Books by Kennan Ferguson

From Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking to the community cookbook created by the First Baptist Church of Midland, Tennessee, Cookbook Politics explores the sensual and political implications of cookbooks, demonstrating how they create nations, establish ideologies, shape international relations, and form communities.

This innovative and theoretically sophisticated book investigates how aesthetic judgment forms the groundwork for understanding political identities. It posits aesthetics as central to conceptions of politics that are based on how people understand the relationship between themselves and larger communities. Ferguson focuses not only on how different theoretical conceptions of political judgment relate to one another, but also on their historical development and potential meaning for contemporary scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. Drawing on recent contributions to philosophy, economics, cultural studies, feminism, psychology, and anthropology, The Politics of Judgment demonstrates how modern political identities depend upon and are formed by aesthetic judgment. Political theorists, social scientists, philosophers and cultural critics will find this book especially useful, though general readers will also be attracted by the author's keen insight into contemporary political questions.

William James is known as a philosopher of pragmatism. This work challenges this understanding. It traces the historical importance and contemporary possibilities of pluralism's original political insight. It illuminates political philosophy of the 20th century and challenges contemporary assumptions about the desirability of unanimity.

Ferguson starts with the commonplace assumption within political philosophy that the family provides the ideal model for political association. Yet families are not necessarily harmonious units. Ferguson takes up several situations to think about how familial attachments can offer insight into the creation of a pluralistic and democratic society.