Political Categories

Western philosophy has been dominated by the concept or the idea—the belief that there is one sovereign notion or singular principle that can make reality explicable and bring all that exists under its sway. In modern politics, this role is played by ideology. Left, right, or center, political schools of thought share a metaphysics of simplification. We internalize a dominant, largely unnoticeable framework, oblivious to complex, plural, and occasionally conflicting or mutually contradictory explanations for what is the case. In this groundbreaking work, Michael Marder proposes a new methodology for political science and philosophy, one which he terms “categorial thinking.” In contrast to the concept, no category alone can exhaust the meaning of anything: categories are so many folds, complications, respectful of multiplicity. Ranging from classical Aristotelian and Kantian philosophies to phenomenology and contemporary politics, Marder's book offers readers a theoretical toolbox for the interpretation of political phenomena, processes, institutions, and ideas. His categorial apparatus encompasses political temporality and spatiality; the revolutionary and conservative modalities of political actuality, possibility, and necessity; quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of political reality; the meaning of political relations; and various senses of political being. Under this lens, the political appears not as a singular concept but as a family of categories, allowing room for new, plural, and often antagonistic ideas about the state, the people, sovereignty, and power.

Political parties are at the centre of Canadian democracy. They choose our prime ministers, premiers, and candidates for public office; they decide which policy issues are considered in the provincial and federal legislatures; they dominate our election campaigns. As a result, a democracy that is participatory, responsive, and inclusive can only be achieved if Canadian political parties share these values and operate in a manner respecting them. In a concise and accessible manner, this book delves into the history, structure, mechanisms, and roles of Canada's political parties, and assesses the degree to which Canadians today can rely on political parties as vehicles for grassroots participation.

The passage of Citizens United by the Supreme Court in 2010 sparked a renewed debate about campaign spending by large political action committees, or Super PACs. Its ruling said that it is okay for corporations and labor unions to spend as much as they want in advertising and other methods to convince people to vote for or against a candidate. This book provides a wide range of opinions on the issue. Includes primary and secondary sources from a variety of perspectives; eyewitnesses, scientific journals, government officials, and many others.

Although Isaiah Berlin liked to say that he left philosophy for the history of ideas after the Second World War, there is a decided continuity between his more purely philosophical writings, most of which are collected in this volume, and the more historical work for which he is better known. Included here are Berlin's early arguments against logical positivism and later essays which more evidently reflect his life-long interest in political theory, intellectual history and the philosophy of history. In two related pieces he gives his view on the philosopher's task, to uncover the various models - the concepts and categories - that we bring to our experience, and that help to form it. In his own words 'The goal of philosophy is always the same, to assist men to understand themselves and thus operate in the open, and not wildly, in the dark.'

To all of these animals we owe respect for their basic inviolable rights.

The notion of the "impolitical" developed in this volume draws its meaning from the exhaustion of modernity's political categories, which have become incapable of giving voice to any genuinely radical perspective. The impolitical is not the opposite of the political but rather its outer limit: the border from which we might glimpse a trajectory away from all forms of political theology and the depoliticizing tendencies of a completed modernity. The book's reconstruction of the impolitical lineage--which is anything but uniform--begins with the extreme conclusions reached by Carl Schmitt and Romano Guardini in their reflections on the political and then moves through a series of encounters between several great twentieth-century texts: from Hannah Arendt's On Revolution to Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil, to Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power; from Simone Weil's The Need for Roots to Georges Bataille's Sovereignty to Ernst Junger's An der Zeitmauer. The trail forged by this analysis offers a defiant counterpoint to the modern political lexicon, but at the same time a contribution to our understanding of its categories.

The authors interviewed over 5,000 citizens in Germany, Italy, Mexico, Great Britain, and the U.S. to learn political attitudes in modem democratic states. Originally published in 1963. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.