28167 books match the query 'History' and 1297 start with p

cover of Political Aesthetics in the Era of Shakespeare

Political Aesthetics in the Era of Shakespeare

Edited by Christopher Pye

Northwestern University Press, 2020

The turn to political concerns in Renaissance studies, beginning in the 1980s, was dictated by forms of cultural materialism that staked their claims against the aesthetic dimension of the work. Recently, however, the more robustly political conception of the aesthetic formulated by theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Jacques Rancière has revitalized literary analysis generally and early modern studies in particular. For these theorists, aesthetics forms the crucial link between politics and the most fundamental phenomenological organization of the world, what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible.”

Taking up this expansive conception of aesthetics, Political Aesthetics in the Era of Shakespeare suggests that the political stakes of the literary work—and Shakespeare’s work in particular—extend from the most intimate dimensions of affective response to the problem of the grounds of political society. The approaches to aesthetic thought included in this volume explore the intersections between the literary work and the full range of concerns animating the field today: political philosophy, affect theory, and ecocritical analysis of environs and habitus.
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cover of Political Affairs of the Heart: Female Travel Writers, the Sentimental Travelogue, and Revolution, 1775-1800

Political Affairs of the Heart

Female Travel Writers, the Sentimental Travelogue, and Revolution, 1775-1800

Linda Van Netten Blimke

Bucknell University Press, 2022

Richly researched and engagingly written, Political Affairs of the Heart traces the emergence of female sentimental travel writing in late eighteenth-century Britain, and posits its centrality to women’s engagement with national and gender politics. This study examines four travel narratives written by women between 1774 and 1795, convincingly arguing that they effectively deploy the discourse of sensibility to engage with debates around Britain’s national identity during the French and American Revolutions. Van Netten Blimke contends that Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768)—which first introduced sentimental discourse to the travelogue—facilitated women’s gradual inclusion into this previously male-dominated genre, effectively paving the way for women to influence the country’s sociopolitical transformation. These four previously understudied works successfully combine eyewitness authority with the language of sensibility to mount impassioned interventions in their nation’s perception and practice of revolutionary politics, at a time when its national identity was most in flux.
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cover of Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics

Political Arithmetic

Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics

Robert William Fogel, Enid M. Fogel, Mark Guglielmo, and Nathaniel Grotte

University of Chicago Press, 2013

We take for granted today that the assessments, measurements, and forecasts of economists are crucial to the decision-making of governments and businesses alike. But less than a century ago that wasn’t the case—economists simply didn’t have the necessary information or statistical tools to understand the ever more complicated modern economy.

With Political Arithmetic, Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Fogel and his collaborators tell the story of economist Simon Kuznets, the founding of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the creation of the concept of GNP, which for the first time enabled us to measure the performance of entire economies. The book weaves together the many strands of political and economic thought and historical pressures that together created the demand for more detailed economic thinking—Progressive-era hopes for activist government, the production demands of World War I, Herbert Hoover’s interest in business cycles as President Harding’s commerce secretary, and the catastrophic economic failures of the Great Depression—and shows how, through trial and error, measurement and analysis, economists such as Kuznets rose to the occasion and in the process built a discipline whose knowledge could be put to practical use in everyday decision-making.

The product of a lifetime of studying the workings of economies and skillfully employing the tools of economics, Political Arithmetic is simultaneously a history of a key period of economic thought and a testament to the power of applied ideas.

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cover of Political Attitudes in Venezuela: Societal Cleavages and Political Opinion

Political Attitudes in Venezuela

Societal Cleavages and Political Opinion

By Enrique A. Baloyra and John D. Martz

University of Texas Press, 1979

Here is a benchmark study of voter attitudes in a Latin American country. This volume is based on extensive survey research conducted during the Venezuelan elections of 1973. The methods employed by Baloyra and Martz to poll an "unpollable" society successfully challenge previously established paradigms.

The authors interviewed a representative sample of over 1,500 voters to determine relationships between class, status, community, context, religion, ideology, and partisanship on the one hand and political attitudes and preferences on the other. They found that the Venezuelan electorate is defined by a series of contradictory tendencies, and they place their conclusions in the context of contemporary political science literature regarding class and party, ideology and party, and inequality and participation.

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cover of Political Corruption in Transition: A Sceptic's Handbook

Political Corruption in Transition

A Sceptic's Handbook

András Sajó

Central European University Press, 2002

Based on two international conferences at Princeton University and the Central European University, this is a handy guide to the problem of corruption in transition countries, with an important comparative content. Political Corruption in Transition is distinguished from similar publications by at least two features: by the quality of the carefully selected and edited essays ans by its original treatment. Instead of the usual preaching and excommunications, this Skeptic`s Handbook represents down-to-earth realism.

Combines general issues with case studies and original research. The geographic coverage is wide, though it is ideas rather than a geography that drive the volume`s organization.

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cover of Political Cultures in the Andes, 1750-1950

Political Cultures in the Andes, 1750-1950

Nils Jacobsen and Cristóbal Aljovín de Losada, eds.

Duke University Press, 2005

A major contribution to debates about Latin American state formation, Political Cultures in the Andes brings together comparative historical studies focused on Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth. While highlighting patterns of political discourse and practice common to the entire region, these state-of-the-art histories show how national and local political cultures depended on specific constellations of power, gender and racial orders, processes of identity formation, and socioeconomic and institutional structures.

The contributors foreground the struggles over democracy and citizens’ rights as well as notions of race, ethnicity, gender, and class that have been at the forefront of political debates and social movements in the Andes since the waning days of the colonial regime some two hundred years ago. Among the many topics they consider are the significance of the Bourbon reform era to subsequent state-formation projects, the role of race and nation in the work of early-twentieth-century Bolivian intellectuals, the fiscal decentralization campaign in Peru following the devastating War of the Pacific in the late nineteenth century, and the negotiation of the rights of “free men of all colors” in Colombia’s Atlantic coast region during the late colonial period. Political Cultures in the Andes includes an essay by the noted Mexicanist Alan Knight in which he considers the value and limits of the concept of political culture and a response to Knight’s essay by the volume’s editors, Nils Jacobsen and Cristóbal Aljovín de Losada. This important collection exemplifies the rich potential of a pragmatic political culture approach to deciphering the processes involved in the formation of historical polities.

Contributors. Cristóbal Aljovín de Losada, Carlos Contreras, Margarita Garrido, Laura Gotkowitz, Aline Helg, Nils Jacobsen, Alan Knight, Brooke Larson, Mary Roldan, Sergio Serulnikov, Charles F. Walker, Derek Williams

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cover of Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England

Political Descent

Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England

Piers J. Hale

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Historians of science have long noted the influence of the nineteenth-century political economist Thomas Robert Malthus on Charles Darwin. In a bold move, Piers J. Hale contends that this focus on Malthus and his effect on Darwin’s evolutionary thought neglects a strong anti-Malthusian tradition in English intellectual life, one that not only predated the 1859 publication of the Origin of Species but also persisted throughout the Victorian period until World War I. Political Descent reveals that two evolutionary and political traditions developed in England in the wake of the 1832 Reform Act: one Malthusian, the other decidedly anti-Malthusian and owing much to the ideas of the French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck.            
           
These two traditions, Hale shows, developed in a context of mutual hostility, debate, and refutation. Participants disagreed not only about evolutionary processes but also on broader questions regarding the kind of creature our evolution had made us and in what kind of society we ought therefore to live. Significantly, and in spite of Darwin’s acknowledgement that natural selection was “the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms,” both sides of the debate claimed to be the more correctly “Darwinian.” By exploring the full spectrum of scientific and political issues at stake, Political Descent offers a novel approach to the relationship between evolution and political thought in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
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cover of Political Discourse in Exile: Karl Marx and the Jewish Question

Political Discourse in Exile

Karl Marx and the Jewish Question

Dennis Fischman

University of Massachusetts Press, 1991

Over the years, Karl Marx's tangled relation with Judaism has provoked heated debate among followers and critics alike. Can the Jewish tradition better help us understand Marx's political theory? Which themes in Marx's writings become clearer when read in a Jewish context? This book argues that Marx's work, from his doctoral dissertation to Capital, resounds with characteristic concerns of Jewish thought, identifying three key elements that Marx's theory shares with Judaism - its ontology, its use of texts, and its conception of liberation as a return from exile.
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cover of Political Ecologies of Cattle Ranching in Northern Mexico: Private Revolutions

Political Ecologies of Cattle Ranching in Northern Mexico

Private Revolutions

Eric P. Perramond

University of Arizona Press, 2010

Private ranchers survived the Mexican Revolution and the era of agrarian reforms, and they continue to play key roles in the ecology and economy of northern Mexico.

In this study of the Río Sonora region of northern Mexico, where ranchers own anywhere from several hundred to tens of thousands of acres, Eric Perramond evaluates management techniques, labor expenditures, gender roles, and decision-making on private ranches of varying size. By examining the economic and ecological dimensions of daily decisions made on and off the ranch he shows that, contrary to prevailing notions, ranchers rarely collude as a class unless land titles are at issue, and that their decision-making is as varied as the landscapes they oversee.

Through first-hand observation, field measurements, and intimate ethnographies, Perramond sheds light on a complex set of decisions made, avoided, and confronted by these land managers and their families. He particularly shows that ranching has endured because of its extended kinship network, its reliance on all household members, and its close ties to local politics.

Perramond follows ranchers caught between debt, drought, and declining returns to demonstrate the novel approaches they have developed to adapt to changing economies and ecologies alike—such as strategically marketing the ranches for wild-game hunting or establishing small businesses that subsidize their lifestyles and livelihoods. Even more importantly, he reveals the false dichotomy between private and communal ranching. Political Ecologies of Cattle Ranching in Northern Mexico is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of ranching in western North America.
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cover of Political Economy of the Urban Ghetto

Political Economy of the Urban Ghetto

Daniel R. Fusfeld and Timothy Bates

Southern Illinois University Press, 1984

The income of blacks in most northern industrial states today is lower relative to the income of whites than in 1949.Fusfeld and Bates examine the forces that have led to this state of affairs and find that these economic relationships are the product of a complex pattern of historical development and change in which black-white economic relation­ships play a major part, along with pat­terns of industrial, agricultural, and technological change and urban develop­ment. They argue that today’s urban racial ghettos are the result of the same forces that created modern Amer­ica and that one of the by-products of American affluence is a ghettoized racial underclass.

These two themes, they state, are es­sential for an understanding of the prob­lem and for the formulation of policy. Poverty is not simply the result of poor education, skills, and work habits but one outcome of the structure and func­tioning of the economy. Solutions re­quire more than policies that seek to change people: they await a recognition that basic economic relationships must be changed.

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cover of Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism

Political Epistemics

The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism

Andreas Glaeser

University of Chicago Press, 2011

What does the durability of political institutions have to do with how actors form knowledge about them? Andreas Glaeser investigates this question in the context of a fascinating historical case: socialist East Germany’s unexpected self-dissolution in 1989. His analysis builds on extensive in-depth interviews with former secret police officers and the dissidents they tried to control as well as research into the documents both groups produced. In particular, Glaeser analyzes how these two opposing factions’ understanding of the socialist project came to change in response to countless everyday experiences. These investigations culminate in answers to two questions: why did the officers not defend socialism by force? And how was the formation of dissident understandings possible in a state that monopolized mass communication and group formation? He also explores why the Stasi, although always well informed about dissident activities, never developed a realistic understanding of the phenomenon of dissidence.

Out of this ambitious study, Glaeser extracts two distinct lines of thought. On the one hand he offers an epistemic account of socialism’s failure that differs markedly from existing explanations. On the other hand he develops a theory—a sociology of understanding—that shows us how knowledge can appear validated while it is at the same time completely misleading.

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cover of Political Essay on the Island of Cuba: A Critical Edition

Political Essay on the Island of Cuba

A Critical Edition

Alexander von Humboldt

University of Chicago Press, 2011

The research Alexander von Humboldt amassed during his five-year trek through the Americas in the early nineteenth-century proved foundational to the fields of botany, geography, and geology. But his visit to Cuba during this time yielded observations that extended far beyond the natural world. Political Essay on the Island of Cuba is a physical and cultural study of the island nation. In it, Humboldt denounces colonial slavery on both moral and economic grounds and stresses the vital importance of improving intercultural relations throughout the Americas.

Humboldt’s most controversial book, Political Essay on the Island of Cuba was banned, censored, and willfully mistranslated to suppress Humboldt’s strong antislavery sentiments. It reemerges here, newly translated from the original two volume French edition, to introduce a new generation of readers to Humboldt’s astonishing multiplicity of scientific and philosophical perspectives. In their critical introduction, Vera Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette emphasize Humboldt’s rare ability to combine scientific rigor with a cosmopolitan consciousness and a deeply felt philosophical humanism. The result is a work on Cuba of historical import that will attract historians of science as well as cultural historians, political scientists, and literary scholars.

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cover of Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, Volume 1: A Critical Edition

Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, Volume 1

A Critical Edition

Alexander von Humboldt

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Volume 1 of this critical edition includes a note on the text from the Humboldt in English team, an introduction by editors Vera M. Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette, a preface to the first edition by Alexander von Humboldt, and the translation of Volumes 1 and 2 of Humboldt’s Essai politique sur le royaume de de Nouvelle Espagne from 1825 to 1827.
 
Alexander von Humboldt was the most celebrated modern chronicler of North and South America and the Caribbean, and this translation of his essay on New Spain—the first modern regional economic and political geography—covers his travels across today’s Mexico in 1803–1804. The work canvases natural-scientific and cultural-scientific objects alike, combining the results of fieldwork with archival research and expert testimony.
 
To show how people, plants, animals, goods, and ideas moved across the globe, Humboldt wrote in a variety of styles, bending and reshaping familiar writerly conventions to keep readers attentive to new inputs. Above all, he wanted his readers to be open-minded when confronted with cultural and other differences in the Americas. Fueled by his comparative global perspective on politics, economics, and science, he used his writing to support Latin American independence and condemn slavery and other forms of colonial exploitation. It is these voluminous and innovative writings on the New World that made Humboldt the undisputed father of modern geography, early American studies, transatlantic cultural history, and environmental studies.
 
This two-volume critical edition—the third installment in the Alexander von Humboldt in English series—is based on the full text, including all footnotes, tables, and maps, of the second, revised French edition of Essai politique sur le royaume de de Nouvelle Espagne from 1825 to 1827, which has never been translated into English before. Extensive annotations and full-color atlases are available on the series website.
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cover of Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, Volume 2: A Critical Edition

Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, Volume 2

A Critical Edition

Alexander von Humboldt

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Volume 2 of this critical edition includes the translation of Volumes 3 and 4 of the second, revised French edition of Alexander von Humboldt’s Essai politique sur le royaume de de Nouvelle Espagne from 1825 to 1827 as well as notes, supplements, indexes, and more.
 
Alexander von Humboldt was the most celebrated modern chronicler of North and South America and the Caribbean, and this translation of his essay on New Spain—the first modern regional economic and political geography—covers his travels across today’s Mexico in 1803–1804. The work canvases natural-scientific and cultural-scientific objects alike, combining the results of fieldwork with archival research and expert testimony.
 
To show how people, plants, animals, goods, and ideas moved across the globe, Humboldt wrote in a variety of styles, bending and reshaping familiar writerly conventions to keep readers attentive to new inputs. Above all, he wanted his readers to be open-minded when confronted with cultural and other differences in the Americas. Fueled by his comparative global perspective on politics, economics, and science, he used his writing to support Latin American independence and condemn slavery and other forms of colonial exploitation. It is these voluminous and innovative writings on the New World that made Humboldt the undisputed father of modern geography, early American studies, transatlantic cultural history, and environmental studies.
 
This two-volume critical edition—the third installment in the Alexander von Humboldt in English series—is based on the full text, including all footnotes, tables, and maps, of the second, revised French edition of Essai politique sur le royaume de de Nouvelle Espagne from 1825 to 1827, which has never been translated into English before. Extensive annotations and full-color atlases are available on the series website.
 
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cover of Political Justice in Budapest after World War II

Political Justice in Budapest after World War II

Andrea Peto

Central European University Press, 2015

In Hungary, which fell under Soviet influence at the end of World War II, those who had participated in the wartime atrocities were tried by so called people’s courts. This book analyses this process in an objective, quantitative way, contributing to the present timely discussion on the Hungarian war guilt. The authors apply a special focus on the gender aspect of the trials.

Political justice had a specific nature in Hungary. War criminals began to be brought to trial while fighting was still underway in the western part of the country, well before the Nuremberg trials. Not only crimes committed during the war were tried in the same frame but also post-war ones. As far as the post-war period is concerned, legal proceedings regarding these crimes were most often launched on the basis of Act VII of 1946. This act of law concerned “the criminal law protection of the democratic constitutional order and the republic” and its basic aim was to facilitate the creation of a communist dictatorship and to deal with perceived or real enemies of the regime.

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cover of Political Landscape: The Art History of Nature

Political Landscape

The Art History of Nature

Martin Warnke

Reaktion Books, 2004

An insightful analysis of a well-worn metaphor through the lens of art history
 
We all know what "the political landscape" is, and politicians and journalists never tire of referring to it. But in this ingenious and original book, Martin Warnke takes that well-worn metaphor literally and uses it to reveal just how politicized the real landscape of continental Europe has been for centuries. The author finds his evidence of humanity's intervention in nature in the form of monuments and milestones, gardens, roads and border crossings, in landscape paintings and maps – even, in fact, in the anthropomorphic interpretations once given to formations of hills and rocks.

The Political Landscape is underpinned with a fascinating array of examples and illustrations, many of which will be new even to experts in the art of landscape and related disciplines.
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cover of Political Landscapes: Forests, Conservation, and Community in Mexico

Political Landscapes

Forests, Conservation, and Community in Mexico

Christopher R. Boyer

Duke University Press, 2015

Following the 1917 Mexican Revolution inhabitants of the states of Chihuahua and Michoacán received vast tracts of prime timberland as part of Mexico's land redistribution program. Although locals gained possession of the forests, the federal government retained management rights, which created conflict over subsequent decades among rural, often indigenous villages; government; and private timber companies about how best to manage the forests. Christopher R. Boyer examines this history in Political Landscapes, where he argues that the forests in Chihuahua and Michoacán became what he calls "political landscapes"—that is, geographies that become politicized by the interactions between opposing actors—through the effects of backroom deals, nepotism, and political negotiations. Understanding the historical dynamic of community forestry in Mexico is particularly critical for those interested in promoting community involvement in the use and conservation of forestlands around the world. Considering how rural and indigenous people have confronted, accepted, and modified the rationalizing projects of forest management foisted on them by a developmentalist state is crucial before community management is implemented elsewhere.
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cover of Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair

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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cover of Political Memory in and after the Persian Empire

Political Memory in and after the Persian Empire

Jason M. Silverman

SBL Press, 2015

An interdisciplinary study of the Persian Period

Various disciplines that deal with Achaemenid rule offer starkly different assessments of Persian kingship. While Assyriologists treat Cyrus's heirs as legitimate successors of the Babylonian kings, biblical scholars often speak of a "kingless era" in which the priesthood took over the function of the Davidic monarch. Egyptologists see their land as uniquely independently minded despite conquests, while Hellenistic scholarship tends to evaluate the interface between Hellenism and native traditions without reference to the previous two centuries of Persian rule. This volume brings together in dialogue a broad array of scholars with the goal of seeking a broader context for assessing Persian kingship through the anthropological concept of political memory.

Features

  • Articles present the results of an international symposium held in Leiden, the Netherlands, 2014
  • More than twenty illustrations
  • Seventeen articles, an introduction, and a summary response
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cover of Political Perversion: Rhetorical Aberration in the Time of Trumpeteering

Political Perversion

Rhetorical Aberration in the Time of Trumpeteering

Joshua Gunn

University of Chicago Press, 2020

When Trump became president, much of the country was repelled by what they saw as the vulgar spectacle of his ascent, a perversion of the highest office in the land. In his bold, innovative book, Political Perversion, rhetorician Joshua Gunn argues that this “mean-spirited turn” in American politics (of which Trump is the paragon) is best understood as a structural perversion in our common culture, on a continuum with infantile and “gotcha” forms of entertainment meant to engender provocation and sadistic enjoyment.

Drawing on insights from critical theory, media ecology, and psychoanalysis, Gunn argues that perverse rhetorics dominate not only the political sphere but also our daily interactions with others, in person and online. From sexting to campaign rhetoric, Gunn advances a new way to interpret our contemporary political context that explains why so many of us have difficulty deciphering the appeal of aberrant public figures. In this book, Trump is only the tip of a sinister, rapidly growing iceberg, one to which we ourselves unwittingly contribute on a daily basis.
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cover of Political Philosophy 1: Rights--The New Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns

Political Philosophy 1

Rights--The New Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns

Luc Ferry

University of Chicago Press, 1990

In recent years, an increasing number of thinkers have grown suspicious of the Enlightenment ideals of progress, reason, and freedom. These critics, many inspired by Martin Heidegger, have attacked modern philosophy's attempt to ground a vision of the world upon the liberty of the human subject. Pointing to the rise of totalitarian regimes in this century, they argue that the Enlightenment has promoted the enslavement of human beings rather than their freedom.

In this first of four volumes that aim to revitalize the fundamental values of modern political thought, one of the leading figures in the contemporary revival of liberalism in France responds to these critics and offers a philosophically cogent defense of a humanistic modernity. Luc Ferry reexamines the philosopical basis of the contemporary retreat from the Enlightenment and then suggests his own alternative, which defends the ideals of modernity while giving due consideration to the objections of the critics.
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cover of Political Philosophy 2: The System of Philosophies of History

Political Philosophy 2

The System of Philosophies of History

Luc Ferry

University of Chicago Press, 1992

Because contemporary political philosophy owes a significant debt to the great nineteenth-century German philosophies of history, a sound knowledge of German Idealist philosophy is crucial to an understanding of our own time. In Political Philosophy 2, Luc Ferry provides not only a thorough introduction to German Idealism and its critics, but also an insightful look at contemporary political philosophy.

Ferry begins this second volume of his ambitious three-volume Political Philosophy by considering both the structure and the potential political effects of the various philosophies of history born of German Idealism. He focuses on the key question of whether, and to what extent, the principle of reason may be said to govern the totality of the historically real. This leads to an examination of Hegel's criticism of the moral view of the world and to an assessment of the phenomenological criticism of Hegel put forth by Heidegger and Arendt.
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cover of Political Philosophy: From Plato to Mao

Political Philosophy

From Plato to Mao

Martin Cohen

Pluto Press, 2008

Guiding the reader through the key arguments of the classic figures of Western political philosophy, from Plato through to the modern era, this revised edition includes new essays on Aristotle's 'Politics', Confucianism, Islamic social philosophy and Nazism, as well as additional material on 'Roman Law', Anarchism and 'anti-capitalism'.

Cohen moves chronologically through the development of political philosophy. He presents key texts in their own terms, before offering short, precise analyses of their strengths, weaknesses and influence. The book finishes with a discussion of modern liberalism and conservatism.

Providing both a broad overview and precise summaries of key ideas, this is an invaluable guide for all students of political thought.

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cover of Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda: Economy, Society, and Warfare in the Nineteenth Century

Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda

Economy, Society, and Warfare in the Nineteenth Century

Richard Reid

Ohio University Press, 2002

Blessed with fertile and well-watered soil, East Africa’s kingdom of Buganda supported a relatively dense population and became a major regional power by the mid-nineteenth century. This complex and fascinating state has also long been in need of a thorough study that cuts through the image of autocracy and military might.

Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda explores the material basis of Ganda political power, gives us a new understanding of what Ganda power meant in real terms, and relates the story of how the kingdom used the resources at its disposal to meet the challenges that confronted it. Reid further explains how these same challenges ultimately limited Buganda’s dominance of the East African great lakes region.

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cover of Political Prairie Fire: The Nonpartisan League, 1915-1922

Political Prairie Fire

The Nonpartisan League, 1915-1922

Robert L. Morlan

University of Minnesota Press, 1955

Political Prairie Fire was first published in 1955. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Political Prairie Fire was first published in 1955.

The farmers of North Dakota were ripe for revolt when the magnetic figure of A. C. Townley strode into their midst and offered them a new political formula to redress their grievances. Townley's plan was simple but revolutionary; it called for the formation of a Nonpartisan Political League dedicated to the election of candidates through the established two-party system and to a platform emphasizing public ownership of certain vital farm services and facilities, such as terminal grain elevators and hail insurance on crops.

Like the great prairie fires of the plains states, the political flames of the Nonpartisan League spread swiftly from one farm to the next across North Dakota and into the adjoining states. The League is regarded by many as the last of the great agrarian protest movements. It is historically significant because it achieved a measure of success well beyond that of most similar movements. It controlled the government of one state for some years, elected state officials and legislators in a number of midwestern and western states, and sent several congressmen to Washington. Its impact helped shape the destinies of a dozen states and the political philosophies of an important segment of the nation's voters. The League's methods of operation often serve today as a guide for political action.

This is the first detailed, unbiased history of the Nonpartisan League. Thoroughly documented for the specialist, it is nevertheless equally interesting for the general reader.

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cover of Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970

Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970

Doug McAdam

University of Chicago Press, 1999

In this classic work of sociology, Doug McAdam presents a political-process model that explains the rise and decline of the black protest movement in the United States. Moving from theoretical concerns to empirical analysis, he focuses on the crucial role of three institutions that foster protest: black churches, black colleges, and Southern chapters of the NAACP. He concludes that political opportunities, a heightened sense of political efficacy, and the development of these three institutions played a central role in shaping the civil rights movement. In his new introduction, McAdam revisits the civil rights struggle in light of recent scholarship on social movement origins and collective action.

"[A] first-rate analytical demonstration that the civil rights movement was the culmination of a long process of building institutions in the black community."—Raymond Wolters, Journal of American History

"A fresh, rich, and dynamic model to explain the rise and decline of the black insurgency movement in the United States."—James W. Lamare, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
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cover of Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848-1897

Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna

Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848-1897

John W. Boyer

University of Chicago Press, 1995

John Boyer offers a meticulously researched examination of the social and political atmosphere of late imperial Vienna. He traces the demise of Vienna's liberal culture and the burgeoning of a new radicalism, exemplified by the rise of Karl Lueger and the Christian Socialist Party during the latter half of the nineteenth century. This important study paves the way for new readings of fin de siecle Viennese politics and their broader European significance.

"Offers a comprehensive, multicausal study of the rise of Christian Socialism in Vienna, that phenomenon which was experienced nowhere else in urban Central Europe and which culminated in the famous clash between the Austrian establishment and the colourful, domineering lead of the movement, Karl, Lueger."—R.J.W. Evans, History

"Boyer's analysis is masterful in terms of research, exposition, and organization. His use of available economic data is judicious, and his sense of the social structure of late nineteenth-century Vienna is formidable."—William A. Jenks, American Historical Review

"To understand Viennese and even imperial politics in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Boyer's book is absolutely essential.""—Robert Wegs, Review of Politics
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cover of Political Recruitment across Two Centuries: Mexico, 1884-1991

Political Recruitment across Two Centuries

Mexico, 1884-1991

By Roderic Ai Camp

University of Texas Press, 1995

During more than twenty years of field research, Roderic Ai Camp built a monumental database of biographical information on more than 3,000 leading national figures in Mexico. In this major contribution to Mexican political history, he draws on that database to present a definitive account of the paths to power Mexican political leaders pursued during the period 1884 to 1992.

Camp’s research clarifies the patterns of political recruitment in Mexico, showing the consequences of choosing one group over another. It calls into question numerous traditional assumptions, including that upward political mobility was a cause of the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

Comparing Mexican practices with those in several East Asian countries also allows Camp to question many of the tenets of political recruitment theory. His book will be of interest to students not only of Mexican politics but also of history, comparative politics, political leadership, and Third World development.

[more]
cover of Political Repression in Modern America: FROM 1870 TO 1976

Political Repression in Modern America

FROM 1870 TO 1976

Robert Justin Goldstein

University of Illinois Press, 1978

Robert Justin Goldstein's Political Repression in Modern America provides the only comprehensive narrative account ever published of significant civil liberties violations concerning political dissidents since the rise of the post-Civil War modern American industrial state. A history of the dark side of the "land of the free," Goldstein's book covers both famous and little-known examples of governmental repression, including reactions to the early labor movement, the Haymarket affair, "little red scares" in 1908, 1935, and 1938-41, the repression of opposition to World War I, the 1919 "great red scare," the McCarthy period, and post-World War II abuses of the intelligence agencies.
 
Enhanced with a new introduction and an updated bibliography, Political Repression in Modern America remains an essential record of the relentless intolerance that suppresses radical dissent in the United States.
 
[more]
cover of Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR: A Carnegie-Myrdal Report Emphasizing the American South

Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR

A Carnegie-Myrdal Report Emphasizing the American South

Ralph J. Bunche

University of Chicago Press, 1973

A Nobel Peace Prize winner's groundbreaking work of social science that offered one of the earliest portraits of Black life in twentieth-century America
 
This volume presents the essence of a massive report prepared in 1940 by a team headed by political scientist and civil rights leader Ralph J. Bunche for the Carnegie Corporation’s Survey of the Negro in America. The report was used by Swedish social economist Gunnar Myrdal in writing his monumental An American Dilemma, and it shaped Myrdal’s treatment of the Black political experience. As a valuable historical document, it provides a backdrop against which we can measure change in the Black American’s political status and interpret the origins and consequences of the second Reconstruction.
 
The Political Status of the Negro introduces essential information about political practices in the Southern states. It offers insight into the historical, economic, sociological, and psychological factors that accounted for these practices, as well as some understanding of the myths, stereotypes, and symbols that contemporaries often used to explain and justify them. The study’s most enduring value lies in its wealth of personal interviews which were conducted in the South in the late 1930s and in its first-hand impressions of the African Americans and Southern politics.
 
The book is divided into two parts: The first contains Bunche’s explanations, comments, and analytical writings on the subject; the second includes almost all of the interviews and field reports. To this text historian Dewey W. Grantham added a comprehensive introduction that discusses Bunche and his work, the preparation of the research manuscript, and the book’s role in Gunnar Myrdal’s later work.
[more]
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Political Strategies in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica

Sarah Kurnick

University Press of Colorado, 2020

Political authority contains an inherent contradiction. Rulers must reinforce social inequality and bolster their own unique position at the top of the sociopolitical hierarchy, yet simultaneously emphasize social similarities and the commonalities shared by all. Political Strategies in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica explores the different and complex ways that those who exercised authority in the region confronted this contradiction.

New data from a variety of well-known scholars in Mesoamerican archaeology reveal the creation, perpetuation, and contestation of politically authoritative relationships between rulers and subjects and between nobles and commoners. The contributions span the geographic breadth and temporal extent of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica—from Preclassic Oaxaca to the Classic Petén region of Guatemala to the Postclassic Michoacán—and the contributors weave together archaeological, epigraphic, and ethnohistoric data.

Grappling with the questions of how those exercising authority convince others to follow and why individuals often choose to recognize and comply with authority, Political Strategies in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica discusses why the study of political authority is both timely and significant, reviews how scholars have historically understood the operation of political authority, and proposes a new analytical framework to understand how rulers rule.

Contributors include Sarah B. Barber, Joanne Baron, Christopher S. Beekman, Jeffrey Brzezinski, Bryce Davenport, Charles Golden, Takeshi Inomata, Arthur A. Joyce, Sarah Kurnick, Carlo J. Lucido, Simon Martin, Tatsuya Murakami, Helen Perlstein Pollard, and Víctor Salazar Chávez.

[more]
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Political Survival of Small Parties in Europe

Jae-Jae Spoon

University of Michigan Press, 2015

It is often thought that small party survival or failure is a result of institutional constraints, the behavior of large parties, and the choices of individual politicians. Jae-Jae Spoon, in contrast, argues that the decisions made by small parties themselves determine their ability to balance the dual goals of remaining true to their ideals while maximizing their vote and seat shares, thereby enabling them to survive even in adverse electoral systems.

Spoon employs a mixed-methods approach in order to explore the policy, electoral, and communication strategies of West European Green Parties from 1980 to the present. She combines cross-national data on these parties with in-depth comparative case studies of two New Politics parties, the French and British Green Parties, that have survived in similar national-level plurality electoral systems. Both of these parties have developed as organizations which run candidates in elections at the local, national, and European levels in their respective countries. The parties’ survival, Spoon asserts, results from their ability to balance their competing electoral, policy, and communication goals.

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Political Theology and Early Modernity

Edited by Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Political theology is a distinctly modern problem, one that takes shape in some of the most important theoretical writings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But its origins stem from the early modern period, in medieval iconographies of sacred kinship and the critique of traditional sovereignty mounted by Hobbes and Spinoza. In this book, Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton assemble established and emerging scholars in early modern studies to examine the role played by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and thought in modern conceptions of political theology.
 
Political Theology and Early Modernity explores texts by Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Milton, and others that have served as points of departure for such thinkers as Schmitt, Strauss, Benjamin, and Arendt. Written from a spectrum of positions ranging from renewed defenses of secularism to attempts to reconceive the religious character of collective life and literary experience, these essays probe moments of productive conflict, disavowal, and entanglement in politics and religion as they pass between early modern and modern scenes of thought. This stimulating collection is the first to answer not only how Renaissance and baroque literature help explain the persistence of political theology in modernity and postmodernity, but also how the reemergence of political theology as an intellectual and political problem deepens our understanding of the early modern period.
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Political Thought and Political Thinkers

Judith N. Shklar

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Ethics described Judith Shklar as "a towering presence" at Harvard for decades, an "influential teacher and mentor to many of the best known political theorists working today in the United States." One of this century's most important liberal scholars, she is remembered for her "sharp intellect, forceful personality, and passionate intellectual honesty and curiosity." Political Thought and Political Thinkers makes startlingly clear her role in the reinvigoration of liberal theory that has been taking place over the last two decades.

This second volume of Shklar's work—which follows the 1997 publication of Redeeming American Political Thought—brings together heretofore uncollected (and several unpublished) essays on a number of themes, including the place of the intellect in the modern political world and the dangers of identity politics. While many of these essays have been previously published, they remain far from accessible. In collecting the work scattered over the past forty years in journals and other publications, noted political theorist Stanley Hoffmann provides an essential guide to Shklar's thought, complemented by George Kateb's comprehensive introduction to her work. Hoffmann's selection, which includes Shklar's classic essay "The Liberalism of Fear," showcases her distinctive defense of liberalism and follows her explorations in this history of moral and political thought as she engages with Bergson, Arendt, and Rousseau.

Political Thought and Political Thinkers displays one of the century's most compelling and flexible intellects in action and is the definitive collection of her work on European history and thinkers.

"Shklar's legacy is an inspiring example of liberal thought at its arresting best, unflinchingly courageous and unmoved by the dreary and unmeaning harmonies conjured up by theories of justice and rights."—John Gray, Times Literary Supplement

Judith N. Shklar (1928-1992) was Cowles Professor of Government at Harvard University and the author of nine books in political theory.
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cover of Political Vocabularies: FDR, the Clergy Letters, and the Elements of Political Argument

Political Vocabularies

FDR, the Clergy Letters, and the Elements of Political Argument

Mary E. Stuckey

Michigan State University Press, 2018

Political Vocabularies: FDR, the Clergy Letters, and the Elements of Political Argument uses a set of letters sent to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 by American clergymen to make a larger argument about the rhetorical processes of our national politics. At any given moment, national politics are constituted by competing political imaginaries, through which citizens understand and participate in politics. Different imaginaries locate political authority in different places, and so political authority is very much a site of dispute between differing political vocabularies. Opposing political vocabularies are grounded in opposing characterizations of the specific political moment, its central issues, and its citizens, for we cannot imagine a political community without populating it and giving it purpose. These issues and people are hierarchically ordered, which provides the imaginary with a sense of internal cohesion and which also is a central point of disputation between competing vocabularies in a specific epoch. Each vocabulary is grounded in a political tradition, read through our national myths, which authorize the visions of national identity and purpose and which contain significant deliberative aspects, for each vision of the nation impels distinct political imperatives. Such imaginaries are our political priorities in action. Taking one specific moment of political change, the author illuminates the larger processes of change, competition, and stability in national politics.
 
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cover of Political Waters: The Long, Dirty, Contentious, Incredibly Expensive but Eventually Triumphant History of Boston Harbor-A Unique Environmental Success Story

Political Waters

The Long, Dirty, Contentious, Incredibly Expensive but Eventually Triumphant History of Boston Harbor-A Unique Environmental Success Story

Eric Jay Dolin

University of Massachusetts Press, 2004

Boston Harbor served as a colonial gateway to the world, witnessed the Boston Tea Party, and helped the community transform itself from an outpost of a few hardy settlers into a bustling metropolis and self-proclaimed hub of the universe. Yet for hundreds of years Boston Harbor was also a cesspool. Long before Bostonians dumped tea into the harbor to protest English taxes, they dumped sewage there. 

As the Boston area grew and prospered, its sewage problems worsened, as did the harbor's health, to the point where in the 1980s it was considered the most polluted harbor in the country and ridiculed as the “harbor of shame.” Then, in one of the most impressive environmental comebacks in American history, Boston Harbor was dramatically cleaned up. All it took was two lawsuits, two courts, dozens of lawyers, the creation of a powerful sewage authority, thousands of workers, millions of labor hours, and billions of dollars. 

Sewage management is rarely as compelling and exciting as higher profile environmental issues such as global climate change, preserving endangered species, or protecting tropical rainforests. But it can be, as Eric Jay Dolin shows in this engaging narrative account. Boston's struggle to deal with its sewage is an epic story of failure and success, replete with colorful characters, political, bureaucratic, and legal twists and turns, engineering feats, and massive amounts of money. In the end, success hinged on the often overlooked yet monumentally important act of responsibly disposing of the waste people produce every day.

[more]
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Political Woman

Florence

Sharon Strom

Temple University Press, 2001

Florence Hope Luscomb's life spanned nearly all of the twentieth century. Born into a remarkable family of abolitionists and progressive thinkers, the young Florence accompanied her feminist mother to lectures and political rallies, soon choosing a course of political engagement and social activism from which she never retreated.

Politcal Women counters the traditional narratives that place men at the center of political thinking and history. Showing how three generations of Luscomb's family had set the stage for her activism, this biography presents her story against the backdrop of Boston's politics and larger struggles for social justice. Luscomb participated in every significant social reform movement of her time -- from securing women's right to vote and supporting trade unionism to advocating an end to the war in Vietnam. Luscomb also ran for public office; she was narrowly defeated when she ran for Boston's city council in 1922. Although unsuccessful as a third-party candidate for Congress (in 1936 and 1950) and for Governor of Massachusetts (in 1952), she was one of the few women of her time to seek office. Independent, athletic, and spirited, she apparently never thought that traditional gender prescriptions applied to her. A practicing architect before the First World War, an exuberant hiker all her life, and a member in collective-living arrangements, Luscomb enjoyed a life of rich experiences and sustaining relationships.

In Florence Luscomb's biography, Sharon Hartman Strom suggests that although women were excluded from the activities and sites associated with conventional politics until recently, they did political work that gave purpose to their lives and affected political thinking in their communities, states, and ultimately the nation.
[more]
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Political Writings

Edited by Jude Davies

University of Illinois Press, 2011

Theodore Dreiser staked his reputation on fearless expression in his fiction, but he never was more outspoken than when writing about American politics, which he did prolifically. Although he is remembered primarily as a novelist, the majority of his twenty-seven books were nonfiction treatises.
 
To Dreiser, everything was political. His sense for the hype and hypocrisies of politics took shape in reasoned but emphatic ruminations in his fiction and nonfiction on the hopes and disappointments of democracy, the temptations of nationalism and communism, the threat and trumpets of war, and the role of writers in resisting and advancing political ideas.
 
Spanning a period of American history from the Progressive Era to the advent of the Cold War, this generous volume collects Dreiser's most important political writings from his journalism, broadsides, speeches, private papers, and long out-of-print nonfiction books. Touching on the Great Depression, the New Deal, and both World Wars as well as Soviet Russia and the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, these writings exemplify Dreiser's candor and his penchant for championing the defenseless and railing against corruption.
 
Positing Dreiser as an essential public intellectual who addressed the most important issues of the first half of the twentieth century, these writings also navigate historical terrain with prescient observations on topics such as religion, civil rights, national responsibility, individual ethics, global relations, and censorship that remain particularly relevant to a contemporary audience. Editor Jude Davies provides historical commentaries that frame these selections in the context of his other writings, particularly his novels.
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Politicizing Creative Economy

Activism and a Hunger Called Theater

Dia Da Costa

University of Illinois Press, 2016

Scholars increasingly view the arts, creativity, and the creative economy as engines for regenerating global citizenship, renewing decayed local economies, and nurturing a new type of all-inclusive politics. Dia Da Costa delves into the global development, nationalist and leftist/progressive histories shaping these ideas with a critical ethnography of two activist performance groups in India: the Communist-affiliated Jana Natya Manch, and Budhan Theatre, a community-based group of the indigenous Chhara people.
 
As Da Costa shows, commodification, heritage, and management discussions inevitably creep into performance. Yet the ability of performance to undermine such subtle invasions make activist theater a crucial site for considering what counts as creativity in the cultural politics of creative economy. Da Costa explores the precarious lives, livelihoods, and ideologies at the intersection of heritage projects, planning discourse, and activist performance. By analyzing the creators, performers, and activists involved--individuals at the margins of creative economy as well as society--Da Costa builds a provocative argument. Their creative economy practices may survive, challenge, and even reinforce the economies of death, displacement, and divisiveness used by the urban poor to survive.
 
[more]
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Politicizing Gender

Narrative Strategies in the Aftermath of the French Revolution

Kadish, Doris Y

Rutgers University Press, 1991

It is Doris Kadish's contention in this book that gender and politics went hand-in-hand in the nineteenth century; that nineteenth-century works can often be read as retellings of the French Revolution; and that the political meanings of these works can be gleaned through the study of narrative strategies that she chooses to call "semiotic readings." Building on the work of Marina Warner, Lynn Hunt, Joan Landes, Nancy Armstrong, Foucault and others, she shows how the strategy of politicizing gender during and after the revolution served many functions--among them to articulate representations of revolution, to form the nineteenth-century public sphere, to constitute bourgeois ideology, to distance the unruly masses, and ultimately, perhaps, to express a deep seated fear of women as a threat to the status quo.     Looking at the French and English novel, and even selected relevant paintings in this way, she is able to read much-read texts in new and refreshing ways. She shows us how a collective story or master narrative of the revolution was retold and refashioned throughout the century, even where we might least expect to find it. She looks first at small details in order to see the larger patterns, and is among the first to show us how semiotics may make a contribution to gender studies.
[more]
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Politicizing Islam in Austria

The Far-Right Impact in the Twenty-First Century

Farid Hafez

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Among its Continental peers, Austria has stood out for its longstanding state recognition of the Muslim community as early as 1912. A shift has occurred more recently, however, as populist far-right voices within the Austrian government have redirected public discourse and put into question Islam’s previously accepted autonomous status within the country. 

Politicizing Islam in Austria examines this anti-Muslim swerve in Austrian politics through a comprehensive analysis of government policies and regulations, as well as party and public discourses. In their innovative study, Hafez and Heinisch show how the far-right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) adapted anti-Muslim discourse to their political purposes and how that discourse was then appropriated by the conservative center-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP). This reconfiguration of the political landscape prepared the way for a right-wing coalition government between conservatives and far-right actors that would subsequently institutionalize anti-Muslim political demands and change the shape of the civic conditions and public perceptions of Islam and the Muslim community in the republic. 
 
[more]
cover of Politics Over Process: Partisan Conflict and Post-Passage Processes in the U.S. Congress

Politics Over Process

Partisan Conflict and Post-Passage Processes in the U.S. Congress

Hong Min Park, Steven S. Smith, and Ryan J. Vander Wielen

University of Michigan Press, 2018

Although the U.S. Constitution requires that the House of Representatives and the Senate pass legislation in identical form before it can be sent to the president for final approval, the process of resolving differences between the chambers has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. Hong Min Park, Steven S. Smith, and Ryan J. Vander Wielen document the dramatic changes in intercameral resolution that have occurred over recent decades, and examine the various considerations made by the chambers when determining the manner in which the House and Senate pursue conciliation. Politics Over Process demonstrates that partisan competition, increasing party polarization, and institutional reforms have encouraged the majority party to more creatively restructure post-passage processes, often avoiding the traditional standing committee and conference processes altogether.
 
[more]
cover of Politics after Violence: Legacies of the Shining Path Conflict in Peru

Politics after Violence

Legacies of the Shining Path Conflict in Peru

Edited by Hillel David Soifer and Alberto Vergara

University of Texas Press, 2019

Between 1980 and 1994, Peru endured a bloody internal armed conflict, with some 69,000 people killed in clashes involving two insurgent movements, state forces, and local armed groups. In 2003, a government-sponsored “Truth and Reconciliation Committee” reported that the conflict lasted longer, affected broader swaths of the national territory, and inflicted higher costs in both human and economic terms than any other conflict in Peru’s history. Of those killed, 75 percent were speakers of an indigenous language, and almost 40 percent were among the poorest and most rural members of Peruvian society. These unequal impacts of the violence on the Peruvian people revealed deep and historical disparities within the country.

This collection of original essays by leading international experts on Peruvian politics, society, and institutions explores the political and institutional consequences of Peru’s internal armed conflict in the long 1980s. The essays are grouped into sections that cover the conflict itself in historical, comparative, and theoretical perspectives; its consequences for Peru’s political institutions; its effects on political parties across the ideological spectrum; and its impact on public opinion and civil society. This research provides the first systematic and nuanced investigation of the extent to which recent and contemporary Peruvian politics, civil society, and institutions have been shaped by the country’s 1980s violence.

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Politics and Apocalypse

Robert Hamerton-Kelly

Michigan State University Press, 2007

Apocalypse. To most, the word signifies destruction, death, the end of the world, but the literal definition is "revelation" or "unveiling," the basis from which renowned theologian René Girard builds his own view of Biblical apocalypse. Properly understood, Girard explains, Biblical apocalypse has nothing to do with a wrathful or vengeful God punishing his unworthy children, and everything to do with a foretelling of what future humans are making for themselves now that they have devised the instruments of global self-destruction. In this volume, some of the major thinkers about the interpretation of politics and religion— including Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, and Carl Schmitt— are scrutinized by some of today's most qualified scholars, all of whom are thoroughly versed in Girard’s groundbreaking work.
     Including an important new essay by Girard, this volume enters into a philosophical debate that challenges the bona fides of philosophy itself by examining three supremely important philosopher of the twentieth century. It asks how we might think about politics now that the attacks of 9/11 have shifted our intellectual foundations and what the outbreak of rabid religion might signify for international politics.

 

[more]
cover of Politics and History in William Golding: The World Turned Upside Down

Politics and History in William Golding

The World Turned Upside Down

Paul Crawford

University of Missouri Press, 2002

Politics and History in William Golding provides a much needed politicized and historicized reading of William Golding’s novels as a counter to previous, universalizing criticism. Paul Crawford argues that an understanding of fantastic and carnivalesque modes in Golding’s work is vital if we are to appreciate fully his interrogation of twentieth-century life.
            Golding’s early satirical novels question English constructions of national identity in opposition to Nazism and the “totalitarian personality.” For Crawford, Golding can and must be studied in the wider European tradition of “literature of atrocity.” His early novels, especially Lord of the Flies, are preoccupied with atrocity, whereas the later work betrays a greater concern for the status of language and literature.
In Golding’s later fiction, such as Darkness Visible, the fantastic and carnivalesque are used in an increasingly nonsatirical manner to complement first modernist and then postmodernist self-consciousness and indeterminacy. Even his critique of class and religious authority, which carries through all of his fiction, gives way to more lighthearted productions—a symptom of which is his crude, absurd attack against the English literary industry in The Paper Men. This reduction of satire marks a decline in Golding’s political commitment and the production of more complex and arguably less satisfying novels.
            The fantastic and carnivalesque are foundational to both the satirical and nonsatirical approaches that mark Golding’s early and late fiction. No previous study has analyzed this structure that is so central to his work. Politics and History in William Golding examines this writer’s work more fully than it has been studied within the convoluted context of the last half of the twentieth century. Crawford directly links Golding’s various deployments of the fantastic and carnivalesque to historical, political, and social change.
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cover of Politics and Partnerships: The Role of Voluntary Associations in America's Political Past and Present

Politics and Partnerships

The Role of Voluntary Associations in America's Political Past and Present

Edited by Elisabeth S. Clemens and Doug Guthrie

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Exhorting people to volunteer is part of the everyday vocabulary of American politics. Routinely, members of both major parties call for partnerships between government and nonprofit organizations. These entreaties increase dramatically during times of crisis, and the voluntary efforts of ordinary citizens are now seen as a necessary supplement to government intervention.

But despite the ubiquity of the idea of volunteerism in public policy debates, analysis of its role in American governance has been fragmented. Bringing together a diverse set of disciplinary approaches, Politics and Partnerships is a thorough examination of the place of voluntary associations in political history and an astute investigation into contemporary experiments in reshaping that role. The essays here reveal the key role nonprofits have played in the evolution of both the workplace and welfare and illuminate the way that government’s retreat from welfare has radically altered the relationship between nonprofits and corporations.
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cover of Politics and Poetics of Authenticity: A Cultural Genealogy of Sinhala Nationalism

Politics and Poetics of Authenticity

A Cultural Genealogy of Sinhala Nationalism

Harshana Rambukwella

University College London, 2018

What is the role of cultural authenticity in the making of nations? Much scholarly and popular commentary on nationalism dismisses authenticity as a romantic fantasy or, worse, a deliberately constructed mythology used for political manipulation. The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity places authenticity at the heart of Sinhala nationalism in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century Sri Lanka. It argues that the passion for the "real" or the "authentic" has played a significant role in shaping nationalist thinking and argues for an empathetic yet critical engagement with the idea of authenticity.

Through a series of fine-grained and historically grounded analyses of the writings of individual figures central to the making of Sinhala nationalist ideology the book demonstrates authenticity’s rich and varied presence in Sri Lankan public life and its key role in understanding postcolonial nationalism in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in South Asia and the world. It also explores how notions of authenticity shape certain strands of postcolonial criticism and offers a way of questioning the nature of the nation as a unit of analysis but at the same time critically explore the deep imprint of nations and nationalisms on people’s lives.
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cover of Politics and Policies in Post-Communist Transition: Primary and Secondary Privatisation in Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union

Politics and Policies in Post-Communist Transition

Primary and Secondary Privatisation in Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union

Károly Attila Soós

Central European University Press, 2011

Discusses the policies, practices and outcomes of privatization in six transition economies: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Slovenia and Ukraine, paying particular attention to cross-country differences and to interrelations between the processes of privatisation and the political transition from communism to a new system.The analysis is restricted to the privatisation in those fields where its methods have been strongly different from privatisations in advanced market economies and where differences of privatisation principles and techniques among our six countries were also rather various. This is basically the privatisation of middle-sized and large enterprises, not including banks, non-bank financial companies, natural monopolies and agricultural entities.
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cover of Politics and Property Rights: The Closing of the Open Range in the Postbellum South

Politics and Property Rights

The Closing of the Open Range in the Postbellum South

Shawn Everett Kantor

University of Chicago Press, 1998

After the American Civil War, agricultural reformers in the South called for an end to unrestricted grazing of livestock on unfenced land. They advocated the stock law, which required livestock owners to fence in their animals, arguing that the existing system (in which farmers built protective fences around crops) was outdated and inhibited economic growth. The reformers steadily won their battles, and by the end of the century the range was on the way to being closed.

In this original study, Kantor uses economic analysis to show that, contrary to traditional historical interpretation, this conflict was centered on anticipated benefits from fencing livestock rather than on class, cultural, or ideological differences. Kantor proves that the stock law brought economic benefits; at the same time, he analyzes why the law's adoption was hindered in many areas where it would have increased wealth. This argument illuminates the dynamics of real-world institutional change, where transactions are often costly and where some inefficient institutions persist while others give way to economic growth.
[more]
cover of Politics and Welfare in Birmingham, 1900–1975

Politics and Welfare in Birmingham, 1900–1975

Edward Shannon LaMonte

University of Alabama Press, 1995

This well-written volume explores the relationships between politics and welfare programs for low-income residents in Birmingham during four periods in the twentieth century:

• 1900-1917, the formative period of city building when welfare was predominantly a responsibility of the private sector;
• 1928-1941, when the Great Depression devastated the local economy and federal intervention became the principal means of meeting human need;
• the mid 1950s, when the lasting impacts of the New Deal could be assessed and when matters of race relations became increasingly significant;
• 1962-1975, when an intense period of local government reform, the Civil Rights movement, federal intervention in the form of the War on Poverty, and increasing demands for citizen participation all reinforced one another.

From the time of its founding in 1871, Birmingham has had a biracial population, so the theme of race relations runs naturally throughout the narrative. LaMonte pays particular attention to those efforts to achieve a more harmonious biracial community, including the failed effort to establish an Urban League in the 1940s, the progressive activities of the Community Chest’s Interracial Division in the 1950s, which were abruptly terminated, and the dramatic events of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, when local events were elevated to international significance.

[more]