Order, Crisis, and Redemption

Order, Crisis, and Redemption PDF Author: Peter Langford
Publisher: Suny Press
ISBN: 9781438493435
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A critical reflection on the limitations of Carl Schmitt's political theology, reconsidered in light of the current crisis of the liberal democratic order.

Order, Crisis, and Redemption

Order, Crisis, and Redemption PDF Author: Peter Langford
Publisher: Suny Press
ISBN: 9781438493435
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A critical reflection on the limitations of Carl Schmitt's political theology, reconsidered in light of the current crisis of the liberal democratic order.

Order, Crisis, and Redemption

Order, Crisis, and Redemption PDF Author: Peter Langford
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438493452
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Recent events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, the rise of right-wing populism, the growing economic inequality and political instability, and the climate emergency, are indicative of the decomposition of the global liberal democratic order. Order, Crisis, and Redemption is a critical reflection on the limitations of Carl Schmitt's political theology, an attempt to think, with and beyond Schmitt, about the parameters of this crisis. Through a sustained critical engagement, ranging over Schmittian texts, including the lesser known, from the 1920s to the 1970s, the book elaborates three main themes that preoccupied Schmitt: order, crisis, and redemption. In times of crisis, as with the one we are currently experiencing, we are faced with the dilemma of either shoring up the current political and legal order—through ever more authoritarian measures—or radically transforming it. Redemption, in the full theological sense of the word, thus implies the possibility of a new understanding of ethics and politics, aimed at creating a more just world.

Catastrophe and Redemption

Catastrophe and Redemption PDF Author: Jessica Whyte
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438448546
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Challenging the prevalent account of Agamben as a pessimistic thinker, Catastrophe and Redemption proposes a reading of his political thought in which the redemptive element of his work is not a curious aside but instead is fundamental to his project. Jessica Whyte considers his critical account of contemporary politics—his argument that Western politics has been "biopolitics" since its inception, his critique of human rights, his argument that the state of exception is now the norm, and the paradigmatic significance he attributes to the concentration camp—and shows that it is in the midst of these catastrophes of the present that Agamben sees the possibility of a form of profane redemption. Whyte outlines the importance of potentiality in his attempt to formulate a new politics, examines his relation to Jewish and Christian strands of messianism, and interrogates the new forms of praxis that he situates within contemporary commodity culture, taking Agamben's thought as a call for the creation of new political forms.

Carl Schmitt Between Technological Rationality and Theology

Carl Schmitt Between Technological Rationality and Theology PDF Author: Hugo E. Herrera
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438478771
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Carl Schmitt, one of the most influential legal and political thinkers of the twentieth century, is known chiefly for his work on international law, sovereignty, and his doctrine of political exception. This book argues that greater prominence should be given to his early work in legal studies. Schmitt himself repeatedly identified as a jurist, and Hugo E. Herrera demonstrates how for Schmitt, law plays a key role as an intermediary between ideal, conceptual theory and the complexity of practical, concrete situations. Law is concerned precisely with balancing the extremes of theory and reality, and in this respect, Schmitt associates it with philosophical thinking broadly as being able to understand and explain the tensions in human experience. Reviewing and analyzing prevailing interpretations of Schmitt by Jacques Derrida, Heinrich Meier, and others, Herrera argues that the importance of Schmitt's legal framework is both significant and overlooked.

Good Enough for Government Work

Good Enough for Government Work PDF Author: Amy E. Lerman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022663020X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
American government is in the midst of a reputation crisis. An overwhelming majority of citizens—Republicans and Democrats alike—hold negative perceptions of the government and believe it is wasteful, inefficient, and doing a generally poor job managing public programs and providing public services. When social problems arise, Americans are therefore skeptical that the government has the ability to respond effectively. It’s a serious problem, argues Amy E. Lerman, and it will not be a simple one to fix. With Good Enough for Government Work, Lerman uses surveys, experiments, and public opinion data to argue persuasively that the reputation of government is itself an impediment to government’s ability to achieve the common good. In addition to improving its efficiency and effectiveness, government therefore has an equally critical task: countering the belief that the public sector is mired in incompetence. Lerman takes readers through the main challenges. Negative perceptions are highly resistant to change, she shows, because we tend to perceive the world in a way that confirms our negative stereotypes of government—even in the face of new information. Those who hold particularly negative perceptions also begin to “opt out” in favor of private alternatives, such as sending their children to private schools, living in gated communities, and refusing to participate in public health insurance programs. When sufficient numbers of people opt out of public services, the result can be a decline in the objective quality of public provision. In this way, citizens’ beliefs about government can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with consequences for all. Lerman concludes with practical solutions for how the government might improve its reputation and roll back current efforts to eliminate or privatize even some of the most critical public services.

The Debt of the Living

The Debt of the Living PDF Author: Elettra Stimilli
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438464150
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Analyzes theological and philosophical understandings of debt and its role in contemporary capitalism. Max Weber’s account of the rise of capitalism focused on his concept of a Protestant ethic, valuing diligence in earning and saving money but restraint in spending it. However, such individual restraint is foreign to contemporary understandings of finance, which treat ever-increasing consumption and debt as natural, almost essential, for maintaining the economic cycle of buying and selling. In The Debt of the Living, Elettra Stimilli returns to this idea of restraint as ascesis, by analyzing theological and philosophical understandings of debt drawn from a range of figures, including Saint Paul, Schmitt and Agamben, Benjamin and Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, and Foucault. Central to this analysis is the logic of “profit for profit’s sake”—an aspect of Weber’s work that Stimilli believes has been given insufficient attention. Following Foucault, she identifies this as the original mechanism of a capitalist dispositif that feeds not on a goal-directed rationality, but on the self-determining character of human agency. Ascesis is fundamental not because it is characterized by renunciation, but because the self-discipline it imposes converts the properly human quality of action without a predetermined goal into a lack, a fault, or a state of guilt: a debt that cannot be settled. Stimilli argues that this lack, which is impossible to fill, should be seen as the basis of the economy of hedonism and consumption that has governed global economies in recent years and as the premise of the current economy of debt.

Beyond Redemption

Beyond Redemption PDF Author: Carole Emberton
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022602427X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
In the months after the end of the Civil War, there was one word on everyone’s lips: redemption. From the fiery language of Radical Republicans calling for a reconstruction of the former Confederacy to the petitions of those individuals who had worked the land as slaves to the white supremacists who would bring an end to Reconstruction in the late 1870s, this crucial concept informed the ways in which many people—both black and white, northerner and southerner—imagined the transformation of the American South. Beyond Redemption explores how the violence of a protracted civil war shaped the meaning of freedom and citizenship in the new South. Here, Carole Emberton traces the competing meanings that redemption held for Americans as they tried to come to terms with the war and the changing social landscape. While some imagined redemption from the brutality of slavery and war, others—like the infamous Ku Klux Klan—sought political and racial redemption for their losses through violence. Beyond Redemption merges studies of race and American manhood with an analysis of post-Civil War American politics to offer unconventional and challenging insight into the violence of Reconstruction.

Redeeming Church Conflicts

Redeeming Church Conflicts PDF Author: Tara Klena Barthel
Publisher: Hendrickson Publishers
ISBN: 1619708728
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Discover practical advice on resolving conflicts and dealing with crises within the church---and learn how to turn each situation into an opportunity for grace. In this hope-filled book, experts Barthel and Edling take you through the Acts 15 model of approaching dissension in order to provide a clear, godly way forward to redemptive reconciliation. 204 pages, softcover from Hendrickson.

Containing Community

Containing Community PDF Author: Greg Bird
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438461879
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Analyzes the role of community in the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Winner of the 2017 Symposium Book Award presented by Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy Community has been both celebrated and demonized as a fortress that shelters and defends its members from being exposed to difference. Instead of abandoning community as an antiquated model of relationships that is ill suited for our globalized world, this book turns to the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Jean-Luc Nancy in search for ways to rethink community in an open and inclusive manner. Greg Bird argues that a central piece of this task is found in how each philosopher rearticulates community not as something that is proper to those who belong and improper to those who are excluded or where inclusion is based on one’s share in common property. We must return to the forgotten dimension of sharing, not as a sharing of things that we can contain and own, but as a process that divides us up and shares us out in community with one another. This book traces this problem through a wide array of fields ranging from biopolitics, communitarianism, existentialism, phenomenology, political economy, radical philosophy, and social theory. Greg Bird is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada, and the coeditor (with Jonathan Short) of Community, Immunity and the Proper: Roberto Esposito.

Theology of Money

Theology of Money PDF Author: Philip Goodchild
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822392552
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Theology of Money is a philosophical inquiry into the nature and role of money in the contemporary world. Philip Goodchild reveals the significance of money as a dynamic social force by arguing that under its influence, moral evaluation is subordinated to economic valuation, which is essentially abstract and anarchic. His rigorous inquiry opens into a complex analysis of political economy, encompassing markets and capital, banks and the state, class divisions, accounting practices, and the ecological crisis awaiting capitalism. Engaging with Christian theology and the thought of Carl Schmitt, Georg Simmel, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, and many others, Goodchild develops a theology of money based on four contentions, which he elaborates in depth. First, money has no intrinsic value; it is a promise of value, a crystallization of future hopes. Second, money is the supreme value in contemporary society. Third, the value of assets measured by money is always future-oriented, dependent on expectations about how much might be obtained for those assets at a later date. Since this value, when realized, will again depend on future expectations, the future is forever deferred. Financial value is essentially a degree of hope, expectation, trust, or credit. Fourth, money is created as debt, which involves a social obligation to work or make profits to repay the loan. As a system of debts, money imposes an immense and irresistible system of social control on individuals, corporations, and governments, each of whom are threatened by economic failure if they refuse their obligations to the money system. This system of debt has progressively tightened its hold on all sectors and regions of global society. With Theology of Money, Goodchild aims to make conscious our collective faith and its dire implications.