Download or read book Politics Without Vision written by Tracy B. Strong and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-04-20 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politics without Vision takes up the thought of seven influential thinkers, each of whom attempted to construct a political solution to this problem: Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Lenin, Schmitt, Heidegger, and Arendt. None of these theorists were liberals nor, excepting possibly Arendt, were they democrats—and some might even be said to have served as handmaidens to totalitarianism. And all to a greater or lesser extent shared the common conviction that the institutions and practices of liberalism are inadequate to the demands and stresses of the present times. In examining their thought, Strong acknowledges the political evil that some of their ideas served to foster but argues that these were not necessarily the only paths their explorations could have taken. By uncovering the turning points in their thought—and the paths not taken—Strong strives to develop a political theory that can avoid, and perhaps help explain, the mistakes of the past while furthering the democratic impulse.
Download or read book Politics Without a Past written by Shari J. Cohen and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1999-11-22 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVArgues that the rise to power of quasi-nationalist demagogues in many post-communist countries is the result of "organized forgetting" orchestrated by communist regimes that left these countries with little common history./div
Download or read book Politics without a Past written by Shari J. Cohen and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1999-11-22 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Politics without a Past Shari J. Cohen offers a powerful challenge to common characterizations of postcommunist politics as either a resurgence of aggressive nationalism or an evolution toward Western-style democracy. Cohen draws upon extensive field research to paint a picture of postcommunist political life in which ideological labels are meaningless and exchangeable at will, political parties appear and disappear regularly, and citizens remain unengaged in the political process. In contrast to the conventional wisdom, which locates the roots of widespread intranational strife in deeply rooted national identities from the past, Cohen argues that a profound ideological vacuum has fueled destructive tension throughout postcommunist Europe and the former Soviet Union. She uses Slovakia as a case study to reveal that communist regimes bequeathed an insidious form of historical amnesia to the majority of the political elite and the societies they govern. Slovakia was particularly vulnerable to communist intervention since its precommunist national consciousness was so weak and its only period of statehood prior to 1993 was as a Nazi puppet-state. To demonstrate her argument, Cohen focuses on Slovakia’s failure to forge a collective memory of the World War II experience. She shows how communist socialization prevented Slovaks from tying their individual family stories—of the Jewish deportations, of the anti-Nazi resistance, or of serving in the wartime government—to a larger historical narrative shared with others, leaving them bereft of historical or moral bearings. Politics without a Past develops an analytical framework that will be important for future research in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and beyond. Scholars in political science, history, East European and post-Soviet studies will find Cohen’s methodology and conclusions enlightening. For policymakers, diplomats, and journalists who deal with the region, she offers valuable insights into the elusive nature of postcommunist societies.
Download or read book Democracy without Politics written by Steven Bilakovics and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Western democracies today, politics and politicians are held in contempt by the majority of citizens. Steven Bilakovics argues that this disdain of politics follows neither from the discontents of our liberal political system nor from the preoccupations of a consumer society. Rather, extending Tocqueville’s analysis of the modern democratic way of life, he traces the sources of political cynicism to democracy itself. Democratic society’s defining openness—its promise of transcendent freedom and unlimited power—renders the everyday politics of argument and persuasion absurd by comparison. Persuasion is devalued relative to the norms of free-market competition and patriotic community, assertions of self-interest and self-expression take the place of arguing together, and political life is diminished by the absence of mediating talk. Bilakovics identifies this trend across the political landscape—in the clashing authenticities of the "culture war," the perennial pursuit of the political outsider to set things right again, the call for a postpartisan politics, rising demands on government alongside falling expectations of what government can do, and in a political rhetoric that is at once petty and hyperbolic. To reform democratic politics and ameliorate its pathologies, Bilakovics calls on us to overcome our anti-political prejudice and rethink robust democracy as the citizen's practice of persuading and being persuaded in turn.
Download or read book Open Democracy written by Hélène Landemore and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To the ancient Greeks, democracy meant gathering in public and debating laws set by a randomly selected assembly of several hundred citizens. To the Icelandic Vikings, democracy meant meeting every summer in a field to discuss issues until consensus was reached. Our contemporary representative democracies are very different. Modern parliaments are gated and guarded, and it seems as if only certain people are welcome. Diagnosing what is wrong with representative government and aiming to recover some of the openness of ancient democracies, Open Democracy presents a new paradigm of democracy. Supporting a fresh nonelectoral understanding of democratic representation, Hélène Landemore demonstrates that placing ordinary citizens, rather than elites, at the heart of democratic power is not only the true meaning of a government of, by, and for the people, but also feasible and, more than ever, urgently needed. -- Cover page 4.
Download or read book The Age of Acrimony written by Jon Grinspan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A penetrating, character-filled history “in the manner of David McCullough” (WSJ), revealing the deep roots of our tormented present-day politics. Democracy was broken. Or that was what many Americans believed in the decades after the Civil War. Shaken by economic and technological disruption, they sought safety in aggressive, tribal partisanship. The results were the loudest, closest, most violent elections in U.S. history, driven by vibrant campaigns that drew our highest-ever voter turnouts. At the century's end, reformers finally restrained this wild system, trading away participation for civility in the process. They built a calmer, cleaner democracy, but also a more distant one. Americans' voting rates crashed and never fully recovered. This is the origin story of the “normal” politics of the 20th century. Only by exploring where that civility and restraint came from can we understand what is happening to our democracy today. The Age of Acrimony charts the rise and fall of 19th-century America's unruly politics through the lives of a remarkable father-daughter dynasty. The radical congressman William “Pig Iron” Kelley and his fiery, Progressive daughter Florence Kelley led lives packed with drama, intimately tied to their nation's politics. Through their friendships and feuds, campaigns and crusades, Will and Florie trace the narrative of a democracy in crisis. In telling the tale of what it cost to cool our republic, historian Jon Grinspan reveals our divisive political system's enduring capacity to reinvent itself.
Download or read book Politics Is for Power written by Eitan Hersh and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant condemnation of political hobbyism—treating politics like entertainment—and a call to arms for well-meaning, well-informed citizens who consume political news, but do not take political action. Who is to blame for our broken politics? The uncomfortable answer to this question starts with ordinary citizens with good intentions. We vote (sometimes) and occasionally sign a petition or attend a rally. But we mainly “engage” by consuming politics as if it’s a sport or a hobby. We soak in daily political gossip and eat up statistics about who’s up and who’s down. We tweet and post and share. We crave outrage. The hours we spend on politics are used mainly as pastime. Instead, we should be spending the same number of hours building political organizations, implementing a long-term vision for our city or town, and getting to know our neighbors, whose votes will be needed for solving hard problems. We could be accumulating power so that when there are opportunities to make a difference—to lobby, to advocate, to mobilize—we will be ready. But most of us who are spending time on politics today are focused inward, choosing roles and activities designed for our short-term pleasure. We are repelled by the slow-and-steady activities that characterize service to the common good. In Politics Is for Power, pioneering and brilliant data analyst Eitan Hersh shows us a way toward more effective political participation. Aided by political theory, history, cutting-edge social science, as well as remarkable stories of ordinary citizens who got off their couches and took political power seriously, this book shows us how to channel our energy away from political hobbyism and toward empowering our values.
Download or read book The Politics of History written by Howard Zinn and published by eBookIt.com. This book was released on 2012-08 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a series of case studies and thought-provoking essays arguing for a radical approach to history and providing a revisionist interpretation of the historian's role. In a new introduction, the author responds to critics of his original work and comments further on the radicalization of history.
Download or read book A Movement Without Marches written by Lisa Levenstein and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this bold interpretation of U.S. history, Lisa Levenstein reframes highly charged debates over the origins of chronic African American poverty and the social policies and political struggles that led to the postwar urban crisis. A Movement Withou
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 Whistling Past Dixie written by Thomas F. Schaller and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2006 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two generations after he challenged Republicans to envision a Southern-based national majority, Phillips issues a bold challenge to Democrats to transform American politics by building a winning coalition outside the South.
Download or read book In Defence of Politics written by Bernard R. Crick and published by Chicago : University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1972 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Future Without a Past written by John Paul Russo and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Argues that technological imperatives like rationalization, universalism, monism, and autonomy have transformed the humanities and altered the relation between humans and nature. Examines technology and its impact on education, historical memory, and technological and literary values in criticism and theory, concluding with an analysis of the fiction of Don DeLillo"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Politics Culture and Class in the French Revolution written by Lynn Hunt and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-10-17 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When this book was published in 1984, it reframed the debate on the French Revolution, shifting the discussion from the Revolution's role in wider, extrinsic processes (such as modernization, capitalist development, and the rise of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes) to its central political significance: the discovery of the potential of political action to consciously transform society by molding character, culture, and social relations. In a new preface to this twentieth-anniversary edition, Hunt reconsiders her work in the light of the past twenty years' scholarship.
Download or read book Voices Without Votes written by Ronald J. Zboray and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2010 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revelatory scholarship about New England women engaging mainstream politics in the antebellum period
Download or read book Public Forgetting written by Bradford Vivian and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forgetting is usually juxtaposed with memory as its opposite in a negative way: it is seen as the loss of the ability to remember, or, ironically, as the inevitable process of distortion or dissolution that accompanies attempts to commemorate the past. The civic emphasis on the crucial importance of preserving lessons from the past to prevent us from repeating mistakes that led to violence and injustice, invoked most poignantly in the call of “Never again” from Holocaust survivors, tends to promote a view of forgetting as verging on sin or irresponsibility. In this book, Bradford Vivian hopes to put a much more positive spin on forgetting by elucidating its constitutive role in the formation and transformation of public memory. Using examples ranging from classical rhetoric to contemporary crises like 9/11, Public Forgetting demonstrates how, contrary to conventional wisdom, communities may adopt idioms of forgetting in order to create new and beneficial standards of public judgment concerning the lessons and responsibilities of their shared past.
Download or read book Why I Write written by George Orwell and published by Renard Press Ltd. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times
