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In modern times politics in the Western world has become the ultimate source of morality, with the decline of religious and spiritual certainties. Today, public legitimacy, both political and moral, can only be derived from the idea that authority is based on individual decisions. The foundation of modern Western morality is based on the priority of the individual, hence the entitlement of modern democracy. This book is a case in favour of communal based individualism. Narrow-minded individualism can only lead to modern forms of nihilistic morality, such as egoism and narcissism. Today the schisms of morality within Western culture are more and more visible; between the USA and Europe; and is within Europe, which has been exacerbated by the rift between Europe and Russia. The book argues that if these schisms are not handled in a moral sense, then Nietzsche's prediction that Europe was to face two hundred years of nihilism might come true, and would threaten Western civilization.

In this radical new book, Patrick Chabal reveals how the future of the West is now inextricably linked to that of the non-West. The rise of the economic power of China and other Asian countries as well as urgent environmental issues now force the West to think in new ways about how to best face the future. This is an issue which runs far deeper than present debates on the decline of the West might suggest. The book argues that the postcolonial challenge, from regions such as Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, as well as the influence of citizens of non-Western origins now living in the West have combined to expose the limits of Western rationality - that is, the theories and concepts we currently use to understand and act upon the world. Discussing such provocative questions as 'Is it a good idea to build mosques in Europe?' and 'Is Beckham the new black icon?', Chabal explores the growing failure of Western social thought to explain many of our most pressing domestic social and economic issues. He also discusses contentious issues in international relations, such as the spread of democracy and the protection of human rights. He concludes that, ultimately, what the West needs is not more and better theory but an entirely new way of thinking - one that will put an end to its current deep-seated conceit.

'In Can Non-Europeans Think? Dabashi takes his subtle but vigorous polemic to another level.' Pankaj Mishra What happens to thinkers who operate outside the European philosophical pedigree? In this powerfully honed polemic, Hamid Dabashi argues that they are invariably marginalised, patronised and misrepresented. Challenging, pugnacious and stylish, Can Non-Europeans Think? forges a new perspective in postcolonial theory by examining how intellectual debate continues to reinforce a colonial regime of knowledge, albeit in a new guise. Based on years of scholarship and activism, this insightful collection of philosophical explorations is certain to unsettle and delight in equal measure.

Lord Byron described Greece as great, fallen, and immortal, a characterization more apt than he knew. Through most of its long history, Greece was poor. But in the classical era, Greece was densely populated and highly urbanized. Many surprisingly healthy Greeks lived in remarkably big houses and worked for high wages at specialized occupations. Middle-class spending drove sustained economic growth and classical wealth produced a stunning cultural efflorescence lasting hundreds of years. Why did Greece reach such heights in the classical period-and why only then? And how, after \"the Greek miracle\" had endured for centuries, did the Macedonians defeat the Greeks, seemingly bringing an end to their glory? Drawing on a massive body of newly available data and employing novel approaches to evidence, Josiah Ober offers a major new history of classical Greece and an unprecedented account of its rise and fall. Ober argues that Greece's rise was no miracle but rather the result of political breakthroughs and economic development. The extraordinary emergence of citizen-centered city-states transformed Greece into a society that defeated the mighty Persian Empire. Yet Philip and Alexander of Macedon were able to beat the Greeks in the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE, a victory made possible by the Macedonians' appropriation of Greek innovations. After Alexander's death, battle-hardened warlords fought ruthlessly over the remnants of his empire. But Greek cities remained populous and wealthy, their economy and culture surviving to be passed on to the Romans-and to us. A compelling narrative filled with uncanny modern parallels, this is a book for anyone interested in how great civilizations are born and die. This book is based on evidence available on a new interactive website. To learn more, please visit: http://polis.stanford.edu/.

How did meat emerge to become such an important feature in Western society? In both popular and academic literatures, biophysical and political-economic factors are often cited as the reason for meat’s preeminent status. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive investigation of these claims by reviewing the available evidence on the political-economic and biophysical features of meat over the long arc of Western history. We specifically focus on nine critical epochs: the Paleolithic (200,000 YA—10,000 YA), early to late Neolithic (10,000 YA—2500 BCE), antiquity (2500 BCE—550 CE), ancient Israel and early Christian societies (1550 BCE—379 CE), medieval Europe (476 CE—1400 CE), early modern Europe (1400–1800), colonial America (1607–1776), the American frontier (1776–1890), and the modern industrial era (1890—present). We find that except under conditions of environmental scarcity, the meaning and value of meat cannot be attributed to intrinsic biophysical value or to the political-economic actors who materially benefit from it. Rather, meat’s status reflects the myriad cultural contexts in which it is socially constructed in people’s everyday lives, particularly with respect to religious, gender, communal, racial, national, and class identity. By deconstructing the normalized/naturalized materialist assumptions circling around meat consumption, this paper clears a space for a more nuanced appreciation of the role that culture has played in the legitimation of meat, and by extension, the possibility of change.

A case study of one of the most important global institutions of cultural policy formation, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary demonstrates the relationship between such policymaking and transformations in the economy. Focusing on UNESCO's use of books, Sarah Brouillette identifies three phases in the agency's history and explores the literary and cultural programming of each. In the immediate postwar period, healthy economies made possible the funding of an infrastructure in support of a liberal cosmopolitanism and the spread of capitalist democracy. In the decolonizing 1960s and '70s, illiteracy and lack of access to literature were lamented as a \"book hunger\" in the developing world, and reading was touted as a universal humanizing value to argue for a more balanced communications industry and copyright regime. Most recently, literature has become instrumental in city and nation branding that drive tourism and the heritage industry. Today, the agency largely treats high literature as a commercially self-sustaining product for wealthy aging publics, and fundamental policy reform to address the uneven relations that characterize global intellectual property creation is off the table. UNESCO's literary programming is in this way highly suggestive. A trajectory that might appear to be one of triumphant success—literary tourism and festival programming can be quite lucrative for some people—is also, under a different light, a story of decline.

In the past decade the Asia-Pacific region has become a focus of international politics and military strategies. Due to China's rising economic and military strength, North Korea's nuclear tests and missile launches, tense international disputes over small island groups in the seas around Asia, and the United States pivoting a majority of its military forces to the region, the islands of the western Pacific have increasingly become the center of global attention. While the Pacific is a current hotbed of geopolitical rivalry and intense militarization, the region is also something else: a homeland to the hundreds of millions of people that inhabit it. Based on a decade of research in the region,The Empires' Edgeexamines the tremendous damage the militarization of the Pacific has wrought on its people and environments. Furthermore, Davis details how contemporary social movements in this region are affecting global geopolitics by challenging the military use of Pacific islands and by developing a demilitarized view of security based on affinity, mutual aid, and international solidarity. Through an examination of \"sacrificed\" islands from across the region-including Bikini Atoll, Okinawa, Hawai'i, and Guam-The Empires' Edge makes the case that the great political contest of the twenty-first century is not about which country gets hegemony in a global system but rather about the choice between perpetuating a system of international relations based on domination or pursuing a more egalitarian and cooperative future.

Events are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. But how do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much as what is actually present? InSemblance and Event, Brian Massumi, drawing on the work of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and others, develops the concept of \"semblance\" as a way to approach this question. It is, he argues, a question of abstraction, not as the opposite of the concrete but as a dimension of it: \"lived abstraction.\" A semblance is a lived abstraction. Massumi uses the category of the semblance to investigate practices of art that are relational and event-oriented -- variously known as interactive art, ephemeral art, performance art, art intervention -- which he refers to collectively as the \"occurrent arts.\" Each art practice invents its own kinds of relational events of lived abstraction, to produce a signature species of semblance. The artwork's relational engagement, Massumi continues, gives it a political valence just as necessary and immediate as the aesthetic dimension.

What are the relationships between the books we read and the communities we share? Common Things explores how transatlantic romance revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth century influenced--and were influenced by--emerging modern systems of community. Drawing on the work of Washington Irving, Henry Mackenzie, Thomas Jefferson, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Charles Brockden Brown, the book shows how romance promotes a distinctive aesthetics of belonging--a mode of being in common tied to new qualities of the singular. Each chapter focuses on one of these common things--the stain of race, the \"property\" of personhood, ruined feelings, the genre of a text, and the event of history--and examines how these peculiar qualities work to sustain the coherence of our modern common places. In the work of Horace Walpole and Edgar Allan Poe, the book further uncovers an important--and never more timely--alternative aesthetic practice that reimagines community as an open and fugitive process rather than as a collection of common things.

How music functions as a metaphor and model for democracy. Musical metaphors abound in political theory and music often accompanies political movements, yet music is seldom regarded as political communication. In this groundbreaking book, Nancy S. Love explores how music functions as metaphor and model for democracy in the work of political theorists and activist musicians. She examines deliberative democratic theorists-Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls-who employ musical metaphors to express the sense of justice that animates their discourse ideals. These metaphors also invoke embodied voices that enter their public discourse only in translation, as rational arguments for legal rights. Love posits that the music of activists from the feminist and civil rights movements-Holly Near and Bernice Johnson Reagon-engages deeper, more fluid energies of civil society by modeling a democratic conversation toward which deliberative democrats' metaphors merely suggest. To omit movement music from politics is, Love argues, to refuse the challenges it poses to modern, rational, secular, Western democracy. In conclusion, Musical Democracy proposes that a more radical-and more musical-democracy would embrace the spirit of humanity which moves a politics dedicated to the pursuit of justice.