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Marxism's collapse in the twentieth century profoundly altered the style and substance of Western European radical thought. To build a more robust form of democratic theory and action, prominent theorists moved to reject revolution, abandon class for more fragmented models of social action, and elevate the political over the social. Acknowledging the constructedness of society and politics, they chose the "symbolic" as a concept powerful enough to reinvent leftist thought outside a Marxist framework. Following Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Adventures of the Dialectic, which reassessed philosophical Marxism at mid century, Warren Breckman critically revisits these thrilling experiments in the aftermath of Marxism.The post-Marxist idea of the symbolic is dynamic and complex, uncannily echoing the early German Romantics, who first advanced a modern conception of symbolism and the symbolic. Hegel and Marx denounced the Romantics for their otherworldly and nebulous posture, yet post-Marxist thinkers appreciated the rich potential of the ambiguities and paradoxes the Romantics first recognized. Mapping different ideas of the symbolic among contemporary thinkers, Breckman traces a fascinating reflection of Romantic themes and resonances, and he explores in depth the effort to reconcile a radical and democratic political agenda with a politics that does not privilege materialist understandings of the social. Engaging with the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Žižek, Breckman uniquely situates these important theorists within two hundred years of European thought and extends their profound relevance to today's political activism

The Westminster-stylized model of Parliamentary democratic politics and public service accountability is increasingly out of step with the realities of today's digitally and socially networked era. This book explores the reconfiguration of democratic and managerial governance within democratic societies due to the advent of technological mobility. More specifically, the traditional public sector prism of organizational and accountability - denoted as 'machinery of government', is increasingly strained in an era characterized by smart devices, social media, and cloud computing. This book examines the roots and implications of the tensions between machinery and mobility and the sorts of investments and initiatives that have been undertaken by governments around the world as well as their appropriateness and relative impacts. This book also examines the prospects for holistic adaptation of democratic and managerial systems going forward, identifying the most crucial directions and determinants for improving public sector performance in terms of outcomes, accountability, and agility. Accordingly, the ultimate aim of this initiative is to contribute to the formation of intellectual foundations for more systemic reforms of public sector governance in Canada and elsewhere, and to offer forward-looking trajectories for government adaptation in shifting from a traditional prism of 'machinery' to new organizational and institutional arrangements better suited for an era of 'mobility'

Intro -- Contents -- Introduction -- Chapter 1: On Having Survived the Academic Moral Philosophy of the Twentieth Century -- Part I: Reading Alasdair MacIntyre -- Chapter 2: Keeping Philosophy Relevant and Humanistic -- Chapter 3: Ethics at the Limits -- Chapter 4: Alasdair MacIntyre's Revisionary Aristotelianism -- Chapter 5: Alasdair MacIntyre -- Chapter 6: Against the Self-Images of the Age -- Part II: Complementary and Competing Traditions -- Chapter 7: MacIntyre and the Emotivists -- Chapter 8: Naturalism, Nihilism, and Perfectionism -- Chapter 9: Marxism and the Ethos of the Twentieth Century -- Chapter 10: Parallel Projects -- Chapter 11: The Perfect Storm -- Chapter 12: Forgiveness at the Limit -- Part III: Thematic Analyses -- Chapter 13: Evolutionary Ethics -- Chapter 14: The Social Epistemological Normalization of Contestable Narratives -- Chapter 15: History, Fetishism, and Moral Change -- Chapter 16: Relativism, Coherence, and the Problems of Philosophy -- Chapter 17: Ethics and the Evil of Being -- Chapter 18: The Inescapability of Ethics -- Epilogue -- Contributors -- Index of Names.

What kind of role can the middle class play in potential democratization in such an undemocratic, late developing country as China? To answer this profound political as well as theoretical question, Jie Chen explores attitudinal and behavioral orientation of China's new middle class to democracy, based on a probability-sample survey and in-depth interviews of residents in the Chinese cities of Beijing, Chengdu, and Xi'an. While China's middle class is not likely to serve as the harbinger of democracy now, its current negative attitudes toward democracy may change in the future.