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As a German critical social theorist associated with the Frankfurt School, Adorno is not typically studied in the context of American political thought or democratic theory. But because of his Jewish background, during the World War II era he immigrated to the United States and resided in New York and California for nearly eleven years. Drawing from neglected essays, radio addresses, and lectures originally composed in English in the United States, Adorno and Democracy: The American Years revises the traditional understanding of Adorno as a high modernist aesthete, a cultural elitist, and a notoriously inaccessible theorist. This book traces his theory of democracy as it both develops in and is practically applied to the United States. Adorno enacts and encourages a novel project for democratic leadership that operates through specifically democratic forms of education and pedagogy. We see Adorno translating and introducing his ideas to a broader public in ways that reflect a desire to understand and inform the problems and possibilities of American democracy at the level of the everyday customs and conventions of citizens. Reframing our image of Adorno in the process of drawing out the lessons of these neglected and unexplored writings, this book shows why we should begin to read him as a twentieth-century democratic theorist. Adorno’s unconventional perspectives may help revitalize our democratic politics, add conceptual rigor to democratic theory, and remind us of the normative promise that used to attach more closely to the concept of “democracy.”

In Being in the World: Dialogue and Cosmopolis, noted political theorist Fred Dallmayr explores the world’s transition from a traditional Westphalian system of states to today’s interlocking cosmopolis. Drawing upon biblical literature, as well as ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle and current scholars such as Heidegger, Gadamer, and Raimon Panikkar, this manuscript delves into the importance of what Dallmayr calls “ethical-political engagement.” Dallmayr asserts that traditional concepts of individual and national identity, as well as perceived relationships between the self and others, are undergoing profound change. Every town has become a cosmopolis—an international city—affecting the way that nations conceptualize the relationship between general order and political practice. Rather than lamenting current problems, he suggests ways to successfully address them, through civic education and global citizenship. He argues that what is most needed is a politics of the common good, which requires the cultivation of public ethics, open dialogue, and civic responsibility. The book engages varied philosophical traditions in an original conversation about globalization and our world today.

This book explores the possibility of a transition from the modern paradigm—presently in a state of decay or disarray—toward new modes of life where freedom and solidarity would be reconciled, thus making possible a new flourishing of humanity on a global scale. However, it also acknowledges that antinomies of the past cannot quickly be exorcised by philosophical writings and that inherent conflicts in the modern paradigm may surface in virulent forms. Chapters 7 through 9 offer individual case studies that illustrate the difficulties involved in overcoming modern antinomies, especially the tension between freedom and solidarity. They look in particular at contemporary Protestant theology in its quest to reconcile human freedom with the Christian community of believers; Russian intellectual history in its difficult journey from traditional holism via totalitarianism to a precarious democratic freedom; and recent Indian philosophy as it tried to situate itself vis-à-vis traditional Hindu cosmology in its search for a viable democratic path in postcolonial India. The end of the book returns to the book’s central theme—the issue of a reconnection of freedom with social engagement—and stresses the need for new beginnings in this reconnection. Freedom and Solidarity ultimately offers that the solution to the possible derailments of freedom and solidarity into selfish narcissism and ethnocentric collectivism consists in the conception of solidarity as an open-ended, differentiated “public” and the conception of freedom as “authentic” guardianship.

To whom should we look for moral guidance during times of global violence, scarcity, and corruption? For two millennia, Aristotle's writings have taught that the ethically “good life” is the highest purpose of human existence. This book traces the development of this notion, illuminating the connections between Greek philosophy, Judeo-Christian tradition, Eastern religions, and postindustrial social criticism. This is, however, not merely an academic exercise. The book's investigations apply directly to a number of contemporary issues: the relevance of the classics, the global spread of democracy, appropriate responses to evil, and the public role of religion in a democracy. It reinvigorates the notion of the good life as a hallmark of personal conduct, civic virtue, and political engagement, seeking to roust a complacent and self-indulgent citizenry out of a fog of modern amusements and distractions.

This book provides a fresh interpretation of Henry Thoreau’s political theory through a comprehensive interpretation of public and private writings. While recent critics have opened new vistas in Thoreau interpretation, little attention has been paid to Thoreau’s journals and correspondence. This book argues that these private sources enhance our understanding of Thoreau’s political theory by highlighting its place within his overall philosophical mission. In particular, this book attends to the resonances between Thoreau’s overall political-theoretical mission of privatism and the Socratic practice of philosophy as a way of life. Through analyses of Thoreau’s reflective simplification, his philosophy of time, his place in the reform movements of the nineteenth century, his understanding of wildness as freedom, and his virtue-making of political indifference, this book rethinks the basic structure of Thoreau’s overall project.

Taking issue with the way scholarship on American exceptionalism has been conducted for the past few decades, Litke argues that examining the term and idea reveals a profound shift in Americans’ self-conception since the Puritan and founding periods. The dominant social scientific approach to the topic has missed, he argues, the chief elements of its importance to Americans as citizens, namely the reasons America might be unique in the world or in history and what practical ramifications such uniqueness might have for its conduct both at home and abroad. “Imperial American exceptionalism” is thus seen as a development in the American political tradition, a development that has led—with its domestic cognate of centralization, to the erosion of the republican character of the American people. Moving through the most important texts of the colonial, constitutional, Civil War, and Progressive periods, Litke adds to the scholarship in political theory, American political thought, American history, American foreign policy.