BiblioVault - Books about Political Life

Class Act

The Cultural and Political Life of Ewan Maccoll

Ben Harker

Pluto Press, 2007

Ewan MacColl is one of the outstanding British singers and songwriters of the mid to late 20th century,and his work has been covered by artists including Roberta Flack, Johnny Cash and the Pogues. He was also a committed political activist.

For sixty years he was at the cultural forefront of numerous political struggles,producing plays,songs and radio programs on subjects ranging from the Spanish Civil War to the Poll Tax. A founder-member of Theatre Workshop,MacColl as the famous company's resident dramatist,and his plays earned the admiration of contemporaries including George Bernard Shaw,Sean O'Casey and Hugh MacDiarmid. MacColl lived an energetic and colorful life.

This is the first biography of MacColl, and was prepared with the authorization of his collaborator and widow, Peggy Seeger. It charts MacColl's early years, his involvement in the Communist Party, in radical theatre, his pioneering radio programs,as well as his extensive work in the British folk-revival. Exhaustively researched and energetically written, this is an illuminating account of a major and controversial twentieth-century political artist.

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Dawn Clark Netsch

A Political Life

Cynthia Grant Bowman

Northwestern University Press, 2010

Illinois Democratic politics has recently produced the most skilled and inspirational politician in memory . . . and has also reminded us of the need for further reform. It is fitting, then, that the latest installment of the Chicago Lives series turns to Dawn Clark Netsch, a leading reformer of Illinois politics since the 1950s and the first woman major party nominee for governor of Illinois.

Netsch was a pioneer, or the first of her gender, in almost every endeavor she undertook. From the very beginning of her career, when she led the move to desegregate Northwestern University's undergraduate dorms, her passion for social justice extended beyond the rights of women to rights for racial minorities and those of all sexual orientations. Bowman charts Dawn Clark Netsch's remarkable political career, from her work behind the scenes as assistant to Governor Otto Kerner and as a participant in the 1970 Constitutional Convention to her later service in elected office, first as Illinois state senator for eighteen years and later as Illinois comptroller, and culminating in her historic run for governor in 1994. Throughout, Netsch lost neither her genteel yet unpretentious demeanor, nor her passion for progressive politics as exemplified by her early mentor, Governor Adlai E. Stevenson.

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Inventing the Ties That Bind

Imagined Relationships in Moral and Political Life

Francesca Polletta

University of Chicago Press, 2020

At a time of deep political divisions, leaders have called on ordinary Americans to talk to one another: to share their stories, listen empathetically, and focus on what they have in common, not what makes them different. In Inventing the Ties that Bind, Francesca Polletta questions this popular solution for healing our rifts. Talking the way that friends do is not the same as equality, she points out. And initiatives that bring strangers together for friendly dialogue may provide fleeting experiences of intimacy, but do not supply the enduring ties that solidarity requires. But Polletta also studies how Americans cooperate outside such initiatives, in social movements, churches, unions, government, and in their everyday lives. She shows that they often act on behalf of people they see as neighbors, not friends, as allies, not intimates, and people with whom they have an imagined relationship, not a real one. To repair our fractured civic landscape, she argues, we should draw on the rich language of solidarity that Americans already have.

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Napoleon

A Political Life

Steven Englund

Harvard University Press, 2004

Winner of the J. Russell Major Prize, American Historical Association
Best Book on the First Empire by a Foreigner, Napoleon Foundation

“Englund has written a most distinguished book recounting Bonaparte’s life with clarity and ease…This magnificent book tells us much that we did not know and gives us a great deal to think about.”—Douglas Johnson, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Englund, in his lively biography…seeks less to rehabilitate Napoleon’s reputation and legacy than to provide readers with a fuller view of the man and his actions.”—Paula Friedman, New York Times

“Napoleon: A Political Life is a veritable tour de force: the general reader will enjoy it immensely, and learn a great deal from it. But the book also has much to offer historians of modern France.”—Sudhir Hazareesingh, Times Literary Supplement

“Englund’s incisive forays into political theory don’t diminish the force of his narrative, which impressively conveys the epochal changes confronting both France and Europe…A strikingly argued biography.”—Matthew Price, Washington Post

This sophisticated and masterful biography brings new and remarkable analysis to the study of modern history’s most famous general and statesman. As Englund charts Napoleon’s dramatic rise and fall—from his Corsican boyhood, his French education, his astonishing military victories and no less astonishing acts of reform as First Consul (1799–1804) to his controversial record as Emperor and, finally, to his exile and death—he explores the unprecedented power Napoleon maintains over the popular imagination.

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Our Politics

Reflections on Political Life

Douglas Kane, with a foreword by Mike Lawrence

Southern Illinois University Press, 2019

Douglas Kane, an American politician and economist, offers readers a straightforward, personal account of what it is like to run for and hold public office—the demands, conflicts, temptations, and rewards created by political, economic, and social forces. Throughout the book, Kane references Illinois and Wisconsin politics. The campaigns of his wife, Kathleen Vinehout, and her years in the Wisconsin senate show that the centralization of political power, the structure of campaign organizations, and the policy decisions that Kane experienced as an Illinois legislator are not unique to any one state.

In Our Politics Kane reflects on his nearly fifty years of active engagement in state and local politics. In a series of essays, he seeks to understand the forces, motivations, incentives and technologies that shape our politics and produce the consequences that we live with every day. He describes how candidates and officeholders deal with the fundamental contradictions inherent in the democratic process, and how and why the political power structure has changed. He also explores the personal experience of being a legislator, from deciding how to vote to building relationships with party leaders, fellow legislators, the governor, and the voters in the district. Kane concludes by considering the possibility of change, how it might happen, and the steps that candidates, political parties, activists and others might take to better our politics with results more to our liking.

While many journalists record politics from the outside, and numerous political memoirs focus on personalities and what happened to whom and when, this book gives an insider’s view of politics at the level of state government. This book is not about those politicians but about our politics, which together we have created and together we must deal with.

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Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation

Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair

Deborah A. Thomas

Duke University Press, 2019

In 2010, Jamaican police and military forces entered the West Kingston community of Tivoli Gardens to apprehend Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who had been ordered for extradition to the United States on gun and drug-running charges. By the time Coke was detained, somewhere between seventy-five and two hundred civilians had been killed. In Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, Deborah A. Thomas uses the incursion as a point of departure for theorizing the roots of contemporary state violence in Jamaica and in post-plantation societies in general. Drawing on visual, oral historical, and colonial archives, Thomas traces the long-term legacies of the plantation system and how its governing logics continue to shape and replicate forms of violence. She places affect at the center of sovereignty to destabilize disembodied narratives of liberalism and progress and to raise questions about recognition, repair, and accountability. In tying theories of politics, colonialism, race, and affect together with Jamaica's history, Thomas presents a robust framework for understanding what it means to be human in the plantation's wake.

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The Political Life of Medicare

Jonathan Oberlander

University of Chicago Press, 2003

In recent years, bitter partisan disputes have erupted over Medicare reform. Democrats and Republicans have fiercely contested issues such as prescription drug coverage and how to finance Medicare to absorb the baby boomers. As Jonathan Oberlander demonstrates in The Political Life of Medicare, these developments herald the reopening of a historic debate over Medicare's fundamental purpose and structure. Revealing how Medicare politics and policies have developed since Medicare's enactment in 1965 and what the program's future holds, Oberlander's timely and accessible analysis will interest anyone concerned with American politics and public policy, health care politics, aging, and the welfare state.

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The Political Life of Sensation

Davide Panagia

Duke University Press, 2009

The taste of chocolate, the noise of a crowd, the visual impressions of filmic images—such sensory perceptions are rarely if ever discussed in relation to democratic theory. In response, Davide Panagia argues that by overlooking sensation political theorists ignore a crucial dimension of political life. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s and Jacques Rancière’s readings of Kantian aesthetics, Panagia posits sensation as a radical democratic moment of aesthetic judgment. He contends that sensory experience interrupts our perceptual givens, creating occasions to suspend authority and reconfigure the arrangement of a political order.

Panagia claims that the rule of narrative governs our inherited notions of political subjectivity and agency, such that reading and writing are the established modes of political deliberation. Yet the contemporary citizen-subject is a viewing subject, influenced by film, photos, and other perceptual stimuli as much as by text. Challenging the rule of narrative, Panagia analyzes diverse sites of cultural engagement including the visual dynamics portrayed in the film The Ring, the growth of festival culture in late-fifteenth-century Florence, the practices of convivium espoused by the Slow Food movement, and the architectural design of public newsstands. He then ties these occasions for sensation to notable moments in the history of political thought and shows the political potential of a dislocated subjectivity therein. Democratic politics, Panagia concludes, involves a taking part in those everyday practices that interrupt our common modes of sensing and afford us an awareness of what had previously been insensible.

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Pompeis Difficile Est

Studies in the Political Life of Imperial Pompeii

James L. Franklin, Jr.

University of Michigan Press, 2001

In describing the intensity of political life in ancient Pompeii, Cicero remarks, "at Pompeii it's difficult" (Pompeis difficile est). Drawing on thousands of fragmentary writings--campaign posters, graffiti, inscriptions, and business receipts--recovered in the excavations of lava- and mud-covered Pompeii, James L. Franklin assembles evidence from the eras of emperors Augustus through Vespasian to prove the validity of Cicero's statement.
By collecting, sifting, and cross-referencing these varied documents, Franklin proves it possible to trace the major political alliances of the times, explore the remains of their houses, and find traces of their personalities. A few families, like the powerful Holconii, developers of the region's most famous grape vine, prove to have been steady players throughout Pompeii's history; but most families rose and fell within two generations at most. Chapters examine the men and families most prominent in each imperial period, including an analysis of their houses, and concludes with family trees. The documents themselves, elsewhere difficult to access, are prominently featured and translated in the text, making these discussions available and vivid to all readers.
This book is the first such attempt to cross-reference and animate all kinds of writing found at this legendary site. Outside of the city of Rome itself, this is the largest collection of writing from Roman antiquity, and it has lain mostly unexamined in the course of three centuries of excavations at Pompeii. This volume will interest not only students of Pompeii and classical scholars, but also historians, political scientists, sociologists, and enthusiasts of human behavior of all eras.
James L. Franklin is Professor of Classical Studies, Indiana University.

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Prison Area, Independence Valley

American Paradoxes in Political Life and Popular Culture

Rob Kroes

Dartmouth College Press, 2015

The study of prisons brought Tocqueville to America. For Rob Kroes, one of Europe’s most distinguished authorities on contemporary American culture, it was rather the other way around. For Kroes, it was deep knowledge of American culture that brought him back to America and face to face with a couple of highway signs, Tocquevillian in their portent, that invited motorists to exit from Interstate 80 in Nevada toward a place called Independence Valley and to keep their eyes open for a “Prison Area.” In this collection of essays, Kroes invites us to take these two signs seriously for their capacity to deepen our insights into America’s cultural contradictions, especially how, after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the US government’s response altered the meaning of America for Americans and Europeans alike. The author’s fascination with the myriad ways in which America changes face, from hard power to soft, from uses of force to the power of entertainment, but always holding the attention of publics across the globe, is what ties his work together. The essays here touch on diverse topics such as photography (“Falling Man” and Holocaust imagery), music (in Broadway and Hollywood musicals), film (Django Unchained), American exceptionalism (in an interesting counter to dog-eared dogma), and the difficulties of the first “white president of color.” Like his predecessors, Tocqueville and Johan Huizinga, Kroes offers a clear-eyed assessment of America on the ground, love it or hate it. This readable and sharp-penned critique of America and American culture and power will appeal to Americanists across a broad swath of disciplines.

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Rick Perry

A Political Life

Brandon Rottinghaus

University of Texas Press, 2024

How Rick Perry navigated and shaped Texas politics as the state’s longest serving governor.

Rick Perry, the charming rancher, pilot, and politician from West Texas who was governor from 2000 to 2015, is one of the most important but polarizing figures in the state's history. Over the nearly forty years he spent in the political arena, his political instincts served as a radar primed to sense future political opportunities. Hugging the arc of Texas political change, he shifted from a rural, “blue dog” Democrat to one of the most conservative politicians the state had elected up to that time, overseeing the enactment of controversial redistricting, voting, and abortion measures. Yet his evolution was complicated and incomplete, as his stands on such topics as immigration, vaccine requirements, and the use of state funds to attract business ran into opposition from a growing and ever-more conservative wing of the Republican Party in Texas—and the nation.

Rick Perry is both a biography of Perry as a politician and a study of the shifts in state politics that took place during his time in office. Demonstrating that Perry ranks among the most consequential governors in Texas history, Brandon Rottinghaus chronicles the profound ways he accumulated power and shaped the governorship.

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The Social and Political Life of Latin American Infrastructures

Edited by Jonathan Alderman and Geoff Goodwin

University of London Press, 2022

Understanding Latin American identity, history, and politics through its infrastructure and architecture.

From roads, railways, statues, and bridges, infrastructure provides a unique lens through which to view our own national histories and societies. Serving as an important conduit between individuals and the state, infrastructure can help mediate citizenship, reshape social relations between people both within and across communities, and has the capacity to underpin—or indeed, undermine—nation-building.

Over the last century, infrastructure has transformed Latin America. Roads, railways, and airports have increased connectivity between spaces, peoples, and markets. Cables, switches, and tunnels have connected households to electricity grids, water systems, and digital technology. Public buildings, parks, and monuments have reshaped towns and cities and emerged as sites to construct and contest citizenship. Infrastructure has been welcomed and celebrated in Latin America, but it has also been resisted and destroyed.

Based on recent, original research, the essays in this collection cover a range of pressing infrastructural considerations, including sustainability, water conflict, extractive mining, and public housing in Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico to better understand how infrastructure has reshaped Latin America over the past century.

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Understories

The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico

Jake Kosek

Duke University Press, 2006

Through lively, engaging narrative, Understories demonstrates how volatile politics of race, class, and nation animate the notoriously violent struggles over forests in the southwestern United States. Rather than reproduce traditional understandings of nature and environment, Jake Kosek shifts the focus toward material and symbolic “natures,” seemingly unchangeable essences central to formations of race, class, and nation that are being remade not just through conflicts over resources but also through everyday practices by Chicano activists, white environmentalists, and state officials as well as nuclear scientists, heroin addicts, and health workers. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival research, he shows how these contentious natures are integral both to environmental politics and the formation of racialized citizens, politicized landscapes, and modern regimes of rule.

Kosek traces the histories of forest extraction and labor exploitation in northern New Mexico, where Hispano residents have forged passionate attachments to place. He describes how their sentiments of dispossession emerged through land tenure systems and federal management programs that remade forest landscapes as exclusionary sites of national and racial purity. Fusing fine-grained ethnography with insights gleaned from cultural studies and science studies, Kosek shows how the nationally beloved Smokey the Bear became a symbol of white racist colonialism for many Hispanos in the region, while Los Alamos National Laboratory, at once revered and reviled, remade regional ecologies and economies. Understories offers an innovative vision of environmental politics, one that challenges scholars as well as activists to radically rework their understandings of relations between nature, justice, and identity.

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William Godwin

A Political Life

Richard Gough Thomas

Pluto Press, 2019

“Government by its very nature counteracts the improvement of original mind”—William Godwin

William Godwin was the first major anarchist thinker in the Anglophone world, and his thought rocked the establishment at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Famously married to Mary Wollstonecraft, father to Mary Shelley, and inspiration to Lord Byron, he lived a life and created a body of work that lie at the heart of British radicalism and romanticism.
In this biography, Richard Gough Thomas reads Godwin afresh, drawing on newly discovered letters and journals. He situates Godwin’s early life in the counterculture of eighteenth-century religious dissent, before moving on to exploring the ideas of the French Revolution. As Godwin's groundbreaking works propelled him from Whig party hack to celebrity philosopher, his love affair with Mary Wollstonecraft saw him ostracized in both liberal and conservative circles.
Godwin's anarchism always remained at the center of his work, Thomas shows, inspiring libertarians, both left- and right-wing. This biography places Godwin alongside the other members of his famous family as a major political, ethical, and educational writer and shows why a reappraisal of his ideas is pertinent today.

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