Politics and the Search for the Common Good - Softcover

Sluga, Hans

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1107671132 ISBN 13: 9781107671133

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2014

Synopsis

Rethinking politics in a new vocabulary, Hans Sluga challenges the firmly held assumption that there exists a single common good which politics is meant to realize. He argues that politics is not a natural but a historical phenomenon, and not a single thing but a multiplicity of political forms and values only loosely related. He contrasts two traditions in political philosophy: a 'normative theorizing' that extends from Plato to John Rawls and a newer 'diagnostic practice' that emerged with Marx and Nietzsche and has found its three most prominent twentieth-century practitioners in Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault. He then examines the sources of diagnostic political thinking, analyzes its achievements, and offers a critical assessment of its limitations. His important book will be of interest to a wide range of upper-level students and scholars in political philosophy, political theory, and the history of ideas.

About this title

About the Author

Hans Sluga is William and Trudy Ausfahl Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His publications include Gottlob Frege (1980), Heidegger's Crisis, Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (1994) and Wittgenstein (2011). He is also the editor of The Philosophy of Frege (1993) and the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein (with David Stern, Cambridge, 1996).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1107671132
• ISBN 13: 9781107671133
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272