A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Originally published as a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (Summer 1997), this volume includes essays from some of the most prominent American, Australian, British, and French scholars and translators of Deleuze’s writing. These essays, ranging from film, television, art, and literature to philosophy, psychoanalysis, geology, and cultural studies, reflect the broad interests of Deleuze himself. Providing both an introduction and critique of Deleuze, this volume will engage those readers interested in literary and cultural theory, philosophy, and the future of those areas of study in which Deleuze worked.
Contributors. Ronald Bogue, Ian Buchanan, André Pierre Colombat, Tom Conley, Manuel DeLanda, Tessa Dwyer, Jerry Aline Flieger, Eugene Holland, Fredric Jameson, Jean-Clet Martin, John Mullarkey, D. N. Rodowick, Horst Ruthrof, Charles J. Stivale
To show us how Deleuze’s philosophy works, Buchanan begins with Melville’s notion that “a great book is always the inverse of another book that could only be written in the soul, with silence and blood.” Buchanan demonstrates that the figure of two books—one written in ink and the other written in blood—lies at the center of Deleuze’s hermeneutics and that a special relation must be established in order to read the second book from the first. This relation is Deleuzism. By explicating elemental concepts in Deleuze—desire, flow, the nomad—Buchanan finds that, despite Deleuze’s self-declared moratorium on dialectics, he was in several important respects a dialectician. In essays that address the “prehistory” of Deleuze’s philosophy, his methodology, and the utopic dimensions of his thought, Buchanan extracts an apparatus of social critique that arises from the philosopher’s utopian impulse.
Deleuzism is a work that will engage all those with an interest in the twentieth-century’s most original philosopher.
In 2015, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) was elected to govern Delhi promising to improve public services, including education through government schools that would be equal to private-school provisions. Media reports, along with the party’s re-election in 2020, suggest strong public confidence that the AAP is delivering on that promise, but this success has little evidence in the schools themselves. Delhi’s Education Revolution offers a critical evaluation of the AAP’s education reforms by exploring policy and practice through the eyes of a key group: the government-school teachers tasked with making the AAP’s pledge a reality. Drawing on 110 interviews, this volume uses first-hand accounts from teachers to explain how reforms have changed their profession and practice, and whether education really has improved for children of all backgrounds. This study paints a more qualified picture of success than suggested elsewhere and makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of education reforms in India, especially in Delhi.
This early feminist novel is a wickedly funny slice of mid-nineteenth-century Americana peppered with details of the era’s freakish medical tactics and leavened with a smart and sassy commentary about the societal restraints on women’s physical and intellectual abilities.
First published in 1852, Delia’s Doctors is one of four known novels by Hannah Gardner Creamer, an American writer whose life and career have been all but absent from the annals of American history. In the book, eighteen-year-old Delia Thornton is ill. Her condition, more psychological than physical, worsens during the bitter winter, even as doctor after doctor attempts to cure her.
As Delia typifies the female heroine whose sickness is aggravated by listlessness and inactivity, her brother’s fiancée, Adelaide Wilmot, is Delia’s more robust counterpart. Adelaide thinks she could do anything, if only she were a man, and she dreams of being a physician. Quick to point out the shortcomings of male doctors in treating female illnesses, Adelaide saves Delia and delivers a series of arguments against New England patriarchy.
Drawing on oral accounts from Hopi consultants and on contemporary documents, Peter M. Whiteley argues that the split was in fact the result of a conspiracy among Hopi politico-religious leaders from both the “hostile” and “friendly” factions, a revolution to overturn the allegedly corrupt Oraibi religious order. A crucial element of Whiteley’s thesis is that, contrary to established theory, Hopi society was not egalitarian but was controlled by a ruling elite, the pavansinom, who clandestinely planned such events as the destruction of Awatovi because of its reacceptance of Franciscan priests.
Through an analysis of Bacavi social structure, Whiteley demonstrates how one fragment of a well-established society went about creating a new social order after the old one drastically fragmented. His detailed portrait of the history and social organization of a Hopi village represents an unusually rich resource for students of Hopi culture and history.
In Deliberate Conflict: Argument, Political Theory, and Composition Classes, Patricia Roberts-Miller argues that much current discourse about argument pedagogy is hampered by fundamental unspoken disagreements over what democratic public discourse should look like. The book’s pivotal question is, In what kind of public discourse do we want our students to engage? To answer this, the text provides a taxonomy, discussion, and evaluation of political theories that underpin democratic discourse, highlighting the relationship between various models of the public sphere and rhetorical theory.
Deliberate Conflict cogently advocates reintegrating instruction in argumentation with the composition curriculum. By linking effective argumentation in the public sphere with the ability to effect social change, Roberts-Miller pushes compositionists beyond a simplistic Aristotelian conception of how argumentation works and offers a means by which to prepare students for active participation in public discourse.
W. T. Lhamon 's Deliberate Speed is a cultural history of the 1950s in the United States that directly confronts the typical view of this decade as an arid wasteland. By surveying the artistic terrain of the period--examining works by figures as varied as Miles Davis, Ralph Ellison, Robert Frank, Allen Ginsberg, Little Richard, Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollock, Thomas Pynchon, and Ludwig Wittgenstein--Lhamon demonstrates how many of the distinctive elements that so many attribute to the revolutionary period of the 1960s had their roots in the fertile soil of the 1950s.
Taking his title from Chief Justice Earl Warren's desegregation decree of 1955, Lhamon shows how this phrase, "deliberate speed," resonates throughout the culture of the entire decade. The 1950s was a period of transition--a time when the United States began its shift from an industrial society to a postindustrial society, and the era when the first barriers between African-American culture and white culture began to come down.
Deliberate Speed is the story of a nation and a culture making the rapid transition to the increasingly complex world that we inhabit today.
Mucciaroni and Quirk argue that in fashioning the claims they use in debate, legislators make a strategic trade-off between boosting their rhetorical force and ensuring their ability to withstand scrutiny. Using three case studies—welfare reform, repeal of the estate tax, and telecommunications deregulation—the authors show how legislators’ varying responses to such a trade-off shape the issues they focus on, the claims they make, and the information they provide in support of those claims.
Mucciaroni and Quirk conclude that congressional debate generally is only moderately realistic and informed. It often trades in half-truths, omissions, and sometimes even outright falsehoods. Yet some debates are highly informative. Moreover, the authors believe it’s possible to improve congressional deliberation, and they recommend reforms designed to do so.
Imbued with a sensuality reminiscent of the work of Anaïs Nin, Wendy Guerra’s Delicates takes readers on an exhilarating journey through the cities of love, where women leave their bodies “in the showers of men,” marking their territory “like animals in heat,” their panties “saturated with sand and a sidereal isolating odor.” Guerra’s shocking metaphors and images invite us to enter her gallery of striking and provoking poems where we witness a flight through the air from a thirty-fourth-story window and a woman’s pilgrimage to the salt flats “to taste the pink in stones” on her lover’s behalf. Guerra’s relationship with her native Cuba—much like her relationships with men—is complex and multilayered. Her work confronts the realities of a political system that doesn’t celebrate artistic freedom. Here we have a new way of looking at a woman, an artist, a country, and the colonizers of that country. In these music-infused poems, Guerra shares with us her hard-won truths.
This is the first book in English to trace the history of the food of Spain from antiquity to the present day. From the use of pork fat and olive oil to the Spanish passion for eggplants and pomegranates, María José Sevilla skillfully weaves together the history of Spanish cuisine, the circumstances affecting its development and characteristics, and the country’s changing relationship to food and cookery.
The pursuit of happiness weaves disparate strands of Anglo-American religious history together. In The Delight Makers, Catherine L. Albanese unravels a theology of desire tying Jonathan Edwards to Ralph Waldo Emerson to the religiously unaffiliated today. As others emphasize redemptive suffering, this tradition stresses the “metaphysical” connection between natural beauty and spiritual fulfillment. In the earth’s abundance, these thinkers see an expansive God intent on fulfilling human desire through prosperity, health, and sexual freedom. Through careful readings of Cotton Mather, Andrew Jackson Davis, William James, Esther Hicks, and more, Albanese reveals how a theology of delight evolved alongside political overtures to natural law and individual liberty in the United States.
Standing at the crossroads of folklore, media, and performance studies, Arzu Öztürkmen explores the rise of the dizi genre in Turkey since the 1970s, when national television broadcasting began in the country. The Delight of Turkish Dizi approaches this unique genre—not quite soap opera or telenovela—as an art form that developed with the collective creative input of writers, producers, directors, actors, editors, musicians, and, lately, international distributors. Öztürkmen shows how dizi-making is a marathon run by sprinters, where production and broadcasting processes have been tightly interwoven, offering a mode of communication and consumption that is distinct to the Turkish television industry. The research consists of oral history with key figures in dizi production and ethnographic surveys of film sets, international content markets, and award ceremonies. This first-ever monograph on Turkish dizi will be a valuable addition to the field of performance and media studies while delighting the general reader as well.
One of the most individual stylists of his time, trumpeter Lee Morgan began his professional career in Philadelphia at age fifteen. At eighteen, after a short stint with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Morgan joined Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra, where he stayed until the group disbanded in 1958. A return to Blakey brought Morgan new opportunities, including his first successful attempts at composition. But however much his time with Blakey helped to advance his playing and writing, his boss's and his bandmates' destructive drug habits exerted just as strong an influence. Within three years, Morgan would be back home in Philadelphia, strung out on heroin and penniless.
Morgan's return to music in the early to mid-sixties witnessed a tremendous evolution in his playing. Formerly a virtuoso in the model of his idol, Clifford Brown, Morgan brought to his critically acclaimed Blue Note records of the era an emotionally charged, muscular tone, full of poise and control. But it was with the record Sidewinder, recorded in 1963, that Morgan found his greatest fame and commercial success, due to the infectious groove of the title tune. By the time of his death, at thirty-three---murdered in a New York City club by his girlfriend during a gig---Morgan had begun a new phase of his career, experimenting with freer-forms of musical expression.
Jeff McMillan's Delightfulee is the first biography to seriously examine Morgan's vast contributions to jazz, both as a performer and as a composer. Thanks to exclusive access to Lee Morgan's now-deceased brother, McMillan is also able to provide unparalleled insight into Morgan's personal and family life
Jeff McMillan received his master's degree from the Jazz History and Research program at Rutgers-Newark in 2000 and currently works as an archivist for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
The first quartet focuses on the work of Franz Boas and the emergence of "Boasian Culturalism." In the second set of essays Stocking addresses the careers of three British "evolutionaries"—Lord Kames; Sir E. B. Tylor; and Sir James G. Frazer—tracking the development of cultural evolutionary thought from its origins in the Scottish Enlightenment through its early twentieth-century afterglow in Frazer's The Golden Bough.
The third group of essays looks at institutions and national traditions, including British ethnography exemplified in the fieldwork manual Notes and Queries; the humanistic Parisian Société d'Ethnographie; the early tension at the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe between aspiring local amateur anthropologists and professionals from Eastern universities; and the history of ethnographic museums in the European tradition. In closing, Stocking offers reflections on major tendencies in anthropology from the eighteenth century to the present.
"George Stocking is without rival as an historian of modern anthropology. He is trained as an historian, and he knows anthropologists from having lived among them. This collection is indispensable for any one or place concerned with the subject."—Dell Hymes, editor of Reinventing Anthropology
This study of a birth cohort was not originally meant to be etiological or predictive. Yet the data bearing on this cohort of nearly ten thousand boys born in 1945 and living in Philadelphia gave rise to a model for prediction of delinquency, and thus to the possibility for more efficient planning of programs for intervention. It is expert research yielding significant applications and, though largely statistical, the analysis is accessible to readers without mathematical training.
"No serious scholar of the methods of preventing and treating juvenile delinquency can properly ignore this book."—LeRoy L. Lamborn, Law Library Journal
"The magnitude of [this] study is awesome. . . . It should be a useful guide for anyone interested in the intricacies of cohort analysis."—Gary F. Jensen, American Journal of Sociology
"A book the student of juvenile delinquency will find invaluable."—Criminologist
Delinquency evaluates one of the largest longitudinal-observational studies of juvenile delinquents ever conducted. Utilizing a normal population sample and conducting individual interviews repeatedly over many years, the author and his colleagues followed the development of 400 British working-class boys from age eight to twenty-five, of whom one-third eventually had criminal records.
Five factors were found to predict most delinquent behavior, the most powerful statistically being the presence of a criminal parent. By measuring the accumulated pressure of these factors, D. J. West demonstrates the extent to which delinquency can be predicted from classroom observations or social background at an early age. He outlines policy guidelines that would tailor intervention to a youth's age and circumstances, and he argues persuasively that positive change in the parents' situation usually produces good effects on the children.
Over the past decade and a half, girls’ involvement in the juvenile justice system has increased. Yet the topic remains under-studied among criminologists. The Delinquent Girl is a “state-of-the-field” evaluation that identifies and analyzes girls who become delinquent, the kinds of crimes they commit and the reasons they commit them. The distinguished academics and practitioners who contributed to this volume provide an overview of the research on girls’ delinquency, discuss policy implications and point to areas where further research is critically needed.
Throughout more than forty years of research into the causes, treatment, and prevention of delinquency and criminality Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck have put particular emphasis on the central importance of a continuing study of their subjects. This work incorporates data presented in Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency (HUP, 1950) with new data collected in over twelve years of subsequent investigation exploring the lives, into young adulthood, of the delinquents and of the carefully matched control group of nondelinquents who were studied in the earlier work.
By comparing the information detailing the domestic relations, work histories, recreational activities, careers in the armed forces, and other aspects of life of the young adults of both the delinquent and control groups, the Gluecks raise fundamental theoretical issues concerning delinquency prevention and crime control. The authors' research techniques are presented through an illustrative investigation, “The Case of Henry W.” The methods employed are designed to accumulate sufficient evidence to determine how the personalities and environmental backgrounds of law offenders relate to their behavior.
Striking, inexplicable stories circulate among the people of Nuevo León in northern Mexico. Stories of conversos (converted Jews) who fled the Inquisition in Spain and became fabulously wealthy in Mexico. Stories of women and children buried in walls and under houses. Stories of an entire, secret city hidden under modern-day Monterrey. All these stories have no place or corroboration in the official histories of Nuevo León.
In this pioneering ethnography, Marie Theresa Hernández explores how the folktales of Nuevo León encode aspects of Nuevolenese identity that have been lost, repressed, or fetishized in "legitimate" histories of the region. She focuses particularly on stories regarding three groups: the Sephardic Jews said to be the "original" settlers of the region, the "disappeared" indigenous population, and the supposed "barbaric" society that persists in modern Nuevo León. Hernández's explorations into these stories uncover the region's complicated history, as well as the problematic and often fascinating relationship between history and folklore, between officially accepted "facts" and "fictions" that many Nuevoleneses believe as truth.
In the decades following World War II, the creation and expansion of massive domestic markets and relatively stable economies allowed for mass consumption on an unprecedented scale, giving rise to the consumer society that exists today. Many avant-garde artists explored the nexus between consumption and aesthetics, questioning how consumerism affects how we perceive the world, place ourselves in it, and make sense of it via perception and emotion.
Delirious Consumption focuses on the two largest cultural economies in Latin America, Mexico and Brazil, and analyzes how their artists and writers both embraced and resisted the spirit of development and progress that defines the consumer moment in late capitalism. Sergio Delgado Moya looks specifically at the work of David Alfaro Siqueiros, the Brazilian concrete poets, Octavio Paz, and Lygia Clark to determine how each of them arrived at forms of aesthetic production balanced between high modernism and consumer culture. He finds in their works a provocative positioning vis-à-vis urban commodity capitalism, an ambivalent position that takes an assured but flexible stance against commodification, alienation, and the politics of domination and inequality that defines market economies. In Delgado Moya’s view, these poets and artists appeal to uselessness, nonutility, and noncommunication—all markers of the aesthetic—while drawing on the terms proper to a world of consumption and consumer culture.
Winner, Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize, Vernacular Architecture Forum, 2010
From iconic neighborhoods such as the French Quarter and the Garden District to more economically modest but no less culturally vibrant areas, architecture is a key element that makes New Orleans an extraordinary American city. Delirious New Orleans began as a documentary project to capture the idiosyncratic vernacular architecture and artifacts—vintage mom-and-pop businesses, roadside motels, live music clubs, neon signs, wall murals, fast-food joints, and so on—that helped give the city's various neighborhoods their unique character. But because so many of these places and artifacts were devastated by Hurricane Katrina, Delirious New Orleans has become both a historical record of what existed in the past and a blueprint for what must be rebuilt and restored to retain the city's unique multicultural landscape.
Stephen Verderber starts with the premise that New Orleans's often-overlooked neighborhoods imbue the city with deep authenticity as a place. He opens Delirious New Orleans with a photo-essay that vividly presents this vernacular architecture and its artifacts, both before Katrina and in its immediate aftermath. In the following sections of the book, which are also heavily illustrated, Verderber takes us on a tour of the city's commercial vernacular architecture, as well as the expressive folk architecture of its African American neighborhoods. He discusses how the built environment was profoundly shaped by New Orleans's history of race and class inequities and political maneuvering, along with its peculiar, below-sea-level geography. Verderber also considers the aftermath of Katrina and the armada of faceless FEMA trailers that have, at least temporarily and by default, transformed this urban landscape.
Only loosely chronological, Deliver Us proceeds by themes—childhood games, Fascist symbols, religious precepts, and the rites of poverty, of death, of eros, and of love. Meneghello’s ironic musings and profoundly honest recollections make an utterly unsentimental human comedy of that was the whole world to his dawning consciousness.
South Korea is home to one of the most vibrant evangelical Protestant communities in the world. This book investigates the meanings of—and the reasons behind—an intriguing aspect of contemporary South Korean evangelicalism: the intense involvement of middle-class women. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Seoul that explores the relevance of gender and women’s experiences to Korean evangelicalism, Kelly H. Chong not only helps provide a clearer picture of the evangelical movement’s success in South Korea, but interrogates the global question of contemporary women’s attraction to religious traditionalisms.
In highlighting the growing disjunction between the forces of social transformation that are rapidly liberalizing modern Korean society, and a social system that continues to uphold key patriarchal structures on both societal and familial levels, Chong relates women’s religious involvement to the contradictions of South Korea’s recent socio-cultural changes and complex engagement with modernity. By focusing on the ways in which women’s religious participation constitutes—both spiritually and institutionally—an important part of their effort to negotiate the problems and dilemmas of contemporary family and gender relations, this book explores the contradictory significance of evangelical beliefs and practices for women, which simultaneously opens up possibilities for gender negotiation/resistance, and for women’s redomestication.
The influential literary critic David Palumbo-Liu suggests that we can arrive at a sense of responsibility toward others by reconsidering the discourses of sameness that deliver those unlike ourselves to us. Through virtuoso readings of novels by J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ruth Ozeki, he shows how notions that would seem to offer some basis for commensurability between ourselves and others—ideas of rationality, the family, the body, and affect—become less stable as they try to accommodate more radical types of otherness. For Palumbo-Liu, the reading of literature is an ethical act, a way of thinking through our relations to others.
When do international institutions effectively promote economic cooperation among countries and help them resolve conflict? Although the international system lacks any central governing authority, states have created rules, particularly around international economic relations, and empowered international tribunals to enforce those rules. Just how successful are these institutions? In Delivering on Promises Lauren J. Peritz demonstrates that these international courts do indeed deliver results—but they are only effective under certain conditions.
As Peritz shows, states are less likely to comply with international rules and international court decisions when domestic industries have the political ability to obstruct compliance in particular cases. The author evaluates the argument with an extensive empirical analysis that traces the domestic politics of compliance with the decisions of two international economic courts: the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement mechanism and the Court of Justice of the European Union. At a time when international agreements are under attack, this book sheds light on the complex relationship between domestic politics and international economic cooperation, offering detailed evidence that international economic courts are effective at promoting interstate cooperation.
Hodges has structured the book as a series of brief but revealing vignettes grouped into two main sections. In part 1, “Learning,” he introduces us to the town of Greenwood and to his parents, sister, and myriad aunts, uncles, cousins, teachers, and schoolmates. He tells stories of growing up on a plantation, dancing in smoky juke joints, playing sandlot football and baseball, journeying to the West Coast as a nineteen-year-old to meet the biological father he never knew while growing up, and leaving family and friends to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta. In part 2, “Reflecting,” he connects his firsthand experience with broader themes: the civil rights movement, Delta blues, black folkways, gambling in Mississippi, the vital role of religion in the African American community, and the perplexing problems of poverty, crime, and an underfunded educational system that still challenge black and white citizens of the Delta.
Whether recalling the assassination of Medgar Evers (whom he knew personally), the dynamism of an African American church service, or the joys of reconnecting with old friends at a biennial class reunion, Hodges writes with a rare combination of humor, compassion, and—when describing the injustices that were all too frequently inflicted on him and his contemporaries—righteous anger. But his ultimate goal, he contends, is not to close doors but to open them: to inspire dialogue, to start a conversation, “to be provocative without being insistent or definitive.”
During World War II, as women stepped in to fill jobs vacated by men in the armed services, the federal government established public child care centers in local communities for the first time. When the government announced plans to withdraw funding and terminate its child care services at the end of the war, women in California protested and lobbied to keep their centers open, even as these services rapidly vanished in other states.
Analyzing the informal networks of cross-class and cross-race reformers, policymakers, and educators, Demanding Child Care: Women's Activism and the Politics of Welfare, 1940–1971 traces the rapidly changing alliances among these groups. During the early stages of the childcare movement, feminists, Communists, and labor activists banded together, only to have these alliances dissolve by the 1950s as the movement welcomed new leadership composed of working-class mothers and early childhood educators. In the 1960s, when federal policymakers earmarked child care funds for children of women on welfare and children described as culturally deprived, it expanded child care services available to these groups but eventually eliminated public child care for the working poor.
Deftly exploring the possibilities for partnership as well as the limitations among these key parties, Fousekis helps to explain the barriers to a publically funded comprehensive child care program in the United States.
Shaun Bowler and Todd Donovan present a searching and original examination of how voters make decisions in direct referenda. The authors ask if voters have some information about the issue easily at their disposal and if they make choices that seem sensible given their interests and the information they have. Looking at the way voters respond to different kinds of questions, the authors suggest that while direct democracy has its failings, the flaws do not necessarily lie with citizens being "duped," nor with voters approving propositions they do not want or do not understand at some basic level.
As cynicism about government has increased many have sought to take policy questions out of the hands of elected officials and put the questions directly before the voters for decision. And yet many are skeptical about the ability of voters to make intelligent decisions about complex policy issues. This important book demonstrates that voters are capable of responding thoughtfully to referenda questions.
This book will appeal to students of contemporary American politics and electoral politics.
Shaun Bowler is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California at Irvine. Todd Donovan is Associate Professor of Political Science, Western Washington University.
Featuring chapters on Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico, the contributors to Demanding Justice and Security include both leading researchers and community activists. From Kichwa women in Ecuador lobbying for the inclusion of specific clauses in the national constitution that guarantee their rights to equality and protection within indigenous community law, to Me’phaa women from Guerrero, Mexico, battling to secure justice within the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for violations committed in the context of militarizing their home state, this book is a must-have for anyone who wants to understand the struggle of indigenous women in Latin America.
"If you read only one book this year, read Demanding Medical Excellence. It's that good, and the revolution it describes is that important."—Health Affairs
"Millenson has done yeoman's work in amassing and understanding that avalanche of data that lies beneath most of the managed-care headlines. . . . What he finds is both important and well-explained: inconsistency, overlap, and inattention to quality measures in medical treatment cost more and are more dangerous than most cost-cutting measures. . . . [This book] elevates the healthcare debate to a new level and deserves a wide readership."—Library Journal
"An involving, human narrative explaining how we got to where we are today and what lies ahead."—Mark Taylor, Philadelphia Inquirer
"Read this book. It will entertain you, challenge, and strengthen you in your quest for better accountability in health care."—Alex R. Rodriguez, M.D., American Journal of Medical Quality
"Finally, a health-care book that doesn't wring its hands over the decline of medicine at the hands of money-grubbing corporations. . . . This is a readable account of what Millenson calls a 'quiet revolution' in health care, and his optimism makes for a refreshing change."—Publishers Weekly
"With meticulous detail, historical accuracy, and an uncommon understanding of the clinical field, Millenson documents our struggle to reach accountability."—Saty Satya-Murti, M.D., Journal of the American Medical Association
How is it that comic books—the once reviled form of lowbrow popular culture—are now the rage for Hollywood blockbusters, the basis for bestselling video games, and the inspiration for literary graphic novels? In Demanding Respect, Paul Lopes immerses himself in the discourse and practices of this art and subculture to provide a social history of the American comic book over the last 75 years.
Lopes analyzes the cultural production, reception, and consumption of American comic books throughout American history. He charts the rise of superheroes, the proliferation of serials, and the emergence of graphic novels. Demanding Respect explores how comic books born in the 1930s were perceived as a “menace” in the 1950s, only to later become collectors’ items and eventually “hip” fiction in the 1980s through today.
Using a theoretical framework to examine the construction of comic book culture—the artists, publishers, readers and fans—Lopes explains how and why comic books have captured the public’s imagination and gained a fanatic cult following.
How does France reconcile the modern movement toward pluralism and decentralization with a strong central governing power? One of the country's most distinguished political historians offers a radical new interpretation of the development of democracy in France and the relationship between government and its citizens.
Since the publication of Tocqueville's Ancient Regime and the Revolution, French political structures have been viewed as the pure expression of a native Jacobinism, itself the continuation of an old absolutism. This interpretation has served as both a diagnosis of and an excuse for the inability to accept pluralism and decentralization as norms of a modern democracy, as evidenced in such policies as the persistence of the role of prefects and the ban on headscarves in schools.
Pierre Rosanvallon, by contrast, argues that the French have cherished and demonized Jacobinism at the same time; their hearts followed Robespierre, but their heads turned toward Benjamin Constant. The Demands of Liberty traces the long history of resistance to Jacobinism, including the creation of associations and unions and the implementation of elements of decentralization. Behind the ideological triumph of the state lies the conflicting creation of an active civil society.
In exploring these tensions, Rosanvallon takes the debate far beyond traditional views of liberalism versus republicanism and offers an innovative analysis of why the French system has worked despite Jacobinism.
The first work to combine literary criticism with other forms of death penalty–abolitionist writing, Demands of the Dead demonstrates the active importance of literature and literary criticism to the struggle for greater justice in the United States. Gathering personal essays, scholarly articles, and creative writings on the death penalty in American culture, this striking collection brings human voices and literary perspectives to a subject that is often overburdened by statistics and angry polemics. Contributors include death-row prisoners, playwrights, poets, activists, and literary scholars.
Highlighting collaborations between writers inside and outside prison, all within the context of the history of state killing laws and foundational concepts that perpetuate a culture of violent death, Demands of the Dead opens with a pamphlet dictated by Willie Francis, a teenager who survived a first execution attempt in Louisiana’s electric chair before he was subsequently killed by the state in 1947.
Writers are a conspicuous part of U.S. death-penalty history, composing a vibrant literary record of resistance to state killing. This multigenre collection both recalls and contributes to this tradition through discussions of such writers as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Gertrude Atherton, Ernest Gaines, Sonia Sanchez, Kia Corthron, and Sherman Alexie. A major contribution to literary studies and American prison studies, Demands of the Dead asserts the relevance of storytelling to ethical questions and matters of public policy.
Histories of remote islands around Japan are usually told through the prism of territorial disputes. In contrast, Takahiro Yamamoto contends that the transformation of the islands from ambiguous border zones to a territorialized space emerged out of multilateral power relations. Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Tsushima, the Bonin Islands, and the Ryukyu Islands became the subject of inter-imperial negotiations during the formative years of modern Japan as empires nudged each other to secure their status with minimal costs rather than fighting a territorial scramble. Based on multiarchival, multilingual research, Demarcating Japan argues that the transformation of border islands should be understood as an interconnected process, where inter-local referencing played a key role in the outcome: Japan’s geographical expansion in the face of domineering Extra-Asian empires.
Underneath this multilateral process were the connections forged by individuals. Translators, doctors, traffickers, castaways, and indigenous hunters crisscrossed border regions and enacted violence, exchanged knowledge, and forged friendships. Although their motivations were eclectic and their interactions transcended national borders, the linkages they created were essential in driving territorialization forward. Demarcating Japan demonstrates the crucial role of nonstate actors in formulating a territory.
Demarcating the Disciplines was first published in 1986. 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.
With publication of this volume, Glyph begins a new stage in its existence: the move from Johns Hopkins University Press to the University of Minnesota Press is accompanied by a change in focus. In its first incarnation Glyph provided a forum in which established notions of reading, writing, and criticism could be questioned and explored. Since then, the greater currency of such concerns has brought with it new problems and priorities. Setting aside the battles of the past, the new Glyph looks ahead - to confront historical issues and to address the institutional and pedagogical questions emerging from the contemporary critical landscape.
Each volume in the new Glyph series is organized around a specific issue. The essays in this first volume explore the relations between the practice of reading and writing and the operations of the institution. Though their approaches differ from one another, the authors of these essays all recognize that the questions of the institution - most notably the university - points toward a series of constraints that define, albeit negatively, the possibilities for change.
The contributors: Samuel Weber, Jacques Derrida, Tom Conley, Malcolm Evans, Ruth Salvaggio, Robert Young, Henry Sussman, Peter Middleton, David Punter, and Donald Preziosi.
Ancient scholarship had many faces, but most have faded away over time. Demetrios of Scepsis is one of the more shadowy of these lost figures, best known for his commentary on the Trojan Catalogue in Book 2 of the Iliad. Alexandra Trachsel’s work represents the first treatment dedicated to Demetrios of Scepsis in over a century. Because of the incomplete transmission of Demetrios’s work, Trachsel necessarily focuses on the way later readers understood the ancient author’s engagement with the Homeric text. Indeed, modern scholars have access to Demetrios’s analysis of the Trojan Catalogue only through their readings.
Trachsel’s work offers a thorough analysis of the ancient and modern reactions to Demetrios’s research into the Homeric text and the Trojan landscape, and it revisits the ongoing debate about the setting for Homer’s Trojan poem. Trachsel also provides new evidence about the impressively wide range of other topics Demetrios’s work may have contained.
In the tradition of Joyce’s Dubliners, Demigods on Speedway is a portrait of a city that reflects the recession-era Southwest. Inspired by tales from Greek mythology, these gritty heroes and heroines struggle to find their place in the cosmos. Each of these linked stories develops the extremes of the modern psyche: an executive struggling to understand his wife’s illness even as he compulsively cheats on her, a teenage runaway whose attraction to her “twin” is bound to fail, an overweight boy vicariously experiencing true love through the tales of his trainer, a car-wash attendant with outsized dreams of Hollywood.
Characters with mythical-sounding names like Dagfinn and Zero plot their courses through a sky riddled with flawed constellations. Sheehan’s edgy language aptly reveals her characters as they lurch toward the next day’s irreverent beginning. As the characters’ lives overlap, their stories carry mythology out of the past and into a very modern dilemma: the cumulative sense that here is a city with its own demigods, individuals struggling to survive under siege while passionately seeking to make something immortal in their lives.
In nine insightful chapters, this volume's contributors outline each nation's demilitarization choices and how they were made. They investigate factors such as military defeat, border security risks, economic pressures, and the development of strong peace cultures among citizenry. Also at center stage is the influence of the United States, which fills a paradoxical role as both an enabler of demilitarization and a leader in steadily accelerating militarization.
Bookended by Peter N. Stearns' thought-provoking historical introduction and forward-looking conclusion, the chapters in this volume explore what true demilitarization means and how it impacts a society at all levels, military and civilian, political and private. The examples chosen reveal that successful demilitarization must go beyond mere troop demobilization or arms reduction to generate significant political and even psychological shifts in the culture at large. Exemplifying the political difficulties of demilitarization in both its failures and successes, Demilitarization in the Contemporary World provides a possible roadmap for future policies and practices.
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year
“This absolutely splendid book is a triumph on every level. A first-rate history of the United States, it is beautifully written, deeply researched, and filled with entertaining stories. For anyone who wants to see our democracy flourish, this is the book to read.”
—Doris Kearns Goodwin
To all who say our democracy is broken—riven by partisanship, undermined by extremism, corrupted by wealth—history offers hope. Democracy’s nineteen cases, honed in David Moss’s popular course at Harvard and taught at the Library of Congress, in state capitols, and at hundreds of high schools across the country, take us from Alexander Hamilton’s debates in the run up to the Constitutional Convention to Citizens United. Each one presents a pivotal moment in U.S. history and raises questions facing key decision makers at the time: Should the delegates support Madison’s proposal for a congressional veto over state laws? Should Lincoln resupply Fort Sumter? Should Florida lawmakers approve or reject the Equal Rights Amendment? Should corporations have a right to free speech? Moss invites us to engage in the passionate debates that are crucial to a healthy society.
“Engagingly written, well researched, rich in content and context…Moss believes that fierce political conflicts can be constructive if they are mediated by shared ideals.”
—Glenn C. Altschuler, Huffington Post
“Gives us the facts of key controversies in our history—from the adoption of the constitution to Citizens United—and invites readers to decide for themselves…A valuable resource for civic education.”
—Michael Sandel, author of Justice
This book explores how democracy has developed in Chile since the end of the military dictatorship in 1990. It brings together an examination of international influences on the country's political development with empirically based analyses of Chilean political institutions and change. Chapters one and two examine international aspects of the 1973 coup and how these influenced the development of politics inside Chile. Chapters three, four, and five provide empirical analyses of the 1989, 1993, and 1999/2000 presidential elections, respectively. Chapter six investigates how the Pinochet factor influenced developments after 1990 and the Chilean reaction to Pinochet's arrest in London in 1998. Chapter seven assesses changes in the Chilean party system and links these to similar processes elsewhere. The final chapter examines the paradox that despite economic and social advances, opinion polls report a low level of attachment to democracy and very low levels of confidence in political institutions.
Witsoe looks at the history of colonialism in India and its role in both shaping modern caste identities and linking locally powerful caste groups to state institutions, which has effectively created a postcolonial patronage state. He then looks at the rise of lower-caste politics in one of India’s poorest and most populous states, Bihar, showing how this increase in democratic participation has radically threatened the patronage state by systematically weakening its institutions and disrupting its development projects. By depicting democracy and development as they truly are in India—in tension—Witsoe reveals crucial new empirical and theoretical insights about the long-term trajectory of democratization in the larger postcolonial world.
Around the world, established parties are weakening, and new parties are failing to take root. In many cases, outsiders have risen and filled the void, posing a threat to democracy. Why do most new parties fail? Under what conditions do they survive and become long-term electoral fixtures? Brandon Van Dyck investigates these questions in the context of the contemporary Latin American left. He argues that stable parties are not an outgrowth of democracy. On the contrary, contemporary democracy impedes successful party building. To construct a durable party, elites must invest time and labor, and they must share power with activists. Because today’s elites have access to party substitutes like mass media, they can win votes without making such sacrifices in time, labor, and autonomy. Only under conditions of soft authoritarianism do office-seeking elites have a strong electoral incentive to invest in party building. Van Dyck illustrates this argument through a comparative analysis of four new left parties in Latin America: two that collapsed and two that survived.
This classic study of democratic principles is thus now more relevant than ever. A renowned historian of antiquity and political philosophy, Sir M.I. Finley offers a comparative analysis of Greek and modern conceptions of democracy. As he puts the ancient Greeks in dialogue with their contemporary counterparts, Finley tackles some of the most pressing issues of our day, including public apathy, partisanship, consensus politics, distrust of professional politicians, and the limits of free speech.
Including three lectures that Finley delivered at Rutgers University, plus two additional essays that further illuminate his thinking, Democracy Ancient and Modern explores the dramatic differences between the close-knit civil society of the ancient Greeks and our own atomized mass societies. By mapping out democracy’s past and its present manifestations, this book helps us plot a course for democracy’s future.
The two new essays, "Athenian Dialogues" and "Censorship in Classical Antiquity" combine with "Leaders and Followers," "Democracy, Consensus, and the National Interest," "Socrates and After" to make this book an unusual inquiry. Few contemporary writers are able to bring to the subject the depth of learning and the persuasive power of language that Sir M. I. Finley brings.
Cary Federman takes a more sympathetic approach to sex offender legislation. He focuses on the deliberative intentions of legislators, exploring the limits of judicial review and the rights of interested parties to influence lawmaking. Leaders of these interested parties are usually the parents of children who have been sexually violated and murdered. Critics of sex offender legislation tend to focus on the convicted parties, arguing that their rights have been violated. Democracy and Deliberation asserts that these laws are expressions of the deliberative intentions of lawmakers concerned about public safety—they are thus constitutional, if not always wise.
During the past twenty-five years, the scholarly research and applied development work of Michigan State University faculty and students in Mali represents the most significant combined, long-term, and continuing contribution of any group of university faculty in the United States or Europe to the study of Malian society, economy, and politics. The applied nature of much of this work has resulted in a significant number of working papers, reports, and conference presentations. This volume represents a coherent and connected set of essays from one American university with a widely known and highly respected role in African development. While the essays identify and review Mali's unique historical and contemporary path to democracy and development, they also contribute to the advancement of theoretical knowledge about African development.
The din and deadlock of public life in America—where insults are traded, slogans proclaimed, and self-serving deals made and unmade—reveal the deep disagreement that pervades our democracy. The disagreement is not only political but also moral, as citizens and their representatives increasingly take extreme and intransigent positions. A better kind of public discussion is needed, and Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson provide an eloquent argument for “deliberative democracy” today. They develop a principled framework for opponents to come together on moral and political issues.
Gutmann and Thompson show how a deliberative democracy can address some of our most difficult controversies—from abortion and affirmative action to health care and welfare—and can allow diverse groups separated by class, race, religion, and gender to reason together. Their work goes beyond that of most political theorists and social scientists by exploring both the principles for reasonable argument and their application to actual cases. Not only do the authors suggest how deliberative democracy can work, they also show why improving our collective capacity for moral argument is better than referring all disagreements to procedural politics or judicial institutions. Democracy and Disagreement presents a compelling approach to how we might resolve some of our most trying moral disagreements and live with those that will inevitably persist, on terms that all of us can respect.
This powerfully argued appraisal of judicial review may change the face of American law. Written for layman and scholar alike, the book addresses one of the most important issues facing Americans today: within what guidelines shall the Supreme Court apply the strictures of the Constitution to the complexities of modern life?
Until now legal experts have proposed two basic approaches to the Constitution. The first, “interpretivism,” maintains that we should stick as closely as possible to what is explicit in the document itself. The second, predominant in recent academic theorizing, argues that the courts should be guided by what they see as the fundamental values of American society. John Hart Ely demonstrates that both of these approaches are inherently incomplete and inadequate. Democracy and Distrust sets forth a new and persuasive basis for determining the role of the Supreme Court today.
Ely’s proposal is centered on the view that the Court should devote itself to assuring majority governance while protecting minority rights. “The Constitution,” he writes, “has proceeded from the sensible assumption that an effective majority will not unreasonably threaten its own rights, and has sought to assure that such a majority not systematically treat others less well than it treats itself. It has done so by structuring decision processes at all levels in an attempt to ensure, first, that everyone’s interests will be represented when decisions are made, and second, that the application of those decisions will not be manipulated so as to reintroduce in practice the sort of discrimination that is impermissible in theory.”
Thus, Ely’s emphasis is on the procedural side of due process, on the preservation of governmental structure rather than on the recognition of elusive social values. At the same time, his approach is free of interpretivism’s rigidity because it is fully responsive to the changing wishes of a popular majority. Consequently, his book will have a profound impact on legal opinion at all levels—from experts in constitutional law, to lawyers with general practices, to concerned citizens watching the bewildering changes in American law.
Democracy and Dysfunction brings together two of the leading constitutional law scholars of our time, Sanford Levinson and Jack M. Balkin, in an urgently needed conversation that seeks to uncover the underlying causes of our current crisis and their meaning for American democracy. In a series of letters exchanged over a period of two years, Levinson and Balkin travel—along with the rest of the country—through the convulsions of the 2016 election and Trump’s first year in office. They disagree about the scope of the crisis and the remedy required. Levinson believes that our Constitution is fundamentally defective and argues for a new constitutional convention, while Balkin, who believes we are suffering from constitutional rot, argues that there are less radical solutions. As it becomes dangerously clear that Americans—and the world—will be living with the consequences of this pivotal period for many years to come, it is imperative that we understand how we got here—and how we might forestall the next demagogue who will seek to beguile the American public.
How are we to understand the nature and value of higher education's public purposes, mission, and work in a democratic society? How do-and how should-academic professionals contribute to and participate in civic life in their practices as scholars, scientists, and educators?
Democracy and Higher Education addresses these questions by combining an examination of several normative traditions of civic engagement in American higher education with the presentation and interpretation of a dozen oral history profiles of contemporary practitioners. In his analysis of these profiles, Scott Peters reveals and interprets a democratic-minded civic professionalism that includes and interweaves expert, social critic, responsive service, and proactive leadership roles.
Democracy and Higher Education contributes to a new line of research on the critically important task of strengthening and defending higher education's positive roles in and for a democratic society.
Following costly U.S. engagement in two wars in the Middle East, questions about the appropriateness of American military interventions dominate foreign policy debates. Is an interventionist foreign policy compatible with the American constitutional tradition?
This book examines critic Irving Babbitt’s (1865–1933) unique contribution to understanding the quality of foreign policy leadership in a democracy. Babbitt explored how a democratic nation’s foreign policy is a product of the moral and cultural tendencies of the nation’s leaders, arguing that the substitution of expansive, sentimental Romanticism for the religious and ethical traditions of the West would lead to imperialism.
The United States’ move away from the restraint and order of sound constitutionalism to involve itself in the affairs of other nations will inevitably cause a clash with the “civilizational” regions that have emerged in recent decades. Democracy and Imperialism uses the question of soul types to address issues of foreign policy leadership, and discusses the leadership qualities that are necessary for sound foreign policy.
The essays in this volume offer both theoretical insights into the context and implications of Lijphart's ideas and empirical exploration of the ideas. Two chapters by Thomas Koelble and Andrew Reynolds examine and apply Lijphart's insights to South Africa, while another study by Jack Nagel explores the fascinating institutional changes taking place in New Zealand. Essays by Bernard Grofman and Rein Taagepera examine Lijphart's work from a theoretical perspective and place Lijphart's work in the wider neo-institutionalist school of thought. Milton Esman applies the principle of power-sharing to mobilized communities, not only in democratic societies but also to those which are governed by authoritarian rule. Bingham Powell offers an empirical approach to the crucial question of the connection between political institutions and responsiveness of policy-makers. Markus M. L. Crepaz and Vicki Birchfield argue that in this age of globalization, countries with consensual political institutions will not only systematically refract the pressures of globalization but will be able to absorb the domestic consequences of globalization more successfully than majoritarian countries. Finally, Arend Lijphart responds to the arguments made in these essays, extending and adding novel concepts and insights to his conceptual framework.
The book will be of interest to political scientists, lawyers, and sociologists who study institutions, the impact of electoral systems, and constitutional design. In addition, those who study "globalization" will be attracted by the relevance of domestic political institutions and their refractory effects as the tides of globalization wash against the domestic shores.
Markus M. L. Crepaz is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Georgia. Thomas A. Koelble is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Miami. David Wilsford is President and Professor, the Institute for American Universities.
Dean’s critique ranges from her argument that the term democracy has become a meaningless cipher invoked by the left and right alike to an analysis of the fantasy of free trade underlying neoliberalism, and from an examination of new theories of sovereignty advanced by politicians and left academics to a look at the changing meanings of “evil” in the speeches of U.S. presidents since the mid-twentieth century. She emphasizes the futility of a politics enacted by individuals determined not to offend anyone, and she examines questions of truth, knowledge, and power in relation to 9/11 conspiracy theories. Dean insists that any reestablishment of a vital and purposeful left politics will require shedding the mantle of victimization, confronting the marriage of neoliberalism and democracy, and mobilizing different terms to represent political strategies and goals.
In these two essays, one of America’s most honored writers fastens on the interrelation of American democracy and poetry and the concept of selfhood vital to each. “I really don’t want to make a noise like a pundit,” Mr. Warren declares, “What I do want to do is to return us—and myself most of all—to a scrutiny of our own experience of our own world.” Indeed, Democracy and Poetry offers one of the most pertinent and strongly personal meditations on our condition to have appeared in recent letters.
Our native “poetry,” that is, literature and art, in general, is a social document, is “diagnostic,” and has often been a corrosive criticism of our democracy, Mr. Warren argues. Persuasively, and movingly, he shows that all of “art” and all that goes into the making of democracy require a free and responsible self. Yet the American experience has been one of the decay of the notion of self. Our astounding success jeopardized what we promised to create—the free man. For a century and a half the conception of the self has been dwindling, separating itself from traditional values, moral identity, and a secure relation with community. Lonely heroes in a bankrupt civilization, then protest, despair, aimlessness, and violence, have marked our literature.
The anguish of Robert Penn Warren’s own poetic vision of art and democracy is soothed only by his belief that poetry—the making of art can nourish and at least do something toward the rescue of democracy; he shows how art can be- come a healer, can be “therapeutic.” In the face of disintegrative forces set loose in a business and technetronic society, it is poetry that affirms the notion of the self. It is a model of the organized self, an emblem of the struggle for the achieving self, and of the self in a community. More and more as our modern technetronic society races toward the abolition of the self, and diverges from a culture created to enhance the notion of selfhood, poetry becomes indispensable.
Compelling, resonant, memorable, Democracy and Poetry is a major testament not only to the vitality of poetry, but also to a faith in democracy.
Raby argues passionately that the way forward for progressives is not the dogmatic formulae of the Old Left, nor in the spontaneous autonomism of Antonio Negri. Instead, it is to be found in broad popular movements with bold leadership. Examining key leaders, including Hugo Chávez and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Raby shows that it is more necessary than ever to take power, peacefully where possible, but in all cases with the strength that comes from popular unity backed by force where necessary. In this way it is possible to build democratic power, which may or may not be socialist depending on one's definition, but which represent the real anti-capitalist alternative for the twenty-first century.
In this, Addams's earliest book on ethics--presented here with a substantial introduction by Charlene Haddock Seigfried--she reflects on the factors that hinder the ability of all members of society to determine their own well-being. Observing relationships between charitable workers and their clients, between factory owners and their employers, and between household employers and their servants, she identifies sources of friction and shows how conceiving of democracy as a social obligation can lead to new, mutually beneficial lines of conduct. She also considers the proper education of workers, struggles between parents and their adult daughters over conflicting family and social claims, and the merging of politics with the daily lives of constituents.
"The sphere of morals is the sphere of action," Addams proclaims. It is not enough to believe passively in the innate dignity of all human beings. Rather, one must work daily to root out racial, gender, class, and other prejudices from personal relationships.
Although inequality in Latin America ranks among the worst in the world, it has notably declined over the last decade, offset by improvements in health care and education, enhanced programs for social assistance, and increases in the minimum wage.
Mukherjee offers the first comprehensive cross-national framework for identifying the specific economic conditions that influence trade policy in developing countries. Laying out the causes of variation in trade policy in four developing or recently developed countries—Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa—he argues persuasively that changing political interactions among parties, party leaders, and the labor market are often key to trade policy outcome. For instance, if workers are in a position to benefit from opening up to trade, party leaders in turn support trade reforms by decreasing tariffs and other trade barriers.
At a time when discussions about the stability of new democracies are at the forefront, Democracy and Trade Policy in Developing Countries provides invaluable insight into the conditions needed for a democracy to survive in the developing world in the context of globalization.
Belarus is widely regarded as the most authoritarian state in the region, while Ukraine is witnessing a slow, if often troubled, democratic consolidation. Each state presents a different set of challenges to outside agencies. As Pospieszna shows, Poland is uniquely positioned to offer effective counsel on the transition to democracy. With similarities of language and culture, and a shared history, combined with strong civic activism and success within the European Union, Poland’s regional policies have successfully combined its need for security and a motivation to spread democracy as primary concerns. Pospieszna details the founding, internal workings, goals, and methods of Poland’s aid programs. She then compares the relative degrees of success of each in Belarus and Ukraine and documents the work yet to be done.
As her theoretical basis, Pospieszna analyzes current thinking on the methods and effectiveness of NGOs in transitions to democracy, particularly U.S.- and European-led aid efforts. She then views the applicability of these methods to the case of Poland and its aid recipients. Overwhelmingly, Pospieszna finds the greatest success in developmental programs targeting civil society—workers, intellectuals, teachers, students, and other NGO actors.
Through extensive interviews with government administrators and NGO workers in Poland and the United States, coupled with archival research, Pospieszna assembles an original perspective on the mitigation of the ‘postcommunist divide’. Her work will serve as a model for students and scholars of states in transition, and it provides an overview of both successful and unsuccessful strategies employed by NGOs in democracy assistance.
How do threats of terrorism affect the opinions of citizens? Speculation abounds, but until now no one had marshaled hard evidence to explain the complexities of this relationship. Drawing on data from surveys and original experiments they conducted in the United States and Mexico, Jennifer Merolla and Elizabeth Zechmeister demonstrate how our strategies for coping with terrorist threats significantly influence our attitudes toward fellow citizens, political leaders, and foreign nations.
The authors reveal, for example, that some people try to restore a sense of order and control through increased wariness of others—especially of those who exist outside the societal mainstream. Additionally, voters under threat tend to prize “strong leadership” more highly than partisan affiliation, making some politicians seem more charismatic than they otherwise would. The authors show that a wary public will sometimes continue to empower such leaders after they have been elected, giving them greater authority even at the expense of institutional checks and balances. Having demonstrated that a climate of terrorist threat also increases support for restrictive laws at home and engagement against terrorists abroad, Merolla and Zechmeister conclude that our responses to such threats can put democracy at risk.
Winner of the James P. Hanlan Book Award
Winner of the J. David Greenstone Book Prize
Winner of the S. M. Lipset Best Book Award
This pioneering work of political history recovers the central and largely forgotten role that petitioning played in the formative years of North American democracy.
Known as the age of democracy, the nineteenth century witnessed the extension of the franchise and the rise of party politics. As Daniel Carpenter shows, however, democracy in America emerged not merely through elections and parties, but through the transformation of an ancient political tool: the petition. A statement of grievance accompanied by a list of signatures, the petition afforded women and men excluded from formal politics the chance to make their voices heard and to reshape the landscape of political possibility.
Democracy by Petition traces the explosion and expansion of petitioning across the North American continent. Indigenous tribes in Canada, free Blacks from Boston to the British West Indies, Irish canal workers in Indiana, and Hispanic settlers in territorial New Mexico all used petitions to make claims on those in power. Petitions facilitated the extension of suffrage, the decline of feudal land tenure, and advances in liberty for women, African Americans, and Indigenous peoples. Even where petitioners failed in their immediate aims, their campaigns advanced democracy by setting agendas, recruiting people into political causes, and fostering aspirations of equality. Far more than periodic elections, petitions provided an everyday current of communication between officeholders and the people.
The coming of democracy in America owes much to the unprecedented energy with which the petition was employed in the antebellum period. By uncovering this neglected yet vital strand of nineteenth-century life, Democracy by Petition will forever change how we understand our political history.
In Democracy Declined, Mallory E. SoRelle argues that the failure of federal policy makers to curb risky practices can be explained by the evolution of consumer finance policies aimed at encouraging easy credit in part by foregoing more stringent regulation. Furthermore, SoRelle explains how angry borrowers’ experiences with these policies teach them to focus their attention primarily on banks and lenders instead of demanding that lawmakers address predatory behavior. As a result, advocacy groups have been mostly unsuccessful in mobilizing borrowers in support of stronger consumer financial protections. The absence of safeguards on consumer financing is particularly dangerous because the consequences extend well beyond harm to individuals—they threaten the stability of entire economies. SoRelle identifies pathways to mitigate these potentially disastrous consequences through greater public participation.
In the decade before World War I, a wave of democratic revolutions swept the globe, consuming more than a quarter of the world’s population. Revolution transformed Russia, Iran, the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Mexico, and China. In each case, a pro-democracy movement unseated a long-standing autocracy with startling speed. The nascent democratic regime held elections, convened parliament, and allowed freedom of the press and freedom of association. But the new governments failed in many instances to uphold the rights and freedoms that they proclaimed. Coups d’état soon undermined the democratic experiments.
How do we account for these unexpected democracies, and for their rapid extinction? In Democracy Denied, Charles Kurzman proposes that the collective agent most directly responsible for democratization was the emerging class of modern intellectuals, a group that had gained a global identity and a near-messianic sense of mission following the Dreyfus Affair of 1898.
Each chapter of Democracy Denied focuses on a single angle of this story, covering all six cases by examining newspaper accounts, memoirs, and government reports. This thoroughly interdisciplinary treatment of the early-twentieth-century upheavals promises to reshape debates about the social origins of democracy, the causes of democratic collapse, the political roles of intellectuals, and the international flow of ideas.
A national constitution or other statute typically specifies restrictions on executive power, often including a limit to the number of terms the chief executive may hold office. In recent decades, however, some presidents of newly established democracies have extended their tenure by various semilegal means, thereby raising the specter—and in some cases creating the reality—of dictatorship.
Alexander Baturo tracks adherence to and defiance of presidential term limits in all types of regimes (not only democratic regimes) around the world since 1960. Drawing on original data collection and fieldwork to investigate the factors that encourage playing by or manipulating the rules, he asks what is at stake for the chief executive if he relinquishes office. Baturo finds that the income-generating capacity of political office in states where rent-seeking is prevalent, as well as concerns over future immunity and status, determines whether or not an executive attempts to retain power beyond the mandated period. Democracy, Dictatorship, and Term Limits will appeal to scholars of democratization and executive power and also to political theorists.
In Democracy Disfigured, Nadia Urbinati diagnoses the ills that beset the body politic in an age of hyper-partisanship and media monopolies and offers a spirited defense of the messy compromises and contentious outcomes that define democracy.
Urbinati identifies three types of democratic disfiguration: the unpolitical, the populist, and the plebiscitarian. Each undermines a crucial division that a well-functioning democracy must preserve: the wall separating the free forum of public opinion from the governmental institutions that enact the will of the people. Unpolitical democracy delegitimizes political opinion in favor of expertise. Populist democracy radically polarizes the public forum in which opinion is debated. And plebiscitary democracy overvalues the aesthetic and nonrational aspects of opinion. For Urbinati, democracy entails a permanent struggle to make visible the issues that citizens deem central to their lives. Opinion is thus a form of action as important as the mechanisms that organize votes and mobilize decisions.
Urbinati focuses less on the overt enemies of democracy than on those who pose as its friends: technocrats wedded to procedure, demagogues who make glib appeals to “the people,” and media operatives who, given their preference, would turn governance into a spectator sport and citizens into fans of opposing teams.
Moving next to de facto independence, Yadav and Mukherjee bring together data from 103 democracies in the developing world, complemented by case studies of Brazil, India, and Indonesia. Honing in on the effects of electoral institutions, the authors find that, when faced with short time horizons, governments that operate in personal vote electoral systems are likely to increase de facto judicial independence whereas governments in party-centered systems are likely to reduce it.
Athens in the fifth century B.C. offers a striking picture: the first democracy in history; the first empire created and ruled by a Greek city; and a flourishing of learning, philosophical thought, and visual and performing arts so rich as to leave a remarkable heritage for Western civilization. To what extent were these three parallel developments interrelated? An international group of fourteen scholars expert in different fields explores here the ways in which the fifth-century "cultural revolution" depended on Athenian democracy and the ways it was influenced by the fact that Athens was an imperial city.
The authors bring to this analysis their individual areas of expertise--in the visual arts, poetry and drama, philosophy, archaeology, religion, and social, economic, and political history--and a variety of theoretical approaches. The product of a colloquium at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth-Century Athens sheds new light on a much debated question that has wide implications. The book is illustrated and enriched by a comprehensive bibliography on the subject.
How do we make democracy more equal? Although in theory, all citizens in a democracy have the right to participate in politics, time-consuming forms of participation often advantage some groups over others. Where some citizens may have time to wait in long lines to vote, to volunteer for a campaign, to attend community board meetings, or to stay up to date on national, state, and local news, other citizens struggle to do the same. Since not all people have the time or inclination to devote substantial energy to politics, certain forms of participation exacerbate existing inequalities.
Democracy for Busy People takes up the very real challenge of how to build a democracy that empowers people with limited time for politics. While many plans for democratic renewal emphasize demanding forms of political participation and daunting ideals of democratic citizenship, political theorist Kevin J. Elliott proposes a fundamentally different approach. He focuses instead on making democratic citizenship undemanding so that even busy people can be politically included. This approach emphasizes the core institutions of electoral democracy, such as political parties, against deliberative reforms and sortition. Timely and action-focused, Democracy for Busy People is necessary reading.
The difference between developmental success and failure in this view has little to do with natural resource availability, climate, aid, or developed nations' policies. Rather, it is largely a function of whether incentives within a given society steer wealth-maximizing individuals toward producing new wealth or toward diverting it from others. The chapters, seminal essays written by Mancur Olson and his IRIS Center colleagues, provide theoretical and/or empirical underpinnings for the emerging consensus that differences in the way governments and societies are organized have enormous implications for the structure of incentives faced by politicians, bureaucrats, investors, and workers, which in turn determines the level of a nation's material well-being.
Overall this volume applies tools and concepts from the "New Institutional Economics" to some of the major issues in economic development. It will be of interest to scholars and students of various disciplines--including political science, law, and sociology as well as economics--interested in the determinants of economic development and global economic change. The book will also be of interest to many aid practitioners, particularly those working in anticorruption and public sector reform issues.
Stephen Knack is Senior Research Economist, Development Research Group, the World Bank.
This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.
What’s the solution? More democracy. More opportunities for citizens to shape what their government does. To repair our democracy, Page and Gilens argue, we must change the way we choose candidates and conduct our elections, reform our governing institutions, and curb the power of money in politics. By doing so, we can reduce polarization and gridlock, address pressing challenges, and enact policies that truly reflect the interests of average Americans.
Updated with new information, this book lays out a set of proposals that would boost citizen participation, curb the power of money, and democratize the House and Senate.
How did we get here? Through decades of dysfunctional government. In Democracy in America? veteran political observers Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens marshal an unprecedented array of evidence to show that while other countries have responded to a rapidly changing economy by helping people who’ve been left behind, the United States has failed to do so. Instead, we have actually exacerbated inequality, enriching corporations and the wealthy while leaving ordinary citizens to fend for themselves.
What’s the solution? More democracy. More opportunity for citizens to shape what their government does. To repair our democracy, Page and Gilens argue, we must change the way we choose candidates and conduct our elections, reform our governing institutions, and curb the power of money in politics. By doing so, we can reduce polarization and gridlock, address pressing challenges, and enact policies that truly reflect the interests of average Americans.
This book presents a damning indictment. But the situation is far from hopeless. With increased democratic participation as their guide, Page and Gilens lay out a set of proposals that would boost citizen participation, curb the power of money, and democratize the House and Senate. The only certainty is that inaction is not an option. Now is the time to act to restore and extend American democracy.
A respected Chinese political philosopher calls for the Communist Party to take the lead in moving China along the path to democracy before it is too late.
With Xi Jinping potentially set as president for life, China’s move toward political democracy may appear stalled. But Jiwei Ci argues that four decades of reform have created a mentality in the Chinese people that is just waiting for the political system to catch up, resulting in a disjunction between popular expectations and political realities. The inherent tensions in a largely democratic society without a democratic political system will trigger an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy, forcing the Communist Party to act or die.
Two crises loom for the government. First is the waning of the Communist Party’s revolutionary legacy, which the party itself sees as a grave threat. Second is the fragility of the next leadership transition. No amount of economic success will compensate for the party’s legitimacy deficit when the time comes. The only effective response, Ci argues, will be an orderly transition to democracy. To that end, the Chinese government needs to start priming its citizens for democracy, preparing them for new civil rights and civic responsibilities. Embracing this pragmatic role offers the Communist Party a chance to survive. Its leaders therefore have good reason to initiate democratic change.
Sure to challenge the Communist Party and stir debate, Democracy in China brings an original and important voice to an issue with far-reaching consequences for China and the world.
The Green Movement protests that erupted in Iran in 2009 amid allegations of election fraud shook the Islamic Republic to its core. For the first time in decades, the adoption of serious liberal reforms seemed possible. But the opportunity proved short-lived, leaving Iranian activists and intellectuals to debate whether any path to democracy remained open.
Offering a new framework for understanding democratization in developing countries governed by authoritarian regimes, Democracy in Iran is a penetrating, historically informed analysis of Iran’s current and future prospects for reform. Beginning with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Misagh Parsa traces the evolution of Iran’s theocratic regime, examining the challenges the Islamic Republic has overcome as well as those that remain: inequalities in wealth and income, corruption and cronyism, and a “brain drain” of highly educated professionals eager to escape Iran’s repressive confines. The political fortunes of Iranian reformers seeking to address these problems have been uneven over a period that has seen hopes raised during a reformist administration, setbacks under Ahmadinejad, and the birth of the Green Movement. Although pro-democracy activists have made progress by fits and starts, they have few tangible reforms to show for their efforts.
In Parsa’s view, the outlook for Iranian democracy is stark. Gradual institutional reforms will not be sufficient for real change, nor can the government be reformed without fundamentally rethinking its commitment to the role of religion in politics and civic life. For Iran to democratize, the options are narrowing to a single path: another revolution.
Following World War II, the American Occupation created Western style democratic institutions in Japan and sought to develop a society and culture that would support a democratic political system. Now, after four decades, the successes and failures of Japanese democracy can be assessed. How equal are Japan’s citizens? To what extent are their views represented in the legislature? How does Japan handle dissent and protest? How stable is its democracy?
In closely related and readable essays, thirteen leading experts consider three main components of democracy in Japan - political, social, and economic. The editors’ introduction provides historical background, making this book accessible and valuable for students, the general reader interested in Japan, as well as the specialist.
This first volume of Democracy in Latin America considers the development of democratic life in Mexico and Peru from independence to the late 1890s. Forment traces the emergence of hundreds of political, economic, and civic associations run by citizens in both nations and shows how these organizations became models of and for democracy in the face of dictatorship and immense economic hardship. His is the first book to show the presence in Latin America of civic democracy, something that gave men and women in that region an alternative to market- and state-centered forms of life.
In looking beneath institutions of government to uncover local and civil organizations in public life, Forment ultimately uncovers a tradition of edification and inculcation that shaped democratic practices in Latin America profoundly. This tradition, he reveals, was stronger in Mexico than in Peru, but its basic outlines were similar in both nations and included a unique form of what Forment calls Civic Catholicism in order to distinguish itself from civic republicanism, the dominant political model throughout the rest of the Western world.
Democracy in Mexico offers an important contribution to one of the more complex and multifaceted political processes of recent decades in Latin America: Mexico's democratization at the national and subnational levels. Topics include the quality of democracy, political participation, and insecurity.
The book is based on two surveys carried out throughout Mexico in 2009 and 2011. The result of this collaboration is one of the few existing studies on democratic processes in the Mexican states.
Private money, public good, and the original fight for control of America’s energy industry.
Until the 1930s, financial interests dominated electrical power in the United States. That changed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal which restructured the industry. The government expanded public ownership, famously through the Tennessee Valley Authority, and promoted a new kind of utility: the rural electric cooperative that brought light and power to millions in the countryside. Since then, public and cooperative utilities have persisted as an alternative to shareholder control. Democracy in Power traces the rise of publicly governed utilities in the twentieth-century electrification of America.
Sandeep Vaheesan shows that the path to accountability in America’s power sector was beset by bureaucratic challenges and fierce private resistance. Through a detailed and critical examination of this evolution, Vaheesan offers a blueprint for a publicly led and managed path to decarbonization. Democracy in Power is at once an essential history, a deeply relevant accounting of successes and failures, and a guide on how to avoid repeating past mistakes.
Readers will discover the vision of the magazine’s founder, Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, and his suffragist wife, Belle Case La Follette. They’ll find historic gems from the likes of Jane Addams, Carl Sandburg, Huey Long, and John Kenneth Galbraith, and profound essays by Theodore Dreiser, Barbara Ehrenreich, Noam Chomsky, Upton Sinclair, Arundhati Roy, James Baldwin, Edwidge Danticat, and Edward Said. The collection is leavened with humor from Kate Clinton, Will Durst, Michael Feldman, and Molly Ivins, and graced by poems from such writers as Mahmoud Darwish, Rita Dove, Martín Espada, Maxine Kumin, Adrienne Rich, and Sandra Cisneros. Fascinating interviews bring readers into conversations with prominent cultural figures, including Chuck D, the Dalai Lama, Allen Ginsberg, Amy Goodman, Harold Pinter, Patti Smith, Susan Sarandon, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
Eminently browsable, this book is for anyone concerned with American democracy, the global community, and the perils of the planet. With contributions by actors and Supreme Court justices, comedians and Nobel Prize-winners, Democracy in Print offers all readers nourishing food for thought.
For more than 200 years no institution has been more important to the development of the American democratic polity than the state legislature, yet no political institution has been so neglected by historians. Although more lawmaking takes place in the state capitals than in Washington D.C., scholars have lavished their attention on Congress, producing only a handful of histories of state legislatures. Most of those histories have focused on discrete legislative acts rather than on legislative process, and all have slighted key aspects of the legislative environment: the parliamentary rules of play, the employees who make the game possible, the physical setting—the arena—in which the people’s representatives engage in conflict and compromise to create public policy.
This book relates in fascinating detail the history of the Ohio General Assembly from its eighteenth-century origins in the Northwest Territory to its twenty-first-century incarnation as a full-time professional legislature. Democracy in Session explains the constitutional context within which the General Assembly functions, examines the evolution of legislative committees, and explores the impact of technology on political contests and legislative procedure. It sheds new light on the operations of the House and Senate clerks’ offices and on such legislative rituals as seat selection, opening prayers, and the Pledge of Allegiance. Partisan issues and public policy receive their due, but so do ethics and decorum, the election of African American and female legislators, the statehouse, and the social life of the members. Democracy in Session is, in short, the most comprehensive history of a state legislature written to date and an important contribution to the story of American democracy.
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