Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2014 -

Freedomis a keyword in modern political thought and culture.  Yet, as Roberts convincingly shows, modern political thinkers tend to analyze the concept using the freedoms of the powerful and the privileged to inform their conceptual frames.  His wager, which pays off spectacularly, is that readers can gain fresh insights by starting with the history of resistance to slavery.  He calls this new conception of freedom freedom as marronage.  Roberts's book is not merely an ideology critique that shows how dominant conceptions of freedom exclude the experiences of subordinate others.  Rather, it is a detailed and nuanced exploration of the kinds of flight from slavery, their nature, and their limits.  The result is a unique contribution to contemporary political thought: the idea of freedom as an ever-shifting process occurring in the liminal space of the slave escape.  Though it makes reference to historical episodes that are not fully explained,Freedom as Marronage is clearly written and expertly researched.  It is essential reading for those interested in the history of slavery, the concept of freedom, and critical theory.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, and research collections.

Ankers book is a powerful, insightful examination of the ways that melodrama shapes contemporary articulations of political subjectivity and sovereignty, with a focus on the American experience during and after 9/11.  Although melodrama is traditionally deployed within film or literary studies, Anker (George Washington Univ.) shows the ways in which it is equally applicable to present political discourse and practice.  She writes that melodramatic political discourses depict the nation-state as a virtuous and innocent victim overwhelmed by villainous action draw[ing] upon a moral economy that locates goodness in national suffering and that locates heroism in unilateral state action against dominating forces.  Anker adeptly unpacks this argument through close analysis of the ways that, within hours of the attacks on 9/11, media and national leaders were already utilizing the conventions of melodrama to inscribe a narrative upon the experience.  Yet she exposes the ways that this project leads to failure, potentially opening up critical spaces where forms of freedom transcend the constraints of violence, hyper-individualism, and a quixotic quest for an elusive sovereignty.  Ankers bold and creative analysis will significantly shape readers' understanding of contemporary political discourse.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, and research collections.

Melzer (Michigan State Univ.) provides an extensive, in-depth examination of the phenomenon of esoteric writing as it has been practiced down through the centuries in the West.  He takes into account works of philosophy and literature.  This is a landmark scholarly work in the study of the history of political thought.  What is of critical importance is that readers come to understand that esoteric writing has been hiding in plain sight all this time.  As Nietzsche notes in Aphorism 30 ofBeyond Good and Evil, the distinction between the exoteric and the esoteric was formerly known to philosophers across many traditions.  What is perhaps most surprising is that the academic West managed to finally lose sight of it, or at least become convinced that it did not exist.  Melzers book will leave only the most willful in the dark.  He carefully documents the phenomenon of esoteric writing from the Greeks to modern times and outlines the various reasons and forms (four) of esoteric writing.  His final chapter, explicating the profound problem that esoteric writing poses for historicism, opens up a range of important questions for anyone who seriously reflects on the problem of interpretation in reading old books.  An outstanding book.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Undergraduate, graduate, and research collections.

In this provocative work, Gündodu (Barnard College, Columbia Univ.) begins from Arendts observation that stateless persons cannot exercise human rights that should be universal when they do not possess citizenship rights.  Human rights must be institutionalized, it seems, if they are to be guaranteed.  The contemporary challenges asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented immigrants face are typically addressed through a moral economy of compassion, which portrays these individuals as suffering victims and simultaneously undermines their political agency.  By reading Arendt against Arendt, Gündodu suggests that those whom Arendt relegates to the private sphere of labor can reconstitute themselves as political actors to create a public space and to initiate the new beginnings necessary to claiming their rights.  Gündodu proposes a foundation for human rights based not upon justificatory procedures but instead upon a political practice of founding.  Her example is thesans-papiers, those immigrants from former French colonies who have demanded unconditional regularization and whose movement has spread to other countries.  Without prior authorization, they have created a public space and enacted a type of citizenship through the practice of claiming rights.  Gündodu reinterprets and raises Arendts work to a new level.Summing Up: Essential. General readers, upper-division undergraduate students, graduate students, and research faculty.

In this remarkable book, Bargu (The New School) frames a political ethnography of hunger strikes in Turkish prisons with debates around Foucaults critique of biopolitical power.  She makes a forceful case for the continued utility of Foucaults work and for the utility of ethnography for theory.  Bargu argues that death fasts represent a weaponization of life under conditions of asymmetries of power.  The case of Turkey demonstrates a vital tension in Foucaults work, the simultaneous coexistence of sovereign power in the form of the authoritarian state coupled with the biopolitical power of a neoliberal political and economic regime.  Beyond demands for recognition or rights, hunger strikers reject the saturation of their bodies by power and attempt to forge new political subjectivities and communities that reject the states sovereign power over life and the biopolitical drive to manage life.  Bargu explores the struggle between the state and strikers through the competing lenses of the state and the strikers, suggesting that necropoliticized resistance represents a form of political agency within specific contexts.  Elegantly written and argued, this text is a compelling empirical and theoretical contribution.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, and research collections.

This insightful and well-researched book reads like a thriller.  True to its title, the book covers the responses of Arendt and Strauss to the German historical school and to the historicized philosophy of the Weimar years.  It also deals with the situation that Arendt and Strauss faced as Jews in Germany during those years.  But the book is not limited to these topics nor is it limited to the early years of Arendt and Strauss.  Keedus (Univ. of Helsinki, Finland) is thoroughly familiar with the archives, but she is also steeped in the mature works of both authors and in the secondary literature about them.  When she takes up their respective views on politics, liberalism, Hobbes, or the relation of theory and practice, she has all the tools at hand.  In the contrast Keedus develops, Arendt moves away from philosophy and toward politics; Strauss reverses this movement.  But this sweeping generalization hardly does justice to a book in which the richness is in the detail.  There is confusion in some of the references.  Libraries that own books on Strauss by Heinrich Meier or by Catherine and Michael Zuckert will want to add this work to their collections.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers, upper-division undergraduate students, and above.

Nelson (Harvard Univ.) has written an excellent reinterpretation of the founding debates about executive power.  In this persuasively argued, elegantly written, extensively documented account, he argues that advocates of a strong executive were not simply outliers but reflected a rich, influential body of thought.  He demonstrates that Parliament, not the king, was the focus of criticism during the Revolution.  Though not denying that the anti-executive views of important thinkers such as Thomas Paine were influential, he also chronicles the wide range and depth of thought from John Adams, James Wilson, and Alexander Hamilton, among many lesser-known but important figures who defended a strong executive.  Nelson shows that rich and complex debates about executive power were a central part of the Revolutionary and Founding eras and that the Constitution was not simply a conservative reaction to, and betrayal of, the principles of the Revolution.  He also refreshingly and importantly argues for an understanding of the founding with the thought of James Madison somewhat less central, particularly in the realm of executive power.  This book will influence debates about the political thought of the era for some time to come.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, and research collections.

One of the great challenges in studying the figures of the American founding era is unraveling the contradiction between Thomas Jeffersons moral opposition to slavery and his decision to continue his ownership of slaves throughout his lifetime.  Helo (Univ. of Oulu, Finland) offers a new perspective on Jefferson and the dilemma surrounding Jeffersons relationship with slavery.  Helo argues that the fundamental error of Jeffersonian scholarship in the past has been trying to understand Jefferson as a philosopher and, therefore, attempting to connect Jeffersons actions with his moral and ethical thought.  According to Helo, this approach is mistaken because it ignores how Jefferson conceived of himself as a political actor above all else.  Moreover, his rejection of philosophy was a function of his moral thought and was informed by his faith in human progress.  Helo thus attempts to present a holistic vision of Jefferson, understood through a searching analysis of Jeffersons views on Christian morality, moral sentiments, ancient ethics, natural rights, and principles of justice and benevolence.  The result is one of the richest portrayals of Jefferson to date and a welcome contribution to Jeffersonian scholarship.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, research, and professional collections.