Politically Impossible

Politically Impossible PDF Author: W. H. Hutt
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute
ISBN: 1610163664
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Book Description


The Impossible State

The Impossible State PDF Author: Wael B. Hallaq
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231530862
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
Wael B. Hallaq boldly argues that the "Islamic state," judged by any standard definition of what the modern state represents, is both impossible and inherently self-contradictory. Comparing the legal, political, moral, and constitutional histories of premodern Islam and Euro-America, he finds the adoption and practice of the modern state to be highly problematic for modern Muslims. He also critiques more expansively modernity's moral predicament, which renders impossible any project resting solely on ethical foundations. The modern state not only suffers from serious legal, political, and constitutional issues, Hallaq argues, but also, by its very nature, fashions a subject inconsistent with what it means to be, or to live as, a Muslim. By Islamic standards, the state's technologies of the self are severely lacking in moral substance, and today's Islamic state, as Hallaq shows, has done little to advance an acceptable form of genuine Shari'a governance. The Islamists' constitutional battles in Egypt and Pakistan, the Islamic legal and political failures of the Iranian Revolution, and similar disappointments underscore this fact. Nevertheless, the state remains the favored template of the Islamists and the ulama (Muslim clergymen). Providing Muslims with a path toward realizing the good life, Hallaq turns to the rich moral resources of Islamic history. Along the way, he proves political and other "crises of Islam" are not unique to the Islamic world nor to the Muslim religion. These crises are integral to the modern condition of both East and West, and by acknowledging these parallels, Muslims can engage more productively with their Western counterparts.

Power, Politics and the Emotions

Power, Politics and the Emotions PDF Author: Shona Hunter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136004327
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
How can we rethink ideas of policy failure to consider its paradoxes and contradictions as a starting point for more hopeful democratic encounters? Offering a provocative and innovative theorisation of governance as relational politics, the central argument of Power, Politics and the Emotions is that there are sets of affective dynamics which complicate the already materially and symbolically contested terrain of policy-making. This relational politics is Shona Hunter’s starting point for a more hopeful, but realistic understanding of the limits and possibilities enacted through contemporary governing processes. Through this idea Hunter prioritises the everyday lived enactments of policy as a means to understand the state as a more differentiated and changeable entity than is often allowed for in current critiques of neoliberalism. But Hunter reminds us that focusing on lived realities demands a melancholic confrontation with pain, and the risks of social and physical death and violence lived through the contemporary neoliberal state. This is a state characterised by the ascendency of neoliberal whiteness; a state where no one is innocent and we are all responsible for the multiple intersecting exclusionary practices creating its unequal social orderings. The only way to struggle through the central paradox of governance to produce something different is to accept this troubling interdependence between resistance and reproduction and between hope and loss. Analysing the everyday processes of this relational politics through original empirical studies in health, social care and education the book develops an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical synthesis which engages with and extends work in political science, cultural theory, critical race and feminist analysis, critical psychoanalysis and post-material sociology.

A Politics of Impossible Difference

A Politics of Impossible Difference PDF Author: Penelope Deutscher
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501723731
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Book Description
The influential philosopher and theorist Luce Irigaray has been faulted for giving more importance to sexual difference than to race and multiculturalism. Penelope Deutscher's eagerly awaited book, the first to focus on the scholar's controversial later works, addresses this charge. Through a learned critique of these lesser-known writings, the book examines Irigaray's claim that the politics of feminism and multiculturalism are intrinsically linked. The volume also serves as a clear and comprehensive introduction to her entire corpus.In her recent works, Irigaray promotes sexual difference as the philosophical basis for legal, political, and linguistic reform. Deutscher explores this approach and in particular Irigaray's view that the very notion of difference is culturally "impossible." Taking this concept of impossibility into consideration, Deutscher evaluates Irigaray's contributions to contemporary debates about the politics of identity, recognition, diversity, and multiculturalism. In a balanced discussion, she considers the philosopher's work from the perspective of fellow critics including Michéle Le Doeuff, Drucilla Cornell, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Charles Taylor.

Forgotten Americans

Forgotten Americans PDF Author: Isabel Sawhill
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300241062
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
A sobering account of a disenfranchised American working class and important policy solutions to the nation’s economic inequalities One of the country’s leading scholars on economics and social policy, Isabel Sawhill addresses the enormous divisions in American society—economic, cultural, and political—and what might be done to bridge them. Widening inequality and the loss of jobs to trade and technology has left a significant portion of the American workforce disenfranchised and skeptical of governments and corporations alike. And yet both have a role to play in improving the country for all. Sawhill argues for a policy agenda based on mainstream values, such as family, education, and work. While many have lost faith in government programs designed to help them, there are still trusted institutions on both the local and federal level that can deliver better job opportunities and higher wages to those who have been left behind. At the same time, the private sector needs to reexamine how it trains and rewards employees. This book provides a clear-headed and middle-way path to a better-functioning society in which personal responsibility is honored and inclusive capitalism and more broadly shared growth are once more the norm.

Impossible Subjects

Impossible Subjects PDF Author: Mae M. Ngai
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400850231
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

Book Description
This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy—a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century. Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s—its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, remapped America both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Against Purity

Against Purity PDF Author: Alexis Shotwell
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145295304X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Book Description
The world is in a terrible mess. It is toxic, irradiated, and full of injustice. Aiming to stand aside from the mess can produce a seemingly satisfying self-righteousness in the scant moments we achieve it, but since it is ultimately impossible, individual purity will always disappoint. Might it be better to understand complexity and, indeed, our own complicity in much of what we think of as bad, as fundamental to our lives? Against Purity argues that the only answer—if we are to have any hope of tackling the past, present, and future of colonialism, disease, pollution, and climate change—is a resounding yes. Proposing a powerful new conception of social movements as custodians for the past and incubators for liberated futures, Against Purity undertakes an analysis that draws on theories of race, disability, gender, and animal ethics as a foundation for an innovative approach to the politics and ethics of responding to systemic problems. Being against purity means that there is no primordial state we can recover, no Eden we have desecrated, no pretoxic body we might uncover through enough chia seeds and kombucha. There is no preracial state we could access, no erasing histories of slavery, forced labor, colonialism, genocide, and their concomitant responsibilities and requirements. There is no food we can eat, clothes we can buy, or energy we can use without deepening our ties to complex webbings of suffering. So, what happens if we start from there? Alexis Shotwell shows the importance of critical memory practices to addressing the full implications of living on colonized land; how activism led to the official reclassification of AIDS; why we might worry about studying amphibians when we try to fight industrial contamination; and that we are all affected by nuclear reactor meltdowns. The slate has never been clean, she reminds us, and we can’t wipe off the surface to start fresh—there’s no fresh to start. But, Shotwell argues, hope found in a kind of distributed ethics, in collective activist work, and in speculative fiction writing for gender and disability liberation that opens new futures.

The Political Psychology of the Veil

The Political Psychology of the Veil PDF Author: Sahar Ghumkhor
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030320618
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Book Description
Veiled women in the West appear menacing. Their visible invisibility is a cause of obsession. What is beneath the veil more than a woman? This book investigates the preoccupation with the veiled body through the imaging and imagining of Muslim women. It examines the relationship between the body and knowledge through the politics of freedom as grounded in a ‘natural’ body, in the index of flesh. The impulse to unveil is more than a desire to free the Muslim woman. What lies at the heart of the fantasy of saving the Muslim woman is the West’s desire to save itself. The preoccupation with the veiled woman is a defense that preserves neither the object of orientalism nor the difference embodied in women’s bodies, but inversely, insists on the corporeal boundaries of the West’s mode of knowing and truth-making. The book contends that the imagination of unveiling restores the West’s sense of its own power and enables it to intrude where it is ‘other’ – thus making it the centre and the agent by promising universal freedom, all the while stifling the question of what freedom is.

The National System of Political Economy

The National System of Political Economy PDF Author: Friedrich List
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 422

Book Description


Politically Impossible

Politically Impossible PDF Author: Hutt Hutt
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute/Institue of Economic Affairs
ISBN: 9781610160056
Category : Economic policy
Languages : en
Pages : 99

Book Description
Should economists curb their rhetoric and prescriptions based on “political realities”? Should anyone attempt to conceal the truth about state intervention for fear of not fitting into the existing political culture? Many people answer yes to both questions, on grounds that taking a hard-core position in favor of freedom threatens to make one “irrelevant” or discredit the message. W.H. Hutt is one of the few economists who addressed these strategic questions directly. As one of the most eminent economists of the 20th century, and a colleague and friend of Mises’s, he was very qualified to do so. The result is this monograph, which, though long out of print, ought to be considered a classic of economic literature. He makes the point that the political culture, the culture of public opinion, is no less than the dominant strains of thought and convictions held by the common person. And how are those convictions shaped? They are shaped by the ideas and opinions asserted and argued by intellectual leaders. Particularly on economic questions, it is the economists who shape economic opinion. If economists are constantly pulling back from stating their convictions, relentlessly withholding their true views, predictably kowtowing to political leaders, public opinion will not change and policy will not change. Professor Hutt regards this tendency as irresponsible. Economists should never excuse their own silence on grounds that their prescription is politically impossible. On the contrary, the more economists tell the truth, the more politically possible freedom becomes. Hutt applies his point in a wide range of areas: labor unions, inflation and monetary economics, social security, the welfare state, and fiscal planning. In each case, he shows how a forthright telling of the truth is the only way to advance sound economics in the political world. In his view, the principled position is the most practical position too! Hutt also provides a sweeping and erudite look at the history of thought to see how economists in the past have dealt with the vast gulf that separates economic wisdom from public opinion. “The virtue in the democratic process is that the masses have the power to change rulers in a peaceful manner so that rule in the interests of a few is prevented,” writes Hutt. "The vice is that, because the masses have not learned how to discern rulers who will legislate for their advantage, governments are today engaged in dissipating their people's heritage. But if I seem to be disparaging the electoral wisdom of 'the masses', I am in effect criticizing the people who create mass opinion, both from within and outside the political arena. It is the persuadable among the editors, the columnists, the television and radio commentators, the academics, the clergy and the teachers generally who must be won over.” This new edition, the first since 1971, is co-published by the Mises Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs in London.