Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Fighting Monsters

Fighting Monsters

Brown, Rory

Hardcover

PhilosophyGeneral LawGeneral Political Science

ISBN10: 1849460930
ISBN13: 9781849460934
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published: Jan 29 2011
Pages: 340
Weight: 1.44
Height: 0.81 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Against the backdrop of the British-American law- and war-making of the first decade of the millennium, Fighting Monsters considers how the way we think about law affects the way we make war and how the way we think about war affects the way we make law. The discussion is founded upon four of the martial phenomena (aggressive or 'pre-emptive' war, targeted killings, torture and arbitrary detention) that unsettle our complacent and flabby understandings of what law is to a liberal democracy.

The author argues, first, that force is a quintessential albeit ambivalent element of any realistic, serviceable and intellectually coherent concept of law. Second, reappraising the classic question at the intersection of martial doctrine and political philosophy in its contemporary context, the author asserts that we need not, in fighting monsters, become monstrous ourselves; that fighting partisans does not entail our own partisanship; and that we can indeed govern without dirtying our hands.

Seeking to ground a total, essentialist and practical theory of legality's sordid relationship with brutality, the book encompasses language and image; war and crime; liberty, security and rationality; amity, enmity and identity; sex, terror and perversion; temporality, spirituality and sublimity; economy and hegemony; parliaments, the press and the public man.

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