Routledge Innovations in Political Theory
About the Book Series
This series examines contemporary developments and controversies within political theory and features cutting edge interventions into current debates.
The Legitimacy of Modern Democracy: A Study on the Political Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen
1st Edition
By Pedro T. Magalhães
June 30, 2022
By re-examining the political thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen, this book offers a reflection on the nature of modern democracy and the question of its legitimacy. Pedro T. Magalhães shows that present-day elitist, populist and pluralist accounts of democracy owe, in diverse and ...
Legislative Deliberative Democracy: Debating Acts Restricting Freedom of Speech during War
1st Edition
By Avichai Levit
May 30, 2022
Freedom of speech is a basic right in a democracy. During war, however, national legislatures tend to enact laws that restrict this basic right. Under what circumstances can such laws be democratically legitimate? Avichai Levit argues that the degree of democratic legitimacy of laws that restrict ...
Democracy, the Courts, and the Liberal State: A Comparative Analysis of American and German Constitutionalism
1st Edition
By David Miles
May 06, 2022
Reformulating a problem of both constitutionalism and liberalism discussed in the works of Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Hannah Arendt, and Alexis de Tocqueville, the book examines one generally overlooked manifestation of constitutionalism: the role of the courts in shaping democratic politics and ...
On Biopolitics: An Inquiry into Nature and Language
1st Edition
By Marco Piasentier
February 02, 2022
How do humans fit into the natural world? What are the political consequences of viewing humans as animals? On Biopolitics is the first scholarly attempt to answer these questions, bringing critical thought into dialogue with naturalism. Effectively demonstrating that biology cannot serve as a ...
Dignity and Human Rights: Language Philosophy and Social Realizations
1st Edition
By Stephan P. Leher
December 13, 2021
Is it impossible to assess dignity, which is the faculty or agency of autonomy and equality of rights under the current rule of law, when we are met by global challenges like climate change, financial crisis, food crisis, natural disasters, inequality, violent conflicts and trade disputes? Drawing ...
Reconstructing Nonviolence: A New Theory and Practice for a Post-Secular Society
1st Edition
By Roberto Baldoli
June 30, 2021
Nonviolent methods of action have been a powerful tool since the early twentieth century for social protest and revolutionary social and political change, and there is diffuse awareness that nonviolence is an efficient spontaneous choice of movements, individuals and whole nations. Yet from a ...
The Problem of Value Pluralism: Isaiah Berlin and Beyond
1st Edition
By George Crowder
June 30, 2021
Value pluralism is the idea, most prominently endorsed by Isaiah Berlin, that fundamental human values are universal, plural, conflicting, and incommensurable with one another. Incommensurability is the key component of pluralism, undermining familiar monist philosophies such as utilitarianism. But...
Rethinking Positive and Negative Liberty
1st Edition
By Maria Dimova-Cookson
April 01, 2021
This book argues that the distinction between positive and negative freedom remains highly pertinent today, despite having fallen out of fashion in the late twentieth century. It proposes a new reading of this distinction for the twenty-first century, building on the work of Constant, Green and ...
Aesthetics and Political Culture in Modern Society
1st Edition
By Henrik Kaare Nielsen
August 14, 2020
Do aesthetic appeals to senses and emotions in political debate necessarily marginalise political reason and reduce citizens to consumers – thus dangerously undermining democracy? Or is sensuous-emotional engagement, on the contrary, a basic fact of the political process and a crucial precondition ...
Post-Fukushima Activism: Politics and Knowledge in the Age of Precarity
1st Edition
By Azumi Tamura
August 14, 2020
Political disillusionment is widespread in contemporary society. In Japan, the search for the ‘outside’ of a stagnant reality sometimes leads marginalised young people to a disastrous image of social change. The Fukushima nuclear disaster was the realisation of such an image, triggering the largest...
Democracy Beyond the Nation State: Practicing Equality
1st Edition
By Joe Parker
July 29, 2019
Democracy promises rule by all, not by the few. Yet, electoral democracies limit decision-making to representatives and have always had a weakness for inequality. How might democracy serve all rather than the few? Democracy Beyond the Nation State: Practicing Equality examines communities that ...
Epistemontology in Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan: The (Bio)Power of Structure
1st Edition
By A. Kiarina Kordela
July 16, 2019
A. Kiarina Kordela steps beyond extant commentaries on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism—from A. Sohn-Rethel to L. Althusser, É. Balibar, Slavoj Žižek, and others—to show that in capitalism value is the manifestation of the homology between thought and being, while their other aspect—power—is ...