Description
Book SynopsisThe state has been a dominant political form, and the preferred model for a political unity, for at least the last two hundred years. However, many today speak of its crisis. This crisis stems from two main factors: the state’s changing role in the globalizing international system and the state’s complex relation to democracy, a key normative concept of contemporary politics.
Authoritarian leaders using the state to successfully reaffirm sovereignty, despite international integration; democratic movements abound but often only work to reinforce anarchic democracy regimes they contest. Is there an alternative? Do we need to reconceive the phenomenon of state, with a view to the future? These are the questions that an international group of scholars explore and answer in this book, drawing on history of political thought, continental philosophy, and the contemporary political examples.
They engage the dialectical tradition broadly understood, including phenomenological transcendentalism, the political philosophy of French public law, and the German 20th century political philosophy beyond Weber. The result brings the state into a critical political philosophy, providing a realistic sketch of what a good democratic state could and should be like.
Table of ContentsACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
I. The Idea of State.
CHAPTER 1. Michael Marder. The Categories of the State
CHAPTER 2. Alexander Filippov, The State in the International Legal Order
CHAPTER 3. Olga Bashkina. Popular Sovereignty, Constituent Power and Representation in the Early 20th-Century French Constitutional Theory
II. Critique of the State and the State of the Critique
CHAPTER 4. Panagiotis Sotiris. State Power and Social Transformation
CHAPTER 5. Maria Kochkina, Lindsey’s “Concealed State” and the Left Strategy
CHAPTER 6. Ajay Singh Chaudhary. Franz Neumann and the Critical Theory of State for the 21st Century
III. Socialist and Communist State
CHAPTER 7. Lorenzo Chiesa. Lenin and the Transitional-Revolutionary State
CHAPTER 8. Agon Hamza. Marching of God, or the Žižekian Theory of the State. Contemporary “Young Hegelianism”
CHAPTER 9. Christian Sorace. Democratic Corpses and Communist Specters: Between the Liberal Democratic and Post-Socialist State
IV Ex Pluribus Unum
CHAPTER 10. Artemy Magun, Civitas Paradoxa,or: The Dialectical Theory of State
