Skip to main content

Bloomsbury Home

Rethinking Political Crisis and Collapse

Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil

Rethinking Political Crisis and Collapse cover

Rethinking Political Crisis and Collapse

Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil

Quantity
Pre-order. Available 22 Jan 2026
$153.00 RRP $170.00 Website price saving $17.00 (10%)

Payment for this pre-order will be taken when the item becomes available

This product is usually dispatched within 2-4 weeks following the publication date

Description

Responses, both critical and constructive, to changing realities in modern politics and society.

In gathering these essays, Antonio Calcagno and Mark Yenson have chosen the conceptual lens of crisis and collapse, not in the spirit of lamenting or decrying the death of a once-enjoyed, but now lost, state of affairs. Rather, they seek to understand what the concepts of crisis and collapse mean, how they are deployed in various situations, and how they are used to explain shifts in politics and society. The contributing scholars featured in this volume demonstrate how two important political thinkers imagined new worlds and social orders that could arise from significant change brought on by forms of crisis and collapse. Through their work, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil offer new generative visions of what it is to be human in a time when our very understanding of humanity is changing.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Thinking and Being Otherwise, Antonio Calcagno (King's University College, ON, Canada) and Mark Yenson (King's University College, ON, Canada)

Part One. Rethinking Politics: Dialogue between Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt on Crisis and Collapse
1. A Meditation on Powerlessness, Diane Enns (Toronto Metropolitan University, ON, Canada)
2. Words, Lies, and Politics: Is Power Violent? Lessons from Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, Elvira Roncalli (Carroll College, MT, USA)
3. Attention and Moral Fatigue in Desert-Worlds: Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Sara Ahmed on Responding to Political Collapse, A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone (University of North Dakota, ND, USA)
4. Simone Weil as Negative Political Theologian: Destitution, Decreation, and the Politics of Membership, Anna Rowlands (University of Durham, UK)

Part Two. Simone Weil
5. The Crisis of Legitimacy: The Perspective of Simone Weil, Rita Fulco (University of Messina, Italy)
6. Simone Weil: The Need for Roots, and the Erosion of Truth and Obedience in Contemporary Secular Liberal Democracies, Carolyn Chau (King's University College, ON, Canada)
7. Cultivating Decreation, Kathryn Lawson (Carleton University, ON, Canada)
8. Intellectual Leprosy: Attention and Antagonism, Andrew Woods (Fanshawe College, ON, Canada)
9. An Institution of Waiting: The Death Penalty in Weil and Camus, John V. Garner (University of West Georgia, GA, USA)

Part Three. Hannah Arendt
10. Arendt and Adorno on Kant: Toward a Philosophical-Political Modernism, Jeremy W. Arnott (Concordia University, QC, Canada)
11. Nation-State, Cognitive Dissonance, and Existential Crisis: The Tension between Nationalism and the Rights of Man in Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, Andrew D. Spear (Grand Valley State University, MI, USA)
12. Recovering Lost Treasure? Arendt, Luxemburg, and the Influence of the “Peer Group” on Revolutionary Politics, Rita Gardiner (Western University, ON, Canada) and Katy Fulfer (University of Waterloo, ON, Canada)
13. Judging in Crisis: Thinking Exemplarity with Hannah Arendt, Nicholas Poole (York University, ON, Canada)
14. Hannah Arendt and the Free Press, Joshua Livinsgtone (Queen's University, ON, Canada)
15. Reconsidering the Human Condition: An Arendtian Perspective on Earth, Education, and Political Subjectivity in Times of Environmental Crisis, Maria Robaszkiewicz (Paderborn University, Germany)

About the Contributors
Index

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 22 Jan 2026
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 304
ISBN 9781666980639
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations 1 bw illus
Dimensions 229 x 152 mm
Series Continental Philosophy and the History of Thought
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Antonio Calcagno

Antonio Calcagno is Professor of Philosophy at Kin…

Anthology Editor

Mark Yenson

Mark Yenson is Academic Dean and Associate Profess…

Related Titles

Get 30% off in the May sale - for one week only

Environment: Staging