logo for Intellect Books
Lexicon for an Affective Archive
Edited by Giulia Palladini and Marco Pustianaz
Intellect Books, 2017
To study an archive or archival materials is to encounter an affective and critical practice involved in the construction of memory. Lexicon for an Affective Archive, edited by Giulia Palladini and Marco Pustianaz, is an international collection of these encounters, offering glimpses into the intimate relations inherent in finding, remembering (or imagining), and creating an archive. Bringing together voices from a variety of fields across the humanities, performance studies, and contemporary art, and engaging in a multidisciplinary analysis, this beautifully designed and fully illustrated volume advances the idea of an “affective archive” as a useful conceptual tool—a tool which contributes to an understanding of an expanded notion of an archive and its central role in contemporary visual and performing arts.
 
A co-publication with NInA and Live Art Development Agency.
[more]

front cover of LGBT Youth in America's Schools
LGBT Youth in America's Schools
Jason Cianciotto and Sean Cahill
University of Michigan Press, 2012

Jason Cianciotto and Sean Cahill, experts on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender public policy advocacy, combine an accessible review of social science research with analyses of school practices and local, state, and federal laws that affect LGBT students. In addition, portraits of LGBT youth and their experiences with discrimination at school bring human faces to the issues the authors discuss.

This is an essential guide for teachers, school administrators, guidance counselors, and social workers interacting with students on a daily basis; school board members and officials determining school policy; nonprofit advocates and providers of social services to youth; and academic scholars, graduate students, and researchers training the next generation of school administrators and informing future policy and practice.

[more]

logo for University of Michigan Press
LGBT Youth in America's Schools
Jason Cianciotto and Sean Cahill
University of Michigan Press, 2012

Jason Cianciotto and Sean Cahill, experts on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender public policy advocacy, combine an accessible review of social science research with analyses of school practices and local, state, and federal laws that affect LGBT students. In addition, portraits of LGBT youth and their experiences with discrimination at school bring human faces to the issues the authors discuss.

This is an essential guide for teachers, school administrators, guidance counselors, and social workers interacting with students on a daily basis; school board members and officials determining school policy; nonprofit advocates and providers of social services to youth; and academic scholars, graduate students, and researchers training the next generation of school administrators and informing future policy and practice.

[more]

front cover of LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua
LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua
Revolution, Dictatorship, and Social Movements
Karen Kampwirth
University of Arizona Press, 2022
The modern political tumult of Nicaragua includes revolution, dictatorship, and social movements. LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua explores the untold stories of the LGBTQ community of Nicaragua and its role in the recent political history of the country.

Karen Kampwirth is a renowned scholar of the Nicaraguan Revolution, who has been writing at the intersection of gender and politics for decades. In this chronological telling of the last fifty years of political history in Nicaragua, Kampwirth deploys a critical new lens: understanding politics from the perspective of the country’s LGBTQ community. Kampwirth details the gay and lesbian guerrillas in the 1960s and 1970s, Nicaragua’s first openly gay television wizard in the 1980s, and the attempts by LGBTQ revolutionaries to create a civil rights movement and the subsequent squashing of that movement by the ruling Sandinista party. She analyzes the shifting political alliances, the rise of strong feminist and LGBTQ movements in Nicaragua, and the attempts by the administration of Daniel Ortega to co-opt and control these movements.

Ultimately, this is a story of struggle and defeat, progress and joy. This timely book provides a well-documented review of LGBTQ politics in modern Nicaragua, helping us to see the Sandinista Revolution and its ongoing aftermath in a new light.
 
[more]

front cover of Liberal Christianity and Women's Global Activism
Liberal Christianity and Women's Global Activism
The YWCA of the USA and the Maryknoll Sisters
Amanda L. Izzo
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Religiously influenced social movements tend to be characterized as products of the conservative turn in Protestant and Catholic life in the latter part of the twentieth century, with women's mobilizations centering on defense of the “traditional” family. In Liberal Christianity and Women’s Global Activism, Amanda L. Izzo argues that, contrary to this view, liberal wings of Christian churches have remained an instrumental presence in U.S. and transnational politics. Women have been at the forefront of such efforts.

Focusing on the histories of two highly influential groups, the Young Women’s Christian Association of the USA, an interdenominational Protestant organization, and the Maryknoll Sisters, a Roman Catholic religious order, Izzo offers new perspectives on the contributions of these women to transnational social movements, women’s history, and religious studies, as she traces the connections between turn-of-the-century Christian women’s reform culture and liberal and left-wing religious social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Izzo suggests that shared ethical, theological, and institutional underpinnings can transcend denominational divides, and that strategies for social change often associated with secular feminism have ties to spiritually inspired social movements.  
 
[more]

front cover of Liberal Democracy and the Limits of Tolerance
Liberal Democracy and the Limits of Tolerance
Essays in Honor and Memory of Yitzhak Rabin
Raphael Cohen-Almagor, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2000
An irony inherent in all political systems is that the principles that underlie and characterize them can also endanger and destroy them. This collection examines the limits that need to be imposed on democracy, liberty, and tolerance in order to ensure the survival of the societies that cherish them. The essays in this volume consider the philosophical difficulties inherent in the concepts of liberty and tolerance; at the same time, they ponder practical problems arising from the tensions between the forces of democracy and the destructive elements that take advantage of liberty to bring harm that undermines democracy.
Written in the wake of the assasination of Yitzhak Rabin, this volume is thus dedicated to the question of boundaries: how should democracies cope with antidemocratic forces that challenge its system? How should we respond to threats that undermine democracy and at the same time retain our values and maintain our commitment to democracy and to its underlying values?
All the essays here share a belief in the urgency of the need to tackle and find adequate answers to radicalism and political extremism. They cover such topics as the dilemmas embodied in the notion of tolerance, including the cost and regulation of free speech; incitement as distinct from advocacy; the challenge of religious extremism to liberal democracy; the problematics of hate speech; free communication, freedom of the media, and especially the relationships between media and terrorism.
The contributors to this volume are David E. Boeyink, Harvey Chisick, Irwin Cotler, David Feldman, Owen Fiss, David Goldberg, J. Michael Jaffe, Edmund B. Lambeth, Sam Lehman-Wilzig, Joseph Eliot Magnet, Richard Moon, Frederick Schauer, and L.W. Sumner. The volume includes the opening remarks of Mrs.Yitzhak Rabin to the conference--dedicated to the late Yitzhak Rabin--at which these papers were originally presented. These studies will appeal to politicians, sociologists, media educators and professionals, jurists and lawyers, as well as the general public.
[more]

front cover of Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society
Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society
Justin Buckley Dyer
University of Missouri Press, 2023
The liberal arts university has been in decline since well before the virtualization of campus life, increasingly inviting public skepticism about its viability as an institution of personal, civ­ic, and professional growth. New technologies that might have brought people together have instead frustrated the university’s capacity to foster thoughtful citizenship among tomorrow’s lead­ers and exacerbated socioeconomic inequalities that are poison­ing America’s civic culture.

With Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society, a collec­tion of 19 original essays, editors Justin Dyer and Constantine Vassiliou present the work of a diverse group of scholars to assess the value of a liberal arts education in the face of market, technological, cultural, and political forces shaping higher learning today.
 
[more]

front cover of The Liberal Illusion
The Liberal Illusion
Does Trade Promote Peace?
Katherine Barbieri
University of Michigan Press, 2005
"A very important and long-awaited major contribution to the debate . . . Her work cannot be ignored."
--Nils Petter Gleditsch, Journal of Peace Research

"Barbieri builds on a solid foundation of work on trade and conflict and specifies the conditions under which trade reduces and increases conflict. . . . The bottom line is that this is an important book in the study of trade and conflict because of its comprehensive approach."
--Kathy L. Powers, Perspectives on Politics

"Barbieri's analysis reveals the fundamental and intellectual weaknesses of the various arguments on this topic. [A] solid and timely contribution to the literature"
--Choice


The Liberal Illusion sheds light on an increasingly important question in international relations scholarship and the domain of policy making-whether international trade promotes peace. By examining a broad range of theories about trade's impact on interstate relations and undertaking a set of empirical analyses of the trade-conflict puzzle, Katherine Barbieri provides a comprehensive assessment of the liberal view that trade promotes peace. Barbieri's stunning conclusions depart from conventional wisdom in international relations. Consequently, The Liberal Illusion serves as an important counterargument and a warning call to policymakers who rely upon trade-based strategies to promote peace, strategies that appear to offer little hope of achieving their goals.
[more]

front cover of Liberal Suppression
Liberal Suppression
Section 501(c)(3) and the Taxation of Speech
Philip Hamburger
University of Chicago Press, 2018
In the course of exempting religious, educational, and charitable organizations from federal income tax, section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code requires them to refrain from campaign speech and much speech to influence legislation. These speech restrictions have seemed merely technical adjustments, which prevent the political use of a tax subsidy. But the cultural and legal realities are more disturbing.

Tracing the history of American liberalism, including theological liberalism and its expression in nativism, Hamburger shows the centrality of turbulent popular anxieties about the Catholic Church and other potentially orthodox institutions. He argues persuasively that such theopolitical fears about the political speech of churches and related organizations underlay the adoption, in 1934 and 1954, of section 501(c)(3)’s speech limits. He thereby shows that the speech restrictions have been part of a broad majority assault on minority rights and that they are grossly unconstitutional.

Along the way, Hamburger explores the role of the Ku Klux Klan and other nativist organizations, the development of American theology, and the cultural foundations of liberal “democratic” political theory. He also traces important legal developments such as the specialization of speech rights and the use of law to homogenize beliefs. Ultimately, he examines a wide range of contemporary speech restrictions and the growing shallowness of public life in America.
His account is an unflinching look at the complex history of American liberalism and at the implications for speech, the diversity of belief, and the nation’s future.
 
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Liberalism and American Constitutional Law
Rogers M. Smith
Harvard University Press, 1985

Rogers Smith describes the adverse influence of modern liberalism's governing ideas on the development of American constitutional law and offers a new, more purposive theory to suit contemporary needs. He begins with a fresh analysis of the liberal goals shared by America's constitutional framers and points out the weaknesses of their political thought. Examining vital constitutional doctrines of due process, free speech, voting apportionment, and economic welfare, he demonstrates how contemporary law is often an incoherent patchwork of principles drawn from different historic versions of liberalism.

Smith considers and discards the major modern theories in political philosophy that bear on constitutional law: the democratic relativism of Alexander Bickel and John Hart Ely, the higher-law views inherited from America's religious traditions, and the neo-Kantian liberalism of Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls. Returning instead to the early liberalism of John Locke, he suggests how a theory centered on the Enlightenment commitment to promoting human capacities for reflective self-direction, or “rational liberty,” might better guide current constitutional debates.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Liberalism and American Constitutional Law
Rogers M. Smith
Harvard University Press

Rogers Smith describes the adverse influence of modern liberalism's governing ideas on the development of American constitutional law and offers a new, more purposive theory to suit contemporary needs. He begins with a fresh analysis of the liberal goals shared by America's constitutional framers and points out the weaknesses of their political thought. Examining vital constitutional doctrines of due process, free speech, voting apportionment, and economic welfare, he demonstrates how contemporary law is often an incoherent patchwork of principles drawn from different historic versions of liberalism.

Smith considers and discards the major modern theories in political philosophy that bear on constitutional law: the democratic relativism of Alexander Bickel and John Hart Ely, the higher-law views inherited from America's religious traditions, and the neo-Kantian liberalism of Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls. Returning instead to the early liberalism of John Locke, he suggests how a theory centered on the Enlightenment commitment to promoting human capacities for reflective self-direction, or “rational liberty,” might better guide current constitutional debates.

[more]

front cover of Liberalism and Empire
Liberalism and Empire
A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought
Uday Singh Mehta
University of Chicago Press, 1999
We take liberalism to be a set of ideas committed to political rights and self-determination, yet it also served to justify an empire built on political domination. Uday Mehta argues that imperialism, far from contradicting liberal tenets, in fact stemmed from liberal assumptions about reason and historical progress. Confronted with unfamiliar cultures such as India, British liberals could only see them as backward or infantile. In this, liberals manifested a narrow conception of human experience and ways of being in the world.

Ironically, it is in the conservative Edmund Burke—a severe critic of Britain's arrogant, paternalistic colonial expansion—that Mehta finds an alternative and more capacious liberal vision. Shedding light on a fundamental tension in liberal theory, Liberalism and Empire reaches beyond post-colonial studies to revise our conception of the grand liberal tradition and the conception of experience with which it is associated.

[more]

front cover of Liberalism and Its Discontents
Liberalism and Its Discontents
Alan Brinkley
Harvard University Press, 2000

How did liberalism, the great political tradition that from the New Deal to the 1960s seemed to dominate American politics, fall from favor so far and so fast? In this history of liberalism since the 1930s, a distinguished historian offers an eloquent account of postwar liberalism, where it came from, where it has gone, and why. The book supplies a crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century American politics as well as a valuable and clear perspective on the state of our nation's politics today.

Liberalism and Its Discontents moves from a penetrating interpretation of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal to an analysis of the profound and frequently corrosive economic, social, and cultural changes that have undermined the liberal tradition. The book moves beyond an examination of the internal weaknesses of liberalism and the broad social and economic forces it faced to consider the role of alternative political traditions in liberalism's downfall. What emerges is a picture of a dominant political tradition far less uniform and stable--and far more complex and contested--than has been argued. The author offers as well a masterly assessment of how some of the leading historians of the postwar era explained (or failed to explain) liberalism and other political ideologies in the last half-century. He also makes clear how historical interpretation was itself a reflection of liberal assumptions that began to collapse more quickly and completely than almost any scholar could have imagined a generation ago. As both political history and a critique of that history, Liberalism and Its Discontents, based on extraordinary essays written over the last decade, leads to a new understanding of the shaping of modern America.

[more]

front cover of Liberalism and Leadership
Liberalism and Leadership
The Irony of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Emile Lester
University of Michigan Press, 2019

Most scholars and pundits today view Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy as aggressive liberal leaders, while viewing Schlesinger’s famous histories of their presidencies as celebrations of their steadfast progressive leadership. A more careful reading of Schlesinger’s work demonstrates that he preferred an ironic political outlook emphasizing the virtues of restraint, patience, and discipline. For Schlesinger, Roosevelt and Kennedy were liberal heroes and models as much because they respected the constraints on their power and ideals as because they tested traditional institutions and redefined the boundaries of presidential power.

Aggressive liberalism involves the use of inspirational rhetoric and cunning political tactics to expand civil liberties and insure economic equality. Schlesinger’s emphasis on the crucial role that irony has played and should play in liberalism poses a challenge to the aggressive liberalism advocated by liberal activists, political thinkers, and pundits. That his counsel was grounded in conservative insights as well as liberal values makes it accessible to leaders across the political spectrum.
 

[more]

front cover of Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination
Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination
Joyce Appleby
Harvard University Press, 1992

Like dye cast into water, liberal assumptions color everything American, from ideas about human nature to fears about big government. Not the dreaded “L” word of the 1988 presidential campaign, liberalism in its historical context emerged from the modern faith in free inquiry, natural rights, economic liberty, and democratic government. Expressed in the nation-building acts of revolution and constitution-writing, liberalism both structured and limited Americans’ sense of reality for two centuries.

The nation’s scholars were unable to break away from liberalism’s pervasive hold on the American mind until the last generation—when they recovered the lost world of classical republicanism. Ornate, aristocratic, prescriptive, and concerned with the common good, this form of republicanism held sway among the founding fathers before the triumph of liberal thought, with its simple, egalitarian, rational, and individualistic emphasis. The two concepts, as Joyce Appleby shows, posed choices for eighteenth-century thinkers much as they have divided twentieth-century scholars.

Entering one of the liveliest debates in the scholarly world about our ideological roots, Appleby follows the labyrinthine controversies that these two perspectives have generated in their day and in ours. In doing so, she addresses the tensions that remain to be resolved in the democratic societies of the late twentieth century—the complex relations between individual and community, personal liberty and the common good, aspiration and practical wisdom.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Liberalism and the Moral Life
Nancy L. Rosenblum
Harvard University Press, 1989

In the 1988 U.S. presidential campaign the word “liberal” was bandied about as though it were a term of abuse. Charges hurled from the political right and left accused liberalism of moral failing: liberalism lacks concern for good character and civic virtue; its preoccupation with private liberty and toleration is morally anemic and ultimately erodes shared public values. Against this background, philosophers and political theorists take stock of the historical varieties of liberal thought and of the present relation between liberalism and moral living.

Liberalism and the Moral Life presents the timely thoughts of twelve prominent scholars who are redrawing the map of liberalism: Richard Ashcraft, Benjamin R. Barber, Seyla Benhabib, William Galston, Amy Gutmann, Stephen Holmes, George Kateb, Steven Lukes, Susan Moller Okin, Nancy Rosenblum, Judith N. Shklar, and Charles Taylor. In essays that go beyond the conventional defense of liberalism based on moral skepticism or the possibility of discovering neutral principles, these writers consider possibilities for reinspiriting liberal thought. They offer fresh arguments for the moral status of individualism and argue that distinctively liberal virtues and practices sustain democracy, constituting a moral life that people share in common. Moving beyond theory, the authors point to a variety of institutional contexts within liberal democracy that provide moral education and opportunities for expressing commitment to substantive moral values.

[more]

front cover of Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge
Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge
A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy
Charles Arthur Willard
University of Chicago Press, 1996
In this witty and provocative study of democracy and its critics, Charles Willard debunks liberalism, arguing that its exaggerated ideals of authenticity, unity, and community have deflected attention from the pervasive incompetence of "the rule of experts." He proposes a ground of communication that emphasizes common interests rather than narrow disputes.

The problem of "unity" and the public sphere has driven a wedge between libertarians and communitarians. To mediate this conflict, Willard advocates a shift from the discourse of liberalism to that of epistemics. As a means of organizing the ebb and flow of consensus, epistemics regards democracy as a family of knowledge problems—as ways of managing discourse across differences and protecting multiple views.

Building a bridge between warring peoples and warring paradigms, this book also reminds those who presume to instruct government that they are obliged to enlighten it, and that to do so requires an enlightened public discourse.
[more]

front cover of Liberalism and Transformation
Liberalism and Transformation
The Global Politics of Violence and Intervention
Dillon Stone Tatum
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Liberalism and Transformation is the first scholarly work that explores the historical, philosophical, and intellectual development of global liberalism since the nineteenth century in the context of the deployment of violence, force, and intervention. Using an approach that includes interpretive and contextual analysis of texts from writers, philosophers, and policy-makers across nearly two centuries, as well as historiographical and historical analysis of archival documents (some of which have been recently declassified) and other media, Liberalism and Transformation narrates the messy history of emancipatory liberalism and its engagement with issues of war and peace. The book contributes to both a rethinking of liberal democracy and its relationship to world politics, as well as the effects of liberal internationalism on global processes. Furthermore, Liberalism and Transformation invites readers to reflect on global ethics and transformation in world politics. In the first place, it shows how ethical imaginings of the world have direct effects on actions of transformative importance. In the second place, it suggests that discourses are fluid, changing, and complex.

[more]

front cover of Liberalism Disavowed
Liberalism Disavowed
Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore
Beng Huat Chua
National University of Singapore Press, 2018
In Liberalism Disavowed, Chua Beng Huat examines the rejection of Western-style liberalism in Singapore and the way the People's Action Party has forged an independent non-Western ideology. This book explains the evolution of this communitarian ideology,
[more]

front cover of The Liberalism of Care
The Liberalism of Care
Community, Philosophy, and Ethics
Shawn C. Fraistat
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Attention to care in modern society has fallen out of view as an ethos of personal responsibility, free markets, and individualism has taken hold. The Liberalism of Care argues that contemporary liberalism is suffering from a crisis of care, manifest in a decaying sense of collective political responsibility for citizens’ well-being and for the most vulnerable members of our communities. Political scientist Shawn C. Fraistat argues that we have lost the political language of care, which, prior the nineteenth century, was commonly used to express these dimensions of political life.

To recover that language, Fraistat turns to three prominent philosophers—Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and William Godwin—who illuminate the varied ways caring language and caring values have structured core debates in the history of Western political thought about the proper role of government, as well as the rights and responsibilities of citizens. The Liberalism of Care presents a distinctive vision for our liberal politics where political communities and citizens can utilize the ethic and practices of care to face practical challenges.
[more]

front cover of Liberalism with Honor
Liberalism with Honor
Sharon R. Krause
Harvard University Press, 2002

Why do men and women sometimes risk everything to defend their liberties? What motivates principled opposition to the abuse of power? In Liberalism with Honor, Sharon Krause explores honor as a motive for risky and difficult forms of political action. She shows the sense of honor to be an important source of such action and a spring of individual agency more generally.

Krause traces the genealogy of honor, including its ties to conscientious objection and civil disobedience, beginning in old-regime France and culminating in the American civil rights movement. She examines the dangers intrinsic to honor and the tensions between honor and modern democracy, but demonstrates that the sense of honor has supported political agency in the United States from the founders to democratic reformers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Honor continues to hold interest and importance today because it combines self-concern and personal ambition with principled higher purposes, and so challenges the disabling dichotomy between self-interest and self-sacrifice that currently pervades both political theory and American public life.

[more]

front cover of Liberalism without Democracy
Liberalism without Democracy
Nationhood and Citizenship in Egypt, 1922–1936
Abdeslam M. Maghraoui
Duke University Press, 2006
The history of Western intervention in the Middle East stretches from the late eighteenth century to the present day. All too often, the Western rationale for invading and occupying a country to liberate its people has produced new forms of domination that have hindered rather than encouraged the emergence of democratic politics. Abdeslam M. Maghraoui advances the understanding of this problematic dynamic through an analysis of efforts to achieve liberal reform in Egypt following its independence from Great Britain in 1922.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Egypt’s reformers equated liberal notions of nationhood and citizenship with European civilization and culture. As Maghraoui demonstrates, in their efforts to achieve liberalization, they sought to align Egypt with the West and to dissociate it from the Arab and Islamic worlds. Egypt’s professionals and leading cultural figures attempted to replace the fez with European-style hats; they discouraged literary critics from studying Arabic poetry, claiming it was alien to Egyptian culture. Why did they feel compelled to degrade local cultures in order to accommodate liberal principles?

Drawing on the thought of Lacan, Fanon, Said, and Bhabha, as well as contemporary political theory, Maghraoui points to liberalism’s inherent contradiction: its simultaneous commitments to individual liberty and colonial conquest. He argues that when Egypt’s reformers embraced the language of liberalism as their own, they adopted social prejudices built into that language. Efforts to achieve liberalization played out—and failed—within the realm of culture, not just within the political arena. Opinions voiced through literary works, cartoons, newspaper articles on controversial social issues, and other forms of cultural expression were ultimately more important to the fate of liberalism in Egypt than were questions of formal political participation and representation. Liberalism without Democracy demonstrates the powerful—and under appreciated—role of language and culture in defining citizenship and political community.

[more]

front cover of Liberalism without Illusions
Liberalism without Illusions
Essays on Liberal Theory and the Political Vision of Judith N. Shklar
Edited by Bernard Yack
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Well before her untimely death in 1992, Judith Shklar was widely recognized as one of the outstanding political theorists of our time. A pivotal figure in the reinvigoration of liberal theory during the past two decades, Shklar brought to life a complex world in which every vice has distinct political consequences and every virtue unavoidable costs. Her unique and unusually realistic approach to the study of liberal practices and institutions added psychological depth as well as a bracing pragmatism to the liberal political imagination.

In this tightly organized collection of essays, sixteen distinguished political theorists explore Shklar's intellectual legacy, focussing on both her own ideas and the broad range of issues that most intrigued her. The volume opens with a series of varied and illuminating assessments of Shklar's conception of liberal politics. The second section, with essays on Descartes and Racine, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Laski, emphasizes the relation between individual freedom and moral psychology in modern political thought. The third section addresses contemporary issues, such as the role of hypocrisy, offensive speech, and constitutional courts in liberal democracies. The book concludes with an autobiographical essay by Shklar that provides a vivid sense of her singular voice and personality.

The contributors to this volume are Bruce Ackerman, Seyla Benhabib, John Dunn, Amy Gutmann, Stanley Hoffmann, Stephen Holmes, George Kateb, Isaac Kramnick, Patrick Riley, Nancy Rosenblum, Quentin Skinner, Rogers M. Smith, Tracy B. Strong, Dennis F. Thompson, Michael Walzer, and Bernard Yack.
[more]

front cover of Liberalism’s Religion
Liberalism’s Religion
Cécile Laborde
Harvard University Press, 2017

Liberal societies conventionally treat religion as unique under the law, requiring both special protection (as in guarantees of free worship) and special containment (to keep religion and the state separate). But recently this idea that religion requires a legal exception has come under fire from those who argue that religion is no different from any other conception of the good, and the state should treat all such conceptions according to principles of neutrality and equal liberty. Cécile Laborde agrees with much of this liberal egalitarian critique, but she argues that a simple analogy between the good and religion misrepresents the complex relationships among religion, law, and the state. Religion serves as more than a statement of belief about what is true, or a code of moral and ethical conduct. It also refers to comprehensive ways of life, political theories of justice, modes of voluntary association, and vulnerable collective identities.

Disaggregating religion into its various dimensions, as Laborde does, has two clear advantages. First, it shows greater respect for ethical and social pluralism by ensuring that whatever treatment religion receives from the law, it receives because of features that it shares with nonreligious beliefs, conceptions, and identities. Second, it dispenses with the Western, Christian-inflected conception of religion that liberal political theory relies on, especially in dealing with the issue of separation between religion and state. As a result, Liberalism’s Religion offers a novel answer to the question: Can Western theories of secularism and religion be applied more universally in non-Western societies?

[more]

front cover of Liberals under Autocracy
Liberals under Autocracy
Modernization and Civil Society in Russia, 1866–1904
Anton A. Fedyashin
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012

With its rocky transition to democracy, post-Soviet Russia has made observers wonder whether a moderating liberalism could ever succeed in such a land of extremes. But in Liberals under Autocracy, Anton A. Fedyashin looks back at the vibrant Russian liberalism that flourished in the country’s late imperial era, chronicling its contributions to the evolution of Russia’s rich literary culture, socioeconomic thinking, and civil society.
    For five decades prior to the revolutions of 1917, The Herald of Europe (Vestnik Evropy) was the flagship journal of Russian liberalism, garnering a large readership. The journal articulated a distinctively Russian liberal agenda, one that encouraged social and economic modernization and civic participation through local self-government units (zemstvos) that defended individual rights and interests—especially those of the peasantry—in the face of increasing industrialization. Through the efforts of four men who turned The Herald into a cultural nexus in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg, the publication catalyzed the growing influence of journal culture and its formative effects on Russian politics and society.
    Challenging deep-seated assumptions about Russia’s intellectual history, Fedyashin’s work casts the country’s nascent liberalism as a distinctly Russian blend of self-governance, populism, and other national, cultural traditions. As such, the book stands as a contribution to the growing literature on imperial Russia's nonrevolutionary, intellectual movements that emphasized the role of local politics in both successful modernization and the evolution of civil society in an extraparliamentary environment.

[more]

front cover of Liberated Territory
Liberated Territory
Untold Local Perspectives on the Black Panther Party
Yohuru Williams and Jama Lazerow, eds.
Duke University Press, 2008
With their collection In Search of the Black Panther Party, Yohuru Williams and Jama Lazerow provided a broad analysis of the Black Panther Party and its legacy. In Liberated Territory, they turn their attention to local manifestations of the organization, far away from the party’s Oakland headquarters. This collection’s contributors, all historians, examine how specific party chapters and offshoots emerged, developed, and waned, as well as how the local branches related to their communities and to the national party.

The histories and character of the party branches vary as widely as their locations. The Cape Verdeans of New Bedford, Massachusetts, were initially viewed as a particular challenge for the local Panthers but later became the mainstay of the Boston-area party. In the early 1970s, the Winston-Salem, North Carolina, chapter excelled at implementing the national Black Panther Party’s strategic shift from revolutionary confrontation to mainstream electoral politics. In Detroit, the Panthers were defined by a complex relationship between their above-ground activities and an underground wing dedicated to armed struggle. While the Milwaukee chapter was born out of a rising tide of black militancy, it ultimately proved more committed to promoting literacy and health care and redressing hunger than to violence. The Alabama Black Liberation Front did not have the official imprimatur of the national party, but it drew heavily on the Panthers’ ideas and organizing strategies, and its activism demonstrates the broad resonance of many of the concerns articulated by the national party: the need for jobs, for decent food and housing, for black self-determination, and for sustained opposition to police brutality against black people. Liberated Territory reveals how the Black Panther Party’s ideologies, goals, and strategies were taken up and adapted throughout the United States.

Contributors: Devin Fergus, Jama Lazerow, Ahmad A. Rahman, Robert W. Widell Jr., Yohuru Williams

[more]

front cover of Liberating Economics
Liberating Economics
Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work, and Globalization
Drucilla K. Barker and Susan F. Feiner
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Liberating Economics draws on central concepts from women's studies scholarship to construct a feminist understanding of the economic roles of families, caring labor, motherhood, paid and unpaid labor, poverty, the feminization of labor, and the consequences of globalization. Barker and Feiner consistently recognize the importance of social location -- gender, race, class, sexual identity, and nationality -- in economic processes shaping the home, paid employment, market relations, and the global economy. Throughout they connect women's economic status in the industrialized nations to the economic circumstances surrounding women in the global South.

Rooted in the two disciplines, this book draws on the rich tradition of interdisciplinary work in feminist social science scholarship to construct a parallel between the notions that the "personal is political" and "the personal is economic."

Drucilla K. Barker is Professor of Economics and Women's Studies, Hollins University.

Susan F. Feiner is Associate Professor of Economics and Women's Studies, University of Southern Maine.


[more]

front cover of Liberating Memory
Liberating Memory
Our Work and Our Working-Class Consciousness
Zandy, Janet
Rutgers University Press, 1994
This is a book about working-class identity, consciousness, and self-determination. It offers an alternative to middle-class assimiliation and working-class amnesia. The twenty-five contributors use memory--both personal and collective--to show the relationship between the uncertain economic rhythms of working-class life and the possibilities for cultural and political agency. Manual labor and intellectual work are connected in these multicultural autobiographies of writers, educators, artists, political activists, musicians, and photographers and in the cultural work--the poems, stories, photographs, lectures, music--they produce. Illustrated with family snapshots, this collection--the first of its kind--includes the work of a female machinist who is also a poet, a secretary who is also a writer, a poet who worked on the assembly line, a musician who was also a red-diaper baby, and an academic who is recovering the working-class writing of her father. The consciousness that is revealed in this book makes evident the value of class identity to collective, democratic struggle. The contributors are Maggie Anderson, Steve Cagan, Jim Daniels, Lennard Davis, Masani Alexis de Veaux, Sue Doro, Julie Olsen Edwards, Carol Faulkner, Barbara Fox, Laura Hapke, Florence Howe, David Joseph, Linda McCarriston, Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, Gregory Mantsios, M. Bella Mirabella, Joseph Nassar, Tillie Olsen, Maxine Scates, Saul Slapikoff, Clarissa T. Sligh, Carol Tarlen, Joann Maria Vasoncellos, Pat Wynne, and Janet Zandy.
[more]

front cover of Liberation and Democratization
Liberation and Democratization
The South African and Palestinian National Movements
Mona N. Younis
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

front cover of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
And Three Brief Essays
James Fitzjames Stephen
University of Chicago Press, 1992
With great energy and clarity, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894), author of History of the Criminal Law of England, and judge of the High Court from 1879-91, challenges John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and On Utilitarianism, arguing that Mill's view of humanity is sentimental and utopian.

"His writing is strong meat—full of the threat of hellfrire, the virtue of government by the lash and a fervent belief that the state cannot remain neutral but has a duty to espouse a moral code."—Roderick Munday, Cambridge Law Journal
[more]

front cover of Liberty Power
Liberty Power
Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics
Corey M. Brooks
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party was the first party built on opposition to slavery to win on the national stage—but its victory was rooted in the earlier efforts of under-appreciated antislavery third parties. Liberty Power tells the story of how abolitionist activists built the most transformative third-party movement in American history and effectively reshaped political structures in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

As Corey M. Brooks explains, abolitionist trailblazers who organized first the Liberty Party and later the more moderate Free Soil Party confronted formidable opposition from a two-party system expressly constructed to suppress disputes over slavery. Identifying the Whigs and Democrats as the mainstays of the southern Slave Power’s national supremacy, savvy abolitionists insisted that only a party independent of slaveholder influence could wrest the federal government from its grip. A series of shrewd electoral, lobbying, and legislative tactics enabled these antislavery third parties to wield influence far beyond their numbers. In the process, these parties transformed the national political debate and laid the groundwork for the success of the Republican Party and the end of American slavery.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
A Library Classification for City and Regional Planning
Caroline Shillaber
Harvard University Press, 1973
The myriad developments in city and regional planning over the last sixty years are reflected in this revision of the 1913 publication, City Planning: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Subject Arranged for the Classification of Books, Plans, Photographs, Notes, and Other Collected Material with Alphabetic Subject Index. Caroline Shillaber, who is Librarian of the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, also includes in this volume a revision of the 1937 publication State and National Planning by Arthur C. Comey and Katherine McNamara. The major additions include techniques of urban analysis using computers and mathematical models, technological developments, and concepts of urban design and planning and the interrelation of areas with the total environment.
[more]

front cover of Libya After Qaddafi
Libya After Qaddafi
Lessons and Implications for the Future
Christopher S. Chivvis
RAND Corporation, 2014
The 2011 overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi by internationally backed rebel groups has left Libya’s new leaders with a number of post-conflict challenges, including establishing security, building political and administrative institutions, and restarting the economy. This report assesses these challenges, the impact of the limited international role in efforts to overcome them, and possible future roles for the international community.
[more]

front cover of Libya's Displacement Crisis
Libya's Displacement Crisis
Uprooted by Revolution and Civil War
Megan Bradley, Ibrahim Fraihat, and Houda Mzioudet
Georgetown University Press

Libya faces a bleak humanitarian crisis, the result of the country’s descent into civil war in the summer of 2014 following the 2011 revolution.

Hundreds of thousands of Libyan citizens are uprooted within the country and many more are sheltering in neighboring states, particularly Tunisia. Drawing on in-depth interviews with policymakers, practitioners, and displaced Libyans both inside and outside the country, Megan Bradley, Ibrahim Fraihat, and Houda Mzioudet present a brief, yet thoroughly illuminating assessment of the political, socioeconomic, security, humanitarian, and human rights implications of the continued displacement of Libyan citizens within and outside their country.

Assessing the complex dimensions and consequences of the situation, Libya’s Displacement Crisis lays the groundwork for what comes next. Acknowledging that the resolution of this crisis hinges on a negotiated end to the Libyan civil war, the authors present ideas to improve assistance strategies and to support durable solutions for displaced Libyans with implications for refugee crises in other parts of the world, including Syria and Iraq.

Georgetown Digital Shorts—longer than an article, shorter than a book—deliver timely works of peer-reviewed scholarship in a fast-paced, agile environment. They present new ideas and original texts that are easily and widely available to students, scholars, libraries, and general readers.

[more]

front cover of License Plate Readers for Law Enforcement
License Plate Readers for Law Enforcement
Opportunities and Obstacles
Keith Gierlack
RAND Corporation, 2014
Because license plate reader (LPR) technology is relatively new in the United States, opportunities and obstacles in its use in law enforcement are still under exploration. To examine issues about this technology, RAND conducted interviews with law enforcement personnel, police officers, and others responsible for procuring, maintaining, and operating the systems.
[more]

front cover of Licensed To Kill?
Licensed To Kill?
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Shoreham Power Plant
Joan Aron
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998
Examines the nuclear power plant constructed at Shoreham, New York, and the accumulated miscalculations and mishaps that eventually forced its deconstruction. An intricate study of the groups, policies and regulatory issues involved in a historic legal battle.
[more]

front cover of Licentious Gotham
Licentious Gotham
Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York
Donna Dennis
Harvard University Press, 2009

Licentious Gotham, set in the streets, news depots, publishing houses, grand jury chambers, and courtrooms of the nation’s great metropolis, delves into the stories of the enterprising men and women who created a thriving transcontinental market for sexually arousing books and pictures. The experiences of “fancy” publishers, “flash” editors, and “racy” novelists, who all managed to pursue their trade in the face of laws criminalizing obscene publications, dramatically convey nineteenth-century America’s daring notions of sex, gender, and desire, as well as the frequently counterproductive results of attempts to enforce conventional moral standards.

In nineteenth-century New York, the business of erotic publishing and legal attacks on obscenity developed in tandem, with each activity shaping and even promoting the pursuit of the other. Obscenity prohibitions, rather than curbing salacious publications, inspired innovative new styles of forbidden literature—such as works highlighting expressions of passion and pleasure by middle-class American women. Obscenity prosecutions also spurred purveyors of lewd materials to devise novel schemes to evade local censorship by advertising and distributing their products through the mail. This subterfuge in turn triggered far-reaching transformations in strategies for policing obscenity.

Donna Dennis offers a colorful, groundbreaking account of the birth of an indecent print trade and the origins of obscenity regulation in the United States. By revealing the paradoxes that characterized early efforts to suppress sexual expression in the name of morality, she suggests relevant lessons for our own day.

[more]

front cover of Lies, Passions, and Illusions
Lies, Passions, and Illusions
The Democratic Imagination in the Twentieth Century
François Furet
University of Chicago Press, 2014
François Furet needs little introduction. Widely considered one of the leading historians of the French Revolution, he was a maverick for his time, shining a critical light on the entrenched Marxist interpretations that prevailed during the mid-twentieth century. Shortly after his death in 1997, the New York Review of Books called him “one of the most influential men in contemporary France.” Lies, Passions, and Illusions is a fitting capstone to this celebrated author’s oeuvre: a late-career conversation with philosopher Paul Ricoeur on the twentieth century writ large, a century of violence and turmoil, of unprecedented wealth and progress, in which history advanced, for better or worse, in quantum leaps.
           
This conversation would be, sadly, Furet’s last—he died while Ricoeur was completing his edits. Ricoeur did not want to publish his half without Furet’s approval, so what remains is Furet’s alone, an astonishingly cohesive meditation on the political passions of the twentieth century. With strokes at once broad and incisive, he examines the many different trajectories that nations of the West have followed over the past hundred years. It is a dialogue with history as it happened but also as a form of thought. It is a dialogue with his critics, with himself, and with those major thinkers—from Tocqueville to Hannah Arendt—whose ideas have shaped our understanding of the tragic dramas and upheavals of the modern era. It is a testament to the crucial role of the historian, a reflection on how history is made and lived, and how the imagination is a catalyst for political change. Whether new to Furet or deeply familiar with his work, readers will find thought-provoking assessments on every page, a deeply moving look back at one of the most tumultuous periods of history and how we might learn and look forward from it. 
 
 
[more]


front cover of Life After Welfare
Life After Welfare
Reform and the Persistence of Poverty
By Laura Lein and Deanna T. Schexnayder; with Karen Manges Douglas and Daniel G. Schroeder
University of Texas Press, 2007

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

In the decade since President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 into law—amidst promises that it would "end welfare as we know it"—did the reforms ending entitlements and moving toward time limits and work requirements lift Texas families once living on welfare out of poverty, or merely strike their names from the administrative rolls?

Under welfare reform, Texas continued with low monthly payments and demanding eligibility criteria. Many families who could receive welfare in other states do not qualify in Texas, and virtually any part-time job makes a family ineligible. In Texas, most families who leave welfare remain in or near poverty, and many are likely to return to the welfare rolls in the future.

This compelling work, which follows 179 families after leaving welfare, is set against a backdrop of multiple types of data and econometric modeling. The authors' multi-method approach draws on administrative data from nine programs serving low-income families and a statewide survey of families who have left welfare. Survey data on health problems, transportation needs, and child-care issues shed light on the patterns of employment and welfare use seen in the administrative data. In their lives after welfare, the families chronicled here experience poverty even when employed; a multiplicity of barriers to employment that work to exacerbate one another; and a failing safety net of basic human services as they attempt to sustain low-wage employment.

[more]

front cover of Life and Death in the Third Reich
Life and Death in the Third Reich
Peter Fritzsche
Harvard University Press, 2008

On January 30, 1933, hearing about the celebrations for Hitler’s assumption of power, Erich Ebermayer remarked bitterly in his diary, “We are the losers, definitely the losers.” Learning of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which made Jews non-citizens, he raged, “hate is sown a million-fold.” Yet in March 1938, he wept for joy at the Anschluss with Austria: “Not to want it just because it has been achieved by Hitler would be folly.”

In a masterful work, Peter Fritzsche deciphers the puzzle of Nazism’s ideological grip. Its basic appeal lay in the Volksgemeinschaft—a “people’s community” that appealed to Germans to be part of a great project to redress the wrongs of the Versailles treaty, make the country strong and vital, and rid the body politic of unhealthy elements. The goal was to create a new national and racial self-consciousness among Germans. For Germany to live, others—especially Jews—had to die. Diaries and letters reveal Germans’ fears, desires, and reservations, while showing how Nazi concepts saturated everyday life. Fritzsche examines the efforts of Germans to adjust to new racial identities, to believe in the necessity of war, to accept the dynamic of unconditional destruction—in short, to become Nazis.

Powerful and provocative, Life and Death in the Third Reich is a chilling portrait of how ideology takes hold.

[more]

front cover of The Life and Times of Richard J. Hughes
The Life and Times of Richard J. Hughes
The Politics of Civility
Wefing, John B
Rutgers University Press, 2009
The Life and Times of Richard J. Hughes explores the influential public service of this two-term New Jersey governor. He was the only person in New Jersey history to serve as both governor and chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court.

This biography illuminates the governor's accomplishments between 1962 and 1970, including the creation of the Hackensack Meadowlands Commission, formation of the county college system, establishment of stringent antipollution laws, design of the public defender system, and the adoption of a New Jersey sales tax, as well as his pivotal role during the Newark riots. As chief justice, Hughes faced difficult issuesùschool funding, low and moderate income housing needs, freedom of speech, and his decision in the rightto-die case involving Karen Ann Quinlan. With a career characterized by liberal activism, Hughes also contributed nationally and internationally, from serving as host of the 1964 Democratic National Convention to monitoring elections in South Vietnam.

John B. Wefing's research includes interviews with prominent politicians and leaders who worked with Hughes at various points in his career. The result is a rich story of a public servant who possessed a true ability to work with members of both political parties and played a significant role in shaping modern New Jersey.

[more]

front cover of Life, Earth, Colony
Life, Earth, Colony
Friedrich Ratzel's Necropolitical Geography
Ian Klinke
University of Michigan Press, 2023
Life, Earth, Colony explores the ideas, life, and historical significance of German zoologist turned geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), famous for developing the foundations of geopolitical thought. Ratzel produced a remarkable body of work that revolutionized the study of space, movement, colonization, and war. He also served as a source of intellectual inspiration for national socialism, particularly through his Lebensraum (living space) concept, which understood all life as being caught in an eternal struggle for space. This book closely analyzes this radical conservative intellectual, focusing on his often-overlooked ethnography, biogeography, travel, and creative writing, and colonial activism as well as his more widely-known political geography.

Life, Earth, Colony finds that there is an as yet unexplored necropolitical impulse at the heart of Ratzel’s entire oeuvre, a preoccupation with death and dying, which had a profound impact on twentieth-century history.
[more]

front cover of Life in a Cambodian Orphanage
Life in a Cambodian Orphanage
A Childhood Journey for New Opportunities
Kathie Carpenter
Rutgers University Press, 2021
What is it like to grow up in an orphanage? What do residents themselves have to say about their experiences? Are there ways that orphanages can be designed to meet children's developmental needs and to provide them with necessities they are unable to receive in their home communities? In this book, detailed observations of children's daily life in a Cambodian orphanage are combined with follow-up interviews of the same children after they have grown and left the orphanage. Their thoughtful reflections show that the quality of care children receive is more important for their well-being than the site in which they receive it. Life in a Cambodian Orphanage situates orphanages within the social and political history of Cambodia, and shows that orphanages need not always be considered bleak sites of deprivation and despair. It suggests best practices for caring for vulnerable children regardless of the setting in which they are living.
[more]

front cover of A Life in Letters
A Life in Letters
Simone Weil
Harvard University Press, 2024

The inspiring letters of philosopher, mystic, and freedom fighter Simone Weil to her family, presented for the first time in English.

Now in the pantheon of great thinkers, Simone Weil (1909–1943) lived largely in the shadows, searching for her spiritual home while bearing witness to the violence that devastated Europe twice in her brief lifetime. The letters she wrote to her parents and brother from childhood onward chart her intellectual range as well as her itinerancy and ever-shifting preoccupations, revealing the singular personality at the heart of her brilliant essays.

The first complete collection of Weil’s missives to her family, A Life in Letters offers new insight into her personal relationships and experiences. The letters abound with vivid illustrations of a life marked by wisdom as much as seeking. The daughter of a bourgeois Parisian Jewish family, Weil was a troublemaking idealist who preferred the company of miners and Russian exiles to that of her peers. An extraordinary scholar of history and politics, she ultimately found a home in Christian mysticism. Weil paired teaching with poetry and even dabbled in mathematics, as evidenced by her correspondence with her brother, André, who won the Kyoto Prize in 1994 for the famed Weil Conjectures.

A Life in Letters depicts Simone Weil’s thought taking shape amid political turmoil, as she describes her participation in the Spanish struggle against fascism and in the transatlantic resistance to the Nazis. An introduction and notes by Robert Chenavier contextualize the letters historically and intellectually, relating Weil’s letters to her general body of writing. This book is an ideal entryway into Weil’s philosophical insights, one for both neophytes and acolytes to treasure.

[more]

front cover of Life Interrupted
Life Interrupted
Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States
Denise Brennan
Duke University Press, 2014
Life Interrupted introduces us to survivors of human trafficking who are struggling to get by and make homes for themselves in the United States. Having spent nearly a decade following the lives of formerly trafficked men and women, Denise Brennan recounts in close detail their flight from their abusers and their courageous efforts to rebuild their lives. At once scholarly and accessible, her book links these firsthand accounts to global economic inequities and under-regulated and unprotected workplaces that routinely exploit migrant laborers in the United States. Brennan contends that today's punitive immigration policies undermine efforts to fight trafficking. While many believe trafficking happens only in the sex trade, Brennan shows that across low-wage labor sectors—in fields, in factories, and on construction sites—widespread exploitation can lead to and conceal forced labor. Life Interrupted is a riveting account of life in and after trafficking and a forceful call for meaningful immigration and labor reform.

All royalties from this book will be donated to the nonprofit Survivor Leadership Training Fund administered through the Freedom Network.
[more]

front cover of A Life of Sir Harry Parkes
A Life of Sir Harry Parkes
British Minister to Japan, China and Korea, 1865-1885
Robert Morton
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Harry Parkes was at the heart of Britain’s relations with the Far East from the start of his working life at fourteen, to his death at fifty-seven. Orphaned at the age of five, he went to China on his own as a child and worked his way to the top. God-fearing and fearless, he believed his mission was to bring trade and ‘civilisation’ to East Asia. In his day, he was seen as both a hero and a monster and is still bitterly resented in China for his part in the country’s humiliations at Western hands, but largely esteemed in Japan for helping it to industrialise. Morton’s new biography, the first in over thirty years, and benefiting in part from access to the Parkes’ family and archives, offers a more intimate and informed profile of the personal and professional life of a Victorian titan and one of Britain’s most undiplomatic diplomats in the history of the British Civil Service.
[more]

logo for Pluto Press
Life Without Money
Building Fair and Sustainable Economies
Edited by Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman
Pluto Press, 2011
The money-based global economy is failing. The credit crunch undermined capitalism's ability to ensure rising incomes and prosperity while market-led attempts to combat climate change are fought tooth and nail by business as environmental crises continue.

We urgently need to combat those who say 'there is no alternative' to the current system, but what would an alternative look like? The contributors to Life Without Money argue that it is time radical, non-market models were taken seriously. The book brings together diverse voices presenting strong arguments against our money-based system's ability to improve lives and prevent environmental disaster. Crucially, it provides a direct strategy for undercutting capitalism by refusing to deal in money, and offers money-free models of governance and collective sufficiency.

Life Without Money is written by high-profile activist scholars, including Harry Cleaver, Ariel Salleh and John O'Neill, making it an excellent text for political economy and environmental courses, as well as an inspiring manifesto for those who want to take action.
[more]

front cover of Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields
Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields
The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880-1922 2nd Edition
David Corbin
West Virginia University Press, 2015

Between 1880 and 1922, the coal fields of southern West Virginia witnessed two bloody and protracted strikes, the formation of two competing unions, and the largest armed conflict in American labor history—a week-long battle between 20,000 coal miners and 5,000 state police, deputy sheriffs, and mine guards. These events resulted in an untold number of deaths, indictments of over 550 coal miners for insurrection and treason, and four declarations of martial law. Corbin argues that these violent events were collective and militant acts of aggression interconnected and conditioned by decades of oppression. His study goes a long way toward breaking down the old stereotypes of Appalachian and coal mining culture. This second edition contains a new preface and afterword by author David A. Corbin.

[more]

front cover of Lifeblood
Lifeblood
Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital
Matthew T. Huber
University of Minnesota Press, 2013

If our oil addiction is so bad for us, why don’t we kick the habit? Looking beyond the usual culprits—Big Oil, petro-states, and the strategists of empire—Lifeblood finds a deeper and more complex explanation in everyday practices of oil consumption in American culture. Those practices, Matthew T. Huber suggests, have in fact been instrumental in shaping the broader cultural politics of American capitalism.

How did gasoline and countless other petroleum products become so central to our notions of the American way of life? Huber traces the answer from the 1930s through the oil shocks of the 1970s to our present predicament, revealing that oil’s role in defining popular culture extends far beyond material connections between oil, suburbia, and automobility. He shows how oil powered a cultural politics of entrepreneurial life—the very American idea that life itself is a product of individual entrepreneurial capacities. In so doing he uses oil to retell American political history from the triumph of New Deal liberalism to the rise of the New Right, from oil’s celebration as the lifeblood of postwar capitalism to increasing anxieties over oil addiction.

Lifeblood rethinks debates surrounding energy and capitalism, neoliberalism and nature, and the importance of suburbanization in the rightward shift in American politics. Today, Huber tells us, as crises attributable to oil intensify, a populist clamoring for cheap energy has less to do with American excess than with the eroding conditions of life under neoliberalism.

[more]

front cover of Lift High the Cross
Lift High the Cross
Where White Supremacy and the Christian Right Converge
Ann Burlein
Duke University Press, 2002
Both the Christian right and right-wing white supremacist groups aspire to overcome a culture they perceive as hostile to the white middle class, families, and heterosexuality. The family is threatened, they claim, by a secular humanist conspiracy that seeks to erase all memory of the nation’s Christian heritage by brainwashing its children through sex education, multiculturalism, and pop culture. In Lift High the Cross Ann Burlein looks at two groups that represent, in one case, the “hard” right, and in the other, the “soft” right—Pete Peters’s “Scriptures for America” and James Dobson’s “Focus on the Family”—in order to investigate the specific methods these groups rely on to appeal to their followers.
Arguing that today’s right engenders its popularity not by overt bigotry or hatred but by focusing on people’s hopes for their children, Burlein finds a politics of grief at the heart of such rhetoric. While demonstrating how religious symbols, rituals, texts, and practices shape people’s memories and their investment in society, she shows how Peters and Dobson each construct countermemories for their followers that reframe their histories and identities—as well as their worlds—by reversing mainstream perspectives in ways that counter existing power relations. By employing the techniques of niche marketing, the politics of scandal, and the transformation of political issues into “gut issues” and by remasculinizing the body politic, Burlein shows, such groups are able to move people into their realm of influence without requiring them to agree with all their philosophical, doctrinal, or political positions.
Lift High the Cross will appeal to students and scholars of religion, American cultural studies, women’s studies, sociology, and gay and lesbian studies, as well as to non-specialists interested in American politics and, specifically, the right.
[more]

front cover of Lifting the Fog of Peace
Lifting the Fog of Peace
How Americans Learned to Fight Modern War
Janine Davidson
University of Michigan Press, 2011

"Lifting the Fog of Peace is a captivating study of an agile and adaptive military evolving through the chaos of the post-9/11 world. In what is certain to be regarded as the definitive analysis of the reshaping of American combat power in the face of a complex and uncertain future, Dr. Janine Davidson firmly establishes herself as a rising intellectual star in government and politics. A thoroughly captivating study of organizational learning and adaptation—a 'must read' for leaders in every field."
---LTG William B. Caldwell, IV, Commanding General, NATO Training Mission - Afghanistan

"In Lifting the Fog of Peace, Dr. Janine Davidson explains how the American military has adapted itself to succeed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that are the most likely future face of combat. The book is informed by her experience of these wars in the Department of Defense, where she now plays a critical role in continuing the process of learning that has so visibly marked the military's performance in today's wars. Highly recommended."
---John A. Nagl, President, Center for a New American Security

"Janine Davidson’s Lifting the Fog of Peace is a superb, concise, and well-written book that makes important contributions in three areas. It advances our knowledge of organizational learning in the Armed Forces. It also accurately captures the rich post-Vietnam operational and doctrinal history of the Army and the Marine Corps. The simplistic cartoon of dim-witted generals fixated on the Fulda Gap is replaced here by a more accurate version, where engaged senior officers studied the security environment, absorbed important lessons, and began to improve the learning capacity of the military services. Finally, Lifting the Fog of Peace assesses the state of contemporary stability operations and what must be done to further prepare our Armed Forces for modern war on the low end of the spectrum of conflict. It will be a 'must read' on the E-Ring of the Pentagon and in security studies programs across the nation."
---Joseph J. Collins, Professor, National War College, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Stability Operations

Counterinsurgency and stability operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are only the most recent examples of the U.S. Armed Forces fighting insurgents, building infrastructure, enforcing laws, and governing cities. For more than two centuries, these assignments have been a regular part of the military's tasks; yet until recently the lessons learned from the experiences have seldom been formally incorporated into doctrine and training. As a result, each generation of soldiers has had to learn on the job.

Janine Davidson traces the history of the U.S. military's involvement in these complex and frustrating missions. By comparing the historical record to the current era, Davidson assesses the relative influence of organizational culture and processes, institutional structures, military leadership, and political factors on the U.S. military's capacity to learn and to adapt. Pointing to the case of Iraq, she shows that commanders serving today have benefited at the tactical level from institutional changes following the Vietnam War and from the lessons of the 1990s. Davidson concludes by addressing the question of whether or not such military learning, in the absence of enhanced capabilities and capacity in other U.S. government agencies, will be sufficient to meet the complex challenges of the 21st century.

Janine Davidson, a former Air Force pilot, is a professor of national security at George Mason University, currently serving in the Pentagon as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Plans.

The views presented in this book are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Defense or its Components.

[more]

front cover of Lifting the Shadow
Lifting the Shadow
Reshaping Memory, Race, and Slavery in U.S. Museums
Amy Sodaro
Rutgers University Press
Lifting the Shadow: Reshaping Memory, Race, and Slavery in U.S. Museums examines a small but significant wave of new U.S. memorial museums that focus on slavery and its ongoing violent legacies, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Montgomery’s Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and Greenwood Rising, which commemorates the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. These museums are challenging historical narratives of slavery and race by placing racial oppression at the center of American history and linking historical slavery to contemporary racial injustice, but they have opened in a period marked by growing racial tension, white nationalism and political division. Sodaro examines how the violence of U.S. slavery and its lasting legacies is negotiated in these museums, as well as their potential to contribute to the development of a more critical historical memory of race in the U.S. at this particularly volatile sociopolitical moment.
 
[more]

front cover of Like Cattle and Horses
Like Cattle and Horses
Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927
S. A. Smith
Duke University Press, 2002
In Like Cattle and Horses Steve Smith connects the rise of Chinese nationalism to the growth of a Chinese working class. Moving from the late nineteenth century, when foreign companies first set up factories on Chinese soil, to 1927, when the labor movement created by the Chinese Communist Party was crushed by Chiang Kai-shek, Smith uses a host of documents—journalistic accounts of strikes, memoirs by former activists, police records—to argue that a nationalist movement fueled by the effects of foreign imperialism had a far greater hold on working-class identity than did class consciousness.
While the massive wave of labor protest in the 1920s was principally an expression of militant nationalism rather than of class consciousness, Smith argues, elements of a precarious class identity were in turn forged by the very discourse of nationalism. By linking work-related demands to the defense of the nation, anti-imperialist nationalism legitimized participation in strikes and sensitized workers to the fact that they were worthy of better treatment as Chinese citizens. Smith shows how the workers’ refusal to be treated “like cattle and horses” (a phrase frequently used by workers to describe their condition) came from a new but powerfully felt sense of dignity. In short, nationalism enabled workers to interpret the anger they felt at their unjust treatment in the workplace in political terms and to create a link between their position as workers and their position as members of an oppressed nation. By focusing on the role of the working class, Like Cattle and Horses is one of very few studies that examines nationalism “from below,” acknowledging the powerful agency of nonelite forces in promoting national identity.
Like Cattle and Horses will interest historians of labor, modern China, and nationalism, as well as those engaged in the study of revolutions and revolt.
[more]

front cover of Limited Government and the Bill of Rights
Limited Government and the Bill of Rights
Patrick M. Garry
University of Missouri Press, 2012
Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize Short List, 2015

What was the intended purpose and function of the Bill of Rights? Is the modern understanding of the Bill of Rights the same as that which prevailed when the document was ratified? In Limited Government and the Bill of Rights, Patrick Garry addresses these questions. Under the popular modern view, the Bill of Rights focuses primarily on protecting individual autonomy interests, making it all about the individual. But in Garry’s novel approach, one that tries to address the criticisms of judicial activism that have resulted from the Supreme Court’s contemporary individual rights jurisprudence, the Bill of Rights is all about government—about limiting the power of government. In this respect, the Bill of Rights is consistent with the overall scheme of the original Constitution, insofar as it sought to define and limit the power of the newly created federal government.

Garry recognizes the desire of the constitutional framers to protect individual liberties and natural rights, indeed, a recognition of such rights had formed the basis of the American campaign for independence from Britain. However, because the constitutional framers did not have a clear idea of how to define natural rights, much less incorporate them into a written constitution for enforcement, they framed the Bill of Rights as limited government provisions rather than as individual autonomy provisions. To the framers, limited government was the constitutional path to the maintenance of liberty. Moreover, crafting the Bill of Rights as limited government provisions would not give the judiciary the kind of wide-ranging power needed to define and enforce individual autonomy.

With respect to the application of this limited government model, Garry focuses specifically on the First Amendment and examines how the courts in many respects have already used a limited government model in their First Amendment decision-making. As he discusses, this approach to the First Amendment may allow for a more objective and restrained judicial role than is often applied under contemporary First Amendment jurisprudence.

Limited Government and the Bill of Rights will appeal to anyone interested in the historical background of the Bill of Rights and how its provisions should be applied to contemporary cases, particularly First Amendment cases. It presents an innovativetheory about the constitutional connection between the principle of limited government and the provisions in the Bill of Rights.
[more]

front cover of Limited Wants, Unlimited Means
Limited Wants, Unlimited Means
A Reader On Hunter-Gatherer Economics And The Environment
Edited by John Gowdy
Island Press, 1998

For roughly 99% of their existence on earth, Homo sapiens lived in small bands of semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, finding everything they needed to survive and thrive in the biological richness that surrounded them. Most if not all of the problems that threaten our own technologically advanced society -- from depletion of natural capital to the ever-present possibility of global annihilation -- would be inconceivable to these traditional, immediate-return societies. In fact, hunter-gatherer societies appear to have solved problems of production, distribution, and social and environmental sustainability that our own culture seems incapable of addressing.

Limited Wants, Unlimited Means examines the hunter-gatherer society and lifestyle from a variety of perspectives. It provides a brief introduction to the rich anthropological and sociological literature on non-agricultural societies, bringing together in one volume seminal writings on the few remaining hunter-gatherer cultures including, the !Kung, the Hadza, and the Aborigines. It examines the economics of traditional societies, and concludes with a multifaceted investigation of how such societies function and what they can teach us in our own quest for environmental sustainability and social equality.

Limited Wants, Unlimited Means is an important work for students of cultural anthropology, economic anthropology, environmental studies, and sustainable development, as well as for professionals, researchers, and anyone interested in prehistoric societies, environmental sustainability, or social justice.

[more]

front cover of The Limits of Alignment
The Limits of Alignment
Southeast Asia and the Great Powers since 1975
John D. Ciorciari
Georgetown University Press, 2011

The Limits of Alignment is an engaging and accessible study that explores how small states and middle powers of Southeast Asia ensure their security in a world where they are overshadowed by greater powers. John D. Ciorciari challenges a central concept in international relations theory—that states respond to insecurity by either balancing against their principal foes, “bandwagoning” with them, or declaring themselves neutral. Instead, he shows that developing countries prefer limited alignments that steer between strict neutrality and formal alliances to obtain the fruits of security cooperation without the perils of undue dependency.

Ciorciari also shows how structural and normative shifts following the end of the Cold War and the advent of U.S. primacy have increased the prevalence of limited alignments in the developing world and that these can often place constraints on U.S. foreign policy. Finally, he discusses how limited alignments in the developing world may affect the future course of international security as China and other rising powers gather influence on the world stage.

[more]

front cover of The Limits of Blame
The Limits of Blame
Rethinking Punishment and Responsibility
Erin I. Kelly
Harvard University Press, 2018

Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Erin Kelly challenges the moralism behind harsh treatment of criminal offenders and calls into question our society’s commitment to mass incarceration.

The Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. Kelly underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indicates, particularly when it is tied to the illusion that we know how long and in what ways criminals should suffer. Our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly. It represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment.

Appreciating the limits of moral blame critically undermines a commonplace rationale for long and brutal punishment practices. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution. Were we to refocus our perspective to fit the relevant moral circumstances and legal criteria, we could endorse a humane, appropriately limited, and more productive approach to criminal justice.

[more]

front cover of The Limits of Legitimacy
The Limits of Legitimacy
Dissenting Opinions, Media Coverage, and Public Responses to Supreme Court Decisions
Michael A. Zilis
University of Michigan Press, 2015
When the U.S. Supreme Court announces a decision, reporters simplify and dramatize the complex legal issues by highlighting dissenting opinions and thus emphasizing conflict among the justices themselves. This often sensationalistic coverage fosters public controversy over specific rulings despite polls which show that Americans strongly believe in the Court’s legitimacy as an institution. In The Limits of Legitimacy, Michael A. Zilis illuminates this link between case law and public opinion. Drawing on a diverse array of sources and methods, he employs case studies of eminent domain decisions, analysis of media reporting, an experiment to test how volunteers respond to media messages, and finally the natural experiment of the controversy over the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare.

Zilis finds that the media tends not to quote from majority opinions. However, the greater the division over a particular ruling among the justices themselves, the greater the likelihood that the media will criticize that ruling, characterize it as "activist," and employ inflammatory rhetoric. Hethen demonstrates that the media’s portrayal of a decision, as much as the substance of the decision itself, influences citizens’ reactions to and acceptance of it.

This meticulously constructed study and its persuasively argued conclusion advance the understanding of the media, judicial politics, political institutions, and political behavior.
[more]

front cover of The Limits of Liberty
The Limits of Liberty
Between Anarchy and Leviathan
James M. Buchanan
University of Chicago Press, 1977
"The Limits of Liberty is concerned mainly with two topics. One is an attempt to construct a new contractarian theory of the state, and the other deals with its legitimate limits. The latter is a matter of great practical importance and is of no small significance from the standpoint of political philosophy."—Scott Gordon, Journal of Political Economy

James Buchanan offers a strikingly innovative approach to a pervasive problem of social philosophy. The problem is one of the classic paradoxes concerning man's freedom in society: in order to protect individual freedom, the state must restrict each person's right to act. Employing the techniques of modern economic analysis, Professor Buchanan reveals the conceptual basis of an individual's social rights by examining the evolution and development of these rights out of presocial conditions.
[more]

front cover of The Limits of Market Organization
The Limits of Market Organization
Richard R. Nelson
Russell Sage Foundation, 2005
The last quarter century has seen a broad, but qualified, belief in the efficacy of market organization slide into an unyielding dogma that the market, as unconstrained as possible, is the best way to govern virtually all economic activity. However, unrestricted markets can often lead to gross inequalities in access to important resources, the creation of monopolies, and other negative effects that require regulation or public subsidies to remedy. In The Limits of Market Organization, editor Richard Nelson and a group of economic experts take a more sophisticated look at the public/private debate, noting where markets are useful, where they can be effective only if augmented by non-market mechanisms, and where they are simply inappropriate. The Limits of Market Organization examines the appropriateness of markets in four areas where support for privatization varies widely: human services, public utilities, science and technology, and activities where market involvement is altogether inappropriate. Richard Murnane makes the case that a social interest in providing equal access to high quality education means that for school voucher plans to be effective, substantial government oversight is necessary. Federal involvement in a transcontinental railroad system was initially applauded, but recent financial troubles at Amtrak have prompted many to call for privatization of the rails. Yet contributor Elliot Sclar argues that public subsidies are the only way to maintain this vital part of the American transportation infrastructure. While market principles can promote competition and foster innovation, applying them in certain areas can actually stifle progress. Nelson argues that aggressive patenting has hindered scientific research by restricting access to tools and processes that could be used to generate new findings. He suggests that some kind of exception to patent law should be made for scientists who seek to build off of patented findings and then put their research results into the public domain. In other spheres, market organization is altogether unsuitable. Legal expert Richard Briffault looks at one such example—the democratic political process—and profiles the successes and failures of campaign finance reform in preventing parties from buying political influence. This important volume shows that market organization has its virtues, but also its drawbacks. Just as regulation can be over-applied, so too can market principles. The Limits of Market Organization encourages readers to think more discriminately about the march toward privatization, and to remember the importance of public institutions.
[more]

front cover of The Limits of Party
The Limits of Party
Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era
James M. Curry and Frances E. Lee
University of Chicago Press, 2020
To many observers, Congress has become a deeply partisan institution where ideologically-distinct political parties do little more than engage in legislative trench warfare. A zero-sum, winner-take-all approach to congressional politics has replaced the bipartisan comity of past eras. If the parties cannot get everything they want in national policymaking, then they prefer gridlock and stalemate to compromise. Or, at least, that is the conventional wisdom.

In The Limits of Party, James M. Curry and Frances E. Lee challenge this conventional wisdom. By constructing legislative histories of congressional majority parties’ attempts to enact their policy agendas in every congress since the 1980s and by drawing on interviews with Washington insiders, the authors analyze the successes and failures of congressional parties to enact their legislative agendas.

Their conclusions will surprise many congressional observers: Even in our time of intense party polarization, bipartisanship remains the key to legislative success on Capitol Hill. Congressional majority parties today are neither more nor less successful at enacting their partisan agendas. They are not more likely to ram though partisan laws or become mired in stalemate. Rather, the parties continue to build bipartisan coalitions for their legislative priorities and typically compromise on their original visions for legislation in order to achieve legislative success.
[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
The Limits of Policy Change
Incrementalism, Worldview, and the Rule of Law
Michael T. Hayes
Georgetown University Press

Michael Hayes offers a vigorous defense of incrementalism: the theory that the policymaking process typically should involve bargaining, delay, compromise, and, therefore, incremental change. Incrementalism, he argues, is one result of a checks-and-balances system in which politicians may disagree over what we want to achieve as a nation or what policies would best achieve shared goals.

Many political scientists have called for reforms that would facilitate majority rule and more radical policy change by strengthening the presidency at the expense of Congress. But Hayes develops policy typologies and analyzes case studies to show that the policy process works best when it conforms to the tenets of incrementalism. He contends that because humans are fallible, politics should work through social processes to achieve limited ends and to ameliorate—rather than completely solve—social problems. Analyzing the evolution of air pollution policy, the failure of President Clinton’s health care reform in 1994, and the successful effort at welfare reform in 1995-96, Hayes calls for changes that would make incrementalism work better by encouraging a more balanced struggle among social interests and by requiring political outcomes to conform to the rule of law.

Written for students and specialists in politics, public policy, and public administration, The Limits of Policy Change examines in detail a central issue in democratic theory.

[more]

front cover of The Limits Of Protectionism
The Limits Of Protectionism
Building Coalitions for Free Trade
Michael Lusztig
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004

Conventional wisdom holds that free trade is economically beneficial to nations. But this does not prevent industries and interest groups from lobbying their governments for protection, which creates a fear of electoral backlash among politicians hoping to promote free trade. The Limits of Protectionism demonstrates how governments can attain those economic benefits while avoiding the political costs.

Michael Lusztig’s theoretical model focuses on a process by which protectionists can be pushed to restructure and compete in a global economy. In this process, a small cutback in domestic protection leads to lost market shares at home; producers must then turn to overseas exports, and, as the size of foreign profits grow, former protectionists become active advocates for more and greater free trade opportunities.

In a wide-ranging array of case studies—from nineteenth-century Britain to Depression-era United States to contemporary New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, and Mexico—Lusztig reveals that, if skillfully handled, governments can eliminate the obstacles to free trade and enjoy continued economic growth without fear of protectionist groups seeking revenge at the ballot box.

[more]

front cover of The Limits of Rationality
The Limits of Rationality
Edited by Karen Schweers Cook and Margaret Levi
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Prevailing economic theory presumes that agents act rationally when they make decisions, striving to maximize the efficient use of their resources. Psychology has repeatedly challenged the rational choice paradigm with persuasive evidence that people do not always make the optimal choice. Yet the paradigm has proven so successful a predictor that its use continues to flourish, fueled by debate across the social sciences over why it works so well.

Intended to introduce novices to rational choice theory, this accessible, interdisciplinary book collects writings by leading researchers. The Limits of Rationality illuminates the rational choice paradigm of social and political behavior itself, identifies its limitations, clarifies the nature of current controversies, and offers suggestions for improving current models.

In the first section of the book, contributors consider the theoretical foundations of rational choice. Models of rational choice play an important role in providing a standard of human action and the bases for constitutional design, but do they also succeed as explanatory models of behavior? Do empirical failures of these explanatory models constitute a telling condemnation of rational choice theory or do they open new avenues of investigation and theorizing?

Emphasizing analyses of norms and institutions, the second and third sections of the book investigate areas in which rational choice theory might be extended in order to provide better models. The contributors evaluate the adequacy of analyses based on neoclassical economics, the potential contributions of game theory and cognitive science, and the consequences for the basic framework when unequal bargaining power and hierarchy are introduced.
[more]

front cover of The Limits of Russian Manipulation
The Limits of Russian Manipulation
National Identity and the Origins of the War in Ukraine
Clint Reach
RAND Corporation, 2023
Russia’s manipulation of Ukraine, which culminated in the 2022 invasion, demonstrated that Russia was willing to resort to all means necessary to secure a regional sphere of influence that included Ukraine. But events could have taken a different direction. Using the concept of national identity as a starting point, RAND researchers developed a framework to illuminate the underlying causes of the Russia-Ukraine war.
[more]

front cover of The Limits of Social Policy
The Limits of Social Policy
Nathan Glazer
Harvard University Press, 1988

Many social policies of the 1960s and 1970s, designed to overcome poverty and provide a decent minimum standard of living for all Americans, ran into trouble in the 1980s—with politicians, with social scientists, and with the American people. Nathan Glazer has been a leading analyst and critic of those measures. Here he looks back at what went wrong, arguing that our social policies, although targeted effectively on some problems, ignored others that are equally important and contributed to the weakening of the structures—family, ethnic and neighborhood ties, commitment to work—that form the foundations of a healthy society. What keeps society going, after all, is that most people feel they should work, however well they might do without working, and that they should take care of their families, however attractive it might appear on occasion to desert them.

Glazer proposes new kinds of social policies that would strengthen social structures and traditional restraints. Thus, to reinforce the incentive to work, he would attach to low-income jobs the same kind of fringe benefits—health insurance, social security, vacations with pay—that now make higher-paying jobs attractive and that paradoxically are already available in some form to those on welfare. More generally, he would reorient social policy to fit more comfortably with deep and abiding tendencies in American political culture: toward volunteerism, privatization, and decentralization.

After a long period of quiescence, social policy and welfare reform are once again becoming salient issues on the national political agenda. Nathan Glazer’s deep knowledge and considered judgment, distilled in this book, will be a source of advice, ideas, and inspiration for citizens and policymakers alike.

[more]

front cover of The Limits of Transnationalism
The Limits of Transnationalism
Nancy L. Green
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Transnationalism means many things to many people, from crossing physical borders to crossing intellectual ones. The Limits of Transnationalism reassesses the overly optimistic narratives often associated with this malleable term, revealing both the metaphorical and very real obstacles for transnational mobility. Nancy L. Green begins her wide-ranging examination with the story of Frank Gueydan, an early twentieth-century American convicted of manufacturing fake wine in France who complained bitterly that he was neither able to get a fair trial there nor to enlist the help of US officials. Gueydan’s predicament opens the door for a series of inquiries into the past twenty-five years of transnational scholarship, raising questions about the weaknesses of global networks and the slippery nature of citizenship ties for those who try to live transnational lives. The Limits of Transnationalism serves as a cogent reminder of this topic’s complexity, calling for greater attention to be paid to the many bumps in the road.
 
[more]

front cover of Limits to Liberation after Apartheid
Limits to Liberation after Apartheid
Citizenship, Governance & Culture
Steven L. Robins
Ohio University Press, 2005
Post-apartheid South Africa has been characterized by race tensions, social inequalities, and unemployment that are contributing to widespread crises. In addressing the transition to democracy, Limits to Liberation examines issues of culture and identity, drawing attention to the creative agency of citizens of the “new” South Africa. The writers question the classical western model of citizenship and procedural democracy in the face of the inability of most African states to provide basic needs. Their bold, interdisciplinary inquiry contributes to South African and international scholarship on urban planning, governance, and citizenship.ABOUT THE AUTHOR---Steven L. Robins is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa.
[more]

front cover of Lincoln and Citizenship
Lincoln and Citizenship
Mark E. Steiner
Southern Illinois University Press, 2021
Exploring Lincoln’s Evolving Views of Citizenship
 
At its most basic level, citizenship is about who belongs to a political community, and for Abraham Lincoln in nineteenth-century America, the answer was in flux. The concept of “fellow citizens,” for Lincoln, encompassed different groups at different times. In this first book focused on the topic, Mark E. Steiner analyzes and contextualizes Lincoln’s evolving views about citizenship over the course of his political career.
 
As an Illinois state legislator, Lincoln subscribed to the by-then-outmoded belief that suffrage must be limited to those who met certain obligations to the state. He rejected the adherence to universal white male suffrage that had existed in Illinois since statehood. In 1836 Lincoln called for voting rights to be limited to white people who had served in the militia or paid taxes. Surprisingly, Lincoln did not exclude women, though later he did not advocate giving women the right to vote and did not take women seriously as citizens. The women at his rallies, he believed, served as decoration.
 
For years Lincoln presumed that only white men belonged in the political and civic community, and he saw immigration through this lens. Because Lincoln believed that white male European immigrants had a right to be part of the body politic, he opposed measures to lengthen the time they would have to wait to become a citizen or to be able to vote. Unlike many in the antebellum north, Lincoln rejected xenophobia and nativism. He opposed black citizenship, however, as he made clear in his debates with Stephen Douglas. Lincoln supported Illinois’s draconian Black Laws, which prohibited free black men from voting and serving on juries or in the militia. Further, Lincoln supported sending free black Americans to Africa—the ultimate repudiation and an antithesis of citizenship.
 
Yet, as president, Lincoln came to embrace a broader vision of citizenship for African Americans. Steiner establishes how Lincoln’s meetings at the White House with Frederick Douglass and other black leaders influenced his beliefs about colonization, which he ultimately disavowed, and citizenship for African Americans, which he began to consider. Further, the battlefield success of black Union soldiers revealed to Lincoln that black men were worthy of citizenship. Lincoln publicly called for limited suffrage among black men, including military veterans, in his speech about Reconstruction on April 11, 1865. Ahead of most others of his era, Lincoln showed just before his assassination that he supported rights of citizenship for at least some African Americans.
 
[more]

front cover of Lincoln and Congress
Lincoln and Congress
William C. Harris
Southern Illinois University Press, 2017
Winner, ISHS Annual Award for a Scholarly Publication, 2018

In Lincoln and Congress, William C. Harris reveals that the relationship between the president and Congress, though sometimes contentious, was cooperative rather than adversarial. During his time as president, Abraham Lincoln embodied his personal conviction that the nation’s executive should not interfere with the work of the legislature, and though often critical of him privately, in public congressional leaders compromised with and assisted the president to unite the North and minimize opposition to the war.

Despite the turbulence of the era and the consequent tensions within the government, the executive and legislative branches showed restraint in their dealings with each other. In fact, except in his official messages to Congress, Lincoln rarely lobbied for congressional action, and he vetoed only one important measure during his tenure as president. Many congressmen from Lincoln’s own party, although publicly supportive, doubted his leadership and sought a larger role for Congress in setting war policies. Though they controlled Congress, Republican legislators frequently differed among themselves in shaping legislation and in their reactions to events as well as in their relationships both with each other and with the president. Harris draws intriguing sketches of nineteenth-century congressional leaders and shows that, contrary to what historians have traditionally concluded, radical Republicans such as Representative Thaddeus Stevens and Senator Charles Sumner did not dominate their party or Congress. Harris includes the minority party’s role, showing that Northern Democrats and conservative Unionists of the border states generally opposed Republican policies but worked with them on support for the troops and on nonwar issues like the Pacific Railroad Bill.

Lincoln and Congress sheds new light on the influence of members of Congress and their relationship with Lincoln on divisive issues such as military affairs, finance, slavery, constitutional rights, reconstruction, and Northern political developments. Enjoyable both for casual Civil War readers and professional historians, this book provides an engaging narrative that helps readers redefine and understand the political partnership that helped the Union survive.
[more]

front cover of Lincoln and the Abolitionists
Lincoln and the Abolitionists
Stanley Harrold
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
Winner, ISHS Best of Illinois History Award, 2019

Abraham Lincoln has often been called the “Great Emancipator.” But he was not among those Americans who, decades before the Civil War, favored immediate emancipation of all slaves inside the United States. Those who did were the abolitionists—the men and women who sought freedom and equal rights for all African Americans. Stanley Harrold traces how, despite Lincoln’s political distance from abolitionists, they influenced his evolving political orientation before and during the Civil War.
 
While explaining how the abolitionist movement evolved, Harrold also clarifies Lincoln’s connections with and his separation from this often fiery group. For most of his life Lincoln regarded abolitionists as dangerous fanatics. Like many northerners during his time, Lincoln sought compromise with the white South regarding slavery, opposed abolitionist radicalism, and doubted that free black people could have a positive role in America. Yet, during the 1840s and 1850s, conservative northern Democrats as well as slaveholders branded Lincoln an abolitionist because of his sympathy toward black people and opposition to the expansion of slavery.
 
Lincoln’s election to the presidency and the onslaught of the Civil War led to a transformation of his relationship with abolitionists. Lincoln’s original priority as president had been to preserve the Union, not to destroy slavery. Nevertheless many factors—including contacts with abolitionists—led Lincoln to favor ending slavery. After Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and raised black troops, many, though not all, abolitionists came to view him more favorably.
 
Providing insight into the stressful, evolving relationship between Lincoln and the abolitionists, and also into the complexities of northern politics, society, and culture during the Civil War era, this concise volume illuminates a central concern in Lincoln’s life and presidency.
[more]

front cover of Lincoln and the American Founding
Lincoln and the American Founding
Lucas E. Morel
Southern Illinois University Press, 2020
In this persuasive work of intellectual history, Lucas E. Morel argues that the most important influence on Abraham Lincoln’s political thought and practice was what he learned from the leading figures of and documents from the birth of the United States. In this systematic account of those principles, Morel compellingly demonstrates that to know Lincoln well is to understand thoroughly the founding of America.
 
With each chapter describing a particular influence, Morel leads readers from the Founding Father, George Washington; to the founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution; to the founding compromise over slavery; and finally to a consideration of how the original intentions of the Founding Fathers should be respected in light of experience, progress, and improvements over time. Within these key discussions, Morel shows that without the ideals of the American Revolution, Lincoln’s most famous speeches would be unrecognizable, and the character of the nation would have lost its foundation on the universal principles of human equality, individual liberty, and government by the consent of the governed.
Lincoln thought that the principles of human equality and individual rights could provide common ground for a diverse people to live as one nation and that some old things, such as the political ideals of the American founding, were worth preserving. He urged Americans to be vigilant in maintaining the institutions of self-government and to exercise and safeguard the benefits of freedom for future generations. Morel posits that adopting the way of thinking and speaking Lincoln advocated, based on the country’s founding, could help mend our current polarized discourse and direct the American people to employ their common government on behalf of a truly common good.
 
[more]

front cover of Lincoln and the Election of 1860
Lincoln and the Election of 1860
Michael S. Green
Southern Illinois University Press, 2011
 
Abraham Lincoln looms large in American memory. He is admired for his many accomplishments, including his skills as an orator and writer, his Emancipation Proclamation, and his unswerving leadership during the strife-ridden years of the Civil War. Now, Michael S. Green unveils another side to the sixteenth president of the United States: that of the astute political operator. Lincoln and the Election of 1860 examines how, through a combination of political intrigue and deep commitment to the principle of freedom, Lincoln journeyed from Republican underdog to an improbable victor who changed the course of American history. 

Although Lincoln rose to national prominence in 1858 during his debates with Stephen Douglas, he was unable to publicly stump for the presidency in a time when personal campaigning for the office was traditionally rejected. This limitation did nothing to check Lincoln’s ambitions, however, as he consistently endeavored to place himself in the public eye while stealthily pulling political strings behind the scenes. Green demonstrates how Lincoln drew upon his considerable communication abilities and political acumen to adroitly manage allies and enemies alike, ultimately uniting the Republican Party and catapulting himself from his status as one of the most unlikely of candidates to his party’s nominee at the national convention. 

As the general election campaign progressed, Lincoln continued to draw upon his experience from three decades in Illinois politics to unite and invigorate the Republican Party. Democrats fell to divisions between North and South, setting the stage for a Republican victory in November—and for the most turbulent times in U.S. history. 

Moving well beyond a study of the man to provide astute insight into the era’s fiery political scene and its key players, Green offers perceptive analysis of the evolution of American politics and Lincoln’s political career, the processes of the national and state conventions, how political parties selected their candidates, national developments of the time and their effects on Lincoln and his candidacy, and Lincoln’s own sharp—and often surprising—assessments of his opponents and colleagues. Green frequently employs Lincoln’s own words to afford an intimate view into the political savvy of the future president. 

The pivotal election of 1860 previewed the intelligence, patience, and shrewdness that would enable Lincoln to lead the United States through its greatest upheaval. This exciting new book brings to vivid life the cunning and strength of one of America’s most intriguing presidents during his journey to the White House.
[more]

front cover of Lincoln in the Illinois Legislature
Lincoln in the Illinois Legislature
Ron J Keller
Southern Illinois University Press, 2019
In this indispensable account of Abraham Lincoln’s earliest political years, Ron J. Keller reassesses Lincoln’s arguably lackluster legislative record during four terms in the Illinois House of Representatives to reveal how the underpinnings of his temperament, leadership skills, and political acumen were bolstered on the statehouse floor.
 
Due partly to Lincoln’s own reserve and partly to an unimpressive legislative tally, Lincoln’s time in the state legislature has been largely neglected by historians more drawn to other early hallmarks of his life, including his law career, his personal life, and his single term as a U.S. congressman in the 1840s. Of about sixteen hundred bills, resolutions, and petitions passed from 1834 to 1842, Lincoln introduced only about thirty of them. The issue he most ardently championed and shepherded through the legislature—the internal improvements system—left the state in debt for more than a generation.
 
Despite that spotty record, Keller argues, it was during these early years that Lincoln displayed and honed the traits that would allow him to excel in politics and ultimately define his legacy: honesty, equality, empathy, and leadership. Keller reanimates Lincoln’s time in the Illinois legislature to reveal the formation of Lincoln’s strong character and political philosophy in those early years, which allowed him to rise to prominence as the Whig party’s floor leader regardless of setbacks and to build a framework for his future.
 
Lincoln in the Illinois Legislature details Lincoln’s early political platform and the grassroots campaigning that put him in office. Drawing on legislative records, newspaper accounts, speeches, letters, and other sources, Keller describes Lincoln’s positions on key bills, highlights his colleagues’ perceptions of him, and depicts the relationships that grew out of his statehouse interactions. Keller’s research delves into Lincoln’s popularity as a citizen of New Salem, his political alliances and victories, his antislavery stirrings, and his personal joys and struggles as he sharpened his political shrewdness.
 
Keller argues Lincoln’s definitive political philosophies—economic opportunity and the right to rise, democratic equality, and to a lesser extent his hatred of slavery—took root during his legislative tenure in Illinois. Situating Lincoln’s tenure and viewpoints within the context of national trends, Keller demonstrates that understanding Lincoln’s four terms as a state legislator is vital to understanding him as a whole.
 
[more]

front cover of Lincoln's Campaign Biographies
Lincoln's Campaign Biographies
Thomas A. Horrocks
Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

During the 1860 and 1864 presidential campaigns, Abraham Lincoln was the subject of over twenty campaign biographies. In this innovative study, Thomas A. Horrocks examines the role that these publications played in shaping an image of Lincoln that would resonate with voters and explores the vision of Lincoln that the biographies crafted, the changes in this vision over the course of four years, and the impact of these works on the outcome of the elections.

Horrocks investigates Lincoln’s campaign biographies within the context of the critical relationship between print and politics in nineteenth-century America and compares the works about Lincoln with other presidential campaign biographies of the era. Horrocks shows that more than most politicians of his day, Lincoln deeply appreciated and understood the influence and the power of the printed word. 

The 1860 campaign biographies introduced to America “Honest Abe, the Rail Splitter,” a trustworthy, rugged candidate who appealed to rural Americans. When Lincoln ran for reelection in 1864, the second round of campaign biographies complemented this earlier portrait of Lincoln with a new, paternal figure, “Father Abraham,” more appropriate for Americans enduring a bloody civil war.  Closing with a consideration of the influence of these publications on Lincoln’s election and reelection, Lincoln’s Campaign Biographies provides a new perspective for those seeking a better understanding of the sixteenth president and two of the most critical elections in American history.

[more]

front cover of Lincoln's Christianity
Lincoln's Christianity
Michael Burkhimer
Westholme Publishing
The Changing Role of Faith in the Life of the Sixteenth President of the United States

After listening to Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, many in the audience were stunned. Instead of a positive message about the coming Union victory, the president implicated the entire country in the faults and responsibility for slavery. Using Old Testament references, Lincoln explained that God was punishing all Americans for their role in the calamity with a bloody civil war.
These were surprising words from a man who belonged to no church, did not regularly attend services, and was known to have publicly and privately questioned some of Christianity’s core beliefs. But Lincoln’s life was one with supreme sadness—the death of his first fiancee, the subsequent loss of two of his sons—and these events, along with the chance encounter with a book in Mary Todd’s father’s library, The Christian’s Defense, are all part of the key to understanding Lincoln’s Christianity. Biblical quotations soon entered his speeches—a point noted by Stephen Douglas in their debates—but it is unclear whether Lincoln’s use of scripture was a signal that American politicians should openly embrace religion in their public lives, or a rhetorical tool to manipulate his audience, or a result of a personal religious transformation. After his death both secular and religious biographers claimed Lincoln as one of their own, touching off a controversy that remains today.

In Lincoln’s Christianity, Michael Burkhimer examines the entire history of the president’s interaction with religion—accounts from those who knew him, his own letters and writings, the books he read—to reveal a man who did not believe in orthodox Christian precepts (and might have had a hard time getting elected today) yet, by his example, was a person and president who most truly embodied Christian teachings.

[more]

front cover of Lincoln's Legacy
Lincoln's Legacy
Ethics and Politics
Edited by Phillip Shaw Paludan
University of Illinois Press, 2007

The four new essays in Lincoln's Legacy describe major ethical problems that the sixteenth president navigated what can be learned from how he did so. The distinguished and award-winning Lincoln scholars William Miller, Mark E. Neely Jr., Phillip Shaw Paludan, and Mark Summers describe Lincoln’s attitudes and actions during encounters with questions of politics, law, constitutionalism, patronage, and democracy. The remarkably focused essays include an assessment of Lincoln's virtues in the presidency, the first study on Lincoln and patronage in more than a decade, a challenge to the cliché of Lincoln the democrat, and a study of habeas corpus, Lincoln, and state courts. On the eve of the bicentennial celebration of Lincoln’s birth, Lincoln’s Legacy highlights his enduring importance in contemporary conversations about law, politics, and democracy.

[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
Lincoln's Rise to Eloquence
How He Gained the Presidential Nomination
D. Leigh Henson
University of Illinois Press, 2024
At turns eloquent and earthy, Abraham Lincoln’s rhetoric played a vital role in his success as a politician and statesman. D. Leigh Henson examines Lincoln’s pre-presidential development as a rhetorician, the purposes and methods behind his speeches and writings, and how the works contributed to his political rise. Lincoln’s close study of the rhetorical process drew on sources that ranged from classical writings to foundational American documents to the speeches of Daniel Webster. As Henson shows, Lincoln applied his learning to combine arguments on historical, legal, and moral grounds with appeals to emotion and his own carefully curated credibility. Henson also explores Lincoln’s use of the elements of structural design to craft coherent arguments that, whatever their varying purposes, used direct and plain language to reach diverse audiences--and laid the groundwork for his rise to the White House.

Insightful and revealing, Lincoln’s Rise to Eloquence follows Lincoln from his early career through the years-long clashes with Stephen A. Douglas to trace the future president’s evolution as a communicator and politician.

[more]

front cover of Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism
Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism
Lincoln, Douglas, and Moral Conflict
John Burt
Harvard University Press, 2013

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

In 1858, challenger Abraham Lincoln debated incumbent Stephen Douglas seven times in the race for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. More was at stake than slavery in those debates. In Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism, John Burt contends that the very legitimacy of democratic governance was on the line. In a United States stubbornly divided over ethical issues, the overarching question posed by the Lincoln-Douglas debates has not lost its urgency: Can a liberal political system be used to mediate moral disputes? And if it cannot, is violence inevitable?

“John Burt has written a work that every serious student of Lincoln will have to read...Burt refracts Lincoln through the philosophy of Kant, Rawls and contemporary liberal political theory. His is very much a Lincoln for our time.”
—Steven B. Smith, New York Times Book Review

“I'm making space on my overstuffed shelves for Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism. This is a book I expect to be picking up and thumbing through for years to come.”
—Jim Cullen, History News Network

“Burt treats the [Lincoln-Douglas] debates as being far more significant than an election contest between two candidates. The debates represent profound statements of political philosophy and speak to the continuing challenges the U.S. faces in resolving divisive moral conflicts.”
—E. C. Sands, Choice

[more]

front cover of Lineages Of State Fragility
Lineages Of State Fragility
Rural Civil Society In Guinea-Bissau
Joshua B. Forrest
Ohio University Press, 2003

In Guinea-Bissau, as elsewhere in Africa, there is a disjuncture between the central state and rural civil society. It is this significant and overlooked aspect of Guinea-Bissau’s political evolution—the continuing ability of civil society to evade and thwart state power—that is at the heart of Joshua B. Forrest’s Lineages of State Fragility.

Professor Forrest argues that despite European influences, the contemporary fragility of African states can be fully appreciated only by examining the indigenous social context in which these states evolved. Focusing on Guinea-Bissau, Forrest exposes the emergence of a strong and adaptable “rural civil society” that can be traced back to precolonial times.

Lineages of State Fragility analyzes the social, political, and military experiences of this rural civil society to account for the origins of Guinea-Bissau’s soft state. For example, Forrest identifies interethnic social and military practices that became entrenched in rural social structures and continued to evolve through the colonial period, enabling Guinea-Bissauans to resist state predation.

Lineages of State Fragility offers an unorthodox explanation of African politics by tracing the direct social links among the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods and affirms the role of rural actors in determining present-day political outcomes.

Based on remarkably extensive research conducted in archives in Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, and Portugal, Lineages of State Fragility represents both a new approach to the region’s past and present and an important synthesis of the political analysis that has come before.

[more]

front cover of Lines in the Sand
Lines in the Sand
Congressional Redistricting in Texas and the Downfall of Tom DeLay
By Steve Bickerstaff
University of Texas Press, 2007

The events of 2003 in Texas were important to the political history of this country. Congressman Tom DeLay led a Republican effort to gerrymander the state's thirty-two congressional districts to defeat all ten of the Anglo Democratic incumbents and to elect more Republicans; Democratic state lawmakers fled the state in an effort to defeat the plan. The Lone Star State uproar attracted attention worldwide. The Republicans won this showdown, gaining six additional seats from Texas and protecting the one endangered Republican incumbent. Some of the methods used by DeLay to achieve this result, however, led to his criminal indictment and ultimately to his downfall.

With its eye-opening research, readable style, and insightful commentary, Lines in the Sand provides a front-line account of what happened in 2003, often through the personal stories of members of both parties and of the minority activist groups caught in a political vortex. Law professor Steve Bickerstaff provides much-needed historical perspective and also probes the aftermath of the 2003 redistricting, including the criminal prosecutions of DeLay and his associates and the events that led to DeLay's eventual resignation from the U.S. House of Representatives. As a result, Bickerstaff graphically shows a dark underside of American politics—the ruthless use of public institutional power for partisan gain.

[more]

front cover of Lion and Lamb
Lion and Lamb
A Portrait of British Moral Duality
Mihir Bose
Haus Publishing, 2018
The great British dilemma is this: Britain is a country forever wrestling with two moral sides—whether to be viewed as a lion that roars and conquers, or a gentle lamb that gambols happily. In the days of the empire, one face meant the Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, the Mother of Parliaments, and the country that harbored people forced to flee their homelands. But there also was an imperial face, where colonial subjects were made very aware that the British knew how to ensure obedience, even if that required the use of brutal force. Brexit has once again highlighted these dualities.

In Britain’s Eternal Dilemma, Mihir Bose shows how those who voted to leave the E.U. want Britain to roar like a lion. In contrast, the Remainers saw Brexit as a self-inflicted wound, believing the only option is to live symbiotically with the rest of Europe for a common future. Writing from the unique perspective of an immigrant, Bose personifies this ongoing debate: He has experienced racism in his near half century in Britain, but he has also been provided unimaginable opportunities to become a writer, opportunities he would never have had in his native India. This timely book demonstrates that Britain is still wresting with its two-sided identity while also showing that Brexit is still the number one priority on the European political agenda.
[more]

logo for Ohio University Press
Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa
Jonathan Crush
Ohio University Press, 1992

In June 1976 political demonstrations in the black township of Soweto exploded into an insurrection that would continue sporadically and spread to urban areas across South Africa. In their assault on apartheid the youths who spearheaded the rebellion attacked and often destroyed the state institutions that they linked to their oppression: police stations, government offices, schools, and state-owned liquor outlets. In Soweto alone during the first days of the revolt protestors smashed and burned eighteen beerhalls and a similar number of bottle stores; as the rebellion spread more were destroyed. This study sets out to demonstrate that liquor outlets were not simply convenient symbols of oppression. The anger that launched gasoline bombs into beerhalls across South Africa had specific origins in deep and complicated struggles over the control of alcohol production and consumption in South Africa.

Conflict over alcohol has continuously intruded upon the lives of the black residents of southern African towns, cities, and labor compounds and upon the rural communities to which these people traced their origins. Yet the subject has received little systematic scholarly attention until now. In Liquor and Labor in Southern Africa scholars explore the complex relationship between alcohol use and the emergence of the modern urban-industrial system. In examining the role of alcohol in social control and the state, they also reveal the vibrant subcultures nurtured in beerhalls and underground shebeens and expose the bitter conflicts over alcohol that run along the fault lines of age, gender, class, and ethnicity.

[more]

front cover of Listed
Listed
Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act
Joe Roman
Harvard University Press, 2011

The first listed species to make headlines after the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973 was the snail darter, a three-inch fish that stood in the way of a massive dam on the Little Tennessee River. When the Supreme Court sided with the darter, Congress changed the rules. The dam was built, the river stopped flowing, and the snail darter went extinct on the Little Tennessee, though it survived in other waterways. A young Al Gore voted for the dam; freshman congressman Newt Gingrich voted for the fish.

A lot has changed since the 1970s, and Joe Roman helps us understand why we should all be happy that this sweeping law is alive and well today. More than a general history of endangered species protection, Listed is a tale of threatened species in the wild—from the whooping crane and North Atlantic right whale to the purple bankclimber, a freshwater mussel tangled up in a water war with Atlanta—and the people working to save them.

Employing methods from the new field of ecological economics, Roman challenges the widely held belief that protecting biodiversity is too costly. And with engaging directness, he explains how preserving biodiversity can help economies and communities thrive. Above all, he shows why the extinction of species matters to us personally—to our health and safety, our prosperity, and our joy in nature.

[more]

front cover of The Listeners
The Listeners
A History of Wiretapping in the United States
Brian Hochman
Harvard University Press, 2022

They’ve been listening for longer than you think. A new history reveals how—and why.

Wiretapping is nearly as old as electronic communications. Telegraph operators intercepted enemy messages during the Civil War. Law enforcement agencies were listening to private telephone calls as early as 1895. Communications firms have assisted government eavesdropping programs since the early twentieth century—and they have spied on their own customers too. Such breaches of privacy once provoked outrage, but today most Americans have resigned themselves to constant electronic monitoring. How did we get from there to here?

In The Listeners, Brian Hochman shows how the wiretap evolved from a specialized intelligence-gathering tool to a mundane fact of life. He explores the origins of wiretapping in military campaigns and criminal confidence games and tracks the use of telephone taps in the US government’s wars on alcohol, communism, terrorism, and crime. While high-profile eavesdropping scandals fueled public debates about national security, crime control, and the rights and liberties of individuals, wiretapping became a routine surveillance tactic for private businesses and police agencies alike.

From wayward lovers to foreign spies, from private detectives to public officials, and from the silver screen to the Supreme Court, The Listeners traces the long and surprising history of wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping in the United States. Along the way, Brian Hochman considers how earlier generations of Americans confronted threats to privacy that now seem more urgent than ever.

[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
Listening to Workers
Oral Histories of Metro Detroit Autoworkers in the 1950s
Daniel J. Clark
University of Illinois Press, 2024

Historians and readers alike often overlook the everyday experiences of workers. Drawing on years of interviews and archival research, Daniel J. Clark presents the rich, interesting, and sometimes confounding lives of men and women who worked in Detroit-area automotive plants in the 1950s.

In their own words, the interviewees frankly discuss personal matters like divorce and poverty alongside recollections of childhood and first jobs, marriage and working women, church and hobbies, and support systems and workplace dangers. Their frequent struggles with unstable jobs and economic insecurity upend notions of the 1950s as a golden age of prosperity while stories of domestic violence and infidelity open a door to intimate aspects of their lives. Taken together, the narratives offer seldom-seen accounts of autoworkers as complex and multidimensional human beings.

Compelling and surprising, Listening to Workers foregoes the union-focused strain of labor history to provide ground-level snapshots of a blue-collar world.

[more]

front cover of Literary Criticism
Literary Criticism
A Concise Political History
Joseph North
Harvard University Press, 2017

Literary Criticism offers a concise overview of literary studies in the English-speaking world from the early twentieth century to the present. Joseph North steps back from the usual tangle of figures, schools, and movements in order to analyze the intellectual paradigms that underpinned them. The result is a radically new account of the discipline’s development, together with a trenchant argument about where its political future lies.

People in today’s literature departments often assume that their work is politically progressive, especially when compared with the work of early- and mid-twentieth-century critics. North’s view is less cheering. For when understood in relation to the longer arc of the discipline, the current historicist and contextualist mode in literary studies represents a step to the Right. Since the global turn to neoliberalism in the late 1970s, all the major movements within literary studies have been diagnostic rather than interventionist in character: scholars have developed sophisticated techniques for analyzing culture, but they have retreated from systematic attempts to transform it. In this respect, the political potential of current literary scholarship compares poorly with that of earlier critical modes, which, for all their faults, at least had a programmatic commitment to cultural change.

Yet neoliberalism is now in crisis—a crisis that presents opportunities as well as dangers. North argues that the creation of a genuinely interventionist criticism is one of the central tasks facing those on the Left of the discipline today.

[more]

front cover of Literary Journalism on Trial
Literary Journalism on Trial
Masson v. New Yorker and the First Amendment
Kathy Roberts Forde
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
In November 1984, Jeffrey Masson filed a libel suit against writer Janet Malcolm and the New Yorker, claiming that Malcolm had intentionally misquoted him in a profile she wrote for the magazine about his former career as a Freud scholar and administrator of the Freud archives. Over the next twelve years the case moved up and down the federal judicial ladder, at one point reaching the U.S. Supreme Court, as lawyers and judges wrestled with questions about the representation of "truth" in journalism and, by extension, the limits of First Amendment protections of free speech. Had a successful Freudian scholar actually called himself an "intellectual gigolo" and "the greatest analyst who ever lived"? Or had a respected writer for the New Yorker knowingly placed false, self-damning words in her subject's mouth? In Literary Journalism on Trial, Kathy Roberts Forde explores the implications of Masson v. New Yorker in the context of the history of American journalism. She shows how the case represents a watershed moment in a long debate between the advocates of traditional and literary journalism and explains how it reflects a significant intellectual project of the period: the postmodern critique of objectivity, with its insistence on the instability of language and rejection of unitary truth in human affairs. The case, Forde argues, helped widen the perceived divide between ideas of literary and traditional journalism and forced the resolution of these conflicting conceptions of truth in the constitutional arena of libel law. By embracing traditional journalism's emphasis on fact and objectivity and rejecting a broader understanding of truth, the Supreme Court turned away from the First Amendment theory articulated in previous rulings, opting to value less the free, uninhibited interchange of ideas necessary to democracy and more the "trustworthiness" of public expression. The Court's decision in this case thus had implications that reached beyond the legal realm to the values and norms expressed in the triangular relationship between American democracy, First Amendment principles, and the press.
[more]

front cover of The Literary Underground of the Old Regime
The Literary Underground of the Old Regime
Robert Darnton
Harvard University Press, 1982

Robert Darnton introduces us to the shadowy world of pirate publishers, garret scribblers, under-the-cloak book peddlers, smugglers, and police spies that composed the literary underground of the Enlightenment.

Here are the ambitious writers who crowded into Paris seeking fame and fortune within the Republic of Letters, but who instead sank into the miserable world of Grub Street—victims of a closed world of protection and privilege. Venting their frustrations in an illicit literature of vitriolic pamphlets, libelles, and chroniques scandaleuses, these “Rousseaus of the gutter” desecrated everything sacred in the social order of the Old Regime. Here too are the workers who printed their writings and the clandestine booksellers who distributed them.

While censorship, a monopolistic guild, and the police contained the visible publishing industry within the limits of official orthodoxies, a prolific literary underworld disseminated a vast illegal literature that conveyed a seditious ideology to readers everywhere in France. Covering their traces in order to survive, the creators of this eighteenth-century counterculture have virtually disappeared from history. By drawing on an ingenious selection of previously hidden sources, such as police ledgers and publishers’ records, Robert Darnton reveals for the first time the fascinating story of that forgotten underworld.

The activities of the underground bear on a broad range of issues in history and literature, and they directly concern the problem of uncovering the ideological origins of the French Revolution. This engaging book illuminates those issues and provides a fresh view of publishing history that will inform and delight the general reader.

[more]

front cover of Literature and Resistance in Guatemala
Literature and Resistance in Guatemala
Textual Modes and Cultural Politics from El Señor Presidente to Rigoberta Menchú
Marc Zimmerman
Ohio University Press, 1994
What circumstances lead writers in a poor, multi-ethnic and largely illiterate country to produce a literature that both expresses and affects opposition to the regime? Who are these writers? This study examines these and other questions about the literature of resistance in Guatemala, from the days of Estrada Cabrera up to the events of May and June of 1993. Zimmerman provides the cultural context for the various modes of literary production and analysis, and identifies the currents of opposition in the nation’s fiction, poetry, and testimonial writing. He details the cultural politics involving Guatemalan writers and their organizations during their years of Cerezo and Serrano-Elías, paying particular attention to the role of women and indigenous groups, Rigoberta Menchú among them. These two volumes are companion texts to Guatemala: Voices from the Silence, an “epic-collage” of writings compiled by Zimmerman and Raúl Rojas.
[more]

front cover of Lithuanian Social Democracy in Perspective, 1893-1914
Lithuanian Social Democracy in Perspective, 1893-1914
Leonas Sabaliunas
Duke University Press, 1990
Lithuanian Social Democracy in Perspective is the first book in any Western language on Lithuanian Social Democracy. In this work Leonas Sabaliunas studies the conflict between and convergence of socialism and nationalism in pre-1914 Lithuania. He analyzes the interplay of ideological priorities by observing the operations of Marxist political parties, emphasizing the origins, development, and achievements of the Social Democratic Party of Lithuania.
But Sabaliunas also considers such partners and rivals as the Jewish Bund, the Polish Socialist Party, the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, and the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. He focuses on the appearance of socialist parties at the local level, the politics of assertive behavior during the Russian Revolution of 1905–1906, the nature of interparty relations, and efforts to promote party unity. In particular, he investigates the projected relationship between Russia and its subject nationalities—a cardinal concern today as the Baltic peoples attempt to distance themselves from their Russian neighbors.
Sabaliunas clarifies current massive Lithuanian opposition to Moscow and to its version of socialism. He stresses that in Lithuania the socialist movement from the beginning not only sought solutions to social and economic problems but also addressed issues of ethnic and national interest, especially the question of national sovereignty.
[more]

front cover of LITIGATION AS LOBBYING
LITIGATION AS LOBBYING
REPRODUCTIVE HAZARDS & INTEREST AGGREGATION
JULIANNA S. GONEN
The Ohio State University Press
This book is a case study that shows how interest groups use the litigation process to further their policy agendas. The case detailed here revolves around issues of reproductive health. It is a good illustration of the commonly held view among judicial scholars that the judicial process is essentially the same as the political process, that in both cases there is room for influence from a variety of sources.
[more]

front cover of The Little Mans Big Friend
The Little Mans Big Friend
James E. Folsom in Alabama Politics, 1946-1958
George E. Sims
University of Alabama Press, 1985
Examines the political career of Alabama’s “Big Jim” Folsom
 
At the end of World War II changing economic and social forces transformed the lives of Alabamians, whose political leaders had built careers on localistic politics shaped by established economic and governmental interests. Into this context strolled “Big Jim”—six feet eight inches tall—with his corn-shuck mop, wooden suds bucket, and a promise to scrub out the Capitol. Ridiculed by his opponents, Folsom advertised his progressive program in every crossroads community.
 
As governor, Folsom faced a legislature dominated by local politicians whom he had bypassed during the campaign, and although he won approval of some bills, legislative opposition made his administration a four-year filibuster.
 
Not until 1955, after his election to a second term, did Folsom become an effective leader. Tying programs for expanded services to the local interests of the legislators, he won approval for road construction, “old-age pensions,” industrial development, and reorganization of the state docks. But the lawmakers balked at constitutional reform.
 
As his reform efforts met defeat during 1956, Folsom was losing his ability to lead. He refused to exploit racial tensions, and the rise of the civil rights movement undermined his popularity among whites. Unwilling to discipline his aides and supporters, his administration became notorious for petty graft. By 1958 aspiring candidates kept their distance from Folsom. “Big Jim” attempted a comeback in the 1962 campaign, but he was never again to hold public office.
 
 
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Live Stock and Dead Things
The Archaeology of Zoopolitics between Domestication and Modernity
Hannah Chazin
University of Chicago Press
Reconceptualizes human-animal relationships and their political significance in ancient and modern societies.
 
In Live Stock and Dead Things, Hannah Chazin combines zooarchaeology and anthropology to challenge familiar narratives about the role of non-human animals in the rise of modern societies. Conventional views of this process tend to see a mostly linear development from hunter-gatherer societies, to horticultural and pastoral ones, to large-scale agricultural ones, and then industrial ones. Along the way, traditional accounts argue that owning livestock as property, along with land and other valuable commodities, introduced social inequality and stratification. Against this, Chazin raises a provocative question: What if domestication wasn’t the origin of instrumentalizing non-human animals after all?
 
Chazin argues that these conventional narratives are inherited from conjectural histories and ignore the archaeological data. In her view, the category of “domestication” flattens the more complex dimensions of humans’ relationship to herd animals. In the book’s first half, Chazin offers a new understanding of the political possibilities of pastoralism, one that recognizes the powerful role herd animals have played in shaping human notions of power and authority. In the second half, she takes readers into her archaeological fieldwork in the South Caucasus, which sheds further light on herd animals’ transformative effect on the economy, social life, and ritual. Appealing to anthropologists and archaeologists alike, this daring book offers a reconceptualization of human-animal relationships and their political significance.
[more]

front cover of The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism
The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism
Carolien Stolte
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
The Afro-Asianism of the early Cold War has long remained buried under the narrative of Bandung, homogenising and subverting the different visions of post-colonial worldmaking that co-existed alongside the Bandung project. This book turns the lens on these other visions, and the transnational interactions which emerged from various other gatherings of the 1950s and 1960s that existing beyond the realm of high diplomacy, while blurring the lines between state and non-state projects. It examines how Afro-Asianism was lived by activists, intellectuals, cultural figures, as well as political leaders in building a post-imperial world – particularly women. As a whole, this collection of essays examines the diversity of Afro-Asian ideals that emerged through such movements, untangling the personal relationships, political competition, racial hierarchies, and solidarities that shaped them. By visualising political Afro-Asianism and its proponents as a living network, a fuller picture of decolonization and the Cold War is brought into view.
[more]

front cover of Lives Per Gallon
Lives Per Gallon
The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction
Terry Tamminen
Island Press, 2008
How much would you pay for a gallon of gas? $4.00? $10.00? Would you pay with the health of your lungs or with years taken from your lifespan?
The infamous "pain at the pump" runs much deeper than our wallets, argues Terry Tamminen, former Secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency and current Special Advisor to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Petroleum may power our cars and heat our homes, but it also contributes to birth defects and disorders like asthma and emphysema, not to mention cancer.
In Lives Per Gallon, Tamminen takes a hard look at these and other health, environmental, and national security costs hidden in every barrel of oil.
While the petroleum industry is raking in huge profits, Tamminen shows, it is studiously avoiding measures that would lessen the hazards of its products. Using the successful lawsuits by state governments against big tobacco as a model, the author sets forth a bold strategy to hold oil and auto companies accountable and force industry reform. He also offers a blueprint for developing alternative energy sources based on California's real world experiences.

Certain to be controversial, Lives Per Gallon is an unblinking assessment of the true price of petroleum and a prescription for change. The choice is clear: continuing paying with our health, or kick our addiction and evolve beyond an oil-dependent economy.
[more]

front cover of Living Ideology in Cuba
Living Ideology in Cuba
Socialism in Principle and Practice
Katherine A. Gordy
University of Michigan Press, 2015
In Living Ideology in Cuba, Katherine Gordy demonstrates how the Cuban state and its people engage in an ongoing negotiation that produces a “living ideology.” In contrast to official slogans and fiats, Cuba’s living ideology is a decentralized phenomenon, continually adapting, informing, and responding to daily life, without losing sight of the fundamental national principles of socioeconomic equality, unified leadership, and inclusive nationalism.

Tracing Cuba’s ideological history, Gordy first looks at the ways in which the 19th century wars of independence and the 1959 revolution were used as the basis for both challenging and legitimizing Cuban socialism. Following the embrace of a pure socialist ideology in the 1960s, state policies of the 1970s became more accommodating of market imperatives, while still holding on to the principles articulated by Che Guevara and Karl Marx. In the 1990s, the Cuban people themselves pushed back against further economic reforms, reasserting the value of socioeconomic equality. Gordy also examines ideological debates among intellectuals, from the controversy sparked by Fidel Castro’s “Words to the Intellectuals” speech to the demand in the 1990s for a separation between academia and the state—not to safeguard academia from politics, but to ensure that academics as such could contribute to the political dialogue.
[more]

front cover of Living in Problematicity
Living in Problematicity
Jan Patocka
Karolinum Press, 2020
Spanning his entire career, this selection of texts by influential philosopher Jan Patočka illustrates his thoughts on the appropriate manner of being and engagement in the world. The writings assembled in Living in Problematicity examine the role of the philosopher in the world, how the world constrains us through ideology, and how freedom is possible through the recognition of our human condition in the problems of the world. These views outline Patočka’s political philosophy and how his later engagement in the political sphere with the human rights initiative Charter 77 corresponds with the ideas he maintained throughout his life. This short and engaging book—published in conjunction with the prestigious philosophy press OIKOYMENH—is an ideal English-language introduction to the most significant Czech philosopher in recent history.
 
[more]

front cover of Living in the Future
Living in the Future
Sovereignty and Internationalism in the Canterbury Tales
Susan Nakley
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Nationalism, like medieval romance literature, recasts history as a mythologized and seamless image of reality. Living in the Future analyzes how the anachronistic nationalist fantasies in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales create a false sense of England’s historical continuity that in turn legitimized contemporary political ambitions. This book spells out the legacy of the Tales that still resonates throughout English literature, exploring the idea of England in the medieval literary imagination as well as critiquing more recent centuries’ conceptions of Chaucer’s nationalism.     
       
Chaucer uses two extant national ideals, sovereignty and domesticity, to introduce the concept of an English nation into the contemporary popular imagination and reinvent an idealized England as a hallowed homeland. For nationalist thinkers, sovereignty governs communities with linguistic, historical, cultural, and religious affinities. Chaucerian sovereignty appears primarily in romantic and household contexts that function as microcosms of the nation, reflecting a pseudo-familial love between sovereign and subjects and relying on a sense of shared ownership and judgment. This notion also has deep affinities with popular and political theories flourishing throughout Europe. Chaucer’s internationalism, matched with his artistic use of the vernacular and skillful distortions of both time and space, frames a discrete sovereign English nation within its diverse interconnected world.

As it opens up significant new points of resonance between postcolonial theories and medieval ideas of nationhood, Living in the Future marks an important contribution to medieval literary studies. It will be essential for scholars of Middle English literature, literary history, literary political and postcolonial theory, and literary transnationalism.
 
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter