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Situated at the intersection of democratic theory and international studies, Accountability and Democracy provides an in-depth critical analysis of the concept “democratic accountability.” The book proceeds with separate chapters on accountability as found in the U.S. Ratification debates, agency theory, ancient Athenian democracy, theories of deliberative democracy, capitalist markets, and cosmopolitan democracy. Through an engagement with these different traditions and contexts, the book paints a picture of democratic accountability as a multidimensional concept harboring competing imperatives and diverse instantiations. It both engages conventional electoral models of accountability and moves beyond them by situating democratic accountability within more deliberative, participatory and agonistic contexts. Contrary to dominant views that emphasize discipline and control, the book describes democratic accountability as a source of mutuality, community, and political transformation. The book also challenges deep-seated understandings of democratic accountability as an expression of popular sovereignty. It instead argues that accountable governance is incompatible with all claims to ultimate authority, regardless of whether they refer to the demos, the state, or cosmopolitan public law. Rather than conceiving of democratic accountability as a way to legitimize a secure and sovereign political order, the book contends that destabilization and democratic insurgence are indispensable and often neglected facets of democratic accountability practices.

The past few decades have witnessed the growth of movements that use digital means to connect with broader publics and express their point of view. Social media facilitate feelings of engagement, in ways that frequently make people feel reenergized about what it means to be political. In doing so, media do not make or break revolutions but they do lend emerging, storytelling publics their own means for feeling their way into the developing event, frequently by making them a part of the developing story. Digital technologies network us but it is our stories that connect us to each other, making us feel close to some and distancing us from others. Affective Publics explores how storytelling practices on Twitter facilitate affective engagement for publics tuning into a current issue or event by employing three case studies: Arab Spring movements, various iterations of Occupy, and everyday casual political expressions as traced through the archives of trending topics on Twitter.

What should progressive social movements after Occupy be aiming for? What is the underlying economic vision and what are the ultimate economic goals? This book provides an answer to these questions. The book investigates the fundamental aspects of the contemporary economy by providing a perspective that integrates both normative and empirical concerns. Part One asks whether workplaces should be democratized and examines the empirical record of worker cooperatives. Part Two investigates the democratic potential of markets and examines the extent to which actual market systems, particularly the Nordic variety, have been democratized in practice. Part Three asks whether finance and investment institutions should be democratized and analyzes the empirical record of various experiments in this regard, including capital controls, public banks, and participatory budgeting. The book thus weaves together the different strands of economic democracy into a comprehensive whole. It culminates in an illustration of a truly democratic society in the form of market socialism. Yet while the book is hopeful it is not utopian. It invites us to pay close attention to the inherent costs and benefits of economic reforms. The ultimate argument is that although economic democracy is far from perfect, it represents a significant and substantial advance over contemporary American neoliberalism as well as European social democracy.

Given the almost universal assumption that democracy is a ‘good thing’, the goal of mankind, it is easy to forget that ‘rule by the people’ has been vehemently opposed by some of the most distinguished thinkers in the Western tradition. The book attempts to combat collective amnesia by systematically exploring the evaluating anti‐democratic thought since the French Revolution. Using categories first introduced by A. O. Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction, it examines the various arguments under the headings of ‘perversity’, ‘futility’, and ‘jeopardy’. This classification scheme makes it possible to highlight the fatalism and pessimism of anti‐democratic thinkers, their conviction that democratic reform would be either pointless or destructive. They failed to understand the adaptability of democracy, its ability to coexist with traditional and elitist values. Nevertheless, it must be granted that some of their predictions and observations have been confirmed by history.

The exact phrase, “state of nature,” was used thousands of times in the British colonies between 1630 and 1810, in juridical, theological, medical, political, economic, and other senses. From the plurality of meanings, a distinctive American state of nature discourse started to emerge by the 1760s. It combined existing European and American semantic ranges and sidelined others in moments of intense contestation, for instance during the 1765–66 Stamp Act crisis, and the 1774 First Continental Congress. In numerous laws and resolutions, forensic arguments, petitions, sermons, broadsides, books, pamphlets, letters, diaries, and college essays, the increasingly distinct and coherent American state of nature came to justify independence at least as much as colonial formulations of liberty, property, and individual rights did.

For centuries, animals have worked alongside humans in a wide variety of workplaces, yet they are rarely recognized as workers or accorded labour rights. Many animal rights advocates have argued that using animals for their labour is inherently oppressive, and that animal labour should therefore be abolished. Recently, however, some people have argued that work can be a source of meaning, self-development, and social membership for animals, as it is for humans, and that our goal should be to create good work for animals, not to abolish work. In this volume, an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars explores the benefits and drawbacks of animal labour as a site for interspecies justice. What kind of work is good work for animals? What kinds of labour rights are appropriate for animal workers? Can animals consent to work? Would recognizing animals as ‘workers’ improve their legal and political status, or would it simply reinforce the perception that they are beasts of burden? Can a focus on labour help create bonds between the animal rights movement and other social justice movements? These and other questions are explored in depth. While the authors defend a range of views on these questions, their contributions make clear that the question of labour deserves a central place in any account of justice between humans and animals.

The aim of this book is not to trace the changing fortunes of the interpretation of one of the most sophisticated and famous political philosophers who ever lived, but to glimpse here and there his place in different contexts, and how his interpreters see their own images reflected in him, or how they define themselves in contrast to him. The main claim is that there is no Hobbes independent of the interpretations that arise from his appropriation in these various contexts and which serve to present him to the world. There is no one perfect context that enables us to get at what Hobbes ‘really meant’, despite the numerous claims to the contrary. He is almost indistinguishable from the context in which he is read. This contention is justified with reference to hermeneutics, and particularly the theories of Gadamer, Koselleck, and Ricoeur, contending that through a process of ‘distanciation’ Hobbes’s writings have been appropriated and commandeered to do service in divergent contexts such as philosophical idealism; debates over the philosophical versus historical understanding of texts; and in ideological disputations, and emblematic characterizations of him by various disciplines such as law, politics, and international relations. The book illustrates the capacity of a text to take on the colouration of its surroundings by exploring and explicating the importance of contexts in reading and understanding how and why particular interpretations of Hobbes have emerged, such as those of Carl Schmitt and Michael Oakeshott, or the international jurists of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

Most observers who follow nuclear affairs agree on one major aspect regarding Israel’s famous policy of nuclear ambiguity—mainly that it is an exception. More specifically, it is largely accepted that the 1969 Nixon-Meir understanding, which formally established Israel’s policy of nuclear ambiguity and transformed it from an undeclared Israeli strategy into a long-lasting undisclosed bilateral agreement, was in fact a singularity, aimed at allowing Washington to turn a blind eye to the existence of an Israeli arsenal. According to conventional wisdom, this nuclear bargain was a foreign policy exception on behalf of Washington, an exception which reflected a relationship growing closer and warmer between the superpower leading the free world and its small Cold War associate. Contrary to the orthodox narrative, this research demonstrates that this was not the case. The 1969 bargain was, not, in fact, an exception, but rather the first of three Cold War era deals on nuclear tests brokered by Washington with its Cold War associates, the other two being Pakistan and South Africa. These two deals are not well known and until now were discussed and explored in the literature in a very limited fashion. This new reading places the role of nuclear tests by American associates, as well as Washington’s attempts to prevent and delay them, at the heart of a new nuclear history narrative.

Being and Motion offers an original philosophical ontology of movement. The history of philosophy has systematically explained movement as derived from something else that does not move: space, eternity, force, and time. Why, when movement has been central to human societies, did a philosophy based on movement never take hold in the West? This book is the first major work of systematic ontology to answer this question and finally overturn this long-standing metaphysical tradition by placing movement at the heart of philosophy. In doing so, Being and Motion provides a completely new understanding of the most fundamental categories of ontology from the ground up: quality, quantity, relation, modality, and others. It also provides the first history of the philosophy of motion, from the early prehistoric mythologies up to contemporary ontologies. More than at any other time in human history, we live in an age defined by movement and mobility, and yet we lack a single contemporary ontology that takes this seriously as a starting point for philosophy. Being and Motion sets out to remedy this lacuna in contemporary thought by providing a historical ontology of our present: an ontology of movement.

Large-scale, Western-based humanitarian INGOs, such as Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders, are often either celebrated as “do-gooding machines” or maligned as incompetents “on the road to hell.” Rejecting both of these characterizations, this book begins with a picture of humanitarian INGOs as a “mixed bag.” It then offers a “map” of humanitarian INGO political ethics based on this picture. Drawing on both original fieldwork and secondary literature, it argues that while humanitarian INGOs are often perceived as non-governmental and apolitical, they are in fact sometimes somewhat governmental and highly political. They are also often “second-best” actors. These three features combine in different ways to generate several ethical predicaments that humanitarian INGOs regularly face: the problem of spattered hands, the quandary of the second-best, the cost-effectiveness conundrum, and the moral motivation trade-off. It argues that in attempting to navigate these predicaments in ways that are consistent with democratic, egalitarian, humanitarian, and justice-based norms, humanitarian INGOs must regularly make deep moral compromises. In choosing which compromises to make, they should focus primarily on their overall consequences, rather than on their intentions or the intrinsic value of their activities. But they should interpret consequences expansively, and not limit themselves to those that are amenable to precise cost-benefit analysis. The book concludes by explaining the implications of its “map” of humanitarian INGO political ethics for individual donors to INGOs, and more generally for INGOs’ role in addressing pressing global problems.

This book examines how ideas of war and peace have functioned as organizing frames of reference within the history of political theory. It interprets ten widely read figures in that history within five thematically focused chapters that pair (in order) Schmitt and Derrida, Aquinas and Machiavelli, Hobbes and Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, and Thucydides and Plato. The book’s substantive argument is that attempts to establish either war or peace as dominant intellectual perspectives obscure too much of political life. The book argues for a style of political theory committed more to questioning than to closure. It challenges two powerful currents in contemporary political philosophy: the verdict that premodern or metaphysical texts cannot speak to modern and postmodern societies, and the insistence that all forms of political theory be some form of democratic theory. What is offered instead is a nontraditional defense of the tradition and a democratic justification for moving beyond democratic theory. Though the book avoids any attempt to show the immediate relevance of these interpretations to current politics, its impetus stems very much from the current political circumstances. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century , a series of wars has eroded confidence in the progressively peaceful character of international relations; citizens of the Western democracies are being warned repeatedly about the threats posed within a dangerous world. In this turbulent context, democratic citizens must think more critically about the actions their governments undertake. The texts interpreted here are valuable resources for such critical thinking.

This book studies war in the thought of one of the 20th-century's most important and original political thinkers, Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt's writing was fundamentally rooted in her understanding of war and its political significance. But this element of her work has surprisingly been neglected in international and political theory. This book assesses the full range of Arendt's historical and conceptual writing on war and introduces to international theory the distinct language she used to talk about war and the political world. It builds on her re-thinking of old concepts such as power, violence, greatness, world, imperialism, evil, hypocrisy, and humanity and introduces some that are new to international thought like plurality, action, agonism, natality, and political immortality. Chapters engage Arendt's writing in dialogue with various schools of political and international theory, including realism, liberalism, constructivism, post-structuralism, post-colonial thought, neoconservatism, and Habermas-inspired critical theory. Re-reading Arendt's writing — forged through firsthand experience of occupation and struggles for liberation, political founding, and resistance in time of war — reveals a more serious engagement with war than her earlier readers have recognised. Arendt's political theory makes more sense when it is understood in the context of her thinking about war and we can think about the history and theory of warfare, and international politics in new ways by thinking with Arendt.

Beyond Empathy and Inclusion: The Challenge of Listening in Democratic Deliberation considers how to improve democracy under the politically divided conditions we currently face. The book argues that while democracy does not require that citizens reach an agreement, it does require that they listen to one another. The book goes on to offer a systematic theory of listening acts to explain the democratic force of listening. Modeled after speech act theory, Scudder’s listening act theory shows how we do something in listening, independent of the outcomes of listening. In listening to our fellow citizens, we recognize their moral equality of voice. Being heard by our fellow citizens is what ensures we have a say in the laws to which we are held. The book offers a realistic view of listening, one that does not assume it will always produce empathy or even understanding. Listening is not the answer to all of our problems. In fact, listening can even produce certain undemocratic effects. The book argues that despite these challenges and risks, listening is a key responsibility of democratic citizenship. It also tackles questions regarding the limits of toleration in a democratic society. Do we owe listening even to democracy’s enemies? The book shows how listening can be used defensively, to protect against threats to democracy. The democratic listening this book prescribes is admittedly hard, especially in pluralistic societies. This volume investigates how to motivate citizens to listen seriously, attentively, and humbly even to those with whom they disagree.

From classical stories of divine lawgivers to contemporary ones of Founding Fathers and constitutional beginnings, foundings have long been synonymous with singular, extraordinary moments of political origin and creation. In constitutional democracies, this common view is particularly attractive, with original founding events, actors, and ideals invoked time and again in everyday politics as well as in times of crisis to remake the state and unify citizens. Beyond Origins challenges this view of foundings, explaining how it is ultimately dangerous, misguided, and unsustainable. Engaging with cases of founding through a series of “travels” across political traditions and historical time, this book evaluates the uses and abuses of this view to expose in its links among foundings, origins, and authority a troubling political foundationalism. It argues that by ascribing to foundings a universally binding, unifying, and transcendent authority, the common view works to obscure the fraught political struggles involved in actual foundings and refoundings. In the wake of this challenge, the book develops an alternate approach. Centered on a political view of foundings, this framework recasts foundations as far from authoritatively settled or grounded and redefines foundings as contentious, uncertain, and incomplete. It looks to actors whose complicated relations to pure origins both reveal and capitalize on the underauthorized and contingent nature of foundations to enact foundational change. By examining such actors—from Haitian revolutionaries to Latin American presidents and social movements—the book prods a reconsideration of foundings on different terms: as a contestatory, ongoing dimension of political life.

The two subjects of this book are biopolitics (unfashionable since the late 1990s) and posthumanism (falling out of fashion since the mid-2000s). Taking the inauspicious intersection of these two passé scholarly analytic modes as its starting point, the book makes a case for their value, nonetheless, in explaining the increasing cen¬trality of nostalgia to democratic politics. Nostalgia, far from being a too human evasion of political responsibility, appears here, on the contrary, as the product of a slow-motion collision between nonhuman biopolitical reproduction and nonhu¬man biopolitical thought. As a reproductive thought process, nostalgia is thus both central to ongoing democratic engagement and irrelevant to the human experience. Embedded in a wide-ranging reading of feminist theories of cognition, reproduction, and the posthuman as well as literary and historical studies of nostalgia as an illness, an experience, and a problem for engaged politics, and drawing together two seem¬ingly unrelated case studies of nostalgic, thoughtful, reproductive activity—first, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing in French on embryonic material and, second, nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing in Turkish on Alphabet reform—the book demonstrates the unexpected reach of a new, if nostalgic, reproductive his¬tory and politics of the nonhuman.

This book provides a new and distinct approach to gender through the frameworks of biopolitics and genealogy, theorizing it as a historically specific apparatus of biopower. Through the use of a diverse mix of historical and contemporary documents, the book explores how the problematization of intersex infant genitalia in 1950s psychiatry propelled the emergence of the gender apparatus in order to socialize sexed individuals into the ideal productive and reproductive subjects of white, middle-class postwar America. The idea of gender was then directly appropriated from psychiatry by Anglo-American feminists during the struggle for women’s liberation, soon followed by demographers and economists concerned with the possible effects of declining fertility on Western populations. The book argues that this genealogy has critical relevance for feminist politics today, amid the deployment of gender equality as a neoliberal means of optimizing the fertility rates of ethnic Europeans and ensuring the region’s future economic growth. It shows how grasping the biopolitics of the idea of gender itself is integral to comprehending both the disappointments and challenges faced by feminist theory and politics today.

This book uses the body to peel back the layers of time and taken-for-granted-ness upon the two defining political forms of modernity, the state and the subject of rights. It traces, under the lens of the body, how the state and the subject mutually constituted each other all the way down, by going all the way back, to their original crafting in the seventeenth century. It considers multiple sites of theory and practice and two revolutions. The first, scientific, threw humanity out of the centre of the universe, and transformed the very meanings of matter, space, and the body; while the second, legal and political, re-established humans as the centre-point of a framework of rights. The book analyses the fundamental rights to security, liberty, and property, respectively, as the initial knots where the state-subject relation was first sealed. It develops three arguments, that the body served to naturalise security, to individualise liberty, and to privatise property. Covering a wide range of materials—from early modern anatomy lesson paintings, to the Anglo-Scottish legal struggles of naturalisation, to the emergence of discrete practices of religious toleration in Central Europe—it shows both how the body has operated as history’s great naturaliser, and how it can be mobilised instead as a critical tool that lays bare the deeply racialised and gendered constructions that made both the state and the subject of rights. The book returns to the origins of constructivist and constitutive theorising to reclaim their radical and critical potential.

Black Natural Law offers a new way of understanding the African American political tradition. By telling the stories of Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr., the book shows how appeals to a higher law, or God’s law, have long fueled black political engagement. Such appeals do not seek to implement divine directives on earth; rather, they pose a challenge to the wisdom of the world, and they mobilize communities for collective action. Black natural law is deeply democratic: While charismatic leaders may provide the occasion for reflection and mobilization, all are capable of discerning the higher law using human capacities for reason and emotion. At a time when continuing racial injustice poses a deep moral challenge, the most powerful intellectual resources in the struggle for justice have been abandoned. Black Natural Law recovers a rich tradition, and it examines just how this tradition was forgotten. A black intellectual class emerged that was disconnected from social movement organizing and beholden to white interests. Appeals to higher law became politically impotent: overly rational or overly sentimental. Recovering the black natural law tradition provides a powerful resource for confronting police violence, mass incarceration, and today’s gross racial inequities. Black Natural Law offers a new way to approach natural law, a topic central to the Western ethical and political tradition. While drawing particularly on African American resources, Black Natural Law speaks to all who seek politics animated by justice.