As one of Louis Althusser's most brilliant students in the 1960s, Etienne Balibar contributed to the theoretical collective masterpiece of Reading Capital. Since then he has established himself among the most subtle philosophical and political thinkers in France. In Politics and the Other Scene Balibar deepens and extends the work he first developed with Immanuel Wallerstein in Race, Nation, Class. Exploring the theme of universalism and difference, he addresses such topical questions as European racism, the notion of the border, whether a European citizenship is possible or desirable, violence and politics, and identity and emancipation.

Here Balibar deepens and extends the work he first developed with Immanuel Wallerstein.

Human Rights in Crisis uniquely documents recent ideas on democracy and human rights in the current French intellectual, social, and political context, arguing that the French emphasis on the interdependence between democracy and human rights as a tool for the critique and renewal of democracy is a valid contribution to the global debate on the political philosophy and the ethics of human rights. Centering on the work of four prominent, contemporary French political philosophers, Blandine Kriegel, Marcel Gauchet, Luc Ferry, and Etienne Balibar, Geneviève Souillac expertly examines the themes of contestation and reform that are the driving force in the French approach to democracy and human rights.

The classic and deeply prescient collection that explores the multifaceted nature of race, class, and identity in America, from one of our most insightful and iconoclastic intellectuals Hailed by Publishers Weekly for its “forceful” and “bracing opinions on race and politics,” Class Notes is a collection of critic Adolph Reed Jr.’s clearest thinking on matters of race, class, and other American dilemmas. With barbed wit, Reed takes aim against the solipsistic, individualistic approaches of identity politics, and in favor of class-based political interpretation and action. Reed leaves no topic untouched, from the myth that there exists a particular kind of “Black Anti-Semitism,” to the grift perpetuated by commentators who claim to speak for groups solely based on their identity categories. Adolph Reed Jr. remains one of our most controversial and necessary interpreters of American politics. These essays illustrate why Reed is “the smartest person of any race, class, or gender writing on race, class, and gender” (Katha Pollitt). Class Notes is a classic text that signposts a path for the Left—out of essentialist gridlock and into meaningful, goal-oriented mass politics.

An understanding of International Relations exclusively as a sphere plagued by countless known and unknown risks, looming disasters and imminent threats leaves an important aspect of the study of politics unengaged – that of the human herself. The Politics of Bodies at Risk re-engages and re-conceptualizes politics from the point of view of the everyday experiences of human materiality living with risk across geopolitical worlds and state borders. Re-imagining human bodies as productive, singular and embodied materiality removes them from an understanding of “life” in an age of terror as pejorative, dispensable, and burdensome, enabling a novel understanding of politics as an embodiment of human bodies with risk, and not as a sphere of activity aimed primarily at managing, silencing, and normalizing the risky other. Drawing on case studies from several countries and across several disciplines, The Politics of Bodies at Risk investigates the possibility of developing an understanding of the productive possibilities contained in engaging with the human body as a site of a radical interconnectedness between politics, singularity, risk, and security.

Political jurisprudence is the branch of jurisprudence that treats law as an aspect of human experience called 'the political'. This is an approach that many contemporary jurists, those whose work presupposes the autonomy of legal order, tend to suppress. In this book, Martin Loughlin assesses the contribution made by political jurists and explains its contemporary significance. Political jurists maintain that the essential characteristics of modern legal order can only be revealed by considering how political authority is constituted. The political is orientated to the fact that people are organized into territorially-bounded units within which authoritative governing arrangements have been established, but the authority of this way of viewing the world is strengthened only through institution-building. Law may be an aspect of the political, but to perform its authority-generating functions effectively it must operate relatively autonomously. The political and the legal operate relationally, without one being reduced to the other. Loughlin introduces the rich literature of political jurisprudence through essays on innovative political jurists such as Hobbes, Burke, Constant, Romano, and Schmitt, and on such central themes as political right, institutionalism, constitutional legality, and reason of state. Building on his earlier books, The Idea of Public Law (OUP 2003) and Foundations of Public Law (OUP 2010), this collection extends his account of this influential strand of European legal thought.

Through a series of historical illustrations, the author investigates violence, law, terror, protection, justice and post-colonial governance. His reading of the materiality of politics is disturbingly 'physical'. Unlike the 'philosophical subject' (a purely theoretical construct), the author's 'political subject' is the real product of particular conflicts and circumstances, violence and bloodshed. The universal immediacy of conflict drives home the futility of vague philosophical speculations and generalizations. Instead, it prompts a rigorous study of control and rebellion, statecraft and autonomy, law and lawlessness. History, claims the author, must be studied in a new way.