UID:
almafu_9958110929002883
Format:
1 online resource (218 p.)
Edition:
Course Book
ISBN:
1-282-15804-X
,
9786612158049
,
1-4008-2795-7
Content:
Since 9/11, American foreign policy has been guided by grand ideas like tyranny, democracy, and freedom. And yet the course of events has played havoc with the cherished assumptions of hawks and doves alike. The geo-civil war afflicting the Muslim world from Lebanon through Iraq and Afghanistan to Pakistan confronts the West with the need to articulate anew what its political ideas and ideals actually are. In The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy, John Brenkman dissects the rhetoric that has corrupted today's political discourse and abused the idea of freedom and democracy in foreign affairs. Looking back to the original assumptions and contradictions that animate democratic thought, he attempts to resuscitate the language of liberty and give political debate a fresh basis amid the present global turmoil. The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy picks apart the intellectual design and messianic ambitions of the neoconservative American foreign policy articulated by figures such as Robert Kagan and Paul Berman; it casts the same critical eye on a wide range of liberal and leftist thinkers, including Noam Chomsky and Jürgen Habermas, and probes the severe crisis that afflicts progressive political thought. Brenkman draws on the contrary visions of Hobbes, Kant, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, and Isaiah Berlin in order to disclose the new contours of conflict in the age of geo-civil war, and to illuminate the challenges and risks of contemporary democracy.
Note:
Description based upon print version of record.
,
Introduction: Political thought in the fog of war -- War and democracy -- Hobbes versus Kant? -- Leviathan -- The neoconservative illusion -- The frailty of human affairs -- Crises of the republic -- The argument -- Seized by power -- Death and the governor of Texas -- The new American exceptionalism -- The cold warrior myth -- Kant with Arendt -- Targeting Iraq -- Al Qaeda and ultimate ends -- A grammar of motives -- The imagination of power -- State of exception -- Arendt versus Agamben -- Schmitt and Hobbes -- Decision and covenant -- The ordeal of universalism -- September 11 and fables of the left -- First response -- Multilateral ambivalence -- Terrorism as symptom -- Chomskian certitudes -- Hardt and Negri's Empire -- The multitude and prophecy -- Iraq : delirium of war, delusions of peace -- The idealism of means -- The idealism of ends -- Neither left nor right -- The Atlantic misalliance -- Diplomatic intrigues and political truths -- Repudiations of the UN left and right -- The Hobbesian nightmare : occupied Iraq -- The ordeal of universalism -- Democracy and war -- Postnational cosmopolitanism versus liberal nationalism? -- Kant with Hobbes -- Habermas's Agon with Schmitt -- Hobbes with Kant -- Europe, or, the empire of rights -- Islam's geo-civil war -- Global neoliberal religious conservatism? -- No exit -- Conclusion: Prelude to the unknown -- Ideas and errors -- Arendt with Berlin -- Liberty without democracy versus democracy without liberty? -- Democratic striving and sectarian mobilization -- Untimely meditation.
,
Issued also in print.
,
English
Additional Edition:
ISBN 0-691-17120-3
Additional Edition:
ISBN 0-691-11664-4
Language:
English
DOI:
10.1515/9781400827954
