From Quarry to Cornfield provides an innovative model for examining the technology of hoe production and its contribution to the agriculture of Mississippian communities.
Lithic specialist Charles Cobb examines the political economy in Mississippian communities through a case study of raw material procurement and hoe production and usage at the Mill Creek site on Dillow Ridge in southwest Illinois. Cobb outlines the day-to-day activities in a Mississippian chiefdom village that flourished from about A.D. 1250 to 1500. In so doing, he provides a fascinating window into the specialized tasks of a variety of "day laborers" whose contribution to the community rested on their production of stone hoes necessary in the task of feeding the village. Overlooked in most previous studies, the skills and creativity of the makers of the hoes used in village farming provide a basis for broader analysis of the technology of hoe use in Mississippian times.
Although Cobb's work focuses on Mill Creek, his findings at this site are representative of the agricultural practices of Mississippian communities throughout the eastern United States. The theoretical underpinnings of Cobb's study make a clear case for a reexamination of the accepted definition of chiefdom, the mobilization of surplus labor, and issues of power, history, and agency in Mississippian times. In a well-crafted piece of writing, Cobb distinguishes himself as one of the leaders in the study of lithic technology. From Quarry to Cornfield will find a well-deserved place in the ongoing discussions of power and production in the Mississippian political economy.
While today's presidential tweets may seem a light-year apart from the scratch of quill pens during the era of the American Revolution, the importance of political communication is eternal. This book explores the roles that political narratives, media coverage, and evolving communication technologies have played in precipitating, shaping, and concluding or prolonging wars and revolutions over the course of US history. The case studies begin with the Sons of Liberty in the era of the American Revolution, cover American wars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and conclude with a look at the conflict against ISIS in the Trump era. Special chapters also examine how propagandists shaped American perceptions of two revolutions of international significance: the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution. Each chapter analyzes its subject through the lens of the messengers, messages, and communications-technology-media to reveal the effects on public opinion and the trajectory and conduct of the conflict. The chapters collectively provide an overview of the history of American strategic communications on wars and revolutions that will interest scholars, students, and communications strategists.
A Project Syndicate Best Read of the Year
On the centennial of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, the definitive history of how Mao and his successors overcame incredible odds to gain and keep power.
Mao Zedong and the twelve other young men who founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 could hardly have imagined that less than thirty years later they would be rulers. On its hundredth anniversary, the party remains in command, leading a nation primed for global dominance.
Tony Saich tells the authoritative, comprehensive story of the Chinese Communist Party—its rise to power against incredible odds, its struggle to consolidate rule and overcome self-inflicted disasters, and its thriving amid other communist parties’ collapse. Saich argues that the brutal Japanese invasion in the 1930s actually helped the party. As the Communists retreated into the countryside, they established themselves as the populist, grassroots alternative to the Nationalists, gaining the support they would need to triumph in the civil war. Once in power, however, the Communists faced the difficult task of learning how to rule. Saich examines the devastating economic consequences of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the political chaos of the Cultural Revolution, as well as the party’s rebound under Deng Xiaoping’s reforms.
Leninist systems are thought to be rigid, yet the Chinese Communist Party has proved adaptable. From Rebel to Ruler shows that the party owes its endurance to its flexibility. But is it nimble enough to realize Xi Jinping’s “China Dream”? Challenges are multiplying, as the growing middle class makes new demands on the state and the ideological retreat from communism draws the party further from its revolutionary roots. The legacy of the party may be secure, but its future is anything but guaranteed.
“The definitive, candid, and absorbing history of a political organization…A vital account, based on magnificent research, that shows the party as a colossal, relentless, and enduring machine.”—Jane Perlez, former Beijing Bureau Chief, New York Times
“If you were to travel back in time to 1921 and predict that the Communist Party of China would rule over the world’s second-largest economy 100 years later, no one would believe you. In this definitive primer, Tony Saich explains how the impossible came true.”—Yuen Yuen Ang, Project Syndicate
“An extremely lucid, insightful history of the Chinese Communist Party. Saich’s readable narrative takes the CCP from its origins as a tiny group of revolutionaries…to the powerful, repressive rulers of a world power today.”—James Mann, author of The China Fantasy
Mao Zedong and the twelve young men who founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 could hardly have imagined that less than thirty years later, they would rule China. Over a century later the party remains in command, leading a nation primed for global dominance.
From Rebel to Ruler is a landmark history of the Chinese Communist Party—its rise against incredible odds, its struggle to consolidate power and overcome self-inflicted disasters, and its ability to thrive long after the collapse of the Soviet Union and dissolution of other communist parties. Leninist systems are thought to be rigid, yet the Chinese Communist Party has proved adaptable. Tony Saich shows that the party owes its endurance to its flexibility. But is it nimble enough to realize Xi Jinping’s “China Dream”? Challenges are multiplying, as a restless middle class makes new demands and the party strays ever further from its revolutionary roots.
Once hailed as a revolutionary change in U.S. federal aid policy that would return power to state and local governments, General Revenue Sharing was politically dead a decade later. Bruce A. Wallin now offers the only complete history of the General Revenue Sharing program — why it passed, why state and local governments used it the way they did, and why it died. He examines its unique role in the history of U.S. federalism and explores its relevance to intergovernmental aid policy at the turn of a new century.
This book is crucial to understanding the changed environment of U.S. intergovernmental relations in the 1990’s and makes a strong case for reconsidering a program of federal unrestricted aid.
This first-hand account tells the story of turbulent civil rights era Atlanta through the eyes of a white upper-class woman who became an outspoken advocate for integration and racial equality
As a privileged white woman who grew up in segregated Atlanta, Sara Mitchell Parsons was an unlikely candidate to become a civil rights agitator. After all, her only contacts with blacks were with those who helped raise her and those who later helped raise her children. As a young woman, she followed the conventional path expected of her, becoming the dutiful wife of a conservative husband, going to the country club, and playing bridge. But unlike many of her peers, Parsons harbored an increasing uneasiness about racial segregation.To understand how North Korea has survived as the worlds last Stalinist regime despite international isolationand at enormous human costs to its peopleone must look at how its political system was created. The countrys foundations were laid in the late 1940s and 1950s as a result of interaction between the Soviet Stalinist model, imposed from outside, and local traditions.
Andrei Lankov traces the formation of the North Korean state and the early years of Kim Il Sungs rule, when the future "Great Leader" and his entourage were consolidating their power base. Surveying the situation in North Korea after 1945, Lankov explores the internal composition of the ruling elite, the role of the Soviets, and the uneasy relations between various political groups. He also focuses on how in 1956 Kim Il Sung defeated the only known attempt to oust him and thereby established absolute personal rule beyond either Soviet or Chinese control.
The book is based on previously secret Soviet documents from Russian archives, as well as interviews with Russian and Korean participants.
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was once synonymous with steel. But after the factories closed, the city bet its future on a new industry: casino gambling. On the site of the former Bethlehem Steel plant, thousands of flashing slot machines and digital bells replaced the fires in the blast furnaces and the shift change whistles of the industrial workplace. From Steel to Slots tells the story of a city struggling to make sense of the ways in which local jobs, landscapes, and identities are transformed by global capitalism.
Postindustrial redevelopment often makes a clean break with a city’s rusted past. In Bethlehem, where the new casino is industrial-themed, the city’s heritage continues to dominate the built environment and infuse everyday experiences. Through the voices of steelworkers, casino dealers, preservationists, immigrants, and executives, Chloe Taft examines the ongoing legacies of corporate presence and urban development in a small city—and their uneven effects.
Today, multinational casino corporations increasingly act as urban planners, promising jobs and new tax revenues to ailing communities. Yet in an industry premised on risk and capital liquidity, short-term gains do not necessarily mean long-term commitments to local needs. While residents often have few cards to play in the face of global capital and private development, Taft argues that the shape economic progress takes is not inevitable, nor must it always look forward. Memories of corporations’ accountability to communities persist, and citizens see alternatives for more equitable futures in the layered landscapes all around them.
Natural disasters, the effects of climate change, and political upheavals and war have driven tens of millions of people from their homes and spurred intense debates about how governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) should respond with long-term resettlement strategies. Many resettlement efforts have focused primarily on providing infrastructure and have done little to help displaced people and communities rebuild social structure, which has led to resettlement failures throughout the world. So what does it take to transform a resettlement into a successful community?
This book offers the first long-term comparative study of social outcomes through a case study of two Honduran resettlements built for survivors of Hurricane Mitch (1998) by two different NGOs. Although residents of each arrived from the same affected neighborhoods and have similar demographics, twelve years later one resettlement wrestles with high crime, low participation, and low social capital, while the other maintains low crime, a high degree of social cohesion, participation, and general social health. Using a multi-method approach of household surveys, interviews, ethnography, and analysis of NGO and community documents, Ryan Alaniz demonstrates that these divergent resettlement trajectories can be traced back to the type and quality of support provided by external organizations and the creation of a healthy, cohesive community culture. His findings offer important lessons and strategies that can be utilized in other places and in future resettlement policy to achieve the most effective and positive results.
This book is an inquiry into the possibilities of politics in exile. Russian Mensheviks, driven out of Soviet Russia and their party stripped of legal existence, functioned abroad in the West—in Berlin, Paris, and New York—for an entire generation. For several years they also continued to operate underground in Soviet Russia. Bereft of the usual advantages of political actors, the Mensheviks succeeded in impressing their views upon social democratic parties and Western thinking about the Soviet Union.
The Soviet experience through the eyes of its first socialist victims is recreated here for the first time from the vast storehouse of archival materials and eyewitness interviews. The exiled Mensheviks were the best informed and most perceptive observers of the Soviet scene through the 1920s and 1930s. From today’s perspective the Mensheviks’ analyses and reflections strikingly illuminate the causes of the failure of the Soviet experiment.
This book also probes the fate of Marxism and democratic socialism as it tracks the activities and writings of a remarkable group of men and women—including Raphael Abramovitch, Fedor and Lidia Dan, David Dallin, Boris Nicolaevsky, Solomon Schwarz, and Vladimir Woytinsky—entangled in the most momentous events of this century. Their contribution to politics and ideas in the age of totalitarianism merits scrutiny, and their story deserves to be told.
From the almshouses of seventeenth-century Puritans to the massive housing projects of the mid-twentieth century, the struggle over housing assistance in the United States has exposed a deep-seated ambivalence about the place of the urban poor. Lawrence J. Vale's groundbreaking book is both a comprehensive institutional history of public housing in Boston and a broader examination of the nature and extent of public obligation to house socially and economically marginal Americans during the past 350 years.
First, Vale highlights startling continuities both in the way housing assistance has been delivered to the American poor and in the policies used to reward the nonpoor. He traces the stormy history of the Boston Housing Authority, a saga of entrenched patronage and virulent racism tempered, and partially overcome, by the efforts of unyielding reformers. He explores the birth of public housing as a program intended to reward the upwardly mobile working poor, details its painful transformation into a system designed to cope with society's least advantaged, and questions current policy efforts aimed at returning to a system of rewards for responsible members of the working class. The troubled story of Boston public housing exposes the mixed motives and ideological complexity that have long characterized housing in America, from the Puritans to the projects.
Co-Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A Wall Street Journal Favorite Book of the Year
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Favorite Book of the Year
In the United States today, one in every thirty-one adults is under some form of penal control, including one in eleven African American men. How did the “land of the free” become the home of the world’s largest prison system? Challenging the belief that America’s prison problem originated with the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs, Elizabeth Hinton traces the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society at the height of the civil rights era.
“An extraordinary and important new book.”
—Jill Lepore, New Yorker
“Hinton’s book is more than an argument; it is a revelation…There are moments that will make your skin crawl…This is history, but the implications for today are striking. Readers will learn how the militarization of the police that we’ve witnessed in Ferguson and elsewhere had roots in the 1960s.”
—Imani Perry, New York Times Book Review
For decades, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) exerted an outsized pull on the political stage. Formed in 1947 by anticommunist liberals such as economist John Kenneth Galbraith and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the ADA established itself as the most prominent liberal organization in the United States for more than a quarter century. Shaped by the ADA, the New Politics movement upended Democratic Party politics with its challenge to the Vietnam War, demands for redistributive economic policies, and development of a far-reaching politics of race, gender, and sexuality.
By bringing the ADA and its influential public intellectuals into the story of the New Politics movement, Scott Kamen reveals how American liberalism shifted away from the working-class concerns of the New Deal era and began to cater to the interests of a new, suburban professional class. By the 1980s, many Democratic politicians, activists, and voters had embraced a neoliberal ideology that coupled socially liberal attitudes with market-based solutions, eschewing an older progressive politics steeped in labor issues.
In the absence of innovation in the field of conservation finance, a daunting funding gap faces conservationists aiming to protect America's system of landscapes that provide sustainable resources, water, wildlife habitat, and recreational amenities. Experts estimate that the average annual funding gap will be between $1.9 billion and $7.7 billion over the next forty years. Can the conservation community come up with new methods for financing that will fill this enormous gap? Which human and financial resources will allow us to fund critical land conservation needs?
From Walden to Wall Street brings together the experience of more than a dozen pioneering conservation finance practitioners to address these crucial issues. Contributors present groundbreaking ideas including mainstreaming environmental markets; government ballot measures for land conservations; convertible tax-exempt financing; and private equity markets.
The creativity and insight of From Walden to Wall Street offers considerable hope that, even in this era of widespread financial constraints, the American conservation community's financial resources may potentially grow dramatically in both quantity and quality in the decades to come.
Some contributors highlight how expedited flows of information allow business professionals to develop new knowledge practices. They analyze dynamics ranging from the decision-making processes of the Federal Reserve Board to the legal maneuvering necessary to buttress a nascent Japanese market in over-the-counter derivatives. Others focus on the social consequences of globalization and new modes of communication, evaluating the introduction of new information technologies into African communities and the collaborative practices of open-source computer programmers. Together the essays suggest that social relations, rather than becoming less relevant in the high-tech age, have become more important than ever. This finding dovetails with the thinking of many corporations, which increasingly employ anthropologists to study and explain the “local” cultural practices of their own workers and consumers. Frontiers of Capital signals the wide-ranging role of anthropology in explaining the social and cultural contours of the New Economy.
Contributors. Jean Comaroff, John L. Comaroff, Greg Downey, Melissa S. Fisher, Douglas R. Holmes, George E. Marcus, Siobhán O’Mahony, Aihwa Ong, Annelise Riles, Saskia Sassen, Paul A. Silverstein, AbdouMaliq Simone, Neil Smith, Caitlin Zaloom
For the past fifty years, science and technology—supported with billions of dollars from the U.S. government—have advanced at a rate that would once have seemed miraculous, while society's problems have grown more intractable, complex, and diverse. Yet scientists and politicians alike continue to prescribe more science and more technology to cure such afflictions as global climate change, natural resource depletion, overpopulation, inadequate health care, weapons proliferation, and economic inequality.
Daniel Sarewitz scrutinizes the fundamental myths that have guided the formulation of science policy for half a century—myths that serve the professional and political interests of the scientific community, but often fail to advance the interests of society as a whole. His analysis ultimately demonstrates that stronger linkages between progress in science and progress in society will require research agendas that emerge not from the intellectual momentum of science, but from the needs and goals of society.
Theories of social justice are necessarily abstract, reaching beyond the particular and the immediate to the general and the timeless. Yet such theories, addressing the world and its problems, must respond to the real and changing dilemmas of the day. A brilliant work of practical philosophy, Frontiers of Justice is dedicated to this proposition. Taking up three urgent problems of social justice neglected by current theories and thus harder to tackle in practical terms and everyday life, Martha Nussbaum seeks a theory of social justice that can guide us to a richer, more responsive approach to social cooperation.
The idea of the social contract--especially as developed in the work of John Rawls--is one of the most powerful approaches to social justice in the Western tradition. But as Nussbaum demonstrates, even Rawls's theory, suggesting a contract for mutual advantage among approximate equals, cannot address questions of social justice posed by unequal parties. How, for instance, can we extend the equal rights of citizenship--education, health care, political rights and liberties--to those with physical and mental disabilities? How can we extend justice and dignified life conditions to all citizens of the world? And how, finally, can we bring our treatment of nonhuman animals into our notions of social justice? Exploring the limitations of the social contract in these three areas, Nussbaum devises an alternative theory based on the idea of "capabilities." She helps us to think more clearly about the purposes of political cooperation and the nature of political principles--and to look to a future of greater justice for all.
Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist curate innovative essays that use transnational and comparative analysis to explore the two nations’ differences. The contributors examine five major areas: World War I’s impact on labor and socialist movements; the history of coerced labor; patterns of ethnic and class identification; forms of working-class collective action; and the struggles related to trade union democracy and independent working-class politics. Throughout, many essays highlight how hard-won transnational ties allowed Australians and Americans to influence each other’s trade union and political cultures.
Contributors: Robin Archer, Nikola Balnave, James R. Barrett, Bradley Bowden, Verity Burgmann, Robert Cherny, Peter Clayworth, Tom Goyens, Dianne Hall, Benjamin Huf, Jennie Jeppesen, Marjorie A. Jerrard, Jeffrey A. Johnson, Diane Kirkby, Elizabeth Malcolm, Patrick O’Leary, Greg Patmore, Scott Stephenson, Peta Stevenson-Clarke, Shelton Stromquist, and Nathan Wise
Frontiers of Possession asks how territorial borders were established in Europe and the Americas during the early modern period and challenges the standard view that national boundaries are largely determined by military conflicts and treaties. Focusing on Spanish and Portuguese claims in the New and Old Worlds, Tamar Herzog reconstructs the different ways land rights were negotiated and enforced, sometimes violently, among people who remembered old possessions or envisioned new ones: farmers and nobles, clergymen and missionaries, settlers and indigenous peoples.
Questioning the habitual narrative that sees the Americas as a logical extension of the Old World, Herzog portrays Spain and Portugal on both sides of the Atlantic as one unified imperial space. She begins in the Americas, where Iberian conquerors had to decide who could settle the land, who could harvest fruit and cut timber, and who had river rights for travel and trade. The presence of indigenous peoples as enemies to vanquish or allies to befriend, along with the vastness of the land, complicated the picture, as did the promise of unlimited wealth. In Europe, meanwhile, the formation and re-formation of boundaries could last centuries, as ancient entitlements clashed with evolving economic conditions and changing political views and juridical doctrines regarding how land could be acquired and maintained.
Herzog demonstrates that the same fundamental questions had to be addressed in Europe and in the Americas. Territorial control was always subject to negotiation, as neighbors and outsiders, in their quotidian interactions, carved out and defended new frontiers of possession.
In the middle decades of the sixteenth century, the republican city-state of Florence--birthplace of the Renaissance--failed. In its place the Medici family created a principality, becoming first dukes of Florence and then grand dukes of Tuscany. The Fruit of Liberty examines how this transition occurred from the perspective of the Florentine patricians who had dominated and controlled the republic. The book analyzes the long, slow social and cultural transformations that predated, accompanied, and facilitated the institutional shift from republic to principality, from citizen to subject.
More than a chronological narrative, this analysis covers a wide range of contributing factors to this transition, from attitudes toward office holding, clothing, and the patronage of artists and architects to notions of self, family, and gender. Using a wide variety of sources including private letters, diaries, and art works, Nicholas Baker explores how the language, images, and values of the republic were reconceptualized to aid the shift from citizen to subject. He argues that the creation of Medici principality did not occur by a radical break with the past but with the adoption and adaptation of the political culture of Renaissance republicanism.
Alberto Fujimori ascended to the presidency of Peru in 1990, boldly promising to remake the country. Ten years later, he hastily sent his resignation from exile in Japan, leaving behind a trail of lies, deceit, and corruption. While piecing together the shards of Fujimori’s presidency, prosecutors uncovered a vast criminal conspiracy fueled by political ambition and personal greed.
The Fujimori regime managed to maintain a facade of democracy while systematically eviscerating democratic institutions and the rule of law through legal subterfuge, intimidation, and outright bribery. The architect of this strategy was Fujimori’s notorious intelligence advisor, Vladimiro Montesinos. With great skill, Fujimori and Montesinos created the appearance of a democratic public sphere but ensured it would work only to suit their personal motives. The press was allowed to operate, but information exchange was under strict control. The more government officials tampered with the free flow of ideas, the more they inadvertently exposed the ills they were trying to cover up. And that proved to be their downfall.
Merging penetrating analysis and a journalist’s flair for narrative, Catherine Conaghan reveals the thin line between democracy and dictatorship, and shows how public institutions can both empower dictators and bring them down.
A new history shows that, despite Marxism’s rejection of money, the ruble was critical to the Soviet Union’s promise of shared prosperity for its citizens.
In spite of Karl Marx’s proclamation that money would become obsolete under Communism, the ruble remained a key feature of Soviet life. In fact, although Western economists typically concluded that money ultimately played a limited role in the Soviet Union, Kristy Ironside argues that money was both more important and more powerful than most histories have recognized. After the Second World War, money was resurrected as an essential tool of Soviet governance. Certainly, its importance was not lost on Soviet leaders, despite official Communist Party dogma. Money, Ironside demonstrates, mediated the relationship between the Soviet state and its citizens and was at the center of both the government’s and the people’s visions for the maturing Communist project. A strong ruble—one that held real value in workers’ hands and served as an effective labor incentive—was seen as essential to the economic growth that would rebuild society and realize Communism’s promised future of abundance.
Ironside shows how Soviet citizens turned to the state to remedy the damage that the ravages of the Second World War had inflicted upon their household economies. From the late 1940s through the early 1960s, progress toward Communism was increasingly measured by the health of its citizens’ personal finances, such as greater purchasing power, higher wages, better pensions, and growing savings. However, the increasing importance of money in Soviet life did not necessarily correlate to improved living standards for Soviet citizens. The Soviet government’s achievements in “raising the people’s material welfare” continued to lag behind the West’s advances during a period of unprecedented affluence. These factors combined to undermine popular support for Soviet power and confidence in the Communist project.
The United States Social Science Research Council (SSRC), founded in 1923, was the first national social science institution in the world and might be said to represent the creation of a "science of society." In Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences , Donald Fisher shows how this institution, under the considerable influence of Rockefeller philanthropy, shaped an entire discipline.
Fisher demonstrates that the creation and growth of the SSRC during the 1920s and 1930s is essential to our understanding of the major developments in the social sciences since World War II. He shows that during this period, the place of social science and social scientists in American society was fixed in a way that has had substantial, lasting impact.
The author weaves a number of larger, related issues into his account of the wide-ranging influence of the SSRC: the role of social scientists in the political life of the societies in which they live; the way in which knowledge systems develop and change; the role of philanthropy in industrialized societies; and the formation and preservation of the modern capitalist state.
Donald Fisher's discussion of how an American institution sculpted an entire discipline will be of interest to all social scientists and historians of social science.
The 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule was the most significant federal effort to increase equality of access to place-based resources and opportunities, such as high-performing schools or access to jobs, since the 1968 Fair Housing Act. However, in an effort to appeal to suburban voters, the Trump administration repealed the rule in 2020, leaving its future in doubt.
Furthering Fair Housing analyzes multiple dimensions of this rule, identifying failures of past efforts to increase housing choice, exploring how the AFFH Rule was crafted, measuring the initial effects of the rule before its rescission, and examining its interaction with other contemporary housing issues, such as affordability, gentrification, anti-displacement, and zoning policies.
The editors and contributors to this volume—a mix of civil rights advocates, policymakers, and public officials—provide critical perspectives and identify promising new directions for future policies and practices. Placing the history of fair housing in the context of the centuries-long struggle for racial equity, Furthering Fair Housing shows how this policy can be revived and enhanced to advance racial equity in America’s neighborhoods.
The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be details how the 2016 presidential election developed in the eleven states that make up the South. Preeminent scholars of Southern politics analyze this momentous election, including the issues that drove southern voters, the nomination process in early 2016, and where the region may be headed politically in the Trump era. In addition, each state chapter includes analysis on notable congressional races and important patterns within the states.
This new edited volume will be an important tool for scholars, and also journalists and political enthusiasts seeking a deeper understanding of contemporary southern electoral politics.
Many people point to recent events—the collapse of the Soviet Union, the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas—as proof that capitalism has triumphed over socialism once and for all. In A Future for Socialism, a noted economist argues that socialism is not dead but merely in need of modernizing. John Roemer believes that the hallmark of socialism is egalitarianism—equality of opportunity for self-realization and welfare, for political influence, and for social status—and he reminds us that capitalist societies face increasingly difficult problems of poverty and social inequality. Reenergizing a debate that began with Oskar Lange and Friedrich Hayek in the late 1930s, he brings to important questions of political economy a new level of sophistication in line with contemporary theories of justice and equality.
Roemer sees the solution of the principal-agent problem as the key to developing a decentralized market-socialist economy. This would be capable of maintaining efficiency and technological innovation while supporting a substantively more equal distribution of income than is achieved in capitalist economies. Roemer defends his views against skeptics on the right, who believe that efficiency and innovation are incompatible with egalitarianism, and skeptics on the left, who believe that socialism is incompatible with markets.
Because of its interdisciplinary approach, A Future for Socialism will appeal to a general social science audience, including economists, political scientists, sociologists, and political philosophers. It is also accessible to the interested reader.
In this book, fifteen major scholars assess the current state of American democracy, offering a spirited dialogue on the future of democratic politics. Contributors focus on three principles fundamental to democracyequality, liberty, and participation. They examine these principles within the context of the basic institutions of American democracy: Congress and the state legislatures, the president, political parties, interest groups, and the Supreme Court. They raise questions regarding the checks and balances among formal governmental institutions as well as the role of political parties and interest groups.
Topics discussed include the incomplete mobilization of the electorate, the debates over campaign finance reform and term limits, the Supreme Courts activist role in the Florida recount, the dangers of teledemocracy and state initiatives, the separation of political participation from residential location, "identity politics," the clash of "negative" and "positive" liberty, and the prospects for personal freedom in an era of terrorist threats.
This timely collection covers the issues relevant to the future of American democracy today not only for lawmakers, students, and historians, but for any concerned citizen.
Are humans hard-wired to make good decisions about managing their privacy in an increasingly public world? Or are we helpless victims of surveillance through our use of invasive digital media? Exploring the chasm between the tyranny of surveillance and the ideal of privacy, this book traces the origins of personal data collection in digital technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) embedded in social network sites, search engines, mobile apps, the web, and email. The Future of Digital Surveillance argues against a technologically deterministic view—digital technologies by nature do not cause surveillance. Instead, the shaping of surveillance technologies is embedded in a complex set of individual psychology, institutional behaviors, and policy principles.
Are NATO’s mutual security commitments strong enough today to deter all adversaries? Is the nuclear umbrella as credible as it was during the Cold War? Backed by the full range of US and allied military capabilities, NATO’s mutual defense treaty has been enormously successful, but today’s commitments are strained by military budget cuts and antinuclear sentiment. The United States has also shifted its focus away from European security during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and more recently with the Asia rebalance. Will a resurgent Russia change this?
The Future of Extended Deterrence brings together experts and scholars from the policy and academic worlds to provide a theoretically rich and detailed analysis of post–Cold War nuclear weapons policy, nuclear deterrence, alliance commitments, nonproliferation, and missile defense in NATO but with implications far beyond. The contributors analyze not only American policy and ideas but also the ways NATO members interpret their own continued political and strategic role in the alliance.
In-depth and multifaceted, The Future of Extended Deterrence is an essential resource for policy practitioners and scholars of nuclear deterrence, arms control, missile defense, and the NATO alliance.
A once-in-a-generation event held every twenty years, the Minnowbrook conference brings together the top scholars in public administration and public management to reflect on the state of the field and its future. This unique volume brings together a group of distinguished authors—both seasoned and new—for a rare critical examination of the field of public administration yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
The book begins by examining the ideas of previous Minnowbrook conferences, such as relevance and change, which are reflective of the 1960s and 1980s. It then moves beyond old Minnowbrook concepts to focus on public administration challenges of the future: globalism, twenty-first century collaborative governance, the role of information technology in governance, deliberative democracy and public participation, the organization of the future, and teaching the next generation of leaders. The book ends by coming full circle to examine the current challenge of remaining relevant. There is no other book like this—nor is there ever likely to be another—in print. Simply put, the ideas, concepts, and spirit of Minnowbrook are one-of-a-kind. This book captures the soul of public administration past, present, and future, and is a must-read for anyone serious about the theory and practice of public administration.
The United States is about to embark on the most thorough reconsideration of its ocean policy in more than three decades. With 1998 designated as the International Year of the Ocean by the United Nations, and with both the executive branch and the Congress currently working toward developing new approaches to formulating and implementing ocean policy, a comprehensive overview of key issues and concerns is essential.
The Future of U.S. Ocean Policy provides such an overview, with an in-depth analysis of the evolution of U.S. ocean policy and a timely discussion of the most important ocean and coastal issues facing the nation. The book assesses the current status of ocean policy, examines national and international trends, and considers choices for policymakers in the 21st century. Following an introductory chapter that reviews national ocean policy and the process by which it is made, the authors:
The Future of U.S. Ocean Policy is the only recent book that focuses on national ocean policy in its entirety, and will play an important role in upcoming debates concerning the future direction of policy initiatives. Agency personnel, members and staff of nongovernmental organizations, industry groups, Congressional staffers, state and local government officials, academics, and concerned citizens will find the book an invaluable guide, as will students and faculty in courses in marine and coastal management and in environmental management.
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