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The state has been a dominant political form, and the preferred model of political unity , for at least the last two centuries. However, many today speak of its crisis, which stems from two main factors: the state’s changing role in the globalizing international system and the state’s complex relation to democracy, a key normative concept of contemporary politics. Authoritarian leaders use the state to successfully reaffirm sovereignty, despite international integration; democratic movements abound but often serve only to reinforce the regimes they contest. Is there an alternative? Do we need to reconceive the phenomenon of state, with a view to the future?
These are the questions that an international group of scholars explores and answers in this groundbreaking book, drawing on the history of political thought, continental philosophy, and contemporary political examples. They engage the dialectical tradition broadly understood, including phenomenological transcendentalism, the political philosophy of French public law, and German twentieth-century political philosophy beyond Weber. The result brings the state into a critical political philosophy, providing a realistic model of what a good democratic state could and should be like.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
I. The Idea of State.
CHAPTER 1. Michael Marder. The Categories of the State
CHAPTER 2. Alexander Filippov, The State in the International Legal Order
CHAPTER 3. Olga Bashkina. Popular Sovereignty, Constituent Power and Representation in the Early 20th-Century French Constitutional Theory
II. Critique of the State and the State of the Critique
CHAPTER 4. Panagiotis Sotiris. State Power and Social Transformation
CHAPTER 5. Maria Kochkina, Lindsey’s “Concealed State” and the Left Strategy
CHAPTER 6. Ajay Singh Chaudhary. Franz Neumann and the Critical Theory of State for the 21st Century
III. Socialist and Communist State
CHAPTER 7. Lorenzo Chiesa. Lenin and the Transitional-Revolutionary State
CHAPTER 8. Agon Hamza. Marching of God, or the Žižekian Theory of the State. Contemporary “Young Hegelianism”
CHAPTER 9. Christian Sorace. Democratic Corpses and Communist Specters: Between the Liberal Democratic and Post-Socialist State
IV Ex Pluribus Unum
CHAPTER 10. Artemy Magun, Civitas Paradoxa,or: The Dialectical Theory of State
Description
The state has been a dominant political form, and the preferred model of political unity , for at least the last two centuries. However, many today speak of its crisis, which stems from two main factors: the state’s changing role in the globalizing international system and the state’s complex relation to democracy, a key normative concept of contemporary politics. Authoritarian leaders use the state to successfully reaffirm sovereignty, despite international integration; democratic movements abound but often serve only to reinforce the regimes they contest. Is there an alternative? Do we need to reconceive the phenomenon of state, with a view to the future?
These are the questions that an international group of scholars explores and answers in this groundbreaking book, drawing on the history of political thought, continental philosophy, and contemporary political examples. They engage the dialectical tradition broadly understood, including phenomenological transcendentalism, the political philosophy of French public law, and German twentieth-century political philosophy beyond Weber. The result brings the state into a critical political philosophy, providing a realistic model of what a good democratic state could and should be like.
