Political responsibility
Subtitle: responding to predicaments of power
By: Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo
Series: New directions in critical theory; New directions in critical theory
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 334
ISBN-13: 9780231174848
Subjects: Political ethics; Moral and ethical aspects; Government accountability; Power (Social sciences)
Description: "Scholars in the humanities and social sciences have turned to ethics to theorize politics in what seems to be an increasingly depoliticized age. Yet the move toward ethics has obscured the ongoing value of political responsibility and the vibrant life it represents as an effective response to power. Sounding the alarm for those who care about robust forms of civic engagement, this book fights for a new conception of political responsibility that meets the challenges of today's democratic practice. Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo forcefully argues against the notion that modern predicaments of power can only be addressed ethically or philosophically through pristine concepts that operate outside of the political realm. By returning to the political, the individual is reintroduced to the binding principles of participatory democracy and the burdens of acting and thinking as a member of a collective. Vázquez-Arroyo historicizes the ethical turn to better understand its ascendence and reworks Adorno's dialectic of responsibility to reassert the political in contemporary thought and theory"--Publisher's website.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: Historicizing the Ethical Turn; title: Responsibility in History; title: Autonomy, Ethics, Intrasubjectivity; title: Ethical Reductions; title: Adorno and the Dialectic of Responsibility; title: Political Ethic, Violence, and Defeat.