Suchergebnisse

"In The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution, Dan Robinson presents a new history of politics in colonial America and the imperial crisis, tracing how ideas of Europe and Europeanness shaped British-American political culture. Reconstructing colonial debates about the European states system, European civilisation, and Britain's position within both, Robinson shows how these concerns informed colonial attitudes towards American identity and America's place inside - and, ultimately, outside - the emerging British Empire. Taking in more than two centuries of Atlantic history, he explores the way in which colonists inherited and adapted Anglo-British traditions of thinking about international politics, how they navigated imperial politics during the European wars of 1740-1763, and how the burgeoning patriot movement negotiated the dual crisis of Europe and Empire in the between 1763 and 1775. In the process, Robinson sheds new light on the development of public politics in colonial America, the Anglicisation/Americanisation debate, the political economy of empire, early American art and poetry, eighteenth-century geopolitical thinking, and the relationship between international affairs, nationalism, and revolution. What emerges from this story is an American Revolution that seems both decidedly arcane and strikingly relevant to the political challenges of the twenty-first century." --

The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) is widely regarded as the greatest and most significant English-speaking philosopher and often seen as having had the most influence on the way philosophy is practiced today in the West. His reputation is based not only on the quality of his philosophical thought but also on the breadth and scope of his writings, which ranged over metaphysics, epistemology, morals, politics, religion, and aesthetics. The Handbook's 38 newly commissioned chapters are divided into six parts: Central Themes; Metaphysics and Epistemology; Passion, Morality and Politics; Aesthetics, History, and Economics; Religion; Hume and the Enlightenment; and After Hume. The volume also features an introduction from editor Paul Russell and a chapter on Hume's biography.

Citizen Support for Democratic and Autocratic Regimes takes a political-culture perspective on the struggle between democracy and autocracy by examining how these regimes fare in the eyes of their citizens. Taking a globally comparative approach, it studies both the levels as well as the individual- and system-level sources of political support in democracies and autocracies worldwide. The book develops an explanatory model of regime support which includes both individual- and system level determinants and specifies not only the general causal mechanisms and pathways through which these determinants affect regime support but also spells out how these effects might vary between the two types of regimes. It empirically tests its propositions using multi-level structural equation modeling and a comprehensive dataset that combines recent public-opinion data from six cross-national survey projects with aggregate data from various sources for more than 100 democracies and autocracies. It finds that both the levels and individual-level sources of regime support are the same in democracies and autocracies, but that the way in which system-level context factors affect regime support differs between the two types of regimes. The results enhance our understanding of what determines citizen support for fundamentally different regimes, help assessing the present and future stability of democracies and autocracies, and provide clear policy implications to those interested in strengthening support for democracy and/or fostering democratic change in autocracies.

"Ramism was the most innovative and disruptive educational reform movement to sweep through the international Protestant world in the latter sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. During the 1620s, the Thirty Years' War destroyed the network of central European academies and universities which had generated most of this innovation. Students and teachers, fleeing the conflict in all directions, transplanted that tradition into many different geographical and cultural contexts in which it bore are wide variety of interrelated fruit. Within the Dutch Republic, post-Ramist method played a crucial role in the rapid assimilation of Cartesianism into a network of thriving young academies and universities. From England to east-central Europe, the tradition was no less important in accelerating the reception of Baconianism. In the easternmost outpost of the Reformed world in Transylvania, the displaced tradition generated a final flourishing of philosophical innovation which exercised a formative influence on the young Leibniz. The failure of all of these efforts to assemble the fruits of this tradition into an encyclopaedic synthesis marks a major watershed in Western intellectual history. The Reformation of Common Learning brings together all of these aspects of the tradition in a manner which roots them in deeper historical developments and relates a series of far-flung and poorly understood developments together in new ways"--

"Between 2009 and 2014, an anti homosexuality law circulating in the Ugandan parliament attracted global attention for the draconian nature of its provisions and for the involvement of US antigay evangelical Christians who were reported to have lobbied for its passage. This book makes three contributions to our understanding of these developments. First, it offers an account of the international relations that anticipated and followed the Anti Homosexuality Act. Journeying through encounters between the kingdom of Buganda and British colonialism, between the Ugandan state and its international donors, and between LGBTI activists in the global South and North, the book illuminates the frictional collaborations across geopolitical divides that produce and contest contemporary queerphobias. Second, it explores the dialectic produced by two opposed statements that mark queer postcolonial disagreements-'homosexuality is Western' and 'homophobia is Western'. Arguing that both statements are true but trivial, the book demonstrates how their opposition produces distinctive forms of temporal politics in the queer postcolony. In this register, the book explores the afterlives of colonialism and the queer futures enabled by it in Uganda, India, and Britain. Third, in shifting the scenes of encounter that it investigates from one chapter to the next, the book reveals how queerness mutates in different configurations of power to become a metonym for other categories such as nationality, religiosity, race, class, and caste. It argues that these mutations reveal the grammars forged in the originary violence of the state and social institutions in which queer difference struggles to find place"--

"This book defends a new interpretation of Hegel's idealism as oriented by a philosophical and logical concept of life, with a focus on Hegel's Science of Logic. Beginning with the influence of Kant's Critique of Judgment, Karen Ng argues that Hegel's key philosophical contributions concerning self-consciousness, freedom, and logic, all develop around the idea of internal purposiveness, an idea that Hegel takes to be "Kant's great service to philosophy." In the first part of the book, Ng charts the development of the purposiveness theme in Kant's third Critique, and argues that the key innovation from that text is the claim that the purposiveness of nature opens up and enables the non-arbitrary operation of the power of judgment. She argues that this innovation is the key for understanding Hegel's philosophical method in the Differenzschrift (1801) and Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), a method in which the theory of self-consciousness plays a central role. With the aid of arguments from Fichte and Schelling, Hegel argues against Kant that internal purposiveness is constitutive of cognition's activity, shaping its essential relation to both self and world. In part two, Ng defends a new and detailed interpretation of Hegel's Logic, arguing that Hegel's Subjective Logic can be understood as Hegel's own version of a critique of judgment, in which life comes to be understood as opening up the possibility of intelligibility as such. She argues that Hegel's theory of judgment is modelled on reflective, teleological judgments, in which something's species or kind provides the objective context for predication. The Subjective Logic culminates in the argument that life is a primitive or original activity of judgment, one that is the necessary presupposition for the actualization of self-conscious cognition. Ng demonstrates that absolute method is best interpreted as the ongoing dialectic between life and self-conscious cognition, providing a new way of understanding Hegel's philosophical system"--

Cities on the front lines -- Energy efficiency : from buildings to districts and neighborhoods -- Beyond the building : district heating and cooling -- Renewable cities -- Electrifying transportation -- Liberating cities from cars -- Eco-innovation districts accelerating urban climate action -- Cities and a green new deal -- The elements of greenovation.

"Based on extensive archival research, the extraordinary stories of ordinary peoples' lives explore many facets of young people's intimacy from meeting to courtship and to the many occasions when untimely pregnancies necessitated a range of strategies that might include marriage but also efforts to induce abortions, arrangements for out of wedlock delivery and custody with the fathers or charging the babies to a foundling hospital or infanticide. Clergy, lawyers, social welfare officials, employers, midwives, wet-nurses, neighbors, family and friends supported young women and held young men responsible for the reproductive consequences of their sexual activity. These practices of intimacy reframe our understanding of multiple aspects of the Old Regime. Their experiences challenge the centrality of the disciplining of female sexuality as a critical early modern project of state formation and religious reformation, the history of a sexual double standard in local and long contexts, the history of marriage, and the role of law in politics writ large and small of communities and institutions. Their lives also reshape many more specific debates, for instance, about the history of emotions, infanticide, attitudes to illegitimacy, pre-modern workplaces, and the body. It reveals the ways in which for working communities local management of intimacy with a heavy emphasis on pastoral care and pragmatic acceptance of the inevitability of out of wedlock pregnancy were the norm"--