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72 Politics & Philosophy
Philosophy of Dreams
Christoph Türcke
Translated by Susan H. Gillespie
Why has mankind developed so
differently from other animals? How
and why did language, culture,
religion and the arts come into being?
Christoph Türcke offers a new answer
to these questions by scrutinising the
phenomenon of the dream, using it as
a psychic fossil connecting us with
our Stone Age ancestors. Provocatively, he argues that both
civilisation and mental processes are the results of a compulsion
to repeat early traumas, one to which hallucination,
imagination, mind, spirit and God all developed in response.
Until the beginning of the modern era, repetition was
synonymous with de-escalation and calming down. Then,
automatic machinery gave rise to a new type of repetition,
whose effects are permanent alarm and distraction. The new
global forces of distraction, Türcke argues, are producing a
specific kind of stress that breaks down the barriers between
dreams and waking consciousness. Türcke’s essay ends with a
sobering indictment of this psychic deregulation and the social
and economic deregulations that have accompanied it.
Christoph Türcke is professor of philosophy and religion at
the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig.
November 304 pp. 234x156mm.
HB ISBN 978-0-300-18840-0 £20.00*
Translation rights: Beck Verlag, Munich
Civil Disobedience
An American Tradition
Lewis Perry
The American tradition of civil
disobedience stretches back to pre-
Revolutionary War days. Tracing the
origins of the notion of civil
disobedience to 18th-century
evangelicalism and republicanism,
Lewis Perry discusses how the
tradition took shape in the actions
of black and white abolitionists and antiwar protesters in the
decades leading to the Civil War, then found new expression
in post-Civil War campaigns for women’s equality, temperance
and labour reform. Gaining new strength and clarity from
explorations of Thoreau’s essays and Gandhi’s teachings, the
tradition persisted through the Second World War, grew
stronger during the decades of civil rights protest and antiwar
struggles, and has been adopted more recently by antiabortion
groups, advocates of same-sex marriage, opponents of
nuclear power and many others. Perry clarifies some of the
central implications of civil disobedience that have become
blurred in recent times and highlights the dilemmas faced by
those who choose to violate laws in the name of a higher
morality.
Lewis Perry is John Francis Bannon, S.J., Professor Emeritus,
Department of History, Saint Louis University.
November 384 pp. 234x156mm.
HB ISBN 978-0-300-12459-0 £20.00
A Theory of Militant
Democracy
The Ethics of Combatting Political
Extremism
Alexander S. Kirshner
How should pro-democratic forces
safeguard representative government
from anti-democratic forces? By
granting rights of participation to
groups that do not share democratic
values, democracies may endanger the
very rights they have granted; but
denying these rights may also
undermine democratic values.
Alexander Kirshner offers a set of
principles for determining when one
may reasonably refuse rights of
participation, and he defends this
theory through real-world examples,
ranging from the far-right British
Nationalist Party to Turkey’s Islamist
Welfare Party to America’s Democratic
Party during Reconstruction.
Alexander S. Kirshner is an assistant
professor of political science at Duke
University and a senior fellow at the
Kenan Institute for Ethics.
February 160 pp. 234x156mm.
PB ISBN 978-0-300-18824-0 £25.00
Adam Smith’s Pluralism
Rationality, Education,
and the Moral Sentiments
Jack Russell Weinstein
In this thought-provoking study,
Jack Russell Weinstein suggests the
foundations of liberalism can be found
in the writings of Adam Smith
(1723–1790), a pioneer of modern
economic theory and major figure in
the Scottish Enlightenment. While
offering an interpretive methodology for
approaching Smith’s two major works,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments and
The Wealth of Nations, Weinstein argues
against the libertarian interpretation of
Smith, emphasising his philosophies of
education and rationality. Weinstein
also demonstrates that Smith should be
recognised for a prescient theory of
pluralism that prefigures current
theories of cultural diversity.
Jack Russell Weinstein is Professor of
Philosophy and Director of the Institute
for Philosophy in Public Life at the
University of North Dakota.
October 360 pp. 234x156mm.
HB ISBN 978-0-300-16253-0 £45.00
The Warburg Years
(1919–1933)
Essays on Language, Art, Myth,
and Technology
Ernst Cassirer • Translated and with
an introduction by S. G. Lofts
with A. Calcagno
The Jewish German philosopher
Ernst Cassirer was one of the leading
proponents of the Marburg school of
neo-Kantianism. The essays in this
volume provide a window into Cassirer’s
discovery of the symbolic nature of
human existence – the fact that our
entire emotional and intellectual life is
configured and formed through the
originary expressive power of word and
image, that it is in and through the
symbolic cultural systems of language,
art, myth, religion, science and
technology that human life realises itself
and attains not only its form, its
visibility, but also its reality.
S. G. Lofts and A. Calcagno are
professors of philosophy at King’s
University College at Western
University, London, Canada.
January 384 pp. 210x140mm.
HB ISBN 978-0-300-10819-4 £35.00