With the collapse of the bipolar system of global rivalry that dominated world politics after the Second World War, and in an age that is seeing the return of ethnic cleansing and identity politics, the question of violence, in all of its multiple ramifications, imposes itself with renewed urgency. Rather than concentrating on the socioeconomic or ......
Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics
This is an analysis of the ways a linked set of ethico-political concepts responsibility, rights, freedom, equality, and justice might be re-thought, not simply jettisoned or reactively defended, in view of the linguistic deconstruction of their underlying principle, the individual human subject. In a series of readings of contemporary thinkers ......
Enriched with almost 700 illustrations, this book has long been the definitive study of the American Cable Car, a widely touted form of urban transformation once operated in 29 cities across the United States. The once-promising technology proved inefficient, however, and cable cars were soon replaced by electric trolley cars. Today, they are only ......
This is the first comprehensive and up-to-date history of Byzantium to appear in almost sixty years, and the first ever to cover both the Byzantine state and Byzantine society. It begins in a.d. 285, when the emperor Diocletian separated what became Byzantium from the western Roman Empire, and ends in 1461, when the last Byzantine outposts fell to ......
Luther and Calvin applied the term fanatic to those who sought to destroy civil society in order to establish the Kingdom of God, the false prophets and their followers who, early on in the Reformation, began smashing images in churches and rebelling against princes. Civil Society and Fanaticism is organized around this seminal moment of religious ......
For the past half century, Maurice Blanchot has been an extraordinarily influential figure on the French literary and cultural scene. He is arguably the key figure after Sartre in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. This collection of 29 critical essays and reviews on art, politics, literature, and philosophy documents the ......
During the 1960's and 1970's, the eruption of theory was presented as an epistemic break, reorganizing the field of questioning both prospectively and retrospectively. In the forefront of this new movement was the influential journal Tel Quel, which both canonized a body of preferred avant-garde texts (both literary and theoretical) and nullified ......
As a form of power, subjection is paradoxical. To be dominated by a power external to oneself is a familiar and agonizing form power takes. To find, however, that what one is, one's very formation as a subject, is dependent upon that very power is quite another. If, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, it ......
Reform and Reaction in Costa Rica and Guatemala, 1870s-1950s
This book examines the origins of democracy and authoritarianism using a novel coalitional approach to examine two questions: What are the conditions under which actors found democracy? What are the conditions conducive to its endurance? The book explores these questions by analyzing the cases of Costa Rica and Guatemala. Costa Rica is the ......
