At the Margins of the Modern State

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1951 Refugee Convention
A01=Seyla Benhabib
Adorno Prize
Adorno Prize 2024
are human rights a fig leaf for Western power?
are human rights universal?
Arendt
Author_Seyla Benhabib
Can cosmopolitanism be reconciled with climate change?
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cosmopolitanism
critical theory
Dworkin
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extremism
extremism book
Frankfurt school
Gaza
Habermas
Hannah Arendt
Hegel
hermeneutics of suspicion
how can we defend universal values in a sceptical age?
how to make the world a better place
human rights
inequality
Kant
Law
law and human rights book
postcolonialism
Rawls
Ricoeur
Seyla Benhabib
Ukraine
violence
war
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who won this year’s Adorno Prize?

Product details

  • ISBN 9781509563579
  • Weight: 454g
  • Dimensions: 158 x 231mm
  • Publication Date: 02 May 2025
  • Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Hardback
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The international order of the post-WW II period is in disarray. The sounds of war can be heard all around us, from Ukraine to Gaza, from Darfur to the Congo, and there is growing skepticism towards human rights and democracy, the rule of law and peace among peoples.

Facile expressions such as “Eurocentrism” and “demise of the West and the rise of the rest” miss the real challenge in this situation: how to extend moral, legal and political universalism to address the experiences of the multitude of humanity for whom western modernity has brought not only equality but also subordination, not only emancipation but also domination. Benhabib argues that rethinking this universalist project and participating in world-building together can be achieved by reconstructing and retrieving the best insights of critical social theory in the Frankfurt tradition and the liberal Kantianism of Rawls and Dworkin. In that spirit, this volume addresses state and popular sovereignty, Third World approaches to International Law, the 1951 Refugee Convention, and climate change legislation, while focusing on the changing fortunes of the European Union and cosmopolitanism. Benhabib engages with postcolonial thinkers and argues that, although validity claims and relations of domination and inequality are often intermixed, it is possible to reconstruct the insights of international law to serve a more inclusive universalism and world-building. 

This vibrant defense of human rights and universal norms in an age of political skepticism and extremism will appeal to a wide readership and will be of particular interest to students and scholars in political theory, critical theory and law.
Seyla Benhabib is Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, Emerita at Yale University and Senior Research Scholar at Columbia Law School.

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