John Richard Gibbins

Postmodern theory is well placed to provide a useful resource in carrying forward the project of instituting cosmopolitan morality and justice at the local level. It is qualified to contribute because the central problematic of postmodern political theory is shared by cosmopolitanism, namely, how can a multiplicity of divergent autonomous groups, with few, or no shared cultural resources, negotiate and agree to share common spaces? How, can we have political and moral order when the preconditions, normally believed to accompany these, are non existent or unstable. Postmodern thinking also brings to the debate about cosmopolitanism, the resources that will allow for the toleration, openness and ingenuity that build upon eclecticism, pluralism, the celebration of difference, and expressivism in a period experiencing alteration, vulnerability, irony and insecurity. In approach, postmodern thinking shares with cosmopolitanism: a preference for particular narrative over grand narrative; the local over the global; particular over universal; difference over generalisation; eclecticism over absolutism; synchrony over unity; and pluralism over monism. Both approaches are resources that can help us re-learn how neighbours can live together in strange times.

John Grote struggled to construct an intelligible account of philosophy at a time when radical change and sectarian conflict made understanding and clarity a rarity. This book answers three questions: * How did John Grote develop and contribute to modern Cambridge and British philosophy? * What is the significance of these contributions to modern philosophy in general and British Idealism and language philosophy in particular? * How were his ideas and his idealism incorporated into the modern philosophical tradition? Grote influenced his contemporaries, such as his students Henry Sidgwick and John Venn, in both style and content; he forged a brilliantly original philosophy of knowledge, ethics, politics and language, from a synthesis of the major British and European philosophies of his day; his social and political theory provide the origins of the 'new liberal' ideas later to reach their zenith in the writings of Green, Sidgwick, and Collingwood; he founded the ‘Cambridge style’ associated with Moore, Russell, Broad, McTaggart and Wittgenstein; and he was also a major influence on Oakeshott.

What happens to politics in the postmodern condition? The Politics of Postmodernity is a political tour de force that addresses this key contemporary question. Politics in postmodernity is carefully contextualized by relating its specific sphere - the polity - to those of the economic, social, technological and cultural. The authors confront globalization and the notion of postmodernity as disorganized capitalism. They analyze the role of the mass media, the changing ways in which politics is used, the role of the state and the progressive potential of politics in postmodern times. Closing with a postscript on the future of the discipline of political science, this book offers a profound yet highly accessible account.

The dramatic changes in contemporary European politics associated with the rise of the New Right has created a new political culture which is the subject of this fascinating and informative book. Contemporary Political Culture pioneers the application of the theory of postmodernism to Western political behaviour and political science. Underpinning the book is the observation that fundamental long-term changes in the contours of European political culture explain the rise of the new politics and recent political events. The authors offer a critical analysis of traditional theories, models and accounts of political culture, and -- an evaluation of the two contending contemporary explanatory models, postmodernism and po.

The writings of John Grote (1813–1866) are a valuable resource for both historians and those continuing to explore and utilize modern Cambridge philosophy. Grote was the inheritor of the mantle of Cambridge philosophy when appointed to the Knightbridge Chair in 1855 and he transformed and professionalized philosophical studies there. In the Grote Society, and the reform of the syllabus, reading and tutoring of the Moral Sciences, he influenced the next generation of Cambridge philosophers, especially Henry Sidgwick, John Venn, W. K. Clifford and James Ward. Like his successors, Sidgwick, Moore and Broad, he rejected both identification with schools of philosophy and the internecine warfare in and between them, in favour of careful linguistic analysis, boundary commissioning and eclecticism. His patient and respectful analysis of phenomenalism, materialism, positivism, common sense, idealism, utilitarianism, and philology, are typical of an approach, style, method, and way of conducting philosophical conversation, that is characteristic of modern Cambridge philosophy. Claims for connections with the latter work of the above, and Sorley, Russell, McTaggart, Wittgenstein and Oakeshott, are explored and supported. That Grote was the younger brother of the Greek historian, agnostic, phenomenalist and Philosophical Radical, George Grote, goes further to make him an interesting, as well as a stimulating philosopher, to engage.