Books by Craig Calhoun
Degenerations of Democracy
by Charles Taylor, Craig Calhoun, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar
Three leading thinkers analyze the erosion of democracy’s social foundations and call for a movement to reduce inequality, strengthen inclusive solidarity, empower citizens, and reclaim pursuit of the public good.
Democracy is in trouble. Populism is a common scapegoat but not the root cause. More basic are social and economic transformations eroding the foundations of democracy, ruling elites trying to lock in their own privilege, and cultural perversions like making individualistic freedom the enemy of democracy’s other crucial ideals of equality and solidarity. In Degenerations of Democracy three of our most prominent intellectuals investigate democracy gone awry, locate our points of fracture, and suggest paths to democratic renewal.
In Charles Taylor’s phrase, democracy is a process, not an end state. Taylor documents creeping disempowerment of citizens, failures of inclusion, and widespread efforts to suppress democratic participation, and he calls for renewing community. Craig Calhoun explores the impact of disruption, inequality, and transformation in democracy’s social foundations. He reminds us that democracies depend on republican constitutions as well as popular will, and that solidarity and voice must be achieved at large scales as well as locally.
Taylor and Calhoun together examine how ideals like meritocracy and authenticity have become problems for equality and solidarity, the need for stronger articulation of the idea of public good, and the challenges of thinking big without always thinking centralization.
Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar points out that even well-designed institutions will not integrate everyone, and inequality and precarity make matters worse. He calls for democracies to be prepared for violence and disorder at their margins―and to treat them with justice, not oppression.
The authors call for bold action building on projects like Black Lives Matter and the Green New Deal. Policy is not enough to save democracy; it will take movements.
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Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories And American Power (Social Science Reacher council)
by Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, Kevin W. Moore
In the shadow of America's recent military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, distinguished historians of empires and noted international relations specialists consider the dirty word "empire" in the face of contemporary political reality. Is "empire" a useful way to talk about America's economic, cultural, political, and military power?
This final volume in the Social Science Research Council "After September 11" series examines what the experience of past empires tells us about the nature and consequences of global power. How do the goals and circumstances of the United States today compare to classical imperialist projects of rule over others, whether for economic exploitation or in pursuit of a "civilizing mission"?
Reviewing the much contested history of domination by Western colonizing powers, Lessons of Empire asks what lessons the history of these empires can teach us about the world today.
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Nationalism (Concepts Social Thought)
Drawing on examples from Eritrea, Yugoslavia and China to France and Germany, this book clarifies the way in which national boundaries and identities became central to the modern era, how they relate to the development of state power, and how a host of different social movements and government policies try to make use of them. At the same time, the author also challenges attempts to "debunk" nationalism that fail to grasp why it maintains its power and centrality in modern life.
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Does Capitalism Have a Future?
by Michael Mann, Craig Calhoun, Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Georgi Derluguian
In Does Capitalism Have a Future?, a global quintet of distinguished scholars cut their way through to the question of whether our capitalist system can survive in the medium run. Despite the current gloom, conventional wisdom still assumes that there is no real alternative to capitalism. The authors argue that this generalization is a mistaken outgrowth of the optimistic nineteenth-century claim that human history ascends through stages to an enlightened equilibrium of liberal capitalism. All major historical systems have broken down in the end, and in the modern epoch several cataclysmic events-notably the French revolution, World War I, and the collapse of the Soviet bloc-came to pass when contemporary political elites failed to calculate the consequences of the processes they presumed to govern. At present, none of our governing elites and very few intellectuals can fathom a systemic collapse in the coming decades. While the book's contributors arrive at different conclusions, they are in constant dialogue with one another, and they construct a relatively seamless-if open-ended-whole.
Written by five of world's most respected scholars of global historical trends, this ambitious book asks the most important of questions: are we on the cusp of a radical world historical shift?
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The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere, and Early Nineteenth-Century Social Movements
The story of the rise of radicalism in the early nineteenth century has often been simplified into a fable about progressive social change. The diverse social movements of the era—religious, political, regional, national, antislavery, and protemperance—are presented as mere strands in a unified tapestry of labor and democratic mobilization. Taking aim at this flawed view of radicalism as simply the extreme end of a single dimension of progress, Craig Calhoun emphasizes the coexistence of different kinds of radicalism, their tensions, and their implications.
The Roots of Radicalism reveals the importance of radicalism’s links to preindustrial culture and attachments to place and local communities, as well the ways in which journalists who had been pushed out of “respectable” politics connected to artisans and other workers. Calhoun shows how much public recognition mattered to radical movements and how religious, cultural, and directly political—as well as economic—concerns motivated people to join up. Reflecting two decades of research into social movement theory and the history of protest, The Roots of Radicalism offers compelling insights into the past that can tell us much about the present, from American right-wing populism to democratic upheavals in North Africa.
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Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics (Volume 6) (Contradictions of Modernity)
Eminent contributors consider what Hannah Arendt means in today’s public debates.
Is politics really nothing more than power relations, competing interests and claims for recognition, conflicting assertions of “simple” truths? No thinker has argued more passionately against this narrow view than Hannah Arendt, and no one has more to say to those who bring questions of meaning, identity, value, and transcendence to our impoverished public life. This volume brings leading figures in philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary theory into a dialogue about Arendt’s work and its significance for today’s fractious identity politics, public ethics, and civic life.
For each essay—on the fate of politics in a postmodern, post-Marxist era; on the connection of nonfoundationalist ethics and epistemology to democracy; on the conditions conducive to a vital public sphere; on the recalcitrant problems of violence and evil—the volume includes extended responses, and a concluding essay by Martin Jay responding to all the others. Ranging from feminism to aesthetics to the discourse of democracy, the essays explore how an encounter with Arendt reconfigures, disrupts, and revitalizes what passes for public debate in our day. Together they forcefully demonstrate the power of Arendt’s work as a splendid provocation and a living resource.
Contributors: Richard Bernstein, New School; Anthony Cascardi, U of California, Berkeley; Susan Bickford, U of North Carolina; Kim Curtis, Duke U; Lisa Disch, U of Minnesota; Nancy Fraser, New School; Martin Jay; U of California, Berkeley, Steven Leonard, U of North Carolina; Kirstie McClure, Johns Hopkins U; Dana Villa, Amherst College; and Eli Zaretsky, U of Missouri.
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