The Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis offers fresh insight into the fascinating and controversial works, both literary and visual, of Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957). Accessible to students and scholars alike, this Companion illuminates key areas of Lewis's life and career. Written by a team of leading experts, this book examines Lewis's work in light of contemporary concerns with radical politics, feminism and queer perspectives, and the effects of mass media. Individual essays further illustrate the author's early leadership of the British artistic avant-garde, his varying later phases as a writer and painter, and his radical and changing political views, in addition to his complex views on gender and race, his relation to philosophy and theology, and his idiosyncratic practice of cultural criticism.
At a time when the dull rationality of the money calculus seems to be making ground in every sphere, it is perhaps opportune to reopen the question of literature and its relations with a rationality defined according to the logic of economic exchange: what kinds of value flow from such a rationality and what possibilities of resistance are there if we happen not to like the model and its more rebarbative ideological implications? Historically, attempts to reduce the richness of human exchange to utilitarian or economic paradigms have met with counter-cultural expressions of dissent and defiance. And yet the search for an 'authentic community' outside the reifications and repressions of economic exchange presents its own ambiguities and pitfalls, since the attempt to ground value in other spheres can function ideologically to secure and legitimize the very values it seeks to oppose. This is especially true in literature and other expressions of high culture, where mobilizations of the aesthetic (or the textual) as a site of resistance to economic hegemony are frequently recuperated in advance by the dominant discourse. The essays collected here tend, then, to explore in various ways, not only the ideological implications of literary (or more broadly cultural) representations or constructions of economic exchange, but also the often complex mediations that such constructions enter into with different kinds of oppositional discourse.
This book provides a contextual account of the first anarchist theory of war and peace, and sheds new light on our contemporary understandings of anarchy in International Relations. Although anarchy is arguably the core concept of the discipline of international relations, scholarship has largely ignored the insights of the first anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon's anarchism was a critique of the projects of national unification, universal dominion, republican statism and the providentialism at the heart of enlightenment social theory. While his break with the key tropes of modernity pushed him to the margins of political theory, Prichard links Proudhon back into the republican tradition of political thought from which his ideas emerged, and shows how his defence of anarchy was a critique of the totalising modernist projects of his contemporaries. Given that we are today moving beyond the very statist processes Proudhon objected to, his writings present an original take on how to institutionalise justice and order in our radically pluralised, anarchic international order. Rethinking the concept and understanding of anarchy, Justice, Order and Anarchy will be of interest to students and scholars of political philosophy, anarchism and international relations theory.
In Sweet Land of Liberty, Tom Sancton examines how the French left perceived and used the image of the United States against the backdrop of major historical developments in both countries between the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. Along the way, he weaves in the voices of scores of French observers—including those of everyday French citizens as well as those of prominent thinkers and politicians such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Victor Hugo, and Georges Clemenceau—as they looked to the democratic ideals of their American counterparts in the face of rising authoritarianism on the European continent. Louis Napoleon’s bloody coup in December 1851 disbanded France’s Second Republic and ushered in an era of increased political oppression, effectively forging together a disparate group of dissidents who embraced the tradition of the French Revolution and advocated for popular government. As they pursued their opposition to the Bonapartist regime, the French left looked to the American example as both a democratic model and a source of ideological support in favor of political liberty. During the 1850s, however, the left grew increasingly wary of the United States, as slavery, rapacious expansionism, and sectional frictions tarnished its image and diminished its usefulness. The Civil War, Sancton argues, marked a critical turning point. While Napoleon III considered joint Anglo-French recognition of the Confederacy and launched an ill-fated invasion of Mexico, his opponents on the left feared the collapse of the great American experiment in democracy and popular government. The Emancipation Proclamation, the Union victory, and Lincoln’s assassination ignited powerful pro-American sentiment among the French left that galvanized their opposition to the imperial regime. After the fall of the Second Empire and the founding of the conservative Third Republic in 1870, the relevance of the American example waned. Moderate republicans no longer needed the American model, while the more progressive left became increasingly radicalized following the bloody repression of the Commune in 1871. Sancton argues that the corruption and excesses of Gilded Age America established the groundwork for the anti-American fervor that came to characterize the French left throughout much of the twentieth century. Sweet Land of Liberty counters the long-held assumption that French workers, despite the distress caused by a severe cotton famine in the South, steadfastly supported the North during the Civil War out of a sense of solidarity with American slaves and lofty ideas of liberty. On the contrary, many workers backed the South, hoped for an end to fighting, and urged French government intervention. More broadly, Sancton’s analysis shows that the American example, though useful to the left, proved ill-adapted to French republican traditions rooted in the Great Revolution of 1789. For all the ritual evocations of Lafayette and the “traditional Franco-American friendship,” the two republics evolved in disparate ways as each endured social turmoil and political upheaval during the second half of the nineteenth century.
In this book, the author develops a comprehensive analysis of the demands which the process of globalization exerts on the political organisations of humanity. The author starts from a diagnosis of the process of globalisation. The question central to the book can be formulated as follows: "How can the social, moral and legal achievements of the nation-state be retained while its structure is reshaped to satisfy the requirements of a globalised world?"
Research on federalism is rarely concerned with its philosophical foundations. However, arguments on why and how best to organise a plurality of states in a multilevel political order have first been discussed by philosophers and continue to inspire contemporary reasoning on international and supranational relations not only in political philosophy. This book offers a unique overview of the philosophical foundations of federalism from both a historical and a systematic perspective. The analyses proposed by renowned scholars from the US and from several European countries cover classic writers such as Hobbes and the authors of the Federalist Papers, Kant and Rawls, and range from anthropological justifications of federal orders to contemporary problems of EU constitutionalism, the principle of subsidiarity and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The book is of relevance to anyone interested in philosophical justifications of federalism.
The European Union, we are told, is facing extinction. Most of those who believe that, however, have no understanding of how, and why, it became possible to imagine that the diverse peoples of Europe might be united in a single political community. The Pursuit of Europe tells the story of the evolution of the 'European project', from the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which saw the earliest creation of a 'Concert ofEurope', right through to Brexit. The question was how, after centuries of internecine conflict, to create a united Europe while still preserving the political legal and cultural integrity of each individual nation. The need tofind an answer to this question became more acute after two world wars had shown that if the nations of Europe were to continue to play a role in the world they could now only do so together. To achieve that, however, they had to be prepared to merge their zealously-guarded sovereign powers into a new form of trans-national constitutionalism. This, the European Union has tried to do. Here, Anthony Pagden argues that it has created not as its enemies have claimed, a'super-state' but a new post-national order united in a political life based, not upon the old shibboleths of nationalism and patriotism, but upon a common body of values and aspirations.It is this, argues Pagden, that will allow the Union to defeat its political enemies from within, and to overcome the difficulties, from mass migration to the pandemic, which it faces from without. But it will only succeed in doing so if it also continues to evolve as it has over the past two centuries.