1066 books match the query 'Political' and 31 start with n

cover of Naming Evil, Judging Evil

Naming Evil, Judging Evil

Edited by Ruth W. Grant

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Is it more dangerous to call something evil or not to?  This fundamental question deeply divides those who fear that the term oversimplifies grave problems and those who worry that, to effectively address such issues as terrorism and genocide, we must first acknowledge them as evil. Recognizing that the way we approach this dilemma can significantly affect both the harm we suffer and the suffering we inflict, a distinguished group of contributors engages in the debate with this series of timely and original essays.

Drawing on Western conceptions of evil from the Middle Ages to the present,  these pieces demonstrate that, while it may not be possible to definitively settle moral questions, we are still able—and in fact are obligated—to make moral arguments and judgments. Using a wide variety of approaches, the authors raise tough questions: Why is so much evil perpetrated in the name of good?  Could evil ever be eradicated? How can liberal democratic politics help us strike a balance between the need to pass judgment and the need to remain tolerant? Their insightful answers exemplify how the sometimes rarefied worlds of political theory, philosophy, theology, and history can illuminate pressing contemporary concerns.

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cover of Narratives of Debt

Narratives of Debt

Peter Szendy, special issue editor

Duke University Press, 2020

As the problem of debt grows more and more urgent in light of the central role it plays in neoliberal capitalism, scholars have analyzed debt using numerous approaches: historical analysis, legal arguments, psychoanalytic readings, claims for reparations in postcolonial debates, and more. Contributors to this special issue of differences argue that these diverse approaches presuppose a fundamental connection between indebtedness and narrative. They see debt as a promise that refers to the future—deferred repayment that purports to make good on a past deficit—which implies a narrative in a way that other forms of exchange may not. The authors approach this intertwining of debt and narration from the perspectives of continental philosophy, international law, the history of slavery, comparative literature, feminist critique, and more.

Contributors. Arjun Appadurai, Anthony Bogues, Emmanuel Bouju, Silvia Federici, Mikkel Krause Frantzen, Raphaelle Guidée, Odette Lienau, Catherine Malabou, Vincent Message, Laura Odello, Peter Szendy, Frederik Tygstrup
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cover of Narratives of Justice: Legislators' Beliefs about Distributive Fairness

Narratives of Justice

Legislators' Beliefs about Distributive Fairness

Grant Reeher

University of Michigan Press, 1996

Narratives of Justice offers a provocative, contemporary look at the timeless questions of justice and fairness. Using face-to-face interviews, Grant Reeher plumbs the minds of legislators for their beliefs about distributive justice and attempts to discover the ways in which those beliefs influence their behavior. The book calls into question many notions of American political ideology and, in particular, the idea of an "American exceptionalism" regarding views from the political left, and the dominance in the United States of a "liberal tradition."

Political philosophers have amassed a large body of work on justice and fairness from a theoretical perspective, but there is comparatively little empirical work on the subject. The work that does exist concentrates on the beliefs of the public. We know very little concerning the beliefs about justice held by political elites. This work offers a window into the beliefs of legislators, a group for which such an inquiry is rarely undertaken.

The book is based on a set of extended, in-depth interviews with the members of the Connecticut State Senate as well as a year of close observation of the Senate in action. The interviews averaged four hours in length and covered a variety of topics related to fairness. Through this material, Reeher employs a narrative-based framework to understand the patterns in the senators' interview responses, and develops a typology of the senator's narratives. These narratives vary in both content and form, and as a whole present a surprising range of views.

Narratives of Justice will be of interest to those concerned with justice, political ideologies, and political beliefs, as well as state and local politics and, more generally, American politics. Its wide research and thorough documentation make it a useful guide to the literature within and beyond political science concerning beliefs, ideologies, legislative behavior, and qualitative research methods.

Grant Reeher is Assistant Professor, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Department of Political Science, Syracuse University, and currently a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research, University of Michigan.

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cover of Nasser

Nasser

Anne Alexander

Haus Publishing, 2007

One of the young officers who overthrew King Farouq in 1952, Nasser was 36 years old when he became the undisputed leader of Egypt. In 1956 he nationalised the Suez Canal, braving the anger of Britain, France and war with Israel.
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cover of Nasser

Nasser

Anne Alexander

Haus Publishing, 2025

A nuanced portrait of one of the most complex figures of the Middle East, Gamal Abd al-Nasser.

More than fifty years after his death, Gamal Abd al-Nasser remains a towering figure in the Arab world. As one of the young officers who overthrew British-backed King Farouk in Egypt in 1952, Nasser rose to prominence as a charismatic visionary who challenged foreign dominance. At just thirty-six years old, he became the undisputed leader of Egypt in a presidency that would run from 1956 to 1970.

This insightful biography, in its second edition and featuring a new introduction from the author, delves into the life of Nasser, charting his rise to power, his nationalization of the Suez Canal, and his turbulent years as president. Many in the Arab World celebrate Nasser for his defiance of colonial rule and his dream of Arab unity. However, his legacy is not without its contradictions. Critics have alluded, for instance, to his autocratic rule and unfulfilled promises. In Nasser, Anne Alexander explores this tension between Nasser’s revolutionary ideas and the reality of his governance.
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cover of Nationalism and Beyond: Introducing Moral Debate about Values

Nationalism and Beyond

Introducing Moral Debate about Values

Nenad Mišcevic

Central European University Press, 2001

A very readable introduction to the concepts and principles shaping the philosophical debate around nationalism. The book provides portraits of two kinds of nationalists: the tougher type, more common in everyday life, and the ultra-moderate "liberal nationalist" encountered in academia. The author introduces a debate with a "thoughtful nationalist," one who defends the view that states should be organized around national culture and that individuals have basic obligations to their nation. The author attempts to answer his opponent's standard arguments and presents a fully documented critique of his views.

A passion born from Miscevic's encounter with nationalism in the former Yugoslavia glows from every line of the argument. Questions raised and discussed include: Why is radicalism typical of nationalism? How successful is the nation-state? Does nationalism support liberal-democratic values? Is membership in a nation necessary for human fulfillment and for understanding values? Why might nationalism be immoral?

The book is unique not only because it explains a contemporary moral debate, in terms clear to the non-philosopher reader, but also because it has been written from the perspective of Central and Eastern Europe based on the author's personal experience.

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cover of Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community

Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community

Bernard Yack

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Nationalism is one of modern history’s great surprises. How is it that the nation, a relatively old form of community, has risen to such prominence in an era so strongly identified with the individual? Bernard Yack argues that it is the inadequacy of our understanding of community—and especially the moral psychology that animates it—that has made this question so difficult to answer.

Yack develops a broader and more flexible theory of community and shows how to use it in the study of nations and nationalism. What makes nationalism such a powerful and morally problematic force in our lives is the interplay of old feelings of communal loyalty and relatively new beliefs about popular sovereignty. By uncovering this fraught relationship, Yack moves our understanding of nationalism beyond the oft-rehearsed debate between primordialists and modernists, those who exaggerate our loss of individuality and those who underestimate the depth of communal attachments.

A brilliant and compelling book, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community sets out a revisionist conception of nationalism that cannot be ignored.

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cover of Naïve Readings: Reveilles Political and Philosophic

Naïve Readings

Reveilles Political and Philosophic

Ralph Lerner

University of Chicago Press, 2016

One sure fact of humanity is that we all cherish our opinions and will often strongly resist efforts by others to change them. Philosophers and politicians have long understood this, and whenever they have sought to get us to think differently they have often resorted to forms of camouflage that slip their unsettling thoughts into our psyche without raising alarm. In this fascinating examination of a range of writers and thinkers, Ralph Lerner offers a new method of reading that detects this camouflage and offers a way toward deeper understandings of some of history’s most important—and most concealed—messages.
           
Lerner analyzes an astonishing diversity of writers, including Francis Bacon, Benjamin Franklin, Edward Gibbon, Judah Halevi, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Moses Maimonides, and Alexis de Tocqueville. He shows that by reading their words slowly and naïvely, with wide-open eyes and special attention for moments of writing that become self-conscious, impassioned, or idiosyncratic, we can begin to see a pattern that illuminates a thinker’s intent, new messages purposively executed through indirect means. Through these experimental readings, Lerner shows, we can see a deep commonality across writers from disparate times and situations, one that finds them artfully challenging others to reject passivity and fatalism and start thinking afresh.    
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cover of Necropolitics

Necropolitics

Achille Mbembe

Duke University Press, 2019

In Necropolitics Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side---what he calls its “nocturnal body”---which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates on biopolitics, war, and race as well as Fanon's notion of care as a shared vulnerability to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude but as a person with whom to build a more just world.
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cover of Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism

Negativity and Revolution

Adorno and Political Activism

Edited by John Holloway, Fernando Matamoros, and Sergio Tischler

Pluto Press, 2009

How can activists combat the political paralysis that characterises the anti-dialectical Marxism of Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze, without reverting to a dogmatic orthodoxy? This book explores solutions in the 'negative dialectics' of Theodor Adorno.

The poststructuralist shift from dialectics to 'difference' has been so popular that it becomes difficult to create meaningful revolutionary responses to neoliberalism. The contributors to this volume come from within the anti-capitalist movement, and close to the concerns expressed in Negri and Hardt's Empire and Multitude. However, they argue forcefully and persuasively for a return to dialectics so a real-world, radical challenge to the current order can be constructed.

This is a passionate call to arms for the anti-capitalist movement. It should be read by all engaged activists and students of political and critical theory.

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cover of Nestor Makhno and Rural Anarchism in Ukraine, 1917-1921

Nestor Makhno and Rural Anarchism in Ukraine, 1917-1921

Colin Darch

Pluto Press, 2020

Histories of the Russian Revolution often present the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 as the central event, neglecting the diverse struggles of urban and rural revolutionaries across the heartlands of the Russian Empire. This book takes as its subject one such struggle, the anarcho-communist peasant revolt led by Nestor Makhno in left-bank Ukraine, locating it in the context of the final collapse of the Empire that began in 1914.

Between 1917 and 1921, the Makhnovists fought German and Austrian invaders, reactionary monarchist forces, Ukrainian nationalists and sometimes the Bolsheviks themselves. Drawing upon anarchist ideology, the Makhnovists gathered widespread support amongst the Ukrainian peasantry, taking up arms when under attack and playing a significant role - in temporary alliance with the Red Army - in the defeats of the White Generals Denikin and Wrangel. Often dismissed as a kulak revolt, or a manifestation of Ukrainian nationalism, Colin Darch analyses the successes and failures of the Makhnovist movement, emphasising its revolutionary character.

Over 100 years after the revolutions, this book reveals a lesser known side of 1917, contributing both to histories of the period and broadening the narrative of 1917, whilst enriching the lineage of anarchist history.
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cover of Nestor Makhno and Rural Anarchism in Ukraine, 1917-1921

Nestor Makhno and Rural Anarchism in Ukraine, 1917-1921

Colin Darch

Pluto Press, 2020

Histories of the Russian Revolution often present the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 as the central event, neglecting the diverse struggles of urban and rural revolutionaries across the heartlands of the Russian Empire. This book takes as its subject one such struggle, the anarcho-communist peasant revolt led by Nestor Makhno in left-bank Ukraine, locating it in the context of the final collapse of the Empire that began in 1914.

Between 1917 and 1921, the Makhnovists fought German and Austrian invaders, reactionary monarchist forces, Ukrainian nationalists and sometimes the Bolsheviks themselves. Drawing upon anarchist ideology, the Makhnovists gathered widespread support amongst the Ukrainian peasantry, taking up arms when under attack and playing a significant role - in temporary alliance with the Red Army - in the defeats of the White Generals Denikin and Wrangel. Often dismissed as a kulak revolt, or a manifestation of Ukrainian nationalism, Colin Darch analyzes the successes and failures of the Makhnovist movement, emphasizing its revolutionary character.

Over 100 years after the revolutions, this book reveals a lesser known side of 1917, contributing both to histories of the period and broadening the narrative of 1917, whilst enriching the lineage of anarchist history.
[more]
cover of Nevada's Turbulent 50's: Decade Of Political And Economic Change

Nevada's Turbulent 50's

Decade Of Political And Economic Change

Al Glass

University of Nevada Press, 1981

The 1950s marked a period of significant changes for Nevada--gambling came under national and local scrutiny, atomic bombs were tested regularly near Las Vegas, and labor disputes made national headlines. Glass examines the events of the decade and their impact on Nevada and on the rest of the country.

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cover of Never Make a Spy Out of Me: An Epistolary Story from the Romanian Secret Police Archives (1947-1962)

Never Make a Spy Out of Me

An Epistolary Story from the Romanian Secret Police Archives (1947-1962)

Valentina Glajar

Central European University Press, 2027

“You'll never make a spy out of me!” declared Marianne S., a German Romanian woman whose private life became entangled in the Cold War. Hidden for decades in the vaults of Bucharest’s secret police archives, her dossier reveals a true story that reads like a thriller, blending an epistolary romance with espionage. At its heart is Marianne’s fifteen-year correspondence with her West German pen pal and future husband, Heinz H., which turned perilous when Romania’s communist secret police, the Securitate, intervened. Drawing on passionate love letters, surveillance reports, and intercepted mail, this book uncovers a world in which mailboxes became battlefields and exposes the human cost of surveillance. Forced onto a divided global stage with no script and no escape from watchful eyes, the lovers must decide whether to play their assigned roles or outsmart the state puppeteers pulling the strings.
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cover of New Directions in Private Law Theory

New Directions in Private Law Theory

Edited by Fabiana Bettini, Martin Fischer, Charles Mitchell, and Prince Saprai

University College London, 2023

A wide-ranging interrogation of aspects of private law doctrine and its development, ordering, and application.

New Directions in Private Law Theory brings together some of the best new work on private law theory, reflecting the breadth of this increasingly important field. The authors adopt a variety of different approaches and contribute to ongoing and important debates about the moral foundations of private law, the individuation of areas of private law, and the connections between private law and everyday moral experience. Questions addressed include: does the diversity identified among claims in unjust enrichment mean that the category is incoherent? Are claims in tort law always about compensating for wrongs? How should we understand the parties’ agreement in a contract? The contributions shed new light on these and other topics and the ways in which they intersect and open up new lines of scholarly inquiry.

This book will be of interest to researchers working in private law and legal theory, but it will also appeal to those outside of law, most notably researchers with an interest in moral and political philosophy, economics, and history.
 
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cover of New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism

New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism

Barry Cooper

University of Missouri Press, 2004

In New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism, Barry Cooper applies the insights of Eric Voegelin to the phenomenon of modern terrorism. Cooper points out that the chief omission from most contemporary studies of terrorism is an analysis of the “spiritual motivation” that is central to the actions of terrorists today. When spiritual elements are discussed in conventional literature, they are grouped under the opaque term religion. A more conceptually adequate approach is provided by Voegelin’s political science and, in particular, by his Schellingian term pneumopathology—a disease of the spirit.

While terrorism has been used throughout the ages as a weapon in political struggles, there is an essential difference between groups who use these tactics for more of less rational political goals and those seeking more apocalyptic ends. Cooper argues that today's terrorists have a spiritual perversity that causes them to place greater significance on killing than on exploiting political grievances. He supports his assertion with an analysis of two groups that share the characteristics of a pneumopathological consciousness—Aum Shinrikyo, the terrorist organization that poisoned thousands of Tokyo subway riders in 1995, and Al-Qaeda, the group behind the infamous 9/11 killings.

Cooper applies the Voegelinian terms first reality (a commonsense goal regarding legitimate political grievances) and second reality (a fantastic objective sought by those whose rationality has been obscured) to show the major divide between political and apocalyptic terrorist groups. Osama Bin Laden's "second reality" was the imaginary goal that the 9/11 attack was supposed to achieve, and the commonsense reality was what truly happened (the deaths of nearly 3,000 people and the United States's subsequent military response). Cooper shows how such spiritual perversity enables a human being, imagining himself empowered by God, to go on a campaign of mass destruction.

Cooper concludes with a chapter on the uniqueness of terrorist networks, their limitations, and the means by which they can be dealt with. In the ongoing conversations among specialists in terrorist studies, as well as the ordinary discourse of citizens in western democracies wishing to understand the world around them, this book will add a distinctive voice.

 

 

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cover of Nietzsche's Earth: Great Events, Great Politics

Nietzsche's Earth

Great Events, Great Politics

Gary Shapiro

University of Chicago Press, 2016

We have Nietzsche to thank for some of the most important accomplishments in intellectual history, but as Gary Shapiro shows in this unique look at Nietzsche’s thought, the nineteenth-century philosopher actually anticipated some of the most pressing questions of our own era. Putting Nietzsche into conversation with contemporary philosophers such as Deleuze, Agamben, Foucault, Derrida, and others, Shapiro links Nietzsche’s powerful ideas to topics that are very much on the contemporary agenda: globalization, the nature of the livable earth, and the geopolitical categories that characterize people and places.
           
Shapiro explores Nietzsche’s rejection of historical inevitability and its idea of the end of history. He highlights Nietzsche’s prescient vision of today’s massive human mobility and his criticism of the nation state’s desperate efforts to sustain its exclusive rule by declaring emergencies and states of exception. Shapiro then explores Nietzsche’s vision of a transformed garden earth and the ways it sketches an aesthetic of the Anthropocene. He concludes with an explanation of the deep political structure of Nietzsche’s “philosophy of the Antichrist,” by relating it to traditional political theology. By triangulating Nietzsche between his time and ours, between Bismarck’s Germany and post-9/11 America, Nietzsche’s Earth invites readers to rethink not just the philosopher himself but the very direction of human history.
 
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cover of Nietzsche's Final Teaching

Nietzsche's Final Teaching

Michael Allen Gillespie

University of Chicago Press, 2017

In the seven and a half years before his collapse into madness, Nietzsche completed Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the best-selling and most widely read philosophical work of all time, as well as six additional works that are today considered required reading for Western intellectuals. Together, these works mark the final period of Nietzsche’s thought, when he developed a new, more profound, and more systematic teaching rooted in the idea of the eternal recurrence, which he considered his deepest thought.

Cutting against the grain of most current Nietzsche scholarship, Michael Allen Gillespie presents the thought of the late Nietzsche as Nietzsche himself intended, drawing not only on his published works but on the plans for the works he was unable to complete, which can be found throughout his notes and correspondence. Gillespie argues that the idea of the eternal recurrence transformed Nietzsche’s thinking from 1881 to 1889. It provided both the basis for his rejection of traditional metaphysics and the grounding for the new logic, ontology, theology, and anthropology he intended to create with the aim of a fundamental transformation of European civilization, a “revaluation of all values.” Nietzsche first broached the idea of the eternal recurrence in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but its failure to gain attention or public acceptance led him to present the idea again through a series of works intended to culminate in a never-completed magnum opus. Nietzsche believed this idea would enable the redemption of humanity. At the same time, he recognized its terrifying, apocalyptic consequences, since it would also produce wars of unprecedented ferocity and destruction.

Through his careful analysis, Gillespie reveals a more radical and more dangerous Nietzsche than the humanistic or democratic Nietzsche we commonly think of today, but also a Nietzsche who was deeply at odds with the Nietzsche imagined to be the forefather of Fascism. Gillespie’s essays examine Nietzsche’s final teaching—its components and its political, philosophical, and theological significance. The book concludes with a critical examination and a reflection on its meaning for us today. 
 
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cover of Nietzsche's Legacy: "Ecce Homo" and "The Antichrist," Two Books on Nature and Politics

Nietzsche's Legacy

"Ecce Homo" and "The Antichrist," Two Books on Nature and Politics

Heinrich Meier

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A reappraisal of Ecce Homo and The Antichrist within Nietzsche’s oeuvre.

Nietzsche's Legacy takes on the most challenging and misunderstood works in Nietzsche’s oeuvre to illuminate his view of what a philosopher is and what constitutes a philosophic life. Interpreting Ecce Homo and The Antichrist as twin books meant to replace the abandoned Will to Power project, Heinrich Meier recovers them from the stigma of Nietzsche’s late mental collapse, showing that these works are, above all, a lucid self-assessment. The carefully written pair contains both the highest affirmation—the Yes of the “revaluation of all values”—and the most resolute negation—the No to Christianity. How the Yes and the No go together, how the relation between nature and politics is to be determined, how Nietzsche’s intention is governing the political-philosophical double-face: this is the subject of Nietzsche’s Legacy, which opens up a new understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole.

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cover of Nightmare Remains: The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance

Nightmare Remains

The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance

Ege Selin Islekel

Northwestern University Press, 2024

Offering a political epistemology of collective mourning

Focusing on forms of improper burial in Turkey and Latin America, Ege Selin Islekel argues that a political technology of mourning is fundamental to contemporary politics. This technology of necrosovereignty shapes not only individuals’ and populations’ lives but also their epistemic and political afterlives. Local practices of mourning, however, contain resistant capacities, opening alternative ways of knowing, remembering, and assembling. “Nightmare knowledges,” Islekel posits, are resistant modes of knowing tied up with grief that challenge the contemporary politics of death and those politics’ archival boundaries. Seen in mothers’ movements across the globe, from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo of Argentina to the Saturday Mothers of Turkey, nightmare knowledges produce counterarchives that mobilize traditionally ignored epistemic categories.

Nightmare Remains forges a new dialogue between post-Foucauldian political theory and decolonial thought and brings a fresh critical perspective to the theoretical discourse of enforced disappearances.

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cover of Nixon and the Silver Screen

Nixon and the Silver Screen

Mark Feeney

University of Chicago Press, 2004

Richard Nixon and the film industry arrived in Southern California in the same year, 1913. In Nixon and the Silver Screen, Mark Feeney offers a new and often revelatory way of thinking about one of our most controversial presidents: by looking not just at Nixon's career—but Hollywood's. Nixon viewed more movies while in office than any other president, and Feeney argues that Nixon’s story, both in politics and in his personal life, is nothing if not quintessentially American. Bearing in mind the events that shaped his presidency from 1969 to 1974, Feeney sees aspects of Nixon’s character—and the nation’s—refracted and reimagined in the more than 500 films Nixon watched during his tenure in the White House. The verdict? Nixon’s legacy, for better or worse, is forever representative of the “Silver Age” in Hollywood, shaping and being shaped by that flickering silver screen.

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cover of No Apocalypse, No Integration: Modernism and Postmodernism in Latin America

No Apocalypse, No Integration

Modernism and Postmodernism in Latin America

Martín Hopenhayn

Duke University Press, 2001

Winner of the Premio Iberoamericano Book Award in 1997 (Spanish Edition)

What form does the crisis of modernity take in Latin America when societies are politically demobilized and there is no revolutionary agenda in sight? How does postmodern criticism reflect on enlightenment and utopia in a region marked by incomplete modernization, new waves of privatization, great masses of excluded peoples, and profound sociocultural heterogeneity? In No Apocalypse, No Integration Martín Hopenhayn examines the social and philosophical implications of the triumph of neoliberalism and the collapse of leftist and state-sponsored social planning in Latin America.
With the failure of utopian movements that promised social change, the rupture of the link between the production of knowledge and practical intervention, and the defeat of modernization and development policy established after World War II, Latin American intellectuals and militants have been left at an impasse without a vital program of action. Hopenhayn analyzes these crises from a theoretical perspective and calls upon Latin American intellectuals to reevaluate their objects of study, their political reality, and their society’s cultural production, as well as to seek within their own history the elements for a new collective discourse. Challenging the notion that strict adherence to a single paradigm of action can rescue intellectual and cultural movements, Hopenhayn advocates a course of epistemological pluralism, arguing that such an approach values respect for difference and for cultural and theoretical diversity and heterodoxy.
This essay collection will appeal to readers of sociology, public policy, philosophy, cultural theory, and Latin American history and culture, as well as to those with an interest in Latin America’s current transition.

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cover of No Man Is An Island: Community and Commemoration on Norway's Utøya

No Man Is An Island

Community and Commemoration on Norway's Utøya

Jørgen Watne Frydnes, translated by Wendy H. Gabrielsen

University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

On July 22, 2011, a white supremacist killed eight people at Oslo’s Government Center in Norway and then terrorized the idyllic island of Utøya, where he executed sixty-nine more people, mostly teenagers. The country had never suffered such a massacre, and in the aftermath, the entire population was reeling.

Utøya, the Norwegian Labor Party’s summer camp for youth, a beloved place where many Norwegians learned about democratic values and processes, made lifelong friendships, and developed a vision for a just society, became mired in grief and discord. When Jørgen Watne Frydnes took on the daunting task of rebuilding the island and charting its future, he had to figure out a compassionate and just way forward. He made a radical decision: he set out to talk with each family of a murdered person, seeking to understand their needs and their hopes so that the future of the island could include their wishes and concerns. This emotionally grueling work, which was never considered in the scholarly literature on commemoration, led to a true renewal of Utøya, resulting in a meaningful memorial to those who were lost as well as beautiful surroundings for campers who come there to study democracy and peace.

Frydnes’s narrative, originally published in Norwegian, is structured around the seasons of the year and the landscape of the island, and tracks one person’s account of learning how to remember, commemorate, and honor the dead, and acknowledge a mass tragedy, and yet also create a nurturing, aspirational space for hope.

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cover of Nobody Calls Just to Say Hello: Reflections on Twenty-Two Years in the Illinois Senate

Nobody Calls Just to Say Hello

Reflections on Twenty-Two Years in the Illinois Senate

Philip J. Rock, with Ed Wojcicki

Southern Illinois University Press, 2011

A loyal partisan and highly principled public official whose career overlapped with those of many legends of Illinois politics-including Mayor Richard J. Daley, Governor James Thompson, and Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan-Democrat Philip J. Rock served twenty-two years in the Illinois Senate. Fourteen of those years were spent as senate president, the longest tenure anyone has served in that position. This nuanced political biography, which draws on dozens of interviews conducted by Ed Wojcicki to present the longtime senate president's story in his own words, is also a rare insider's perspective on Illinois politics in the last three decades of the twentieth century. 

A native of Chicago's West Side, Rock became one of the most influential politicians in Illinois during the 1970s and 1980s. As a senator in the 1970s and senate president from 1979 to 1993, he sponsored historic legislation to assist abused and neglected children and victims of domestic violence, ushered the state through difficult income tax increases and economic development decisions, shepherded an unruly and fragmented Democratic senate caucus, and always was fair to his Republican counterparts. Covering in great detail a critical period in Illinois political history for the first time, Rock explains how making life better for others drove his decisions in office, while also espousing the seven principles he advocates for effective leadership and providing context for how he applied those principles to the legislative battles of the era. 

Unlike many Illinois politicians, Rock, a former seminarian, was known for having a greater interest in issues than in partisan politics. Considered a true statesman, he also was known as a skilled orator who could silence a busy floor of legislators with his commentary on important issues and as a devoted public servant who handled tens of thousands of bills and sponsored nearly five hundred of them himself. 

Nobody Calls Just to Say Hello, which takes its title from the volume of calls and visits to elected officials from constituents in need of help, perfectly captures Rock's profound reverence for the institutions of government, his respect for other government offices, and his reputation as a problem solver who, despite his ardent Democratic beliefs, disavowed political self-preservation to cross party lines and make government work for the people. Taking readers through his legislative successes, bipartisan efforts, and political defeats-including a heartbreaking loss in the U.S. Senate primary to Paul Simon in 1984-Rock passionately articulates his belief that government's primary role is to help people, offering an antidote to the current political climate with the simple legislative advice, "Just try to be fair, give everyone a chance, and everything else comes after that."
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cover of Nordic Socialism: The Path Toward a Democratic Economy

Nordic Socialism

The Path Toward a Democratic Economy

Pelle Dragsted, Translated by William Banks

University of Wisconsin Press, 2025

In recent years, the Nordic countries have been the envy of the world for their economic success, institutional stability, and consistently high levels of social happiness. But are they socialist? Several prominent members of the American right think so. They may find a surprising ally in Pelle Dragsted, a member of the Danish parliament and the leader of the socialist political party Enhedslisten (Red-Green Alliance); contrary to most Nordic leaders, Dragsted not only accepts but embraces the charge of socialism.
 
In Dragsted’s analysis, Denmark and the rest of the Nordic countries are already socialist, but only in part. The dangers come (and here many conservative Americans will disagree) from the unhealthy encroachment of capitalism. His provocative argument is that capitalism and socialism are not in fact mutually exclusive, and already Nordic economies are hybrids, a mix of decommodified, democratically governed sectors and undemocratic, privately controlled enterprises. The relevant question is the degree to which one dominates the other. Currently, undemocratic forces are ascendant, but it need not be so. Dragsted offers both his diagnosis and his proposed solution, a comprehensive plan for a gradual (re)democratization of the economy and a move to fully and firmly embrace, and redefine, “Nordic socialism.”
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cover of Not Without Honor: The Life of John H. Reagan

Not Without Honor

The Life of John H. Reagan

By Ben H. Procter

University of Texas Press, 1961

John H. Reagan was one of the most important figures in Texas history; this was the first biography of him to be published. Reagan, who was born in Sevier County, Tennessee, in 1818, came to Texas twenty-one years later—while Texas was still a republic—and stayed to play many major roles in its later economic and political development.

In this excellent biography, Ben H. Procter not only re-creates for us the character of the man, with his forthright integrity and his boundless desire for knowledge, but also places him against the background of the time in which he lived. In vivid language Procter portrays the violence and vigor of pioneer life, the excitement of frontier politics, the dedication, devotion, enthusiasm, and—ultimately—despair of the Civil War, and the bitterness of the struggle with the railroad tycoons and their gargantuan monopolies. Spanning as it does the Republic of Texas, early statehood, the Confederacy, Reconstruction, and the era of the "robber barons," the story of John H. Reagan encompasses a panoramic sweep of mid- to late-nineteenth-century United States history.

Throughout his long life, respect came to Reagan almost as a matter of course. The forceful strength of his personality made an impression few people could ignore. From the day when Colonel Durst hired the young Reagan as a tutor for his children, exclaiming, "This man is a scholar," until the day some fifty years later when Governor Hogg persuaded him to leave the U.S. Senate to become chairman of the new Railroad Commission because the Commission "must be above reproach," his extraordinary character and ability were recognized. In fact, the perceptive intelligence that made him examine all aspects of a situation, and the sturdy integrity and courage that made it impossible for him to abandon a position he believed to be right simply because it was for the moment unpopular, frequently gave him the appearance of a prophet. Although this "prophetic gift" occasionally led to interludes of public disfavor, Reagan was accorded honor, even in his own land—and in later years veneration—that any prophet might envy.

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cover of Not by Reason Alone: Religion, History, and Identity in Early Modern Political Thought

Not by Reason Alone

Religion, History, and Identity in Early Modern Political Thought

Joshua Mitchell

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Masterfully interweaving political, religious, and historical themes, Not by Reason Alone creates a new interpretation of early modern political thought. Where most accounts assume that modern thought followed a decisive break with Christianity, Joshua Mitchell reveals that the line between the age of faith and that of reason is not quite so clear. Instead, he shows that the ideas of Luther, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau draw on history, rather than reason alone, for a sense of political authority.

This erudite and ambitious work crosses disciplinary boundaries to expose unsuspected connections between political theory, religion, and history. In doing so, it offers a view of modern political thought undistorted by conventional distinctions between the ancient and the modern, and between the religious and the political.

"Original. . . . A delight to read a political philosopher who takes the theologies of Hobbes and Locke seriously." —J. M. Porter, Canadian Journal of History

"Mitchell's argument both illuminates and fascinates. . . . An arresting, even stunning, contribution to our study of modern political thought."—William R. Stevenson, Jr., Christian Scholar's Review
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cover of Not for Circulation: The George E. Bogaars Story

Not for Circulation

The George E. Bogaars Story

Bertha Henson

National University of Singapore Press, 2022

The story of George Bogaars, a civil servant who played a key role in Singapore’s political history.

Do civil servants make a difference? Can they shape history? In 1985 when John Drysdale published one of the first books on the political history of independent Singapore, George E. Bogaars wrote to his daughter with typical understatement, “I feature in it a bit.” Bogaars headed the special branch at the time of Operation Cold Store. He reported directly to pioneer leaders such as Lee Kuan Yew and Goh Keng Swee before they became political icons. He started the Singapore Armed Forces from scratch when he was Permanent Secretary of the Interior and Defence. He was the head of the civil service, involved in a dozen or so government-linked companies attempting to shore up the country’s infrastructure, and expand its business portfolio. He held the country’s purse strings when he moved into the finance ministry before his retirement at the age of fifty-five. His impressive resume belies a colorful, flamboyant character with a wicked sense of humor. Veteran Singaporean journalist Bertha Henson tells his story.
 
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cover of Nothing Is Impossible: America's Reconciliation with Vietnam

Nothing Is Impossible

America's Reconciliation with Vietnam

Ted Osius

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Today Vietnam is one of America’s strongest international partners, with a thriving economy and a population that welcomes American visitors. How that relationship was formed is a twenty-year story of daring diplomacy and a careful thawing of tensions between the two countries after a lengthy war that cost nearly 60,000 American and more than two million Vietnamese lives.
 
Ted Osius, former ambassador during the Obama administration, offers a vivid account, starting in the 1990s, of the various forms of diplomacy that made this reconciliation possible. He considers the leaders who put aside past traumas to work on creating a brighter future, including senators John McCain and John Kerry, two Vietnam veterans and ideological opponents who set aside their differences for a greater cause, and Pete Peterson—the former POW who became the first U.S. ambassador to a new Vietnam. Osius also draws upon his own experiences working first-hand with various Vietnamese leaders and traveling the country on bicycle to spotlight the ordinary Vietnamese people who have helped bring about their nation’s extraordinary renaissance. 
 
With a foreword by former Secretary of State John Kerry, Nothing Is Impossible tells an inspiring story of how international diplomacy can create a better world.
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cover of Notions of Nationalism

Notions of Nationalism

Sukumar Periwal

Central European University Press, 1996

In this highly topical volume, a group of distinguished scholars explore various aspects of nationalism theory and shed light on the current thinking in this area of great contemporary importance. Such topics as primordialism, institutional plurality in multi-ethnic states, historical problems of nationalism, and the importance of local-level understanding in dealing with such problems, are examined with clarity and vision.

Together the essays provide a valuable insight into an intricate debate which is of crucial relevance to the understanding of contemporary politics not only in Central Europe but in the world at large.

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cover of Nuclear Waste Stalemate: Political and Scientific Controversies

Nuclear Waste Stalemate

Political and Scientific Controversies

Robert Vandenbosch

University of Utah Press, 2007

Diminishing oil supplies, global warming due to use of fossil fuels, persistent strife in the Middle East, and increasing demands for energy have led to the search for additional energy sources. Many feel that a significant expansion of nuclear power will be necessary to meet projected needs. However, although nuclear power has been produced commercially for over thirty years, no country has yet found a permanent solution for the disposal of high-level nuclear waste. This book examines the complex political, legal, and scientific issues relating to the disposal of that waste.
The political controversies discussed here include the power of governors to veto placement of high-level nuclear waste repositories in their states, the use of incentives for spent-fuel acceptance, the use of Indian reservations as host sites, control of a Nuclear Waste Fund, and whether a state without a nuclear reactor should be required to accept spent fuel.
The scientific controversies discussed include monitored surface storage versus permanent geological disposal, burial above or below the water table, the probability of serious seismic and volcanic events, and long-term hazard assessment. This book is unique in its comprehensive discussion of the issues related to nuclear waste storage.
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