Results by Title     #   A   B   C   D   E   F   G   H   I   J   K   L   M   N   O   P   R   S   T   U   V   W   Y   Z 
886 books about Political and 70 start with A
Sort by     
 

Aaron Henry of Mississippi: Inside Agitator
Minion K. C. Morrison
University of Arkansas Press, 2015
Library of Congress F350.N4M67 2015 | Dewey Decimal 323.092

Winner of the 2016 Lillian Smith Book Award

When Aaron Henry returned home to Mississippi from World War II service in 1946, he was part of wave of black servicemen who challenged the racial status quo. He became a pharmacist through the GI Bill, and as a prominent citizen, he organized a hometown chapter of the NAACP and relatively quickly became leader of the state chapter.

From that launching pad he joined and helped lead an ensemble of activists who fundamentally challenged the system of segregation and the almost total exclusion of African Americans from the political structure. These efforts were most clearly evident in his leadership of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation, which, after an unsuccessful effort to unseat the lily-white Democratic delegation at the Democratic National Convention in 1964, won recognition from the national party in 1968.

The man who the New York Times described as being “at the forefront of every significant boycott, sit-in, protest march, rally, voter registration drive and court case” eventually became a rare example of a social-movement leader who successfully moved into political office. Aaron Henry of Mississippi covers the life of this remarkable leader, from his humble beginnings in a sharecropping family to his election to the Mississippi house of representatives in 1979, all the while maintaining the social-change ideology that prompted him to improve his native state, and thereby the nation.
Expand Description

Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel
Jezer, Marty
Rutgers University Press, 1993
Library of Congress HN90.R3J49 1992 | Dewey Decimal 303.484

In this sympathetic history of a maligned decade, Marty Jezer, a fellow antiwar activist, details Abbie Hoffman's humor, manic energy, depressive spells, political skills, & above all, his incurable & still contagious optimism. He presents a thoughtful, solidly researched biography of the wildly creative & iconoclastic Yippie, portraying Hoffman as a fresh force in American political culture. Jezer surveys in detail the politics, philosophies, & struggles of the antiwar movement.

"... Abbie, more than any other radical, showed potheads how to demonstrate and radicals how to dance." -- Chicago Tribune

"... deeply sympathetic and scrupulously detached-a triumph of judicious empathy." -- MARTIN DUBERMAN, Distinguished Professor of History, Lehman/The Graduate School, C.U.N.Y.

"... details Hoffman's humor, manic energy, depressive spells, political skills, and above all, his Incurable and still contagious optimism." -- Entertainment Weekly

"Here's the Abbie I knew and loved! Marty Jezer has captured him in all his complexity, dedication, humor, and heart." -- ANITA HOFFMAN
Expand Description

Abraham Epstein: The Forgotten Father of Social Security
Pierre Epstein
University of Missouri Press, 2006
Library of Congress HD7125.E653 2006 | Dewey Decimal 368.430092

Social Security has long been called the third rail of American politics—an unassailable institution for which we can thank Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Or can we?
Abraham Epstein was a major figure in American social reform during the first half of the twentieth century. His name and his theories appear in almost every book written on Social Security and the New Deal, but a full account of his life has never been made. Epstein’s son, Pierre, now secures his legacy in this book that tells for the first time the story of his father’s role in the conception and enactment of Social Security and sheds new light on the inner workings of the Roosevelt administration.
Combining memoir and intellectual history, Pierre Epstein takes readers behind the scenes of New Deal legislation to tell how his father’s fast-moving career led him to become the real architect of Social Security—he even came up with those two words to explain his theories. A prolific journalist, founder of the American Association for Social Security, and author of numerous books, including Insecurity: A Challenge to America, Abe Epstein fought desperately with FDR to remedy the failings of the original Social Security Act—only to be cast aside by political machinations. Nonetheless, the exclusion did not stop him from making significant contributions to the 1939 amendments that solidified Social Security for coming generations of Americans.
In this book readers will meet a colorful and tenacious player in the history of this critical piece of social insurance legislation—an obsessed reformer who mobilized support from the bottom up for his vision of Social Security. They will also meet his family and learn of the struggles and frustrations Abe Epstein faced in making his way in America as an immigrant Russian Jew.
This engaging book fills a major gap in the historical record, showing that Social Security is more than a technical subject about finance and actuarial statistics, that it is primarily a human idea with deep philosophical roots. In the face of today’s privatization controversy, Abraham Epstein’s theories have much to tell us about the current debate while Pierre Epstein’s insightful narrative shows us the underlying importance of one man’s indelible legacy.
Expand Description

Abraham Lincoln, Philosopher Statesman
Joseph R. Fornieri
Southern Illinois University Press, 2014
Library of Congress E457.2.F729 2014 | Dewey Decimal 973.7092

2015 ISHS Superior Achievement Award

What constitutes Lincoln’s political greatness as a statesman? As a great leader, he saved the Union, presided over the end of slavery, and helped to pave the way for an interracial democracy. His great speeches provide enduring wisdom about human equality, democracy, free labor, and free society. Joseph R. Fornieri contends that Lincoln’s political genius is best understood in terms of a philosophical statesmanship that united greatness of thought and action, one that combined theory and practice. This philosophical statesmanship, Fornieri argues, can best be understood in terms of six dimensions of political leadership: wisdom, prudence, duty, magnanimity, rhetoric, and patriotism. Drawing on insights from history, politics, and philosophy, Fornieri tackles the question of how Lincoln’s statesmanship displayed each of these crucial elements.

Providing an accessible framework for understanding Lincoln’s statesmanship, this thoughtful study examines the sixteenth president’s political leadership in terms of the traditional moral vision of statecraft as understood by epic political philosophers such as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Fornieri contends that Lincoln’s character is best understood in terms of Aquinas’s understanding of magnanimity or greatness of soul, the crowning virtue of statesmanship. True political greatness, as embodied by Lincoln, involves both humility and sacrificial service for the common good. The enduring wisdom and timeless teachings of these great thinkers, Fornieri shows, can lead to a deeper appreciation of statesmanship and of its embodiment in Abraham Lincoln.

With the great philosophers and books of western civilization as his guide, Fornieri demonstrates the important contribution of normative political philosophy to an understanding of our sixteenth president. Informed by political theory that draws on the classics in revealing the timelessness of Lincoln’s example, his interdisciplinary study offers profound insights for anyone interested in the nature of leadership, statesmanship, political philosophy, political ethics, political history, and constitutional law.

Expand Description

Achieve the Honorable: A Missouri Congressman's Journey from Warm Springs to Washington
Ike Skelton
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013
Library of Congress E840.8.S5495A3 2013 | Dewey Decimal 328.73092

Growing up during the Great Depression and World War II, Ike Skelton dreamed of joining the military. That dream was shattered when he contracted one of the most dreaded diseases of the era: polio. Far from abandoning hope, Skelton, after treatment at Warm Springs, Georgia, overcame his disability and went on to become a college athlete, a celebrated lawyer, a Missouri state senator, and a U.S. Congressman. Achieve the Honorable is the deeply personal tale of Ike Skelton’s determined journey from the small town of Lexington, Missouri, to Capitol Hill.

During his years in the U.S. House of Representatives, Skelton became known as a bipartisan negotiator and a champion of the Armed Services. Throughout the decades, he helped steer the nation through its most dangerous challenges, from Communism to terrorism; took a leading role in the reform of the Department of Defense; dedicated himself to fulfilling the interests of his constituents; and eventually rose to become chair of the House Armed Services Committee during such pivotal events as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to detailing Skelton’s political career and its accompanying challenges and triumphs, Achieve the Honorable provides inside glimpses into the lives of political titans like Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton. Along the way, we are treated to Skelton’s engaging humor and shrewd insight into twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. politics. 

Expand Description

The Actual and the Rational: Hegel and Objective Spirit
Jean-Francois Kervegan
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Library of Congress K230.H432K4713 2018 | Dewey Decimal 193

One of Hegel’s most controversial and confounding claims is that “the real is rational and the rational is real.” In this book, one of the world’s leading scholars of Hegel, Jean-François Kervégan, offers a thorough analysis and explanation of that claim, along the way delivering a compelling account of modern social, political, and ethical life.

​Kervégan begins with Hegel’s term “objective spirit,” the public manifestation of our deepest commitments, the binding norms that shape our existence as subjects and agents. He examines objective spirit in three realms: the notion of right, the theory of society, and the state. In conversation with Tocqueville and other theorists of democracy, whether in the Anglophone world or in Europe, Kervégan shows how Hegel—often associated with grand metaphysical ideas—actually had a specific conception of civil society and the state. In Hegel’s view, public institutions represent the fulfillment of deep subjective needs—and in that sense, demonstrate that the real is the rational, because what surrounds us is the product of our collective mindedness. This groundbreaking analysis will guide the study of Hegel and nineteenth-century political thought for years to come.
Expand Description

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment
Iain McDaniel
Harvard University Press, 2013
Library of Congress JC83.M35 2013 | Dewey Decimal 321.86

Unlike his contemporaries, who saw Europe’s prosperity as confirmation of a utopian future, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Ferguson saw a reminder of Rome’s lesson that egalitarian democracy could become a self-undermining path to dictatorship. This is a major reassessment of a critic overshadowed today by David Hume and Adam Smith.
Expand Description

Adiós Muchachos: A Memoir of the Sandinista Revolution
Sergio Ramírez
Duke University Press, 2012
Library of Congress F1528.R3413 2012 | Dewey Decimal 972.85053

Adiós Muchachos is a candid insider’s account of the leftist Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. During the 1970s, Sergio Ramírez led prominent intellectuals, priests, and business leaders to support the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), against Anastasio Somoza’s dictatorship. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza regime in 1979, Ramírez served as vice-president under Daniel Ortega from 1985 until 1990, when the FSLN lost power in a national election. Disillusioned by his former comrades’ increasing intolerance of dissent and resistance to democratization, Ramírez defected from the Sandinistas in 1995 and founded the Sandinista Renovation Movement. In Adiós Muchachos, he describes the utopian aspirations for liberation and reform that motivated the Sandinista revolution against the Somoza regime, as well as the triumphs and shortcomings of the movement’s leadership as it struggled to turn an insurrection into a government, reconstruct a country beset by poverty and internal conflict, and defend the revolution against the Contras, an armed counterinsurgency supported by the United States. Adiós Muchachos was first published in 1999. Based on a later edition, this translation includes Ramírez’s thoughts on more recent developments, including the re-election of Daniel Ortega as president in 2006.
Expand Description

Aesthetics and Marxism: Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western Contemporaries
Kang Liu
Duke University Press, 2000
Library of Congress BH39.L5595 2000 | Dewey Decimal 111.8509

Although Chinese Marxism—primarily represented by Maoism—is generally seen by Western intellectuals as monolithic, Liu Kang argues that its practices and projects are as diverse as those in Western Marxism, particularly in the area of aesthetics. In this comparative study of European and Chinese Marxist traditions, Liu reveals the extent to which Chinese Marxists incorporate ideas about aesthetics and culture in their theories and practices. In doing so, he constructs a wholly new understanding of Chinese Marxism.
Far from being secondary considerations in Chinese Marxism, aesthetics and culture are in fact principal concerns. In this respect, such Marxists are similar to their Western counterparts, although Europeans have had little understanding of the Chinese experience. Liu traces the genealogy of aesthetic discourse in both modern China and the West since the era of classical German thought, showing where conceptual modifications and divergences have occurred in the two traditions. He examines the work of Mao Zedong, Lu Xun, Li Zehou, Qu Qiubai, and others in China, and from the West he discusses Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Marxist theorists including Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse. While stressing the diversity of Marxist positions within China as well as in the West, Liu explains how ideas of culture and aesthetics have offered a constructive vision for a postrevolutionary society and have affected a wide field of issues involving the problems of modernity.
Forcefully argued and theoretically sophisticated, this book will appeal to students and scholars of contemporary Marxism, cultural studies, aesthetics, and modern Chinese culture, politics, and ideology.
Expand Description

Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment
George E. Marcus, W. Russell Neuman, and Michael MacKuen
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Library of Congress JA74.5.M36 2000 | Dewey Decimal 320.019

Although the rational choice approach toward political behavior has been severely criticized, its adherents claim that competing models have failed to offer a more scientific model of political decisionmaking. This measured but provocative book offers precisely that: an alternative way of understanding political behavior based on cognitive research.

The authors draw on research in neuroscience, physiology, and experimental psychology to conceptualize habit and reason as two mental states that interact in a delicate, highly functional balance controlled by emotion. Applying this approach to more than fifteen years of election results, they shed light on a wide range of political behavior, including party identification, symbolic politics, and negative campaigning.

Remarkably accessible, Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment urges social scientists to move beyond the idealistic notion of the purely rational citizen to form a more complete, realistic model that includes the emotional side of human judgment.
Expand Description

African American Political Thought: A Collected History
Edited by Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Library of Congress E185.A25363 2020 | Dewey Decimal 320.08996073

African American Political Thought offers an unprecedented philosophical history of thinkers from the African American community and African diaspora who have addressed the central issues of political life: democracy, race, violence, liberation, solidarity, and mass political action. Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner have brought together leading scholars to reflect on individual intellectuals from the past four centuries, developing their list with an expansive approach to political expression. The collected essays consider such figures as Martin Delany, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois,  James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, whose works are addressed by scholars such as Farah Jasmin Griffin, Robert Gooding-Williams, Michael Dawson, Nick Bromell, Neil Roberts, and Lawrie Balfour.

While African American political thought is inextricable from the historical movement of American political thought, this volume stresses the individuality of Black thinkers, the transnational and diasporic consciousness, and how individual speakers and writers draw on various traditions simultaneously to broaden our conception of African American political ideas.  This landmark volume gives us the opportunity to tap into the myriad and nuanced political theories central to Black life. In doing so, African American Political Thought: A Collected History transforms how we understand the past and future of political thinking in the West.
 
Expand Description

African Leaders of the Twentieth Century: Biko, Selassie, Lumumba, Sankara
Lindy Wilson
Ohio University Press, 2015

A History Book Club Reading Selection

This omnibus edition brings together concise and up-to-date biographies of Steve Biko, Emperor Haile Selassie, Patrice Lumumba, and Thomas Sankara. African Leaders of the Twentieth Century will complement courses in history and political science and serve as a useful collection for the general reader.

Steve Biko, by Lindy Wilson
Steve Biko inspired a generation of black South Africans to claim their true identity and refuse to be a part of their own oppression. This short biography shows how fundamental he was to the reawakening and transformation of South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century and just how relevant he remains.

Emperor Haile Selassie, by Bereket Habte Selassie
Emperor Haile Selassie was an iconic figure of the twentieth century, a progressive monarch who ruled Ethiopia from 1916 to 1974. The fascinating story of the emperor¹s life is also the story of modern Ethiopia.

Patrice Lumumba, by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja
Patrice Lumumba was a leader of the independence struggle in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Decades after his assassination, Lumumba remains one of the heroes of the twentieth-century Africanindependence movement.

Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary, by Ernest Harsch
Thomas Sankara, often called the African Che Guevara, was president of Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa, until his assassination during the military coup that brought down his government. This is the first English-language book to tell the story of Sankara’s life and struggles.

Expand Description

After Capitalism: Horizons of Finance, Culture, and Citizenship
Ferguson, Kennan
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Library of Congress HB501.A455 2016 | Dewey Decimal 330.122

From Thomas Piketty to David Harvey, scholars are increasingly questioning whether we are entering into a post-capitalist era. If so, does this new epoch signal the failure of capitalism and emergence of alternative systems? Or does it mark the ultimate triumph of capitalism as it evolves into an unstoppable entity that takes new forms as it engulfs its opposition? 
 
After Capitalism brings together leading scholars from across the academy to offer competing perspectives on capitalism’s past incarnations, present conditions, and possible futures.  Some contributors reassess classic theorizations of capitalism in light of recent trends, including real estate bubbles, debt relief protests, and the rise of a global creditocracy. Others examine Marx’s writings, unemployment, hoarding, “capitalist realism,” and coyote (trickster) capitalism, among many other topics. Media and design trends locate the key ideologies of the current economic moment, with authors considering everything from the austerity aesthetics of reality TV to the seductive smoothness of liquid crystal. 
 
Even as it draws momentous conclusions about global economic phenomena, After Capitalism also pays close attention to locales as varied as Cuba, India, and Latvia, examining the very different ways that economic conditions have affected the relationship between the state and its citizens. Collectively, these essays raise provocative questions about how we should imagine capitalism in the twenty-first century. Will capitalism, like all economic systems, come to an end, or does there exist in history or elsewhere a hidden world that is already post-capitalist, offering alternative possibilities for thought and action?  
 
Expand Description

After the Bombs
Arturo Arias
Northwestern University Press, 1990
Library of Congress PQ7499.2.A73D4713 1990

After the Bombs is a coming of age story that holds a mirror up to the modern history of Guatemala—a funhouse mirror of richly inventive and farcical black comedy which provides a better description of life in that country than any history book ever could. It opens with the bombing of Guatemala City in 1954 when the hero, Max, is a small child. In a swiftly moving narrative, Max journeys toward adulthood, searching for his identity, for his father, and along the way, for the real Guatemala and the possibility of a society founded on human decency, after the bombs.
Expand Description

Against Capital in the Twenty-First Century: A Reader of Radical Undercurrents
John Asimakopoulos
Temple University Press, 2018
Library of Congress HX73.A344 2018 | Dewey Decimal 335

The problems of capitalism have been studied from Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty. The latter has recently confirmed that the system of capital is deeply bound up in ever-growing inequality without challenging the continuance of that system. Against Capital in the Twenty-First Century presents a diversity of analyses and visions opposed to the idea that capital should have yet another century to govern human and non-human resources in the interest of profit and accumulation. The editors and contributors to this timely volume present alternatives to the whole liberal litany of administered economies, tax policy recommendations, and half-measures. They undermine and reject the logic of capital, and the foregone conclusion that the twenty-first century should be given over to capital just as the previous two centuries were.

Providing a deep critique of capitalism, based on assessment from a wide range of cultural, social, political, and ecological thinking, Against Capital in the Twenty-First Century insists that transformative, revolutionary, and abolitionist responses to capital are even more necessary in the twenty-first century than they ever were.

Expand Description

Against Obligation
Abner S. Greene
Harvard University Press, 2012
Library of Congress K240.G74 2012 | Dewey Decimal 340.112

Greene argues that citizens are not morally obligated to obey the law and that officials need not follow prior or higher authority when reading the Constitution. The sources of authority in a liberal democracy are multiple—the law must compete with other norms. Constitutional meaning is not locked in, historically or by the Supreme Court.
Expand Description

Against the Flood
Ma Van Khang
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Library of Congress PL4378.9.M25N4813 2000 | Dewey Decimal 895.922334

Against the Flood caused a sensation in Viet Nam when it was published in 1999 because of its controversial description of sex and politics in that country. The plot revolves around a writer, Khiem, whose book is banned and who is publicly censured by his contemporaries, while the tangled relationships in his own circle involve drug-trafficking and adultery. His lover, a pretty and intelligent woman, is slandered and sacked from her job and becomes involved in the opium trade. Meanwhile, his wife, a smuggler, has an extramarital affair that results in pregnancy. The novel presents a vivid picture of contemporary Vietnamese society, examining the dramatic tensions inherent in a changing society, and is imbued with the themes of friendship, love, and betrayal.
Expand Description

The Age of Responsibility
Yascha Mounk
Harvard University Press, 2017
Library of Congress BJ1451+ | Dewey Decimal 361.65

Yascha Mounk shows why a focus on personal responsibility is wrong and counterproductive: it distracts us from the larger economic forces determining aggregate outcomes, ignores what we owe fellow citizens regardless of their choices, and blinds us to key values such as the desire to live in a society of equals. In this book he proposes a remedy.
Expand Description

Agnes Heller: A Moralist in the Vortex of History
John Grumley
Pluto Press, 2005
Library of Congress B4815.H454G78 2005 | Dewey Decimal 199.439

Agnes Heller is one of the leading thinkers to come out of the tradition of critical theory. Her awesome intellectual range and output includes ethics, philosophical anthropology, political philosophy and a theory of modernity and its culture.

Hungarian by birth, she was one of the best known dissident Marxists in central Europe in the 1960's and 1970's. Since her forced immigration she has held visiting lectureships all over the world and has been the Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York for the last twenty years.

This introduction to her thought is ideal for all students of philosophy, political theory and sociology. Grumley explores Heller's early work, elaborating her relation to Lukacs and the evolution of her own version of Marxism. He examines the subsequent break with Marxism and the initial development of an alternative radical philosophy. Finally, he explains and assesses her mature reflective post-modernism, a perspective that is both sceptical and utopian, that upholds a critical humanist perspective just as it critiques contemporary democratic culture.
Expand Description

Albert Camus' Critique of Modernity
Ronald D. Srigley
University of Missouri Press, 2011
Library of Congress PQ2605.A3734Z73628 2011 | Dewey Decimal 194

Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus’ contributions to political and cultural analysis make him one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. Camus’ writing has been heavily researched and analyzed in academia, with many scholars concentrating on the formal tri-part structure he adhered to in his later work: the cycle that divided his books into stages of the absurd, rebellion, and love. Yet other aspects of Camus’ work—his preoccupation with modernity and its association with Christianity, his fixations on Greek thought and classical imagery—have been largely neglected by critical study. These subjects of Camus’ have long deserved critical analysis, and Ronald D. Srigley finally pays them due attention in Albert Camus’ Critique of Modernity.

The straightforward, chronological readings of Camus’ cycles perceive them as simple advancement—the absurd is bad, rebellion is better, and love is best of all. Yet the difficulty with that perspective, Srigley argues, is that it ignores the relationships between the cycles. As the cycles progress, far from denoting improvement, they describe experiences that grow darker and more violent.

Albert Camus’ Critique of Modernity also ventures into new interpretations of seminal works—The Myth ofSisyphus, The Rebel, and The Fall—that illuminate Camus’ critique of Christianity and modernity and his return to the Greeks. The book explores how those texts relate to the cyclical structure of Camus’ works and examines the limitations of the project of the cycles as Camus originally conceived it.

Albert Camus’ Critique of Modernity presents the decisive vision of that ultimate project: to critique Christianity, modernity, and the relationship between them and also to restore the Greek wisdom that had been eclipsed by both traditions. In contrast to much current scholarship, which interprets Camus’ concerns as modern or even postmodern, Srigley contends that Camus’ ambition ran in the opposite direction of history—that his principal aim was to articulate the themes of the ancients, highlighting Greek anthropology and political philosophy.

This book follows the trajectory of Camus’ work, examining the structure and content of Camus’ writing through a new lens. This assessment of Camus, in its unique approach and perspective, opens up new avenues of research regarding the accomplishments of this prominent philosopher and invigorates Camus studies. A thoroughly sourced text, Albert Camus’ Critique of Modernity makes a valuable resource for study of existentialism, modernity, and modern political thought.
Expand Description

Albert Camus, Jean Sénac, or The Rebel Son
Hamid Nacer-Khodja
Michigan State University Press, 2019
Library of Congress PQ2605.A3734Z7218313 2018 | Dewey Decimal 848.91409

While Albert Camus is an internationally acclaimed figure, Jean Sénac has struggled to gain recognition, even in France and Algeria. The correspondence between the Nobel Prize recipient and the young poet, documented in this illuminating collection, is a testimony to a little-known friendship that lasted for over a decade (1947–1958) and coincided with the escalating conflict between France and Algeria. Their letters shed light on a passionate conflict that opposed two men on two sides of the Algerian War. On one side, Camus distanced himself from an Algerian insurrection that was becoming increasingly violent. On the other, Sénac espoused the armed insurrection of the National Liberation Front and Algeria’s right to independence and freedom. The exchange between Sénac and Camus allows for a deeper and more personal understanding of the Algerian conflict, and of the crucial role of writers, poets, and thinkers in the midst of a fratricidal colonial conflict. The letters translated here are also the intimate dialog between two men who had much in common and who shared a deep love for each other and for their homeland. 
Expand Description

Albert Gallatin: Jeffersonian Financier and Diplomat
Raymond Walters
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969

Raymond Walters, Jr. presents the definitive biography of Albert Gallatin (1761-1849), recounting sixty years that the Swiss-born diplomat served his adopted country as a congressional leader, Secretary of the Treasury, financier, and ambassador.  Gallatin was a founder of the House Committee on Finance (later the Ways and Means Committee), a member of the new Democratic-Republican Party, and an active politician who opposed the Federalist Party and its programs, while also helping to bring about the election of Thomas Jefferson.
Expand Description

Alexander Hamilton: From Obscurity to Greatness
John P. Kaminski
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2016
Library of Congress E302.H2A44 2016 | Dewey Decimal 973.4092

Born in 1755 on a small Caribbean island to unmarried parents, Alexander Hamilton did not enjoy the privileges of wealth or heredity by which so many of his contemporaries advanced to the highest levels of power. Yet Hamilton's natural ability and ambition earned him prevailing influence in the American Revolution and the government created thereafter, eventually securing his place in the pantheon of America's founders.
Editor John P. Kaminski has gathered a remarkable collection of quotations by and about Alexander Hamilton that paint for us a nuanced portrait of a complex man. Through his own words and the words of his contemporaries -- including the man who killed him in a duel, Aaron Burr -- we can gain a better understanding of this fascinating man who rose from anonymity on a small Caribbean island to the corridors of power.
Expand Description

Alexander Hamilton's Public Administration
Richard T. Green
University of Alabama Press, 2019
Library of Congress E302.6.H2G787 2019 | Dewey Decimal 973.4092

Examines how Hamilton’s thoughts and experiences about public administration theory and practice have shaped the nation

American public administration inherited from Alexander Hamilton a distinct republican framework through which we derive many of our modern governing standards and practices. His administrative theory flowed from his republican vision, prescribing not only the how of administration but also what should be done and why. Administration and policy merged seamlessly in his mind, each conditioning the other. His Anti-Federalist detractors clearly saw this and fought his vision tooth and nail.

That conflict endures to this day because Americans still have not settled on just one vision of the American republic. That is why, Richard Green argues, Hamilton is a pivotal figure in our current reckoning. If we want to more fully understand ourselves and our ways of governing today, we must start by understanding Hamilton, and we cannot do that without exploring his administrative theory and practice in depth.

Alexander Hamilton’s Public Administration considers Hamilton both as a founder of the American republic, steeped in the currents of political philosophy and science of his day, and as its chief administrative theorist and craftsman, deeply involved in establishing the early institutions and policies that would bring his interpretation of the written Constitution to life. Accordingly, this book addresses the complex mix of classical and modern ideas that informed his vision of a modern commercial and administrative republic; the administrative ideas, institutions, and practices that flowed from that vision; and the substantive policies he deemed essential to its realization. Green’s analysis grows out of an immersion in Hamilton’s extant papers, including reports, letters, pamphlets, and essays. Readers will find a comprehensive explanation of his theoretical contributions and a richly detailed account of his ideas and practices in historical context.
Expand Description

Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy
Muhsin S. Mahdi
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Library of Congress B753.F34M33 2001 | Dewey Decimal 181.6

In this work, Muhsin Mahdi—widely regarded as the preeminent scholar of Islamic political thought—distills more than four decades of research to offer an authoritative analysis of the work of Alfarabi, the founder of Islamic political philosophy. Mahdi, who also brought to light writings of Alfarabi that had long been presumed lost or were not even known, presents this great thinker as his contemporaries would have seen him: as a philosopher who sought to lay the foundations for a new understanding of revealed religion and its relation to the tradition of political philosophy.

Beginning with a survey of Islamic philosophy and a discussion of its historical background, Mahdi considers the interrelated spheres of philosophy, political thought, theology, and jurisprudence of the time. He then turns to Alfarabi's concept of "the virtuous city," and concludes with an in-depth analysis of the trilogy, Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.

This philosophical engagement with the writings of and about Alfarabi will be essential reading for anyone interested in medieval political philosophy.
Expand Description

Alice and Eleanor: A Contrast in Style and Purpose
Sandra R. Curtis
University of Wisconsin Press

Alice and Eleanor: A Contrast in Style and Purpose explores the lifelong personal struggles, political involvement, and private relationship of Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Expand Description

Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity
Jeffrey T. Nealon
Duke University Press, 1998
Library of Congress JA74.5.N43 1998 | Dewey Decimal 320.011

In conventional identity politics subjective differences are understood negatively, as gaps to be overcome, as lacks of sameness, as evidence of failed or incomplete unity. In Alterity Politics Jeffrey T. Nealon argues instead for a concrete and ethical understanding of community, one that requires response, action, and performance instead of passive resentment and unproductive mourning for a whole that cannot be attained.

While discussing the work of others who have refused to thematize difference in terms of the possibility or impossibility of sameness—Levinas, Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Zizek, Jameson, Heidegger, Bakhtin—Nealon argues that ethics is constituted as inexorable affirmative response to different identities, not through an inability to understand or totalize the other. Alterity Politics combines this theoretical itinerary with crucial discussions of specific and diverse sites of literary and cultural production—the work of William S. Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Andy Warhol, Ishmael Reed, Rush Limbaugh, and Vincent Van Gogh—along with analyses of the social formation of subjects as found in identity politics, and in multicultural and whiteness studies. In the process, Nealon takes on a wide variety of issues including white male anger, the ethical questions raised by drug addiction, the nature of literary meaning, and the concept of “becoming-black.”

In seeking to build an ethical structure around poststructuralist discourse and to revitalize the applied use of theoretical concepts to notions of performative identity, Alterity Politics marks a decisive intervention in literary theory, cultural studies, twentieth-century philosophy, and performance studies.

Expand Description

Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy's Perpetual War
Warren Montag
Duke University Press, 2013
Library of Congress B2430.A474M66 2013 | Dewey Decimal 194

Althusser and His Contemporaries alters and expands understanding of Louis Althusser and French philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s. Thousands of pages of previously unpublished work from different periods of Althusser's career have been made available in French since his death in 1990. Based on meticulous study of the philosopher's posthumous publications, as well as his unpublished manuscripts, lecture notes, letters, and marginalia, Warren Montag provides a thoroughgoing reevaluation of Althusser's philosophical project. Montag shows that the theorist was intensely engaged with the work of his contemporaries, particularly Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Lacan. Examining Althusser's philosophy as a series of encounters with his peers' thought, Montag contends that Althusser's major philosophical confrontations revolved around three themes: structure, subject, and beginnings and endings. Reading Althusser reading his contemporaries, Montag sheds new light on structuralism, poststructuralism, and the extraordinary moment of French thought in the 1960s and 1970s.
Expand Description

America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense
Scott Philip Segrest
University of Missouri Press, 2009
Library of Congress B105.C457S44 2010 | Dewey Decimal 320.01

From Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson, seminal thinkers have declared “common sense” essential for moral discernment and civilized living. Yet the story of commonsense philosophy is not well known today.
 
            In America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense, Scott Segrest traces the history and explores the personal and social meaning of common sense as understood especially in American thought and as reflected specifically in the writings of three paradigmatic thinkers: John Witherspoon, James McCosh, and William James. The first two represent Scottish Common Sense and the third, Pragmatism, the schools that together dominated American higher thought for nearly two centuries.
 
Educated Americans of the founding period warmly received Scottish Common Sense, Segrest writes, because it reflected so well what they already thought, and he uncovers the basic elements of American common sense in examining the thought of Witherspoon, who introduced that philosophy to them. With McCosh, he shows the furthest development and limits of the philosophy, and with it of American common sense in its Scottish realist phase. With James, he shows other dimensions of common sense that Americans had long embraced but that had never been examined philosophically.
 
            Clearly, Segrest’s work is much more than an intellectual history. It is a study of the American mind and of common sense itself—its essential character and its human significance, both moral and political. It was common sense, he affirms, that underlay the Declaration of Independence and the founders’ ideas of right and obligation that are still with us today. Segrest suggests that understanding this foundation and James’s refreshing of it could be the key to maintaining America’s vital moral core against a growing alienation from common sense across the Western world.
 
Stressing the urgency of understanding and preserving common sense, Segrest’s work sheds new light on an undervalued aspect of American thought and experience, helping us to perceive the ramifications of commonsense philosophy for dignified living.
Expand Description

American Dictators: Frank Hague, Nucky Johnson, and the Perfection of the Urban Political Machine
Hart, Steven
Rutgers University Press, 2013
Library of Congress E747.H29 2013 | Dewey Decimal 974.90430922

One man was tongue-tied and awkward around women, in many ways a mama's boy at heart, although his reputation for thuggery was well earned. The other was a playboy, full of easy charm and ready jokes, his appetite for high living a matter of public record. One man tolerated gangsters and bootleggers as long as they paid their dues to his organization. The other was effectively a gangster himself, so crooked that he hosted a national gathering of America's most ruthless killers. One man never drank alcohol. The other, from all evidence, seldom drank anything else.

American Dictators is the dual biography of two of America’s greatest political bosses: Frank Hagueand Enoch “Nucky” Johnson. Packed with compelling information and written in an informal, sometimes humorous style, the book shows Hague and Johnson at the peak of their power and the strength of their political machines during the years of Prohibition and the Great Depression. Steven Hart compares how both men used their influence to benefit and punish the local citizenry, amass huge personal fortunes, and sometimes collaborate to trounce their enemies.

Similar in their ruthlessness, both men were very different in appearance and temperament. Hague, the mayor of Jersey City, intimidated presidents and wielded unchallenged power for three decades. He never drank and was happily married to his wife for decades. He also allowed gangsters to run bootlegging and illegal gambling operations as long as they paid protection money. Johnson, the political boss of Atlantic City, and the inspiration for the hit HBO series Boardwalk Empire, presided over corruption as well, but for a shorter period of time. He was notorious for his decadent lifestyle. Essentially a gangster himself, Johnson hosted the infamous Atlantic City conference that fostered the growth of organized crime.

Both Hague and Johnson shrewdly integrated otherwise disenfranchised groups into their machines and gave them a stake in political power. Yet each failed to adapt to changing demographics and circumstances. In American Dictators, Hart paints a balanced portrait of their accomplishments and their failures.

Expand Description

An American Diplomat in Bolshevik Russia
DeWitt Clinton Poole, Edited by Lorraine M. Lees and William S. Rodner
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
Library of Congress DK266.5.P66 2014 | Dewey Decimal 327.73047092

Diplomat DeWitt Clinton Poole arrived for a new job at the United States consulate office in Moscow in September 1917, just two months before the Bolshevik Revolution. In the final year of World War I, as Russians were withdrawing and Americans were joining the war, Poole found himself in the midst of political turmoil in Russia. U.S. relations with the newly declared Soviet Union rapidly deteriorated as civil war erupted and as Allied forces intervened in northern Russia and Siberia. Thirty-five years later, in the climate of the Cold War, Poole recounted his experiences as a witness to that era in a series of interviews.
            Historians Lorraine M. Lees and William S. Rodner introduce and annotate Poole's recollections, which give a fresh, firsthand perspective on monumental events in world history and reveal the important impact DeWitt Clinton Poole (1885–1952) had on U.S.–Soviet relations. He was active in implementing U.S. policy, negotiating with the Bolshevik authorities, and supervising American intelligence operations that gathered information about conditions throughout Russia, especially monitoring anti-Bolshevik elements and areas of German influence. Departing Moscow in late 1918 via Petrograd, he was assigned to the port of Archangel, then occupied by Allied and American forces, and left Russia in June 1919.
Expand Description

American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream
Julia L. Mickenberg
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Library of Congress DK34.A45M54 2017 | Dewey Decimal 305.420947

If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. As Julia L. Mickenberg uncovers in American Girls in Red Russia, there is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation: beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous, like Isadora Duncan or Lillian Hellman; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the “Soviet experiment.” But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, others by horrifying truths.

Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities.

American Girls in Red Russia recounts the experiences of women who saved starving children from the Russian famine, worked on rural communes in Siberia, wrote for Moscow or New York newspapers, or performed on Soviet stages. Mickenberg finally tells these forgotten stories, full of hope and grave disappointments.
 
Expand Description

American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era through the Twentieth Century
David Weir
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
Library of Congress DS518.8.W356 2011 | Dewey Decimal 303.4827305

Surveying the American fascination with the Far East since the mid-eighteenth century, this book explains why the Orient had a fundamentally different meaning in the United States than in Europe or Great Britain. David Weir argues that unlike their European counterparts, Americans did not treat the East simply as a site of imperialist adventure; on the contrary, colonial subjugation was an experience that early Americans shared with the peoples of China and India. In eighteenth-century America, the East was, paradoxically, a means of reinforcing the enlightenment values of the West: Franklin, Jefferson, and other American writers found in Confucius a complement to their own political and philosophical beliefs. In the nineteenth century, with the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, the Hindu Orient emerged as a mystical alternative to American reality. During this period, Emerson, Thoreau, and other Transcendentalists viewed the “Oriental” not as an exotic other but as an image of what Americans could be, if stripped of all the commercialism and materialism that set them apart from their ideal. A similar sense of Oriental otherness informed the aesthetic discoveries of the early twentieth century, as Pound, Eliot, and other poets found in Chinese and Japanese literature an artistic purity and intensity absent from Western tradition. For all of these figures the Orient became a complex fantasy that allowed them to overcome something objectionable, either in themselves or in the culture of which they were a part, in order to attain some freer, more genuine form of philosophical, religious, or artistic expression.
Expand Description

American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams
Peter Richardson
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Library of Congress PN4874.M475R53 2005 | Dewey Decimal 070.92

A long-overdue book on the brilliant life and career of one of our greatest public intellectuals, American Prophet will introduce Carey McWilliams to a new generation of readers.

Peter Richardson's absorbing and elegantly paced book reveals a figure thoroughly engaged with the issues of his time. Deftly interweaving correspondence, diary notes, published writings, and McWilliams's own and others' observations on a colorful and influential cast of characters from Hollywood, New York, Washington, DC, and the American West, Richardson maps the evolution of McWilliams's personal and professional life. Among those making an appearance are H. L. Mencken (McWilliams's mentor and role model), Louis Adamic, John Fante, Robert Towne, Richard Nixon, Studs Terkel, J. Edgar Hoover, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Joseph McCarthy.

American Prophet illustrates the arc of McWilliams's life and career from his early literary journalism through his legal and political activism, his stint in state government, and his two decades as editor of the Nation. This book makes the case for McWilliams's place in the Olympian realm of our most influential and prescient political writers.

Peter Richardson is the editorial director at PoliPointPress in Sausalito, California. He is the author or editor of numerous works on language, literature, and California public policy. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California Berkeley.
Expand Description

The American Way of Peace: An Interpretation
Jan S. Prybyla
University of Missouri Press, 2005
Library of Congress E840.P79 2005 | Dewey Decimal 327.73009045

In The American Way of Peace, Jan S. Prybyla traces the implementation of an idea derived from bedrock American values that has shaped the American character from the nation’s beginning. The idea—simple, generous, optimistic, and effective—was and remains to give people realizable hope, an attainable dream, by creating a peaceful, secure, and materially comfortable world, a Pax Americana, the American Way of Peace.
In the period surveyed, beginning with the end of World War II, this objective was achieved through American initiative and with American leadership, despite resistance from Nazi barbarism, Soviet serfdom, and, more recently, Islamic extremist inhumanity. There has also been opposition from some of those in the western confines of Europe whom Pax Americana helped raise from the ashes to which they had been reduced.
The American Way of Peace examines the work of reconstruction, the enemy bombardment, as well as the hurtful sniping along the way by the beneficiaries of American support. Prybyla recommends a reevaluation of American relations with those to whom friendship is but a utilitarian device, in light of the present eruption of terrorism worldwide. The need for America to act wisely and resolutely in defense of civilized values, to stem the third tidal wave of terrorist savagery, and to venture where others fear to tread is more compelling now than it has been in the six decades past, for today America’s very survival as a force for immense good in the world is being put to the test.
Expand Description

America’s Forgotten Founders, second edition
Gary L. Gregg
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2012
Library of Congress E302.5.A46 2012 | Dewey Decimal 973.30922

Beyond Washington and Jefferson: Ranking the Founders

Even as Americans devour books about our Founding Fathers, the focus seldom extends past a half dozen or so icons—Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton. Many of the men (and women) who made prodigious contributions to the American founding have been all but forgotten.
 
America’s Forgotten Founders corrects this injustice. Editors Gary L. Gregg II and Mark David Hall surveyed forty-five top scholars in history, political science, and law to produce the first-ever ranking of the most neglected contributors to the American Revolution and our constitutional order. This unique book features engaging short biographies of the top ten most important Founders whose contributions are overlooked today: James Wilson, George Mason, Gouverneur Morris, John Jay, Roger Sherman, John Marshall, John Dickinson, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, and John Witherspoon.
 
The latest entry in ISI Books’ Lives of the Founders series, America’s Forgotten Founders reshapes our understanding of America’s founding generation.
Expand Description

Anarchism Volume One: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One – From Anarchy to Anarchism
Edited by Robert Graham
Black Rose Books, 2005
Library of Congress HX826.A47 2005 | Dewey Decimal 335.83

Click here for orders in the UK & Europe.

Volume One of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas is a comprehensive and far-ranging collection of anarchist writings from the classical era to 1939. Edited and introduced by noted anarchist scholar Robert Graham, this incomparable volume includes the definitive texts from the anarchist tradition of political thought. It deals both with the positive ideas and proposals the anarchists tried to put into practice and with their critiques of the authoritarian theories and practices confronting them.

ROBERT GRAHAM has written extensively on the history of anarchist ideas. He is the author of "The Role of Contract in Anarchist Ideology," in For Anarchism, edited by David Goodway, and he wrote the introduction to the 1989 edition of Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century, originally published in 1851. He has been doing research and writing on the historical development of anarchist ideas for over 20 years and is a well respected commentator in the field.

"Robert Graham is an outstanding scholar of anarchism and has made an exceptionally stimulating choice of texts: some familiar, others--especially those from East Asia--entirely unknown to me. The publication of this first instalment of what promises to be a notable anthology is an important event for anarchists." - David Goodway, Anarchist Historian, University of Leeds, UK

"Will definitely meet the need for a comprehensive study of all the strands, ideas and themes of anarchist and libertarian thought." - Stuart Christie, Anarchist Writer/Publisher

"An excellent and long-overdue anthology of anarchist writings. It shows the depth, diversity and relevance of anarchist thought and action. Highly recommended." - Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism

"This judicious collection is admirable in its chronological, geographical, and thematic range. There is nothing comparable in presenting anarchist and libertarian responses both to the challenges of theory and to those of practices forged in the fires of historical crises." - Wayne Thorpe, The Workers Themselves: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour, 1913-1923

"Admirably displays the range and inventiveness of anarchist approaches." - Colin Ward, Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction and Anarchy in Action


Table of Contents

Preface

CHAPTER 1: EARLY TEXTS ON SERVITUDE AND FREEDOM

1. Bao Jingyan: Neither Lord Nor Subject (300 C.E.)

2. Etienne de la Boetie: On Voluntary Servitude (1552)

3. Gerrard Winstanley: The New Law of Righteousness (1649)

CHAPTER 2: ENLIGHTENMENT AND REVOLUTION

4. William Godwin: Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793-97)

5. Jean Varlet: The Explosion (1794)

6. Sylvain Maréchal: Manifesto of the Equals (1796)

CHAPTER 3: INDUSTRIALIZATION AND THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIALISM

7. Charles Fourier: Attractive Labour (1822-37)

8. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: What is Property (1840)

9. Proudhon: The System of Economic Contradictions (1846)

CHAPTER 4: REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS AND ACTION

10. Michael Bakunin, The Reaction in Germany (1842)

11. Max Stirner: The Ego and Its Own (1844)

12. Proudhon: The General Idea of the Revolution (1851)

13. Anselme Bellegarrigue: Anarchy is Order (1850)

14. Joseph Déjacque: The Revolutionary Question (1854)

15. Francisco Pi y Margall: Reaction and Revolution (1854)

16. Carlo Pisacane: On Revolution (1857)

17. Joseph Déjacque: On Being Human (1857)

CHAPTER 5: THE ORIGINS OF THE ANARCHIST MOVEMENT AND THE INTERNATIONAL

18. Proudhon: On Federalism (1863/65)

19. Statutes of the First International (1864-1866)

20. Bakunin: Socialism and the State (1867)

21. Bakunin: Program of the International Brotherhood (1868)

22. Bakunin: What is the State (1869)

23. Bakunin: The Illusion of Universal Suffrage (1870)

24. Bakunin: On Science and Authority (1871)

CHAPTER 6: THE CONFLICT IN THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL

25. Bakunin: The Organization of the International (1871)

26. The Sonvillier Circular (1871)

27. The St. Imier Congress (1872)

CHAPTER 7: THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR AND THE PARIS COMMUNE

28. Bakunin: Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis (1870)

29. Bakunin: The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State (1871)

30. Louise Michel: In Defence of the Commune (1871)

31. Peter Kropotkin: The Paris Commune (1881)

CHAPTER 8: ANARCHIST COMMUNISM

32. Carlo Cafiero: Anarchy and Communism (1880)

33. Kropotkin: The Conquest of Bread (1892)

34. Kropotkin: Fields, Factories and Workshops (1898)

35. Luigi Galleani: The End of Anarchism (1907)

CHAPTER 9: ANARCHY AND ANARCHISM

36. José Llunas Pujols: What is Anarchy (1882)

37. Charlotte Wilson: Anarchism (1886)

38. Élisée Reclus: Anarchy (1894)

39. Jean Grave: Moribund Society and Anarchy (1893)

40. Gustav Landauer: Anarchism in Germany (1895)

41. Kropotkin: On Anarchism (1896)

42. E. Armand: Mini-Manual of the Anarchist Individualist (1911)

CHAPTER 10: PROPAGANDA BY THE DEED

43. Paul Brousse: Propaganda By the Deed (1877)

44. Carlo Cafiero: Action (1880)

45. Kropotkin: Expropriation (1885)

46. Jean Grave: Means and Ends (1893)

47. Leo Tolstoy: On Non-violent Resistance (1900)

48. Errico Malatesta: Violence as a Social Factor (1895)

49. Gustav Landauer: Destroying the State by Creating Socialism (1910/15)

50. Voltairine de Cleyre: Direct Action (1912)

CHAPTER 11: LAW AND MORALITY

51. William Godwin: Of Law (1797)

52. Kropotkin: Law and Authority (1886)

53. Errico Malatesta: The Duties of the Present Hour (1894)

54. Kropotkin: Mutual Aid (1902) and Anarchist Morality (1890)

CHAPTER 12: ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM

55. The Pittsburgh Proclamation (1883)

56. Fernand Pelloutier: Anarchism and the Workers' Unions (1895)

57. Antonio Pellicer Paraire: The Organization of Labour (1900)

58. The Workers' Federation of the Uruguayan Region (FORU): Declarations from the 3rd Congress (1911)

59. Emma Goldman: On Syndicalism (1913)

60. Pierre Monatte and Errico Malatesta: Syndicalism - For and Against (1907)

CHAPTER 13: ART AND ANARCHY

61. Oscar Wilde: The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

62. Bernard Lazare: Anarchy and Literature (1894)

63. Jean Grave: The Artist as Equal, Not Master (1899)

CHAPTER 14: ANARCHY AND EDUCATION

64. Bakunin: Integral Education (1869)

65. Francisco Ferrer: The Modern School (1908)

66. Sébastien Faure: Libertarian Education (1910)

CHAPTER 15: WOMEN, LOVE AND MARRIAGE

67. Bakunin: Against Patriarchal Authority (1873)

68. Louise Michel: Women's Rights (1886)

69. Carmen Lareva: Free Love (1896)

70. Emma Goldman: Marriage (1897), Prostitution and Love (1910)

CHAPTER 16: THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION

71. Voltairine de Cleyre: The Mexican Revolution (1911)

72. Praxedis Guerrero: To Die On Your Feet (1910)

73. Ricardo Flores Magón: Land and Liberty (1911-1918)

CHAPTER 17: WAR AND REVOLUTION IN EUROPE

74. Élisée Reclus: Evolution and Revolution (1891)

75. Tolstoy: Compulsory Military Service (1893)

76. Jean Grave: Against Militarism and Colonialism (1893)

77. Élisée Reclus: The Modern State (1905)

78. Otto Gross: Overcoming Cultural Crisis (1913)

79. Gustav Landauer: For Socialism (1911)

80. Malatesta: Anarchists Have Forgotten Their Principles (1914)

81. International Anarchist Manifesto Against War (1915)

82. Emma Goldman: The Road to Universal Slaughter (1915)

CHAPTER 18: THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

83. Gregory Maksimov: The Soviets (1917)

84. All-Russian Conference of Anarcho-Syndicalists: Resolution on Trade Unions and Factory Committees (1918)

85. Manifestos of the Makhnovist Movement (1920)

86. Peter Arshinov: The Makhnovshchina and Anarchism (1921)

87. Voline: The Unknown Revolution (1947)

88. Alexander Berkman: The Bolshevik Myth (1925)

89. Emma Goldman: The Transvaluation of Values (1923)

CHAPTER 19: ANARCHISM IN LATIN AMERICA

90. Comrades of the Chaco: Anarchist Manifesto (1892)

91. Manuel González Prada: Our Indians (1904)

92. Rafael Barrett: Striving for Anarchism (1909/10)

93. Teodoro Antilli: Class Struggle and Social Struggle (1924)

94. López Arango and Abad de Santillán: Anarchism in the Labour Movement (1925)

95. The American Continental Workers' Association (1929)

CHAPTER 20: CHINESE ANARCHISM

96. He Zhen: Women's Liberation (1907)

97. Chu Minyi: Universal Revolution (1907)

98. Wu Zhihui: Education as Revolution (1908)

99. Shifu: Goals and Methods of the Anarchist-Communist Party (1914)

100. Huang Lingshuang: Writings on Evolution, Freedom and Marxism (1917-29)

101. Li Pei Kan (Ba Jin): On Theory and Practice (1921-1927)

CHAPTER 21: ANARCHISM IN JAPAN AND KOREA

102. Kôtoku Shûsui: Letter from Prison (1910)

103. Ôsugi Sakae: Social Idealism (1920)

104. Itô Noe: The Facts of Anarchy (1921)

105. Shin Chaeho: Declaration of the Korean Revolution (1923)

106. Hatta Shûzô: On Syndicalism (1927)

107. Kubo Yuzuru: On Class Struggle and the Daily Struggle (1928)

108. The Talhwan: What We Advocate (1928)

109. Takamure Itsue: A Vision of Anarchist Love (1930)

110. Japanese Libertarian Federation: What To Do About War (1931)

CHAPTER 22: THE INTERWAR YEARS

111. Gustav Landauer: Revolution of the Spirit (1919)

112. Errico Malatesta: An Anarchist Program (1920)

113. Luigi Fabbri: Fascism: The Preventive Counter-Revolution (1921)

114. The IWA: Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism (1922)

115. The Platform and its Critics (1926-27)

116. Voline: Anarchist Synthesis

117. Alexander Berkman: The ABC of Communist Anarchism (1927)

118. Marcus Graham: Against the Machine (1934)

119. Wilhelm Reich and the Mass Psychology of Fascism (1935)

120. Bart de Ligt: The Conquest of Violence (1937)

121. Rudolf Rocker: Nationalism and Culture (1937)

CHAPTER 23: THE SPANISH REVOLUTION

122. Félix Martí Ibáñez: The Sexual Revolution (1934)

123. Lucía Sánchez Saornil: The Question of Feminism (1935)

124. The CNT: Resolutions from the Zaragoza Congress (1936)

125. Diego Abad de Santillán: The Libertarian Revolution (1937)

126. Gaston Leval: Libertarian Democracy

127. Albert Jensen: The CNT-FAI, the State and Government (1938)

128. Diego Abad de Santillán: A Return to Principle (1938)

CHAPTER 24: EPILOGUE AND PROLOGUE TO VOLUME 2

129. Emma Goldman: A Life Worth Living (1934)

130. Herbert Read: Poetry and Anarchism (1938)

131. Malatesta: Toward Anarchy

2005: 536 pages, bibliography and index
Expand Description

Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking: Conversations with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Nika Dubrovsky, and Assia Turquier-Zauberman
David Graeber
Diaphanes, 2020

David Graeber was not only one of today’s most important living thinkers, but also one of the most influential. He was also one of the very few engaged intellectuals who has a proven track record of effective militancy on a world scale, and his impact on the international left cannot be overstated.

Graeber has offered up perhaps the most credible path for exiting capitalism—as much through his writing about debt, bureaucracy, or “bullshit jobs” as through his crucial involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which led to his more-or-less involuntary exile from the American academy. In short, Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking presents a series of interviews with a first-rate intellectual, a veritable modern hero on the order of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Linus Torvald, Aaron Swartz, and Elon Musk.

Interviewers Mehdi Belhaj Kacem and Assia Turquier-Zauberman asked Graeber not only about the history of anarchy, but also about its contemporary relevance and future. Their conversation also explores the ties between anthropology and anarchism, and the traces of its DNA in the Occupy Wall Street and Yellow Vest movements. Finally, Graeber discussed the meaning of anarchist ethics—not only in the political realm, but also in terms of art, love, sexuality, and more. With astonishing humor, verve, and erudition, this book redefines the contours of what could be (in the words of Peter Kropotkin) “anarchist morality” today. 
Expand Description

Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800
Hilda Kean
Reaktion Books, 1998

In the late twentieth century animals are news. Parliamentary debates, protests against fox hunting and television programs like AnimalHospital all focus on the way in which we treat animals and on what that says about our own humanity. As vegetarianism becomes ever more popular, and animal experimentation more controversial, it is time to trace the background to contemporary debates and to situate them in a broader historical context.

Hilda Kean looks at the cultural and social role of animals from 1800 to the present – at the way in which visual images and myths captured the popular imagination and encouraged sympathy for animals and outrage at their exploitation. From early campaigns against the beating of cattle and ill-treatment of horses to concern for dogs in war and cats in laboratories, she explores the relationship between popular images and public debate and action. She also illustrates how interest in animal rights and welfare was closely aligned with campaigns for political and social reform by feminists, radicals and socialists.

"A thoughtful, effective and well-written book"—The Scotsman

"It could hardly be more timely, and its wonderful material is bound to provoke ... reflection"—The Independent

"A work of great interest"—Sunday Telegraph

"Lively, impressively researched, and well-written ... a book that is timely and valuable"—Times Literary Supplement

"A pleasing balance of anecdote and analysis"—Times Higher Educational Supplement
Expand Description

The Anomie of the Earth: Philosophy, Politics, and Autonomy in Europe and the Americas
Federico Luisetti, John Pickles, and Wilson Kaiser, eds.
Duke University Press, 2015
Library of Congress JC319.A566 2015

The contributors to The Anomie of the Earth explore the convergences and resonances between Autonomist Marxism and decolonial thinking. In discussing and rejecting Carl Schmitt's formulation of the nomos—a conceptualization of world order based on the Western tenets of law and property—the authors question the assumption of universal political subjects and look towards politics of the commons divorced from European notions of sovereignty. They contrast European Autonomism with North and South American decolonial and indigenous conceptions of autonomy, discuss the legacies of each, and examine social movements in the Americas and Europe. Beyond orthodox Marxism, their transatlantic exchanges point to the emerging categories disclosed by the collapse of the colonial and capitalist frameworks of Western modernity.

Contributors. Joost de Bloois, Jodi A. Byrd, Gustavo Esteva, Silvia Federici, Wilson Kaiser, Mara Kaufman, Frans-Willem Korsten, Federico Luisetti, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter D. Mignolo, Benjamin Noys, John Pickles, Alvaro Reyes, Catherine Walsh, Gareth Williams, Zac Zimmer
Expand Description

Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea
Svetlana Boym
University of Chicago Press, 2010
Library of Congress JC585.B696 2010 | Dewey Decimal 320.011

The word “freedom” is so overly used—and frequently abused—that it is always in danger of becoming nothing but a cliché. In Another Freedom, Svetlana Boym offers us a refreshing new portrait of the age-old concept. Exploring the rich cross-cultural history of the idea of freedom, from its origins in ancient Greece to the present day, she argues that our attempts to imagine freedom should occupy the space of not only “what is” but also “what if.” Beginning with notions of sacrifice and the emergence of a public sphere for politics and art, Boym expands her account to include the relationships between freedom and liberation, modernity and terror, and political dissent and creative estrangement. While depicting a world of differences, she affirms lasting solidarities based on the commitment to the passionate thinking that reflections on freedom require. To do so, Boym assembles a remarkable cast of characters: Aeschylus and Euripides, Kafka and Mandelstam, Arendt and Heidegger, and a virtual encounter between Dostoevsky and Marx on the streets of Paris.

By offering a fresh look at the strange history of this idea, Another Freedom delivers a nuanced portrait of freedom, one whose repercussions will be felt well into the future.
Expand Description

Another Mother: Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminism
Cesare Casarino
University of Minnesota Press, 2018
Library of Congress HQ759.D5513 2019 | Dewey Decimal 306.8743

A groundbreaking volume introduces the unique feminist thought of the longstanding Italian group known as Diotima

 

Introducing Anglophone readers to a potent strain of Italian feminism known to French, Spanish, and German audiences but as yet unavailable in English, Another Mother argues that the question of the mother is essential to comprehend the matrix of contemporary culture and society and to pursue feminist political projects. 

Focusing on Diotima, a community of women philosophers deeply involved in feminist politics since the 1960s, this volume provides a multifaceted panorama of its engagement with currents of thought including structuralism, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and Marxism. Starting from the simple insight that the mother is the one who gives us both life and language, these thinkers develop concepts of the mother and sexual difference in contemporary society that differ in crucial ways from both French and U.S. feminisms. 

Arguing that Diotima anticipates many of the themes in contemporary philosophical discourses of biopolitics—exemplified by thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, and Roberto Esposito—Another Mother opens an important space for reflections on the past history of feminism and on feminism’s future. 

Contributors: Anne Emmanuelle Berger, Paris 8 U–Vincennes Saint-Denis; Ida Dominijanni; Luisa Muraro; Diana Sartori, U of Verona; Chiara Zamboni, U of Verona.

Expand Description

Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death
Mary Nyquist
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Library of Congress JC381.N97 2013 | Dewey Decimal 306.36209

Slavery appears as a figurative construct during the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, and again in the American and French revolutions, when radicals represent their treatment as a form of political slavery. What, if anything, does figurative, political slavery have to do with transatlantic slavery? In Arbitrary Rule, Mary Nyquist explores connections between political and chattel slavery by excavating the tradition of Western political thought that justifies actively opposing tyranny. She argues that as powerful rhetorical and conceptual constructs, Greco-Roman political liberty and slavery reemerge at the time of early modern Eurocolonial expansion; they help to create racialized “free” national identities and their “unfree” counterparts in non-European nations represented as inhabiting an earlier, privative age.
               
Arbitrary Rule is the first book to tackle political slavery’s discursive complexity, engaging Eurocolonialism, political philosophy, and literary studies, areas of study too often kept apart. Nyquist proceeds through analyses not only of texts that are canonical in political thought—by Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, and Locke—but also of literary works by Euripides, Buchanan, Vondel, Montaigne, and Milton, together with a variety of colonialist and political writings, with special emphasis on tracts written during the English revolution. She illustrates how “antityranny discourse,” which originated in democratic Athens, was adopted by republican Rome, and revived in early modern Western Europe, provided members of a “free” community with a means of protesting a threatened reduction of privileges or of consolidating a collective, political identity. Its semantic complexity, however, also enabled it to legitimize racialized enslavement and imperial expansion.
               
Throughout, Nyquist demonstrates how principles relating to political slavery and tyranny are bound up with a Roman jurisprudential doctrine that sanctions the power of life and death held by the slaveholder over slaves and, by extension, the state, its representatives, or its laws over its citizenry.

Expand Description

The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays
Joshua Cohen
Harvard University Press, 2010
Library of Congress JC423.C6473 2010 | Dewey Decimal 320.01

Joshua Cohen is one of the best political philosophers in America, as well as one of the best essay writers. He studied with John Rawls during the 1960s and since then, like his teacher, has dared to provide an ideal of democracy to be the guide for political thought rather than the minimalist account that many thinkers seem to believe is the best they can do. These essays, written over the past 20 years, are widely recognized by philosophers and political theorists as major and sometimes defining papers in their fields. The majority of them are essays on democracy and justice, or they discuss major ideas or figures (Locke, Rousseau, Rawls, Habermas) within the liberal and democratic traditions of social and political thought. However, many of these essays are published in obscure editions or journals and some have never been published at all, which makes them hard to find even for the most determined scholar. By gathering these seminal insights into one volume, Harvard Press is performing a valuable service to the community of philosophers and political theorists. Not only does The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays showcase a brilliant theorist whose influence is only going to grow, it also continues the legacy of John Rawls at Harvard University Press.
Expand Description

Arc of Utopia: The Beautiful Story of the Russian Revolution
Lesley Chamberlain
Reaktion Books, 2017

Although Lenin and his fellow revolutionaries never called themselves Utopians—believing strictly in a science of revolution, they considered Utopians to be merely dreamers—they were enormously inspired by the grand humanitarian aims of the French Revolution of 1789. Taking up this French revolutionary agenda and reinforcing it with German philosophy, Russians formed a beautiful vision in which an imaginary theology blended with a premier role for art.

Arc of Utopia offers a fresh look at these German philosophical origins of the Russian Revolution. In the book, Lesley Chamberlain explains how influential German philosophers like Kant, Schiller, and Hegel were dazzled by contemporary events in Paris, and how this led a century later to an explosion of art and philosophy in the Russian streets, with a long-repressed people reinventing liberty, equality, and fraternity in their own cultural image. Chamberlain examines how some of the greatest Russian names of the nineteenth-century—from Alexander Herzen to Mikhail Bakunin, Ivan Turgenev to Fyodor Dostoevsky—defined their visions for Russia in relationship to their views on German enthusiasm for revolutionary France.

With the centenary of the Russian Revolution approaching, Arc of Utopia is an important and timely revisioning of this tumultuous moment in history.
Expand Description

Archives of Infamy: Foucault on State Power in the Lives of Ordinary Citizens
Nancy Luxon
University of Minnesota Press, 2019
Library of Congress HV8204.A73 2019 | Dewey Decimal 364.1094409033

Expanding the insights of Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault’s Disorderly Families into policing, public order, (in)justice, and daily life


What might it mean for ordinary people to intervene in the circulation of power between police and the streets, sovereigns and their subjects? How did the police come to understand themselves as responsible for the circulation of people as much as things—and to separate law and justice from the maintenance of a newly emergent civil order? These are among the many questions addressed in the interpretive essays in Archives of Infamy.

Crisscrossing the Atlantic to bring together unpublished radio broadcasts, book reviews, and essays by historians, geographers, and political theorists, Archives of Infamy provides historical and archival contexts to the recent translation of Disorderly Families by Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault. This volume includes new translations of key texts, including a radio address Foucault gave in 1983 that explains the writing process for Disorderly Families; two essays by Foucault not readily available in English; and a previously untranslated essay by Farge that describes how historians have appropriated Foucault.

Archives of Infamy pushes past old debates between philosophers and historians to offer a new perspective on the crystallization of ideas—of the family, gender relations, and political power—into social relationships and the regimes of power they engender. 

Contributors: Roger Chartier, Collège de France; Stuart Elden, U of Warwick; Arlette Farge, Centre national de recherche scientifique; Michel Foucault (1926–1984); Jean-Philippe Guinle, Catholic Institute of Paris; Michel Heurteaux; Pierre Nora, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales;  Michael Rey (1953–1993); Thomas Scott-Railton; Elizabeth Wingrove, U of Michigan.

Expand Description

Arendt and America
Richard H. King
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Library of Congress JC251.A74K56 2015 | Dewey Decimal 320.5

German-Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–75) fled from the Nazis to New York in 1941, and during the next thirty years in America she wrote her best-known and most influential works, such as The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and On Revolution. Yet, despite the fact that a substantial portion of her oeuvre was written in America, not Europe, no one has directly considered the influence of America on her thought—until now. In Arendt and America, historian Richard H. King argues that while all of Arendt’s work was haunted by her experience of totalitarianism, it was only in her adopted homeland that she was able to formulate the idea of the modern republic as an alternative to totalitarian rule.
 
Situating Arendt within the context of U.S. intellectual, political, and social history, King reveals how Arendt developed a fascination with the political thought of the Founding Fathers. King also re-creates her intellectual exchanges with American friends and colleagues, such as Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, and shows how her lively correspondence with sociologist David Riesman helped her understand modern American culture and society. In the last section of Arendt and America, King sets out the context in which the Eichmann controversy took place and follows the debate about “the banality of evil” that has continued ever since.  As King shows, Arendt’s work, regardless of focus, was shaped by postwar American thought, culture, and politics, including the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War.

For Arendt, the United States was much more than a refuge from Nazi Germany; it was a stimulus to rethink the political, ethical, and historical traditions of human culture. This authoritative combination of intellectual history and biography offers a unique approach for thinking about the influence of America on Arendt’s ideas and also the effect of her ideas on American thought.
Expand Description

Arguing the Just War in Islam
John Kelsay
Harvard University Press, 2007

Jihad, with its many terrifying associations, is a term widely used today, though its meaning is poorly grasped. Few people understand the circumstances requiring a jihad, or "holy" war, or how Islamic militants justify their violent actions within the framework of the religious tradition of Islam. How Islam, with more than one billion followers, interprets jihad and establishes its precepts has become a critical issue for both the Muslim and the non-Muslim world. John Kelsay's timely and important work focuses on jihad of the sword in Islamic thought, history, and culture. Making use of original sources, Kelsay delves into the tradition of shari'a--Islamic jurisprudence and reasoning--and shows how it defines jihad as the Islamic analogue of the Western "just" war. He traces the arguments of thinkers over the centuries who have debated the legitimacy of war through appeals to shari'a reasoning. He brings us up to the present and demonstrates how contemporary Muslims across the political spectrum continue this quest for a realistic ethics of war within the Islamic tradition. Arguing the Just War in Islam provides a systematic account of how Islam's central texts interpret jihad, guiding us through the historical precedents and Qur'anic sources upon which today's claims to doctrinal truth and legitimate authority are made. In illuminating the broad spectrum of Islam's moral considerations of the just war, Kelsay helps Muslims and non-Muslims alike make sense of the possibilities for future war and peace.
Expand Description

The Argument and the Action of Plato's Laws
Leo Strauss
University of Chicago Press, 1977
Library of Congress JC71.P264S86 | Dewey Decimal 321.07

The posthumous publication of The Argument and the Action of Plato's "Laws" was compiled shortly before the death of Leo Strauss in 1973. Strauss offers an insightful and instructive reading through careful probing of Plato's classic text.

"Strauss's The Argument and the Action of Plato's 'Laws' reflects his interest in political thought, his dogged method of following the argument of the Laws step by step, and his vigorous defense of this dialogue's integrity in respect to the ideals of the Republic."—Cross Currents

"The unique characteristics of this commentary on the Laws reflect the care and precision which were the marks of Professor Strauss's efforts to understand the complex thoughts of other men."—Allan D. Nelson, Canadian Journal of Political Science

"Thorough and provocative, an important addition to Plato scholarship."—Library Journal

"The major purpose of the commentary is to provide a reading of the dialogue which displays its structural arrangement and the continuity of the argument."—J. W. Dy, Bibliographical Bulletin of Philosophy

"The reader of Strauss's book is indeed guided closely through the whole text."— M. J. Silverthorne, The Humanities Association Review

Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago.
Expand Description

Aristotle and Hamilton on Commerce and Statesmanship
Michael D. Chan
University of Missouri Press, 2006
Library of Congress HB74.P65C43 2006 | Dewey Decimal 330.1512

Although America’s founders may have been inspired by the political thought of ancient Greece and Rome, the United States is more often characterized by its devotion to the pursuit of commerce. Some have even said that a modern commercial republic such as the United States unavoidably lowers its moral horizon to little more than a concern with securing peace and prosperity so that commerce can flourish.

Michael Chan reconsiders this view of America through close readings of Aristotle and Alexander Hamilton, showing that America at its founding was neither as modern nor as low as we have been led to believe. He challenges the virtue/commerce divide that dominates modern thought by demonstrating that the prevailing views of Aristotle and Hamilton on commerce reflect misleading half-truths.

Chan first examines Aristotle’s views of economics as presented in the Politics, arguing that Aristotle was not as hostile to commerce as is commonly believed. He points out the philosopher’s belief in the value of commercial acquisition in the interest of supplying citizens with the “equipment of virtue,” citing Aristotle’s praise of commercial Carthage over agrarian but much-esteemed Sparta.

Chan then turns to a detailed account of the political economy of Hamilton, a proponent of an advanced industrial republic modeled on Great Britain. While many take Hamilton’s advocacy of public credit, a national bank, and manufacturing as evidence of his rejection of classical republican thought in favor of modernity, Chan contends that Hamilton embraced a classically inspired economic statesmanship that transcended a concern with merely securing peace and prosperity. Leading the reader through the complexities of Hamilton’s thought, Chan shows that he intended commerce to pursue the wider classical goals of forming the character of citizens, establishing harmony and justice, and pursuing national greatness. Rather than attempting to brand Hamilton an Aristotelian, Chan seeks to incorporate into the study of Hamilton’s political economy what Aristotle himself regarded as the statesman’s characteristic virtue, prudence.

By reflecting on Hamilton in the context of Aristotle’s own reflections on commerce, Chan casts him in a new light that cuts across the ongoing debate about liberal versus classical republican elements of the American founding. His cogent analysis also raises important questions regarding the American system as it is being challenged by conflicting worldviews. Aristotle and Hamilton on Commerce and Statesmanship makes a significant contribution to our understanding of both Hamiltonian thought and the moral worthiness of democratic capitalism.
Expand Description

Aristotle: Democracy and Political Science
Delba Winthrop
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Library of Congress JC75.D36W56 2018 | Dewey Decimal 320.011

Today, democracy is seen as the best or even the only legitimate form of government—hardly in need of defense. Delba Winthrop punctures this complacency and takes up the challenge of justifying democracy through Aristotle’s political science. In Aristotle’s time and in ours, democrats want inclusiveness; they want above all to include everyone a part of a whole. But what makes a whole? This is a question for both politics and philosophy, and Winthrop shows that Aristotle pursues the answer in the Politics. She uncovers in his political science the insights philosophy brings to politics and, especially, the insights politics brings to philosophy. Through her appreciation of this dual purpose and skilled execution of her argument, Winthrop’s discoveries are profound. Central to politics, she maintains, is the quality of assertiveness—the kind of speech that demands to be heard. Aristotle, she shows for the first time, carries assertive speech into philosophy, when human reason claims its due as a contribution to the universe.  Political science gets the high role of teacher to ordinary folk in democracy and to the few who want to understand what sustains it.
           
This posthumous publication is more than an honor to Delba Winthrop’s memory. It is a gift to partisans of democracy, advocates of justice, and students of Aristotle.
 
Expand Description

Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates: On the "Nicomachean Ethics"
Ronna Burger
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Library of Congress B430.B87 2008 | Dewey Decimal 171.3

What is the good life for a human being? Aristotle’s exploration of this question in the Nicomachean Ethics has established it as a founding work of Western philosophy, though its teachings have long puzzled readers and provoked spirited discussion. Adopting a radically new point of view, Ronna Burger deciphers some of the most perplexing conundrums of this influential treatise by approaching it as Aristotle’s dialogue with the Platonic Socrates.

Tracing the argument of the Ethics as it emerges through that approach, Burger’s careful reading shows how Aristotle represents ethical virtue from the perspective of those devoted to it while standing back to examine its assumptions and implications. 

“This is the best book I have read on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. It is so well crafted that reading it is like reading the Ethics itself, in that it provides an education in ethical matters that does justice to all sides of the issues.”—Mary P. Nichols, Baylor University

Expand Description

Aristotle's Politics: Living Well and Living Together
Eugene Garver
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Library of Congress JC71.A7G37 2011 | Dewey Decimal 320.011

“Man is a political animal,” Aristotle asserts near the beginning of the Politics. In this novel reading of one of the foundational texts of political philosophy, Eugene Garver traces the surprising implications of Aristotle’s claim and explores the treatise’s relevance to ongoing political concerns. Often dismissed as overly grounded in Aristotle’s specific moment in time, in fact the Politics challenges contemporary understandings of human action and allows us to better see ourselves today.

Close examination of Aristotle’s treatise, Garver finds, reveals a significant, practical role for philosophy to play in politics. Philosophers present arguments about issues—such as the right and the good, justice and modes of governance, the relation between the good person and the good citizen, and the character of a good life—that politicians must then make appealing to their fellow citizens. Completing Garver’s trilogy on Aristotle’s unique vision, Aristotle’s Politics yields new ways of thinking about ethics and politics, ancient and modern.
Expand Description

Aristotle's "Politics": Second Edition
Aristotle
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Library of Congress JC71.A45L67 2013 | Dewey Decimal 320.1

One of the fundamental works of Western political thought, Aristotle’s masterwork is the first systematic treatise on the science of politics. For almost three decades, Carnes Lord’s justly acclaimed translation has served as the standard English edition. Widely regarded as the most faithful to both the original Greek and Aristotle’s distinctive style, it is also written in clear, contemporary English.

This new edition of the Politics retains and adds to Lord’s already extensive notes, clarifying the flow of Aristotle’s argument and identifying literary and historical references. A glossary defines key terms in Aristotle’s philosophical-political vocabulary. Lord has made revisions to problematic passages throughout the translation in order to enhance both its accuracy and its readability. He has also substantially revised his introduction for the new edition, presenting an account of Aristotle’s life in relation to political events of his time; the character and history of his writings and of the Politics in particular; his overall conception of political science; and his impact on subsequent political thought from antiquity to the present. Further enhancing this new edition is an up-to-date selected bibliography.

Expand Description

Aristotle's Teaching in the "Politics"
Thomas L. Pangle
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Library of Congress JC71.A7P37 2013 | Dewey Decimal 320.011

With Aristotle’s Teaching in the “Politics,” Thomas L. Pangle offers a masterly new interpretation of this classic philosophical work. It is widely believed that the Politics originated as a written record of a series of lectures given by Aristotle, and scholars have relied on that fact to explain seeming inconsistencies and instances of discontinuity throughout the text. Breaking from this tradition, Pangle makes the work’s origin his starting point, reconceiving the Politics as the pedagogical tool of a master teacher.

With the Politics, Pangle argues, Aristotle seeks to lead his students down a deliberately difficult path of critical thinking about civic republican life. He adopts a Socratic approach, encouraging his students—and readers—to become active participants in a dialogue. Seen from this perspective, features of the work that have perplexed previous commentators become perfectly comprehensible as artful devices of a didactic approach. Ultimately, Pangle’s close and careful analysis shows that to understand the Politics, one must first appreciate how Aristotle’s rhetorical strategy is inextricably entwined with the subject of his work.

Expand Description

Arizona Politicians: The Noble and the Notorious
James W. Johnson; Illustrations by David "Fitz" Fitzsimmons
University of Arizona Press, 2002
Library of Congress F810.J64 2002 | Dewey Decimal 979.1050922

Do you know these famous Arizona politicians?
 
—A congresswoman who was bridesmaid to Eleanor Roosevelt
—A car dealer who propelled himself to the governor's mansion with the help of public recognition of his TV commercials
—An Arizonan who served not only as governor and chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, but also as the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate and chief sponsor of the GI Bill
—A cowboy who delivered speeches to ranchhands and went on to become a U.S. senator known as one of the great orators of the twentieth century
—One of four Arizonans who lost a bid for the presidency yet made the Gallup Poll as one of the ten most admired men in the world
—A secretary who became the first woman in the nation to sit on a state supreme court

For a state with a small population, Arizona has had an unusually strong presence on the national political scene. Barry Goldwater, Mo Udall, Bruce Babbitt, and John McCain made memorable runs for the White House over just the past four decades. Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior under Kennedy, was the first cabinet appointment from the state. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst and Supreme Court justice William Rehnquist were controversial appointees of Richard Nixon. And Arizona claims two of today's nine Supreme Court justices—not only Rehnquist, now Chief Justice, but also Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman ever appointed to the high court. Not all of Arizona's politicians have garnered such distinction. Two of the state's last four governors of the twentieth century, Evan Mecham and Fife Symington, faced criminal indictments and were forced out of office.

Journalist James Johnson has written profiles of 21 men and women from Arizona who have made their mark in the political arena. Chosen for their contributions to the state, their national prominence, their colorful personalities, and in some cases their notoriety, these prominent public servants—from first governor George W. P. Hunt to current senior senator McCain—all have been major participants in state or national affairs. Congressman Mo Udall once commented on Arizona's "civilized brand of politics," in which Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, treated one another with mutual respect. Johnson conveys both the spirit and spiritedness of Arizona politics and reveals how in many cases these politicians and their family members found their lives and careers overlapping. He tells their stories with humor and objectivity, while political cartoonist David Fitzsimmons captures their trademark styles in original drawings.

Although the individuals may speak from different platforms, all have been proud to call themselves Arizonans and proud to serve their state. This book shares their accomplishments and shows how, for better or worse, they've helped put Arizona in the spotlight.
Expand Description

Arlen Specter: Scandals, Conspiracies, and Crisis in Focus
Evan Laine
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

From his early work as a lawyer on the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to his days as Philadelphia’s district attorney to his thirty-year career as a United States Senator from Pennsylvania, Arlen Spector found himself consistently in the middle of major historical events. During his five terms as senator, Spector met with the likes of Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat and Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro and made significant contributions during the fallout of both the Iran-Contra scandal and the Clinton impeachment. His work had a profound influence on the configuration of the United States Supreme Court, the criminal justice system, LGBTQ rights, and stem cell research. Photographs from Specter’s personal collection highlight many of these key moments, revealing the rich narrative not only of one man’s political career, but how it helped shape a nation. While it will probably be long debated whether Specter’s complex and controversial political legacy merits mainly praise or criticism, Arlen Specter sheds new light on the life of a man who fought to make a difference.
Expand Description

Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Politics of the Pluriverse
Martin Savransky
Duke University Press, 2021

In Around the Day in Eighty Worlds Martin Savransky calls for a radical politics of the pluriverse amid the ongoing devastation of the present. Responding to an epoch marked by the history of colonialism and ecological devastation, Savransky draws on the pragmatic pluralism of William James to develop what he calls a “pluralistic realism”—an understanding of the world as simultaneously one and many, ongoing and unfinished, underway and yet to be made. Savransky explores the radical multifariousness of reality by weaving key aspects of James's thought together with divergent worlds and stories: of Magellan's circumnavigations, sorcery in Mozambique, God's felt presence among a group of evangelicals in California, visible spirits in Zambia, and ghosts in the wake of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Throughout, he experiments with these storied worlds to dramatize new ways of approaching the politics of radical difference and the possibility of transforming reality. By exploring and constructing relations between James's pluralism and the ontological turn in anthropology, Savransky offers a new conceptualization of the pluriverse that fosters modes of thinking and living otherwise.
Expand Description

Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century
Hendrik Meijer
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Library of Congress E748.V18M45 2017 | Dewey Decimal 328.73092

The idea that a Senator—Republican or Democrat—would put the greater good of the country ahead of party seems nearly impossible to imagine in our current climate of gridlock and divisiveness. But this hasn’t always been the case. Arthur H. Vandenberg (1884–1951), Republican from Grand Rapids, Michigan, was the model of a consensus builder, and the coalitions he spearheaded continue to form the foundation of American foreign and domestic policy today. Edward R. Murrow called him “the central pivot of the entire era,” yet, despite his significance, Vandenberg has never received the full public attention he is due—until now. With this authoritative biography, Hendrik Meijer reveals how Vandenberg built and nurtured the bipartisan consensus that created the American Century.
           
Originally the editor and publisher of the Grand Rapids Herald, Vandenberg was appointed and later elected to the Senate in 1928, where he became an outspoken opponent of the New Deal and a leader among the isolationists who resisted FDR’s efforts to aid European allies at the onset of World War II. But Vandenberg soon recognized the need for unity at the dawn of a new world order; and as a Republican leader, he worked closely with Democratic administrations to build the strong bipartisan consensus that established the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, and NATO. Vandenberg, as Meijer reveals, was instrumental in organizing Congressional support for these monumental twentieth-century foreign policy decisions.

Vandenberg’s life and career offer powerful lessons for today, and Meijer has given us a story that suggests an antidote to our current democratic challenges. After reading this poignant biography, many will ask: Where is the Vandenberg of today?
 
Expand Description

Arts of the Political: New Openings for the Left
Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift
Duke University Press, 2013
Library of Congress JA76.A474 2013 | Dewey Decimal 320.53

In the West, "the Left," understood as a loose conglomeration of interests centered around the goal of a fairer and more equal society, still struggles to make its voice heard and its influence felt, even amid an overwhelming global recession. In Arts of the Political: New Openings for the Left, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift argue that only by broadening the domain of what is considered political and what can be made into politics will the Left be able to respond forcefully to injustice and inequality. In particular, the Left requires a more imaginative and experimental approach to the politics of creating a better society. The authors propose three political arts that they consider crucial to transforming the Left: boosting invention, leveraging organization, and mobilizing affect. They maintain that successful Left political movements tend to surpass traditional notions of politics and open up political agency to these kinds of considerations. In other words, rather than providing another blueprint for the future, Amin and Thrift concentrate their attention on a more modest examination of the conduct of politics itself and the ways that it can be made more effective.
Expand Description

As If: Idealization and Ideals
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Harvard University Press, 2017
Library of Congress B823.A83 2017 | Dewey Decimal 141

Idealization is a basic feature of human thought. We proceed “as if” our representations were true, while knowing they are not. Kwame Anthony Appiah defends the centrality of the imagination in science, morality, and everyday life and shows that our best chance for accessing reality is to open our minds to a plurality of idealized depictions.
Expand Description

At the Limits of Political Philosophy: From "Brilliant Errors" to Things of Uncommon Importance
James V. Schall
Catholic University of America Press, 1996
Library of Congress JA71.S277 1996 | Dewey Decimal 320.01

James V. Schall presents, in a convincing and articulate manner, the revelational contribution to political philosophy, particularly that which comes out of the Roman Catholic tradition.
Expand Description

The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Library of Congress JC251.A74P57 1998 | Dewey Decimal 320.5092

"The European intellectual Hannah Arendt worried about the tendency of social structures to take on a life of their own and paralyze individual action. Pitkin . . . is determined to trace our problems to the actions of individuals. This book is thus a battle of wits. . . . [A] vivid sketch of the conflict between two basic outlooks."—Library Journal

"[O]ne leaves this book feeling enriched and challenged. Pitkin prompts us to rethink our understanding of Arendt and to demythologize the pervasive sense of political helplessness Arendt herself sought so hard to articulate. . . . [A] cause for celebration."—Peter Baehr, Times Literary Supplement

"[Arendt] is certainly among the most original and outstanding political theorists of the twentieth century. . . . It is difficult to imagine a hostile critic examining more effectively than Pitkin . . . Arendt's concept of the social, for hostility would inhibit the acquisition of the mastery of Arendt's texts that Pitkin displays at every turn."—Peter Berkowitz, New Republic
Expand Description

The Authoritarian State (CW4): An Essay on the Problem of the Austrian State
Eric Voegelin, Edited & Intro by Gilbert Weiss, Translated by Ruth Hein, & Historical Commentary by Erika Weinzierl
University of Missouri Press, 1999
Library of Congress B3354.V88 1989 vol. 4 | Dewey Decimal 193

Published in Vienna in 1936, The Authoritarian State by Eric Voegelin has remained virtually unknown to the public until now. Sales of the German edition were halted following the Nazi invasion of Austria in 1938, and the entire printing was later destroyed by wartime bombing. In this volume, Voegelin offers a critical examination of the most prominent European theories of state and constitutional law of the period while providing a political and historical analysis of the Austrian situation. He discusses the dismissal of Parliament in 1933, the civil war, the murder of Federal Chancellor Dollfuss, the adoption of the "Authoritarian Constitution" of 1934, and the predicament of being sandwiched between Hitler and Mussolini.

A radical critique of Hans Kelsen's pure theory of law lies at the heart of this work, marking Voegelin's definitive departure from Neo-Kantian epistemology. For the first time, Voegelin elaborates on the important distinction between theoretical concepts and political symbols as a basis for explaining the nontheoretical and speculative character of ideologies, both left and right. He shows that total and authoritarian are symbols of ideological self-interpretation that have no theoretical value, a distinction basic to his later work in The New Science of Politics.

Available for the first time in English, The Authoritarian State is a valuable addition to the Voegelin canon and to the field of intellectual history in general.

Expand Description

Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory
Wendy Brown, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Library of Congress JC480.B769 2018 | Dewey Decimal 321.9

Across the Euro-Atlantic world, political leaders have been mobilizing their bases with nativism, racism, xenophobia, and paeans to “traditional values,” in brazen bids for electoral support. How are we to understand this move to the mainstream of political policies and platforms that lurked only on the far fringes through most of the postwar era?  Does it herald a new wave of authoritarianism? Is liberal democracy itself in crisis? 
 
In this volume, three distinguished scholars draw on critical theory to address our current predicament.  Wendy Brown, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky share a conviction that critical theory retains the power to illuminate the forces producing the current political constellation as well as possible paths away from it.  Brown explains how “freedom” has become a rallying cry for manifestly un-emancipatory movements; Gordon dismantles the idea that fascism is rooted in the susceptible psychology of individual citizens and reflects instead on the broader cultural and historical circumstances that lend it force; and Pensky brings together the unlikely pair of Tocqueville and Adorno to explore how democracies can buckle under internal pressure. These incisive essays do not seek to smooth over the irrationality of the contemporary world, and they do not offer the false comforts of an easy return to liberal democratic values. Rather, the three authors draw on their deep engagements with nineteenth–and twentieth–century thought to investigate the historical and political contradictions that have brought about this moment, offering fiery and urgent responses to the demands of the day.
 
Expand Description

Autobiographical Reflections, Revised Edition with Glossary
Eric Voegelin, edited with an introduction by Ellis Sandoz
University of Missouri Press, 2011

Autobiographical Reflections is a window into the mind of a man whose reassessment of the nature of history and thought has overturned traditional approaches to, and appraisals of, the Western intellectual tradition. Here we encounter the motivations for Voegelin's work, the stages in the development of his unique philosophy of consciousness, his key intellectual breakthroughs, his theory of history, and his diagnosis of the political ills of the modern age.
 
Included in this revised volume is a glossary of terms used in Voegelin’s writings. The glossary lists, defines, and illustrates from the author’s writings many of the key terms employed, paying particular attention to the Greek terms. Together, the glossary and enlarged index systematically include names, subjects, ideas, writings, and terms, making this volume an indispensable help for any serious study of Eric Voegelin’s oeuvre.
Expand Description

Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State
Philip Holden
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
Library of Congress CT25.H65 2008 | Dewey Decimal 808.06692

Philip Holden reveals deeply gendered connections between the writing of individual lives and of the narratives of nations emerging from colonialism. Autobiography and Decolonization is the first book to give serious academic attention to autobiographies of nationalist leaders in the process of decolonization, attending to them not simply as partial historical documents, but as texts involved in remaking the world views of their readers.
            Holden examines Mohandas K. Gandhi’s An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Marcus Garvey’s fragmentary Autobiography,Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound, Lee Kuan Yew’s The Singapore Story, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Jawaharlal Nehru’s An Autobiography, and Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana:The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah.
            Holden argues that these examples of life writing have had significant influence on the formation of new, and often profoundly gendered, national identities. These narratives constitute the nation less as an imagined community than as an imagined individual. Moving from the past to the promise of the future, they mediate relationships between public and private, and between individual and collective stories. Ultimately, they show how the construction of modern selfhood is inextricably linked to the construction of a postcolonial polity.
Expand Description

The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman
Edited with a New Introduction by Robert H. Ferrell
University of Missouri Press, 2002
Library of Congress E814.A32 2002 | Dewey Decimal 973.918092

The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman is a compilation of autobiographical writings composed by Truman between 1934 and 1972. Taken directly from his own manuscript material, the volume presents the thoughts and feelings of the man himself. The book touches on details in Truman’s life from his days as a boy until graduation from Independence High School in 1901 to the vice presidency of the United States and beyond. There is also a memorandum written by Truman about the Pendergast machine in Kansas City telling how it was possible to work with the machine and not be soiled by it. The Autobiography concludes with some of the retired president’s thoughts about politics and the purposes of public life.
Expand Description

The Autonomous Animal: Self-Governance and the Modern Subject
Claire E. Rasmussen
University of Minnesota Press, 2011
Library of Congress JC327.R33 2011 | Dewey Decimal 320.15

Autonomy is a vital concept in much of modern theory, defining the Subject as capable of self-governance. Democratic theory relies on the concept of autonomy to provide justification for participatory government and the normative goal of democratic governance, which is to protect the ability of the individual to self-govern.

Offering the first examination of the concept of autonomy from a postfoundationalist perspective, The Autonomous Animal analyzes how the ideal of self-governance has shaped everyday life. Claire E. Rasmussen begins by considering the academic terrain of autonomy, then focusing on specific examples of political behavior that allow her to interrogate these theories. She demonstrates how the adolescent—a not-yet-autonomous subject—highlights how the ideal of self-governance generates practices intended to cultivate autonomy by forming the individual’s relationship to his or her body. She points up how the war on drugs rests on the perception that drug addicts are the antithesis of autonomy and thus must be regulated for their own good. Showing that the animal rights movement may challenge the distinction between human and animal, Rasmussen also examines the place of the endurance athlete in fitness culture, where self-management of the body is the exemplar of autonomous subjectivity.

Expand Description

Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America
Jack Turner
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Library of Congress HT1521.T875 2012 | Dewey Decimal 305.800973

The election of America’s first black president has led many to believe that race is no longer a real obstacle to success and that remaining racial inequality stems largely from the failure of minority groups to take personal responsibility for seeking out opportunities. Often this argument is made in the name of the long tradition of self-reliance and American individualism. In Awakening to Race, Jack Turner upends this view, arguing that it expresses not a deep commitment to the values of individualism, but a narrow understanding of them.
 
Drawing on the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, Turner offers an original reconstruction of democratic individualism in American thought. All these thinkers, he shows, held that personal responsibility entails a refusal to be complicit in injustice and a duty to combat the conditions and structures that support it. At a time when individualism is invoked as a reason for inaction, Turner makes the individualist tradition the basis of a bold and impassioned case for race consciousness—consciousness of the ways that race continues to constrain opportunity in America. Turner’s “new individualism” becomes the grounds for concerted public action against racial injustice.
Expand Description

READERS
Browse our collection.

PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.

STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.


SEARCH

ADVANCED SEARCH

BROWSE

by TOPIC
  • by BISAC SUBJECT
  • by LOC SUBJECT
by TITLE
by AUTHOR
by PUBLISHER
WANDER
RANDOM TOPIC
ABOUT BIBLIOVAULT
EBOOK FULFILLMENT
CONTACT US

More to explore...
Recently published by academic presses

                   


home | accessibility | search | about | contact us

BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2021
The University of Chicago Press

BiblioVault A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Results
  •  # 
  •  A 
  •  B 
  •  C 
  •  D 
  •  E 
  •  F 
  •  G 
  •  H 
  •  I 
  •  J 
  •  K 
  •  L 
  •  M 
  •  N 
  •  O 
  •  P 
  •  R 
  •  S 
  •  T 
  •  U 
  •  V 
  •  W 
  •  Y 
  •  Z 
  • PUBLISHER LOGIN
  • ADVANCED SEARCH
  • BROWSE BY TOPIC
  • BROWSE BY TITLE
  • BROWSE BY AUTHOR
  • BROWSE BY PUBLISHER
  • ABOUT BIBLIOVAULT
  • EBOOK FULFILLMENT
  • CONTACT US
886 books about Political and 70 886 books about Political
 70
 start with A  start with A
Aaron Henry of Mississippi
Inside Agitator
Minion K. C. Morrison
University of Arkansas Press, 2015
Winner of the 2016 Lillian Smith Book Award

When Aaron Henry returned home to Mississippi from World War II service in 1946, he was part of wave of black servicemen who challenged the racial status quo. He became a pharmacist through the GI Bill, and as a prominent citizen, he organized a hometown chapter of the NAACP and relatively quickly became leader of the state chapter.

From that launching pad he joined and helped lead an ensemble of activists who fundamentally challenged the system of segregation and the almost total exclusion of African Americans from the political structure. These efforts were most clearly evident in his leadership of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation, which, after an unsuccessful effort to unseat the lily-white Democratic delegation at the Democratic National Convention in 1964, won recognition from the national party in 1968.

The man who the New York Times described as being “at the forefront of every significant boycott, sit-in, protest march, rally, voter registration drive and court case” eventually became a rare example of a social-movement leader who successfully moved into political office. Aaron Henry of Mississippi covers the life of this remarkable leader, from his humble beginnings in a sharecropping family to his election to the Mississippi house of representatives in 1979, all the while maintaining the social-change ideology that prompted him to improve his native state, and thereby the nation.
[more]

Abbie Hoffman
American Rebel
Jezer, Marty
Rutgers University Press, 1993
In this sympathetic history of a maligned decade, Marty Jezer, a fellow antiwar activist, details Abbie Hoffman's humor, manic energy, depressive spells, political skills, & above all, his incurable & still contagious optimism. He presents a thoughtful, solidly researched biography of the wildly creative & iconoclastic Yippie, portraying Hoffman as a fresh force in American political culture. Jezer surveys in detail the politics, philosophies, & struggles of the antiwar movement.

"... Abbie, more than any other radical, showed potheads how to demonstrate and radicals how to dance." -- Chicago Tribune

"... deeply sympathetic and scrupulously detached-a triumph of judicious empathy." -- MARTIN DUBERMAN, Distinguished Professor of History, Lehman/The Graduate School, C.U.N.Y.

"... details Hoffman's humor, manic energy, depressive spells, political skills, and above all, his Incurable and still contagious optimism." -- Entertainment Weekly

"Here's the Abbie I knew and loved! Marty Jezer has captured him in all his complexity, dedication, humor, and heart." -- ANITA HOFFMAN
[more]

Abraham Epstein
The Forgotten Father of Social Security
Pierre Epstein
University of Missouri Press, 2006
Social Security has long been called the third rail of American politics—an unassailable institution for which we can thank Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Or can we?
Abraham Epstein was a major figure in American social reform during the first half of the twentieth century. His name and his theories appear in almost every book written on Social Security and the New Deal, but a full account of his life has never been made. Epstein’s son, Pierre, now secures his legacy in this book that tells for the first time the story of his father’s role in the conception and enactment of Social Security and sheds new light on the inner workings of the Roosevelt administration.
Combining memoir and intellectual history, Pierre Epstein takes readers behind the scenes of New Deal legislation to tell how his father’s fast-moving career led him to become the real architect of Social Security—he even came up with those two words to explain his theories. A prolific journalist, founder of the American Association for Social Security, and author of numerous books, including Insecurity: A Challenge to America, Abe Epstein fought desperately with FDR to remedy the failings of the original Social Security Act—only to be cast aside by political machinations. Nonetheless, the exclusion did not stop him from making significant contributions to the 1939 amendments that solidified Social Security for coming generations of Americans.
In this book readers will meet a colorful and tenacious player in the history of this critical piece of social insurance legislation—an obsessed reformer who mobilized support from the bottom up for his vision of Social Security. They will also meet his family and learn of the struggles and frustrations Abe Epstein faced in making his way in America as an immigrant Russian Jew.
This engaging book fills a major gap in the historical record, showing that Social Security is more than a technical subject about finance and actuarial statistics, that it is primarily a human idea with deep philosophical roots. In the face of today’s privatization controversy, Abraham Epstein’s theories have much to tell us about the current debate while Pierre Epstein’s insightful narrative shows us the underlying importance of one man’s indelible legacy.
[more]

Abraham Lincoln, Philosopher Statesman
Joseph R. Fornieri
Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

2015 ISHS Superior Achievement Award

What constitutes Lincoln’s political greatness as a statesman? As a great leader, he saved the Union, presided over the end of slavery, and helped to pave the way for an interracial democracy. His great speeches provide enduring wisdom about human equality, democracy, free labor, and free society. Joseph R. Fornieri contends that Lincoln’s political genius is best understood in terms of a philosophical statesmanship that united greatness of thought and action, one that combined theory and practice. This philosophical statesmanship, Fornieri argues, can best be understood in terms of six dimensions of political leadership: wisdom, prudence, duty, magnanimity, rhetoric, and patriotism. Drawing on insights from history, politics, and philosophy, Fornieri tackles the question of how Lincoln’s statesmanship displayed each of these crucial elements.

Providing an accessible framework for understanding Lincoln’s statesmanship, this thoughtful study examines the sixteenth president’s political leadership in terms of the traditional moral vision of statecraft as understood by epic political philosophers such as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Fornieri contends that Lincoln’s character is best understood in terms of Aquinas’s understanding of magnanimity or greatness of soul, the crowning virtue of statesmanship. True political greatness, as embodied by Lincoln, involves both humility and sacrificial service for the common good. The enduring wisdom and timeless teachings of these great thinkers, Fornieri shows, can lead to a deeper appreciation of statesmanship and of its embodiment in Abraham Lincoln.

With the great philosophers and books of western civilization as his guide, Fornieri demonstrates the important contribution of normative political philosophy to an understanding of our sixteenth president. Informed by political theory that draws on the classics in revealing the timelessness of Lincoln’s example, his interdisciplinary study offers profound insights for anyone interested in the nature of leadership, statesmanship, political philosophy, political ethics, political history, and constitutional law.

[more]

Achieve the Honorable
A Missouri Congressman's Journey from Warm Springs to Washington
Ike Skelton
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013
Growing up during the Great Depression and World War II, Ike Skelton dreamed of joining the military. That dream was shattered when he contracted one of the most dreaded diseases of the era: polio. Far from abandoning hope, Skelton, after treatment at Warm Springs, Georgia, overcame his disability and went on to become a college athlete, a celebrated lawyer, a Missouri state senator, and a U.S. Congressman. Achieve the Honorable is the deeply personal tale of Ike Skelton’s determined journey from the small town of Lexington, Missouri, to Capitol Hill.

During his years in the U.S. House of Representatives, Skelton became known as a bipartisan negotiator and a champion of the Armed Services. Throughout the decades, he helped steer the nation through its most dangerous challenges, from Communism to terrorism; took a leading role in the reform of the Department of Defense; dedicated himself to fulfilling the interests of his constituents; and eventually rose to become chair of the House Armed Services Committee during such pivotal events as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to detailing Skelton’s political career and its accompanying challenges and triumphs, Achieve the Honorable provides inside glimpses into the lives of political titans like Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton. Along the way, we are treated to Skelton’s engaging humor and shrewd insight into twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. politics. 

[more]

The Actual and the Rational
Hegel and Objective Spirit
Jean-Francois Kervegan
University of Chicago Press, 2018
One of Hegel’s most controversial and confounding claims is that “the real is rational and the rational is real.” In this book, one of the world’s leading scholars of Hegel, Jean-François Kervégan, offers a thorough analysis and explanation of that claim, along the way delivering a compelling account of modern social, political, and ethical life.

​Kervégan begins with Hegel’s term “objective spirit,” the public manifestation of our deepest commitments, the binding norms that shape our existence as subjects and agents. He examines objective spirit in three realms: the notion of right, the theory of society, and the state. In conversation with Tocqueville and other theorists of democracy, whether in the Anglophone world or in Europe, Kervégan shows how Hegel—often associated with grand metaphysical ideas—actually had a specific conception of civil society and the state. In Hegel’s view, public institutions represent the fulfillment of deep subjective needs—and in that sense, demonstrate that the real is the rational, because what surrounds us is the product of our collective mindedness. This groundbreaking analysis will guide the study of Hegel and nineteenth-century political thought for years to come.
[more]

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment
Iain McDaniel
Harvard University Press, 2013
Unlike his contemporaries, who saw Europe’s prosperity as confirmation of a utopian future, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Ferguson saw a reminder of Rome’s lesson that egalitarian democracy could become a self-undermining path to dictatorship. This is a major reassessment of a critic overshadowed today by David Hume and Adam Smith.
[more]

Adiós Muchachos
A Memoir of the Sandinista Revolution
Sergio Ramírez
Duke University Press, 2012
Adiós Muchachos is a candid insider’s account of the leftist Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. During the 1970s, Sergio Ramírez led prominent intellectuals, priests, and business leaders to support the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), against Anastasio Somoza’s dictatorship. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza regime in 1979, Ramírez served as vice-president under Daniel Ortega from 1985 until 1990, when the FSLN lost power in a national election. Disillusioned by his former comrades’ increasing intolerance of dissent and resistance to democratization, Ramírez defected from the Sandinistas in 1995 and founded the Sandinista Renovation Movement. In Adiós Muchachos, he describes the utopian aspirations for liberation and reform that motivated the Sandinista revolution against the Somoza regime, as well as the triumphs and shortcomings of the movement’s leadership as it struggled to turn an insurrection into a government, reconstruct a country beset by poverty and internal conflict, and defend the revolution against the Contras, an armed counterinsurgency supported by the United States. Adiós Muchachos was first published in 1999. Based on a later edition, this translation includes Ramírez’s thoughts on more recent developments, including the re-election of Daniel Ortega as president in 2006.
[more]

Aesthetics and Marxism
Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western Contemporaries
Kang Liu
Duke University Press, 2000
Although Chinese Marxism—primarily represented by Maoism—is generally seen by Western intellectuals as monolithic, Liu Kang argues that its practices and projects are as diverse as those in Western Marxism, particularly in the area of aesthetics. In this comparative study of European and Chinese Marxist traditions, Liu reveals the extent to which Chinese Marxists incorporate ideas about aesthetics and culture in their theories and practices. In doing so, he constructs a wholly new understanding of Chinese Marxism.
Far from being secondary considerations in Chinese Marxism, aesthetics and culture are in fact principal concerns. In this respect, such Marxists are similar to their Western counterparts, although Europeans have had little understanding of the Chinese experience. Liu traces the genealogy of aesthetic discourse in both modern China and the West since the era of classical German thought, showing where conceptual modifications and divergences have occurred in the two traditions. He examines the work of Mao Zedong, Lu Xun, Li Zehou, Qu Qiubai, and others in China, and from the West he discusses Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Marxist theorists including Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse. While stressing the diversity of Marxist positions within China as well as in the West, Liu explains how ideas of culture and aesthetics have offered a constructive vision for a postrevolutionary society and have affected a wide field of issues involving the problems of modernity.
Forcefully argued and theoretically sophisticated, this book will appeal to students and scholars of contemporary Marxism, cultural studies, aesthetics, and modern Chinese culture, politics, and ideology.
[more]

Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment
George E. Marcus, W. Russell Neuman, and Michael MacKuen
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Although the rational choice approach toward political behavior has been severely criticized, its adherents claim that competing models have failed to offer a more scientific model of political decisionmaking. This measured but provocative book offers precisely that: an alternative way of understanding political behavior based on cognitive research.

The authors draw on research in neuroscience, physiology, and experimental psychology to conceptualize habit and reason as two mental states that interact in a delicate, highly functional balance controlled by emotion. Applying this approach to more than fifteen years of election results, they shed light on a wide range of political behavior, including party identification, symbolic politics, and negative campaigning.

Remarkably accessible, Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment urges social scientists to move beyond the idealistic notion of the purely rational citizen to form a more complete, realistic model that includes the emotional side of human judgment.
[more]

African American Political Thought
A Collected History
Edited by Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner
University of Chicago Press, 2020
African American Political Thought offers an unprecedented philosophical history of thinkers from the African American community and African diaspora who have addressed the central issues of political life: democracy, race, violence, liberation, solidarity, and mass political action. Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner have brought together leading scholars to reflect on individual intellectuals from the past four centuries, developing their list with an expansive approach to political expression. The collected essays consider such figures as Martin Delany, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois,  James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, whose works are addressed by scholars such as Farah Jasmin Griffin, Robert Gooding-Williams, Michael Dawson, Nick Bromell, Neil Roberts, and Lawrie Balfour.

While African American political thought is inextricable from the historical movement of American political thought, this volume stresses the individuality of Black thinkers, the transnational and diasporic consciousness, and how individual speakers and writers draw on various traditions simultaneously to broaden our conception of African American political ideas.  This landmark volume gives us the opportunity to tap into the myriad and nuanced political theories central to Black life. In doing so, African American Political Thought: A Collected History transforms how we understand the past and future of political thinking in the West.
 
[more]

African Leaders of the Twentieth Century
Biko, Selassie, Lumumba, Sankara
Lindy Wilson
Ohio University Press, 2015

A History Book Club Reading Selection

This omnibus edition brings together concise and up-to-date biographies of Steve Biko, Emperor Haile Selassie, Patrice Lumumba, and Thomas Sankara. African Leaders of the Twentieth Century will complement courses in history and political science and serve as a useful collection for the general reader.

Steve Biko, by Lindy Wilson
Steve Biko inspired a generation of black South Africans to claim their true identity and refuse to be a part of their own oppression. This short biography shows how fundamental he was to the reawakening and transformation of South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century and just how relevant he remains.

Emperor Haile Selassie, by Bereket Habte Selassie
Emperor Haile Selassie was an iconic figure of the twentieth century, a progressive monarch who ruled Ethiopia from 1916 to 1974. The fascinating story of the emperor¹s life is also the story of modern Ethiopia.

Patrice Lumumba, by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja
Patrice Lumumba was a leader of the independence struggle in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Decades after his assassination, Lumumba remains one of the heroes of the twentieth-century Africanindependence movement.

Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary, by Ernest Harsch
Thomas Sankara, often called the African Che Guevara, was president of Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa, until his assassination during the military coup that brought down his government. This is the first English-language book to tell the story of Sankara’s life and struggles.

[more]

After Capitalism
Horizons of Finance, Culture, and Citizenship
Ferguson, Kennan
Rutgers University Press, 2016
From Thomas Piketty to David Harvey, scholars are increasingly questioning whether we are entering into a post-capitalist era. If so, does this new epoch signal the failure of capitalism and emergence of alternative systems? Or does it mark the ultimate triumph of capitalism as it evolves into an unstoppable entity that takes new forms as it engulfs its opposition? 
 
After Capitalism brings together leading scholars from across the academy to offer competing perspectives on capitalism’s past incarnations, present conditions, and possible futures.  Some contributors reassess classic theorizations of capitalism in light of recent trends, including real estate bubbles, debt relief protests, and the rise of a global creditocracy. Others examine Marx’s writings, unemployment, hoarding, “capitalist realism,” and coyote (trickster) capitalism, among many other topics. Media and design trends locate the key ideologies of the current economic moment, with authors considering everything from the austerity aesthetics of reality TV to the seductive smoothness of liquid crystal. 
 
Even as it draws momentous conclusions about global economic phenomena, After Capitalism also pays close attention to locales as varied as Cuba, India, and Latvia, examining the very different ways that economic conditions have affected the relationship between the state and its citizens. Collectively, these essays raise provocative questions about how we should imagine capitalism in the twenty-first century. Will capitalism, like all economic systems, come to an end, or does there exist in history or elsewhere a hidden world that is already post-capitalist, offering alternative possibilities for thought and action?  
 
[more]

After the Bombs
Arturo Arias
Northwestern University Press, 1990
After the Bombs is a coming of age story that holds a mirror up to the modern history of Guatemala—a funhouse mirror of richly inventive and farcical black comedy which provides a better description of life in that country than any history book ever could. It opens with the bombing of Guatemala City in 1954 when the hero, Max, is a small child. In a swiftly moving narrative, Max journeys toward adulthood, searching for his identity, for his father, and along the way, for the real Guatemala and the possibility of a society founded on human decency, after the bombs.
[more]

Against Capital in the Twenty-First Century
A Reader of Radical Undercurrents
John Asimakopoulos
Temple University Press, 2018

The problems of capitalism have been studied from Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty. The latter has recently confirmed that the system of capital is deeply bound up in ever-growing inequality without challenging the continuance of that system. Against Capital in the Twenty-First Century presents a diversity of analyses and visions opposed to the idea that capital should have yet another century to govern human and non-human resources in the interest of profit and accumulation. The editors and contributors to this timely volume present alternatives to the whole liberal litany of administered economies, tax policy recommendations, and half-measures. They undermine and reject the logic of capital, and the foregone conclusion that the twenty-first century should be given over to capital just as the previous two centuries were.

Providing a deep critique of capitalism, based on assessment from a wide range of cultural, social, political, and ecological thinking, Against Capital in the Twenty-First Century insists that transformative, revolutionary, and abolitionist responses to capital are even more necessary in the twenty-first century than they ever were.

[more]

Against Obligation
Abner S. Greene
Harvard University Press, 2012
Greene argues that citizens are not morally obligated to obey the law and that officials need not follow prior or higher authority when reading the Constitution. The sources of authority in a liberal democracy are multiple—the law must compete with other norms. Constitutional meaning is not locked in, historically or by the Supreme Court.
[more]

Against the Flood
Ma Van Khang
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Against the Flood caused a sensation in Viet Nam when it was published in 1999 because of its controversial description of sex and politics in that country. The plot revolves around a writer, Khiem, whose book is banned and who is publicly censured by his contemporaries, while the tangled relationships in his own circle involve drug-trafficking and adultery. His lover, a pretty and intelligent woman, is slandered and sacked from her job and becomes involved in the opium trade. Meanwhile, his wife, a smuggler, has an extramarital affair that results in pregnancy. The novel presents a vivid picture of contemporary Vietnamese society, examining the dramatic tensions inherent in a changing society, and is imbued with the themes of friendship, love, and betrayal.
[more]

The Age of Responsibility
Yascha Mounk
Harvard University Press, 2017
Yascha Mounk shows why a focus on personal responsibility is wrong and counterproductive: it distracts us from the larger economic forces determining aggregate outcomes, ignores what we owe fellow citizens regardless of their choices, and blinds us to key values such as the desire to live in a society of equals. In this book he proposes a remedy.
[more]

Agnes Heller
A Moralist in the Vortex of History
John Grumley
Pluto Press, 2005
Agnes Heller is one of the leading thinkers to come out of the tradition of critical theory. Her awesome intellectual range and output includes ethics, philosophical anthropology, political philosophy and a theory of modernity and its culture.

Hungarian by birth, she was one of the best known dissident Marxists in central Europe in the 1960's and 1970's. Since her forced immigration she has held visiting lectureships all over the world and has been the Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York for the last twenty years.

This introduction to her thought is ideal for all students of philosophy, political theory and sociology. Grumley explores Heller's early work, elaborating her relation to Lukacs and the evolution of her own version of Marxism. He examines the subsequent break with Marxism and the initial development of an alternative radical philosophy. Finally, he explains and assesses her mature reflective post-modernism, a perspective that is both sceptical and utopian, that upholds a critical humanist perspective just as it critiques contemporary democratic culture.
[more]

Albert Camus' Critique of Modernity
Ronald D. Srigley
University of Missouri Press, 2011
Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus’ contributions to political and cultural analysis make him one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. Camus’ writing has been heavily researched and analyzed in academia, with many scholars concentrating on the formal tri-part structure he adhered to in his later work: the cycle that divided his books into stages of the absurd, rebellion, and love. Yet other aspects of Camus’ work—his preoccupation with modernity and its association with Christianity, his fixations on Greek thought and classical imagery—have been largely neglected by critical study. These subjects of Camus’ have long deserved critical analysis, and Ronald D. Srigley finally pays them due attention in Albert Camus’ Critique of Modernity.

The straightforward, chronological readings of Camus’ cycles perceive them as simple advancement—the absurd is bad, rebellion is better, and love is best of all. Yet the difficulty with that perspective, Srigley argues, is that it ignores the relationships between the cycles. As the cycles progress, far from denoting improvement, they describe experiences that grow darker and more violent.

Albert Camus’ Critique of Modernity also ventures into new interpretations of seminal works—The Myth ofSisyphus, The Rebel, and The Fall—that illuminate Camus’ critique of Christianity and modernity and his return to the Greeks. The book explores how those texts relate to the cyclical structure of Camus’ works and examines the limitations of the project of the cycles as Camus originally conceived it.

Albert Camus’ Critique of Modernity presents the decisive vision of that ultimate project: to critique Christianity, modernity, and the relationship between them and also to restore the Greek wisdom that had been eclipsed by both traditions. In contrast to much current scholarship, which interprets Camus’ concerns as modern or even postmodern, Srigley contends that Camus’ ambition ran in the opposite direction of history—that his principal aim was to articulate the themes of the ancients, highlighting Greek anthropology and political philosophy.

This book follows the trajectory of Camus’ work, examining the structure and content of Camus’ writing through a new lens. This assessment of Camus, in its unique approach and perspective, opens up new avenues of research regarding the accomplishments of this prominent philosopher and invigorates Camus studies. A thoroughly sourced text, Albert Camus’ Critique of Modernity makes a valuable resource for study of existentialism, modernity, and modern political thought.
[more]

Albert Camus, Jean Sénac, or The Rebel Son
Hamid Nacer-Khodja
Michigan State University Press, 2019
While Albert Camus is an internationally acclaimed figure, Jean Sénac has struggled to gain recognition, even in France and Algeria. The correspondence between the Nobel Prize recipient and the young poet, documented in this illuminating collection, is a testimony to a little-known friendship that lasted for over a decade (1947–1958) and coincided with the escalating conflict between France and Algeria. Their letters shed light on a passionate conflict that opposed two men on two sides of the Algerian War. On one side, Camus distanced himself from an Algerian insurrection that was becoming increasingly violent. On the other, Sénac espoused the armed insurrection of the National Liberation Front and Algeria’s right to independence and freedom. The exchange between Sénac and Camus allows for a deeper and more personal understanding of the Algerian conflict, and of the crucial role of writers, poets, and thinkers in the midst of a fratricidal colonial conflict. The letters translated here are also the intimate dialog between two men who had much in common and who shared a deep love for each other and for their homeland. 
[more]

Albert Gallatin
Jeffersonian Financier and Diplomat
Raymond Walters
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969
Raymond Walters, Jr. presents the definitive biography of Albert Gallatin (1761-1849), recounting sixty years that the Swiss-born diplomat served his adopted country as a congressional leader, Secretary of the Treasury, financier, and ambassador.  Gallatin was a founder of the House Committee on Finance (later the Ways and Means Committee), a member of the new Democratic-Republican Party, and an active politician who opposed the Federalist Party and its programs, while also helping to bring about the election of Thomas Jefferson.
[more]

Alexander Hamilton
From Obscurity to Greatness
John P. Kaminski
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2016
Born in 1755 on a small Caribbean island to unmarried parents, Alexander Hamilton did not enjoy the privileges of wealth or heredity by which so many of his contemporaries advanced to the highest levels of power. Yet Hamilton's natural ability and ambition earned him prevailing influence in the American Revolution and the government created thereafter, eventually securing his place in the pantheon of America's founders.
Editor John P. Kaminski has gathered a remarkable collection of quotations by and about Alexander Hamilton that paint for us a nuanced portrait of a complex man. Through his own words and the words of his contemporaries -- including the man who killed him in a duel, Aaron Burr -- we can gain a better understanding of this fascinating man who rose from anonymity on a small Caribbean island to the corridors of power.
[more]

Alexander Hamilton's Public Administration
Richard T. Green
University of Alabama Press, 2019
Examines how Hamilton’s thoughts and experiences about public administration theory and practice have shaped the nation

American public administration inherited from Alexander Hamilton a distinct republican framework through which we derive many of our modern governing standards and practices. His administrative theory flowed from his republican vision, prescribing not only the how of administration but also what should be done and why. Administration and policy merged seamlessly in his mind, each conditioning the other. His Anti-Federalist detractors clearly saw this and fought his vision tooth and nail.

That conflict endures to this day because Americans still have not settled on just one vision of the American republic. That is why, Richard Green argues, Hamilton is a pivotal figure in our current reckoning. If we want to more fully understand ourselves and our ways of governing today, we must start by understanding Hamilton, and we cannot do that without exploring his administrative theory and practice in depth.

Alexander Hamilton’s Public Administration considers Hamilton both as a founder of the American republic, steeped in the currents of political philosophy and science of his day, and as its chief administrative theorist and craftsman, deeply involved in establishing the early institutions and policies that would bring his interpretation of the written Constitution to life. Accordingly, this book addresses the complex mix of classical and modern ideas that informed his vision of a modern commercial and administrative republic; the administrative ideas, institutions, and practices that flowed from that vision; and the substantive policies he deemed essential to its realization. Green’s analysis grows out of an immersion in Hamilton’s extant papers, including reports, letters, pamphlets, and essays. Readers will find a comprehensive explanation of his theoretical contributions and a richly detailed account of his ideas and practices in historical context.
[more]

Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy
Muhsin S. Mahdi
University of Chicago Press, 2001
In this work, Muhsin Mahdi—widely regarded as the preeminent scholar of Islamic political thought—distills more than four decades of research to offer an authoritative analysis of the work of Alfarabi, the founder of Islamic political philosophy. Mahdi, who also brought to light writings of Alfarabi that had long been presumed lost or were not even known, presents this great thinker as his contemporaries would have seen him: as a philosopher who sought to lay the foundations for a new understanding of revealed religion and its relation to the tradition of political philosophy.

Beginning with a survey of Islamic philosophy and a discussion of its historical background, Mahdi considers the interrelated spheres of philosophy, political thought, theology, and jurisprudence of the time. He then turns to Alfarabi's concept of "the virtuous city," and concludes with an in-depth analysis of the trilogy, Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.

This philosophical engagement with the writings of and about Alfarabi will be essential reading for anyone interested in medieval political philosophy.
[more]

Alice and Eleanor
A Contrast in Style and Purpose
Sandra R. Curtis
University of Wisconsin Press
Alice and Eleanor: A Contrast in Style and Purpose explores the lifelong personal struggles, political involvement, and private relationship of Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Eleanor Roosevelt.
[more]

Alterity Politics
Ethics and Performative Subjectivity
Jeffrey T. Nealon
Duke University Press, 1998
In conventional identity politics subjective differences are understood negatively, as gaps to be overcome, as lacks of sameness, as evidence of failed or incomplete unity. In Alterity Politics Jeffrey T. Nealon argues instead for a concrete and ethical understanding of community, one that requires response, action, and performance instead of passive resentment and unproductive mourning for a whole that cannot be attained.

While discussing the work of others who have refused to thematize difference in terms of the possibility or impossibility of sameness—Levinas, Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Zizek, Jameson, Heidegger, Bakhtin—Nealon argues that ethics is constituted as inexorable affirmative response to different identities, not through an inability to understand or totalize the other. Alterity Politics combines this theoretical itinerary with crucial discussions of specific and diverse sites of literary and cultural production—the work of William S. Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Andy Warhol, Ishmael Reed, Rush Limbaugh, and Vincent Van Gogh—along with analyses of the social formation of subjects as found in identity politics, and in multicultural and whiteness studies. In the process, Nealon takes on a wide variety of issues including white male anger, the ethical questions raised by drug addiction, the nature of literary meaning, and the concept of “becoming-black.”

In seeking to build an ethical structure around poststructuralist discourse and to revitalize the applied use of theoretical concepts to notions of performative identity, Alterity Politics marks a decisive intervention in literary theory, cultural studies, twentieth-century philosophy, and performance studies.

[more]

Althusser and His Contemporaries
Philosophy's Perpetual War
Warren Montag
Duke University Press, 2013
Althusser and His Contemporaries alters and expands understanding of Louis Althusser and French philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s. Thousands of pages of previously unpublished work from different periods of Althusser's career have been made available in French since his death in 1990. Based on meticulous study of the philosopher's posthumous publications, as well as his unpublished manuscripts, lecture notes, letters, and marginalia, Warren Montag provides a thoroughgoing reevaluation of Althusser's philosophical project. Montag shows that the theorist was intensely engaged with the work of his contemporaries, particularly Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Lacan. Examining Althusser's philosophy as a series of encounters with his peers' thought, Montag contends that Althusser's major philosophical confrontations revolved around three themes: structure, subject, and beginnings and endings. Reading Althusser reading his contemporaries, Montag sheds new light on structuralism, poststructuralism, and the extraordinary moment of French thought in the 1960s and 1970s.
[more]

America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense
Scott Philip Segrest
University of Missouri Press, 2009
From Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson, seminal thinkers have declared “common sense” essential for moral discernment and civilized living. Yet the story of commonsense philosophy is not well known today.
 
            In America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense, Scott Segrest traces the history and explores the personal and social meaning of common sense as understood especially in American thought and as reflected specifically in the writings of three paradigmatic thinkers: John Witherspoon, James McCosh, and William James. The first two represent Scottish Common Sense and the third, Pragmatism, the schools that together dominated American higher thought for nearly two centuries.
 
Educated Americans of the founding period warmly received Scottish Common Sense, Segrest writes, because it reflected so well what they already thought, and he uncovers the basic elements of American common sense in examining the thought of Witherspoon, who introduced that philosophy to them. With McCosh, he shows the furthest development and limits of the philosophy, and with it of American common sense in its Scottish realist phase. With James, he shows other dimensions of common sense that Americans had long embraced but that had never been examined philosophically.
 
            Clearly, Segrest’s work is much more than an intellectual history. It is a study of the American mind and of common sense itself—its essential character and its human significance, both moral and political. It was common sense, he affirms, that underlay the Declaration of Independence and the founders’ ideas of right and obligation that are still with us today. Segrest suggests that understanding this foundation and James’s refreshing of it could be the key to maintaining America’s vital moral core against a growing alienation from common sense across the Western world.
 
Stressing the urgency of understanding and preserving common sense, Segrest’s work sheds new light on an undervalued aspect of American thought and experience, helping us to perceive the ramifications of commonsense philosophy for dignified living.
[more]

American Dictators
Frank Hague, Nucky Johnson, and the Perfection of the Urban Political Machine
Hart, Steven
Rutgers University Press, 2013

One man was tongue-tied and awkward around women, in many ways a mama's boy at heart, although his reputation for thuggery was well earned. The other was a playboy, full of easy charm and ready jokes, his appetite for high living a matter of public record. One man tolerated gangsters and bootleggers as long as they paid their dues to his organization. The other was effectively a gangster himself, so crooked that he hosted a national gathering of America's most ruthless killers. One man never drank alcohol. The other, from all evidence, seldom drank anything else.

American Dictators is the dual biography of two of America’s greatest political bosses: Frank Hagueand Enoch “Nucky” Johnson. Packed with compelling information and written in an informal, sometimes humorous style, the book shows Hague and Johnson at the peak of their power and the strength of their political machines during the years of Prohibition and the Great Depression. Steven Hart compares how both men used their influence to benefit and punish the local citizenry, amass huge personal fortunes, and sometimes collaborate to trounce their enemies.

Similar in their ruthlessness, both men were very different in appearance and temperament. Hague, the mayor of Jersey City, intimidated presidents and wielded unchallenged power for three decades. He never drank and was happily married to his wife for decades. He also allowed gangsters to run bootlegging and illegal gambling operations as long as they paid protection money. Johnson, the political boss of Atlantic City, and the inspiration for the hit HBO series Boardwalk Empire, presided over corruption as well, but for a shorter period of time. He was notorious for his decadent lifestyle. Essentially a gangster himself, Johnson hosted the infamous Atlantic City conference that fostered the growth of organized crime.

Both Hague and Johnson shrewdly integrated otherwise disenfranchised groups into their machines and gave them a stake in political power. Yet each failed to adapt to changing demographics and circumstances. In American Dictators, Hart paints a balanced portrait of their accomplishments and their failures.

[more]

An American Diplomat in Bolshevik Russia
DeWitt Clinton Poole, Edited by Lorraine M. Lees and William S. Rodner
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
Diplomat DeWitt Clinton Poole arrived for a new job at the United States consulate office in Moscow in September 1917, just two months before the Bolshevik Revolution. In the final year of World War I, as Russians were withdrawing and Americans were joining the war, Poole found himself in the midst of political turmoil in Russia. U.S. relations with the newly declared Soviet Union rapidly deteriorated as civil war erupted and as Allied forces intervened in northern Russia and Siberia. Thirty-five years later, in the climate of the Cold War, Poole recounted his experiences as a witness to that era in a series of interviews.
            Historians Lorraine M. Lees and William S. Rodner introduce and annotate Poole's recollections, which give a fresh, firsthand perspective on monumental events in world history and reveal the important impact DeWitt Clinton Poole (1885–1952) had on U.S.–Soviet relations. He was active in implementing U.S. policy, negotiating with the Bolshevik authorities, and supervising American intelligence operations that gathered information about conditions throughout Russia, especially monitoring anti-Bolshevik elements and areas of German influence. Departing Moscow in late 1918 via Petrograd, he was assigned to the port of Archangel, then occupied by Allied and American forces, and left Russia in June 1919.
[more]

American Girls in Red Russia
Chasing the Soviet Dream
Julia L. Mickenberg
University of Chicago Press, 2017
If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. As Julia L. Mickenberg uncovers in American Girls in Red Russia, there is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation: beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous, like Isadora Duncan or Lillian Hellman; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the “Soviet experiment.” But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, others by horrifying truths.

Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities.

American Girls in Red Russia recounts the experiences of women who saved starving children from the Russian famine, worked on rural communes in Siberia, wrote for Moscow or New York newspapers, or performed on Soviet stages. Mickenberg finally tells these forgotten stories, full of hope and grave disappointments.
 
[more]

American Orient
Imagining the East from the Colonial Era through the Twentieth Century
David Weir
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
Surveying the American fascination with the Far East since the mid-eighteenth century, this book explains why the Orient had a fundamentally different meaning in the United States than in Europe or Great Britain. David Weir argues that unlike their European counterparts, Americans did not treat the East simply as a site of imperialist adventure; on the contrary, colonial subjugation was an experience that early Americans shared with the peoples of China and India. In eighteenth-century America, the East was, paradoxically, a means of reinforcing the enlightenment values of the West: Franklin, Jefferson, and other American writers found in Confucius a complement to their own political and philosophical beliefs. In the nineteenth century, with the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, the Hindu Orient emerged as a mystical alternative to American reality. During this period, Emerson, Thoreau, and other Transcendentalists viewed the “Oriental” not as an exotic other but as an image of what Americans could be, if stripped of all the commercialism and materialism that set them apart from their ideal. A similar sense of Oriental otherness informed the aesthetic discoveries of the early twentieth century, as Pound, Eliot, and other poets found in Chinese and Japanese literature an artistic purity and intensity absent from Western tradition. For all of these figures the Orient became a complex fantasy that allowed them to overcome something objectionable, either in themselves or in the culture of which they were a part, in order to attain some freer, more genuine form of philosophical, religious, or artistic expression.
[more]

American Prophet
The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams
Peter Richardson
University of Michigan Press, 2005
A long-overdue book on the brilliant life and career of one of our greatest public intellectuals, American Prophet will introduce Carey McWilliams to a new generation of readers.

Peter Richardson's absorbing and elegantly paced book reveals a figure thoroughly engaged with the issues of his time. Deftly interweaving correspondence, diary notes, published writings, and McWilliams's own and others' observations on a colorful and influential cast of characters from Hollywood, New York, Washington, DC, and the American West, Richardson maps the evolution of McWilliams's personal and professional life. Among those making an appearance are H. L. Mencken (McWilliams's mentor and role model), Louis Adamic, John Fante, Robert Towne, Richard Nixon, Studs Terkel, J. Edgar Hoover, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Joseph McCarthy.

American Prophet illustrates the arc of McWilliams's life and career from his early literary journalism through his legal and political activism, his stint in state government, and his two decades as editor of the Nation. This book makes the case for McWilliams's place in the Olympian realm of our most influential and prescient political writers.

Peter Richardson is the editorial director at PoliPointPress in Sausalito, California. He is the author or editor of numerous works on language, literature, and California public policy. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California Berkeley.
[more]

The American Way of Peace
An Interpretation
Jan S. Prybyla
University of Missouri Press, 2005
In The American Way of Peace, Jan S. Prybyla traces the implementation of an idea derived from bedrock American values that has shaped the American character from the nation’s beginning. The idea—simple, generous, optimistic, and effective—was and remains to give people realizable hope, an attainable dream, by creating a peaceful, secure, and materially comfortable world, a Pax Americana, the American Way of Peace.
In the period surveyed, beginning with the end of World War II, this objective was achieved through American initiative and with American leadership, despite resistance from Nazi barbarism, Soviet serfdom, and, more recently, Islamic extremist inhumanity. There has also been opposition from some of those in the western confines of Europe whom Pax Americana helped raise from the ashes to which they had been reduced.
The American Way of Peace examines the work of reconstruction, the enemy bombardment, as well as the hurtful sniping along the way by the beneficiaries of American support. Prybyla recommends a reevaluation of American relations with those to whom friendship is but a utilitarian device, in light of the present eruption of terrorism worldwide. The need for America to act wisely and resolutely in defense of civilized values, to stem the third tidal wave of terrorist savagery, and to venture where others fear to tread is more compelling now than it has been in the six decades past, for today America’s very survival as a force for immense good in the world is being put to the test.
[more]

America’s Forgotten Founders, second edition
Gary L. Gregg
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2012

Beyond Washington and Jefferson: Ranking the Founders

Even as Americans devour books about our Founding Fathers, the focus seldom extends past a half dozen or so icons—Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton. Many of the men (and women) who made prodigious contributions to the American founding have been all but forgotten.
 
America’s Forgotten Founders corrects this injustice. Editors Gary L. Gregg II and Mark David Hall surveyed forty-five top scholars in history, political science, and law to produce the first-ever ranking of the most neglected contributors to the American Revolution and our constitutional order. This unique book features engaging short biographies of the top ten most important Founders whose contributions are overlooked today: James Wilson, George Mason, Gouverneur Morris, John Jay, Roger Sherman, John Marshall, John Dickinson, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, and John Witherspoon.
 
The latest entry in ISI Books’ Lives of the Founders series, America’s Forgotten Founders reshapes our understanding of America’s founding generation.
[more]

Anarchism Volume One
A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One – From Anarchy to Anarchism
Edited by Robert Graham
Black Rose Books, 2005
Click here for orders in the UK & Europe.

Volume One of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas is a comprehensive and far-ranging collection of anarchist writings from the classical era to 1939. Edited and introduced by noted anarchist scholar Robert Graham, this incomparable volume includes the definitive texts from the anarchist tradition of political thought. It deals both with the positive ideas and proposals the anarchists tried to put into practice and with their critiques of the authoritarian theories and practices confronting them.

ROBERT GRAHAM has written extensively on the history of anarchist ideas. He is the author of "The Role of Contract in Anarchist Ideology," in For Anarchism, edited by David Goodway, and he wrote the introduction to the 1989 edition of Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century, originally published in 1851. He has been doing research and writing on the historical development of anarchist ideas for over 20 years and is a well respected commentator in the field.

"Robert Graham is an outstanding scholar of anarchism and has made an exceptionally stimulating choice of texts: some familiar, others--especially those from East Asia--entirely unknown to me. The publication of this first instalment of what promises to be a notable anthology is an important event for anarchists." - David Goodway, Anarchist Historian, University of Leeds, UK

"Will definitely meet the need for a comprehensive study of all the strands, ideas and themes of anarchist and libertarian thought." - Stuart Christie, Anarchist Writer/Publisher

"An excellent and long-overdue anthology of anarchist writings. It shows the depth, diversity and relevance of anarchist thought and action. Highly recommended." - Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism

"This judicious collection is admirable in its chronological, geographical, and thematic range. There is nothing comparable in presenting anarchist and libertarian responses both to the challenges of theory and to those of practices forged in the fires of historical crises." - Wayne Thorpe, The Workers Themselves: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour, 1913-1923

"Admirably displays the range and inventiveness of anarchist approaches." - Colin Ward, Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction and Anarchy in Action


Table of Contents

Preface

CHAPTER 1: EARLY TEXTS ON SERVITUDE AND FREEDOM

1. Bao Jingyan: Neither Lord Nor Subject (300 C.E.)

2. Etienne de la Boetie: On Voluntary Servitude (1552)

3. Gerrard Winstanley: The New Law of Righteousness (1649)

CHAPTER 2: ENLIGHTENMENT AND REVOLUTION

4. William Godwin: Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793-97)

5. Jean Varlet: The Explosion (1794)

6. Sylvain Maréchal: Manifesto of the Equals (1796)

CHAPTER 3: INDUSTRIALIZATION AND THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIALISM

7. Charles Fourier: Attractive Labour (1822-37)

8. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: What is Property (1840)

9. Proudhon: The System of Economic Contradictions (1846)

CHAPTER 4: REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS AND ACTION

10. Michael Bakunin, The Reaction in Germany (1842)

11. Max Stirner: The Ego and Its Own (1844)

12. Proudhon: The General Idea of the Revolution (1851)

13. Anselme Bellegarrigue: Anarchy is Order (1850)

14. Joseph Déjacque: The Revolutionary Question (1854)

15. Francisco Pi y Margall: Reaction and Revolution (1854)

16. Carlo Pisacane: On Revolution (1857)

17. Joseph Déjacque: On Being Human (1857)

CHAPTER 5: THE ORIGINS OF THE ANARCHIST MOVEMENT AND THE INTERNATIONAL

18. Proudhon: On Federalism (1863/65)

19. Statutes of the First International (1864-1866)

20. Bakunin: Socialism and the State (1867)

21. Bakunin: Program of the International Brotherhood (1868)

22. Bakunin: What is the State (1869)

23. Bakunin: The Illusion of Universal Suffrage (1870)

24. Bakunin: On Science and Authority (1871)

CHAPTER 6: THE CONFLICT IN THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL

25. Bakunin: The Organization of the International (1871)

26. The Sonvillier Circular (1871)

27. The St. Imier Congress (1872)

CHAPTER 7: THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR AND THE PARIS COMMUNE

28. Bakunin: Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis (1870)

29. Bakunin: The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State (1871)

30. Louise Michel: In Defence of the Commune (1871)

31. Peter Kropotkin: The Paris Commune (1881)

CHAPTER 8: ANARCHIST COMMUNISM

32. Carlo Cafiero: Anarchy and Communism (1880)

33. Kropotkin: The Conquest of Bread (1892)

34. Kropotkin: Fields, Factories and Workshops (1898)

35. Luigi Galleani: The End of Anarchism (1907)

CHAPTER 9: ANARCHY AND ANARCHISM

36. José Llunas Pujols: What is Anarchy (1882)

37. Charlotte Wilson: Anarchism (1886)

38. Élisée Reclus: Anarchy (1894)

39. Jean Grave: Moribund Society and Anarchy (1893)

40. Gustav Landauer: Anarchism in Germany (1895)

41. Kropotkin: On Anarchism (1896)

42. E. Armand: Mini-Manual of the Anarchist Individualist (1911)

CHAPTER 10: PROPAGANDA BY THE DEED

43. Paul Brousse: Propaganda By the Deed (1877)

44. Carlo Cafiero: Action (1880)

45. Kropotkin: Expropriation (1885)

46. Jean Grave: Means and Ends (1893)

47. Leo Tolstoy: On Non-violent Resistance (1900)

48. Errico Malatesta: Violence as a Social Factor (1895)

49. Gustav Landauer: Destroying the State by Creating Socialism (1910/15)

50. Voltairine de Cleyre: Direct Action (1912)

CHAPTER 11: LAW AND MORALITY

51. William Godwin: Of Law (1797)

52. Kropotkin: Law and Authority (1886)

53. Errico Malatesta: The Duties of the Present Hour (1894)

54. Kropotkin: Mutual Aid (1902) and Anarchist Morality (1890)

CHAPTER 12: ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM

55. The Pittsburgh Proclamation (1883)

56. Fernand Pelloutier: Anarchism and the Workers' Unions (1895)

57. Antonio Pellicer Paraire: The Organization of Labour (1900)

58. The Workers' Federation of the Uruguayan Region (FORU): Declarations from the 3rd Congress (1911)

59. Emma Goldman: On Syndicalism (1913)

60. Pierre Monatte and Errico Malatesta: Syndicalism - For and Against (1907)

CHAPTER 13: ART AND ANARCHY

61. Oscar Wilde: The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

62. Bernard Lazare: Anarchy and Literature (1894)

63. Jean Grave: The Artist as Equal, Not Master (1899)

CHAPTER 14: ANARCHY AND EDUCATION

64. Bakunin: Integral Education (1869)

65. Francisco Ferrer: The Modern School (1908)

66. Sébastien Faure: Libertarian Education (1910)

CHAPTER 15: WOMEN, LOVE AND MARRIAGE

67. Bakunin: Against Patriarchal Authority (1873)

68. Louise Michel: Women's Rights (1886)

69. Carmen Lareva: Free Love (1896)

70. Emma Goldman: Marriage (1897), Prostitution and Love (1910)

CHAPTER 16: THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION

71. Voltairine de Cleyre: The Mexican Revolution (1911)

72. Praxedis Guerrero: To Die On Your Feet (1910)

73. Ricardo Flores Magón: Land and Liberty (1911-1918)

CHAPTER 17: WAR AND REVOLUTION IN EUROPE

74. Élisée Reclus: Evolution and Revolution (1891)

75. Tolstoy: Compulsory Military Service (1893)

76. Jean Grave: Against Militarism and Colonialism (1893)

77. Élisée Reclus: The Modern State (1905)

78. Otto Gross: Overcoming Cultural Crisis (1913)

79. Gustav Landauer: For Socialism (1911)

80. Malatesta: Anarchists Have Forgotten Their Principles (1914)

81. International Anarchist Manifesto Against War (1915)

82. Emma Goldman: The Road to Universal Slaughter (1915)

CHAPTER 18: THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

83. Gregory Maksimov: The Soviets (1917)

84. All-Russian Conference of Anarcho-Syndicalists: Resolution on Trade Unions and Factory Committees (1918)

85. Manifestos of the Makhnovist Movement (1920)

86. Peter Arshinov: The Makhnovshchina and Anarchism (1921)

87. Voline: The Unknown Revolution (1947)

88. Alexander Berkman: The Bolshevik Myth (1925)

89. Emma Goldman: The Transvaluation of Values (1923)

CHAPTER 19: ANARCHISM IN LATIN AMERICA

90. Comrades of the Chaco: Anarchist Manifesto (1892)

91. Manuel González Prada: Our Indians (1904)

92. Rafael Barrett: Striving for Anarchism (1909/10)

93. Teodoro Antilli: Class Struggle and Social Struggle (1924)

94. López Arango and Abad de Santillán: Anarchism in the Labour Movement (1925)

95. The American Continental Workers' Association (1929)

CHAPTER 20: CHINESE ANARCHISM

96. He Zhen: Women's Liberation (1907)

97. Chu Minyi: Universal Revolution (1907)

98. Wu Zhihui: Education as Revolution (1908)

99. Shifu: Goals and Methods of the Anarchist-Communist Party (1914)

100. Huang Lingshuang: Writings on Evolution, Freedom and Marxism (1917-29)

101. Li Pei Kan (Ba Jin): On Theory and Practice (1921-1927)

CHAPTER 21: ANARCHISM IN JAPAN AND KOREA

102. Kôtoku Shûsui: Letter from Prison (1910)

103. Ôsugi Sakae: Social Idealism (1920)

104. Itô Noe: The Facts of Anarchy (1921)

105. Shin Chaeho: Declaration of the Korean Revolution (1923)

106. Hatta Shûzô: On Syndicalism (1927)

107. Kubo Yuzuru: On Class Struggle and the Daily Struggle (1928)

108. The Talhwan: What We Advocate (1928)

109. Takamure Itsue: A Vision of Anarchist Love (1930)

110. Japanese Libertarian Federation: What To Do About War (1931)

CHAPTER 22: THE INTERWAR YEARS

111. Gustav Landauer: Revolution of the Spirit (1919)

112. Errico Malatesta: An Anarchist Program (1920)

113. Luigi Fabbri: Fascism: The Preventive Counter-Revolution (1921)

114. The IWA: Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism (1922)

115. The Platform and its Critics (1926-27)

116. Voline: Anarchist Synthesis

117. Alexander Berkman: The ABC of Communist Anarchism (1927)

118. Marcus Graham: Against the Machine (1934)

119. Wilhelm Reich and the Mass Psychology of Fascism (1935)

120. Bart de Ligt: The Conquest of Violence (1937)

121. Rudolf Rocker: Nationalism and Culture (1937)

CHAPTER 23: THE SPANISH REVOLUTION

122. Félix Martí Ibáñez: The Sexual Revolution (1934)

123. Lucía Sánchez Saornil: The Question of Feminism (1935)

124. The CNT: Resolutions from the Zaragoza Congress (1936)

125. Diego Abad de Santillán: The Libertarian Revolution (1937)

126. Gaston Leval: Libertarian Democracy

127. Albert Jensen: The CNT-FAI, the State and Government (1938)

128. Diego Abad de Santillán: A Return to Principle (1938)

CHAPTER 24: EPILOGUE AND PROLOGUE TO VOLUME 2

129. Emma Goldman: A Life Worth Living (1934)

130. Herbert Read: Poetry and Anarchism (1938)

131. Malatesta: Toward Anarchy

2005: 536 pages, bibliography and index
[more]

Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking
Conversations with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Nika Dubrovsky, and Assia Turquier-Zauberman
David Graeber
Diaphanes, 2020
David Graeber was not only one of today’s most important living thinkers, but also one of the most influential. He was also one of the very few engaged intellectuals who has a proven track record of effective militancy on a world scale, and his impact on the international left cannot be overstated.

Graeber has offered up perhaps the most credible path for exiting capitalism—as much through his writing about debt, bureaucracy, or “bullshit jobs” as through his crucial involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which led to his more-or-less involuntary exile from the American academy. In short, Anarchy—In a Manner of Speaking presents a series of interviews with a first-rate intellectual, a veritable modern hero on the order of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Linus Torvald, Aaron Swartz, and Elon Musk.

Interviewers Mehdi Belhaj Kacem and Assia Turquier-Zauberman asked Graeber not only about the history of anarchy, but also about its contemporary relevance and future. Their conversation also explores the ties between anthropology and anarchism, and the traces of its DNA in the Occupy Wall Street and Yellow Vest movements. Finally, Graeber discussed the meaning of anarchist ethics—not only in the political realm, but also in terms of art, love, sexuality, and more. With astonishing humor, verve, and erudition, this book redefines the contours of what could be (in the words of Peter Kropotkin) “anarchist morality” today. 
[more]

Animal Rights
Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800
Hilda Kean
Reaktion Books, 1998
In the late twentieth century animals are news. Parliamentary debates, protests against fox hunting and television programs like AnimalHospital all focus on the way in which we treat animals and on what that says about our own humanity. As vegetarianism becomes ever more popular, and animal experimentation more controversial, it is time to trace the background to contemporary debates and to situate them in a broader historical context.

Hilda Kean looks at the cultural and social role of animals from 1800 to the present – at the way in which visual images and myths captured the popular imagination and encouraged sympathy for animals and outrage at their exploitation. From early campaigns against the beating of cattle and ill-treatment of horses to concern for dogs in war and cats in laboratories, she explores the relationship between popular images and public debate and action. She also illustrates how interest in animal rights and welfare was closely aligned with campaigns for political and social reform by feminists, radicals and socialists.

"A thoughtful, effective and well-written book"—The Scotsman

"It could hardly be more timely, and its wonderful material is bound to provoke ... reflection"—The Independent

"A work of great interest"—Sunday Telegraph

"Lively, impressively researched, and well-written ... a book that is timely and valuable"—Times Literary Supplement

"A pleasing balance of anecdote and analysis"—Times Higher Educational Supplement
[more]

The Anomie of the Earth
Philosophy, Politics, and Autonomy in Europe and the Americas
Federico Luisetti, John Pickles, and Wilson Kaiser, eds.
Duke University Press, 2015
The contributors to The Anomie of the Earth explore the convergences and resonances between Autonomist Marxism and decolonial thinking. In discussing and rejecting Carl Schmitt's formulation of the nomos—a conceptualization of world order based on the Western tenets of law and property—the authors question the assumption of universal political subjects and look towards politics of the commons divorced from European notions of sovereignty. They contrast European Autonomism with North and South American decolonial and indigenous conceptions of autonomy, discuss the legacies of each, and examine social movements in the Americas and Europe. Beyond orthodox Marxism, their transatlantic exchanges point to the emerging categories disclosed by the collapse of the colonial and capitalist frameworks of Western modernity.

Contributors. Joost de Bloois, Jodi A. Byrd, Gustavo Esteva, Silvia Federici, Wilson Kaiser, Mara Kaufman, Frans-Willem Korsten, Federico Luisetti, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter D. Mignolo, Benjamin Noys, John Pickles, Alvaro Reyes, Catherine Walsh, Gareth Williams, Zac Zimmer
[more]

Another Freedom
The Alternative History of an Idea
Svetlana Boym
University of Chicago Press, 2010
The word “freedom” is so overly used—and frequently abused—that it is always in danger of becoming nothing but a cliché. In Another Freedom, Svetlana Boym offers us a refreshing new portrait of the age-old concept. Exploring the rich cross-cultural history of the idea of freedom, from its origins in ancient Greece to the present day, she argues that our attempts to imagine freedom should occupy the space of not only “what is” but also “what if.” Beginning with notions of sacrifice and the emergence of a public sphere for politics and art, Boym expands her account to include the relationships between freedom and liberation, modernity and terror, and political dissent and creative estrangement. While depicting a world of differences, she affirms lasting solidarities based on the commitment to the passionate thinking that reflections on freedom require. To do so, Boym assembles a remarkable cast of characters: Aeschylus and Euripides, Kafka and Mandelstam, Arendt and Heidegger, and a virtual encounter between Dostoevsky and Marx on the streets of Paris.

By offering a fresh look at the strange history of this idea, Another Freedom delivers a nuanced portrait of freedom, one whose repercussions will be felt well into the future.
[more]

Another Mother
Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminism
Cesare Casarino
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

A groundbreaking volume introduces the unique feminist thought of the longstanding Italian group known as Diotima

 

Introducing Anglophone readers to a potent strain of Italian feminism known to French, Spanish, and German audiences but as yet unavailable in English, Another Mother argues that the question of the mother is essential to comprehend the matrix of contemporary culture and society and to pursue feminist political projects. 

Focusing on Diotima, a community of women philosophers deeply involved in feminist politics since the 1960s, this volume provides a multifaceted panorama of its engagement with currents of thought including structuralism, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and Marxism. Starting from the simple insight that the mother is the one who gives us both life and language, these thinkers develop concepts of the mother and sexual difference in contemporary society that differ in crucial ways from both French and U.S. feminisms. 

Arguing that Diotima anticipates many of the themes in contemporary philosophical discourses of biopolitics—exemplified by thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, and Roberto Esposito—Another Mother opens an important space for reflections on the past history of feminism and on feminism’s future. 

Contributors: Anne Emmanuelle Berger, Paris 8 U–Vincennes Saint-Denis; Ida Dominijanni; Luisa Muraro; Diana Sartori, U of Verona; Chiara Zamboni, U of Verona.

[more]

Arbitrary Rule
Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death
Mary Nyquist
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Slavery appears as a figurative construct during the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, and again in the American and French revolutions, when radicals represent their treatment as a form of political slavery. What, if anything, does figurative, political slavery have to do with transatlantic slavery? In Arbitrary Rule, Mary Nyquist explores connections between political and chattel slavery by excavating the tradition of Western political thought that justifies actively opposing tyranny. She argues that as powerful rhetorical and conceptual constructs, Greco-Roman political liberty and slavery reemerge at the time of early modern Eurocolonial expansion; they help to create racialized “free” national identities and their “unfree” counterparts in non-European nations represented as inhabiting an earlier, privative age.
               
Arbitrary Rule is the first book to tackle political slavery’s discursive complexity, engaging Eurocolonialism, political philosophy, and literary studies, areas of study too often kept apart. Nyquist proceeds through analyses not only of texts that are canonical in political thought—by Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, and Locke—but also of literary works by Euripides, Buchanan, Vondel, Montaigne, and Milton, together with a variety of colonialist and political writings, with special emphasis on tracts written during the English revolution. She illustrates how “antityranny discourse,” which originated in democratic Athens, was adopted by republican Rome, and revived in early modern Western Europe, provided members of a “free” community with a means of protesting a threatened reduction of privileges or of consolidating a collective, political identity. Its semantic complexity, however, also enabled it to legitimize racialized enslavement and imperial expansion.
               
Throughout, Nyquist demonstrates how principles relating to political slavery and tyranny are bound up with a Roman jurisprudential doctrine that sanctions the power of life and death held by the slaveholder over slaves and, by extension, the state, its representatives, or its laws over its citizenry.

[more]

The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays
Joshua Cohen
Harvard University Press, 2010
Joshua Cohen is one of the best political philosophers in America, as well as one of the best essay writers. He studied with John Rawls during the 1960s and since then, like his teacher, has dared to provide an ideal of democracy to be the guide for political thought rather than the minimalist account that many thinkers seem to believe is the best they can do. These essays, written over the past 20 years, are widely recognized by philosophers and political theorists as major and sometimes defining papers in their fields. The majority of them are essays on democracy and justice, or they discuss major ideas or figures (Locke, Rousseau, Rawls, Habermas) within the liberal and democratic traditions of social and political thought. However, many of these essays are published in obscure editions or journals and some have never been published at all, which makes them hard to find even for the most determined scholar. By gathering these seminal insights into one volume, Harvard Press is performing a valuable service to the community of philosophers and political theorists. Not only does The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays showcase a brilliant theorist whose influence is only going to grow, it also continues the legacy of John Rawls at Harvard University Press.
[more]

Arc of Utopia
The Beautiful Story of the Russian Revolution
Lesley Chamberlain
Reaktion Books, 2017
Although Lenin and his fellow revolutionaries never called themselves Utopians—believing strictly in a science of revolution, they considered Utopians to be merely dreamers—they were enormously inspired by the grand humanitarian aims of the French Revolution of 1789. Taking up this French revolutionary agenda and reinforcing it with German philosophy, Russians formed a beautiful vision in which an imaginary theology blended with a premier role for art.

Arc of Utopia offers a fresh look at these German philosophical origins of the Russian Revolution. In the book, Lesley Chamberlain explains how influential German philosophers like Kant, Schiller, and Hegel were dazzled by contemporary events in Paris, and how this led a century later to an explosion of art and philosophy in the Russian streets, with a long-repressed people reinventing liberty, equality, and fraternity in their own cultural image. Chamberlain examines how some of the greatest Russian names of the nineteenth-century—from Alexander Herzen to Mikhail Bakunin, Ivan Turgenev to Fyodor Dostoevsky—defined their visions for Russia in relationship to their views on German enthusiasm for revolutionary France.

With the centenary of the Russian Revolution approaching, Arc of Utopia is an important and timely revisioning of this tumultuous moment in history.
[more]

Archives of Infamy
Foucault on State Power in the Lives of Ordinary Citizens
Nancy Luxon
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Expanding the insights of Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault’s Disorderly Families into policing, public order, (in)justice, and daily life


What might it mean for ordinary people to intervene in the circulation of power between police and the streets, sovereigns and their subjects? How did the police come to understand themselves as responsible for the circulation of people as much as things—and to separate law and justice from the maintenance of a newly emergent civil order? These are among the many questions addressed in the interpretive essays in Archives of Infamy.

Crisscrossing the Atlantic to bring together unpublished radio broadcasts, book reviews, and essays by historians, geographers, and political theorists, Archives of Infamy provides historical and archival contexts to the recent translation of Disorderly Families by Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault. This volume includes new translations of key texts, including a radio address Foucault gave in 1983 that explains the writing process for Disorderly Families; two essays by Foucault not readily available in English; and a previously untranslated essay by Farge that describes how historians have appropriated Foucault.

Archives of Infamy pushes past old debates between philosophers and historians to offer a new perspective on the crystallization of ideas—of the family, gender relations, and political power—into social relationships and the regimes of power they engender. 

Contributors: Roger Chartier, Collège de France; Stuart Elden, U of Warwick; Arlette Farge, Centre national de recherche scientifique; Michel Foucault (1926–1984); Jean-Philippe Guinle, Catholic Institute of Paris; Michel Heurteaux; Pierre Nora, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales;  Michael Rey (1953–1993); Thomas Scott-Railton; Elizabeth Wingrove, U of Michigan.

[more]

Arendt and America
Richard H. King
University of Chicago Press, 2015
German-Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–75) fled from the Nazis to New York in 1941, and during the next thirty years in America she wrote her best-known and most influential works, such as The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and On Revolution. Yet, despite the fact that a substantial portion of her oeuvre was written in America, not Europe, no one has directly considered the influence of America on her thought—until now. In Arendt and America, historian Richard H. King argues that while all of Arendt’s work was haunted by her experience of totalitarianism, it was only in her adopted homeland that she was able to formulate the idea of the modern republic as an alternative to totalitarian rule.
 
Situating Arendt within the context of U.S. intellectual, political, and social history, King reveals how Arendt developed a fascination with the political thought of the Founding Fathers. King also re-creates her intellectual exchanges with American friends and colleagues, such as Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, and shows how her lively correspondence with sociologist David Riesman helped her understand modern American culture and society. In the last section of Arendt and America, King sets out the context in which the Eichmann controversy took place and follows the debate about “the banality of evil” that has continued ever since.  As King shows, Arendt’s work, regardless of focus, was shaped by postwar American thought, culture, and politics, including the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War.

For Arendt, the United States was much more than a refuge from Nazi Germany; it was a stimulus to rethink the political, ethical, and historical traditions of human culture. This authoritative combination of intellectual history and biography offers a unique approach for thinking about the influence of America on Arendt’s ideas and also the effect of her ideas on American thought.
[more]

Arguing the Just War in Islam
John Kelsay
Harvard University Press, 2007
Jihad, with its many terrifying associations, is a term widely used today, though its meaning is poorly grasped. Few people understand the circumstances requiring a jihad, or "holy" war, or how Islamic militants justify their violent actions within the framework of the religious tradition of Islam. How Islam, with more than one billion followers, interprets jihad and establishes its precepts has become a critical issue for both the Muslim and the non-Muslim world. John Kelsay's timely and important work focuses on jihad of the sword in Islamic thought, history, and culture. Making use of original sources, Kelsay delves into the tradition of shari'a--Islamic jurisprudence and reasoning--and shows how it defines jihad as the Islamic analogue of the Western "just" war. He traces the arguments of thinkers over the centuries who have debated the legitimacy of war through appeals to shari'a reasoning. He brings us up to the present and demonstrates how contemporary Muslims across the political spectrum continue this quest for a realistic ethics of war within the Islamic tradition. Arguing the Just War in Islam provides a systematic account of how Islam's central texts interpret jihad, guiding us through the historical precedents and Qur'anic sources upon which today's claims to doctrinal truth and legitimate authority are made. In illuminating the broad spectrum of Islam's moral considerations of the just war, Kelsay helps Muslims and non-Muslims alike make sense of the possibilities for future war and peace.
[more]

The Argument and the Action of Plato's Laws
Leo Strauss
University of Chicago Press, 1977
The posthumous publication of The Argument and the Action of Plato's "Laws" was compiled shortly before the death of Leo Strauss in 1973. Strauss offers an insightful and instructive reading through careful probing of Plato's classic text.

"Strauss's The Argument and the Action of Plato's 'Laws' reflects his interest in political thought, his dogged method of following the argument of the Laws step by step, and his vigorous defense of this dialogue's integrity in respect to the ideals of the Republic."—Cross Currents

"The unique characteristics of this commentary on the Laws reflect the care and precision which were the marks of Professor Strauss's efforts to understand the complex thoughts of other men."—Allan D. Nelson, Canadian Journal of Political Science

"Thorough and provocative, an important addition to Plato scholarship."—Library Journal

"The major purpose of the commentary is to provide a reading of the dialogue which displays its structural arrangement and the continuity of the argument."—J. W. Dy, Bibliographical Bulletin of Philosophy

"The reader of Strauss's book is indeed guided closely through the whole text."— M. J. Silverthorne, The Humanities Association Review

Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago.
[more]

Aristotle and Hamilton on Commerce and Statesmanship
Michael D. Chan
University of Missouri Press, 2006

Although America’s founders may have been inspired by the political thought of ancient Greece and Rome, the United States is more often characterized by its devotion to the pursuit of commerce. Some have even said that a modern commercial republic such as the United States unavoidably lowers its moral horizon to little more than a concern with securing peace and prosperity so that commerce can flourish.

Michael Chan reconsiders this view of America through close readings of Aristotle and Alexander Hamilton, showing that America at its founding was neither as modern nor as low as we have been led to believe. He challenges the virtue/commerce divide that dominates modern thought by demonstrating that the prevailing views of Aristotle and Hamilton on commerce reflect misleading half-truths.

Chan first examines Aristotle’s views of economics as presented in the Politics, arguing that Aristotle was not as hostile to commerce as is commonly believed. He points out the philosopher’s belief in the value of commercial acquisition in the interest of supplying citizens with the “equipment of virtue,” citing Aristotle’s praise of commercial Carthage over agrarian but much-esteemed Sparta.

Chan then turns to a detailed account of the political economy of Hamilton, a proponent of an advanced industrial republic modeled on Great Britain. While many take Hamilton’s advocacy of public credit, a national bank, and manufacturing as evidence of his rejection of classical republican thought in favor of modernity, Chan contends that Hamilton embraced a classically inspired economic statesmanship that transcended a concern with merely securing peace and prosperity. Leading the reader through the complexities of Hamilton’s thought, Chan shows that he intended commerce to pursue the wider classical goals of forming the character of citizens, establishing harmony and justice, and pursuing national greatness. Rather than attempting to brand Hamilton an Aristotelian, Chan seeks to incorporate into the study of Hamilton’s political economy what Aristotle himself regarded as the statesman’s characteristic virtue, prudence.

By reflecting on Hamilton in the context of Aristotle’s own reflections on commerce, Chan casts him in a new light that cuts across the ongoing debate about liberal versus classical republican elements of the American founding. His cogent analysis also raises important questions regarding the American system as it is being challenged by conflicting worldviews. Aristotle and Hamilton on Commerce and Statesmanship makes a significant contribution to our understanding of both Hamiltonian thought and the moral worthiness of democratic capitalism.
[more]

Aristotle
Democracy and Political Science
Delba Winthrop
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Today, democracy is seen as the best or even the only legitimate form of government—hardly in need of defense. Delba Winthrop punctures this complacency and takes up the challenge of justifying democracy through Aristotle’s political science. In Aristotle’s time and in ours, democrats want inclusiveness; they want above all to include everyone a part of a whole. But what makes a whole? This is a question for both politics and philosophy, and Winthrop shows that Aristotle pursues the answer in the Politics. She uncovers in his political science the insights philosophy brings to politics and, especially, the insights politics brings to philosophy. Through her appreciation of this dual purpose and skilled execution of her argument, Winthrop’s discoveries are profound. Central to politics, she maintains, is the quality of assertiveness—the kind of speech that demands to be heard. Aristotle, she shows for the first time, carries assertive speech into philosophy, when human reason claims its due as a contribution to the universe.  Political science gets the high role of teacher to ordinary folk in democracy and to the few who want to understand what sustains it.
           
This posthumous publication is more than an honor to Delba Winthrop’s memory. It is a gift to partisans of democracy, advocates of justice, and students of Aristotle.
 
[more]

Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates
On the "Nicomachean Ethics"
Ronna Burger
University of Chicago Press, 2008

What is the good life for a human being? Aristotle’s exploration of this question in the Nicomachean Ethics has established it as a founding work of Western philosophy, though its teachings have long puzzled readers and provoked spirited discussion. Adopting a radically new point of view, Ronna Burger deciphers some of the most perplexing conundrums of this influential treatise by approaching it as Aristotle’s dialogue with the Platonic Socrates.

Tracing the argument of the Ethics as it emerges through that approach, Burger’s careful reading shows how Aristotle represents ethical virtue from the perspective of those devoted to it while standing back to examine its assumptions and implications. 

“This is the best book I have read on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. It is so well crafted that reading it is like reading the Ethics itself, in that it provides an education in ethical matters that does justice to all sides of the issues.”—Mary P. Nichols, Baylor University

[more]

Aristotle's Politics
Living Well and Living Together
Eugene Garver
University of Chicago Press, 2011
“Man is a political animal,” Aristotle asserts near the beginning of the Politics. In this novel reading of one of the foundational texts of political philosophy, Eugene Garver traces the surprising implications of Aristotle’s claim and explores the treatise’s relevance to ongoing political concerns. Often dismissed as overly grounded in Aristotle’s specific moment in time, in fact the Politics challenges contemporary understandings of human action and allows us to better see ourselves today.

Close examination of Aristotle’s treatise, Garver finds, reveals a significant, practical role for philosophy to play in politics. Philosophers present arguments about issues—such as the right and the good, justice and modes of governance, the relation between the good person and the good citizen, and the character of a good life—that politicians must then make appealing to their fellow citizens. Completing Garver’s trilogy on Aristotle’s unique vision, Aristotle’s Politics yields new ways of thinking about ethics and politics, ancient and modern.
[more]

Aristotle's "Politics"
Second Edition
Aristotle
University of Chicago Press, 2013
One of the fundamental works of Western political thought, Aristotle’s masterwork is the first systematic treatise on the science of politics. For almost three decades, Carnes Lord’s justly acclaimed translation has served as the standard English edition. Widely regarded as the most faithful to both the original Greek and Aristotle’s distinctive style, it is also written in clear, contemporary English.

This new edition of the Politics retains and adds to Lord’s already extensive notes, clarifying the flow of Aristotle’s argument and identifying literary and historical references. A glossary defines key terms in Aristotle’s philosophical-political vocabulary. Lord has made revisions to problematic passages throughout the translation in order to enhance both its accuracy and its readability. He has also substantially revised his introduction for the new edition, presenting an account of Aristotle’s life in relation to political events of his time; the character and history of his writings and of the Politics in particular; his overall conception of political science; and his impact on subsequent political thought from antiquity to the present. Further enhancing this new edition is an up-to-date selected bibliography.

[more]

Aristotle's Teaching in the "Politics"
Thomas L. Pangle
University of Chicago Press, 2013
With Aristotle’s Teaching in the “Politics,” Thomas L. Pangle offers a masterly new interpretation of this classic philosophical work. It is widely believed that the Politics originated as a written record of a series of lectures given by Aristotle, and scholars have relied on that fact to explain seeming inconsistencies and instances of discontinuity throughout the text. Breaking from this tradition, Pangle makes the work’s origin his starting point, reconceiving the Politics as the pedagogical tool of a master teacher.

With the Politics, Pangle argues, Aristotle seeks to lead his students down a deliberately difficult path of critical thinking about civic republican life. He adopts a Socratic approach, encouraging his students—and readers—to become active participants in a dialogue. Seen from this perspective, features of the work that have perplexed previous commentators become perfectly comprehensible as artful devices of a didactic approach. Ultimately, Pangle’s close and careful analysis shows that to understand the Politics, one must first appreciate how Aristotle’s rhetorical strategy is inextricably entwined with the subject of his work.

[more]

Arizona Politicians
The Noble and the Notorious
James W. Johnson; Illustrations by David "Fitz" Fitzsimmons
University of Arizona Press, 2002
Do you know these famous Arizona politicians?
 
—A congresswoman who was bridesmaid to Eleanor Roosevelt
—A car dealer who propelled himself to the governor's mansion with the help of public recognition of his TV commercials
—An Arizonan who served not only as governor and chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, but also as the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate and chief sponsor of the GI Bill
—A cowboy who delivered speeches to ranchhands and went on to become a U.S. senator known as one of the great orators of the twentieth century
—One of four Arizonans who lost a bid for the presidency yet made the Gallup Poll as one of the ten most admired men in the world
—A secretary who became the first woman in the nation to sit on a state supreme court

For a state with a small population, Arizona has had an unusually strong presence on the national political scene. Barry Goldwater, Mo Udall, Bruce Babbitt, and John McCain made memorable runs for the White House over just the past four decades. Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior under Kennedy, was the first cabinet appointment from the state. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst and Supreme Court justice William Rehnquist were controversial appointees of Richard Nixon. And Arizona claims two of today's nine Supreme Court justices—not only Rehnquist, now Chief Justice, but also Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman ever appointed to the high court. Not all of Arizona's politicians have garnered such distinction. Two of the state's last four governors of the twentieth century, Evan Mecham and Fife Symington, faced criminal indictments and were forced out of office.

Journalist James Johnson has written profiles of 21 men and women from Arizona who have made their mark in the political arena. Chosen for their contributions to the state, their national prominence, their colorful personalities, and in some cases their notoriety, these prominent public servants—from first governor George W. P. Hunt to current senior senator McCain—all have been major participants in state or national affairs. Congressman Mo Udall once commented on Arizona's "civilized brand of politics," in which Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, treated one another with mutual respect. Johnson conveys both the spirit and spiritedness of Arizona politics and reveals how in many cases these politicians and their family members found their lives and careers overlapping. He tells their stories with humor and objectivity, while political cartoonist David Fitzsimmons captures their trademark styles in original drawings.

Although the individuals may speak from different platforms, all have been proud to call themselves Arizonans and proud to serve their state. This book shares their accomplishments and shows how, for better or worse, they've helped put Arizona in the spotlight.
[more]

Arlen Specter
Scandals, Conspiracies, and Crisis in Focus
Evan Laine
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
From his early work as a lawyer on the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to his days as Philadelphia’s district attorney to his thirty-year career as a United States Senator from Pennsylvania, Arlen Spector found himself consistently in the middle of major historical events. During his five terms as senator, Spector met with the likes of Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat and Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro and made significant contributions during the fallout of both the Iran-Contra scandal and the Clinton impeachment. His work had a profound influence on the configuration of the United States Supreme Court, the criminal justice system, LGBTQ rights, and stem cell research. Photographs from Specter’s personal collection highlight many of these key moments, revealing the rich narrative not only of one man’s political career, but how it helped shape a nation. While it will probably be long debated whether Specter’s complex and controversial political legacy merits mainly praise or criticism, Arlen Specter sheds new light on the life of a man who fought to make a difference.
[more]

Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
Politics of the Pluriverse
Martin Savransky
Duke University Press, 2021
In Around the Day in Eighty Worlds Martin Savransky calls for a radical politics of the pluriverse amid the ongoing devastation of the present. Responding to an epoch marked by the history of colonialism and ecological devastation, Savransky draws on the pragmatic pluralism of William James to develop what he calls a “pluralistic realism”—an understanding of the world as simultaneously one and many, ongoing and unfinished, underway and yet to be made. Savransky explores the radical multifariousness of reality by weaving key aspects of James's thought together with divergent worlds and stories: of Magellan's circumnavigations, sorcery in Mozambique, God's felt presence among a group of evangelicals in California, visible spirits in Zambia, and ghosts in the wake of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Throughout, he experiments with these storied worlds to dramatize new ways of approaching the politics of radical difference and the possibility of transforming reality. By exploring and constructing relations between James's pluralism and the ontological turn in anthropology, Savransky offers a new conceptualization of the pluriverse that fosters modes of thinking and living otherwise.
[more]

Arthur Vandenberg
The Man in the Middle of the American Century
Hendrik Meijer
University of Chicago Press, 2017
The idea that a Senator—Republican or Democrat—would put the greater good of the country ahead of party seems nearly impossible to imagine in our current climate of gridlock and divisiveness. But this hasn’t always been the case. Arthur H. Vandenberg (1884–1951), Republican from Grand Rapids, Michigan, was the model of a consensus builder, and the coalitions he spearheaded continue to form the foundation of American foreign and domestic policy today. Edward R. Murrow called him “the central pivot of the entire era,” yet, despite his significance, Vandenberg has never received the full public attention he is due—until now. With this authoritative biography, Hendrik Meijer reveals how Vandenberg built and nurtured the bipartisan consensus that created the American Century.
           
Originally the editor and publisher of the Grand Rapids Herald, Vandenberg was appointed and later elected to the Senate in 1928, where he became an outspoken opponent of the New Deal and a leader among the isolationists who resisted FDR’s efforts to aid European allies at the onset of World War II. But Vandenberg soon recognized the need for unity at the dawn of a new world order; and as a Republican leader, he worked closely with Democratic administrations to build the strong bipartisan consensus that established the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, and NATO. Vandenberg, as Meijer reveals, was instrumental in organizing Congressional support for these monumental twentieth-century foreign policy decisions.

Vandenberg’s life and career offer powerful lessons for today, and Meijer has given us a story that suggests an antidote to our current democratic challenges. After reading this poignant biography, many will ask: Where is the Vandenberg of today?
 
[more]

Arts of the Political
New Openings for the Left
Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift
Duke University Press, 2013
In the West, "the Left," understood as a loose conglomeration of interests centered around the goal of a fairer and more equal society, still struggles to make its voice heard and its influence felt, even amid an overwhelming global recession. In Arts of the Political: New Openings for the Left, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift argue that only by broadening the domain of what is considered political and what can be made into politics will the Left be able to respond forcefully to injustice and inequality. In particular, the Left requires a more imaginative and experimental approach to the politics of creating a better society. The authors propose three political arts that they consider crucial to transforming the Left: boosting invention, leveraging organization, and mobilizing affect. They maintain that successful Left political movements tend to surpass traditional notions of politics and open up political agency to these kinds of considerations. In other words, rather than providing another blueprint for the future, Amin and Thrift concentrate their attention on a more modest examination of the conduct of politics itself and the ways that it can be made more effective.
[more]

As If
Idealization and Ideals
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Harvard University Press, 2017
Idealization is a basic feature of human thought. We proceed “as if” our representations were true, while knowing they are not. Kwame Anthony Appiah defends the centrality of the imagination in science, morality, and everyday life and shows that our best chance for accessing reality is to open our minds to a plurality of idealized depictions.
[more]

At the Limits of Political Philosophy
From "Brilliant Errors" to Things of Uncommon Importance
James V. Schall
Catholic University of America Press, 1996
James V. Schall presents, in a convincing and articulate manner, the revelational contribution to political philosophy, particularly that which comes out of the Roman Catholic tradition.
[more]

The Attack of the Blob
Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin
University of Chicago Press, 1998
"The European intellectual Hannah Arendt worried about the tendency of social structures to take on a life of their own and paralyze individual action. Pitkin . . . is determined to trace our problems to the actions of individuals. This book is thus a battle of wits. . . . [A] vivid sketch of the conflict between two basic outlooks."—Library Journal

"[O]ne leaves this book feeling enriched and challenged. Pitkin prompts us to rethink our understanding of Arendt and to demythologize the pervasive sense of political helplessness Arendt herself sought so hard to articulate. . . . [A] cause for celebration."—Peter Baehr, Times Literary Supplement

"[Arendt] is certainly among the most original and outstanding political theorists of the twentieth century. . . . It is difficult to imagine a hostile critic examining more effectively than Pitkin . . . Arendt's concept of the social, for hostility would inhibit the acquisition of the mastery of Arendt's texts that Pitkin displays at every turn."—Peter Berkowitz, New Republic
[more]

The Authoritarian State (CW4)
An Essay on the Problem of the Austrian State
Eric Voegelin, Edited & Intro by Gilbert Weiss, Translated by Ruth Hein, & Historical Commentary by Erika Weinzierl
University of Missouri Press, 1999

Published in Vienna in 1936, The Authoritarian State by Eric Voegelin has remained virtually unknown to the public until now. Sales of the German edition were halted following the Nazi invasion of Austria in 1938, and the entire printing was later destroyed by wartime bombing. In this volume, Voegelin offers a critical examination of the most prominent European theories of state and constitutional law of the period while providing a political and historical analysis of the Austrian situation. He discusses the dismissal of Parliament in 1933, the civil war, the murder of Federal Chancellor Dollfuss, the adoption of the "Authoritarian Constitution" of 1934, and the predicament of being sandwiched between Hitler and Mussolini.

A radical critique of Hans Kelsen's pure theory of law lies at the heart of this work, marking Voegelin's definitive departure from Neo-Kantian epistemology. For the first time, Voegelin elaborates on the important distinction between theoretical concepts and political symbols as a basis for explaining the nontheoretical and speculative character of ideologies, both left and right. He shows that total and authoritarian are symbols of ideological self-interpretation that have no theoretical value, a distinction basic to his later work in The New Science of Politics.

Available for the first time in English, The Authoritarian State is a valuable addition to the Voegelin canon and to the field of intellectual history in general.

[more]

Authoritarianism
Three Inquiries in Critical Theory
Wendy Brown, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Across the Euro-Atlantic world, political leaders have been mobilizing their bases with nativism, racism, xenophobia, and paeans to “traditional values,” in brazen bids for electoral support. How are we to understand this move to the mainstream of political policies and platforms that lurked only on the far fringes through most of the postwar era?  Does it herald a new wave of authoritarianism? Is liberal democracy itself in crisis? 
 
In this volume, three distinguished scholars draw on critical theory to address our current predicament.  Wendy Brown, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky share a conviction that critical theory retains the power to illuminate the forces producing the current political constellation as well as possible paths away from it.  Brown explains how “freedom” has become a rallying cry for manifestly un-emancipatory movements; Gordon dismantles the idea that fascism is rooted in the susceptible psychology of individual citizens and reflects instead on the broader cultural and historical circumstances that lend it force; and Pensky brings together the unlikely pair of Tocqueville and Adorno to explore how democracies can buckle under internal pressure. These incisive essays do not seek to smooth over the irrationality of the contemporary world, and they do not offer the false comforts of an easy return to liberal democratic values. Rather, the three authors draw on their deep engagements with nineteenth–and twentieth–century thought to investigate the historical and political contradictions that have brought about this moment, offering fiery and urgent responses to the demands of the day.
 
[more]

Autobiographical Reflections, Revised Edition with Glossary
Eric Voegelin, edited with an introduction by Ellis Sandoz
University of Missouri Press, 2011
Autobiographical Reflections is a window into the mind of a man whose reassessment of the nature of history and thought has overturned traditional approaches to, and appraisals of, the Western intellectual tradition. Here we encounter the motivations for Voegelin's work, the stages in the development of his unique philosophy of consciousness, his key intellectual breakthroughs, his theory of history, and his diagnosis of the political ills of the modern age.
 
Included in this revised volume is a glossary of terms used in Voegelin’s writings. The glossary lists, defines, and illustrates from the author’s writings many of the key terms employed, paying particular attention to the Greek terms. Together, the glossary and enlarged index systematically include names, subjects, ideas, writings, and terms, making this volume an indispensable help for any serious study of Eric Voegelin’s oeuvre.
[more]

Autobiography and Decolonization
Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State
Philip Holden
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
Philip Holden reveals deeply gendered connections between the writing of individual lives and of the narratives of nations emerging from colonialism. Autobiography and Decolonization is the first book to give serious academic attention to autobiographies of nationalist leaders in the process of decolonization, attending to them not simply as partial historical documents, but as texts involved in remaking the world views of their readers.
            Holden examines Mohandas K. Gandhi’s An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Marcus Garvey’s fragmentary Autobiography,Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound, Lee Kuan Yew’s The Singapore Story, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Jawaharlal Nehru’s An Autobiography, and Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana:The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah.
            Holden argues that these examples of life writing have had significant influence on the formation of new, and often profoundly gendered, national identities. These narratives constitute the nation less as an imagined community than as an imagined individual. Moving from the past to the promise of the future, they mediate relationships between public and private, and between individual and collective stories. Ultimately, they show how the construction of modern selfhood is inextricably linked to the construction of a postcolonial polity.
[more]

The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman
Edited with a New Introduction by Robert H. Ferrell
University of Missouri Press, 2002
The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman is a compilation of autobiographical writings composed by Truman between 1934 and 1972. Taken directly from his own manuscript material, the volume presents the thoughts and feelings of the man himself. The book touches on details in Truman’s life from his days as a boy until graduation from Independence High School in 1901 to the vice presidency of the United States and beyond. There is also a memorandum written by Truman about the Pendergast machine in Kansas City telling how it was possible to work with the machine and not be soiled by it. The Autobiography concludes with some of the retired president’s thoughts about politics and the purposes of public life.
[more]

The Autonomous Animal
Self-Governance and the Modern Subject
Claire E. Rasmussen
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

Autonomy is a vital concept in much of modern theory, defining the Subject as capable of self-governance. Democratic theory relies on the concept of autonomy to provide justification for participatory government and the normative goal of democratic governance, which is to protect the ability of the individual to self-govern.

Offering the first examination of the concept of autonomy from a postfoundationalist perspective, The Autonomous Animal analyzes how the ideal of self-governance has shaped everyday life. Claire E. Rasmussen begins by considering the academic terrain of autonomy, then focusing on specific examples of political behavior that allow her to interrogate these theories. She demonstrates how the adolescent—a not-yet-autonomous subject—highlights how the ideal of self-governance generates practices intended to cultivate autonomy by forming the individual’s relationship to his or her body. She points up how the war on drugs rests on the perception that drug addicts are the antithesis of autonomy and thus must be regulated for their own good. Showing that the animal rights movement may challenge the distinction between human and animal, Rasmussen also examines the place of the endurance athlete in fitness culture, where self-management of the body is the exemplar of autonomous subjectivity.

[more]

Awakening to Race
Individualism and Social Consciousness in America
Jack Turner
University of Chicago Press, 2012
The election of America’s first black president has led many to believe that race is no longer a real obstacle to success and that remaining racial inequality stems largely from the failure of minority groups to take personal responsibility for seeking out opportunities. Often this argument is made in the name of the long tradition of self-reliance and American individualism. In Awakening to Race, Jack Turner upends this view, arguing that it expresses not a deep commitment to the values of individualism, but a narrow understanding of them.
 
Drawing on the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, Turner offers an original reconstruction of democratic individualism in American thought. All these thinkers, he shows, held that personal responsibility entails a refusal to be complicit in injustice and a duty to combat the conditions and structures that support it. At a time when individualism is invoked as a reason for inaction, Turner makes the individualist tradition the basis of a bold and impassioned case for race consciousness—consciousness of the ways that race continues to constrain opportunity in America. Turner’s “new individualism” becomes the grounds for concerted public action against racial injustice.
[more]




home | accessibility | search | about | contact us

BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2021
The University of Chicago Press