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"This outstanding book is Étienne Balibar at his most powerfully synthetic and politically incisive. In Equaliberty, Balibar works his way through the house of left-wing political thought, performing a sort of philosophical spring cleaning. He disarticulates complex concepts only to reassemble them in better, more usable combinations. It is a call to action."—Bruce Robbins, author of Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence
"Today many of the key concepts of our political vocabulary–including equality, freedom, democracy, and emancipation–seem so corrupted and vacuous that they are almost unusable. Étienne Balibar makes an important contribution by engaging critically and restoring these and other crucial political concepts. Equaliberty is a major book that displays Balibar's exemplary combination of erudition and clear, accessible argument."—Michael Hardt, coauthor of the books Declaration, Commonwealth, Multitude, and Empire
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First published in French in 2010, Equaliberty brings together essays by Étienne Balibar, one of the preeminent political theorists of our time. The book is organized around "equaliberty," a term coined by Balibar to connote the tension between the two ideals of modern democracy: equality (of social rights and political representation) and liberty (the freedom citizens have to contest the social contract). Balibar's theory of equaliberty pits the rights of the person against those of the citizen. He finds the tension between these different kinds of rights to be ingrained in the constitutional nation-state. At the same time, he seeks to keep rights discourse open, eschewing natural rights in favor of rights as a project of states and citizens. Deeply engaged with other thinkers, including Arendt, Rancière, and Laclau, he posits a theory of the state based on social relations. In Equaliberty Balibar brings both the continental and analytic philosophical traditions to bear on the conflicted relations between humanity and citizenship.