Reappraising Political Theory

Written in a lively and accessible style, the book will provoke debate among students and scholars alike. Throughout, Terence Ball shows just how exciting and important political theory can be.

The essays in this volume represent some of the most recent reconsiderations of the living legacy of Thomas Carlyle from both established and upcoming Carlyle scholars. Readers will have the opportunity to explore the richness of Carlyle's ideals, including the ones which challenge modern sensibilities the most. The essays examine carefully the complexities, difficulties, and contours of Carlyle's political and social vision. They also sample the breadth of Carlyle's thought, along with that of Jane Welsh Carlyle, his wife and fellow intellectual traveler, covering topics from political philosophy and cultural critique to education, historiography, biography, and the vagaries of editing. His roles as a political thinker and professional historian are investigated in depth, in addition to his better-known position as a critic of Victorian mores. Thomas Carlyle truly emerges "resartus" or re-tailored, ready to speak with renewed hope to the weighty concerns of the present. --Book Jacket.

This book offers the first authoritative guide to assumptions about time in theories of contemporary world politics. It demonstrates how predominant theories of the international or global ‘present’ are affected by temporal assumptions, grounded in western political thought, that fundamentally shape what we can and cannot know about world politics today. The first part of the book traces the philosophical roots of assumptions about time in contemporary political theory. The second part examines contemporary theories of world politics, including liberal and realist International Relations theories and the work of Habermas, Hardt and Negri, Virilio and Agamben. In each case, it is argued, assumptions about political time ensure the identification of the particular temporality of western experience with the political temporality of the world as such and put the theorist in the unsustainable position of holding the key to the direction of world history. In the final chapter, the book draws on postcolonial and feminist thinking, and the philosophical accounts of political time in the work of Derrida and Deleuze, to develop a new ‘untimely’ way of thinking about time in world politics.

Political Theory and Praxis was first published in 1977. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Nine distinguished contributors—philosophers and political scientists at universities and colleges in the United States, Europe, Canada, and Australia—write essays for this volume in political philosophy. The book is dedicated to the memory of Hannah Arendt, the writer and philosopher who died in 1975. The contributors discuss various aspects of the concepts of theory and practice and their interrelationship. All of the essays were written expressly for this volume. In an introduction, Professor Ball, the volume editor, notes that the essays reflect the diversity of conceptions of theory, of practice, and of their conceptual and practical interrelations, and that the contributors explore various ways and byways of approaching the age-old questions of theory and its relation to practice. Part I: Origins "On the History of 'Theory' and 'Praxis'," Nicholas Lobkowicz; "Creatures of a Day: Thought and Action in Thucydides,"J. Peter Euben; " Plato and Aristotle: The Unity Versus the Autonomy of Theory and Practice." Terence Ball. Part II: Developments "Kant on Theory and Practice," Carl Raschke; "Theory and Practice in Hegel and Marx: An Unfinished Dialogue,"Peter Fuss; "The Unity of Theory and Practice: The Science of Marx and Nietzsche," Edward Andrew. Part II: Dilemmas and New Directions "Hannah Arendt: The Ambiguities of Theory and Practice," Richard J. Bernstein; "Rebels, Beginners, and Buffoons: Politics as Action," Raymond L. Nichols; "How People Change Themselves: The Relationship between Critical Theory and Its Audience," Brian Fay

Political Theory: Methods and Approaches is one of the first books to analyze research methods in political theory and political philosophy. Drawing together a distinguished set of contributors, the book asks how political theory should be conducted today and examines the connections between political theory and a range of adjacent disciplines - including moral philosophy, the empirical social sciences, the history of political thought, the world of 'real' politics, critical social theory, and ideology.

This book is a valuable resource for those involved in translation studies and discourse analysis. Drawing on a corpus-based approach and a combined framework of Appraisal and Ideological Square, this book investigates the variations in stance towards China and other countries in the English translation of contemporary Chinese political discourse. It presents research findings based on comparisons and statistical analyses of the English translation patterns of appraisal epithets, the most prototypical appraisal resources for evaluation, in Chinese political discourse at both lexico-grammatical and discourse semantic levels.

This book is about European IR theoretical traditions, their origins, and key figures. Theorizing is among the most important activities that take place within scientific disciplines. Scholars therefore routinely talk/debate about the discipline of IR and its theories, theories are often used to form the pedagogical backbone of IR and theories are also a key part of scholarly identities. Over time, theories crystalize in to schools of thought, strands of theorizing and theoretical traditions. This book and the volumes that will follow focus on the origins and trajectories of theoretical traditions, and key figures of IR thought in Europe in the 20th Century. The authors are situated in Europe, and it is thus the origins and trajectories of European theoretical traditions, its intellectual history and contemporary forms of theoretical knowledge today, that are on the agenda. In order to achieve this ambitious aim, we opt for a transnational sociological history approach, thus going beyond the national lens through which IR has been predominantly studied. The series will have an integrative function and contribute to a globalized discourse on IR as a discipline. The key benefits of this first volume is that it outlines IR theoretical traditions for the first time ever, provides a novel framework for exploring IR’s theories, and contributes to define and strengthen the European identity of IR. This book is an invaluable resource for scholars of IR.

Containing state-of-the-art reviews of political theories, past and present, this edited collection offers a complete guide to all the main areas and fields of political and philosophical enquiry.