Download or read book Politics in Time written by Paul Pierson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-19 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking book represents the most systematic examination to date of the often-invoked but rarely examined declaration that "history matters." Most contemporary social scientists unconsciously take a "snapshot" view of the social world. Yet the meaning of social events or processes is frequently distorted when they are ripped from their temporal context. Paul Pierson argues that placing politics in time--constructing "moving pictures" rather than snapshots--can vastly enrich our understanding of complex social dynamics, and greatly improve the theories and methods that we use to explain them. Politics in Time opens a new window on the temporal aspects of the social world. It explores a range of important features and implications of evolving social processes: the variety of processes that unfold over significant periods of time, the circumstances under which such different processes are likely to occur, and above all, the significance of these temporal dimensions of social life for our understanding of important political and social outcomes. Ranging widely across the social sciences, Pierson's analysis reveals the high price social science pays when it becomes ahistorical. And it provides a wealth of ideas for restoring our sense of historical process. By placing politics back in time, Pierson's book is destined to have a resounding and enduring impact on the work of scholars and students in fields from political science, history, and sociology to economics and policy analysis.
Download or read book Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History written by Steven L. B. Jensen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-06 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering volume explores the long-neglected history of social rights, from the Middle Ages to the present. It debunks the myth that social rights are 'second-generation rights' – rights that appeared after World War II as additions to a rights corpus stretching back to the Enlightenment. Not only do social rights stretch back that far; they arguably pre-date the Enlightenment. In tracing their long history across various global contexts, this volume reveals how debates over social rights have often turned on deeper struggles over social obligation – over determining who owes what to whom, morally and legally. In the modern period, these struggles have been intertwined with questions of freedom, democracy, equality and dignity. Many factors have shaped the history of social rights, from class, gender and race to religion, empire and capitalism. With incomparable chronological depth, geographical breadth and conceptual nuance, Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History sets an agenda for future histories of human rights.
Download or read book Logics of History written by William H. Sewell Jr. and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-07-27 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While social scientists and historians have been exchanging ideas for a long time, they have never developed a proper dialogue about social theory. William H. Sewell Jr. observes that on questions of theory the communication has been mostly one way: from social science to history. Logics of History argues that both history and the social sciences have something crucial to offer each other. While historians do not think of themselves as theorists, they know something social scientists do not: how to think about the temporalities of social life. On the other hand, while social scientists’ treatments of temporality are usually clumsy, their theoretical sophistication and penchant for structural accounts of social life could offer much to historians. Renowned for his work at the crossroads of history, sociology, political science, and anthropology, Sewell argues that only by combining a more sophisticated understanding of historical time with a concern for larger theoretical questions can a satisfying social theory emerge. In Logics of History, he reveals the shape such an engagement could take, some of the topics it could illuminate, and how it might affect both sides of the disciplinary divide.
Download or read book Gender and the Politics of History written by Joan Wallach Scott and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An interrogation of the uses of gender as a tool for cultural and historical analysis. The revised edition reassesses the book's fundamental topic: the category of gender. In arguing that gender no longer serves to destabilize our understanding of sexual difference, the new preface and new chapter open a critical dialogue with the original book. From publisher description.
Download or read book A Social History of Western Political Thought written by Ellen Meiksins Wood and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 903 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood rewrites the history of political theory, from Plato to Rousseau. Treating canonical thinkers as passionately engaged human beings, Wood examines their ideas not simply in the context of political languages but as creative responses to the social relations and conflicts of their time and place. She identifies a distinctive relation between property and state in Western history and shows how the canon, while largely the work of members or clients of dominant classes, was shaped by complex interactions among proprietors, labourers and states. Western political theory, Wood argues, owes much of its vigour, and also many ambiguities, to these complex and often contradictory relations. In the first volume, she traces the development of the Western tradition from classical antiquity through to the Middle Ages in the perspective of social history - a significant departure not only from the standard abstract history of ideas but also from other contextual methods. From the Ancient Greek polis of Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus and Sophocles, through the Roman Republic of Cicero and the Empire of St Paul and St Augustine, to the medieval world of Averroes, Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, Wood offers a rich, dynamic exploration of thinkers and ideas that have indelibly stamped our modern world. In the second volume, Wood addresses the formation of the modern state, the rise of capitalism, the Renaissance and Reformation, the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, which have all been attributed to the "early modern" period. Nearly everything about its history remains controversial, but one thing is certain: it left a rich and provocative legacy of political ideas unmatched in Western history. The concepts of liberty, equality, property, human rights and revolution born in those turbulent centuries continue to shape, and to limit, political discourse today. Assessing the work and background of figures such as Machiavelli, Luther, Calvin, Spinoza, the Levellers, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, Ellen Wood vividly explores the ideas of the canonical thinkers, not as philosophical abstractions but as passionately engaged responses to the social conflicts of their day.
Download or read book Social Forms A Short History of Political Art written by Christian Viveros-Faune and published by David Zwirner Books. This book was released on 2018-12-20 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an increasingly polarized world, with shifting and extreme politics, Social Forms illustrates artists at the forefront of political and social resistance. Highlighting different moments of crisis and how these are reflected and preserved through crucial artworks, it also asks how to make art in the age of Brexit, Trump, and the refugee and climate crises. In Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art, renowned critic, curator, and writer Christian Viveros-Fauné has picked fifty representative artworks—from Francisco de Goya’s The Disasters of War (1810–1820) to David Hammons’s In the Hood (1993)—that give voice to some of modern art’s strongest calls to political action. In accessible and witty entries on each piece, Viveros-Fauné paints a picture of the context in which each work was created, the artist’s background, and the historical impact of each contribution. At times artists create projects that subvert existing power structures; at other moments they make artwork so powerful it challenges the very fabric of society. Whether it is Picasso’s Guernica and its place at the 1937 Worlds Fair, or Jenny Holzer’s Truisms (1977–1979), which still stop us in our tracks, this book tells the story behind some of the most important and unexpected encounters between artworks and the real worlds they engage with. Never professing to be a definitive history of political art, Social Forms delivers a unique and compelling portrait of how artists during the last 150 years have dealt with changing political systems, the violence of modern warfare, the rise of consumer culture worldwide, the prevalence of inequality and racism, and the challenges of technology.
Download or read book Social Security written by Daniel Béland and published by Lawrence, Kan. : University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2005 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compact, timely, well-researched, and balanced, this institutional history of Social Security's seventy years shows how the past still influences ongoing reform debates, helping the reader both to understand and evaluate the current partisan arguments on both sides.
Download or read book Art and Politics written by Claudia Mesch and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-10 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary art is increasingly concerned with swaying the opinions of its viewier. To do so, the art employs various strategies to convey a political message. This book provides readers with the tools to decode and appreciate political art, a crucial and understudied direction in post-war art. From the postwar works of Pablo Picasso and Alexander Deineka to thie Border Film Project and web-based works of Beatriz da Costa, Art and Politics: a Small History of Art for Social Change after 1945 considers how artists visual or otherwise have engaged with major political and grassroots movements, particularly after 1960. With its broad definition of the political, this book features chapters on postcolonialism, feminism, the anti-war movement, environmentalism, gay rights and anti-globiliaztion. It charts how individual artworks reverberated with enormous idealogical shifts. While emphasising the West, Art and Politics takes global developments into account as well - looking at art production practiced by postcolonial African, Latin American and Middle Eastern artists. Its case-study approach to the subject provides the reader with an overview of a most complex subject. This book will also challenge its readers to consider often devalued and marginalised political artworks as properly part of the history of modern and contemporary art.
Download or read book Tajikistan written by Kirill Nourzhanov and published by ANU E Press. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a historical study of the Tajiks in Central Asia from the ancient times to the post-Soviet period. For millennia, these descendants of the original Aryan settlers were part of many different empires set up by Greek, Arab, Turkic and Russian invaders, as well as their own, most notably during the Middle Ages. The emergence of the modern state of Tajikistan began after 1917 under Soviet rule, and culminated in the promulgation of independence from the moribund USSR in 1991. In the subsequent civil war that raged between 1992 and 1997, Tajikistan came close to becoming a failed state. The legacy of that internal conflict remains critical to understanding politics in Tajikistan a generation later. Exploring the patterns of ethnic identity and the exigencies of state formation, the book argues that despite a strong sense of belonging underpinned by shared history, mythology and cultural traits, the Tajiks have not succeeded in forming a consolidated nation. The politics of the Russian colonial administration, the national-territorial delimitation under Stalin, and the Soviet strategy of socio-economic modernisation contributed to the preservation and reification of sub-ethnic cleavages and regional identities. The book demonstrates the impact of region-based elite clans on Tajikistan’s political trajectory in the twilight years of the Soviet era, and identifies objective and subjective factors that led to the civil war. It concludes with a survey of the process of national reconciliation after 1997, and the formal and informal political actors, including Islamist groups, who compete for influence in Tajik society. “Tajikistan: A Political and Social History is the best source of information on this important country in the English language. Drs Nourzhanov and Bleuer present a comprehensive yet detailed account of the past and prospects of this emerging nation, and have filled one of the major gaps in Central Asian scholarship. This book must be read by those who wish to grasp the vagaries of Central Asia’s evolving political and cultural landscapes.” Reuel Hanks, Professor of Geography, Oklahoma State University, and Editor of the Journal of Central Asian Studies. “If Tajikistan is known outside its region, it is often for the civil war that gravely damaged it. This volume authoritatively provides the longer perspective to the unsettling events of the 1990s and skilfully explains them in terms of history, social structure, and sub-state identities. In addition to highlighting a wealth of local factors, it is insightful on the ways in which antagonists can be transformed into broader ethnic and regional blocs. Kirill Nourzhanov and Christian Bleuer are erudite guides to an understudied part of Central Asia, while astutely instructing us about larger patterns of state-society relations and their impact on the logic of conflict.” James Piscatori, Professor of International Relations, Durham University.
Download or read book The Politics of Social Solidarity written by Peter Baldwin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By analyzing the competing concerns of different social "actors" behind the evolution of social policy, this study explains why some nations had an easy time in developing a welfare state while others fought long entrenched battles.
Download or read book A Social History of Spanish Labour written by José A. Piqueras and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on organization, resistance and political culture, this collection represents some of the best examples of recent Spanish historiography in the field of modern Spanish labor movements. Topics range from socialism to anarchism, from the formation of the liberal state in the 19th century to the Civil War, and from women in the work place to the fate of the unions under Franco.
Download or read book Common Sense written by Sophia Rosenfeld and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Common sense has always been a cornerstone of American politics. In 1776, Tom Paine’s vital pamphlet with that title sparked the American Revolution. And today, common sense—the wisdom of ordinary people, knowledge so self-evident that it is beyond debate—remains a powerful political ideal, utilized alike by George W. Bush’s aw-shucks articulations and Barack Obama’s down-to-earth reasonableness. But far from self-evident is where our faith in common sense comes from and how its populist logic has shaped modern democracy. Common Sense: A Political History is the first book to explore this essential political phenomenon. The story begins in the aftermath of England’s Glorious Revolution, when common sense first became a political ideal worth struggling over. Sophia Rosenfeld’s accessible and insightful account then wends its way across two continents and multiple centuries, revealing the remarkable individuals who appropriated the old, seemingly universal idea of common sense and the new strategic uses they made of it. Paine may have boasted that common sense is always on the side of the people and opposed to the rule of kings, but Rosenfeld demonstrates that common sense has been used to foster demagoguery and exclusivity as well as popular sovereignty. She provides a new account of the transatlantic Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions, and offers a fresh reading on what the eighteenth century bequeathed to the political ferment of our own time. Far from commonsensical, the history of common sense turns out to be rife with paradox and surprise.
Download or read book Shaped by the State written by Brent Cebul and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American political history has been built around narratives of crisis, in which what “counts” are the moments when seemingly stable political orders collapse and new ones rise from the ashes. But while crisis-centered frameworks can make sense of certain dimensions of political culture, partisan change, and governance, they also often steal attention from the production of categories like race, gender, and citizenship status that transcend the usual break points in American history. Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams have brought together first-rate scholars from a wide range of subfields who are making structures of state power—not moments of crisis or partisan realignment—integral to their analyses. All of the contributors see political history as defined less by elite subjects than by tensions between state and economy, state and society, and state and subject—tensions that reveal continuities as much as disjunctures. This broader definition incorporates investigations of the crosscurrents of power, race, and identity; the recent turns toward the history of capitalism and transnational history; and an evolving understanding of American political development that cuts across eras of seeming liberal, conservative, or neoliberal ascendance. The result is a rich revelation of what political history is today.
Download or read book American Political History as Social Analysis written by Samuel P. Hays and published by Knoxville : University of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Atlantic Crossings written by Daniel T. RODGERS and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 671 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text is an account of the vibrant international network that the American soci-political reformers constructed - so often obscured by notions of American exceptionalism - and of its profound impact on the USA from the 1870's through to 1945.
Download or read book Social History written by Miles Fairburn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 1999-05-26 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing examples from some of the classic works in the discipline, Miles Fairburn examines the nature, varieties, schools and evolution of social history. Intended for advanced students and practising social historians who see social history as a problem-solving discipline, the methodological problems examined include the absence of social categories, fragmenting evidence, the appraisal of rival explanations, the use of socially constructed evidence to substantiate claims about realities, how to avoid presentism and when its practice is justifiable, how to distinguish important causes and how to tell similarities from differences.
Download or read book American Political History A Very Short Introduction written by Donald T. Critchlow and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-14 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Founding Fathers who drafted the United States Constitution in 1787 distrusted political parties, popular democracy, centralized government, and a strong executive office. Yet the country's national politics have historically included all those features. In American Political History: A Very Short Introduction, Donald Critchlow takes on this contradiction between original theory and actual practice. This brief, accessible book explores the nature of the two-party system, key turning points in American political history, representative presidential and congressional elections, struggles to expand the electorate, and critical social protest and third-party movements. The volume emphasizes the continuity of a liberal tradition challenged by partisan divide, war, and periodic economic turmoil. American Political History: A Very Short Introduction explores the emergence of a democratic political culture within a republican form of government, showing the mobilization and extension of the mass electorate over the lifespan of the country. In a nation characterized by great racial, ethnic, and religious diversity, American democracy has proven extraordinarily durable. Individual parties have risen and fallen, but the dominance of the two-party system persists. Fierce debates over the meaning of the U.S. Constitution have created profound divisions within the parties and among voters, but a belief in the importance of constitutional order persists among political leaders and voters. Americans have been deeply divided about the extent of federal power, slavery, the meaning of citizenship, immigration policy, civil rights, and a range of economic, financial, and social policies. New immigrants, racial minorities, and women have joined the electorate and the debates. But American political history, with its deep social divisions, bellicose rhetoric, and antagonistic partisanship provides valuable lessons about the meaning and viability of democracy in the early 21st century. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
