Thinking Politics In The Vernacular

Vernacular Rights Cultures offers a bold challenge to the dominant epistemologies and political practices of global human rights. It argues that decolonising global human rights calls for a serious epistemic accounting of the historically and politically specific encounters with human rights, and of the forms of world-making that underpin the stakes and struggles for rights and human rights around the globe. Through combining ethnographic investigations with political theory and philosophy, it goes beyond critiquing the Eurocentrism of global human rights, in order to document and examine the different political imaginaries, critical conceptual vocabularies, and gendered political struggles for rights and justice that animate subaltern mobilisations in 'most of the world'. Vernacular Rights Cultures demonstrates that these subaltern struggles call into being different and radical ideas of justice, politics and citizenship, and open up different possibilities and futures for human rights.

This book is the first to explore systematically what it means to think 'politically'. Using detailed contemporary and historical material, and investigating both professional and 'amateur' forms of political thinking, this study challenges much accepted wisdom on the topic, arguing that it is to be approached as a cluster of interacting features.

What does it mean to say that human beings think politically, and what is distinctive about that kind of thinking? That question is all-too infrequently asked by political theorists, or is dealt with through generalizations, abstractions, and dichotomies. This study examines the actual, real-world patterns people display when thinking politically, identifying six features of political thinking. They include the role of making ultimate decisions and regulating all social affairs, ranking collective priorities, mobilizing support for groups or withholding it, conceptualizing social order and stability as well as disorder and instability, projecting future visions and constructing plans for a society, and engaging the power aspects embedded in language, by means of reason, rhetoric, emotion or menace. Concurrently the untidiness and occasional failures of thinking politically are acknowledged alongside its quest for neatness. A large number of case studies is employed, drawn both from professional political theorists and philosophers and from various instances of vernacular usage: politicians, political commentators, or protest groups. Both contemporary and historical evidence from different cultures is utilized in illustrating the theoretical framework of the book. This is the first systematic study of political thinking as a cluster of thought-practices, combining insights from political theory--traditional and recent--the study of language and discourse, and political science. This investigation of 'the political' as a mode of thinking challenges many conventional understandings of political thought in the current literature, teases out what is political--not philosophical or ethical--in political theory, and locates it as a complex and ubiquitous social practice present at all points of human interaction and at diverse levels of articulation.

This book is the first concentrated effort to explore the most recent chapter of East Central European past from the perspective of intellectual history. Post-socialism can be understood both as a period of scarcity and preponderance of ideas, the dramatic eclipsing of the dissident legacy?as well as the older political traditions?and the rise of technocratic and post-political governance. This book, grounded in empirical research sensitive to local contexts, proposes instead a history of adaptations, entanglements, and unintended consequences. In order to enable and invite comparison, the volume is structured around major domains of political thought, some of them generic (liberalism, conservatism, the Left), others (populism and politics of history) deemed typical for post-socialism. However, as shown by the authors, the generic often turns out to be heavily dependent on its immediate setting, and the typical resonates with processes that are anything but vernacular.

Democracy is not easy. Citizens who disagree sharply about politics must nonetheless work together as equal partners in the enterprise of collective self-government. Ideally, this work would be conducted under conditions of mutual civility, with opposed citizens nonetheless recognizing one another's standing as political equals. But when the political stakes are high, and the opposition seems to us severely mistaken, why not drop the democratic pretences of civil partnership, and simply play to win? Why seek to uphold properly democratic relations with those who embrace political ideas that are flawed, irresponsible, and out of step with justice? Why sustain democracy with political foes? Drawing on extensive social science research concerning political polarization and partisan identity, Robert B. Talisse argues that when we break off civil interactions with our political opponents, we imperil relations with our political allies. In the absence of engagement with our political critics, our alliances grow increasingly homogeneous, conformist, and hierarchical. Moreover, they fracture and devolve amidst internal conflicts. In the end, our political aims suffer because our coalitions shrink and grow ineffective. Why sustain democracy with our foes? Because we need them if we are going to sustain democracy with our allies and friends.

Exploring unique survey and interview data on the personality characteristics of British politicians, this book provides a timely psychological analysis of those individuals who pursue political careers and how they represent their constituents once elected. Focusing specifically on the Basic Human Values of more than 150 MPs as well as hundreds of local councillors, Weinberg offers original insights into three compelling questions: Who enters politics and how are they different to the general public? Do politicians’ personality characteristics matter for their legislative behaviour? Do voters really get the ‘wrong’ politicians? Taking a fresh psychological approach to issues that are predominant in political science, this book casts new light on the human side of representative democracy.

Taking points of departure from Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, Paul Strohm deploys superior powers of textual and linguistic analysis to uncover a 'pre-Machiavellian moment': an historical phase which saw political discourse deployed with unprecedented slipperiness and subtlety; a time when it was thought possible not just to follow Fortune, but to jam her turning wheel. That this should have occurred in the fifteenth century, a period regarded as too dull, tradition-bound, or chaotic for significant discursive innovation, is just one of the surprises of this remarkable book. Little-regarded writers such as Fortescue and Pecock, Whethamstede and Warkworth, emerge as figures of compelling interest; John Lydgate, once dismissed as Chaucer's dullest successor, opens paths to the Mirror for Magistrates and to the heart of Shakespearean history. This book is recommended to scholars and students of medieval and Renaissance history and literature and to all those fascinated by languages of conspiracy, destiny, and government. -David Wallace, University of Pennsylvania

While the need for a history of liberalism that goes beyond its conventional European limits is well recognized, the agrarian backwaters of the British Empire might seem an unlikely place to start. Yet specifically liberal preoccupations with property and freedom evolved as central to agrarian policy and politics in colonial Bengal.Ê Liberalism in Empire explores the generative crisis in understanding propertyÕs role in the constitution of a liberal polity, which intersected in Bengal with a new politics of peasant independence based on practices of commodity exchange. Thus the conditions for a new kind of vernacular liberalism were created. Andrew SartoriÕs examination shows the workings of a section of liberal policy makers and agrarian leaders who insisted that norms governing agrarian social relations be premised on the property-constituting powers of labor, which opened a new conceptual space for appeals to both political economy and the normative significance of property. It is conventional to see liberalism as traveling through the space of empire with the extension of colonial institutions and intellectual networks. SartoriÕs focus on the Lockeanism of agrarian discourses of property, however, allows readers to grasp how liberalism could serve as a normative framework for both a triumphant colonial capitalism and a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of peasant property.