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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies > Conservatism & right-of-centre democratic ideologies
This highly readable book, is a unique, ethnographic study of devolution and Scottish politics as well as party political activism more generally. Available in paperback for the first time, it explores how Conservative Party activists who had opposed devolution and the movement for a Scottish Parliament during the 1990s attempted to mobilise politically following their annihilation at the 1997 General Election. It draws on fieldwork conducted in Dumfries and Galloway - a former stronghold for the Scottish Tories - to describe how senior Conservatives worked from the assumption that they had endured their own 'crisis' in representation. The material consequences of this crisis included losses of financial and other resources, legitimacy and local knowledge for the Scottish Conservatives. This book ethnographically describes the processes, practices and relationships that Tory Party activists sought to enact during the 2003 Scottish and local government elections. Its central argument is that, having asserted that the difficulties they faced constituted problems of knowledge, Conservative activists cast to the geographical and institutional margins of Scotland became 'banal' activists. Believing themselves to be lacking in the data and information necessary for successful mobilisation during Parliamentary elections, local Tory Party strategists attempted to address their knowledge 'crisis' by burying themselves in paperwork and petty bureaucracy. -- .
For nearly 40 years "among the glades of Epping Forest" Churchill found a base for his parliamentary life. This book relates with anecdotal and archival evidence the attempt to unseat him after what many supporters considered an injudicious Munich speech.
Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, who gradually transformed himself into the English writer, Joseph Conrad, was a mercurial personality. He left Poland for the sea, though he had no experience with salt water. He left the Polish language for French, and then for English. He attempted suicide at the age of twenty. He invested in various schemes and lost his inheritance. He married an English typist nearly sixteen years younger than himself with whom he had nothing in common. He worked as a writer though he made no money through all the years of his most important work and though he experienced terrible psychological breakdowns after completing each novel. He was warm with his friends, ingratiating with influential strangers, but also intensely irritable and easily offended. His work is as varied and changeable as his personality, from his first two, emotionally intense Malay novels, to the stolid and confident Nigger of the "Narcissus" and "Typhoon"; from the coldly ironic "Outpost of Progress" to the nightmarishly subjective Heart of Darkness; from the leisurely, panoramic visions of Nostromo to the tautly nervous, claustrophobic ironies in The Secret Agent. Despite the extraordinary thematic and tonal range of his work, critics have imposed a stable political perspective on his fiction-most often an organic conservatism, influenced by his Polish background. This is understandable; until recently, a critic's role has been to impose order on an artist's creations. The approach in this book is different. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard, especially on the latter's critique of what he called "the grand narrative," A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad shows how Conrad's politics were always radically contingent on audience, contemporary events, and, especially, genre. While the political perspective in each of his stories and novels may be more-or-less coherent and consistent, there is no consistency throughout his work. A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad is the first book devoted exclusively to Conrad's politics since the 1960s.
The Anatomy of Thatcherism explains how, for the first time in British history, a prime minister's name has become an 'Ism'--a symbol of a profound social change. Letwin argues that Thatcherism promoted a moral agenda rather than an economic doctrine or a political theory in order to achieve a fundamental realignment in British politics. She introduces a new term--"the vigorous virtues"--to describe what Thatcherites have aimed to cultivate in Individual Britons and In the country as a whole. Her definition of Thatcherism is supported by a detailed analysis of the principal Thatcherite policies and the grounds on which they were advocated and opposed, Inside and outside the Conservative Party. Without departing from a lucid and lively style or resorting to technical jargon. Dr. Letwin explains such innovations as schools opting out, budget holding by GPs, and the creation of the first ever competitive spot market in electricity. Just how did the Thatcherite administrations shape the reform of the unions? How is the Thatcherite attitude to the family connected with Thatcherite policies on schools? Why does mon-etarism appear--wrongly--to be at the heart of Thatcherism? The Anatomy of Thatcherism is a bold and searching book about how Britain changed between 1979 and 1992. It challenges many truisms about British politics, and Is indispensable reading both for those who believe in the future relevance of Thatcherism and for those who want to demolish it. And it will be of particular interest to those con-cerned with the history of British politics, as It shows how Thatcherism both arose out of, and confronted, trends that had per-meated Conservatism for the entire twentieth century.
This text documents the economic development of East Asian countries in order to highlight the beneficial techniques used to increase growth. Socialist and capitalist structures are discussed, complete with an analysis of the future extent of interaction between East Asian countries.
Roger Scruton looks at the central ideas of conservatism over the centuries. He examines conservative thinking on civil society, the rule of law and the role of the state on the one hand; and freedom (including freedom of expression and association), morality, equality, property and rights on the other. He traces the origins and development of the conservative ideology in the philosophies and thoughts of, among others, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Michael Oakeshott, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Robert Nozick. He shows how conservative ideas have worked out in the politics and policies of leading figures people such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Disraeli, the Earl of Salisbury, Calvin Coolidge, Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. He also looks closely at the degree to which capitalism and free markets have been, and are integral to, conservative ideology and politics in the UK and in the USA. Professor Scruton's clear, incisive guide is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the politics and policies of the west now and over the last three centuries.
In an era disgusted with politicians and the various instruments of "direct democracy," Walter Lippmann's The Phantom Public remains as relevant as ever. It reveals Lippmann at a time when he was most critical of the ills of American democracy. Antipopulist in sentiment, this volume defends elitism as a serious and distinctive intellectual option, one with considerable precursors in the American past. Lippmann's demythologized view of the American system of government resonates today. The Phantom Public discusses the "disenchanted man" who has become disillusioned not only with democracy, but also with reform. According to Lippmann, the average voter is incapable of governance; what is called the public is merely a "phantom." In terms of policy-making, the distinction should not be experts versus amateurs, but insiders versus outsiders. Lippmann challenges the core assumption of Progressive politics as well as any theory that pretends to leave political decision making in the hands of the people as a whole. In his biography Walter Lippmann and the American Century, Ronald Steel praised The Phantom Public as "one of Lippmann's most powerfully argued and revealing books. In it he came fully to terms with the inadequacy of traditional democratic theory." This volume is part of a continuing series on the major works of Walter Lippmann. As more and more Americans are inclined to become apathetic to the political system, this classic will be essential reading for students, teachers, and researchers of political science and history.
Michael Oakshott described conservatism as a non-ideological preference for the familiar, tried, actual, limited, near, sufficient, convenient and present. Historically, conservatives have been associated with attempts to sustain social harmony between classes and groups within an organic, hierarchical order grounded in collective history and cultural values. Yet, in recent decades, conservatism throughout the English-speaking world has been associated with radical social and economic policy, often championing free-market models which substitute the free movement of labour and forms of competition and social mobility for organic hierarchy and noblesse oblige. The radical changes associated with such policies call into question the extent to which contemporary conservatism is conservative, rather than ideological. This book seeks to explore contemporary conservative political thought with regard to such topics as, 'One Nation' politics and Big Society, sovereignty, multiculturalism and international blocs, paternalism and negative liberty with regard to narcotics, pornography and education, regional and international development, and public faith, establishment and religious diversity. This book will be published as a special issue of Global Discourse.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. As a complex and multifaceted world-view, conservatism is often pigeonholed and partially understood. And while the nature of conservative ideology is warmly contested among scholars, no-one can deny its prominence in contemporary debates and its effects on the politics of everyday life. These 16 essays written by expert scholars and specialists offer a broad survey of conservative thought that extends beyond typical historical and geographic boundaries to include past thinkers like Plato and Edmund Burke, non-European conservative traditions such as Japan and Russia, and political 'practitioners' including Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Charles de Gaulle. Each essay grapples with short primary source extracts while offering instructive criticism and commentary. Conservative Moments offers students a useful, accessible, and comprehensive exposition of this political ideology.
This book, first published in 1986, examines the activities and beliefs of right-wing Conservatives and overt Fascists in inter-war Britain. It analyses the role that ideology played in the various struggles between leaders and dissidents within the Conservative Party, traces the development of central themes in right-wing thought and seeks to show how the complexity of these beliefs established ideological barriers to the growth of Fascism in Britain which, it is argued, was heavily reliant upon the support of disillusioned Conservatives for its limited success. The book helps to establish an overview of right-wing politics in Britain since the turn of the century.
Even as historians credit Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II with hastening the end of the Cold War, they have failed to recognize the depth or significance of the bond that developed between the two leaders. Acclaimed scholar and bestselling author Paul Kengor changes that. In this fascinating book, he reveals a singular bond-which included a spiritual connection between the Catholic pope and the Protestant president-that drove the two men to confront what they knew to be the great evil of the twentieth century: Soviet communism. Reagan and John Paul II almost didn't have the opportunity to forge this relationship: just six weeks apart in the spring of 1981, they took bullets from would-be assassins. But their strikingly similar near-death experiences brought them close together-to Moscow's dismay. Based on Kengor's tireless archival digging and his unique access to Reagan insiders, A Pope and a President is full of revelations. It takes you inside private meetings between Reagan and John Paul II and into the Oval Office, the Vatican, the CIA, the Kremlin, and many points beyond. Nancy Reagan called John Paul II her husband's "closest friend"; Reagan himself told Polish visitors that the pope was his "best friend." When you read this book, you will understand why. As kindred spirits, Ronald Reagan and John Paul II united in pursuit of a supreme objective-and in doing so they changed history.
Research on the extreme right is rare, and the extreme right has even more rarely been analysed as a social movement. In this volume, the extreme right is compared in Italy, Germany, and the United States using concepts and methods developed in social movement studies. In particular, the book describes the discourse, action, and organizational structures of the extreme right, and explains these on the basis of the available discursive and political opportunities. Three main empirical methods are used in the research. Firstly, the frame analysis looks at the cognitive mechanisms that are relevant in influencing organizational and individual behaviour. Second, network analysis looks at the (inter-) organizational structural characteristics of right-wing organizations. Finally, protest event analysis allows for an empirical summary of the actions undertaken by right-wing extremists over the last decade. The substantive chapters address the organizational structure of the extreme right, their action repertoires, the framing of protest events, the definition of 'us', the struggle against modernity, old and new forms of racism, opposition to globalization, and populism.
Immigration to Britain has rarely achieved the levels experienced by the US, but it is nevertheless true of all periods that immigrants, refugees and soujourners have been continually present'. While we may have the beginnings of a history of immigration, ethnicity and race in Britain, there is a lack of historiographical awareness in the subject. The essays in this collection, ranging from specific case studies to broad themes, are an attempt to provide a basis for future discussion.
While 20th-century Spain has been dominated by right-wing forces historians have, until now, paid little critical attention to the Spanish Right, concentrating instead on the Civil War and the earlier anarchist revolution. "The Politics of Revenge" seeks to redress this balance in a disturbing account of how the Right seized power through that civil war and then maintained a cruel and corrupt dictatorship. Apart from a brief interval for the Second Republic between 1931 and 1936, the Right prevailed in modern Spain until 1977 when the current democratic regime came to power. On occasions when the Right's domination was challenged by popular democratic forces, the challengers were met with violence. Paul Preston examines the course of the Spanish Civil War (1936-9) and focuses on the army officers and Falangists who fought it and who struggled to reimpose the hegemony of the right. Their success resulted in 40 years of dictatorship under Franco which wreaked revenge on the defeated Left. This book provides an original account of the Spanish Right in its authoritarian, fascist and military forms and presents a highly readable analysis of a ruthless political scene.
First published in 1990, this book was intended as a counter to the rising and continued strength of the New Right and an attempt to bolster the perceived weakness of the opposition - providing a critical discussion of New Right ideology and also of the more influential Left reactions to them. The contributors scrutinise the attempts to reconstruct the idea of socialism in the 1990s, and pinpoint the relation of socialism to freedom, equality and the market. In the course of this searching evaluation, they also take up issues relating more directly to specific policy areas such as monetary policy and international finance, secondary education, social welfare, and race relations.
First Published in 1990. During the last twenty years, prodigious scholarly effort has gone into the study of fascism and the right in twentieth-century Europe. Quite apart from the study of particular fascist and national socialist movements and of individual right-wing regimes (Fascist Italy, the Third Reich, Franco's Spain, etc.), scholars have striven to locate the essential nature of fascism; to determine what is distinctive about its ideas, programmes, policies and support; to identify what, if anything, differentiates it from other forms of rightism; and to decide whether a satisfactory definition of 'fascism' can be arrived at. This volume is intended to assist the further consideration of these and related problems.
Despite the increasing academic interest in populism, we still lack understanding of individual factors contributing to populist voting. One of the main reasons for this is that populism is almost always attached to other ideologies which makes it difficult to isolate factors. This book draws on an innovative research design by comparing the reasons to vote for six populist parties which differ remarkably in terms of their host ideology in Belgium, The Netherlands, and Germany. The results show that populist voters are motivated by their dissatisfaction with the functioning of democracy and a desire for more direct democracy. Furthermore it appears that populist parties do not mobilize among one specific social group although deprived groups are generally more susceptible to populist voting. Finally, this study explored why some populist parties persist while others decline. Origins of party formation and how leaders organize their party internally seem the most important factors determining party persistence. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of populism, European politics and contemporary political theory.
The populist radical right is one of the most studied political phenomena in the social sciences, counting hundreds of books and thousands of articles. This is the first reader to bring together the most seminal articles and book chapters on the contemporary populist radical right in western democracies. It has a broad regional and topical focus and includes work that has made an original theoretical contribution to the field, which make them less time-specific. The reader is organized in six thematic sections: (1) ideology and issues; (2) parties, organizations, and subcultures; (3) leaders, members, and voters; (4) causes; (5) consequences; and (6) responses. Each section features a short introduction by the editor, which introduces and ties together the selected pieces and provides discussion questions and suggestions for further readings. The reader is ended with a conclusion in which the editor reflects on the future of the populist radical right in light of (more) recent political developments - most notably the Greek economic crisis and the refugee crisis - and suggest avenues for future research.
A fresh and sharp-eyed history of political conservatism from its nineteenth-century origins to today's hard Right For two hundred years, conservatism has defied its reputation as a backward-looking creed by confronting and adapting to liberal modernity. By doing so, the Right has won long periods of power and effectively become the dominant tradition in politics. Yet, despite their success, conservatives have continued to fight with each other about how far to compromise with liberalism and democracy-or which values to defend and how. In Conservatism, Edmund Fawcett provides a gripping account of this conflicted history, clarifies key ideas, and illuminates quarrels within the Right today. Focusing on the United States, Britain, France, and Germany, Fawcett's vivid narrative covers thinkers and politicians. They include the forerunners James Madison, Edmund Burke, and Joseph de Maistre; early friends and foes of capitalism; defenders of religion; and builders of modern parties, such as William McKinley and Lord Salisbury. The book chronicles the cultural critics and radical disruptors of the 1920s and 1930s, recounts how advocates of laissez-faire economics broke the post 1945 consensus, and describes how Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and their European counterparts are pushing conservatism toward a nation-first, hard Right. An absorbing, original history of the Right, Conservatism portrays a tradition as much at war with itself as with its opponents.
This book is based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with Partition survivors from west Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province, in Delhi and its surroundings between 2017–18. It locates the global rise of far-right nationalism within globalisation and memories of victimhood. Focussing on Hindu nationalism in India, this book is an important and timely contribution to the literature on South Asian Partition Studies that shows how tragedy begets tragedy. It tries to answer an urgent, provocative but nevertheless necessary question: 'What does it mean to remember the Partition in the time of fascism?' The author shows what makes up cycles of violence by connecting the reinscription of trauma in Partition memories to the self-serving justifications of the contemporary violence of Hindu nationalism. It analyses how the hegemony of Hindu nationalism has structured the narratives of Hindu Partition survivors and recruited them in service of a putative Hindu nation.
What happened to economic policy during the first five years of Mrs Thatcher's government? Most commentators have emphasised the radical changes wrought in economic theory and policy over the period from 1979. The left saw this as heralding the introduction of the social market economy and authoritarian populism, the right saw it as evangelical monetarism and a new beginning. This book, first published in 1986, challenges the notion that there was a revolution in economic policy making. It emphasises the constraints on economic policy formation and the ironies that these have thrown up with respect to the Conservatives' attempts at changing the course of the economy. The book argues that the Thatcher government had not been able to implement a great deal of its rhetoric. This book is ideal for students of economics and politics.
Since the 1880s, the Conservative party has been an important political force in Britain. In this study of Conservative ideology since the end of Second World War, first published in 1974, Andrew Gamble considers the nature of Conservative party opinion, and the factors that have accounted for its success. The adaptation of the party post-1945 is discussed, as well as the ascendancy of the Right progressives in the leadership, and the challenge of the Whigs and Imperialists. Finally, the book includes a discussion of the fluctuations within the Conservative Government between 1970 and 1974, with an account of what Gamble believes to have been ultimately a failure. A rigorous and comprehensive analysis of Conservative thought and policy, this study will be of particular value to those with an interest in the history of British Conservative politics and government.
Rules to live by from Roger Stone, master of political dark arts, advisor to Donald Trump, and subject of the award-winning documentary Get Me Roger Stone Here are the lessons of a lifetime of work helping influence America's politics and culture, learned from working for Richard Nixon and use to help make Donald J. Trump the 45th President of the United States. Roger Stone is a freedom fighter to his admirers, a dirty trickster to his detractors. He is flamboyant, outrageous, articulate, and extraordinarily well-dressed. Here he lays out the maxims that have governed his legendary career as a campaign operative for four American presidents. As a raconteur, pundit, prognosticator, and battle-scarred veteran of America's political wars, Roger Stone shares his lessons on punking liberals and playing the media, gives an inside look at his push to legalize marijuana, details how much "linen" to show at the cuff of an impeccably-cut suit, lays out how and why LBJ orchestrated the murder of JFK, and reveals how to make the truly great marinara sauce that is the foundation of Stone's legendary Sunday Gravy. Along the way, Stone dishes on the "cloak and dagger" nitty-gritty that has guided his own successes and occasional defeats, culminating in the election of the candidate he first pushed for the presidency in 1988, Donald J. Trump. First revealed in the Weekly Standard by Matt Labash and commemorated by CNN's Jeffrey Toobin, the blunt, pointed, and real-world practical Stone's Rules were immortalized in the Netflix smash hit documentary Get Me Roger Stone-part Machiavelli's The Prince, part Sun Tzu's The Art of War, all brought together with a highly-entertaining blend of culinary and sartorial advice from the Jedi Master of political dark arts. From "Attack, attack, attack!" inspired by Winston Churchill, to "Three can keep a secret, if two are dead," taken from the wall of mob boss Carlos Marcello's headquarters, to Stone's own "It is better to be infamous than to never have been famous at all," Roger Stone shares with the world all that he's learned from his decades of political jujitsu and life as a maven of high-style. From Stone's Rules for campaign management to the how-to's of an internet mobilization campaign to advice on custom tailoring to the ingredients for the perfect martini from Dick Nixon's (no-longer) secret recipe, Stone has fashioned the truest operating manual for anyone navigating the rough-and-tumble of business, finance, politics, social engagement, family affairs, and life itself. |
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