Many political scientists have hailed the apparent existence of Democratic Peace—the absence of wars between democracies—as proof that a world of democracies would be a world without war. This idea challenges traditional approaches to international politics, which focus on the balance of power between states regardless of their political systems. It also has important implications for world politics, especially as President Clinton has made the promotion of democracy a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy on the grounds that democracies never fight each other.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was one of the most important political philosophers of our century. Now, twenty years after her death, this collection of fifteen essays brings her work into dialogue with those philosophical views that are at center stage today—in critical theory, communitarianism, virtue theory, and feminism. An extensive bibliography of work on Arendt in English is included as an appendix.
THE ESSAYS
- Hannah Arendt as a Conservative Thinker - Margaret Canovan
In 1795 Immanuel Kant published an essay entitled "Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch." The immediate occasion for the essay was the March 1795 signing of the Treaty of Basel by Prussia and revolutionary France, which Kant condemned as only "the suspension of hostilities, not a peace." In the essay, Kant argues that it is humankind's immediate duty to solve the problem of violence and enter into the cosmopolitan ideal of a universal community of all peoples governed by the rule of law.
This collection of ten essays offers the first systematic assessment of Jürgen Habermas's Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, a book that defended the rational potential of the modern age against the depiction of modernity as a spent epoch. The essays (of which four are newly commissioned, five were published in the journal Praxis International, and one—by Habermas—first appeared in translation in New Critique) are divided into two sections: Critical Rejoinders and Thematic Reformulations.
Winner, 1996 Elaine and David Spitz Book Prize for the best book on liberal and democratic theory, Conference for the Study of Political Thought. Winner, 1994 First Book Prize, Foundations of Political Thought Organized Section, American Political Science Association.
In this sweeping challenge to the postmodern critiques of psychoanalysis, Joel Whitebook argues for a reintegration of Freud's uncompromising investigation of the unconscious with the political and philosophical insights of critical theory. Perversion and Utopia follows in the tradition of Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and Paul Ricoeur's Freud and Philosophy.
How do social structures and group behaviors arise from the interaction of individuals? Growing Artificial Societies approaches this question with cutting-edge computer simulation techniques. Fundamental collective behaviors such as group formation, cultural transmission, combat, and trade are seen to "emerge" from the interaction of individual agents following a few simple rules.
In this pathbreaking study, Axel Honneth argues that "the struggle for recognition" is, and should be, at the center of social conflicts. Moving smoothly between moral philosophy and social theory, Honneth offers insights into such issues as the social forms of recognition and nonrecognition, the moral basis of interaction in human conflicts, the relation between the recognition model and conceptions of modernity, the normative basis of social theory, and the possibility of mediating between Hegel and Kant.
Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative as Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism and everyday life in the late twentieth cenlury.
