Download or read book The Politics and Business of Self Interest from Tocqueville to Trump written by Richard Ned Lebow and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-20 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Self-interest is an important human motive and this book explores its evolution in the United States and its consequences for politics, business, and personal relationships. In the postwar era American understandings of self-interest have moved away from Alexis de Tocqueville’s concept of “self-interest well-understood” – in which people recognize that their interests are served by the success of the community of which they are part – towards “individualism” – by which he meant narrow framing that often leads people to pursue their interests at the expense of the community. The book documents this evolution through qualitative and quantitative content analysis of presidential speeches, television sitcoms and popular music, before exploring its negative consequences for democracy.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Political Orders written by Richard Ned Lebow and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-13 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a new theory of the rise, evolution, decline, and collapse of political orders, exploring the impact of late-modernity upon the survival of democratic and authoritarian regimes.
Download or read book Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Sociology written by Maria Grasso and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2023-12-11 with total page 723 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive and authoritative Encyclopedia, featuring entries written by academic experts in the field, explores the diverse topics within the discipline of political sociology. By looking at both macro- and micro-components, questions relating to nation-states, political institutions and their development, and the sources of social and political change such as social movements and other forms of contentious politics, are raised and critically analysed.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Political Orders written by Richard Ned Lebow and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-13 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on political theory, comparative politics, international relations, psychology and classics, Ned Lebow offers insights into why social and political orders form, how they evolve, and why and how they decline. Following The Tragic Vision of Politics and A Cultural Theory of International Relations, this book thus completes Lebow's trilogy with an original theory of political order. He identifies long- and short-term threats to political order that are associated respectively with shifts in the relative appeal of principles of justice and lack of self-restraint by elites. Two chapters explore the consequences of late-modernity for democracy in the United States, and another chapter, co-authored with Martin Dimitrov, the consequences for authoritarianism in China. The Rise and Fall of Political Orders forges new links between political theory and political science via the explicit connection it makes between normative goals and empirical research.
Download or read book Cuban American Political Culture and Civic Organizing written by Robert M. Ceresa and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-06-21 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies civic organizations in Miami’s Cuban community. Few places in the United States have been transformed by immigration the way Miami has been transformed by Cuban exiles. Cuban civic organizations help to explain why this is the case. Civic organizations are the heart of the story of the social and political power and influence of Miami’s Cuban community. This community is home to a broad tradition of active political participation and many civic organizations. The sheer number of organizations suggests they have something to do with the community’s considerable vibrancy and civic capacity. How do the organizations work? How have they managed to be so successful over so many years? What can be learned about successful civic organizing from their experience? How will changing United States-Cuba relations impact Cuban civic organizations, and, in turn, broader Miami? These are questions this book helps to answer.
Download or read book Wealth and Power written by Michael Bennett and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is political equality viable when a capitalist economy unequally distributes private property? This book examines the nexus between wealth and politics and asks how institutions and citizens should respond to it. Theories of democracy and property have often ignored the ways in which the rich attempt to convert their wealth into political power, implicitly assuming that politics is isolated from economic forces. This book brings the moral and political links between wealth and power into clear focus. The chapters are divided into three thematic sections. Part I analyses wealth and politics from the perspective of various political traditions, such as liberalism, republicanism, anarchism, and Marxism. Part II addresses the economic sphere, and looks at the political influence of corporations, philanthropists, and commons-based organisations. Finally, Part III turns to the political sphere and looks at the role of political parties and constitutions, and phenomena such as corruption and lobbying. Wealth and Power: Philosophical Perspectives will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in political philosophy, political science, economics, and law.
Download or read book Private Military and Security Companies PMSCs and the Quest for Accountability written by George Andreopoulos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-18 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) have constituted a perennial feature of the security landscape. Yet, it is their involvement in and conduct during the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have transformed the outsourcing of security services into such a pressing public policy and world-order issue. The PMSCs’ ubiquitous presence in armed conflict situations, as well as in post-conflict reconstruction, their diverse list of clients (governments in the developed and developing world, non-state armed groups, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, and international corporations) and, in the context of armed conflict situations, involvement in instances of gross misconduct, have raised serious accountability issues. The prominence of PMSCs in conflict zones has generated critical questions concerning the very concept of security and the role of private force, a rethinking of "essential governmental functions," a rearticulation of the distinction between public/private and global/local in the context of the creation of new forms of "security governance," and a consideration of the relevance, as well as limitations, of existing regulatory frameworks that include domestic and international law (in particular international human rights law and international humanitarian law). This book critically examines the growing role of PMSCs in conflict and post-conflict situations, as part of a broader trend towards the outsourcing of security functions. Particular emphasis is placed on key moral, legal, and political considerations involved in the privatization of such functions, on the impact of outsourcing on security governance, and on the main challenges confronting efforts to hold PMSCs accountable through a combination of formal and informal, domestic as well as international, regulatory mechanisms and processes. It will be of interest to scholars, policymakers, practitioners and advocates for a more transparent and humane security order. This book was published as a special issue of Criminal Justice Ethics.
Download or read book Age of Anger written by Pankaj Mishra and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2017-01-20 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book of 2017 • Named a Best Book of the Year by Slate and NPR • Longlisted for the Orwell Prize One of our most important public intellectuals reveals the hidden history of our current global crisis How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world—from American shooters and ISIS to Donald Trump, from a rise in vengeful nationalism across the world to racism and misogyny on social media? In Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra answers our bewilderment by casting his gaze back to the eighteenth century before leading us to the present. He shows that as the world became modern, those who were unable to enjoy its promises—of freedom, stability, and prosperity—were increasingly susceptible to demagogues. The many who came late to this new world—or were left, or pushed, behind—reacted in horrifyingly similar ways: with intense hatred of invented enemies, attempts to re-create an imaginary golden age, and self-empowerment through spectacular violence. It was from among the ranks of the disaffected that the militants of the nineteenth century arose—angry young men who became cultural nationalists in Germany, messianic revolutionaries in Russia, bellicose chauvinists in Italy, and anarchist terrorists internationally. Today, just as then, the wide embrace of mass politics and technology and the pursuit of wealth and individualism have cast many more billions adrift in a demoralized world, uprooted from tradition but still far from modernity—with the same terrible results. Making startling connections and comparisons, Age of Anger is a book of immense urgency and profound argument. It is a history of our present predicament unlike any other.
Download or read book Veblens America written by Sidney Plotkin and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2018-12-28 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donald Trump’s astonishing rise to the US presidency challenges conventional understandings of American politics, yet he is distinctively American. His biography and family lineage reflect American traditions such as real estate hucksterism and buccaneering salesmanship. But Trump’s pugnacity also reflects the shadow of other darker American traditions of misogyny, racism and xenophobia, patterns that formed what Thorstein Veblen called a “sclerosis of the American soul.” Using Veblen’s theory of American development to explore the nation’s curious fusion of barbarism and liberal democracy, Veblen’s America taps the rich vein of the sociologist’s early twentieth-century insights to shed light on the Trump phenomenon that has overwhelmed and threatened early twenty-first-century American democracy.
Download or read book A Road to Nowhere written by Matthew W. Slaboch and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Matthew W. Slaboch examines the work of German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Oswald Spengler, Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and American historians Henry Adams and Christopher Lasch—rare skeptics of the idea of progress who have much to offer political theory, a field dominated by historical optimists.
Download or read book The Upswing written by Robert D. Putnam and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Bowling Alone and Our Kids, a “sweeping yet remarkably accessible” (The Wall Street Journal) analysis that “offers superb, often counterintuitive insights” (The New York Times) to demonstrate how we have gone from an individualistic “I” society to a more communitarian “We” society and then back again, and how we can learn from that experience to become a stronger, more unified nation. Deep and accelerating inequality; unprecedented political polarization; vitriolic public discourse; a fraying social fabric; public and private narcissism—Americans today seem to agree on only one thing: This is the worst of times. But we’ve been here before. During the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, America was highly individualistic, starkly unequal, fiercely polarized, and deeply fragmented, just as it is today. However as the twentieth century opened, America became—slowly, unevenly, but steadily—more egalitarian, more cooperative, more generous; a society on the upswing, more focused on our responsibilities to one another and less focused on our narrower self-interest. Sometime during the 1960s, however, these trends reversed, leaving us in today’s disarray. In a sweeping overview of more than a century of history, drawing on his inimitable combination of statistical analysis and storytelling, Robert Putnam analyzes a remarkable confluence of trends that brought us from an “I” society to a “We” society and then back again. He draws inspiring lessons for our time from an earlier era, when a dedicated group of reformers righted the ship, putting us on a path to becoming a society once again based on community. Engaging, revelatory, and timely, this is Putnam’s most ambitious work yet, a fitting capstone to a brilliant career.
Download or read book Identity written by Francis Fukuyama and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order offers a provocative examination of modern identity politics: its origins, its effects, and what it means for domestic and international affairs of state In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to “the people,” who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole. Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious “identity liberalism” of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy. Identity is an urgent and necessary book—a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.
Download or read book The Long Game written by Mitch McConnell and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback with a foreword by President Donald J. Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's memoir shows how one of the most successful public figures of our time has worked to advance conservative values in Washington. Under Mitch McConnell’s famously quiet and strategic leadership, Republicans in the Senate have seen win after win—from tax cuts and deregulation to major improvements for veterans, farmers, and our national defense. In 2018, President Donald Trump dubbed McConnell “the greatest leader in history”—and even his harshest critics on the Left acknowledge his skill. Now with a new foreword by President Trump and an afterword that details McConnell’s friendship with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, this paperback edition of McConnell’s memoir reveals the backdrop of his decision not to fill Scalia’s vacant seat until after the 2016 presidential election. Of this decision, New York Times chief Washington correspondent Carl Hulse wrote that “McConnell not only preserved a Supreme Court seat, he elected Donald Trump president.” The years of the McConnell-led Senate have proved that lasting change can only be won by playing the long game. Leading up to the 2020 election, when the system of government our Founding Fathers created will again be threatened by the Left, this book is necessary reading for anyone who wants to avoid repeating the mistakes of our recent past.
Download or read book Civic Ideals written by Rogers M. Smith and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 740 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is civic identity in the United States really defined by liberal, democratic political principles? Or is U.S. citizenship the product of multiple traditions--not only liberalism and republicanism but also white supremacy, Anglo-Saxon supremacy, Protestant supremacy, and male supremacy? In this powerful and disturbing book, Rogers Smith traces political struggles over U.S. citizenship laws from the colonial period through the Progressive era and shows that throughout this time, most adults were legally denied access to full citizenship, including political rights, solely because of their race, ethnicity, or gender. Basic conflicts over these denials have driven political development and civic membership in the U.S., Smith argues. These conflicts are what truly define U.S. civic identity up to this day. Others have claimed that nativist, racist, and sexist traditions have been marginal or that they are purely products of capitalist institutions. In contrast, Smith's pathbreaking account explains why these traditions have been central to American political and economic life. He shows that in the politics of nation building, principles of democracy and liberty have often failed to foster a sense of shared "peoplehood" and have instead led many Americans to claim that they are a "chosen people," a "master race" or superior culture, with distinctive gender roles. Smith concludes that today the United States is in a period of reaction against the egalitarian civic reforms of the last generation, with nativist, racist, and sexist beliefs regaining influence. He suggests ways that proponents of liberal democracy should alter their view of U.S. citizenship in order to combat these developments more effectively.
Download or read book The Fifth Risk Undoing Democracy written by Michael Lewis and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times Bestseller, with a new afterword "[Michael Lewis’s] most ambitious and important book." —Joe Klein, New York Times Michael Lewis’s brilliant narrative of the Trump administration’s botched presidential transition takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its leaders through willful ignorance and greed. The government manages a vast array of critical services that keep us safe and underpin our lives from ensuring the safety of our food and drugs and predicting extreme weather events to tracking and locating black market uranium before the terrorists do. The Fifth Risk masterfully and vividly unspools the consequences if the people given control over our government have no idea how it works.
Download or read book Trump and Political Philosophy written by Marc Benjamin Sable and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-16 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book seeks to address the relation of political philosophy and Donald Trump as a political phenomenon through the notions of patriotism, cosmopolitanism, and civic virtue. Political philosophers have been prescient in explaining trends that may explain our political misgivings. Madison warned during the debates on the Constitution that democracies are vulnerable to factions based on passion for personalities and beliefs; various continental thinkers have addressed the problem of nihilism—the modern loss of faith in objective standards of truth and morality—that in Max Weber’s analysis pointed to the importance of charisma, in Carl Schmitt’s to the idea that politics is essentially rooted in the definition of friends and enemies, and in early Heidegger resulted in the emphasis on the enduring significance of local, rather than cosmopolitan values. The former concerns—regarding demagoguery, charisma and nihilism—will enable an evaluation of Trump as a political character, while the latter concerns—regarding the status of universal versus local values—will enable us to evaluate the content of “Trumpism.” Taken together, these essays seek to advance the public conversation about the relationship between the rise of Trump and the ideological forces that seek to justify that rise.
Download or read book Cognitive Capitalism written by Yann Moulier-Boutang and published by Polity. This book was released on 2011 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that we are undergoing a transition from industrial capitalism to a new form of capitalism - what the author calls & lsquo; cognitive capitalism & rsquo;
