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Mathias Thaler articulates a novel perspective on the study of violence that demonstrates why the imagination matters for political theory. He explores how narrative art, thought experiments, and historical events can challenge and enlarge our existing ways of thinking about violence.
Lois McNay, Oxford University, author of The Misguided Search for the Political:Although a ubiquitous political phenomenon, violence is notoriously difficult to conceptualize. Dominant paradigms in political theory are flawed; moralism sanitizes violence while realism shies away from crucial matters of evaluation. Thaler’s impressive and insightful 'politics of naming' demonstrates how historically grounded appreciation of violence’s protean character may be linked to an orienting normativity. He sheds light not just on the problem of violence but also on fundamental issues such as the role that imagination plays in reasoning and the nature of political judgment. This is a brilliant, thought-provoking, and timely study and a much-needed exemplar of engaged political theorizing.
María Pía Lara, author of The Disclosure of Politics: Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization:Forcefully arguing against realists and moralists, Thaler rescues the category of imagination as a way of providing critical tools to show us how things could have been different and develops a new understanding of how cruelty and suffering have to be re-described to meet each historical moment. This is, indeed, a brave way to face the urgent problem of the violence of our times.
Kimberly Hutchings, Queen Mary University of London, author of International Political Theory: Rethinking Ethics in a Global Era:In Naming Violence, Mathias Thaler asks how we can get beyond a stalemate between moralist and realist approaches in the political theory of violence, with an emphasis particularly on the critique of 'ideal,' definitional approaches. He argues that the imagination is key to an alternative way of approaching violence as a political theorist. This book makes both a very strong contribution to the literature within political theory on political violence and a broader contribution to metatheoretical debates about how to do political theory.
Alessandro Ferrara, University of Rome Tor Vergata, author of The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment:All naming of extreme violence–genocide, torture, terrorism–conveys a political judgment. Exploring the politics of naming, Mathias Thaler questions the binary of moralism and unreconstructed realism and brilliantly shows how storytelling, thought experiments, and genealogies nourish our imagination and thereby contribute to better orient our reflective judgments. A remarkably original contribution to a judgment-based approach to politics.
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