- Achieving Our Country
- Richard Rorty
- Must the sins of America's past poison its hope for the future? Lately the American Left, withdrawing into the ivied halls of academe to rue the nation's shame, has answered yes in both word and deed. In Achieving Our Country, one of America's foremost philosophers challenges this lost generation of the Left to understand the role it might play in the great tradition of democratic intellectual labor that started with writers like Walt Whitman and John Dewey.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 1999
- The Anatomy of Antiliberalism
- Stephen Holmes
- How has liberalism, the grand democratic ideal, come to be a dirty word? This book shows us what antiliberalism means in the modern world--where it comes from, whom it serves, and why it speaks with such a forceful, if ever changing, voice.
- Hardcover 1993 / Paperback
- Arguing the Just War in Islam
- John Kelsay
- Jihad, with its many terrifying associations, is a term widely used today, though its meaning is poorly grasped. Kelsay's timely and important work focuses on jihad of the sword in Islamic thought, history, and culture. Making use of original sources, Kelsay delves into the tradition of shari'a--Islamic jurisprudence and reasoning--and shows how it defines jihad as the Islamic analogue of the Western "just" war.
- Hardcover 2007
- The Case against Perfection
- Michael J. Sandel
- Genetic breakthroughs present us with a promise but also with a predicament: is it wrong to re-engineer our nature? Sandel explores this and other moral quandaries surrounding the quest to perfect ourselves and our children. He concludes that the pursuit of perfection is flawed for reasons that go beyond safety and fairness. The drive to enhance human nature through genetic technologies is objectionable because it represents a bid for mastery that fails to appreciate human achievements.
- Hardcover 2007
- Citizens and Citoyens
- Mark Hulliung
- Hulliung argues that the standard American account of a continuous Jacobin republican tradition--"illiberal to the core"--is fatally misleading. In reality it was the nineteenth-century French liberals who undermined the cause of liberalism, and it was French republicans who eventually saved liberal ideals.
- Hardcover 2002
- Conflict of Interest in American Public Life
- Andrew Stark
- Ranging over a wide array of cases, Andrew Stark draws on legal, moral, and political thought--as well as the rhetoric of officeholders and the commentary of journalists--to analyze several decades of debate over conflict of interest in American public life. He offers new ways of interpreting the controversies about conflict of interest, explains their prominence in American political combat, and suggests how we might make them less venomous and intractable.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2003
- Culture and Equality
- Brian Barry
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2002
- The Decent Society
- Avishai Margalit
- Naomi Goldblum, Translator
- How to be decent, how to build a decent society, emerges out of Margalit's analysis of the corrosive functioning of humiliation in its many forms. This is a deeply felt book that springs from Margalit's experience at the borderlands of conflicts between Eastern Europeans and Westerners, between Palestinians and Israelis.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1998
- Democracy's Discontent
- Michael J. Sandel
- In a searching account of current controversies over morality in politics, Michael Sandel discovers that we suffer from an impoverished vision of citizenship and community. Democracy's Discontent provides a new interpretation of the American political and constitutional tradition that offers hope of rejuvenating our civic life.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1998
- Development As a Human Right
- A Nobel Book
- Edited by Bård A. Andreassen
- Edited by Stephen P. Marks
- Foreword by Louise Arbour
- Drawing on the papers presented at the Nobel Symposium on The Right to Development and Human Rights in Development, this book contains chapters on the conceptual underpinnings of development as a human right, the national dimensions of this right, and the role of international institutions. The contributors explore the meaning and practical implications of human rights-based approaches to economic development and ask what this relationship may add to our understanding and thinking about human and global development.
- Paperback 2007
- The Disorder of Political Inquiry
- Keith Topper
- Engaging the work of thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Pierre Bourdieu, Roy Bhaskar, and Hannah Arendt, as well as recent literature in political science and the history and philosophy of science, Topper proposes a pluralist, normative, and broadly pragmatist conception of political inquiry, one that is analytically rigorous yet alive to the notorious vagaries, idiosyncrasies, and messy uncertainties of political life.
- Hardcover 2005
- Empire
- Michael Hardt
- Antonio Negri
- Imperialism as we knew it may be no more, but Empire is alive and well. It is, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri demonstrate in this bold work, the new political order of globalization. Their book shows how this emerging Empire is fundamentally different from the imperialism of European dominance and capitalist expansion in previous eras. Rather, today's Empire draws on elements of U.S. constitutionalism, with its tradition of hybrid identities and expanding frontiers. More than analysis, Empire is also an unabashedly utopian work of political philosophy.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2001
- Experiments in Ethics
- Kwame Anthony Appiah
- Appiah explores how the new empirical moral psychology relates to the age-old project of philosophical ethics. In this study, he urges that the relation between empirical research and morality, now so often antagonistic, should be seen in terms of dialogue, not contest. And he shows how experimental philosophy, far from being something new, is actually as old as philosophy itself.
- Hardcover 2008
- Fanon's Dialectic of Experience
- Ato Sekyi-Otu
- A Caribbean psychiatrist trained in France after World War II and an eloquent observer of the effects of French colonialism on its subjects, Frantz Fanon was a controversial figure. By recognizing the centrality of experience to Fanon's work, Sekyi-Otu enables readers to comprehend this much misunderstood figure within the tradition of political philosophy.
- Paperback 1997 / Hardcover 1997
- Foundations of Hegel's Social Theory
- Frederick Neuhouser
- Frederick Neuhouser's task is to understand the conceptions of freedom on which Hegel's social theory rests and to show how they ground his arguments in defense of the modern social world. In doing so, the author focuses on Hegel's most important and least understood contribution to social philosophy, the idea of "social freedom." In addressing these concepts, the book aims not only to interpret Hegel correctly but also to demonstrate the richness and power that his vision of the rational social order possesses.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2003
- Frontiers of Justice
- Martha C. Nussbaum
- Theories of social justice, addressing the world and its problems, must respond to the real and changing dilemmas of the day. A brilliant work of practical philosophy, Frontiers of Justice is dedicated to this proposition. Taking up three urgent problems of social justice--those with physical and mental disabilities, all citizens of the world, and nonhuman animals--neglected by current theories and thus harder to tackle in practical terms and everyday life, Martha Nussbaum seeks a theory of social justice that can guide us to a richer, more responsive approach to social cooperation.
- Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2007
- A Hacker Manifesto
- McKenzie Wark
- Drawing in equal measure on Debord and Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons.
- Hardcover 2004
- If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?
- G. A. Cohen
- Focusing on Marxism and Rawlsian liberalism, G. A. Cohen argues that egalitarian justice is not only a matter of rules that define the structure of society, but also a matter of personal attitude and choice. Personal attitude and choice are, moreover, the stuff of which social structure itself is made. Those truths have not informed political philosophy as much as they should, and Cohen's focus on them brings political philosophy closer to moral philosophy, and to the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition, than it has recently been.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2001
- In a Dark Time
- Robert Jay Lifton, Editor
- Nicholas Humphrey, Editor
- This is an anthology for the nuclear age, created by two psychologists who have ordered their material so that the successive selections reflect and comment on one another, compelling the reader to think about the insanity of war. This book draws on thoughts and writings from more than two millennia: poets from Sappho to Robert Lowell, dreamers from Saint John the Divine to Martin Luther King, Jr., statesmen from Seneca to Winston Churchill, soldiers, churchmen, writers, leaders.
- Hardcover 1984 / Paperback
- Jealousy of Trade
- Istvan Hont
- This collection explores eighteenth-century theories of international market competition that continue to be relevant for the twenty-first century. "Jealousy of trade" refers to a particular conjunction between politics and the economy that emerged when success in international trade became a matter of the military and political survival of nations. Today, it would be called "economic nationalism," and in this book Hont connects the commercial politics of nationalism and globalization in the eighteenth century to theories of commercial society and Enlightenment ideas of the economic limits of politics.
- Hardcover 2005
- Judging Under Uncertainty
- Adrian Vermeule
- In this book, Adrian Vermeule shows that any approach to legal interpretation rests on institutional and empirical premises about the capacities of judges and the systemic effects of their rulings. He argues that legal interpretation is above all an exercise in decisionmaking under severe empirical uncertainty. In view of their limited information and competence, judges should adopt a restrictive, unambitious set of tools for interpreting statutory and constitutional provisions.
- Hardcover 2006
- Just Work
- Russell Muirhead
- This elegant essay on the justice of work focuses on the fit between who we are and the kind of work we do. Muirhead shows how the common hope for work that fulfills us involves more than personal interest; it also points to larger understandings of a just society. We are defined in part by the jobs we hold, and Muirhead has something important to say about the partial satisfactions of the working life, and the increasingly urgent need to balance the claims of work against those of family and community.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2007
- Justice as Fairness
- John Rawls
- Erin Kelly, Editor
- This book originated as lectures for a course on political philosophy that Rawls taught regularly at Harvard University in the 1980s. In time the lectures became a restatement of his theory of justice as fairness, revised in light of his more recent papers and his treatise Political Liberalism (1993).
- Paperback 2001 / Hardcover 2001
- Justice, Luck, and Knowledge
- S. L. Hurley
- Key contemporary discussions of distributive justice have formulated egalitarian approaches in terms of responsibility. But this approach, Hurley contends, has ignored the way our understanding of responsibility constrains the roles it can actually play within distributive justice. While responsibility might help specify what to distribute, it cannot tell us how to distribute; thus, Hurley argues, responsibility cannot tell us to distribute in an egalitarian pattern in particular. It can, however, play other important roles in a theory of justice, in relation to incentive-seeking behavior and well-being.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2005
- The Law of Peoples
- John Rawls
- The Law of Peoples extends the idea of a social contract to the Society of Peoples and lays out the general principles that can and should be accepted as the standard for regulating a society's behavior toward another. In particular, it draws a crucial distinction between basic human rights and the rights of each citizen of a liberal constitutional democracy. Rawls explores the terms under which such a society may appropriately wage war against an "outlaw society," and discusses the moral grounds for rendering assistance to non-liberal societies burdened by unfavorable political and economic conditions.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2001
- Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy
- Richard A. Posner
- Richard Posner argues for a conception of the liberal state based on pragmatic theories of government. He views the actions of elected officials as guided by interests rather than by reason and the decisions of judges by discretion rather than by rules. He emphasizes the institutional and material, rather than moral and deliberative, factors in democratic decision making. Posner argues that democracy is best viewed as a competition for power by means of regular elections. Citizens should not be expected to play a significant role in making complex public policy regarding, say, taxes or missile defense.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2005
- Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy
- John Rawls
- Edited by Samuel Freeman
- This last book by the late John Rawls offers readers an account of the liberal political tradition. Constantly revised and refined over three decades, Rawls's lectures on various historical figures reflect his developing and changing views on the history of liberalism and democracy. With its clear and careful analyses of the doctrine of the social contract, utilitarianism, and socialism, this volume has a critical place in the traditions it expounds.
- Hardcover 2007 / Paperback 2008
- Leibniz’ "Universal Jurisprudence
- Patrick Riley
- Although Leibniz is universally regarded as the greatest German philosopher before Kant, his work as a political and moral philosopher is almost entirely neglected in the English-speaking world. Patrick Riley recovers this crucial part of Leibniz' thought and activity.
- Hardcover 1996
- Liberalism with Honor
- Sharon R. Krause
- Hardcover 2002
- The Modern Self in the Labyrinth
- Eyal Chowers
- This book explores the distinct historical-political imagination of the self in the twentieth century and advances two arguments. First, it suggests that we should read the history of modern political philosophy afresh in light of a theme that emerges in the late eighteenth century: the rift between self and social institutions. Second, it argues that this rift was reformulated in the twentieth century in a manner that contrasts with the optimism of nineteenth-century thinkers regarding its resolution. It proposes a new political imagination of the twentieth century found in the works of Weber, Freud, and Foucault, and characterizes it as one of "entrapment."
- Hardcover 2004
- Moral Dimensions
- T. M. Scanlon
- Scanlon reframes current philosophical debates as he explores the moral permissibility of an action. Blame, he argues, is a response to the meaning of an action rather than its permissibility. This analysis leads to a novel account of the conditions of moral responsibility and to important conclusions about the ethics of blame.
- Hardcover 2009
- Nietzsche
- Peter Berkowitz
- Nietzsche has come to be revered by postmodern thinkers as one of their founding fathers, a prophet of human liberation who broke radically with traditional forms of morality and philosophy. Peter Berkowitz challenges this new orthodoxy, asserting that it produces a one-dimensional picture of Nietzsche's philosophical explorations and passes by much of what is provocative and problematic in his thought.
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover
- On Voluntary Servitude
- Michael Rosen
- Michael Rosen diagnoses the underlying question to which the theory of ideology was meant to provide the answer: "Why do people accept forms of political domination which it is against their interests to accept?" This book provides a historical and critical analysis of that answer.
- Hardcover 1996
- Political Conduct
- Mark Philp
- This book explores how the processes and practices of politics shape political values such as liberty, justice, equality, and democracy. Mining the history of political episodes and political thinkers, including Caesar and Machiavelli, Philp argues that it is through political activity that "values are articulated and embraced, and they become powerful motivating forces."
- Hardcover 2007
- Politics of Nature
- Bruno Latour
- Translated by Catherine Porter
- This book establishes the conceptual context for political ecology--transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Latour proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society--and the constitution, in its place, of a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced.
- Paperback 2004 / Hardcover 2004
- Principles of Social Justice
- David Miller
- Social justice has been the animating ideal of democratic governments throughout the twentieth century. Even those who oppose it recognize its potency. Yet the meaning of social justice remains obscure, and existing theories have failed to capture the way people in general think about issues of social justice. David Miller develops a new theory and argues that principles of justice must be understood contextually, with each principle finding its natural home in a different form of human association.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2001
- Public Philosophy
- Michael J. Sandel
- Liberals often worry that inviting moral and religious argument into the public sphere runs the risk of intolerance and coercion. These essays respond to that concern by showing that substantive moral discourse is not at odds with progressive public purposes, and that a pluralist society need not shrink from engaging the moral and religious convictions that its citizens bring to public life.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006
- Reconstructing Public Reason
- Eric A. MacGilvray
- Can a liberal polity act on pressing matters of public concern in a way that respects the variety of beliefs and commitments that its citizens hold? Recent efforts to answer this question typically begin by seeking an uncontroversial starting point from which legitimate public ends can be said to follow. MacGilvray argues that we should shift our attention away from the problem of identifying uncontroversial public ends in the present and toward the problem of evaluating potentially controversial public ends through collective inquiry over time.
- Hardcover 2004
- Rescuing Justice and Equality
- G. A. Cohen
- In this work of political philosophy, Cohen sets out to rescue the egalitarian thesis that in a society where distributive justice prevails, people’s material prospects are roughly equal. Arguing against the Rawlsian version of a just society, Cohen demonstrates that distributive justice does not tolerate deep inequality.
- Hardcover 2008
- Saving Persuasion
- Bryan Garsten
- In Saving Persuasion, Bryan Garsten uncovers the early modern origins of today's suspicious attitude toward rhetoric and seeks to loosen its grip on contemporary political theory. He argues that the artful practice of persuasion ought to be viewed as a crucial part of democratic politics. Against theorists who advocate a rationalized ideal of deliberation aimed at consensus, Garsten argues that a controversial politics of partiality and passion can produce a more engaged and more deliberative kind of democratic discourse.
- Hardcover 2006
- A Short History of Distributive Justice
- Samuel Fleischacker
- Fleischacker argues that guaranteeing aid to the poor is a modern idea, developed only in the last two centuries. To attribute a longer pedigree to distributive justice is to fail to distinguish between justice and charity. By examining major writings in ancient, medieval, and modern political philosophy, Fleischacker shows how we arrived at the contemporary meaning of distributive justice.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2005
- Sovereign Virtue
- Ronald Dworkin
- Ronald Dworkin argues that equality, freedom, and individual responsibility are not in conflict, but flow from and into one another as facets of the same humanist conception of life and politics. Grounding his well-known thesis that true equality means equality in the value of the resources that each person commands, not in the success he or she achieves, Dworkin applies his principles to heated contemporary controversies such as the distribution of health care, affirmative action, assisted suicide, and genetic engineering.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002
- Theories of Distributive Justice
- John E. Roemer
- John Roemer has written a unique book that critiques economists' conceptions of justice from a philosophical perspective and philosophical theories of distributive justice from an economic one.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1998
- A Theory of Justice
- John Rawls
- Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book. Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published.
- Paperback 1999 / Hardcover 1999
- A Theory of Justice
- John Rawls
- Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.
- Paperback 2005
- The Two Faces of Justice
- Jiwei Ci
- In this book, Jiwei Ci explores the dual nature of justice, in an attempt to make unitary sense of key features of justice reflected in its close relation to resentment, punishment, and forgiveness. He probes the human psychology of justice to understand what motivates moral agents who seek to behave justly, and why their desire to be just is as precarious as it is uplifting. The Two Faces of Justice can also be read as a remarkably discerning contribution to the Western discourse on justice.
- Hardcover 2006
- We Who Are Dark
- Tommie Shelby
- We Who Are Dark provides the first extended philosophical defense of black political solidarity. Tommie Shelby argues that we can reject a biological idea of race and agree with many criticisms of identity politics yet still view black political solidarity as a needed emancipatory tool. In developing his defense of black solidarity, he draws on the history of black political thought, focusing on the canonical figures of Martin R. Delany and W. E. B. Du Bois.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2007
- What We Owe to Each Other
- T. M. Scanlon
- How do we judge whether an action is morally right or wrong? If an action is wrong, what reason does that give us not do it? Why should we give such reasons priority over our other concerns and values? In this book, T. M. Scanlon offers new answers to these questions, as they apply to the central part of morality that concerns what we owe to each other.
- Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2000