Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies > Conservatism & right-of-centre democratic ideologies
In this classic volume, written at the height of the Cold War, with a new preface of 2006, Peter Viereck, one of the foremost intellectual spokesmen of modern conservatism, examines the differing responses of American and European intellectuals to the twin threats of Nazism and Soviet communism. In so doing, he seeks to formulate a humanistic conservatism with which to counter the danger of totalitarian thought in the areas of politics, ethics, and art. The glory of the intellectuals was the firm moral stance they took against Nazism at a time when appeasement was the preferred path of many politicians; their shame lay in their failure to recognize the brutality of Stalinism to the extent of becoming apologists for or accomplices of its tyranny. In Viereck's view, this failure is rooted in an abandonment of humane values that he sees as a legacy of nineteenth-century romanticism and certain strands of modernist thought and aesthetics. Among his targets are literary obscurantism as personified by Ezra Pound, the academicization of literary culture, the rigidity of adversarial avant-gardism, and the failure of many writers and cultural institutions to conserve the very heritage their political freedom and security depend on. Viereck represents their attitude in a series of satirical dialogues with Gaylord Babbitt, son of Sinclair Lewis' embodiment of conservative philistinism. Babbitt Junior is as unreflective as his father, but the objects of his credulity are the received ideas of liberal progressivism and avant-garde mandarinism. Ultimately, Viereck's critique stands as a timely rebuke to the extremism of both left and right.
Conservative Thought in Contemporary China examines the evolution of conservative politics in China, which has become increasingly present following the death of Mao Zedong in 1978. Peter Moody traces the roots of conservatism through the imperial system, the Republican period, and the pre-Cultural Revolution People's Republic, all of which influence contemporary Chinese politics. The most direct programmatic form of conservativism has been neo-conservativism politics, which formed during the Jiang Zemin regime and persists to the present age in a diluted version. This book demonstrates that conservative thought is a consequence of relatively broad cultural and economic liberty, China's resentment of American arrogance, and a fear of the social turmoil generated as a by-product of liberal economic reforms. Moody critically analyzes the influence of antipolitics and traditional values on the current ideology of Chinese politicians and citizens. Conservative Thought in Contemporary China is a insightful text that will captivate those interested in Chinese studies and political theory.
Pride in prejudice offers a concise introduction to extreme right cultures in Britain today, exploring the origins of this complex movement and the numerous groups and activists that make up Britain's contemporary extreme right. Showcasing the latest research, Pride in prejudice demonstrates that the movement has a long history in Britain. Jackson evaluates successes and failures in policy responses to the extreme right, and identifies the on-going risks posed by lone-actor terrorism. In order to tackle the extreme right, Jackson argues, we must not only make ourselves aware of the changing ways the movement operates, but we must understand how the extreme right legitimises its perspectives in mainstream discourses that can implicitly and explicitly support its racist and extremist views. -- .
"Lucidly written, widely informed, and uncompromisingly honest -- a valuable expose." Michael Parenti "Documents the stunning success of a network of wealthy donors and corporations in creating and sustaining a set of think tanks, legal action groups, and media strategies." Gary Orfield, Harvard University What explains the electoral success of Republicans, particularly of the ascendant neoconservatives who now dominate the Party? Based on a thorough and up-to-date examination of the New Right over twenty-five years, The Politics of Fear proposes some provocative answers, including globalization, new technologies, and a far-reaching network of right-wing think tanks and foundations. As the authors show, all have opened the doors to a new politics of fear successfully waged by the neoconservatives. By manipulating insecurity, the New Right has created an extraordinarily successful populist conservative movement. Utilizing extensive documentation, the authors argue convincingly that the fear of immigrants and racial minorities has served as the most effective tactic in the GOP arsenal, while their approach also implicates gays, feminists, and terrorists. The book explains why Americans have willingly supported a party that promises them security, just as it delivers greater economic and political insecurity. The authors argue that, despite their striking political successes, neoconservatives have delivered to voters a set of policies harmful to working Americans in the way of regressive tax measures, military exploits, tort reform, deregulation, and environmental destruction.
"Lucidly written, widely informed, and uncompromisingly honest -- a valuable expose." Michael Parenti "Documents the stunning success of a network of wealthy donors and corporations in creating and sustaining a set of think tanks, legal action groups, and media strategies." Gary Orfield, Harvard University What explains the electoral success of Republicans, particularly of the ascendant neoconservatives who now dominate the Party? Based on a thorough and up-to-date examination of the New Right over twenty-five years, The Politics of Fear proposes some provocative answers, including globalization, new technologies, and a far-reaching network of right-wing think tanks and foundations. As the authors show, all have opened the doors to a new politics of fear successfully waged by the neoconservatives. By manipulating insecurity, the New Right has created an extraordinarily successful populist conservative movement. Utilizing extensive documentation, the authors argue convincingly that the fear of immigrants and racial minorities has served as the most effective tactic in the GOP arsenal, while their approach also implicates gays, feminists, and terrorists. The book explains why Americans have willingly supported a party that promises them security, just as it delivers greater economic and political insecurity. The authors argue that, despite their striking political successes, neoconservatives have delivered to voters a set of policies harmful to working Americans in the way of regressive tax measures, military exploits, tort reform, deregulation, and environmental destruction.
This book offers a distinctive treatment of Hayek's ideas, as a
research programme. It presents a detailed account of aspects of
Hayek's intellectual development and of problems that arise within
his work, and then offers some broad suggestions as to ways in
which the programme initiated in his work might be developed
further.
One of the country's most influential public intellectuals asks: What if the roots of the culture war lie not in the culture itself, but laws and regulations enacted decades ago that few are aware of today? In a nation nearly evenly split between conservatives and liberals, the left dominates nearly all major institutions, including universities, the government, and corporate America. Hanania argues that this is as much a legal requirement as it is an issue of one side triumphing in the marketplace of ideas. Culture has its own independent force, but the state has since the 1960s been putting its thumb on the scale. The product of more than a decade of research and thought about American politics and culture, The Origins of Woke explains where wokeness came from and ultimately what to do about it. Ideas like the belief that standardized tests are racist if groups don't perform equally on them are not simply intellectual fads, but mandatory dogmas that institutions are required to believe in. Even the ways in which we classify ourselves has been shaped by an activist state—this is why Americans talk about laws and initiatives to address discrimination against "Hispanics" and "Asian American-Pacific Islanders" rather than Middle Easterners, white ethnics, or people from specific Latin American countries. For those angry about wokeness and what it has done to American institutions, the book offers concrete suggestions regarding policies that can move us back to being a country that emphasizes merit, individual liberty, and color-blind governance.Â
This book examines the nature of the extreme right in contemporary Russia, arguing in particular that, alongside a continuing tradition which emphasizes Russia's orthodox and traditional past, an increasingly important intellectual current is drawing on Western European neo-fascist ideas and adapting them to the Russian situation. This book examines this intellectual current within the context of increasing conservatism across Russia as a whole, showing how the new ideas have an impact right across the political spectrum, and assessing the threat posed by them and their proponents.
'Priestdaddy caused a sensation when it hit bookshelves in 2017' Vogue 'Glorious' Sunday Times 'Laugh-out-loud funny' The Times 'Extraordinary' Observer 'Exceptional' Telegraph 'Electric' New York Times 'Snort-out-loud' Financial Times 'Dazzling' Guardian 'Do yourself a favour and read this memoir!' BookPage WINNER OF THE THURBER PRIZE FOR AMERICAN HUMOUR The childhood of Patricia Lockwood, the poet dubbed 'The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas' by The New York Times, was unusual in many respects. There was the location: an impoverished, nuclear waste-riddled area of the American Midwest. There was her mother, a woman who speaks almost entirely in strange riddles and arnings of impending danger. Above all, there was her gun-toting, guitar-riffing, frequently semi-naked father, who underwent a religious conversion on a submarine and found a loophole which saw him approved for the Catholic priesthood by the future Pope Benedict XVI, despite already having a wife and children. When an unexpected crisis forces Lockwood and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, she must learn to live again with the family's simmering madness, and to reckon with the dark side of her religious upbringing. Pivoting from the raunchy to the sublime, from the comic to the serious, Priestdaddy is an unforgettable story of how we balance tradition against hard-won identity - and of how, having journeyed in the underworld, we can emerge with our levity and our sense of justice intact. 'Destined to be a classic . . . this year's must-read memoir' Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club 'Irrepressible . . . joyous, funny and filthy . . . Lockwood blows the roof off every paragraph' Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine 'Beautiful, funny and poignant. I wish I'd written this book' Jenny Lawson, author of Furiously Happy 'A revelatory debut . . . Lockwood's prose is nothing short of ecstatic . . . her portrait of her epically eccentric family is funny, warm, and stuffed to bursting with emotional insight' Joss Whedon 'Praise God, this is why books were invented' Emily Berry, author of Dear Boy and Stranger, Baby
Peter Viereck, poet and historian, is one of the principle theoreticians of conservatism in modern American political thought. In this classic work, Viereck undertakes a penetrating and unorthodox analysis of that quintessential conservative, Prince Metternich, and offers evidence that cultural and political conservatism may perhaps be best adapted to sustain a free and reasonable society. According to Viereck's definition, conservatism is not the enemy of economic reform or social progress, nor is it the oppressive instrument of the privileged few. Although conservatism has been attacked from the left and often discredited by exploitation from the right, it remains the historic name for a point of view vital to contemporary society and culture. Divided into three parts, the book opens with a survey of conservatism in its cultural context of classicism and humanism. Rejecting the blind alley of reaction, Viereck calls for a discriminating set of principles that include preservation through reform, self-expression through self-restraint, a fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux, and a preference for historical continuity over violent rupture. Viereck locates our idea of Western political unity in Metternich's Concert of Europe whose goal was a cosmopolitan Europe united in peace. This ideal was opposed by both the violent nationalism that resulted in Nazism and the socialist internationalism that became a tool of Soviet Russian expansionism. While not ignoring the extremely negative aspects of Metternich's legacy, Viereck focuses on his attempts to tame the bellicosity of European nationalism and his little-known efforts to reform and modernize the Hapsburg Empire.
In recent years, black neoconservatism has captured the national imagination. Clarence Thomas sits on the Supreme Court. Stephen Carter's opinions on topics ranging from religion to the confirmation process are widely quoted. "The New Republic "has written that black neoconservative Thomas Sowell was having a greater influence on the discussion of matters of race and ethnicity than any other writer of the past ten years. In this compelling and vividly argued book, Ronald Roberts reveals how this attention has turned an eccentricity into a movement. Black neoconservatives, Roberts believes, have no real constituency but, as was the case with Clarence Thomas, are held up--and proclaim themselves--as simply and ruthlessly honest, as above mere self-interest and crude political loyalties. They profess a concern for those they criticize, claiming to possess an objective truth which sets them apart from their critics in the establishment Left. They claim to be outsiders even while sustained by the culture's most powerful institutions. As they level attacks at the activist organizations they perceive as moribund, every significant argument they advance rests on fervent mantras of harsh truths and simple realities. Enlisting the ideal of impartiality as a partisan weapon, this Tough Love Crowd has elevated the familiar wisdom of Spare the rod and spoil the child to the arena of national politics. Turning to their own writings and proclamations, Roberts here serves up a devastating critique of such figures as Clarence Thomas, Shelby Steele, Stephen Carter, and V. S. Naipaul (Tough Love International). Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd marks the emergence of a provocative and powerful voice on our cultural and political landscape, a voice which holds those who subscribe to this polemically powerful ideology accountable for their opinions and actions.
"Joseph Scotchie wishes to tell the story of what he terms an
"underfunded, mostly unknown movement" known as the
"paleoconservative" or "Old Right" which, he argues, has "provided
the intellectual firepower behind the troubled populism of the
1990's." And Scotchie is not afraid to ask hard questions." --"The
Review of Politics"
Nineteenth century Spain deserves wider readership. Bedevilled by lost empires, wars, political instability and frustrated modernisation, the country appeared backward in relation to northern Europe and even in relation to much of its own geographical periphery. This new history, the first survey of its kind in English in more than a hundred years, offers a fresh perspective on this century, showing how and why elements of backwardness and modernity ran in parallel through Spain. Bounded by the military and imperial crises of 1808 and 1898, this study pays special attention to the experience of war on politics and society, and integrates the latest historical debates in its analysis.
First published in 1998, this volume offers some solutions to the inherent difficulties with moving from philosophical generalities to specific policies, by exploring how a bridge might be built between political philosophy and social policy analysis. In light of these findings, Steven R. Smith evaluates the relationship between the Centre-Left and the New Right, focusing on the way in which concepts of individual autonomy and equality are used by political philosophers and social policy makers. Smith explores post-1945 training, education, social security and community care policy within the United Kingdom.
This book is a critique of Cambridge School Historical Contextualism as the currently dominant mode of history of political thought, drawing upon Michael Oakeshott's analysis of the logic of historical enquiry. While acknowledging that the early Cambridge School work represented a considerable advance towards genuinely historical histories of political thought, this work identifies two major historiographical problems that have become increasingly acute. The first is general: an insufficiently rigorous understanding of the key concept of "pastness" necessarily presupposed in historical enquiry of all kinds. The second is specific to histories of political thought: a failure to do justice to the varieties of past political thinking, especially differences between ideology and philosophy. In addressing these problems, the author offers a comprehensive account of the history of political thought that establishes the parameters not just of histories of ideological thinking but also of the much disputed character of histories of political philosophy. Since rethinking history of political thought in Oakeshottian terms requires resisting current pressures to turn history into the servant of currently felt needs, the book offers a sustained defence of the cultural value of modernist historical enquiry against its opponents. An important work for political theorists, historians of political thought and those researching intellectual history, the philosophy of history and proposed new directions in contemporary historical studies.
The Conservatives have been the most successful party in British politics since the arrival of a mass electorate following the Reform Acts of 1885 and 1918. Although identified with the elite, the Conservatives have consistently been able to mobilize a mass popular support. This has involved more than just a narrow defence of privilege and property, or negative anti-socialism. The essays in this volume explore the relationship between the Conservative Party and the mass of the British people from the 1880s to the Thatcher and Major era. Several focus on the party's sources of support and the ways in which it has sought to broaden these through shifts in policies, presentation and organization.
The papers that comprise this volume reveal how people are intent on preserving not only their wealth but culture too. The individual contributions identify the key arguments used to coax voters, whose natural sympathies might gravitate to the left, to vote for the Conservative Party en masse.
"Joseph Scotchie wishes to tell the story of what he terms an
"underfunded, mostly unknown movement" known as the
"paleoconservative" or "Old Right" which, he argues, has "provided
the intellectual firepower behind the troubled populism of the
1990's." And Scotchie is not afraid to ask hard questions." --"The
Review of Politics"
An investigation of the roots of the alliance between free-market neoliberals and social conservatives. Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations is recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives. Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socioeconomic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged-and at the limit enforced-as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. In a series of case studies ranging from Bill Clinton's welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.
This Longman Companion provides a wide-ranging compendium of essential facts and figures on the Conservative Party - from its origins in the 1830s to the dawn of the 21st Century. Central to the book are the detailed chronologies on the Conservative Party's years in government and opposition. In addition, it contains fascinating information on the Party's relationships with women, ethnic minoirities, the trade unions, Europe, Ireland, ideology, social reform and empire.
This work examines the attitudes of the Conservative Party towards Jews in Britain, Palestine and elsewhere from 1900-1948. It aims to show how the Conservative Party in the first half of the 20th century regarded both itself and British society on the one hand, and Britain's role on the other.
This work examines the attitudes of the Conservative Party towards Jews in Britain, Palestine and elsewhere from 1900-1948. It aims to show how the Conservative Party in the first half of the 20th century regarded both itself and British society on the one hand, and Britain's role on the other. It discusses Conservative responses to Jewish immigration into Britain from both Eastern Europe in the first decades of the century and from Central Europe in the 1930s. Conservative attitudes to the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine are examined from its nascent stage up until the establishment of the State of Israel. The author argues, in conclusion, that the generally held view that the Conservative party is, and always was, anti-Semitic is too simplistic an analysis of a complex group of people during a period which saw changes in the Party, in British society and in the Jewish community. |
You may like...
Sold Out - How High-Tech Billionaires…
Michelle Malkin, John Miano
Paperback
|