This series examines contemporary developments and controversies within political theory and features cutting edge interventions into current debates.
By Azumi Tamura
June 05, 2018
Political disillusionment is widespread in contemporary society. In Japan, the search for the ‘outside’ of a stagnant reality sometimes leads marginalised young people to a disastrous image of social change. The Fukushima nuclear disaster was the realisation of such an image, triggering the largest...
By Jens Borchert, Stephan Lessenich
May 09, 2018
Back in 1972, German political sociologist Claus Offe published a book on the Structural Problems of Late Capitalism which, for almost two decades, inspired and stimulated an international and transdisciplinary debate on the role of the state in contemporary capitalism. An academic debate which, ...
By Henrik Kaare Nielsen
March 22, 2018
Do aesthetic appeals to senses and emotions in political debate necessarily marginalise political reason and reduce citizens to consumers – thus dangerously undermining democracy? Or is sensuous-emotional engagement, on the contrary, a basic fact of the political process and a crucial precondition ...
By Ali Riza Taskale
March 07, 2018
As disciplines, Politics and International Relations remain dominated by ideas drawn from traditions of liberal internationalism and political realism in which political imagination is preoccupied with command and order, rather than with disruption and emancipation. Yet, they have failed to offer ...
By Justin Chandler Mueller
January 24, 2018
The Temporality of Political Obligation offers a critique and reconceptualization of the ways in which our political obligations – what we owe to political authorities and communities, and the reasons why we ought to obey their rules – have been traditionally conceptualized, justified, and ...
By Stephan P. Leher
January 16, 2018
Is it impossible to assess dignity, which is the faculty or agency of autonomy and equality of rights under the current rule of law, when we are met by global challenges like climate change, financial crisis, food crisis, natural disasters, inequality, violent conflicts and trade disputes? Drawing...
By Brian C. Lovato
November 28, 2017
It has been nearly two centuries since Marx famously turned Hegel on his head in order to repurpose dialectics as a revolutionary way of thinking about the internal contradictions of our social relations. Despite critiques from post-structuralists, post-colonialists, and others, there has been a ...
By Greg A. Graham
November 08, 2017
A ground-breaking work in Africana political thought that links the plight of progressive political endeavors in Africa with those in the Diaspora and beyond, Democratic Tragedy in the Postcolony engages with two of the defining political sagas of the postcolonial era. The book presents Michael ...
Edited
By Christian Rostboll, Theresa Scavenius
November 03, 2017
Until recently, discussions of compromise have been largely absent in political theory. However, political theorists have become increasingly interested in understanding the practice and justification of compromise in politics. This interest is connected to the increased concern with pluralism and ...
By Martin Beckstein
October 13, 2017
In recent years, economic life has become increasingly politicized: now, every company has a ‘philosophy’, promising its customers some ethical surplus in return for buying their products; consumers shop for change; workers engage in individualized forms of employee activism such as whistleblowing;...
By A. Kiarina Kordela
October 03, 2017
A. Kiarina Kordela steps beyond extant commentaries on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism—from A. Sohn-Rethel to L. Althusser, É. Balibar, Slavoj Žižek, and others—to show that in capitalism value is the manifestation of the homology between thought and being, while their other aspect—power—is ...
By Kyle Johannsen
October 02, 2017
Conceptual analysis has fallen out of favor in political philosophy. The influence of figures like John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin has led political philosophy to focus on questions about what should be done, and to ignore questions about the usage of words. In this book, Kyle Johannsen calls for ...