fukuzawa remains under-researched in Western academia, and while a few English-language books have been written about Fukuzawa, none have dealt with his political theory. This book describes Fukuzawa as a character with universal relevance and a unique view of the Enlightenment tradition. Emphasizing the power of bourgeois liberalism and the debate regarding its potential for transforming the strict class-caste society of Tokugawa Japan, Hwang discusses Fukuzawa's belief in the significance of individual autonomy, progress, and liberal rule of law in developing his project of the East Asian enlightenment, as well as his supposed “betrayal” of his early commitments due to his existential desire for Western recognition of Japan’s greatness. The book ends with an analysis of the complex relation between liberalism and progress in the East Asian context. ​

Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Bourgeois Liberalism introduces readers to the East Asian Enlightenment led by Fukuzawa Yukichi, one of the most important figures in the intellectual history of modern Japan. Despite his impact on political theory and modern Japanese history, Fukuzawa remains under-researched in Western academia, and while a few English-language books have been written about Fukuzawa, none have dealt with his political theory. This book describes Fukuzawa as a character with universal relevance and a unique view of the Enlightenment tradition. Emphasizing the power of bourgeois liberalism and the debate regarding its potential for transforming the strict class-caste society of Tokugawa Japan, Hwang discusses Fukuzawa's belief in the significance of individual autonomy, progress, and liberal rule of law in developing his project of the East Asian enlightenment, as well as his supposed “betrayal” of his early commitments due to his existential desire for Western recognition of Japan’s greatness. The book ends with an analysis of the complex relation between liberalism and progress in the East Asian context. ​

The field of political science has not given sufficient attention to pedagogy. This book outlines why this is a problem and promotes a more reflective and self-critical form of political science pedagogy. To this end, the author examines innovative work on radical pedagogy such as critical race theory and feminist theory as well as more traditional perspectives on political science pedagogy. Bridging the divide between this research and scholarship on both teaching and learning opens the prospect of a critical, radical and utopian form of political science pedagogy. With chapters on Socrates, Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, Leo Strauss, Sheldon S. Wolin, e-learning, and a prison field trip, this book outlines a new path for political science pedagogy.