Drinking to excess has been a striking problem for industrial and post-industrial societies – who is responsible when a ‘free’ individual opts for a slow suicide? The causes of such drinking have often been blamed on heredity, moral weakness, ‘disease’ (addiction), hedonism, and Romantic illusion. Yet there is another reason which may be more fundamental and which has been overlooked or dismissed, and it is that the drinker may act with sincere philosophical intent. The Existential Drinker looks at the convergence of a new kind of excessive, habitual drinking, beginning in the nineteenth century, and a new way of thinking about the self which in the twentieth century comes to be labelled ‘Existential’. A substantial introduction covers questions of self, will, consciousness, authenticity, and ethics in relation to drinking, while introducing aspects of Existential thought pertinent to the discussion. The Existential-drinker canon is anchored in Jack London’s ‘alcoholic memoir’ John Barleycorn (1913), where London claims he can get at the truth of existence only through the insights afforded by excessive and repeated alcohol use. The book then covers drinker-texts such as Jean Rhys’s interwar novels, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend and John O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas, along with less well-known works such as Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, Venedikt Yerofeev’s Moscow–Petushki, and A. L. Kennedy’s Paradise. The book will appeal to anybody with an interest in drinking and literature, as well as those with more specialised concerns in drinking studies, Existentialism, twentieth-century literature, and medical humanities.
Rainer Bauböck has a chair in social and political theory at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the European University Institute in Florence. His research interests are in normative political theory and comparative democratic citizenship, European integration, migration, nationalism and minority rights. Together with Jo Shaw (University of Edinburgh) and Maarten Vink (University of Maastricht), he coordinates GLOBALCIT, an online observatory on citizenship and voting rights.
Joseph H. Carens, FRSC, is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and Professorial Fellow at the Institute for Social Justice at Australian Catholic University. He is the author or editor of six books, including The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford University Press, 2013), which won prizes from the American Political Science Association, the International Studies Association and the Canadian Political Science Association; Culture, Citizenship, and Community (Oxford University Press, 2000), which won the C.B. Macpherson prize from the Canadian Political Science Association; and Equality, Moral Incentives, and the Market (University of Chicago Press, 1981). He has published over ninety articles and book chapters.
Sue Donaldson is a Canadian writer, and research associate in the Department of Philosophy, Queen's University, Kingston. She is the author, with Will Kymlicka, of Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford University Press, 2011), and of numerous articles concerning group differentiated/citizenship rights for animals appearing in the Journal of Political Philosophy, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Canadian Journal of Political Science, Journal of Social Philosophy, and elsewhere.
Iseult Honohan is Associate Professor Emeritus, UCD School of Politics and International Relations, and Member of the Royal Irish Academy. Her research interests lie in the foundations of republican political theory and its applications in areas including citizenship, immigration and diversity. Her books include Civic Republicanism (Routledge, 2002) and Domination, Migration and Non-citizens (Routledge, 2014, co-edited with Marit Hovdal Moan). She has been a research collaborator in EUDO-Citizenship/GLOBALCIT since 2010. Recent work includes: “Civic Integration: The Acceptable Face of Assimilation?” in Ethics and Politics of Immigration, ed. A. Sager (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016); and “Liberal and Republican Conceptions of Citizenship” in The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, ed. A. Shachar, R.Bauböck, I. Bloemraad and M. Vink (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Will Kymlicka is the Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen's University, and a recurrent Visiting Professor in the Nationalism Studies programme at the Central European University in Budapest. His research interests focus on issues of democracy and diversity, and in particular on models of citizenship and social justice within multicultural societies. His books include Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 1995), Multicultural Odysseys (Oxford University Press, 2007) and Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford University Press, 2011, co-authored with Sue Donaldson).
David Miller is Professor of Political Theory in the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Nuffield College; he is also a Visiting Professor in Law and Philosophy at Queen's University, Canada. His books include On Nationality (Clarendon Press, 1995), Principles of Social Justice (Harvard University Press, 1999), National Responsibility and Global Justice (Oxford University Press, 2007), Justice for Earthlings (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration (Harvard University Press, 2016). He continues to work on the issues of immigration, national identity, territorial boundaries and self-determination.
David Owen is Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Southampton. His most recent books include Multiculturalism and Political Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2007, co-edited with Anthony Laden) and Recognition and Power (Cambridge University Press, 2007, co-edited with Bert van den Brink). He is currently writing a book on migration and political theory.
Peter Spiro is Charles Weiner Professor of Law, Temple University Law School, and the author most recently of At Home in Two Countries: The Past and Future of Dual Citizenship (New York University Press, 2016).