Race Empire And The Idea Of Human Development

In an exciting new study of ideas accompanying the rise of the West, Thomas McCarthy analyzes the ideologies of race and empire that were integral to European-American expansion. He highlights the central role that conceptions of human development (civilization, progress, modernization, and the like) played in answering challenges to legitimacy through a hierarchical ordering of difference. Focusing on Kant and natural history in the eighteenth century, Mill and social Darwinism in the nineteenth, and theories of development and modernization in the twentieth, he proposes a critical theory of development which can counter contemporary neoracism and neoimperialism, and can accommodate the multiple modernities now taking shape. Offering an unusual perspective on the past and present of our globalizing world, this book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of philosophy, political theory, the history of ideas, racial and ethnic studies, social theory, and cultural studies.

In Public Theology and Civil Society, author Paul S. Chung charts the political history of modern democracy and social contract to define the role of Christian public theology in the post-colonial era. Capturing the thought of Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls in reference to the dialectical theory of Hegel and Marx, Chung forges a new model of public theology for today’s society. "Engaging in an expansive conversation with the thought of major figures in philosophy, political economy, and theology, Paul Chung articulates a compelling argument for a public theology that takes seriously our postcolonial context . . . Chung’s prophetic perspective critiques the hierarchical structures and social stratification that threaten civil society, upholding the values of justice, democracy, and peace among the religions. This book constructs a public theology that engages diverse public spheres toward the creation of a more equitable and diverse society." Craig L. Nessan, Professor of Contextual Theology and Ethics, Wartburg Theological Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa "How does political and emancipatory public theology look and function in post-colonial reality? Dr. Chung makes a resounding case for Christian public theology as explicitly ethical theology . . . Dr. Chung’s excavation of some of the root causes and frameworks of oppression invites deep and theologically informed engagement in the affairs of the world." Kirsi Stjerna, Los Angeles/Southwest California Synod Professor of Lutheran History and Theology, Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary of California Lutheran University.

Written by both well-established and rising scholars, Radical Future Pasts seeks to open up new possibilities for theoretical inquiries and engagements with practical political struggles. Unlike conventional "state of the discipline" collections, this volume does not summarize the history of political theory. Rather than accept traditional ideas about the political past, the contributors reinterpret canonical and current texts to demonstrate fresh interpretations and narratives. Led by editors Romand Coles, Mark Reinhardt, and George Shulman, and inspired by the work of Peter Euben, the contributors both explore and exemplify the range and importance of political theory's different genres while concentrating on such themes as time and temporality, the politics of tragedy, and political movements and subjectivities. A groundbreaking volume featuring the best new scholarship in the field, this provocative book will be useful to scholars and students interested in political theory and its relationship to political practice.

The election of 2008 brought onto the national stage complexitiesarising when the member of a minority group assumes power over national political institutions. It also underlined the limits placed on that power by the double accountability such a figure faces. The question posed in this volume of the NPSR is: Might the ascendancy of President Obama lead to a deracialization of American politics or its opposite?The contributions to this volume examine this question in a variety of ways. David Wilson and Khalilah Brown-Dean analyze black attitudes towards the candidates for the Democratic Party nomination in the presidential race of 2008. Lorenzo Morris asks how perceptions of race have defined expectations of the African American ambassadors to the United Nations. Horace Bartilow and Kihong Eom use a game theoretic approach to examine US drug strategies in the Caribbean.A works-in-progress section follows with personal reflections by Michael C. Dawson and Andra Gillespe. They relate how personal concerns and curiosities guide their research. A book review section provides a discussion about works of interest to scholars studying black politics.

This book deals with the aftermath of the enlightenment and its legacy in the political, social, and racial context. It discusses the incomplete project of modernity in terms of social contract theory, racial justice issues, and political theology in the postcolonial context. Hermeneutical realism and cultural linguistic inquiry become substantial features in elaborating postcolonial political theology and its ethical stance against the colonization of lifeworld and its pathologies. A study of critical theory and political theology is of a reconstructive character in seeking to relocate critical theory and political ethics in the context of alternative modernities at the level of postcolonial theory.

The first volume to explore the role of race and empire in political theory debates over global justice.

Domination consists in subjection to the will of others and manifests itself both as a personal relation and a structural phenomenon serving as the context for relations of power. Domination has again become a central political concern through the revival of the republican tradition of political thought (not to be confused with the US political party). However, normative debates about domination have mostly remained limited to the context of domestic politics. Also, the republican debate has not taken into account alternative ways of conceptualizing domination. Critical theorists, liberals, feminists, critical race theorists, and postcolonial writers have discussed domination in different ways, focusing on such problems as imperialism, racism, and the subjection of indigenous peoples. This volume extends debates about domination to the global level and considers how other streams in political theory and nearby disciplines enrich, expand upon, and critique the republican tradition’s contributions to the debate. This volume brings together, for the first time, mostly original pieces on domination and global political justice by some of this generation’s most prominent scholars, including Philip Pettit, James Bohman, Rainer Forst, Amy Allen, John McCormick, Thomas McCarthy, Charles Mills, Duncan Ivison, John Maynor, Terry Macdonald, Stefan Gosepath, and Hauke Brunkhorst.

Hermeneutics has frequently been dismissed as useful only for literary and textual analysis. Some consider it to be Eurocentric or inherently relativistic and thus unsuited to social critique. Lorenzo C. Simpson offers a persuasive and powerful argument that hermeneutics is a valuable tool not only for critical theory but also for robustly addressing many of the urgent issues of today. Simpson demonstrates that hermeneutics exhibits significant interpretive advantages compared to competing explanatory modalities. While it shares with pragmatism a suspicion of essentialism, an understanding that disagreements are situated, and an insistence on the dialogical nature of understanding, it nevertheless resolutely rejects the relativistic accounts of rationality that are often associated with pragmatism. In the tradition of Gadamer, Simpson firmly establishes hermeneutics as a resource for both philosophy and the social sciences. He shows its utility for unpacking intractable issues in the philosophy of science, multiculturalism, social epistemology, and racial and social justice in the global arena. Simpson addresses fraught questions such as why recent claims that “race” has a biological basis lack grounding, whether female genital excision can be critically addressed without invidious ethnocentrism, and how to lay the foundations for meaningful cross-cultural dialogue and reparative justice. This book reveals how hermeneutics can be a worthy partner with critical theory in achieving emancipatory aims.