This second volume continues the story told in the first by focusing on the writings of a selection of seminal thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in England, the German speaking world and in France, ending with the debate around the French Revolution of 1789. Tony Burns discusses the work of Thomas Hobbes, John Selden, Sir Matthew Hale, John Locke, Samuel Clarke, Johannes Althusius, Samuel Pufendorf, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Jean Barbeyrac, the anonymous author of Militaire philosophe, Claude Buffier, l’abbé de Saint-Pierre, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, l’abbé de Sieyès, Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, Mary Wollstonecraft and Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon. The author concludes with an analysis of the concept of administration in the writings of Saint-Simon, as a point of transition to the discussion of the themes of bureaucracy, technocracy and managerialism in the third volume.

A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding multiculturalism. Charles Taylor's initial inquiry, which considers whether the institutions of liberal democratic government make room--or should make room--for recognizing the worth of distinctive cultural traditions, remains the centerpiece of this discussion. It is now joined by Jürgen Habermas's extensive essay on the issues of recognition and the democratic constitutional state and by K. Anthony Appiah's commentary on the tensions between personal and collective identities, such as those shaped by religion, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality, and on the dangerous tendency of multicultural politics to gloss over such tensions. These contributions are joined by those of other well-known thinkers, who further relate the demand for recognition to issues of multicultural education, feminism, and cultural separatism. Praise for the previous edition:

In The Experience of Injustice, the French philosopher Emmanuel Renault opens an important new chapter in critical theory. He brings together political theory, critical social science, and a keen sense of the power of popular movements to offer a forceful vision of social justice. Questioning normative political philosophy’s conception of justice, Renault gives an account of injustice as the denial of recognition, placing the experience of social suffering at the heart of contemporary critical theory. Inspired by Axel Honneth, Renault argues that a radicalized version of Honneth’s ethics of recognition can provide a systematic alternative to the liberal-democratic projects of such thinkers as Rawls and Habermas. Renault reformulates Honneth’s theory as a framework founded on experiences of injustice. He develops a complex, psychoanalytically rich account of suffering, disaffiliation, and identity loss to explain these experiences as denials of recognition, linking everyday injustice to a robust defense of the politicization of identity in social struggles. Engaging contemporary French and German critical theory alongside interdisciplinary tools from sociology, psychoanalysis, socialist political theory, social-movement theory, and philosophy, Renault articulates the importance of a theory of recognition for the resurgence of social critique.

A debate between two philosophers who hold different views on the relation of redistribution to recognition.

Recognition is one of the most debated concepts in contemporary social and political thought. Its proponents, such as Axel Honneth, hold that to be recognized by others is a basic human need that is central to forming an identity, and the denial of recognition deprives individuals and communities of something essential for their flourishing. Yet critics including Judith Butler have questioned whether recognition is implicated in structures of domination, arguing that the desire to be recognized can motivative individuals to accept their assigned place in the social order by conforming to oppressive norms or obeying repressive institutions. Is there a way to break this impasse? Recognition and Ambivalence brings together leading scholars in social and political philosophy to develop new perspectives on recognition and its role in social life. It begins with a debate between Honneth and Butler, the first sustained engagement between these two major thinkers on this subject. Contributions from both proponents and critics of theories of recognition further reflect upon and clarify the problems and challenges involved in theorizing the concept and its normative desirability. Together, they explore different routes toward a critical theory of recognition, departing from wholly positive or negative views to ask whether it is an essentially ambivalent phenomenon. Featuring original, systematic work in the philosophy of recognition, this book also provides a useful orientation to the key debates on this important topic.

Time is at the forefront of contemporary scholarly inquiry across the natural sciences and the humanities. Yet the social sciences have remained substantially isolated from time-related concerns. This book argues that time should be a key part of social theory and focuses concern upon issues which have emerged as central to an understanding of today's social world. Through her analysis of time Barbara Adam shows that our contemporary social theories are firmly embedded in Newtonian science and classical dualistic philosophy. She exposes these classical frameworks of thought as inadequate to the task of conceptualizing our contemporary world of standardized time, computers, nuclear power and global telecommunications.