A lively and engaging collection which explains the various strands of political theory, identifies key futures trends and explores the foundations of contemporary debate. Features interviews with pre-eminent theorists, including Quentin Skinner, Carole Pateman and Alex Honneth.

This important text introduces students to both feminism and other social and political theories via an examination of the inter relationship between different feminist positions and key contemporary debates. The book takes each debate in turn, outlines the main themes, discusses different feminist responses and evaluates the implications for real-life political and social issues. This user-friendly structure effectively redraws the map of contemporary feminist thought, offering a fresh and succinct summary of an extensive range of material and graphically demonstrating the ongoing relevance and value of a feminist perspective.

This book discusses the contribution of philosophers and thinkers whose ideas have recently begun to permeate international relations theory. It provides an introduction to the contemporary debates regarding theories and methodologies used to study international relations, particularly the relationships between interpretive accounts of social action, European philosophical traditions, hermeneutics and the discipline of international relations. The authors provides a platform for dialogue between theorists and researchers engaged in a more specific area studies, geo-political studies, political theory and historical accounts of international politics. The volume analyzes a variety of theoretical and explores the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gramsci, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Levinas, Bakhtin, Patocka, Derridean, Deleuze and Susan Sontag. Making an important contribution to discussions about how to study the complexities of world politics, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of international relations, politics, sociology, philosophy and political theory.

This book argues that classical political philosophy, represented in the works of Thucydides and Plato, is an important resource for both contemporary democratic political theory and democratic citizens. By placing the Platonic dialogues and Thucydides' History in conversation with four significant forms of modern democratic theory—the rational choice perspective, deliberative democratic theory, the interpretation of democratic culture, and postmodernism—Gerald M. Mara contends that these classical authors are not enemies of democracy. Rather than arguing for the creation of a more encompassing theoretical framework guided by classical concerns, Mara offers readings that emphasize the need to focus critically on the purposes of politics, and therefore of democracy, as controversial yet unavoidable questions for political theory.

This book of tightly woven dialogues engages prominent thinkers in a discussion about the role of culture-broadly construed-in contemporary society and politics. Faced with the conceptual inflation of the notion of 'culture, ' which now imposes itself as an indispensable issue in contemporary moral and political debates, these dynamic exchanges seek to rethink culture and critique beyond the schematic models that have often predominated, such as the opposition between "mainstream multiculturalism" and the "clash of civilizations." Prefaced by an introduction relating current cultural debates to the critical theory tradition, this book examines the politics of culture and the spirit of critique from three different vantage points. To begin, Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller provide a stage-setting dialogue, followed by discussions with two major representatives of contemporary critical theory: Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser. Working at the horizons of this tradition, Judith Butler, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Cornel West then provide important critical perspectives on cultural politics. The book's concluding section engages with Michael Sandel and Will Kymlicka, who work out of the Rawlsian tradition yet are uniquely concerned with the issue of culture, broadly understood. The epilogue, an interview with Axel Honneth, returns to the core issue of critical theory in cultural politics. Ranging from recent developments and progressive interventions in critical theory to dialogues that incorporate its insights into larger discussions of social and political philosophy, this book sharpens old critical tools while developing new strategies for rethinking the role of 'culture' in contemporary society.

At the heart of this experiment in intellectual synthesis is an effort to clarify differences of method and understanding within a common political trajectory. Through a series of exchanges on the value of the Hegelian and Lacanian legacies, the dilemmas of multiculturalism, and the political challenges of a global economy, Butler, Laclau, and ÄiPek lend fresh significance to the key philosophical categories of the last century while setting a new standard for debate on the Left. --Book Jacket.