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.
Kantian Theory and Human Rights
1st Edition
Edited
By Andreas Follesdal, Reidar Maliks
December 01, 2015
Human rights and the courts and tribunals that protect them are increasingly part of our moral, legal, and political circumstances. The growing salience of human rights has recently brought the question of their philosophical foundation to the foreground. Theorists of human rights often assume that...
Rethinking the Politics of Absurdity: Albert Camus, Postmodernity, and the Survival of Innocence
1st Edition
By Matthew H. Bowker
December 01, 2015
What does it mean to describe something or someone as absurd? Why did absurd philosophy and literature become so popular amidst the violent conflicts and terrors of the mid- to late-twentieth century? Is it possible to understand absurdity not as a feature of events, but as a psychological posture ...
Civil Disobedience and Deliberative Democracy
1st Edition
By William Smith
September 29, 2015
Civil disobedience is a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act, contrary to law, carried out to communicate opposition to law and policy of government. This book presents a theory of civil disobedience that draws on ideas associated with deliberative democracy. This book explores the ...
Untangling Heroism: Classical Philosophy and the Concept of the Hero
1st Edition
By Ari Kohen
August 19, 2015
The idea of heroism has become thoroughly muddled today. In contemporary society, any behavior that seems distinctly difficult or unusually impressive is classified as heroic: everyone from firefighters to foster fathers to freedom fighters are our heroes. But what motivates these people to act ...
Post-Ecologist Politics: Social Theory and the Abdication of the Ecologist Paradigm
1st Edition
By Ingolfur Blühdorn
August 07, 2015
Since the late 1980s, ecological thought and the European eco-movement have gone through a phase of fundamental transformation which has been widely acknowledged but not yet theorised in any satisfactory way. This important text questions why radical ecological criticism has had so little impact on...
Democracy and National Pluralism
1st Edition
Edited
By Ferran Requejo
July 20, 2015
How can democracies deal with plurality? This book looks at the political accommodation of national plurality in liberal democracies and in the European Union at the turn of the century. Its panel of international authorities examines this issue from a variety of perspectives, considering ...
Class, States and International Relations: A critical appraisal of Robert Cox and neo-Gramscian theory
1st Edition
By Adrian Budd
July 16, 2015
This book provides an outline and a critique of neo-Gramscian international relations theory, from a Marxist perspective. Focusing on the pioneering work of Robert Cox, but also drawing on the wider neo-Gramscian literature, this book presents a comprehensive account of neo-Gramscian international...
Pliny’s Defense of Empire
1st Edition
By Thomas R. Laehn
July 16, 2015
Despite perennial interest in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, the world’s first encyclopedia, as a record of the prodigious, the quotidian, and the useful in Rome in the first century AD, for centuries Pliny has been derided as little more than an inept compiler of facts and marvels ...
Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom: ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ 50 Years Later
1st Edition
Edited
By Bruce Baum, Robert Nichols
May 21, 2015
Since his death in 1997, Isaiah Berlin’s writings have generated continual interest among scholars and educated readers, especially in regard to his ideas about liberalism, value pluralism, and "positive" and "negative" liberty. Most books on Berlin have examined his general political theory, but ...
John Stuart Mill - Thought and Influence: The Saint of Rationalism
1st Edition
Edited
By Georgios Varouxakis, Paul Kelly
April 09, 2015
More than two hundred years after his birth, and 150 years after the publication of his most famous essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill remains one of the towering intellectual figures of the Western tradition. This book combines an up-to-date assessment of the philosophical legacy of Mill’s ...
Sophocles and the Politics of Tragedy: Cities and Transcendence
1st Edition
By Jonathan N. Badger
February 27, 2015
Sophocles and the Politics of Tragedy is an inquiry into a fundamental political problem made visible through the tragic poetry of Sophocles. In part I Badger offers a detailed exegesis of three plays: Ajax, Antigone, and Philoctetes. These plays share a common theme, illuminating a persistent ...
Ethnic Diversity and the Nation State: National Cultural Autonomy Revisited
1st Edition
By David Smith, John Hiden
November 10, 2014
This book explores a largely forgotten legacy of multicultural political thought and practice from within Eastern Europe and examines its relevance to post-Cold War debates on state and nationhood. Featuring a Preface by former UK Home Secretary Charles Clarke, it weaves theory and practice to ...