The Politics of Reason : A Postfoundational Appraoch

Rae, Gavin

Edinburgh University Press（2026/03発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 320 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781399552561

Full Description

While Western political theory has traditionally affirmed the importance of pure reason, this has recently come under attack from a variety of directions, including from those who question its universal pretensions, its neglect of the emotions, and its attachment to rationally discerned truth.

Gavin Rae accepts aspects of these critiques, but rejects the conclusion that this means that reason should be abandoned politically. Instead, Rae argues that it opens the possibility for a rethinking and recuperation of a reconceived understanding of political reason that emphasises, not individual abstract reflection, but social performativity. Through engagements with analytic epistemology, critical theory, feminism, hegemony theory, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis, political reason is reconceived as an ongoing collective performative practice that aims at establishing the hegemonic norms that will structure and define collective identity, including its political and epistemic possibilities.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Recuperating Reason Politically

Part I: The Follies of Reason
1. Epistemic Vices and the Politics of Reason
2. The Politics of Epistemic Injustice

Part II: Reason and Irrationality
3. Freud, Drive Theory, and Reason
4. Adorno and Horkheimer on the Dialectic of Reason

Part III: From Reason to the Political
5. Schmitt on the Political Decisionism of the Constituent-Power
6. Laclau on the Politics of Hegemony

Part IV: Politics, Truth, and Epistemic Frames
7. Foucault on the Politics of Truth-Telling
8. Butler and the Politics of Epistemic Frames

Conclusion: Universality, Social Reasoning, and Normativity

Bibliography
Index