Gideon Baker
Biographic Data
| ID | 3781041 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gideon Baker |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gideon |
| FAMILY NAME | Baker |
| SIGNATURE | BAKER G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Griffith University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7574-941X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 80 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
After Government: Implications of Foucault’s On the Government of the Living for a Genealogy of Obedience
Questioning: A New History of Western Philosophy
Studies the questions of 18 ancient, medieval and modern philosophers, from Socrates to Judith Butler \nTakes a new approach to the history of Western philosophy around the theme of questioning \nLooks at an equal balance of ancient and modern philosophers (plus two medieval philosophers) showing how the ancient and the modern are connected \nQuestions Western philosophy without claiming a God’s-eye view from above it \nGideon Baker provides a gr…
Paul’s Reduction of the Dual Commandment: The Significance of Worldliness to Messianic Life
Jesus' dual commandment to love God and neighbour, in that order, was clearly central to the teachings of the earliest communities of believers. Paul’s reduction of this twin commandment (Galatians 5.13; Romans 13.9) to love of neighbour was therefore very significant, as Spinoza and Taubes both noticed. How, then, to account for Paul’s audacity? Building on related readings of Paul from Heidegger and Agamben, particularly their respective interp…
Critique, Use and World in Giorgio Agamben's Genealogy of Government
This article explores the implications of Giorgio Agamben's genealogy of government for our understanding of critique. Agamben argues that the providential government of the world of Christian theology has bequeathed to the West an ontology of will and command. Replacing the pantheistic world of Stoic late Antiquity, the Christian world must be other than it is. The lack that this introduces is central to Agamben's account of nihilism, as it was …
Cynical Cosmopolitanism
The Ancient Cynic Diogenes of Sinope was the first to call himself a cosmopolitan because the Cynic true life, as a living according to phusis rather than nomos (law), enabled the negation of the polis. The polis, which divides according to citizenship, was shown to be nothing and Diogenes became a citizen of the world (kosmopolitês) by default. I link this to the Cynic sense of phusis as ‘being’, rather than the usual ‘nature’, concluding that t…
Paul and political theology: Nihilism, empire and the messianic vocation
Nihilism, for Nietzsche, is the nothing that results from the devaluation of the highest values. There is widespread agreement with Nietzsche’s claim that the apostle Paul was the great devaluer of the values of the ancient world, even to the extent of breaking the history of the world in two. Yet the mode of Paul’s devaluating nihilism is contested. Using Nietzsche’s three types of nihilist, I frame this debate over Paul as giving us, respective…
Hospitality and World Politics
Future of Political Community
The Revolution Is Dissent: Reconciling Agamben and Badiou on Paul
Underlying Giorgio Agamben’s and Alain Badiou’s disagreement over the apostle Paul we find common cause: following Paul’s deactivation of law, both Agamben and Badiou see the fixed identities necessary to the naturalised nomos of State politics as transfigured by a politics of grace. This transfiguration is differently rendered as either the emergence of a universal subject (Badiou) or the opening up of existing subjectivities (Agamben), but both…
Now We Have Been Delivered from the Law’: Thoughts Towards a Genealogy of Anarchism
What would a genealogy of anarchism reveal? No doubt many diverse and discontinuous themes. Here I foreground just one of these themes, but one that, however distant it might seem, remains a sine qua non of the radical's cause. I suggest that although anarchism, as a modern political philosophy, stands opposed specifically to the modern state and its laws, it is able to mount this critique thanks to an ancient tradition of Gnostic- apocalyptic th…
Right of entry or right of refusal? Hospitality in the law of nature and nations
This article explores the account of international hospitality found in the natural law tradition from Vitoria to Kant. Rather than limit itself to intellectual history, the focus here is on a more enduring theme: the double-bind of hospitality which the natural lawyers encountered in seeking to find a place for the welcome of the foreigner in the ‘law of nations’. Although these thinkers agreed on a natural right of communication, this proved de…
The Spectre of Montezuma: Hospitality and Haunting
By way of a retelling of the story of Montezuma’s tragic end at the hands of his inhospitable guest, Cortés, this article recovers the spectral presence of wronged hosts in the history of international hospitality. While conditional hospitality, as Jacques Derrida shows, is stalked by the absent or wronged guest, unconditional hospitality is disturbed by the abused host. Derridean deconstruction allows for this counter-haunting; but the host-harm…
The 'Double Law' of Hospitality: Rethinking Cosmopolitan Ethics in Humanitarian Intervention
By way of a discussion of the deliberately hard case of humanitarian intervention, this article considers the merits of an alternative cosmopolitan ethics to that of liberal cosmopolitanism, one which founds its universalism on an ethics of hospitality rather than the rights of man. Jacques Derrida describes the ethics of hospitality as defined by an unconditional welcome which nonetheless must become conditional in order to function. This leads …
Cosmopolitanism as Hospitality: Revisiting Identity and Difference in Cosmopolitanism
For many cosmopolitans, an emergent global civil society is re-framing the relationship between the universal and particular in world politics in ways that do justice to both. This article disputes this claim, finding that the concept of global civil society shares the same fundamental problem as state sovereignty, namely that it is better at articulating global identity than difference because it reproduces in different form statist attempts to …
Post-territorial politics and the politics of difference
Post-territorial politics and the politics of difference
Revisiting the Concept of Representation1
In Hannah Pitkin's influential book, The Concept of Representation (1967), the case is made that, despite its undoubted complexity, representation means something; that it is possible to establish when representation has taken place and, conversely, when it has not. Representation, as a central practice of modern politics, has objective content. Though it will often be imperfect, it is possible to be fairly and accurately represented politically.…
Civil Society and Democratic Theory: Alternative Voices
This book introduces radically alternative models of civil society that have been developed outside the liberal democratic frame of reference, models which suggest that civil society does offer new and non-statist democratic possibilities. Drawing on a wide range of civil society theory-practice from Eastern Europe and Latin America (including the Zapatistas in Mexico), and from visions of global civil society too, this book is uniquely positione…
Civil society that so perturbs”: Zapatismo and the democracy of civil society
The debate surrounding civil society and democracy is centrally concerned with which spaces democracy should be practised in. In many versions of the argument, and against the flow of previous democratic thought, practising democracy outside the state is seen as the best hope for a democratic future. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that much has been made of the concept of civil society by the Zapatistas, particularly by their figurehead Subcoma…
Auditing as the Eternal Present: Organisational Transformation in British Higher Education
This article examines organisational transformation within higher education in Britain. In the process, it highlights the focus upon the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’ of organisational existence that guides these changes. Drawing on recent experiences of auditing of subject provision within universities, it is argued that the new discourse of managerialism that is reflected in the drive for ‘quality assurance’ constitutes the triumph of method over…
Problems in the Theorisation of Global Civil Society
Existing theories of global civil society are problematical for two reasons. First, they assume that transnational organisations can assist world-wide democratisation without questioning either the representativeness of such organisations, or their accountability, or the potentially negative ramifications of their actions for international political equality. Second, despite placing new emphasis on political agency outside of the state, many acco…
Civil society theory and republican democracy
Calls to ‘build civil society’, ‘create active citizenship’, ‘empower communities’, or ‘widen political participation’ are growing by the day. They are heard in academia, the private sector, among NGOs and increasingly in government. In short, the rhetoric of self‐government, that ideal dear to republicans, is back on the political agenda. This time, however, it is increasingly tied to the category of civil society. Yet can the programme of ‘more…
The taming of the idea of civil society
Since 1989, civil society theory within the literature on democratization reflects the hold exerted by the model of actually existing liberal democracy over political studies. Thus civil society is viewed in largely instrumental terms ‐ as a support structure for democracy at the state level ‐ and earlier, more radical, models ‐ which understood civil society to be a democratic end in itself ‐ are forgotten. Liberal‐democratic conceptualizations …
Civil Society and Democracy: The Gap between Theory and Possibility
In this essay, I first provide reasons for the reemergence of the idea of civil society and for its subsequent importance in contemporary democratic theory, particularly on the left. I then show how this new approach to civil society is premised upon the separation of spheres between state and society. Thus the place of civil society in such accounts of democracy and democratisation, although normative and therefore putatively universal, is actua…
The changing idea of civil society: Models from the Polish democratic opposition
No examination of the concept of civil society and it's recent re‐emergence as a central idea in political theory would be complete without returning to the theoretical‐political models of the Polish democratic opposition from the 1970s and 1980s. Polish theorists developed a model of civil society that combined a radical self‐management agenda with a liberal emphasis on the importance of the ‘self‐limiting revolution’ and the separation of spher…
Problems in the Theorisation of Global Civil Society
Existing theories of global civil society are problematical for two reasons. First, they assume that transnational organisations can assist world-wide democratisation without questioning either the representativeness of such organisations, or their accountability, or the potentially negative ramifications of their actions for international political equality. Second, despite placing new emphasis on political agency outside of the state, many acco…
The taming of the idea of civil society
Since 1989, civil society theory within the literature on democratization reflects the hold exerted by the model of actually existing liberal democracy over political studies. Thus civil society is viewed in largely instrumental terms ‐ as a support structure for democracy at the state level ‐ and earlier, more radical, models ‐ which understood civil society to be a democratic end in itself ‐ are forgotten. Liberal‐democratic conceptualizations …
Cosmopolitanism as Hospitality: Revisiting Identity and Difference in Cosmopolitanism
For many cosmopolitans, an emergent global civil society is re-framing the relationship between the universal and particular in world politics in ways that do justice to both. This article disputes this claim, finding that the concept of global civil society shares the same fundamental problem as state sovereignty, namely that it is better at articulating global identity than difference because it reproduces in different form statist attempts to …
Civil Society and Democracy: The Gap between Theory and Possibility
In this essay, I first provide reasons for the reemergence of the idea of civil society and for its subsequent importance in contemporary democratic theory, particularly on the left. I then show how this new approach to civil society is premised upon the separation of spheres between state and society. Thus the place of civil society in such accounts of democracy and democratisation, although normative and therefore putatively universal, is actua…
The Spectre of Montezuma: Hospitality and Haunting
By way of a retelling of the story of Montezuma’s tragic end at the hands of his inhospitable guest, Cortés, this article recovers the spectral presence of wronged hosts in the history of international hospitality. While conditional hospitality, as Jacques Derrida shows, is stalked by the absent or wronged guest, unconditional hospitality is disturbed by the abused host. Derridean deconstruction allows for this counter-haunting; but the host-harm…
The Revolution Is Dissent: Reconciling Agamben and Badiou on Paul
Underlying Giorgio Agamben’s and Alain Badiou’s disagreement over the apostle Paul we find common cause: following Paul’s deactivation of law, both Agamben and Badiou see the fixed identities necessary to the naturalised nomos of State politics as transfigured by a politics of grace. This transfiguration is differently rendered as either the emergence of a universal subject (Badiou) or the opening up of existing subjectivities (Agamben), but both…
Revisiting the Concept of Representation1
In Hannah Pitkin's influential book, The Concept of Representation (1967), the case is made that, despite its undoubted complexity, representation means something; that it is possible to establish when representation has taken place and, conversely, when it has not. Representation, as a central practice of modern politics, has objective content. Though it will often be imperfect, it is possible to be fairly and accurately represented politically.…
The changing idea of civil society: Models from the Polish democratic opposition
No examination of the concept of civil society and it's recent re‐emergence as a central idea in political theory would be complete without returning to the theoretical‐political models of the Polish democratic opposition from the 1970s and 1980s. Polish theorists developed a model of civil society that combined a radical self‐management agenda with a liberal emphasis on the importance of the ‘self‐limiting revolution’ and the separation of spher…
The 'Double Law' of Hospitality: Rethinking Cosmopolitan Ethics in Humanitarian Intervention
By way of a discussion of the deliberately hard case of humanitarian intervention, this article considers the merits of an alternative cosmopolitan ethics to that of liberal cosmopolitanism, one which founds its universalism on an ethics of hospitality rather than the rights of man. Jacques Derrida describes the ethics of hospitality as defined by an unconditional welcome which nonetheless must become conditional in order to function. This leads …
Cynical Cosmopolitanism
The Ancient Cynic Diogenes of Sinope was the first to call himself a cosmopolitan because the Cynic true life, as a living according to phusis rather than nomos (law), enabled the negation of the polis. The polis, which divides according to citizenship, was shown to be nothing and Diogenes became a citizen of the world (kosmopolitês) by default. I link this to the Cynic sense of phusis as ‘being’, rather than the usual ‘nature’, concluding that t…
Critique, Use and World in Giorgio Agamben's Genealogy of Government
This article explores the implications of Giorgio Agamben's genealogy of government for our understanding of critique. Agamben argues that the providential government of the world of Christian theology has bequeathed to the West an ontology of will and command. Replacing the pantheistic world of Stoic late Antiquity, the Christian world must be other than it is. The lack that this introduces is central to Agamben's account of nihilism, as it was …
Right of entry or right of refusal? Hospitality in the law of nature and nations
This article explores the account of international hospitality found in the natural law tradition from Vitoria to Kant. Rather than limit itself to intellectual history, the focus here is on a more enduring theme: the double-bind of hospitality which the natural lawyers encountered in seeking to find a place for the welcome of the foreigner in the ‘law of nations’. Although these thinkers agreed on a natural right of communication, this proved de…
Civil society that so perturbs”: Zapatismo and the democracy of civil society
The debate surrounding civil society and democracy is centrally concerned with which spaces democracy should be practised in. In many versions of the argument, and against the flow of previous democratic thought, practising democracy outside the state is seen as the best hope for a democratic future. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that much has been made of the concept of civil society by the Zapatistas, particularly by their figurehead Subcoma…
From structuralism to voluntarism: The Latin American left and the discourse on civil society and democracy
Civil Society and Democracy: The Gap between Theory and Possibility
In this essay, I first provide reasons for the reemergence of the idea of civil society and for its subsequent importance in contemporary democratic theory, particularly on the left. I then show how this new approach to civil society is premised upon the separation of spheres between state and society. Thus the place of civil society in such accounts of democracy and democratisation, although normative and therefore putatively universal, is actua…
The changing idea of civil society: Models from the Polish democratic opposition
No examination of the concept of civil society and it's recent re‐emergence as a central idea in political theory would be complete without returning to the theoretical‐political models of the Polish democratic opposition from the 1970s and 1980s. Polish theorists developed a model of civil society that combined a radical self‐management agenda with a liberal emphasis on the importance of the ‘self‐limiting revolution’ and the separation of spher…
From structuralism to voluntarism: The Latin American left and the discourse on civil society and democracy
The taming of the idea of civil society
Since 1989, civil society theory within the literature on democratization reflects the hold exerted by the model of actually existing liberal democracy over political studies. Thus civil society is viewed in largely instrumental terms ‐ as a support structure for democracy at the state level ‐ and earlier, more radical, models ‐ which understood civil society to be a democratic end in itself ‐ are forgotten. Liberal‐democratic conceptualizations …
Civil society theory and republican democracy
Calls to ‘build civil society’, ‘create active citizenship’, ‘empower communities’, or ‘widen political participation’ are growing by the day. They are heard in academia, the private sector, among NGOs and increasingly in government. In short, the rhetoric of self‐government, that ideal dear to republicans, is back on the political agenda. This time, however, it is increasingly tied to the category of civil society. Yet can the programme of ‘more…
Auditing as the Eternal Present: Organisational Transformation in British Higher Education
This article examines organisational transformation within higher education in Britain. In the process, it highlights the focus upon the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’ of organisational existence that guides these changes. Drawing on recent experiences of auditing of subject provision within universities, it is argued that the new discourse of managerialism that is reflected in the drive for ‘quality assurance’ constitutes the triumph of method over…
Problems in the Theorisation of Global Civil Society
Existing theories of global civil society are problematical for two reasons. First, they assume that transnational organisations can assist world-wide democratisation without questioning either the representativeness of such organisations, or their accountability, or the potentially negative ramifications of their actions for international political equality. Second, despite placing new emphasis on political agency outside of the state, many acco…
Civil Society and Democratic Theory: Alternative Voices
This book introduces radically alternative models of civil society that have been developed outside the liberal democratic frame of reference, models which suggest that civil society does offer new and non-statist democratic possibilities. Drawing on a wide range of civil society theory-practice from Eastern Europe and Latin America (including the Zapatistas in Mexico), and from visions of global civil society too, this book is uniquely positione…
Civil society that so perturbs”: Zapatismo and the democracy of civil society
The debate surrounding civil society and democracy is centrally concerned with which spaces democracy should be practised in. In many versions of the argument, and against the flow of previous democratic thought, practising democracy outside the state is seen as the best hope for a democratic future. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that much has been made of the concept of civil society by the Zapatistas, particularly by their figurehead Subcoma…
Revisiting the Concept of Representation1
In Hannah Pitkin's influential book, The Concept of Representation (1967), the case is made that, despite its undoubted complexity, representation means something; that it is possible to establish when representation has taken place and, conversely, when it has not. Representation, as a central practice of modern politics, has objective content. Though it will often be imperfect, it is possible to be fairly and accurately represented politically.…
Post-territorial politics and the politics of difference
Post-territorial politics and the politics of difference
Cosmopolitanism as Hospitality: Revisiting Identity and Difference in Cosmopolitanism
For many cosmopolitans, an emergent global civil society is re-framing the relationship between the universal and particular in world politics in ways that do justice to both. This article disputes this claim, finding that the concept of global civil society shares the same fundamental problem as state sovereignty, namely that it is better at articulating global identity than difference because it reproduces in different form statist attempts to …
The Spectre of Montezuma: Hospitality and Haunting
By way of a retelling of the story of Montezuma’s tragic end at the hands of his inhospitable guest, Cortés, this article recovers the spectral presence of wronged hosts in the history of international hospitality. While conditional hospitality, as Jacques Derrida shows, is stalked by the absent or wronged guest, unconditional hospitality is disturbed by the abused host. Derridean deconstruction allows for this counter-haunting; but the host-harm…
The 'Double Law' of Hospitality: Rethinking Cosmopolitan Ethics in Humanitarian Intervention
By way of a discussion of the deliberately hard case of humanitarian intervention, this article considers the merits of an alternative cosmopolitan ethics to that of liberal cosmopolitanism, one which founds its universalism on an ethics of hospitality rather than the rights of man. Jacques Derrida describes the ethics of hospitality as defined by an unconditional welcome which nonetheless must become conditional in order to function. This leads …
Right of entry or right of refusal? Hospitality in the law of nature and nations
This article explores the account of international hospitality found in the natural law tradition from Vitoria to Kant. Rather than limit itself to intellectual history, the focus here is on a more enduring theme: the double-bind of hospitality which the natural lawyers encountered in seeking to find a place for the welcome of the foreigner in the ‘law of nations’. Although these thinkers agreed on a natural right of communication, this proved de…
Now We Have Been Delivered from the Law’: Thoughts Towards a Genealogy of Anarchism
What would a genealogy of anarchism reveal? No doubt many diverse and discontinuous themes. Here I foreground just one of these themes, but one that, however distant it might seem, remains a sine qua non of the radical's cause. I suggest that although anarchism, as a modern political philosophy, stands opposed specifically to the modern state and its laws, it is able to mount this critique thanks to an ancient tradition of Gnostic- apocalyptic th…
Hospitality and World Politics
Future of Political Community
The Revolution Is Dissent: Reconciling Agamben and Badiou on Paul
Underlying Giorgio Agamben’s and Alain Badiou’s disagreement over the apostle Paul we find common cause: following Paul’s deactivation of law, both Agamben and Badiou see the fixed identities necessary to the naturalised nomos of State politics as transfigured by a politics of grace. This transfiguration is differently rendered as either the emergence of a universal subject (Badiou) or the opening up of existing subjectivities (Agamben), but both…
Paul and political theology: Nihilism, empire and the messianic vocation
Nihilism, for Nietzsche, is the nothing that results from the devaluation of the highest values. There is widespread agreement with Nietzsche’s claim that the apostle Paul was the great devaluer of the values of the ancient world, even to the extent of breaking the history of the world in two. Yet the mode of Paul’s devaluating nihilism is contested. Using Nietzsche’s three types of nihilist, I frame this debate over Paul as giving us, respective…
Critique, Use and World in Giorgio Agamben's Genealogy of Government
This article explores the implications of Giorgio Agamben's genealogy of government for our understanding of critique. Agamben argues that the providential government of the world of Christian theology has bequeathed to the West an ontology of will and command. Replacing the pantheistic world of Stoic late Antiquity, the Christian world must be other than it is. The lack that this introduces is central to Agamben's account of nihilism, as it was …
Cynical Cosmopolitanism
The Ancient Cynic Diogenes of Sinope was the first to call himself a cosmopolitan because the Cynic true life, as a living according to phusis rather than nomos (law), enabled the negation of the polis. The polis, which divides according to citizenship, was shown to be nothing and Diogenes became a citizen of the world (kosmopolitês) by default. I link this to the Cynic sense of phusis as ‘being’, rather than the usual ‘nature’, concluding that t…
Paul’s Reduction of the Dual Commandment: The Significance of Worldliness to Messianic Life
Jesus' dual commandment to love God and neighbour, in that order, was clearly central to the teachings of the earliest communities of believers. Paul’s reduction of this twin commandment (Galatians 5.13; Romans 13.9) to love of neighbour was therefore very significant, as Spinoza and Taubes both noticed. How, then, to account for Paul’s audacity? Building on related readings of Paul from Heidegger and Agamben, particularly their respective interp…
Questioning: A New History of Western Philosophy
Studies the questions of 18 ancient, medieval and modern philosophers, from Socrates to Judith Butler \nTakes a new approach to the history of Western philosophy around the theme of questioning \nLooks at an equal balance of ancient and modern philosophers (plus two medieval philosophers) showing how the ancient and the modern are connected \nQuestions Western philosophy without claiming a God’s-eye view from above it \nGideon Baker provides a gr…
Law (22 works) · Political science (21 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Politics (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Democracy (10 works) · Civil society (8 works)