Relates politics to the fields of evolutionary biology, social psychology, linguistics, and game theory and looks at the influence of language on politics

A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology—transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: “Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks.” Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society—and the constitution, in its place, of a collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced. In a critique of the distinction between fact and value, Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy implicated in such a “commonsense” division—which here reveals itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving beyond the modernist institutions of “mononaturalism” and “multiculturalism,” Latour develops the idea of “multinaturalism,” a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by “diplomats” who are flexible and open to experimentation.

Introduction. The Science Question in Political Theory -- Earth to Arendt -- Vico's World of Nature -- Descartes and Democracy -- Hobbes's Worldly Geometry of Politics -- Epilogue. Science and Politics at the End of the World

Nature no longer exists apart from humanity. The world we will inhabit is the one we have made. Geologists call this epoch the Anthropocene, Age of Humans. The facts of the Anthropocene are scientific—emissions, pollens, extinctions—but its shape and meaning are questions for politics. Jedediah Purdy develops a politics for this post-natural world.

Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903-1987) was one of the great political thinkers of the twentieth century, but he left few disciples. The essays contained in this volume have been selected because they serve to clarify, elaborate, and expand upon the themes of his three masterworks: On Power, Sovereignty, and The Pure Theory of Politics. De Jouvenel's thought stands apart from the main branches of twentieth-century political philosophy and is largely independent of schools and ideologies. By drawing on an older, more persuasive philosophical tradition stretching from Plato to Rousseau, de Jouvenel sought to restore political science to its ancient function: the explanation of political things. With directness and originality, his work addresses questions that go to the heart of the political science enterprise, exploring its nature, its mission, and its attitude to theory, facts, and values. In the realm of political practice, de Jouvenel shares common ground with his contemporaries while remaining essentially independent. He shares with the left a deep concern for reducing human misery and ecological depredation and a belief in the need for government-directed economic planning. On the other hand, he shares the right's abiding suspicion of state power and its belief in the superiority of the market as the presumptive method for economic decision making. De Jouvenel's refreshing freedom from ideological blinders makes him worthy of comparison to Orwell, but his ambition stretches beyond the novelistic in that he attempts to develop a theory of the good state resting upon a clear-sighted understanding of the true nature of political behavior. Graced with a brilliant introduction by Dennis Hale and Marc Landy, this volume serves as an ideal introduction to de Jouvenel's thought. It will be of interest to political scientists, historians, and sociologists.

This 1992 book explains how people acquire political information from elites and the mass media and convert it into political preferences.

In Man Is by Nature a Political Animal, Peter K. Hatemi and Rose McDermott bring together a diverse group of contributors to examine the ways in which evolutionary theory and biological research are increasingly informing analyses of political behavior. Focusing on the theoretical, methodological, and empirical frameworks of a variety of biological approaches to political attitudes and preferences, the authors consider a wide range of topics, including the comparative basis of political behavior, the utility of formal modeling informed by evolutionary theory, the genetic bases of attitudes and behaviors, psychophysiological methods and research, and the wealth of insight generated by recent research on the human brain. Through this approach, the book reveals the biological bases of many previously unexplained variances within the extant models of political behavior. The diversity of methods discussed and variety of issues examined here will make this book of great interest to students and scholars seeking a comprehensive overview of this emerging approach to the study of politics and behavior.