Nietzsche on Autonomy and Morality: the Challenge to Political Theory

Nietzsche's challenge to political theory can be located in his claim that autonomy and morality are mutually exclusive. In this paper an examination of Kant's attempt to ground a notion of autonomy through constructing a metaphysic of morals is followed by a consideration of Nietzsche's understanding of autonomy in terms of a notion of supra-moral sovereign individuality. A genealogy of morals represents an attempt to historicize the key notions of moral and political theory. Nietzsche's aristocratic conception of sovereign individuality is seen in terms of the value-basis on which sovereign individuals are to construct a common ethical and political identity and enter into social relationships. Foucaultian and feminist attempts to construct an ethics and politics of difference and a recent attempt to construct a post-modern conception of agency based on a synthesis of Nietzsche's philosophy of power and Kant's ethics are examined.     

The Geography of Empire

Abstract

Wealth and poverty, overdevelopment and underdevelopment, are sides of the same coin; in a capitalist system the one cannot exist without the other. This is as true at the global level as at the national level, and the U.S. Empire consists of both external and internal colonies (e.g. the ghettoes or the Indian and Chicano communities of the Southwest).     

Police,Prisons and Prisoners: the view from the Home Office

Those with some knowledge of the history of the British women's suffrage campaign will be well acquainted with the experiences of suffragettes at the hands of police and prison officials. It is, however, through the writings of the suffragettes that such treatment is usually articulated and in this article I shall, instead, describe how the Home Office viewed the suffrage campaign, how it attempted to keep the movement under control, and whether it was likely that it would succeed in doing so. The Home Office had two problems, that of policing the suffragettes and then of dealing with the women once they had achieved their aim of imprisonment. The article is divided into two sections. The first deals with policing and the second with the way in which the Home Office handled suffrage prisoners.