Political Theory & Philosophy

Zack draws on empirical pragmatism to define applicative justice, because ‘Rawlsian ideal theorizing has nothing to offer for correcting real life injustice.’ The approach is based on Arthur Bentley’s claims in The Process of Government (1908) that just law can coexist with unjust practices, and that institutions and rules are nothing more than the actual realizations associated with them. A central example is the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights promotion of a ‘general equality principle,’ which has not been a serious interest to world leaders. Applicative justice is the ‘extension of received functions of ordinary justice under ordinary law, to those who have been denied them in modern democratic societies.’ A barrier to achieving this is facing the delusion of the power of academic speech to change reality, and that social construction of race ‘may require the kind of faith found in activists within the black prophetic tradition.’. . .An excellent supplemental text for any course on justice.

Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

George Bragues’s well-written and thoroughly researched book is a much needed reminder to economists and others that there are thinkers before Adam Smith whose work is relevant to the case for capitalism. By also focusing on the pre-modern concern for community and other values often neglected in more modern arguments, Bragues helpfully expands the case for capitalism by emphasizing the importance of elements of human behavior other than self-interest.

This book probes the extreme variation in discourses on violence and punishment. Its comprehensive examination brings together normative political-theoretical discourses on punishment, historical changes in violence and punishment, and perspectives on punishment from political powers, world religions, literature and film, criminology, and theodicy.

In this book, Lucy Jane Ward argues that although contemporary scholarship tends to divide Agnes Heller's work chronologically in terms of her “Marxist” and subsequent “post-Marxist” periods, a closer reading reveals her work as a continuing engagement both with and against Marx's idea of the human being rich in need.

Freedom and Political Order: Traditional American Thought and Practice is an ambitious and thoughtful work of political philosophy by one of America’s greatest political theorists. This book is not only an indispensable resource for scholars, it’s a guide for understanding and thinking further about the relationship between liberty and politics. This book is a gem.

In a fine and unusually comprehensive analysis of honor in Tocqueville, Laurie Johnson shows how Tocqueville understood the sense of honor to shape American life in domains ranging from politics, business, and the military to family, religion, and race relations. The book makes an effective case for the continuing value of honor in liberal democratic societies today, and helps us envision a uniquely American code of honor attuned to the demands of our contemporary times.

Just Liberal Violence offers a much needed, carefully developed and highly original critique of the inadequacies of contemporary thinking about violence. Michael Neu masterfully succeeds where most academics fail, writing eloquently about topics of utmost political concern without sacrificing complexity and nuance. This engaging book is political theory at its very best: scholarly, but not scholastic; combative, but not polemical; timely, but not faddish. Anybody interested in understanding and responding to violence will have something to learn from it.

What criteria should determine which states the international community recognizes? Should we set strict minimum standards or be flexible in the interest of bringing lagging states along in their progress toward justice? Should we recognize states that have seceded from other states, and under what conditions? These are the weighty questions Naticchia (California State Univ., San Bernardino) addresses in this work. Beginning from a starting point of John Rawls’s Law of Peoples, the author first provides a multichapter review of the criticism of Rawls’s social contract theory of international justice. The author concedes much of the criticism and, as a solution, seeks to transform Law of Peoples into a theory of state recognition rather than of international justice. While the review of criticism may be useful to the unfamiliar, it is a lengthy and arguably unnecessary windup for a project that stands on its own merits. That is, the author largely succeeds in creating a Rawlsian theory of recognition. He does so, insightfully, by placing recognition in the realm of Rawls’s nonideal theory for, if the community of nations were operating in the ideal realm, the question of recognition would be moot. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

This engaging yet deeply serious book deploys great literature to illuminate perennial political issues in the service of discovering the possibilities and limits of politics.  The writing is lucid and conversational in the mode of a first-rate teacher.  Its intention is to involve diverse readers in the shared joy of discovery, and there’s no superfluous scholarly baggage or pointless critical vanity.  A huge amount of insight is displayed on remarkably few pages.  The book deserves a wide audience, and I predict it will, in fact, find a place in many classes on politics and literature.

Pemberton uses original archival research and historically informed secondary scholarship to produce an insightful study of the relationship between Locke’s philosophically grounded writings on the origins of government and his role as adviser for imperial policy as a member of the Board of Trade. By examining the issues of piracy, penal slavery, and forced military service (especially naval impressment), she notes the tensions in Locke’s commitment to representative government and liberty and his strong advocacy of colonial settlement in the Americas that required the accoutrements of imperial power. Intersecting this tension was the felt need to turn the unemployed poor into productive citizens, using inducements and coercion to people the colonies with the labor of indentured servants. Locke’s agriculturalist theory of property, combined with his natural law theory of the commons, led to his defense of open seas and advocacy of international treaties to address issues of natural and domestic law jurisdictional conflicts. Locke’s writings on the oceans echo today in discussions of piracy, the extension of national sovereignty far into the ocean beds, and the defense of open international waters. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Koch (Appalachian State Univ.) provides a productive account of a materialist tradition within Continental philosophy. In lieu of the common narrative regarding Continental philosophy, which highlights the phenomenological tradition, Koch sheds light on an equally valuable tradition of materialist thought. Emphasizing (aspects of) materialism in Kant, Marx, Weber, Nietzsche, and the poststructuralists, he offers a contrast to the empiricist tradition of Hobbes and Hume as well as both positivism and phenomenology. He also takes Darwin to be a contributor to this tradition and gives his reader a concise defense for this. Scholars working in social theory, political theory, sociopolitical philosophy, and Continental philosophy will appreciate Koch’s exploration of materialism. More specifically, this book will be worthwhile for those interested in the divide between metaphysics and epistemology, the functions of consciousness, or the conditions for cognition. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

What if Brazil, or more generally the South, could be taken seriously in re-conceptualizing global neoliberalism—its domination and resistances? In their brilliant and thought-provoking book, Cocco and Cava offer a strong theoretical and political framework to move beyond multicultural and dialectical traps by convincingly arguing for the centrality of subjectivities and the body as the exit from biopower.

Anxiety is arguably more fundamental to the human condition than any other emotion or affect. Yet we know comparatively little about its specificities. This book theorizes anxiety beyond the limits of 20th century psychoanalysis, and offers a novel approach to the politics of anxiety, demonstrating not just the dangers but potentials of anxiety for political subjects of the present.

Ismail Kurun’s book fills a gap in the literature on the emergence of liberalism.

The author both situates us within the context of the philosophical tradition and opens us up to questions concerning our destiny as humans. This book is both well-conceived and elegantly written, and although it will find much interest among political scientists, political philosophers and those interested in the philosophy of science and technology, it also will be found accessible by generally informed, curious and concerned readers.