Thinkers for a Complex Age : Normative Political Theory After Foundationalism

This book addresses how normative judgement remains possible after the collapse of philosophical foundations. Moving from Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger through Foucault, Deleuze, Butler, and Latour, the book reconstructs a mode of critical inquiry that is genealogical, relational, and normatively oriented.

Thinkers for a Complex Age offers a sustained engagement with key figures in modern and contemporary political and social thought in order to address one of the central problems of our time: how normative judgement remains possible after the collapse of philosophical foundations. Moving from Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger through Foucault, Deleuze, Butler, and Latour, and on to contemporary debates in political theory, ecology, and governance, the book reconstructs a mode of critical inquiry that is at once genealogical, relational, and normatively oriented. Organised into six thematic sections, the book traces a clear conceptual progression across traditions and debates, from genealogies of the modern subject through poststructural, materialist, ecological, and institutional approaches to contemporary questions of justice and freedom. Each chapter provides a focused engagement with a major thinker, identifying both their key contributions and their limits, while contributing to an overarching argument. The book’s modular structure and its substantial annotated bibliography also make it especially well suited for advanced teaching, offering readers a coherent orientation across complex intellectual terrain. Against both foundational moral theory and post-foundational scepticism, it advances a distinctive account of “life continuance” as an immanent basis for ethical and political judgement—one grounded not in universal principles, but in the conditions that sustain agency, institutions, and collective life over time. Bringing together insights from continental philosophy, political theory, and contemporary social thought, this book offers a compelling framework for thinking ethics, freedom, and governance in an age marked by ecological crisis, technological transformation, and global interdependence. It will be of interest to scholars and students in political theory, philosophy, education, and the social sciences more broadly.