Download or read book Lineages of the Absolutist State written by Perry Anderson and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forty years after its original publication, Lineages of the Absolutist State remains an exemplary achievement in comparative history. Picking up from where its companion volume, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, left off, Lineages traces the development of Absolutist states in the early modern period from their roots in European feudalism, and assesses their various trajectories. Why didn’t Italy develop into an Absolutist state in the same, indigenous way as the other dominant Western countries, namely Spain, France and England? On the other hand, how did Eastern European countries develop into Absolutist states similar to those of the West, when their social conditions diverged so drastically? Reflecting on examples in Islamic and East Asian history, as well as the Ottoman Empire, Anderson concludes by elucidating the particular role of European development within universal history.
Download or read book Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism written by Perry Anderson and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism is a sustained exercise in historical sociology that shows how the slave-based societies of Ancient Greece and Rome eventually became the feudal societies of the Middle Ages. In the course of this study, Anderson vindicates and refines the explanatory power of historical materialism, while casting a fascinating light on the Ancient world, the Germanic invasions, nomadic society, and the different routes taken to feudalism in Northern, Mediterranean, Eastern and Western Europe. Through this work and its companion volume, Lineages of the Absolutist State, Anderson presents a Marxist history of Western political development that takes readers from the first stirrings of political consciousness in the classical world to the rise of absolutist monarchies in Europe and the birth of the modern epoch.
Download or read book Chaucerian Polity written by David Wallace and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of Chaucer's poetry and prose incorporates approaches gleaned from modern Marxist historiography, gender theory, and cultural studies. It presents an articulation of Chaucerian polity through analyses of art, architecture, city and country, household space, guild and mercantile cultures, as well as literary texts. The author argues that The Canterbury Tales reveal the influence of Chaucer's Italian journeys and exposure to the the great Trecento authors Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch and the Trecento's most crucial material and ideological conflict - that between the associational polity of Florence and the prototype absolutist state of Lombardy. In drawing these parallels, the author challenges conventional divisions between the medieval and the Renaissance.
Download or read book The New Old World written by Perry Anderson and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2011-11-07 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Old World looks at the history of the European Union, the core continental countries within it, and the issue of its further expansion into Asia. It opens with a consideration of the origins and outcomes of European integration since the Second World War, and how today's EU has been theorized across a range of contemporary disciplines. It then moves to more detailed accounts of political and cultural developments in the three principal states of the original Common Market-France, Germany and Italy. A third section explores the interrelated histories of Cyprus and Turkey that pose a leading geopolitical challenge to the Community. The book ends by tracing ideas of European unity from the Enlightenment to the present, and their bearing on the future of the Union. The New Old World offers a critical portrait of a continent now increasingly hailed as a moral and political example to the world at large.
Download or read book Vienna and Versailles written by Jeroen Frans Jozef Duindam and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-08-14 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings vividly to life the courtiers and servants of the imperial court in Vienna and the royal court at Paris-Versailles. Drawing on a wealth of material masterfully set in a comparative context, the book makes a unique contribution to the field of court studies. Staff, numbers, costs and hierarchies; daily routines and ceremonies; court favourites and the nature of rulership; the integrative and centripetal forces of the central courtly establishment: all are seen in a long-term, comparative perspective that highlights both the similarities and the distinctiveness of developments in France and the Habsburg lands. In the process, most conventional views of each court - and of court life in general - are challenged, and an alternative interpretation emerges. Finally, by relocating the household in the heart of the early modern state, Vienna and Versailles forces us to rethink the process of statebuilding and the notion of 'absolutism'.
Download or read book Ever Closer Union written by Perry Anderson and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive, critical assessment of the EU after Brexit The European Union is a political order of peculiar stamp and continental scope, its polity of 446 million the third largest on the planet, though with famously little purchase on the conduct of its representatives. Sixty years after the founding treaty, what sort of structure has crystallised, and does the promise of ever closer union still obtain? Against the self-image of the bloc, Perry Anderson poses the historical record of its assembly. He traces the wider arc of European history, from First World War to Eurozone crisis, the hegemony of Versailles to that of Maastricht, and casts the work of the EU’s leading contemporary analysts – both independent critics and court philosophers – in older traditions of political thought. Are there likenesses to the age of Metternich, lessons in statecraft from that of Machiavelli? An excursus on the UK’s jarring departure from the Union considers the responses it has met with inside the country’s intelligentsia, from the contrite to the incandescent. How do Brussels and Westminster compare as constitutional forms? Differently put, which could be said to be worse?
Download or read book The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci written by Perry Anderson and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major essay on the thought of the great Italian Marxist Perry Anderson’s essay “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” first published in New Left Review in 1976, was an explosive analysis of the central strategic concepts in the thought of the great Italian Marxist. Since then it has been the subject of book-length attacks across four decades for its disentangling of the hesitations and contradictions in Gramsci’s highly original usage of such key dichotomies as East and West, domination and direction, hegemony and dictatorship, state and civil society, and war of position and war of movement. In a critical tribute to the international richness of Gramsci’s work, the essay shows how deeply embedded these notions were in the revolutionary debates in Tsarist Russia and Wilhelmine Germany. Here arguments crisscrossed between Plekhanov, Lenin, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Lukács and Trotsky, with later echoes in Brecht and Benjamin. A new preface considers the objections the essay provoked and the reasons for them. This edition also includes the first English translation of Athos Lisa’s report on Gramsci’s lectures in prison.
Download or read book Imagined Communities written by Benedict Anderson and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2006-11-17 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.
Download or read book The Origins of Postmodernity written by Perry Anderson and published by Verso. This book was released on 1998-09-17 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the genesis, consolidation and consequences of the postmodern idea. Beginning in the Hispanic world of the 1930s, the text takes the reader through to the 70s, when Lyotard and Habermas gave the idea of postmodernism wider currency and finally the 90s, with the work of Fredric Jameson.
Download or read book The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations written by Max Weber and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Max Weber, widely recognized as the greatest of the founders of classical sociology, is often associated with the development of capitalism in Western Europe and the analysis of modernity. But he also had a profound scholarly interest in ancient societies and the Near East, and turned the youthful discipline of sociology to the study of these archaic cultures. The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations – Weber’s neglected masterpiece, first published in German in 1897 and reissued in 1909 – is a fascinating examination of the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Hebrew society in Israel, the city-states of classical Greece, the Hellenistic world and, finally, Republican and Imperial Rome. The book is infused with the excitement attendant when new intellectual tools are brought to bear on familiar subjects. Throughout the work, Weber blends a description of socio-economic structures with an investigation into mechanisms and causes in the rise and decline of social systems. The volume ends with a magisterial explanatory essay on the underlying reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire.
Download or read book The H Word written by Perry Anderson and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating history of the political theory of hegemony Few terms are so widely used in the literature of international relations and political science, with so little agreement about their exact meaning, as hegemony. In the first full historical study of its fortunes as a concept, Perry Anderson traces its emergence in Ancient Greece and its rediscovery during the upheavals of 1848–1849 in Germany. He then follows its checkered career in revolutionary Russia, fascist Italy, Cold War America, Gaullist France, Thatcher’s Britain, post-colonial India, feudal Japan, Maoist China, eventually arriving at the world of Merkel and May, Bush and Obama. The result is a surprising and fascinating expedition into global intellectual history, ending with reflections on the contemporary political landscape.
Download or read book The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism written by Paul Marlor Sweezy and published by Verso. This book was released on 1978 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays largely on Studies in the development of capitalism, by M. Dobb.
Download or read book Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran written by İlker Evrim Binbaş and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-26 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the importance of informal intellectual networks and the formation of the republic of letters in Islamic history. The book focuses on the fifteenth century Timurid, Ottoman, and Mamluk empires, and traces the connections between intellectuals in these three early modern Islamic polities.
Download or read book English Questions written by Perry Anderson and published by Verso. This book was released on 1992-05-17 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intellectual reversals of the recent period. The book concludes with a survey of the political conjuncture after the fall of Thatcher, which considers the prospects of the Labour Party within the context of the wider changes that have reshaped European social democracy in these years.
Download or read book Sovereignty RIP written by Don Herzog and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Has the concept of sovereignty outlived its usefulness? Social order requires a sovereign: an actor with unlimited, undivided, and unaccountable authority. Or so the classic theory says. But without noticing, we’ve gutted the theory. Constitutionalism limits state authority. Federalism divides it. The rule of law holds it accountable. In vivid historical detail—with millions tortured and slaughtered in Europe, a king put on trial for his life, journalists groaning at idiotic complaints about the League of Nations, and much more—Don Herzog charts both the political struggles that forged sovereignty and the ones that undid it. He argues that it’s no longer a helpful guide to our legal and political problems, but a pernicious bit of confusion. It’s time, past time, to retire sovereignty.
Download or read book Brazil Apart written by Perry Anderson and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading English-language account of the fall of Lula’s Workers’ Party and rise of Bolsonaro and the New Right What does Brazil’s lurch to the hard right under Jair Bolsonaro portend for Latin America’s largest country, and how has it come about? Always something of a world unto itself, Brazil became, under the Workers’ Party from 2003 to 2016, “the theatre of a socio-political drama without equivalent in any other major state.” Bucking the global trend towards a tighter neoliberalism, former steelworker Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva swept aside the broken promises of previous years to invest in social transfers, defying vituperations in the Brazilian media to become the most popular ruler of the age. But in a second spectacular reversal, a parliamentary coup d’état against Lula’s successor—backed by forces in the judiciary and a youthful New Right—has been consolidated by Bolsonaro’s 2018 capture of the Planalto. With the PT’s lodestar now behind bars, a weighing up of his legacy, and of the contrasting Bolsonaro regime, is urgently needed. Brazil Apart is the sharp-edged, comprehensive analytic account required.
Download or read book Does War Make States written by Lars Bo Kaspersen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging volume scrutinises the causal relationship between warfare and state formation, using Charles Tilly's work as a foundation.
