Rowman & Littlefield International has just published the paperback edition of The Spell of Responsibility: Labour, Criminality, Philosophy. Also, you can save 30% using the code from the flyer.
The book starts from the astonishing fact that only 200 years ago, ‘responsibility’ was only of marginal importance in discussions of law and legal practice, and it had little ethical significance. Obviously, this has changed, as responsibility has become an almost unquestioned (and unquestionable) norm. Yet what is the significance of the fact that ‘responsibility’ now plays such a central role in, for example, work, the welfare state, or the criminal justice system? What happens when individuals are generally expected to think of themselves as ‘responsible’ agents? And what are the consequences of the fact that the philosophical analysis of ‘responsibility’ focuses almost exclusively on conditions of agency that are mostly absent from real life?
The German book Im Bann der Verantwortung was published at Campus Verlag in the series Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie und Sozialphilosophie of the Institute for Social Research erschienen.