Between Specters of War and Visions of Peace

Dialogic Political Theory and the Challenges of Politics

Bibliographic Data

ID19973219
AuthorsGerald M Mara (Georgetown University, corresponding author)
Year2019
Pages272
Publication date2019-04-03
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueBetween Specters of War and Visions of Peace (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University PressNew York (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/oso/9780190903916.001.0001
OpenAlexW2949476844
Open LibraryOL28925925M
ISBN9780190903916
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited136

"Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, recurring political violence at both state and non-state levels has eroded confidence in the progressively peaceful character of international relations, and has unsettled the parameters of political thought. Frames of peace and frames of war have, throughout Western thought, colored the questions that we ask about politics, the descriptions of the pragmatic and moral alternatives that we face, and the ideas and metaphors that we use at any given moment. These frames, as this book argues, also obscure too much of political life. Gerald M. Mara proposes, instead, a political philosophy that takes both war and peace seriously, and a style of theory committed to questioning rather than closure. He challenges two powerful currents in contemporary political philosophy: the verdict that "premodern" or "metaphysical" texts cannot speak to modern and postmodern societies and the insistence that all forms of political theory be some form of democratic theory. Mara reexamines seminal texts in the history of political theory, from Thucydides to Jacques Derrida, and from Machiavelli to Judith Butler, to examine how frames of reference of war and peace have structured both the writing of these texts, as well as interpretations of them. The result is not a linear history of ideas, but a series of conversations between them, and a democratic justification for moving beyond democratic theory. "

Argument (complex analysis) · Context (archaeology) · Democracy · Dialogic · Epistemology · Hegelianism · History of political thought · Pedagogy · Political economy · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Postmodernism · Sociology · Vision · Anthropology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Global History, Politics, and Ideology · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies · Peace · Politics and war

Tools

Open DOI