Postmodern Revisionings Of The Political

A challenging reassessment of the concepts and institutions of modern liberal democracy in the light of postmodern theory and the politics of difference.

Working through the issue of representation, in art forms from fiction to photography, Linda Hutcheon sets out postmodernism's highly political challenge to the dominant ideologies of the western world.

In his study Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman contrasts the hopes and expectations of the modernising world of the nineteenth century with the real outcomes of the twentieth century, where the very conditions of modernity have led to the mass destruction of humanity and of those early hopes for the betterment of humankind. This volume explores the possibilities left to those once modernising societies, not only in terms of the worlds they have constructed but also in discerning the novel conditions which the closure of modernity entails. That closure, in part the completion of industrialisation and the social order that went with it, and in part the dislocation of the kinds of social knowledge used to understand it, has raised profound and disturbing questions about the character of this brave new world and the ways in which its governance and the goal of the good society can be understood. This volume explores some of the current vicissitudes of modernity, especially in relation to the crises of the political, and the political consequences of new technologies.

The dramatic changes in contemporary European politics associated with the rise of the New Right has created a new political culture which is the subject of this fascinating and informative book. Contemporary Political Culture pioneers the application of the theory of postmodernism to Western political behaviour and political science. Underpinning the book is the observation that fundamental long-term changes in the contours of European political culture explain the rise of the new politics and recent political events. The authors offer a critical analysis of traditional theories, models and accounts of political culture, and -- an evaluation of the two contending contemporary explanatory models, postmodernism and po

The Politics of Postmodernity outlines in a clear and coherent manner the implications for political theory that are inherent in philosophical hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is not only a general theory of human understanding, it is also, in terms of its practical consequences, a general Theory of Democracy. This book demonstrates, with reference to current debates, how hermeneutical theory provides the ultimate philosophical justification for democratic practice and universal human rights. One of the book's most significant features is the way in which it attempts to work through postmodernism and the way in which throughout it shows how hermeneutics, while fully a form of `postmodern' thought, is nevertheless distinctive in this regard in eschewing all forms of relativism and in resolutely defending a nonessentialist universalism. This book will be of interest to all those concerned with the fate of the core values traditionally defended by philosophy and, indeed, with the future of philosophy itself after postmodernity.

A work of political theory with a focus on questions of strategy that examines the politics of the New Left in the 1960s, showing how its expressivism led to political division and also prepared the ground for postmodernism. It shows also how the political economy of academic life in an increasingly commodified society strengthened the basis of postmodernism. Develops a brilliant account of a Marxism that sets itself the task of building a collective political subject capable of challenging capitalism in its moment of global crisis. [publisher web site].