2nd Edition
Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Social and Political Theory
The triangular relationship between the social, the political, and the cultural has opened up social and political theory to new challenges. The social can no longer be reduced to the category of society, and the political extends beyond the traditional concerns of the nature of the state and political authority.
This Handbook will address a range of issues that have recently emerged from the disciplines of social and political theory, focusing on key themes as opposed to schools of thought or major theorists. It is divided into three sections which address:
- the most influential theoretical traditions that have emerged from the legacy of the twentieth century
- the most important new and emerging frameworks of analysis today
- the major theoretical problems in recent social and political theory
The Second edition is an enlarged, revised, and updated version of the first edition, which was published in 2011 and comprised 42 chapters. The new edition consists of 50 chapters, of which seventeen are entirely new chapters covering topics that have become increasingly prominent in social and political theory in recent years, such as populism, the new materialism, postcolonialism, Deleuzean theory, post-humanism, post-capitalism as well as older topics that were not covered in the first edition, such as Arendt, the gift, critical realism, anarchism. All chapters retained from the first edition have been thoroughly revised and updated.
The Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Social and Political Theory encompasses the most up-to-date developments in contemporary social and political theory, and as such is an essential research tool for both undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as researchers working in the fields of political theory, social and political philosophy, contemporary social theory, and cultural theory.
Introduction
Stephen P. Turner and Gerard Delanty
PART 1: LIVING TRADITIONS
1. Foucault and the Promise of Power without Dogma
Gary Wickham and B.B. Bieganski
2. Pierre Bourdieu and His Legacy
Marcel Fournier
3. Lacanian Theory: Ideology, Enjoyment and the Spirits of Capitalism
Yannis Stavrakakis
4. The Marxist Legacy
Peter Beilharz
5. Critical Race Theory
Patricia Hill Collins
6. Feminist Social and Political Theory
Claire Colebrook
7. Accidental Conditions: The Social Consequences of Poststructuralist Philosophy
Thomas Docherty
8. Critical Theory Today: Legacies and New Directions
Gerard Delanty and Neal Harris
9. Pragmatism and Political Theory
Robert B. Talisse
10. Lessons from Twentieth Century Political Philosophy before Rawls
Jeremy Sheamur
11. Liberalism after Communitarianism
Charles Blattberg
12. Republicanism: Non-domination and the Free State
Richard Bellamy
13. Marcel Gauchet and the Crisis of European Democracy
Natalie J. Doyle
14. A Journey Through Latin American Social and Political Thought
Aurea Mota
15. Intellectuals and Society: Sociological and Historical Perspectives
Patrick Baert and Joel Isaac
16. Power and Violence in the Political Thought of Hannah Arendt
Philip Walsh
PART 2: NEW AND EMERGING FRAMEWORKS
17. Anarchist Social and Political Theory
Ruth Kinna
18. Deleuze, Guattari, and the Concept of Social Assemblage
Jay Conway
19. Critical Realism
Dave Elder-Vass
20. Power, Legitimacy and Authority
Stuart Clegg
21. Environment and Risk
Timothy W. Luke
22. Modernity in Social and Political Theory: Correcting Misunderstandings
Peter Wagner
23. Social and Political Trust
Karen S. Cook and Brian D. Cook
24. From Linguistic Performativity to Social Performance
Maria Lloyd
25. Nationalism and Social Theory: The Distinction between Community and Society
Steven Grosby
26. Empire and Imperialism
Krishan Kumar
27. Cosmopolitanism: Roots and Diversities
David Inglis
28. From Friction to Fruition: Social Theory Meets Postcolonial Studies
Sérgio Costa
29. Nature and Society
Byron Kaldis
30. The Cognitive and Metacognitive Dimensions of Social and Political Theory
Piet Strydom
31. Cognitive Neuroscience and the Theory and Practice of Social and Political Inquiry
John G. Gunnell
32. Humanism, Anti-humanism, Posthumanism
Daniel Chernilo
33. Contemporary Chinese Social and Political Thought
Guanjun Wu
PART 3: NEW PROBLEMS
34. Sovereignty, Security and the Exception: Bare Life in a Pandemic Time
Sheila Nair
35. The Future of the State
Georg Sørensen
36. Modern Constitutionalism under Challenge
Paul Blokker
37. Social Theory and European Integration
William Outhwaite
38. The Limits of Power and the Complexity of Powerlessness: The Case of Immigration
Saskia Sassen
39. Transnational Activisms and the Global Justice Movement
Donatella della Porta and Raffaele Marchetti
40. The Transnational Social Question
Thomas Faist
41. Social Suffering and the New Politics of Sentimentality
Iain Wilkinson
42. Memory Practices and Theory in a Global Age
Daniel Levy
43. The Gift Paradigm
Frank Adloff
44. Postcapitalism: The Return of Radical Critique
Albena Azmanova
45. Populism: The Concept and the Polemic
Filipe Carreira da Silva and Mónica Brito Vieira
46. New Materialism(s)
Geoff Pfeifer
47. Political Theology
Saul Newman
48. Theories of Violence
Larry Ray
49. Universalism, Human Rights and Islamic Relativism
Mehdi Zakerian
50. Animals in Social and Political Theory
Alasdair Cochrane and Krithika Srinivasan
Biography
Gerard Delanty is Professor of Sociology and Social and Political Thought at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. His most recent publication is Critical Theory and Social Transformation (2020) and, as editor, Pandemics, Society and Politics (2021).
Stephen P. Turner is currently Distinguished University Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of South Florida, USA. His books include Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Society in an Age of Experts (2003) and essays collected in The Politics of Expertise (2013). He has also written extensively on Max Weber, especially on politics, on Carl Schmitt, and on the politics of science and science policy.
