L Europe Sous Les Mots

Publisher Description

Jorg Friedrich presents an important new introduction to the existence and relevance of European approaches to IR theory and sets an agenda for the progressive development of a 'Eurodiscipline' of IR studies.

Since the Maastricht ratification debate of the early 1990s, the legitimacy of the European Union has become a subject of controversy. With unprecedented force, Europeans have begun to question the need for deeper integration. Some fear threats to established national identities, while others perceive the emergence of a distant but powerful Brussels, beyond the reach of democratic control. Legitimacy and the European Union breaks with established approaches to the problem of the legitimacy of the European Union by focusing on the recent trend towards reconceptualization of the EU not as a superstate or an organization of states, but as a multi-level, contested polity without precedent. The book examines the implications of this reconceptualization for the problem of legitimacy. Individual chapters focus on policy areas, institutions and identity politics. Taken together, they reach two main conclusions. While Europeans do not strongly identify with the EU, they increasingly recognize it as a framework for politics alongside existing national and subnational structures. And while the EU lacks central democratic institutions, the integration process has spawned significant informal and pluralist forms of representation. Rethinking recognition and representation ouside the context of the nation state points to important, if little understood, actual and potential sources of EU legitimacy.

The International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS) is an essential tool for librarians, academics and researchers wishing to be kept up to date with the published literature in the social sciences. IBSS is compiled in four divisions; Anthropology, Sociology, Economics, and Political Science. This is Volume XXIX of the International bibliography of political science as of 1980.

The term of governance and the way it has been used by European institutions have elicited much interest in the academic world. However, the notion and its uses have often been studied only in terms of intellectual development or network analysis. Such researches leave us in the dark on a key question. What meaning does this concept actually hold to the actors involved? To what degree do they have a shared definition of the term? Does “European governance” work as a self-fulfilling prophecy, structuring the space of the EU and the practices of its actors?

An examination of the ways in which the French Left adapted, through a series of transformations, to the exigencies of presidentialism and the myths which underpin it. The study aims to illustrate the crucial role played by language in the political practice of representative democracy.

The study of ideology has traditionally been concerned not only with political ideas and doctrines, but also with the ways in which social relations are sustained through the representation of institutions and events. These traditional concerns have been transformed in recent years by investigations into the nature of language and its role in social life. Exploring the links between language and ideology has become one of the most pressing tasks of social and political analysis. In this volume John B. Thompson examines some of the outstanding contemporary contributions to the study of ideology. He focuses primarily on European social theorists and philosophers, providing concise and critical appraisals of their work. In addition to asessing the contributions of well-known thinkers, such as Jurgen Habermas and Paul Ricoeur, Thompson introduces the reader to a rich variety of authors who habe been neglected in the English-speaking world: Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Pecheux, Jean Pierre Faye. This work of these authors ia analyzed with a constructive aim: through a sympathetic assessment of their views, Thompson formulates the elements of a novel account of ideology. By addressing substantive and methodological issues as well as abstract questions of justification and critique, this account seeks to integrate sociological and philosophical considerations in a unified framework for the analysis of ideology. Studies in the Theory of Ideology will be essential reading for anyone intersted in the most important developments in European philosophy and modern social thought. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.