A Radical Philosophy

In this concise introduction, Chad Kautzer demonstrates the shared emancipatory goals and methods of several radical philosophies, from Marxism and feminism to critical race and queer theory. Radical Philosophy examines the relations of theory and practice, knowledge and power, as well as the function of law in creating extralegal forms of domination. Through a critical engagement with the history of philosophy, Kautzer reconstructs important counter-traditions of historical, dialectical, and reflexive forms of critique relevant to contemporary social struggles. The result is an innovative, systematic guide to radical theory and critical resistance.

After 1989 human rights have expanded into a vernacular touching every aspect of social life. They are seen as the key concept in morals and politics and a main tool for forging individual and collective identities. They are the ideology after ‘the end of ideologies’ – the only values left after ‘the end of history’. The response of the left to the rights revolution has been muted and unsure. Classical Marxist critiques of (natural) rights have made the left justly suspicious, and this is still the case today. Elaborating and addressing a series of foundational paradoxes of rights, this book – the third in Costas Douzinas’s human rights trilogy, following The End of Human Rights and Human Rights and Empire – provides a long-overdue re-evaluation of the history and political uses of rights for the left. The book examines the history and philosophy of the (legal) person, the subject, the human and dignity from classical Rome to postmodern Brussels. It traces the gradual abandonment of right, virtue and the common good for individual rights and self-interest. The limited and distorted conception of rights of liberal jurisprudence is contrasted with an alternative that sees rights as a relation involved in the struggle for recognition and an everyday utopia. The right to resistance and revolution, prohibited but regularly returning like the repressed, rescues law from sclerosis and presents a case study of the paradoxical nature of rights. Finally, the book offers a brief examination of law’s encounter with radical politics informed by the author’s strange experience as an ‘accidental’ politician in the first radical left government in Europe. The book’s radical concept of legal philosophy and public law will be of considerable value to legal theorists, political philosophers and anyone with an interest in thinking and acting in ways that go beyond the limits of liberal, and neoliberal, ideology.

Anthology of articles that have appeared in the journal Radical Philosophy. It covers topics in social and moral philosophy which are central to current controversies on the left, engaging with contemporary issues in critical terms.

"In the Shadow of Justice tells the story of how liberal political philosophy was transformed in the second half of the twentieth century under the influence of John Rawls. In this first-ever history of contemporary liberal theory, Katrina Forrester shows how liberal egalitarianism--a set of ideas about justice, equality, obligation, and the state--became dominant, and traces its emergence from the political and ideological context of the postwar United States and Britain. In the aftermath of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, Rawls's A Theory of Justice made a particular kind of liberalism essential to political philosophy. Using archival sources, Forrester explores the ascent and legacy of this form of liberalism by examining its origins in midcentury debates among American antistatists and British egalitarians. She traces the roots of contemporary theories of justice and inequality, civil disobedience, just war, global and intergenerational justice, and population ethics in the 1960s and '70s and beyond. In these years, political philosophers extended, developed, and reshaped this liberalism as they responded to challenges and alternatives on the left and right--from the New International Economic Order to the rise of the New Right. These thinkers remade political philosophy in ways that influenced not only their own trajectory but also that of their critics. Recasting the history of late twentieth-century political thought and providing novel interpretations and fresh perspectives on major political philosophers, In the Shadow of Justice offers a rigorous look at liberalism's ambitions and limits."--

This book treats values as the basis for all of philosophy, an approach distinct from critiquing theories of value and far rarer. "First Philosophy," the effort to justify the foundations for a system of philosophy, is one of the main issues that divide philosophers today. McDonald's philosophy of values is a comprehensive attempt to replace philosophies of "existence," "being," "experience," the "subject," or "language," with a philosophy that locates value as most basic. This transformation is a radical move within Western philosophy as a whole, since it has never been done in such a thoroughgoing way. Hugh P. McDonald makes a comprehensive case against first philosophy as metaphysical, by mounting a case against all metaphysical systems of philosophy. Radical Axiology: A First Philosophy of Values is a fresh start for a rebirth of philosophy. While other movements debate the "death of philosophy," this book radically re-evaluates the direction of philosophy by discovering values at the basis of all philosophy. This reorientation addresses the question of what the love of wisdom can mean for us today.

In Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy—published originally in Japanese and now available in four languages—Kōjin Karatani questions the idealization of ancient Athens as the source of philosophy and democracy by placing the origins instead in Ionia, a set of Greek colonies located in present-day Turkey. Contrasting Athenian democracy with Ionian isonomia—a system based on non-rule and a lack of social divisions whereby equality is realized through the freedom to immigrate—Karatani shows how early Greek thinkers from Heraclitus to Pythagoras were inseparably linked to the isonomia of their Ionian origins, not democracy. He finds in isonomia a model for how an egalitarian society not driven by class antagonism might be put into practice, and resituates Socrates's work and that of his intellectual heirs as the last philosophical attempts to practice isonomia's utopic potentials. Karatani subtly interrogates the democratic commitments of Western philosophy from within and argues that the key to transcending their contradictions lies not in Athenian democracy, with its echoes of imperialism, slavery, and exclusion, but in the openness of isonomia.