Catching Up with Wells: The Political Theory of H. G. Wells’s Science Fiction

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 637-658 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Planinc
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Catching Up ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Supreme Fiction ◽  
Catch Up

H. G. Wells’s The Rights of Man (1940)—which provided the groundwork for the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights—has been re-released with a new Introduction by novelist Ali Smith, who reminds us of Wells’s political prophetic call for “a real federation of mankind,” and of the fact that we have still failed to meet the future he envisioned. If we are to catch up with Wells, we must, however, examine the foundations of Wells’s “cosmopolitan” vision, which requires examining both his scientific non-fiction and his scientific romances. Looking to Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau in particular, and the influence of Wells’s early scientific essays on Moreau’s narrative, we get a picture of Wells as a writer and a man who is anxious about the identity and future of the human species, but who nevertheless puts his faith in the “apparatuses” of “education and moral suggestion,” which are held together by “common faith.” Much like Charles Taylor and Simon Critchley, Wells calls for more than a political reconstitution, or institution, of right: he calls for a new cosmic imaginary, or supreme fiction, that has the potential to redeem and preserve the human species.

The Rights Kind of Politics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brooke A. Ackerly
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Transformative Politics ◽  
Taking Responsibility ◽  
Normative Political Theory

Just responsibility is a way of taking responsibility for all forms of global injustice (not just women’s human rights) and to all people, even those who consider themselves removed from the politics of global injustice (though they want to be engaged). Chapter 7 applies the theory to taking responsibility through the enactment of roles in the political economy—those of consumer, donor, worker, and activist—and beyond. It summarizes the view of political community, accountability, and leadership essential to transformative politics. Just responsibility is more than a normative theory of human rights principles. It is also a normative political theory of how to carry out those principles not only in the practices proscribed by our roles in the political economy, but also in imaginative practices that defy the boundaries of those roles in order to transform the political economy. Just responsibility is a human rights theory of global justice.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brooke A. Ackerly
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
The Political ◽  
Self Advocacy ◽  
Garment Factory ◽  
Advocacy Network ◽  
Political Perspective ◽  
Key Features

In the introduction, the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity (BCWS) provides a background for conceptualizing problems of global injustice (injustice itself), the methodology needed to theorize about how to take responsibility for injustice itself politically (grounded normative theory), and the key features and importance of a human rights approach to a political theory of responsibility. BCWS successfully cultivated arrangements with a Bangladeshi factory, RL Denim, to improve conditions there, with Metro Group to keep production in that garment factory, with workers to develop their understanding of their legal rights and strategies for self-advocacy, and with Clean Clothes Campaign (a worker advocacy network) and BSCI (a factory auditing firm) to support the workers’ desire to keep their jobs under improved factory conditions. The remainder of the chapter clarifies the political perspective of the approach.

Human Rights

2018 ◽  
pp. 414-430
Author(s):  
Michael Forman
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Personal Integrity ◽  
Cultural Rights ◽  
The Core

Human rights is a way of articulating appeals for justice and aiming at the juridification of these claims. This chapter reconstructs the political theory of human rights to highlight how solutions to the crises it aims at addressing have been articulated in political theory and practice with the result that rights claims have been expanded from the early assertions of personal integrity, religious freedom, and property of a privileged minority to the demands for social, economic, and cultural rights of the victims of exploitation, imperialism, oppression, and exclusion. This chapter examines the notions of sovereignty that sit at the core of the idea, especially the tension between human rights and popular sovereignty, which can only be temporarily resolved in political practice. It argues that human rights, although incompletely realized, retains its appeal to movements everywhere because it is the best way of realizing justice claims in the context of modernity.

The Creative Force of Discourse and the Appearance of Politics: Reading Charles Taylor with the Political Theory of Jacques Rancière

Dialogue ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 705-715
Author(s):  
MARC EMMERICH
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
The Political ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
Jacques Rancière ◽  
Creative Force ◽  
Per Se

Does the creative force of discourse Taylor describes enable the subaltern to speak for themselves? To answer this question, I underlay Jacques Rancière’s concept of politics. I correlate Charles Taylor’s opposition of HLC- and HHH-language theories to Rancière’s distinction of ‘politics’ and ‘police.’ However, since the creative force of discourse also re-enacts human order through rituals and repetitions, it is not political per se. I discuss Taylor’s example of the “avuncular” relationship to show at which point the creative force could turn into a fundament of politics and where it doesn’t.

Risk, Desire and Adaptation: The Paradox of Queer Solidarity and the Political Possibility of Death Under Neoliberalism and Homonationalism

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Natalie Kouri-Towe
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
State Violence ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sexual Rights ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Strategy I

In 2015, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid Toronto (QuAIA Toronto) announced that it was retiring. This article examines the challenges of queer solidarity through a reflection on the dynamics between desire, attachment and adaptation in political activism. Tracing the origins and sites of contestation over QuAIA Toronto's participation in the Toronto Pride parade, I ask: what does it mean for a group to fashion its own end? Throughout, I interrogate how gestures of solidarity risk reinforcing the very systems that activists desire to resist. I begin by situating contemporary queer activism in the ideological and temporal frameworks of neoliberalism and homonationalism. Next, I turn to the attempts to ban QuAIA Toronto and the term ‘Israeli apartheid’ from the Pride parade to examine the relationship between nationalism and sexual citizenship. Lastly, I examine how the terms of sexual rights discourse require visible sexual subjects to make individual rights claims, and weighing this risk against political strategy, I highlight how queer solidarities are caught in a paradox symptomatic of our times: neoliberalism has commodified human rights discourses and instrumentalised sexualities to serve the interests of hegemonic power and obfuscate state violence. Thinking through the strategies that worked and failed in QuAIA Toronto's seven years of organising, I frame the paper though a proposal to consider political death as a productive possibility for social movement survival in the 21stcentury.

On the Will of the People: Notes on the Political “Theory” of Populism

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Claus Offe
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Conflicts Of Interest ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
The Political ◽  
The People ◽  
National People ◽  
The Will

The “will of the (national) people” is the ubiquitously invoked reference unit of populist politics. The essay tries to demystify the notion that such will can be conceived of as a unique and unified substance deriving from collective ethnic identity. Arguably, all political theory is concerned with arguing for ways by which citizens can make e pluribus unum—for example, by coming to agree on procedures and institutions by which conflicts of interest and ideas can be settled according to standards of fairness. It is argued that populists in their political rhetoric and practice typically try to circumvent the burden of such argument and proof. Instead, they appeal to the notion of some preexisting existential unity of the people’s will, which they can redeem only through practices of repression and exclusion.

From Crusades to Colonization: Violence in Secular and Religious Political Theory

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Xavier Scott
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
International Law ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
State Power ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Beliefs And Values

This paper examines the transition in political philosophy between the medieval and early-modern periods by focusing on the emergence of sovereignty doctrine. Scholars such as Charles Taylor and John Rawls have focused on the ability of modern-states to overcome conflicts between different religious confessionals. In contrast, this paper seeks to examine some of the peace-promoting features of Latin-Christendom and some of the conflict-promoting features of modern-secular states. The Christian universalism of the medieval period is contrasted with the colonial ventures promoted by the Peace of Westphalia. This paper’s goal is not to argue that secularism is in fact more violent than religion. Rather, it seeks to demonstrate the major role that religion played in early modern philosophy and the development of sovereignty doctrine. It argues against the view that the modern, secular state is capable of neutrality vis-à-vis religion, and also combats the view that the secular nature of modern international law means that it is neutral to the different beliefs and values of the world’s peoples. These observations emphasize the ways in which state power and legitimacy are at the heart of the secular turn in political philosophy. 

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