The cultural contradictions of democracy : political thought since September 11
Since 9/11, American foreign policy has been guided by grand ideas like tyranny, democracy, and freedom. And yet the course of events has played havoc with the cherished assumptions of hawks and doves alike. The geo-civil war afflicting the Muslim world from Lebanon through Iraq and Afghanistan to Pakistan confronts the West with the need to articulate anew what its political ideas and ideals actually are
1 online resource (viii, 205 pages)
9781400827954, 9781282158047, 1400827957, 128215804X
437427285
Introduction: Political thought in the fog of war
War and democracy
Hobbes versus Kant?
Leviathan
The neoconservative illusion
The frailty of human affairs
Crises of the republic
The argument
Seized by power
Death and the governor of Texas
The new American exceptionalism
The cold warrior myth
Kant with Arendt
Targeting Iraq
Al Qaeda and ultimate ends
A grammar of motives
The imagination of power
State of exception
Arendt versus Agamben
Schmitt and Hobbes
Decision and covenant
The ordeal of universalism
September 11 and fables of the left
First response
Multilateral ambivalence
Terrorism as symptom
Chomskian certitudes
Hardt and Negri's Empire
The multitude and prophecy
Iraq : delirium of war, delusions of peace
The idealism of means
The idealism of ends
Neither left nor right
The Atlantic misalliance
Diplomatic intrigues and political truths
Repudiations of the UN left and right
The Hobbesian nightmare : occupied Iraq
The ordeal of universalism
Democracy and war
Postnational cosmopolitanism versus liberal nationalism?
Kant with Hobbes
Habermas's Agon with Schmitt
Hobbes with Kant
Europe, or, the empire of rights
Islam's geo-civil war
Global neoliberal religious conservatism?
No exit
Conclusion: Prelude to the unknown
Ideas and errors
Arendt with Berlin
Liberty without democracy versus democracy without liberty?
Democratic striving and sectarian mobilization
Untimely meditation