'We' are not amused: R. B. J. Walker on the state of the political imagination
| dc.contributor.author | Matthews, Ian Douglas | |
| dc.contributor.supervisor | Tully, James | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-02-27T20:32:44Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2025-02-27T20:32:44Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2000 | |
| dc.degree.department | Department of Political Science | |
| dc.description.abstract | This thesis is a critical conversation with the work of R. B. J. Walker, major theorist of international relations, and political theory. The attempt here has been to read Walker specifically as a theorist of political imagination, proper, this although he presents no explicit theory of political imagination. He does, however, appear to write according to an implicit and codified theory/praxis of imagination roughly informed by phenomenological concepts of poetic imagination, particularly those of Gaston Bachelard. His major works, we contend, ultimately read as 'super-historical' attempts to convince the reader of the very possibility of political possibility, as opposed to the timeless reign of political essentialisms. Ultimately, it is the principle of sovereignty, he claims, which is, in the modem era, the constitutive principle of the political itself. As such it is also said to present itself as the only alternative to itself. The transfixing idealism of this 'historically specific' principle is what must be overcome. | |
| dc.description.scholarlevel | Graduate | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1828/21365 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.rights | Available to the World Wide Web | |
| dc.title | 'We' are not amused: R. B. J. Walker on the state of the political imagination | |
| dc.type | Thesis |