Political Theory

The contemporary debate in democracies routinely describes online information threats such as misinformation, disinformation and deception as security-issues in need of urgent attention. Despite this pervasive discourse, policymakers often appear incapable of articulating what security means in this context. Turning to EU policy and previous research on cybersecurity, this dissertation empirically unpacks, critically interrogates and theoretically rethinks the meaning of security in relation to online information threats. In so doing, the articles elucidate a new ‘referent object’ implicitly guiding securitization. Contemporary interventions can be seen as grounded in assumptions about the protection of human judgement. Using Hannah Arendt’s writings on ‘political judgement’ as a point of reference for critically evaluating contemporary policy, the dissertation points to several problems with existing approaches to security in a democratic context where free debate constitutes a legitimizing element of political authority. The rethinking of security departs from this problematic and shows that treating human judgement as a ‘referent object’ – if firmly grounded in the interplay between independent human communicating subjects – can better address some problematic questions about legitimate authority and political community currently haunting security interventions in cyberspace.

This paper engages centrally with the political impotence of much of critical theory today and suggests how a Lacanian-inflected perspective may offer a possible way out of the present intellectual and political deadlock. Lacanian thought has been central to many post-foundational theorizations of the political, yet the radical implications of a Lacanian-inflected reading of the political remain largely unexplored. Our prime objective is to demonstrate that a Lacanian theorization of ‘the political’ can help to open up a space for articulating the current deadlock that locks the Left in a state of melancholy, anxiety, depression, and/ or impotent acting out. After a brief conceptual introduction to the notion of ‘the political’, the paper mobilizes and develops the Lacanian theory of the subject. This permits opening up the terrain of psychoanalyisis to the question of the political as that what does not work in the world. The key insights of a Lacanian- inflected political theory are then explored through the work of some of the key critical political theorists: Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou.

The fall of the Muslim civilization resulted from the rejection of reason. The rejection of reason was a result of the characterization of the use of reason to know revelation as kufr. The rejection of reason became explicit in the shutting of the gates to ijtihad and was reinforced by al-Ghazali’s attack on philosophers. The rejection of reason found political expression in the repression of the rationalists by Musa al-Hadi in 786. The slaughter of five-thousand philosophers was an event analogous to the Reign of Terror of the Jacobins, under Maximilien Robespierre during the French Revolution. Sixteen thousand followers of “tradition” were beheaded at the guillotine with the emergence of the Age of Reason, touted by the European Enlightenment, a millennium afterwards. In Islam, the rejection of reason made it harder to understand and follow revelation. The perception that “all knowledge is in the Quran” did not help matters. This was an example of perfunctory thought. For it automatically withheld the designation of “knowledge” from all knowledge not in the Quran. This perception was based on a problematic understanding of epistemology or what constitutes knowledge. It was a reflection of hubris. In response to the bewilderment caused the prohibition of the use of reason, exegetes alleged that revelation features “ambiguous” passages. The rejection of reason made it hard to know and follow revelation. It also made it hard to understand key terms as “mutashabihat,” “hikma,” and “hawa.” As a result, Muslims turned to tradition, which replaced reason for the purpose of explaining revelation. But to “explain” revelation, tradition had to be elevated to an “equal” of revelation and subsequently even “above” revelation.
For the expectation that it would “explain” revelation placed tradition in the position of a “judge” of revelation. The elevation of tradition above revelation reversed the relation of revelation and tradition. The word of God was subordinated to the words of persons. The reversal of the relationship between revelation and tradition facilitated the adoption of the teaching of abrogation. The abrogation of the peace verses by the ayah as-sayf transformed Islam into “political Islam.” The abrogation of revelation by tradition transformed Islam into “traditional Islam.” The application of the teaching of abrogation warped penal law. The abrogation of revelation by tradition subjugated revelation to tradition. Hence, the process that led to this requires attention. It is necessary to restore revelation to its pre-eminence in relation to tradition, to rehabilitate reason, and to ensure that all laws are in agreement with revelation rather than based on inclination. (4 pages)

Research on youth civic engagement often sees the everyday lives of young people as barriers to civic engagement.  Recent qualitative approaches have drawn attention to the civic and political dimensions of young people’s everyday lives. This is a crucial insight, but cannot—by itself—answer a key question: Just how is it that everyday experience can be transformed into civic engagement?  I argue that Dewey's theory of experience makes two key contributions towards answering this question. First, Dewey’s situational understanding of experience directs us to the concrete conditions everyday life as the necessary groundwork and starting point for civic engagement.  Second, Dewey’s concept of reflective experience helps us understand how taken for granted assumptions about political and social life can be transformed into more active forms of engagement.  I illustrate this argument by drawing on selected findings from a qualitative study of young people’s experience in Public Achievement, a civic engagement initiative

Seit den Erfahrungen der Gewaltexplosionen im 20. Jahrhundert erleben wir insbesondere nach den Anschlägen vom 11. September 2001 weltweit eine neue Dimension von Gewalt und Terror, wie sie Hannah Arendt in ihrer eindrücklichen und nachhaltigen Analyse der totalen Herrschaft bereits vor einem halben Jahrhundert antizipiert. Die globalisierte Zivilisation, so Arendts These, berge eine Destruktivität, die alle Zivilisation zu vernichten drohe, wenn nicht die zentralen Fragen der politischen Verantwortung ebenso wie die Folgen ihres Scheitern in die öffentliche Reflexion gerückt werden.
Einige der vielfältigen Aspekte des komplexen Zusammenhangs von Politik und Verantwortung, vor allem mit Bezug auf das Werk von Hannah Arendt, werden im vorliegenden Band behandelt.
Mit Beiträgen von Hannah Arendt, Margaret Canovan, Ronald Beiner, Jeffrey Newman, Richard J. Bernstein, Waltraud Meints, Nancy Fraser, Julia Kristeva und Albert Friedlander

To cite:
Wilkins, A. 2017. Rescaling the local: Multi-academy trusts, private monopoly and statecraft in England. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 49 (2), 171-185

For the past six years successive UK governments in England have introduced reforms intended to usher in less aggregated, top-down, bureaucratically overloaded models of service delivery as well as secure conditions for greater school autonomy.  Yet the ‘hollowing out’ of local government has not resulted in less bureaucracy on the ground or less regulation from above, nor has it diminished hierarchy as an organising principle of education governance.  In some cases, monopolies and monopolistic practices dominated by powerful bureaucracies and professional groups persist, albeit realised through the involvement of new actors and organisations from business and philanthropy.  In this paper I adopt a governmentality perspective to explore the political significance of large multi-academy trusts (MATs) – private sponsors contracted by central government to run publicly funded schools – to the generation of new scalar hierarchies and accountability infrastructures that assist in bringing the gaze of government to bear upon the actions of schools that are otherwise less visible under local government management.  On this account, it is argued, MATs are integral to statecraft and the invention and assemblage of particular apparatuses for intervening upon specific organisations, spaces and peoples.

Political parties advocating transhumanist ideas have recently sprung up in a great number of countries, supported by rapid technological and scientific progress. This article examines whether any of the various frameworks of niche party theory can adequately describe transhumanist parties. It is discussed how the nicheness of transhumanist parties can be conceptualized. After determining the common set of issues that ideologically diverse transhumanist political organizations accentuate, this article conducts a qualitative analysis to justify the “proto-nicheness” of transhumanist parties within the spatial and salience theories. Two new accounts will be put forward based on Bischof’s consumer market analogy and Hughes’s three-dimensional conceptualization of contemporary politics.

Contrairement aux interprétations coutumières il y a un dialogue permanent entre la République, le Politique et les Lois et non une rupture ou un changement substantiel de la pensée politique de Platon. Une analyse minutieuse de Leg. V 739a1-740a2 montre clairement cette cohérence, en particulière la tournure "dieux ou fils des dieux" qu'y apparaît se rattache à l'état ordonné de l'âme et plus spécifiquement à la connaissance philosophique et n'indique pas l'abandonnement des positions de la République. De cette façon sont réfutées les thèses soutenues par A. Laks depuis quelques années sur le rapport entre la République et les Lois.
In spite of the usual interpretations there is a continuous dialogue between the Republic, the Statesman, and the Laws and not a break or a substantial change in Plato's political thought. A detailed analysis of Laws V 739a1-740a2 shows beyond all doubt this strict coherence, especially the expression "gods or children of gods" that appears in this passage is related to the ordered state of the soul and more specifically to the philosophical knowledge and does not point to a revision of the doctrines defended in the Republic, so that the interpretation of the relationship between the Republic and the Laws defended since the beginning of the 90'ties by A. Laks can be considered as definitively refuted.

In this book, I identify contemporary developments on the theme of vulnerability within critical theory while also seeking to reconstruct an idea of vulnerability that enables an articulation of the political and demonstrates how it is socially produced. Philosophies that take vulnerability as a moral object contribute to rendering the political, as the site of a specific power and action, foreign to vulnerability. The notion of recognition offered by critical theory does not correct this deficit. Instead, I argue that vulnerability, as susceptibility to a harmful event, is above all a breach of normative expectations. I demonstrate that these expectations are not mental phenomena but are situated between subjects and must even be conceived as institutions. On this basis I argue that the link between the political and vulnerability cannot be reduced to the institutional implementation of moral principles. Rather I seek to rethink the political by taking vulnerability as the starting point and thereby understand the political as simultaneously referring to the advent of a world, the emergence of a relation, and the appearance of a political subject.

Úvod do studia politiky Miroslav Novák et al. Tato učebnice je určena zejména vysokoškolským studentům sociálních a humanitních věd bakalářského a magisterského stupně. Jde o práci kolektivní a svým pojetím i rozsahem v českém prostředí ojedinělou. Je rozdělena do čtyř částí. V první části je politika vykládána očima nejrůznějších disciplín-od politologie přes filosofii, psychologii, antropologii, právo, geografii a ekonomii až po his-torii. Obsahem druhé části jsou úvody do vybraných subdisciplín politické vědy, jako je komparativní politologie, teorie mezinárod-ních vztahů a správní věda. Ve třetí části jsou zpracovány úvody do kvantitativních a kvalitativních metod v politické vědě, včetně tzv. kvalitativní srovnávací analýzy. Čtvrtá část pak pojednává o někte-rých velkých tématech politiky, jako jsou stranické a volební systémy, národy a nacionalismus nebo demokracie a nedemokratické režimy. Učebnice tvoří vnitřně propojený celek, i když se názory, pojetí nebo hodnocení autorů jednotlivých kapitol od sebe mohou poněkud lišit.-Kdy vznikla politická věda?-Jaké další disciplíny se zabývají politikou?-Jaký je vztah mezi politickou vědou a politickou sociologií?-Proč se v češtině více ujal výraz "politologie" než "politická věda"?-Co je politika? Jaký je vztah mezi politikou a mocí?-Je řadový občan v politice kompetentní?-Jak nám analýza stranického systému pomáhá pochopit mo-derní politické režimy?-Co je předmětem komparativní politologie? Jaké metody pou-žívá?-V čem spočívá rozdíl mezi komparativní politologií a teorií mezi-národních vztahů?-Čím se vyznačuje dobrá veřejná správa? Rozsáhlý autorský tým pod vedením Miroslava Nováka tvoří čeští odborníci nejrůznějších generací z mnoha akademických pracovišť. vydání druhé, rozšířené a doplněné o 2 nové kapitoly.  Doporučená cena 749 Kč

""Ancient Greece is famous as the civilization which "gave" the world democracy. Democracy has in modern times become the rallying cry of liberation from supposed totalitarianism and dictatorship. It is embedded in the assumptions of Western powers who proclaim their faith in the global spread of democratic governance and at the same time wielded by protesters in the developing world who challenge what they view as the West's cultural imperialism. Thus, a lively and well informed treatment of the nexus between politics in antiquity and political discourse in the modern era is both timely and apposite.

As Kostas Vlassopoulos shows, much can be learned about the practice of politics from a comparative discussion of the classical and the contemporary. His starting point is that the value of looking back to a political system with different assumptions and elements can help us think, and even shape, what the future of modern politics might be. He discusses the contrasting political systems of Athens, Sparta and Rome; the political theories of thinkers like Plato, Aristotle and Cicero; how great events like the Peloponnesian War or the Roman civil wars shaped the course of political theory; and the discovery of freedom, participation and equality as political values in antiquity. Above all, the book shows how important and surprising an analysis of the ancient world can be in reassessing and revaluating modern political debates.""""

L'hospitalité est une pratique en apparence simple et universellement partagée. Il serait donc tentant d'en fournir une définition générique : l'hospitalité est l'institution qui règle l'interaction entre un accueillant (chez lui) et un accueilli (nouveau venu), consistant en un processus de familiarisation réciproque (faire connaissance, entretenir une relation, etc.). Elle a comme fonctions la dispensation de bienfaits, l'amorçage de la socialité, l'identification de l'étranger, ou l'intégration temporaire de l'invité.
L'hospitalité ne saurait néanmoins être réduite à une vertu privée. Elle est au contraire une pratique politique : elle institue des règles, des frontières, et des dispositifs d'intégration ou d'exclusion. Cet ouvrage expose les différentes formes qu'elle a pu revêtir, des sociétés traditionnelles à nos jours en explicitant les relations de pouvoir qui se jouent dans le langage vertueux de l'hospitalité. Une telle généalogie permet de retrouver les moments et les lieux clés qui ont façonné ce concept en le transformant, le déplaçant et le recomposant selon sa fonction politique.

Not-guilty verdicts, mistrials, and impunity for the Bundy family and many of their supporters in the armed confrontations over public land use in Nevada and Oregon. Expanded access for private oil, gas, mining, and logging industries and the downsizing of national monuments such as Bears Ears lead by Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke. A number of highly contentious debates and sensationalized events have again focused attention on land held in the public domain by the United States. This essay argues that federal land policy as a form of colonial administration has been constitutive for the logic of expectation as property in what is now the United States. From the state land cessions negotiated on behalf of the Articles of Confederation to the preemption acts (1830–1841) to the homestead acts (1862–1916) to present-day demands for land transfer, the acquisition and disposal of the so-called public domain have been central to westward colonization, the consolidation of the nation-state, and the promise of land ownership as the ostensible foundation of individual liberty. These dynamics are evident in contemporary conflicts over public lands and arguments for the transfer of public lands to either state or private ownership. Approaching the Bundy occupations as flashpoints that illuminate competing interpretations and claims to land within the history of westward colonization, this essay seeks to demonstrate the ways in which expectation emerges from particular economies of dispossession of indigenous peoples that have historically worked through and across the division of public and private property.

This article argues that Rousseau’s autobiographies outline an account of personal happiness as an Epicurean memorial practice. For Rousseau, happiness is secured by an attitude to pleasure cultivated by practices utilizing the powers of memory and imagination. In describing these practices autobiographically, he hoped to teach his readers to avoid the false pleasures of vulgar sensuality and pursue instead the true pleasures of what he called ‘temperate sensuality’. This orienting idea of the autobiographies is a distinctly Epicurean ascetic practice—combatting the constant threat of vulgar hedonism to bring about a new relationship to the self. By reconstructing this account, the article provides a basis to reconsider the relationship between solitude, sociability, and citizenship in Rousseau’s political thought.

Situated within the wider post-secular turn in politics and international relations, this collection focuses not on religion per se, but rather explicitly on theology. Contributions to this volume highlight the political theological foundations of international theory and world politics, explicitly recasting theology and politics as symbiotic discourses with all the risks, promises and open questions this relation may involve. The overarching claim this volume makes is that all politics has theology embedded in it, both in the genealogical sense of carrying ineradicable traces of its theological origins, but also in the more ontological sense of being enacted by alternative configurations of the theologico-political. The book is unique in bringing together a diverse group of scholars, spanning knowledge areas as varied as IR, political theory, philosophy, theology, and history to investigate the complex interconnections between theology and world politics. It will be of interest to students and scholars of political theory, international relations, intellectual history, and political theology.

The aim of this paper is to study from an anthropological perspective the formation of identities in the Canadian tv-series Vikings (2013- ), created by Michael Hirst for The History Channel. With this purpose, we use a textual methodology of the most relevant fragments. The discussion of the results is organized around one main core point that shape the construction of identities in this show: power.

During the 15 years of civil war (1975–90), political posters filled the streets and charged the walls of cities all over Lebanon. As the ongoing war formed an intrinsic aspect of everyday life in Lebanon, the graphic signs and political rhetoric of posters became a prevalent sight/reading that shaped the cityscape. The political parties strove to legitimize and sustain their political struggle while battling for power and territorial control. Their military engagement on the battlefronts was coupled with a relentless battle of signs and symbolic appropriation of territory through extensive poster production and distribution.

How to make sense of political posters’ nature of operation in the context of civil war? How does one poster, out of many on the same wall, hail to a specific person and at once be contested by another?
If we begin to rethink the concept of propaganda and question the models of communication on which its various definitions are built, perhaps we could move beyond the reductive notions of ‘mass persuasion’, ‘coercion’ and ‘deceit’. We could then undertake a more complex examination of the posters as inscribed in the socio-political institution of political communities during civil war time. In this chapter, I present the limits of the concept of propaganda and argue for alternative theoretical tools, which allow me to advance a conceptualization of political posters as symbolic sites of hegemonic struggle over meaning and political discourse.

Working across earth and social sciences, this article reevaluates resilience’s conceptual framework, drawing out alternative pathways for understanding and responding to the dislocations of the Anthropocene. Via a critical reading of the Anthropocene with the help of resilience’s adaptive cycle heuristic, I locate the possibility of new forms of life in its phase of release and reorganisation: the back loop. More than a brief, negative phase to govern or navigate, I argue that the back loop o ers the possibility for a practical orientation to the Anthropocene based on experimentation with new uses, release of old frameworks, and allowance for the unknown. Inhabiting the back loop, as I call it, articulates an ethos couched not in fear or survival but rather creative and technical audacity in unsafe operating space, as embodied already in a variegated landscape of practitioners.

On the History of Political Philosophy is a lively and lucid account of the major political theorists and philosophers of the ancient Greek, Roman, medieval, renaissance, and early modern periods. Topics include discussions concerning human nature, social justice, the origin of law and human rights, the rise and development of different forms of government, idealism and realism in international relations, the distinction between just and unjust war, and the sources of public authority and the nature of legitimate sovereignty. The organizing principle of the book is the idea that the great political thinkers were searching for the best political order and a criterion for human conduct in both domestic and international politics. Demonstrating the continued relevance of historical ideas to today's problems, the author traces ongoing discussions about politics by examining the ideas of key political theorists. The book is intended for use in courses on political philosophy or the history of political philosophy.
https://www.routledge.com/On-the-History-of-Political-Philosophy-Great-Political-Thinkers-from-Thucydides/Korab-Karpowicz/p/book/9780205119745

A critical, comparative analysis of the exhibition project Utopia Station, mounted by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Molly Nesbit, and Rirkrit Tiravanija at the 2003 Venice Biennale, against Hardt and Negri's 2000 treatise, Empire. This essay was written in 2006 and originally published online in the journal PART (no. 12, 2007), which is now defunct as far as I can tell. I wrote this piece in my first year of grad school, but it has been cited by a number of scholars so I share it here in case it may be of further use to others.

¿Continúa siendo el reformismo y sus formas de organización y reivindicación una opción válida para generar Progreso, entendido como ampliación de los derechos y la igualdad?
El reformismo fue útil para generar Progreso en el viejo Estado Constitucional donde existían las condiciones para ello, que en este libro se describen en forma de tres pluralismos. Sin embargo, a lo largo de las últimas décadas y con el paso al Estado neoliberal, hemos transitado a una sociedad donde tales condiciones están siendo eliminadas y sustituidas por un nuevo escenario. Una realidad, caracterizada ahora por la existencia de tres monismos, donde se han eliminado los instrumentos y alternativas a través de los cuales los ciudadanos podían presionar o intervenir para generar igualdad desde y por el Estado.
Ante tal situación, donde ya no hay alternativas de Progreso posibles dentro del Estado neoliberal, la única opción de reconstruir la democracia es una estrategia rupturista en forma de Poder Constituyente, redefinido y adaptado a nuestros espacios y tiempos.

Das Buch verbindet zwei Schlüsselkonzepte aktueller politischer und feministischer Theorie - Intersektionalität und Gouvernementalität - mit der historischen Analyse der Problematisierung von Prostitution und ihren Regierungsweisen Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts und analysiert, welche Machtlogiken bei der Interpretation der Prostitution als Problem individueller moralischer Führung einerseits und als gesamtgesellschaftliches, politisches Problem andererseits wirkten.
Die Autorin zeigt empirisch auf, dass verschiedene gesellschaftliche Gruppen jeweils spezifisch moralisch regiert wurden und plädiert für ein politisches und prozessorientiertes Verständnis von Intersektionalität, so dass differenzierte Mechanismen der Machtausübung erfassbar werden.

This thesis analyses the idea of central bank independence, how it shaped the creation of the European Central Bank (ECB) and its management of the Euro Crisis. Based on a genealogical analysis, the thesis identifies the central normative commitments undergirding the insulation of monetary policy from ordinary democratic politics. It argues that central bank independence is an institutional response to the ‘problem of politics’ in relation to money: the problem that money is simultaneously founded on political authority and fundamentally threatened by the ordinary exercise of this authority. Central bank independence, then, constitutes a way of grounding the value of money politically while at the same time depoliticising its government. The form that central bank independence takes in practice, however, differs substantially, reflecting different ways of wedding the idea to broader constitutional imaginaries. Drawing comparisons to other major central banks, the thesis details the ECB’s form of independence and argues that the creation of the ECB not as a government agency (as the Fed) or a societal power on a par with the government (as the Bundesbank), but as a sovereign representative on a par with the Member States altered the constitutional make-up of the Eurozone. As the existential crisis of the euro shows, general tensions within central bank independence become irresolvable contradictions in this constitutional construct. Without institutional mechanisms for resolving them through ordinary politics, the emergency politics of the Euro Crisis placed the ECB centre-stage, engaged in the ‘higher lawmaking’ of changing the Eurozone’s constitution in order to save it. In doing so, however, the ECB redefined the meaning of its independence and reignited ‘the problem of politics’ by undermining its underlying social contract.

Die digitale Revolution lässt vielfach die Einlösung des Versprechens vermissen, einen offenen Marktplatz des Meinungsaustausches zu schaffen. An die Stelle der etablierten Torwächter sind Algorithmen getreten, die bekannte Präferenzen der Nutzerinnen und Nutzer fortspinnen und sie so tendenziell Gleichem und Gleichen zuführen, statt sie mit abweichenden Positionen zu konfrontieren. Dieses als "Filterblase" bekannt gewordene Phänomen soll im folgenden Beitrag vor dem Hintergrund grundrechtlicher Anforderungen diskutiert werden.

While " inclusion " has been seen as a central mode of redressing ongoing injustices against communities of color in the US, Indigenous political experiences feature more complex legacies of contesting US citizenship. Turning to an important episode of contestation, this essay examines the relation between inclusion and the politics of eliminating Indigenous nations that was part of a shared policy shift toward " Termination " in the Anglo-settler world of the 1950s and 1960s. Through a reading of Indigenous activist-intellectual Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), it demonstrates how the construction of what I call the " civic inclusion narrative " in post–World War II American political discourse disavowed practices of empire-formation. Widely considered a foundational text of the Indigenous Sovereignty Movement, the work repositioned Indigenous peoples not as passive recipients of civil rights and incorporation into the nation-state but as colonized peoples actively demanding decolonization. Deloria's work provides an exemplary counterpoint to the enduring thread of civic inclusion in American political thought and an alternative tradition of decolonization—an imperative that continues to resonate in today's North American and global Indigenous struggles over land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty.

This article intervenes in the debate on the place of religious arguments in public reason. I advance the debate not by asking whether something called " religious reasons " ought to be invoked in the justification of coercive laws, but by creating a typology of (a) different kinds and forms of religious arguments and, more importantly, (b) different areas of political and social life which coercive laws regulate or about which human political communities deliberate. Religious arguments are of many different kinds, are offered to others in a variety of ways, and the spheres of life about which communities deliberate pose distinct moral questions. Turning back to the public reason debate, I argue then that political liberals ought to be concerned primarily about the invocation of a certain subset of religious reasons in a certain subset of areas of human activity, but also that inclusivist arguments on behalf of religious contributions to public deliberation fail to justify the use of religious arguments in all areas of public deliberation.

For Hannah Arendt, spontaneous, ‘initiatory’ human action and interaction are suppressed by the normalizing pressures of society once ‘life’ – that is, sheer life – becomes the primary concern of politics, as it does, she finds, in the modern age. Arendt’s concept of the social is indebted to Martin Heidegger’s analysis of everyday Dasein in Being and Time, and contemporary political philosophers inspired by Heidegger, such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Giorgio Agamben, tend to reproduce her account of the withdrawal of the political in modernity. In this article, I complicate Arendt’s theory by turning to Michel Foucault’s parallel but diverging understanding of the nature of power in modern society to show, surprisingly, that Foucault’s narrative of the emergence of modern power pictures a society that is more, not less, politicized.

This paper explores the way in which feminism, whilst trying to achieve gender equality, has increased inequality between women.  It locates the cause of this in feminism's early adoption of Marxist and Engelsian thought and the way in which these two thinkers misconstrued the relationship between private and public domains.

The article reads the invention of the Exodus-Narrative in its historical context of the religious and political system of the Ancient Near East. It reconstructs the revolutionary different approach to political power and theological foundation in the development of the Mose- and Exodus-Narrative and its innerbiblical Fortschreibung. For this development it is most decisive that the Exodus-Narrative is not based on a historical migration-movement "from point A to point B", but on a historical confrontation with the political powers at that time. The foundation of a strict monotheistic understanding of theology and the invention of “textual authority” that diverged from the status of scripture in the Ancient Near East and which can be reconstructed through the structure of the Exodus-Narrative and its canonical form as the Tora of Mose, has laid the foundation for the identity of Israel and the basis for the three Monotheistic Religions. The article's argument is strictly developed in correspondence with contemporary exegetical and historical research (esp. E. Otto and Chr. Dohmen) and is brought together with contemporary accounts to political thought from poststructuralist and deconstructive philosophers like Derrida, Levinas, Badiou and Agamben. The outcome of this study is articulated as a contribution to an affirmative reading of the so-called »crisis of representation«.