A new publication in conceptual history: The United Nations and Peace. The Evolution of an Organizational Concept.

Sami — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 14:25:30 +0300

A new publication in conceptual history: The United Nations and Peace: The Evolution of an Organizational Concept.

Aiming to trace the development of the concept of peace from the foundation of the UN until today, the book investigates on what conceptual understanding the UN was instituted in 1945 and what notion of peace has become apparent in subsequent UN policy as it is performed by the primary UN organs. Along the lines of this research program, the book seeks to reveal the changing underlying assumptions about how a peaceful world order looks and how it should be brought about. Beyond these aspects of semantic change, the book also explores the institutional dimension of this organizational concept by carving out how it is anchored in functional-normative structures of the world organization, its policy, and rhetoric. It builds on an interdisciplinary

approach of institutional analysis and conceptual explanation that combines interpretive methods from international law scholarship, conceptual history and policy analysis.

Peter Lang

Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2011. XIV, 355 pp., num. graphs

Print: ISBN 978-3-631-61926-1 hb.

SFR 80.00 / €* 54.80 / €** 56.30 / € 51.20 / £ 46.10 / US$ 79.95

www.peterlang.com

http://www.peterlang.com/download/datasheet/61489/datasheet_261926.pdf

New book

Sami — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 15:17:57 +0200

New book on the concept of democracy

Jeppe Nevers’ doctoral dissertation on Danish conceptions of democracy will be published by the University Press of Southern Denmark on the 4th of February 2011. The book focuses on Danish examples but also charts general patterns in the European history of the concept.

Redescriptions volume 12 published

Sami — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 09:26:52 +0200

Redescriptions vol. 12, Yearbook of Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory has recently come out. New volume includes articles by Quentin Skinner, Kari Saastamoinen, Burkhard Conrad, Raymond Geuss, Kari Palonen and Jan Ifversen etc. Table of contents can be found here.

Three new studies in conceptual history

Sami — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:13:50 +0300

Three new studies in conceptual history:

Jörn Leonhard: Bellizismus und Nation. Kriegsdeutung und Nationsbestimmung in Europa und den Vereinigten Staaten 1750-1914

Alle politischen Begriffe und Vorstellungen beziehen sich nach Carl Schmitt auf die politische Unterscheidung von Freund und Feind, deren letzte Konsequenz sich in Krieg oder Revolution äußere. Aber was erlaubte es dem Staat, unter Rückgriff auf die Legitimationsformel der Nation Millionen seiner Bürger in den Krieg zu schicken? Vor dem Hintergrund dieser Frage untersucht Jörn Leonhard Ursprung, Wandel und Vielfalt der aus der Erfahrung kriegerischer Gewalt hervorgegangenen nationalen Legitimationsmuster. Auf synchroner Ebene stellt er Frankreich, Deutschland, Großbritannien und die Vereinigten Staaten in der longue durée vom Siebenjährigen Krieg bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg systematisch-vergleichend gegenüber.

See: http://www.oldenbourg-wissenschaftsverlag.de/olb/de/1.c.1329373.de?hasjs...

Kari Palonen: The Politics of Limited Times. The Rhetoric of Temporal Judgment in Parliamentary Democracies

Politik ist von Natur aus ein Spiel mit der Zeit. Das Buch bietet eine interessante Lektüre mit einer gelungenen Kombination aus idealtypischen, rhetorischen und historischen Ansätzen.

Der Autor setzt hiermit seine Studien der Politischen Ideengeschichte mit einer rhetorischen Analyse der Institutionen und Verfahren mit dem Spiel der Zeit fort. Die Parlamentarisierung und Demokratisierung der Politik bedingen einen kürzeren zeitlichen Horizont der Politik als in monarchischen oder bürokratischen Regierungsformen. Die zeitlichen Ebenen regulärer und wiederkehrender Gelegenheiten für Veränderungen lassen sich im Einzelnen in Lebensdauer, Dynamik, Zeitspannen und Kalendarium aufteilen. Weitere Kapitel, die sich mit der Demokratisierung des Wahlrechts, dem Wechsel in der Regierung, parlamentarischen Verfahren, rhetorischen Praktiken und der Zeit von Politikern beschäftigen, zeigen Zusammenspiel und Widerspruch dieser Ebenen.

Die abschließenden Kapitel verbinden die zeitlichen Ebenen mit dem Spiel mit der knappen Zeit und schließen mit einer Befürwortung des kurzen zeitlichen Horizonts einer Wahlperiode als den wichtigsten Vorteil von parlamentarischen Demokratien.

Mit dem Sprichwort: "Staatsmänner denken an die nächsten Generationen, Politiker an die nächsten Wahlen", ermutigt das Buch seine Leser, zu denken wie ein Politiker.
Politics is inherently a play with time. “The Politics of Limited Times” offers a temporal reading of politics, combining ideal typical, rhetorical and historical approaches. The study continues the author’s work on the history of concept of politics with a rhetorical analysis of the institutions and practices of playing with time. The parliamentarization and democratization of politics render the temporal horizons of politics shorter than in monarchic and bureaucratic regimes. The temporal layers of regular and recurrent occasions for change can be divided into individual lifetime, momentum, time-span and calendar. Chapters dealing with the democratization of suffrage, the alternation in government, parliamentary procedures and rhetorical practices and times of politicians illustrate the interplay and opposition these layers with each other. The concluding chapters connect the temporal layers to the play with the scarce time and to a defense of the short temporal horizons as the main advantage of parliamentary democracies. If a proverb says: “statesmen think about next generations, politicians about next elections”, this book encourages its readers to think like politicians.

See: http://www.nomos-shop.de/productview.aspx?product=10624&toc=90

Kari Palonen, Tuija Pulkkinen & José María Rosales (edts.): The Ashgate Research Companion to the Politics of Democratization in Europe

Democratization' is a concept often used in academic book titles. Yet not many of them deal with the initial breakthrough of democratization. This research companion presents an alternative view to the widespread assumption that Western democracies should be the normative reference for the study of democratization elsewhere. Rather, it questions the universal validity of such an assumption by searching the history of European politics and by paying specific attention to the struggles of democratization accomplished outside Western Europe. This way of reading history highlights neglected dimensions of democratization such as rhetoric, conceptual change, gender and time, all of which serve as new dimensions of a topic that is seemingly well known. The authors apply a comparative approach to analysing debates in the primary sources in a number of countries and languages, with the aim of situating the results into a broader European context.

The volume consists of 25 chapters distributed among four main sections that focus on European democratization from different historical and analytical perspectives. Its objective is to discuss the politics, concepts and histories involved in democratization as a complex of changes that has altered the conditions of political action and debate in the continent for the past two centuries. The sections are structured as follows:

- The seven chapters of the first section, Concepts, focus on the historical and typological aspects of the conceptual controversies around democratization.

- The six chapters of the second section, Practices, refer to the rhetorical and cultural practices in the politics of democratization.

- The six chapters in the third section, Changes, connect democratization with more long-term historical and political changes.

- The five chapters of the fourth section, Contexts, take a definite thematic or national context as their point of departure.

There exists no comprehensive volume on the democratization in Europe from the eighteenth century to the present. This volume offers scholars, students, politicians, journalists and other interested readers a picture that avoids anachronisms by reminding of the topics and problems that political agents have faced before the quasi-universal acceptance of democracy.

Contents: On the politics, concepts and histories of European democratization, Tuija Pulkkinen and José María Rosales. Part I Concepts: Representative democracy: Rosanvallon on the French experience, Frank R. Ankersmit; Direct democracy, ancient and modern, Mogens Herman Hansen; Neither ancient nor modern: Rousseau's theory of democracy, Gabriella Silvestrini; Representative government or republic? Sieyès on good government, Christine Fauré; Democratic politics and the dynamics of passions, Chantal Mouffe; Disobedient state and faithful citizen? Re-locating politics in the age of globalization, Olivia Guaraldo; The gendered 'subjects' of political representation, Tuija Pulkkinen. Part II Practices: Political rhetoric and the role of ridicule, Quentin Skinner; Political times and the rhetoric of democratization, Kari Palonen; Democratization and the instrumentalization of the past, Irène Herrmann; The rhetoric of intellectual manifestos from the First World War to the war against terrorism, Marcus Llanque; City squats and women's struggle: feminist political action as public performance, Anna Schober; Spectres of totality, Simona Forti. Part III Changes: Women's partial; citizenship: cleavages and conflicts concerning women's citizenship in theory and practice, Claudia Wiesner; Gendering political representation? The debate on gender parity in France, Laure Bereni; Political professionalism and representative democracy: common history, irresolvable linkage and inherent tensions, Jens Borchert; Democratization and professionalization: the disappearance of the polling officer in Germany and the introduction of computer democracy, Hubertus Buchstein; The history of parliamentary democracy in Denmark in comparative perspective, Uffe Jakobsen. Part IV Contexts: A long and hard process of democratization: political representation, elections and democracy in contemporary Spain, Gonzalo Capellán de Miguel; Do political parties matter? Direct democracy and electoral struggles in Switzerland in the 19th century, Pierre-Antoine Schorderet; The breakthrough of universal suffrage in Finland, 1905–1906, Jussi Kurunmäki; Nationalism, constitutionalism and democratization: the Basque question in perspective, Jose María Rosales; The Dis-/appearance of the demos, Meike Schmidt-Gleim; Postscript: the past, present and future of democratization, Kari Palonen; Index.

See: http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=10233&...

A forthcoming publication

sanna — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:09:40 +0300

A forthcoming publication:
TEORÍAS Y PRÁCTICAS DE LA HISTORIA CONCEPTUAL
Faustino Oncina Coves (ed.)
Theoria cum Praxi, Impronta 4, Plaza y Valdés PyV Editores, CSIC, Madrid-México, 2008.

For more details please visit the website at:
http://www.plazayvaldes.es/index.php?s=libro&id=1274

Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought and first Redescriptions available on-line

Sami — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 10:59:30 +0200

Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought (Volumes 1-7, 1997 - 2003), more recently known as Redescriptions and Yearbook of Political Thought and Conceptual History (Volume 8, 2004) are now available online on website at http://www.jyu.fi/yhtfil/redescriptions/articles.htm

Quentin Skinner's new book out in march 2008

admin — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 11:09:02 +0200

According to Cambridge University Press Quentin Skinner's new book will be published in march 2008. The book's title is Hobbes and Republican Liberty. In the book Skinner developes his earlier ideas about the nature of liberty and the two rival theories of liberty during Hobbes' era. See further details in Cambridge University Press-site.

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