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When we talk about globalization, we tend to focus on its social and economic benefits. In Governance in the New Global Disorder, the political philosopher Daniel Innerarity considers its unsettling and largely unacknowledged consequences. The “opening” of different societies to new ideas, products, and forms of prosperity has introduced a persistent uncertainty, or disorder, into everyday life. Multinational corporations have weakened sovereignty. We no longer know who is in control or who is responsible. Economies can collapse without sufficient warning, and the effort to rebuild can drag on for years. Piracy is everywhere. Is there any way to balance the interests of state, marketplace, and society in this new construct of power? Since national economies have become deterritorialized and political interdependencies aggravate our common vulnerabilities, Innerarity contends that there is no other solution except to move toward global governance and a denationalization of justice. Globalization tries to unify the world through technologies, the economy, and cultural products and styles, but it cannot articulate or regulate political and legal equivalents. Everyone faces the same risks to their security, food supply, health, financial stability, and environment, and these risks demand a new global politics of humanity. In her foreword, the sociologist Saskia Sassen isolates the key takeaways from Innerarity’s argument and the solutions they present to growing global tensions.

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses. For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in their political struggle and how they have thought about their past since. Throughout the twentieth century, argues Left-Wing Melancholia, from classical Marxism to psychoanalysis to the advent of critical theory, a culture of defeat and its emotional overlay of melancholy have characterized the leftist understanding of the political in history and in theoretical critique. Drawing on a vast and diverse archive in theory, testimony, and image and on such thinkers as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and others, the intellectual historian Enzo Traverso explores the varying nature of left melancholy as it has manifested in a feeling of guilt for not sufficiently challenging authority, in a fear of surrendering in disarray and resignation, in mourning the human costs of the past, and in a sense of failure for not realizing utopian aspirations. Yet hidden within this melancholic tradition are the resources for a renewed challenge to prevailing regimes of historicity, a passion that has the power to reignite the dialectic of revolutionary thought.

While supporting the cosmopolitan pursuit of a world that respects all rights and interests, this book supports political theorists which have, in their approach to this book's project, compromised its egalitarian and emancipatory principles. Focusing on recent debates without losing sight of cosmopolitanism's ancient and Enlightenment roots, the book confronts the philosophical difficulties of defending universal ideals and the implications for ethics and political theory. In morality as in politics, theorists have generally focused first on discovering universal values and second on their implementation. The book argues that only by prioritizing the development and articulation of universal values through political action in the fight for freedom and equality can theorists do justice to these efforts and cosmopolitanism's universal vocation. Only by proceeding from the local to the global, from the bottom up rather than from the top down, on the basis of political practice rather than moral ideals, can we salvage moral and political universalism. This book provides the clearest, most systematic account yet of this schematic reversal and its radical possibilities.

Actions taken by the United States and other countries during the Great Recession focused on restoring the viability of major financial institutions while guaranteeing debt and stimulating growth. Once the markets stabilized, the United States enacted regulatory reforms that ultimately left basic economic structures unchanged. At the same time, the political class pursued austerity measures to curb the growing national debt. Drawing on the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes and Hyman Minsky and applying them to the modern evolution of American banking and finance, this book offers a chilling prediction about future crises and the structural factors inhibiting true reform. The book follows the rise of banking practices and financial motives in America over the past thirty years and the simultaneous growth of a shadow industry of hedge funds, private equity firms, and financial innovations such as derivatives. It analyzes the damage that increasing unsustainable debt and excessive risk-taking has done to our financial system and expands his critique to a discussion of world systems and globalization. Revealing the willful blind spots of mainstream finance theory, the text moves beyond an economic model reliant on debt expansion and dangerous levels of leverage, proposing instead a social structure of accumulation that places economic justice over profit and, more practically, institutes an inclusive, sustainable model for growth.

Theories of justice are haunted by a paradox: the more ambitious the theory of justice, the less applicable and useful the model is to political practice; yet the more politically realistic the theory, the weaker its moral ambition, rendering it unsound and equally useless. Brokering a resolution to this “judgment paradox,” the book advances a “critical consensus model” of judgment that serves the normative ideals of a just society without the help of ideal theory. Tracing the evolution of two major traditions in political philosophy—critical theory and philosophical liberalism—and the way they confront the judgment paradox, the book critiques prevailing models of deliberative democracy and their preference for ideal theory over political applicability. Instead, it replaces the reliance on normative models of democracy with an account of the dynamics of reasoned judgment produced in democratic practices of open dialogues. Combining Hannah Arendt's study of judgment with Pierre Bourdieu's social critique of power relations, and incorporating elements of political epistemology from Kant, Wittgenstein, H. L. A. Hart, Max Weber, and American philosophical pragmatism, the book centers its inquiry on the way participants in moral conflicts attribute meaning to their grievances of injustice. It then demonstrates the emancipatory potential of the model of critical deliberative judgment it forges and its capacity to guide policy making.

Published more than twenty years ago, this bold defense of socialism remains a seminal text for our time. Treating socialism as an ethic, reinterpreting its core categories, and critically confronting its early foundations, the book offers a reinvigorated “class ideal” and a new perspective for progressive politics in the twentieth century. It is an extraordinary work of political history that revisits the pivotal figures of the labor movement: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg. Examining their contributions as well as their flaws, the book shows how critical innovation gave way to dogma. New practical problems have arisen, and this book engages with the relationship between class and social movements, institutional accountability and democratic participation, economic justice and market imperatives, and internationalism and identity.

We fear that the growing threat of violent attack has upset the balance between existential concepts of political power, which emphasize security, and traditional notions of constitutional limits meant to protect civil liberties. We worry that constitutional states cannot, during a time of war, terror, and extreme crisis, maintain legality and preserve civil rights and freedoms. This book allays these concerns by revisiting the theoretical origins of the modern constitutional state, which, it argues, recognized and made room for tensions among law, war, and the social order. We traditionally associate the Enlightenment with the taming of absolutist sovereign power through the establishment of a legal state based on the rights of individuals. This book shows instead that Enlightenment thinkers conceived of political autonomy in a systematic, theoretical way. Focusing on the nature of foundational violence, war, and existential crises, eighteenth-century thinkers understood law and constitutional order not as constraints on political power but as the logical implication of that primordial force. The book reclaims the idea of law, warfare, and the social order as intertwining elements subject to complex historical development. It reviews the major canonical thinkers of constitutional theory (Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau) from the perspective of existential security and sovereign power, and demonstrates that Enlightenment thinkers understood the autonomous political sphere as a space of law protecting individuals according to their political status, not as mere members of a historically contingent social order.

A philosopher, rabbi, religious historian, and Gnostic, Jacob Taubes was for many years a correspondent and interlocutor of Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), a German jurist, philosopher, political theorist, law professor—and self-professed Nazi. Despite their unlikely association, Taubes and Schmitt shared an abiding interest in the fundamental problems of political theology, believing the great challenges of modern political theory were ancient in pedigree and, in many cases, anticipated the works of Judeo-Christian eschatologists. In this book, the two intellectuals work through ideas of the apocalypse and other central concepts of political theology. Taubes acknowledges Schmitt's reservations about the weakness of liberal democracy yet distances himself from his prescription to rectify it, arguing the apocalyptic worldview requires less of a rigid hierarchical social ordering than a community committed to the importance of decision making. In these writings, a sharper and more nuanced portrait of Schmitt's thought emerges, as well as a more complicated understanding of Taubes, who has shaped the work of Giorgio Agamben, Peter Sloterdijk, and other major twentieth-century theorists.

This book is a meditation on contemporary political, legal, and social theory from a psychoanalytic perspective. It argues for the enabling function of formal and symbolic constraints in sustaining desire as a source of creativity, innovation, and social change. It begins by calling for a richer understanding of the psychoanalytic concept of the symbolic and the resources it might offer for an examination of the social link and the political sphere. The symbolic is a crucial dimension of social coexistence that is introduced by language—and thus inescapably “Other” with respect to the laws of nature—and an undeniable fact of human existence. Yet the same cannot be said of the forms and practices that represent and sustain it. The book analyzes examples of “experimental” (as opposed to “normative”) articulations of the symbolic and their creative use of formal limits and constraints not as mere prohibitions or rules but as “enabling constraints” that favor the exercise of freedom. The first part examines practices that conceive of subjective freedom as enabled by the struggle with constraints or limits, from the transference that structures the “minimal social link” of psychoanalysis to constrained relationships between two or more people in the context of political and social movements. The second part is devoted to legal and political debates surrounding the function of the written law. In conclusion, the study considers the relationship between will and constraint in Immanuel Kant's aesthetic philosophy and in the experimental literary works of the collective Oulipo.