At the cutting edge of political theory, this first volume in the Taking on the Political Series reflects the conceptual foundations of the series, opening up space to the political by engaging in and redefining polemics. In recognition of the collapse of the traditional belief in strong foundations for the political domain and the ungrounding of politics generally, the authors introduce and map the concept of afoundationalism while tackling such themes as social structure, ethical argumentation and political organization. Provocative and engaging, this book will change ways of thinking about and approaching political theory both in teaching and research.
Is There Such a Thing as Populism? calls into question our common understanding of populism. Taken on their own, commonplace references to the people, leaders, or elites are more like dog whistles or false positives of populism than part of a serious attempt to address the phenomenon. Scholars asked themselves, “What is populism?” without realizing that this assumed there was such a thing and that we just needed to figure out what it meant. That was a mistake. Benjamin Arditi proposes that we put this certainty on hold and start from a different premise, asking, “Is there such a thing as populism?” This doesn’t rule out its existence or take it for granted. Structured as a set of polemical interventions and theoretical proposals, Arditi addresses key theoretical, methodological, and comparative questions in the study of populism. These include the limitations of formal definitions of populism, the importance of context and the conjuncture, polemics, the situated gaze, and issues concerning strategic relations and governing from below. Five subject experts, Nadia Urbinati, José Luis Villacañas, Carlos de la Torre, Anthoula Malkopoulou, and Anthony Spanakos, react to Arditi’s theses in captivating conversations on how to study populism and the way in which populism has been used in contemporary comparative analysis. Refreshingly different and thought-provoking, Is There Such a Thing as Populism? is the ideal departure for the exploration of this diverse and fascinating political movement.
This Festschrift honours Dr. Gerrit Reinink on the occasion of the end of his professional career as a senior lecturer of Syriac and Aramaic studies at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. The Festschrift includes, in addition to a brief biography and a complete bibliography of Reinink's scholarly writings, fifteen articles, arranged according to the chronology of their topics and covering a wide variety of subjects, ranging from the days of Julian the Apostate to the year of the fall of Constantinople, through the period of Late Antiquity, the Byzantine period, early Islam and the Middle Ages. The authors are all prominent experts in the field of Syriac studies and adjacent areas. The title of the book, Syriac Polemics, is a clear reference to one of Reinink's favourite research topics: Eastern Christian reactions to the rise of Islam. This volume is a valuable contribution to the study of Syriac literature and culture in general.
Studies in Theology and Religion,11 Polemics, as “the art or practice of disputation or controversy”, is a living issue in matters of religion, and is a major object of research for scholars in religious studies and theology. The second international conference of the Leiden Institute for the Study of Religions (LISOR), held at Leiden in April 2000, was devoted to the subject of Religious Polemics in Context, aiming at a further exploration of the notion of religious polemics, together with the unfolding of a wide variety of case-studies from various religious traditions. The volume contains most of the papers read at the conference, and offers contributions on general issues (e.g., by M. Dascal), as well as on particular topics in the fields of history of religion (e.g., Islam), ancient Israel and early Christianity, the history of Christianity, and the social sciences of religion. An annotated bibliography is added to this collection, which may stimulate a further study of the topic.
This collection takes a new approach to understanding religious plurality in the Iberian Peninsula and its Mediterranean and northern European contexts. Focusing on polemics—works that attack or refute the beliefs of religious Others—this volume aims to challenge the problematic characterization of Iberian Jews, Muslims, and Christians as homogeneous groups. From the high Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century, Christian efforts to convert groups of Jews and Muslims, Muslim efforts to convert Christians and Jews, and the defensive efforts of these communities to keep their members within the faiths led to the production of numerous polemics. This volume brings together a wide variety of case studies that expose how the current historiographical focus on the three religious communities as allegedly homogeneous groups obscures the diversity within the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities as well as the growing ranks of skeptics and outright unbelievers. Featuring contributions from a range of academic disciplines, this paradigm-shifting book sheds new light on the cultural and intellectual dynamics of the conflicts that marked relations among these religious communities in the Iberian Peninsula and beyond. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Antoni Biosca i Bas, Thomas E. Burman, Mònica Colominas Aparicio, John Dagenais, Óscar de la Cruz, Borja Franco Llopis, Linda G. Jones, Daniel J. Lasker, Davide Scotto, Teresa Soto, Ryan Szpiech, Pieter Sjoerd van Koningsveld, and Carsten Wilke.
For most of the last century, William F. Buckley Jr. was the leading figure in the conservative movement in America. The magazine he founded in 1955, National Review, brought together writers representing every strand of conservative thought, and refined those ideas over the decades that followed. Buckley’s own writings were a significant part of this development. He was not a theoretician but a popularizer, someone who could bring conservative ideas to a vast audience through dazzling writing and lively wit. Culled from millions of published words spanning nearly sixty years, Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations offers Buckley’s commentary on the American and international scenes, in areas ranging from Kremlinology to rock music. The subjects are widely varied, but there are common threads linking them all: a love for the Western tradition and its American manifestation; the belief that human beings thrive best in a free society; the conviction that such a society is worth defending at all costs; and an appreciation for the quirky individuality that free people inevitably develop.
Rashi's commentary and the Glossa Ordinaria both developed in the late eleventh and early twelfth century with no known contact between them. Nevertheless, they shared a way of reading text that shaped their interpretations of the near-sacrifice of Isaac. This work compares them both with each other and their respective sources to show their similarity.
The rise of populism, cynicism, fanaticism and fundamentalism challenges us to reconsider the problem of ressentiment. Characterized by Nietzsche as the self-poisoning of the will through internalising trauma in the form of a postponed and imaginary revenge, the concept of ressentiment is making a comeback in political discourse. Unlike resentment, the feeling of injustice, ressentiment is an intrinsically polemical notion. It implies a political drama in which there is no inherent good sense in its application and no universal criterion. Drawing on psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory and philosophy, this book examines a wide variety of ideological contexts, offering an examination of the divergent senses in which the concept of ressentiment is used today.
In Intolerance, Polemics, and Debate in Antiquity politico-cultural, philosophical, and religious forms of critical conversation in the ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, Graeco-Roman, and early-Islamic world are discussed. The contributions enquire into the boundaries between debate, polemics, and intolerance, and address their manifestations in both philosophy and religion.
How do we understand differences and disputes among various branches of Islam? This book places intimacies, rather than radical incompatibilities, at the centre of its in-depth ethnographic account of mass-publicized theological polemics among Sunni Muslims in the south Indian state of Kerala. What unites Muslims of different Sunni groups also divides them and incites polemics?Islam as a shared system of knowledge and practices, bonds of kinship and other social relations, and the common condition of being a beleaguered religious minority in a Hindu majoritarian democracy. Diverging from works that have focused on how Islamic practices like ritual prayers facilitate the fashioning of theologically grounded pious selves, the book argues that intra-Muslim polemics marginalize theology and have little to do with cultivating piety. Instead, polemics constitute inter- and intra-religious socialities, enable Muslims to articulate their connections to India and other imaginaries, and produce Islam as a public religion in a secular nation-state.
