Victory Briefs Store Now Offers Three Philosophy Texts

SANTA MONICA, Cali. - Victory Briefs is pleased to offer — direct from the publisher — three excellent philosophy texts. These works cover a broad range of theories and approaches and make for excellent summer reading for any debater. (Indeed, all three books are being offered as book groups at the Victory Briefs Institute at Loyola Marymount University this summer!)

The Individual and the Political Order, by Norman E. Bowie and Robert L. Simon, is written in an accessible yet sophisticated style and is a text appropriate for students at all levels. This thoroughly revised edition challenges its readers to critically respond to a sustained defense of liberalism. Additions include examinations of communitarian and feminist critiques of liberalism, discussions of hate speech regulations, responses to the most recent work of Rawls, a study of humanitarian intervention efforts in other countries, and an expanded and updated bibliography.

Postmodern Theory, by Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, has been a popular offering at camp since it was first offered. “Postmodern Theory,” notes Professor Carl Boggs of UCLA, “covers the difficult, sometimes treacherous, and always labyrinthine terrain of modern critical theory about as well as it can be done. This text explores the intricate — and often dense — discourses of writers like Foucault, Baudrillard, Jameson, and Habermas with admirable clarity and insight. If a good deal of postmodern theorizing is opaque and unreadable, this volume is eminently coherent and readable. If postmodernism seems all too often to be engaged in a flight from politics, Best and Kellner manage to bring the theoretical enterprise back to its political moorings. And this is no easy task. This book is highly recommended for any student of social and political theory.”

Finally, The Theory Toolbox: Critical Concepts for the New Humanities, by Jeffrey T. Nealon and Susan Searls Giroux, involves students in understanding and using the “tools” of critical social and literary theory from the first day of class. It is an ideal first introduction before students encounter more difficult readings from critical and postmodern perspectives. Nealon and Giroux describe key concepts and illuminate each with an engaging inquiry that asks students to consider deeper and deeper questions. Written in students’ own idiom, and drawing its examples from the social world, literature, popular culture, and advertising, The Theory Toolbox offers students the language and opportunity to theorize rather than positioning them to respond to theory as a reified history of various schools of thought. Clear and engaging, it avoids facile description, inviting students to struggle with ideas and the world by virtue of the book’s relentless challenge to common assumptions and its appeal to common sense.

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