The Christian Right never ceases to surprise professional observers of American politics. With the Christian coalition in disarray, many expected that the movement would play less of a role in the 2004 elections. But when exit polls reported that "moral values" were the most commonly cited reason for presidential vote choice, pundits immediately proclaimed the importance of the "values vote." Yet the role of the Christian Right, of statewide referenda on same-sex marriage, and of religious mobilization remained the subject of debate. The Values Campaign? The Christian Right and the 2004 Elections reaches well beyond the instant analyses of the post-election period to provide an assessment of the role of the religious right in 2004. The contributors to this volume are among the leading scholars of religion and politics in the United States, and many have contributed for over a decade to ongoing discussions of the role played by the religious right in national elections.
The authors consider national mobilization and issues, and also explore the role of the Christian Right in specific states. Their evaluations contend that the "values campaign" was not an aberration but a consistent pattern of national politics, and that moral traditionalism will likely continue to be a significant factor in future elections.
A timely study of the 2004 elections, this volume will appeal to scholars and observers of electoral politics, state politics, and religion and politics.
Nancy Folbre challenges the conventional economist's assumption that parents have children for the same reason that they acquire pets--primarily for the pleasure of their company. Children become the workers and taxpayers of the next generation, and "investments" in them offer a significant payback to other participants in the economy.
Yet parents, especially mothers, pay most of the costs. The high price of childrearing pushes many families into poverty, often with adverse consequences for children themselves.
Parents spend time as well as money on children. Yet most estimates of the "cost" of children ignore the value of this time. Folbre provides a startlingly high but entirely credible estimate of the value of parental time per child by asking what it would cost to purchase a comparable substitute for it.
She also emphasizes the need for better accounting of public expenditure on children over the life cycle and describes the need to rethink the very structure and logic of the welfare state. A new institutional structure could promote more cooperative, sustainable, and efficient commitments to the next generation.
Why do some countries progress while others stagnate? Why does adversity strengthen some countries and weaken others? Indeed, in this era of unprecedented movement of people, goods, and ideas, just what constitutes a nation-state? Forrest Colburn and Arturo Cruz suggest how fundamental these questions are through an exploration of the evolution of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica over the last quarter of a century, a period of intriguing, often confounding, paradoxes in Central America's development.
Offering an elegant defense of empiricism, Colburn and Cruz explore the roles of geography and political choice in constructing nations and states. Countries are shown to be unique: there are a daunting number of variables. There is causality, but not the kind that can be revealed in the laboratory or on the blackboard. Liberalism—today defined as democracy and unfettered markets—may be in vogue, but it has no inherent determinants. Democracy and market economies, when welded to the messy realities of individual countries, are compatible with many different outcomes. The world is more pluralistic in both causes and effects than either academic theories or political rhetoric suggest.
The patrolman has the most difficult, complex, and least understood task in the police department. Much less is known of him than of his better publicized colleague, the detective. In this important and timely book, James Q. Wilson describes the patrolman and the problems he faces that arise out of constraints imposed by law, politics, public opinion, and the expectations of superiors.
The study considers how the uniformed officer in eight communities deals with such common offenses as assault, theft, drunkenness, vice, traffic, and disorderly conduct. Six of the communities are in New York State: Albany, Amsterdam, Brighton, Nassau County, Newburgh, and Syracuse. The others are Highland Park, Illinois, and Oakland, California.
Enforcing laws dealing with common offenses is especially difficult because it raises the question of administrative discretion. Murder, in the eyes of the police, is unambiguously wrong, and murderers are accordingly arrested; but in cases such as street-corner scuffles or speeding motorists, the patrolman must decide whether to intervene (should the scuffle be stopped? should the motorist be pulled over?) and, if he does, just how to intervene (by arrest? a warning? an interrogation?). In most large organizations, the lowest-ranking members perform the more routinized tasks and the means of accomplishing these tasks are decided by superiors, but in a police department the lowest-ranking officer—the patrolman—is almost solely responsible for enforcing those laws which are the least precise, the most ambiguous. Three ways or “styles” of policing—the watchman, the legalistic, and the service styles—are analyzed and their relation to local politics is explored.
In the final chapter, Mr. Wilson discusses if and how the patrolman’s behavior can be changed and examines some current proposals for reorganizing police departments. He observes that the ability of the patrolman to do his job well may determine our success in managing social conflict and our prospects for maintaining a proper balance between liberty and order.
In Varieties of State Regulation, Yukyung Yeo explores how, despite China’s increasing integration into the global market, the Chinese central party-state continues to oversee the most strategic sectors of its economy. Since the 1990s, as major state firms were spun off from the ministries that managed them under the central planning system, the nature of the state in governing the economy has been remarkably transformed into that of a regulator.
Based on over 100 interviews conducted with Chinese central and local officials, firms, scholars, journalists, and consultants, the book demonstrates that the form of central state control varies considerably across leading industrial sectors, depending on the dominant mode of state ownership, conception of control, and governing structure. By analyzing and comparing institutional dynamics across various sectors, Yeo explains variations in the pattern of China’s regulation of its economy. She contrasts the regulation of the automobile industry, a relatively decentralized sector, with the highly-centralized telecommunications industry, and demonstrates how China’s central party-state maintains regulatory authority over key local state-owned enterprises. Placing these findings in historical and comparative contexts, the book presents the evolution and current practice of state regulation in China and examines its compatibility with other contemporary government practices.
Decision makers matching wits with an adversary want intelligence—good, relevant information to help them win. Intelligence can gain these advantages through directed research and analysis, agile collection, and the timely use of guile and theft. Counterintelligence is the art and practice of defeating these endeavors. Its purpose is the same as that of positive intelligence—to gain advantage—but it does so by exploiting, disrupting, denying, or manipulating the intelligence activities of others. The tools of counterintelligence include security systems, deception, and disguise: vaults, mirrors, and masks.
In one indispensable volume, top practitioners and scholars in the field explain the importance of counterintelligence today and explore the causes of—and practical solutions for—U.S. counterintelligence weaknesses. These experts stress the importance of developing a sound strategic vision in order to improve U.S. counterintelligence and emphasize the challenges posed by technological change, confused purposes, political culture, and bureaucratic rigidity. Vaults, Mirrors, and Masks skillfully reveals that robust counterintelligence is vital to ensuring America's security.
Published in cooperation with the Center for Peace and Security Studies and the George T. Kalaris Memorial Fund, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University.
Contributors
Carolina Acosta-Alzuru
Julia Buxton
Luis Duno Gottberg
Sujatha Fernandes
María Pilar García-Guadilla
Kirk A. Hawkins
Daniel Hellinger
Michael E. Johnson
Luis E. Lander
Margarita López-Maya
Elizabeth Gackstetter Nichols
Coraly Pagan
Guillermo Rosas
Naomi Schiller
David Smilde
Alejandro Velasco
The author places MAS in its international national, and historical contexts in order to determine the extent to which it is a unique communist party, as it claims to be. He traces the theory of "national democratic revolution, " which MAS rejects, back to Lenin, and discusses the Latin American left's reevaluation of that thesis. Ellner examines the guerrilla movement in Venezuela, the student movement of the late 1960s, and the emergence of the "New Left" in other countries, especially noting their influence on the formation of MAS. He also discusses the group's role in Venezuelan elections and it's relations with the other parties.
Today, war is considered a last resort for resolving disagreements. But a day of staged slaughter on the battlefield was once seen as a legitimate means of settling political disputes. James Whitman argues that pitched battle was essentially a trial with a lawful verdict. And when this contained form of battle ceased to exist, the law of victory gave way to the rule of unbridled force. The Verdict of Battle explains why the ritualized violence of the past was more effective than modern warfare in bringing carnage to an end, and why humanitarian laws that cling to a notion of war as evil have led to longer, more barbaric conflicts.
Belief that sovereigns could, by rights, wage war for profit made the eighteenth century battle’s golden age. A pitched battle was understood as a kind of legal proceeding in which both sides agreed to be bound by the result. To the victor went the spoils, including the fate of kingdoms. But with the nineteenth-century decline of monarchical legitimacy and the rise of republican sentiment, the public no longer accepted the verdict of pitched battles. Ideology rather than politics became war’s just cause. And because modern humanitarian law provided no means for declaring a victor or dispensing spoils at the end of battle, the violence of war dragged on.
The most dangerous wars, Whitman asserts in this iconoclastic tour de force, are the lawless wars we wage today to remake the world in the name of higher moral imperatives.
Moore's personal, from-the-hip history spans the long-running war against dons and drug dealers and covers agents' daring infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan, Hell's Angels, and other violent groups. He reveals the cutting-edge forensics work that helped crack the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings and also provides an insider account of the raid on the Branch Davidians at Waco. Finally, Moore discusses the ATF's rivalry with the FBI and the political power games that impede the government's ability to fight crime.
"This is a terrific book. The questions that Slapin asks about intergovernmental conferences (IGCs) in the European Union are extraordinarily important and ambitious, with implications for the EU and for international cooperation more generally. Furthermore, Slapin's theorizing of his core questions is rigorous, lucid, and accessible to scholarly readers without extensive formal modeling background . . . This book is a solid, serious contribution to the literature on EU studies."
---Mark Pollack, Temple University
"An excellent example of the growing literature that brings modern political science to bear on the politics of the European Union."
---Michael Laver, New York University
Veto rights can be a meaningful source of power only when leaving an organization is extremely unlikely. For example, small European states have periodically wielded their veto privileges to override the preferences of their larger, more economically and militarily powerful neighbors when negotiating European Union treaties, which require the unanimous consent of all EU members.
Jonathan B. Slapin traces the historical development of the veto privilege in the EU and how a veto---or veto threat---has been employed in treaty negotiations of the past two decades. As he explains, the importance of veto power in treaty negotiations is one of the features that distinguishes the EU from other international organizations in which exit and expulsion threats play a greater role. At the same time, the prominence of veto power means that bargaining in the EU looks more like bargaining in a federal system. Slapin's findings have significant ramifications for the study of international negotiations, the design of international organizations, and European integration.
Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.
Implemented in the 1970s at the point of the bayonet and in the shadow of the torture chamber, the neoliberal policies of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship reversed many of the gains in wages, benefits, and working conditions that Chile’s workers had won during decades of struggle and triggered a severe economic crisis. Later refined and softened, Pinochet’s neoliberal model began, finally, to promote economic growth in the mid-1980s, and it was maintained by the center-left governments that followed the restoration of democracy in 1990. Yet, despite significant increases in worker productivity, real wages stagnated, the expected restoration of labor rights faltered, and gaps in income distribution continued to widen. To shed light on this history and these ongoing problems, the contributors look at industries long part of the Chilean economy—including textiles and copper—and industries that have expanded more recently—including fishing, forestry, and agriculture. They not only show how neoliberalism has affected Chile’s labor force in general but also how it has damaged the environment and imposed special burdens on women. Painting a sobering picture of the two Chiles—one increasingly rich, the other still mired in poverty—these essays suggest that the Chilean miracle may not be as miraculous as it seems.
Contributors.
Paul Drake
Volker Frank
Thomas Klubock
Rachel Schurman
Joel Stillerman
Heidi Tinsman
Peter Winn
Victorian Critics of Democracy was first published in 1938. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
When Margaret Thatcher called in 1979 for a return to Victorian values such as hard work, self-reliance, thrift, and national pride, Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock responded that “Victorian values” also included “cruelty, misery, drudgery, squalor, and ignorance.”
The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror is an in-depth look at the ways that the twentieth century reacted to and reimagined its predecessor. It considers how the Victorian inheritance has been represented in literature, politics, film, and visual culture; the ways in which modernists and progressives have sought to differentiate themselves from an image of the Victorian; and how conservatives (and some liberals) have sought to revive elements of nineteenth-century life. Nostalgic and critical impulses combine to fix an understanding of the Victorians in the popular imagination.
Simon Joyce examines heritage culture, contemporary politics, and the “neo-Dickensian” novel to offer a more affirmative assessment of the Victorian legacy, one that lets us imagine a model of social interconnection and interdependence that has come under threat in today’s politics and culture.
Although more than one hundred years have passed since the death of Queen Victoria, the impact of her time is still fresh. The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror speaks to diverse audiences in literary and cultural studies, in addition to those interested in visual culture and contemporary politics, and situates detailed close readings of literary and cinematic texts in the context of a larger argument about the legacies of an era not as distant as we might like to think.
This groundbreaking history of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) examines, for the first time in any language, how General Francisco Franco and his Nationalist forces managed state finance and economic production, and mobilized support from elites and middle-class Spaniards, to achieve their eventual victory over Spanish Republicans and the revolutionary left.
The Spanish Nationalists are exceptional among counter-revolutionary movements of the twentieth century, Michael Seidman demonstrates, because they avoided the inflation and shortages of food and military supplies that stymied not only their Republican adversaries but also their counter-revolutionary counterparts—the Russian Whites and Chinese Nationalists. He documents how Franco’s highly repressive and tightly controlled regime produced food for troops and civilians; regular pay for soldiers, farmers, and factory workers; and protection of property rights for both large and small landowners. These factors, combined with the Nationalists’ pro-Catholic and anti-Jewish propaganda, reinforced solidarity in the Nationalist zone.
Seidman concludes that, unlike the victorious Spanish Nationalists, the Russian and Chinese bourgeoisie were weakened by the economic and social upheaval of the two world wars and succumbed in each case to the surging revolutionary left.
Why did the Vietnamese accept certain Chinese institutions and yet explicitly reject others? How did Vietnamese cultural borrowings from China alter the dynamics of traditional relations between Vietnam, Siam, Laos, and Cambodia? How did Vietnam's smaller Southeast Asian environment modify and distort classical East Asian institutions?
Woodside has answered these questions in this well-received political and cultural study. This first real comparison of the civil governments of two traditional East Asian societies on an institution-by-institution basis is now reissued with a new preface.
Why did the Vietnamese accept certain Chinese institutions and yet explicitly reject others? How did Vietnamese cultural borrowings from China alter the dynamics of traditional relations between Vietnam, Siam, Laos, and Cambodia? How did Vietnam’s smaller Southeast Asian environment modify and distort classical East Asian institutions?
Alexander Woodside has answered these questions in this well-received political and cultural study. This first real comparison of the civil governments of two traditional East Asian societies on an institution-by-institution basis is now reissued with a new preface.
In the late 1980s, most of the world still associated Vietnam with resistance and war, hardship, refugees, and a mismanaged planned economy. During the 1990s, by contrast, major countries began to see Vietnam as both a potential partner and a strategically significant actor—particularly in the competition between the United States and an emerging China—and international investors began to see Vietnam as a land of opportunity.
Vietnam remains a Leninist party-state ruled by the Communist Party of Vietnam that has reconciled the supposedly irreconcilable: a one-party system and a market-based economy linked to global value chains. For the Party stability is crucial and, recently, increasing economic openness has been combined with growing political control and repression.
This book, undertaken by scholars from Vietnam, North America, and Europe, focuses on how the country’s governance shapes its politics, economy, social development, and relations with the outside world, as well as on the reforms required if Vietnam is to become a sustainable and modern high-income nation in the coming decades.
Despite the challenges, including systemic ones, the authors remain optimistic about Vietnam’s future, noting the evident vitality of a determined society.
In the late 1980s, most of the world still associated Vietnam with resistance and war, hardship, refugees, and a mismanaged planned economy. During the 1990s, by contrast, major countries began to see Vietnam as both a potential partner and a strategically significant actor—particularly in the competition between the United States and an emerging China—and international investors began to see Vietnam as a land of opportunity.
Vietnam remains a Leninist party-state ruled by the Communist Party of Vietnam that has reconciled the supposedly irreconcilable: a one-party system and a market-based economy linked to global value chains. For the Party stability is crucial and, recently, increasing economic openness has been combined with growing political control and repression.
This book, undertaken by scholars from Vietnam, North America, and Europe, focuses on how the country’s governance shapes its politics, economy, social development, and relations with the outside world, as well as on the reforms required if Vietnam is to become a sustainable and modern high-income nation in the coming decades.
Despite the challenges, including systemic ones, the authors remain optimistic about Vietnam’s future, noting the evident vitality of a determined society.
Widely regarded as one of the most active and publicly engaged university presidents in modern academia, Duderstadt—who led the University of Michigan from 1988 to 1996—presided over a period of enormous change, not only for his institution, but for universities across the country. His presidency was a time of growth and conflict: of sweeping new affirmative-action and equal-opportunity programs, significant financial expansion, and reenergized student activism on issues from apartheid to codes of student conduct.
Under James Duderstadt’s stewardship, Michigan reaffirmed its reputation as a trailblazer among universities. Part memoir, part history, part commentary, The View from the Helm extracts general lessons from his experiences at the forefront of change in higher education, offering current and future administrators a primer on academic leadership and venturing bold ideas on how higher education should be steered into the twenty-first century.
A human rights lawyer travels to hot zones around the globe, before and after the September 11 attacks, to document abuses committed by warlords, terrorist groups, and government counterterrorism forces. Whether reporting on al Qaeda safe houses, the mechanics of the Pentagon’s smartest bombs, his interviews with politicians and ordinary civilians, or his own brush with death outside Kabul, John Sifton wants to help us understand violence—what it is, and how we think and speak about it.
For the human rights community, the global war on terror brought unprecedented challenges. Of special concern were the secret detention centers operated by the CIA as it expanded into a paramilitary force, and the harsh treatment of prisoners throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. In drafting legal memoranda that made domestic prosecution for these crimes impossible, Sifton argues, the United States possessed not only the detainees but the law itself. Sifton recounts his efforts to locate secret prisons and reflects on the historical development of sanctioned military or police violence—from hand-to-hand combat to the use of drones—and the likelihood that technology will soon enable completely automated killing.
Sifton is equally concerned to examine what people have meant by nonviolent social change, and he asks whether pure nonviolence is ever possible. To invoke rights is to invoke the force to uphold them, he reminds us. Ultimately, advocates for human rights can only shame the world into better behavior, and their work may involve advocating the very violence they deplore.
In a world desperate to comprehend and address what appears to be an ever-enlarging explosion of violence, this book provides important insights into crucial contemporary issues, with violence providing the lens. Violence: Analysis, Intervention, and Prevention provides a multidisciplinary approachto the analysis and resolution of violent conflicts. In particular, the book discusses ecologies of violence, and micro-macro linkages at the local, national, and international levels as well as intervention and prevention processes critical to constructive conflict transformation.
The causes of violence are complex and demand a deep multidimensional analysis if we are to fully understand its driving forces. Yet in the aftermath of such destruction there is hope in the resiliency, knowledge, and creativity of communities, organizations, leaders, and international agencies to transform the conditions that lead to such violence.
The contributors—anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, and historians—explore how individuals and institutions in Latin American democracies, from the rural regions of Colombia and the Dominican Republic to the urban centers of Brazil and Mexico, use violence to impose and contest notions of order, rights, citizenship, and justice. They describe the lived realities of citizens and reveal the historical foundations of the violence that Latin America suffers today. One contributor examines the tightly woven relationship between violent individuals and state officials in Colombia, while another contextualizes violence in Rio de Janeiro within the transnational political economy of drug trafficking. By advancing the discussion of democratic Latin American regimes beyond the usual binary of success and failure, this collection suggests more sophisticated ways of understanding the challenges posed by violence, and of developing new frameworks for guaranteeing human rights in Latin America.
Contributors: Enrique Desmond Arias, Javier Auyero, Lilian Bobea, Diane E. Davis, Robert Gay, Daniel M. Goldstein, Mary Roldán, Todd Landman, Ruth Stanley, María Clemencia Ramírez
The askari, African soldiers recruited in the 1890s to fill the ranks of the German East African colonial army, occupy a unique space at the intersection of East African history, German colonial history, and military history.
Lauded by Germans for their loyalty during the East Africa campaign of World War I, but reviled by Tanzanians for the violence they committed during the making of the colonial state between 1890 and 1918, the askari have been poorly understood as historical agents. Violent Intermediaries situates them in their everyday household, community, military, and constabulary roles, as men who helped make colonialism in German East Africa.
By linking microhistories with wider nineteenth-century African historical processes, Michelle Moyd shows how as soldiers and colonial intermediaries, the askari built the colonial state while simultaneously carving out paths to respectability, becoming men of influence within their local contexts.
Through its focus on the making of empire from the ground up, Violent Intermediaries offers a fresh perspective on African colonial troops as state-making agents and critiques the mythologies surrounding the askari by focusing on the nature of colonial violence.
Throughout Virtual Americas Giles focuses on specific examples of transatlantic cultural interactions such as Frederick Douglass’s experiences and reputation in England; Herman Melville’s satirizing fictions of U.S. and British nationalism; and Vladimir Nabokov’s critique of European high culture and American popular culture in Lolita. He also reverses his perspective, looking at the representation of San Francisco in the work of British-born poet Thom Gunn and Sylvia Plath’s poetic responses to England. Giles develops his theory about the need to defamiliarize the study of American literature by considering the cultural legacy of Surrealism as an alternative genealogy for American Studies and by examining the transatlantic dimensions of writers such as Henry James and Robert Frost in the context of Surrealism.
That there is a "digital divide"—which falls between those who have and can afford the latest in technological tools and those who have neither in our society—is indisputable. Virtual Inequality redefines the issue as it explores the cascades of that divide, which involve access, skill, political participation, as well as the obvious economics. Computer and Internet access are insufficient without the skill to use the technology, and economic opportunity and political participation provide primary justification for realizing that this inequality is a public problem and not simply a matter of private misfortune.
Defying those who say the divide is growing smaller, this volume, based on a unique national survey that includes data from over 1800 respondents in low-income communities, shows otherwise. In addition to demonstrating why disparities persist in such areas as technological abilities, the survey also shows that the digitally disadvantaged often share many of the same beliefs as their more privileged counterparts. African-Americans, for instance, are even more positive in their attitudes toward technology than whites are in many respects, contrary to conventional wisdom. The rigorous research on which the conclusions are based is presented accessibly and in an easy-to-follow manner.
Not content with analysis alone, nor the untangling of the complexities of policymaking, Virtual Inequality views the digital divide compassionately in its human dimensions and recommends a set of practical and common-sense policy strategies. Inequality, even in a virtual form this book reminds us, is unacceptable and a situation that society is compelled to address.
Aneesh draws on the sociology of science, social theory, and research on migration to illuminate the practical and theoretical ramifications of virtual migration. He combines these insights with his extensive ethnographic research in offices in three locations in India—in Delhi, Gurgaon, and Noida—and one in New Jersey. Aneesh contrasts virtual migration with “body shopping,” the more familiar practice of physically bringing programmers from other countries to work on site, in this case, bringing them from India to New Jersey. A significant contribution to the social theory of globalization, Virtual Migration maps the expanding transnational space where globalization is enacted via computer programming code.
A denunciation of the credentialed elite class that serves capitalism while insisting on its own progressive heroism
Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways. Author Catherine Liu shows how the PMC stands in the way of social justice and economic redistribution by promoting meritocracy, philanthropy, and other self-serving operations to abet an individualist path to a better world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits.
Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
Winner of the Helen and Howard Marraro Prize
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year
“Perhaps the greatest study ever written of Renaissance political thought.”
—Jeffrey Collins, Times Literary Supplement
“Magisterial…Hankins shows that the humanists’ obsession with character explains their surprising indifference to particular forms of government. If rulers lacked authentic virtue, they believed, it did not matter what institutions framed their power.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Puts the politics back into humanism in an extraordinarily deep and far-reaching way…For generations to come, all who write about the political thought of Italian humanism will have to refer to it; its influence will be…nothing less than transformative.”
—Noel Malcolm, American Affairs
“[A] masterpiece…It is only Hankins’s tireless exploration of forgotten documents…and extraordinary endeavors of editing, translation, and exposition that allow us to reconstruct—almost for the first time in 550 years—[the humanists’] three compelling arguments for why a strong moral character and habits of truth are vital for governing well. Yet they are as relevant to contemporary democracy in Britain, and in the United States, as to Machiavelli.”
—Rory Stewart, Times Literary Supplement
“The lessons for today are clear and profound.”
—Robert D. Kaplan
Convulsed by a civilizational crisis, the great thinkers of the Renaissance set out to reconceive the nature of society. Everywhere they saw problems. Corrupt and reckless tyrants sowing discord and ruling through fear; elites who prized wealth and status over the common good; religious leaders preoccupied with self-advancement while feuding armies waged endless wars. Their solution was at once simple and radical. “Men, not walls, make a city,” as Thucydides so memorably said. They would rebuild the fabric of society by transforming the moral character of its citizens. Soulcraft, they believed, was a precondition of successful statecraft.
A landmark reappraisal of Renaissance political thought, Virtue Politics challenges the traditional narrative that looks to the Renaissance as the seedbed of modern republicanism and sees Machiavelli as its exemplary thinker. James Hankins reveals that what most concerned the humanists was not reforming institutions so much as shaping citizens. If character mattered more than laws, it would have to be nurtured through a new program of education they called the studia humanitatis: the precursor to our embattled humanities.
Almost every American city has or had neighborhoods like Clifton, which developed in the mid-nineteenth century as a silk-stocking suburb with a more diverse population than most observers noticed. Incorporated by Cincinnati in the late nineteenth century, Clifton had a reputation as a better-than-average place in which to live, a view that persisted until the end of the twentieth century.
In Visions of Place, Zane L. Miller treats ideas about the nature of cities—including their neighborhoods and their suburbs—as the dynamic factors in Clifton’s experience and examines the changes in Clifton's social, physical, civic, and political structure resulting from these transforming notions. These structural shifts involved a variety of familiar nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban phenomena, including not only the switch from suburban village to city neighborhood and the salience of interracial fears but also the rise of formal city planning and conflicts among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews over the future of Clifton's religious and ethnic ambiance.
Miller concludes with a policy analysis of current and future prospects for neighborhoods like Clifton and the cities and metropolitan areas of which they form a part.
Analyzing the visual syntax and display rhetoric applied in newspaper photos, national historical albums, and museum exhibitions, Noa Hazan shows that although racial thought was and still is verbally suppressed in Israel, it is vividly present in its nonverbal official and public visual sphere. The racist perspective of newspaper editors, book publishers, photographers, and museum curators were morally justified in its time by such patronizing ideals as realistic news coverage or the salvation of Jewish heritage assets. Although their perspectives played a dominant role in establishing a visual syntax of race in Israel, they were not seen as racially discriminating at the time. The racist motifs and actions are revealed here by colligating multiple cases into a coherent narrative in retrospect.
This book points to a direct influence of the anti-Semitic discourse in Europe toward Mizrahim in Israel, highlighting the shared visual stereotypes used in both Europe and the fledgling state of Israel. Engraved in their body, these cultural traits were depicted and understood as racial-biological qualities and were visually manipulated to silo Ashkenazim and Mizrahim in Israel as distinct racial types.
An exploration of how an official French visual culture normalized France’s colonial project and exposed citizens and subjects to racialized ideas of life in the empire.
By the end of World War I, having fortified its colonial holdings in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Asia, France had expanded its dominion to the four corners of the earth. This volume examines how an official French visual culture normalized the country’s colonial project and exposed citizens and subjects alike to racialized ideas of life in the empire. Essays analyze aspects of colonialism through investigations into the art, popular literature, material culture, film, and exhibitions that represented, celebrated, or were created for France’s colonies across the seas.
These studies draw from the rich documents and media—photographs, albums, postcards, maps, posters, advertisements, and children’s games—related to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century French empire that are held in the Getty Research Institute’s Association Connaissance de l’histoire de l’Afrique contemporaine (ACHAC) collections. ACHAC is a consortium of scholars and researchers devoted to exploring and promoting discussions of race, iconography, and the colonial and postcolonial periods of Africa and Europe.
Once again a southern governor has shown Democrats the road to the White House. As a native southerner, President Bill Clinton has the opportunity to rebuild Democratic strength in the region. For the Republicans, carrying the entire South still remains a crucial imperative.
The Vital South is the first book to chronicle the massive shift of southern electoral power to Republican presidential candidates, while also showing how Democrats can again become competitive in the region. Deftly combining political narrative, in-depth analysis, and telling anecdotes, this book will be a definitive source on southern presidential politics for years to come.
Between 1926 and 1929, thousands of Mexicans fought and died in an attempt to overthrow the government of their country. They were the Cristeros, so called because of their battle cry, ¡Viva Cristo Rey!—Long Live Christ the King! The Cristero rebellion and the church-state conflict remain one of the most controversial subjects in Mexican history, and much of the writing on it is emotional polemic. David C. Bailey, basing his study on the most important published and unpublished sources available, strikes a balance between objective reporting and analysis. This book depicts a national calamity in which sincere people followed their convictions to often tragic ends.
The Cristero rebellion climaxed a century of animosity between the Catholic church and the Mexican state, and this background is briefly summarized here. With the coming of the 1910 revolution the hostility intensified. The revolutionists sought to impose severe limitations on the Church, and Catholic anti-revolutionary militancy grew apace. When the government in 1926 decreed strict enforcement of anticlerical legislation, matters reached a crisis. Church authorities suspended public worship throughout Mexico, and Catholics in various parts of the country rose up in arms. There followed almost three years of indecisive guerrilla warfare marked by brutal excesses on both sides. Bailey describes the armed struggle in broad outline but concentrates on the political and diplomatic maneuvering that ultimately decided the issue.
A de facto settlement was brought about in 1929, based on the government’s pledge to allow the Church to perform its spiritual offices under its own internal discipline. The pact was arranged mainly through the intercession of U.S. Ambassador Dwight Morrow. His role in the conflict, as well as that of other Americans who decisively influenced the course of events, receives detailed attention in the study. The position of the Vatican during the conflict and its role in the settlement are also examined in detail.
With the 1929 settlement the clergy returned to the churches, whereupon the Cristeros lost public support and the rebellion collapsed. The spirit of the settlement soon evaporated, more strife followed, and only after another decade did permanent religious peace come to Mexico.
This book confirms Alexis de Tocqueville’s idea, dating back a century and a half, that American democracy is rooted in civil society. Citizens’ involvement in family, school, work, voluntary associations, and religion has a significant impact on their participation as voters, campaigners, donors, community activists, and protesters.
The authors focus on the central issues of involvement: how people come to be active and the issues they raise when they do. They find fascinating differences along cultural lines, among African-Americans, Latinos, and Anglo-Whites, as well as between the religiously observant and the secular. They observe family activism moving from generation to generation, and they look into the special role of issues that elicit involvement, including abortion rights and social welfare.
This far-reaching analysis, based on an original survey of 15,000 individuals, including 2,500 long personal interviews, shows that some individuals have a greater voice in politics than others, and that this inequality results not just from varying inclinations toward activity, but also from unequal access to vital resources such as education. Citizens’ voices are especially unequal when participation depends on contributions of money rather than contributions of time. This deeply researched study brilliantly illuminates the many facets of civic consciousness and action and confirms their quintessential role in American democracy.
Examining the work of social justice groups in Minneapolis following the 2008 recession
Since the Great Recession, even as protest and rebellion have occurred with growing frequency, many social justice organizers continue to displace as much as empower popular struggles for egalitarian and emancipatory change. In A Voice but No Power, David Forrest explains why this is the case and explores how these organizers might better reach their potential as advocates for the abolition of exploitation, discrimination, and other unjust conditions.
Through an in-depth study of post-2008 Minneapolis—a center of progressive activism—Forrest argues that social justice organizers so often fall short of their potential largely because of challenges they face in building what he calls “contentious identities,” the public identities they use to represent their constituents and counteract stigmatizing images such as the “welfare queen” or “the underclass.” In the process of assembling, publicizing, and legitimating contentious identities, he shows, these organizers encounter a series of political hazards, each of which pushes them to make choices that weaken movements for equality and freedom. Forrest demonstrates that organizers can achieve better outcomes, however, by steadily working to remake their hazardous political terrain.
The book’s conclusion reflects on the 2020 uprising that followed the police killing of George Floyd, assessing what it means for the future of social justice activism. Ultimately, Forrest’s detailed analysis contributes to leading theories about organizing and social movements and charts possibilities for further emboldening grassroots struggles for a fairer society.
Compiling decades of fieldwork, two acclaimed scholars offer strategies for strengthening democracies by nurturing the voices of children and encouraging public awareness of their role as citizens.
Voice, Choice, and Action is the fruit of the extraordinary personal and professional partnership of a psychiatrist and a neurobiologist whose research and social activism have informed each other for the last thirty years. Inspired by the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Felton Earls and Mary Carlson embarked on a series of international studies that would recognize the voice of children. In Romania they witnessed the consequences of infant institutionalization under the Ceaușescu regime. In Brazil they encountered street children who had banded together to advocate effectively for themselves. In Chicago Earls explored the origins of prosocial and antisocial behavior with teenagers. Children all over the world demonstrated an unappreciated but powerful interest in the common good.
On the basis of these experiences, Earls and Carlson mounted a rigorous field study in Moshi, Tanzania, which demonstrated that young citizens could change attitudes about HIV/AIDS and mobilize their communities to confront the epidemic. The program, outlined in this book, promoted children’s communicative and reasoning capacities, guiding their growth as deliberative citizens. The program’s success in reducing stigma and promoting universal testing for HIV exceeded all expectations.
Here in vivid detail are the science, ethics, and everyday practice of fostering young citizens eager to confront diverse health and social challenges. At a moment when adults regularly profess dismay about our capacity for effective action, Voice, Choice, and Action offers inspiration and tools for participatory democracy.
“A book for these times as we confront the fault lines in our democracy…A deeply provocative work about the place of children in strengthening our sense of community.”
—Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here
“Earls and Carlson have discovered…an aspect of development previously unrecognized: how children and youth can find their voice, feel empowered to use that voice, and translate that voice into political action. This is a remarkable book.”
—Gordon Harper, Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
“An inspiring vision of a newly inclusive democracy.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Voice, Choice, and Action is the fruit of the extraordinary personal and professional partnership between a psychiatrist and neurobiologist whose research and social activism have informed each other for the last thirty years. Inspired by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Felton Earls and Mary Carlson embarked on a series of studies to help children find their voice in the adult world. In Romania, they saw the devastating consequences of infant institutionalization. In Brazil, they found street children who had banded together to advocate for themselves. In Chicago, Earls sought to understand the origins of antisocial behavior in teenagers, and in Tanzania, they piloted a program to guide children’s growth as deliberative citizens.
Here in vivid detail are the science, ethics, and everyday practices needed to foster young citizens eager to confront social challenges. At a moment when adults regularly decry the state of our democracy, Voice, Choice, and Action offers invaluable tools to build a new generation of active citizens.
Voices & Votes: How Democracy Works in Wisconsin invites upper elementary school students to explore the intersection of American civics and Wisconsin history. This sixth and final book in the New Badger History series introduces students to the basic structures of American democracy, state government, and Wisconsin's road to statehood. The first seven chapters help students grasp how the three branches of government function at the federal, state, local, and tribal levels, while tying these structural notions to Wisconsin history. Students will learn that citizens' voices and votes help government evolve to meet ever-changing societal needs. The last chapter emphasizes how young people can actively engage in their communities to bring about positive change.
Voices and Votes: How Democracy Works in Wisconsin; Teacher's Guide and Student Materials features several activities for each chapter to engage students in a more in-depth exploration of the book. These activities, designed for both individual and small groups, demand the use of higher-level thinking skills while integrating a wide range of learning styles, and all have culminating components that can be used for assessment. The guide also features easily reproducible student pages, including maps, charts, and interesting illustrations.
2007 — LASA Peru Flora Tristán Book Prize from the Peru Section – Latin American Studies Association
Voices from the Global Margin looks behind the generalities of debates about globalization to explore the personal impact of global forces on the Peruvian poor. In this highly readable ethnography, William Mitchell draws on the narratives of people he has known for forty years, offering deep insight into how they have coped with extreme poverty and rapid population growth—and their creation of new lives and customs in the process. In their own passionate words they describe their struggles to make ends meet, many abandoning rural homes for marginal wages in Lima and the United States. They chronicle their terror during the Shining Path guerrilla war and the government's violent military response. Mitchell's long experience as an anthropologist living with the people he writes about allows him to put the stories in context, helping readers understand the impact of the larger world on individuals and their communities. His book reckons up the human costs of the global economy, urging us to work toward a more just world.
Powerful personal accounts from migrants crossing the US–Mexico border provide an understanding of their experiences, as well as the consequences of public policy
Migrants, refugees, and deportees live through harrowing situations, yet their personal stories are often ignored. While politicians and commentators mischaracterize and demonize, herald border crises, and speculate about who people are and how they live, the actual memories of migrants are rarely shared. In the tradition of oral storytelling, Voices of the Border reproduces the stories migrants have told, offering a window onto both individual and shared experiences of crossing the US–Mexico border.
This collection emerged from interviews conducted by the Kino Border Initiative (KBI), a Jesuit organization that provides humanitarian assistance and advocates for migrants. Based in Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora—twin border cities connected by shared histories, geographies, economies, and cultures—the editors and their colleagues documented migrants’ testimonios to amplify their voices. These personal narratives of lived experiences, presented in the original Spanish with English translations, bring us closer to these individuals’ strength, love, and courage in the face of hardship and injustice. Short introductions written by migrant advocates, humanitarian workers, religious leaders, and scholars provide additional context at the beginning of each chapter.
These powerful stories help readers better understand migrants' experiences, as well as the consequences of public policy for their community.
Royalties from the sale of the book go to the Kino Border Initiative.
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