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1066 books match the query 'Political' and 4 start with a non-letter

cover of "Discourse and Truth" and "Parresia"

"Discourse and Truth" and "Parresia"

Michel Foucault

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Foucault's lectures on the moral and political challenges of truth-telling—now in paperback.
 
This volume collects a series of lectures given by the renowned French thinker Michel Foucault late in his career. The book is composed of two parts: a talk, Parrēsia, delivered at the University of Grenoble in 1982, and a series of lectures entitled “Discourse and Truth,” given at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983, which appears here for the first time in its full and correct form. Together, they provide an unprecedented account of Foucault’s reading of the Greek concept of parrēsia, often translated as “truth-telling” or “frank speech.” The lectures trace the transformation of this concept across Greek, Roman, and early Christian thought, from its origins in pre-Socratic Greece to its role as a central element of the relationship between teacher and student. In mapping the concept’s history, Foucault’s concern is not to advocate for free speech; rather, his aim is to explore the moral and political position one must occupy in order to take the risk to speak truthfully.

These lectures—carefully edited and including notes and introductory material to fully illuminate Foucault’s insights—are a major addition to Foucault’s English language corpus.
 
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cover of "Work Hard, Study . . . and Keep Out of Politics!"

"Work Hard, Study . . . and Keep Out of Politics!"

James A. Baker III with Steve Fiffer

Northwestern University Press, 2008

White House chief of staff twice over, former secretary of state, past secretary of the treasury, and campaign leader for three different candidates in five successful campaigns—few people have lived and breathed politics as deeply or for as long as James Baker. Now, with candor, down-home Texas storytelling, and more than a few surprises, Baker opens up about his thirty-five years behind the scenes.

Beginning in 1975 with the Ford administration, in a job procured for him by friend and tennis partner George H. W. Bush, Baker was in the thick of American politics. He recounts the inside story of Ford’s rejection of Reagan as a running mate in 1976 with the same insight he has into Reagan’s rejection of Ford four years later. When the White House was plunged into turmoil after the Reagan assassination attempt, he was there, and his stories take readers deeper into those chaotic days. Baker was on hand for the George H. W. Bush campaign’s battle over running mate Dan Quayle and, more recently, he was again on the front row as George W. Bush fought it out in Florida. Spellbinding and frank, his stories are the ones between the lines of our history books.

In this new edition, Baker also responds for the first time in print to the George W. Bush administration’s reaction to the Iraq Study Group Report, written with his input.  Baker is very qualified to comment on the political operation of the current administration, and his new writing for this paperback brings the full weight of his experience to bear.
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cover of (New) Fascism: Contagion, Community, Myth

(New) Fascism

Contagion, Community, Myth

Nidesh Lawtoo

Michigan State University Press, 2019

Fascism tends to be relegated to a dark chapter of European history, but what if new forms of fascism are currently returning to the forefront of the political scene? In this book, Nidesh Lawtoo furthers his previous diagnostic of crowd behavior, identification, and mimetic contagion to account for the growing shadow cast by authoritarian leaders who rely on new media to take possession of the digital age. Donald Trump is considered here as a case study to illustrate Nietzsche’s untimely claim that, one day, “ ‘actors,’ all kinds of actors, will be the real masters.” In the process, Lawtoo joins forces with a genealogy of mimetic theorists—from Plato to Girard, through Nietzsche, Tarde, Le Bon, Freud, Bataille, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy, among others—to show that (new) fascism may not be fully “new,” let alone original; yet it effectively reloads the old problematics of mimesis via new media that have the disquieting power to turn politics itself into a fiction.
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cover of “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker

“The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”

A Biography of Herbert Aptheker

Gary Murrell

University of Massachusetts Press, 2015

When J. Edgar Hoover declared Herbert Aptheker “the most dangerous Communist in the United States,” the notorious FBI director misconstrued his true significance. In this first book-length biography of Aptheker (1915–2003), Gary Murrell provides a balanced yet unflinching assessment of the controversial figure who was at once a leading historian of African America, radical political activist, literary executor of W. E. B. Du Bois, and lifelong member of the American Communist Party. Although blacklisted at U.S. universities, Aptheker published dozens of books, including the groundbreaking American Negro Slave Revolts (1943) and the monumental seven-volume Documentary History of the Negro People (1951–1994). He also edited four volumes of the correspondence and unpublished writings of Du Bois, an achievement that Eric Foner, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called “a milestone in the coming of age of Afro-American history.”

As Murrell shows, Aptheker the historian was inseparable from Aptheker the leading Communist Party intellectual, polemicist, and agitator. During the 1960s, his ability to rouse and inspire both black and white student radicals made him one of the few Old Leftists accepted by the New Left. Aptheker had joined the CPUSA during its heyday in the 1930s, convinced that only through the party's leadership could fascism be defeated and true liberation be achieved: he ended his affiliation five decades later in 1991 after the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

In an afterword, Bettina Aptheker adds to Murrell's narrative by illuminating her mother Fay's vital contributions to her father's work and by affirming the particularly devastating challenges of life in a family dedicated to radical political and social change.

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