Late Capitalism is the first major synthesis to have been produced by the contemporary revival of Marxist economics. It represents, in fact, the only systematic attempt so far ever made to combine the general theory of the "laws of motion" of the capitalist mode of production developed by Marx, with the concrete history of capitalism in the twentieth century. Mandel's book starts with a challenging discussion of the appropriate methods for studying the capitalist economies. He seeks to show why the classical approaches of Luxemburg, Bukharin, Bauer and Grossman failed to accomplish the further development of Marxist theory whose urgency became evident after Marx's death. He then sketches the structure of the world market and the variant types of surplus-profit that have characterized its successive stages. On these foundations, Late Capitalism proceeds to advance an extremely bold schema of the "long waves" of expansion and contraction in the history of capitalism, from the Napoleonic Wars to the present. Mandel criticizes and refines Kondratieff's famous use of the notion. Mandel's book surveys in turn the main economic characteristics of late capitalism as it has emerged in the contemporary period. The last expansionary long wave, it argues, started with the victory of fascism on the European continent and the advent of the war economies in the US and UK during the 1940s, and produced the record world boom of 1947-72. Mandel discusses the reasons why the dynamic upswing of growth in this period was bound to reach its limits at the turn of the 1970s, and why a long wave of economic stagnation and intensified class struggle has set in today. Late Capitalism is a landmark in Marxist economic literature. Specifically designed to explain the international recession of the 1970s, it is a central guide to understanding the nature of the world economic crisis today.

In the name of protecting Americans from Soviet espionage, the post-1945 Red Scare curtailed the reform agenda of the New Deal. The crisis of the Great Depression had brought into government a group of policy experts who argued that saving democracy required attacking economic and social inequalities. The influence of these men and women within the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, and their alliances with progressive social movements, elicited a powerful reaction from conservatives, who accused them of being subversives. Landon Storrs draws on newly declassified records of the federal employee loyalty program--created in response to claims that Communists were infiltrating the U.S. government--to reveal how disloyalty charges were used to silence these New Dealers and discredit their policies. Because loyalty investigators rarely distinguished between Communists and other leftists, many noncommunist leftists were forced to leave government or deny their political views. Storrs finds that loyalty defendants were more numerous at higher ranks of the civil service than previously thought, and that many were women, or men with accomplished leftist wives. Uncovering a forceful left-feminist presence in the New Deal, she also shows how opponents on the Right exploited popular hostility to powerful women and their supposedly effeminate spouses. The loyalty program not only destroyed many promising careers, it prohibited discussion of social democratic policy ideas in government circles, narrowing the scope of political discourse to this day. Through a gripping narrative based on remarkable new sources, Storrs demonstrates how the Second Red Scare repressed political debate and constrained U.S. policymaking in fields such as public assistance, national health insurance, labor and consumer protection, civil rights, and international aid.

When most people think of the history of modern conservatism, they think of Ronald Reagan. Yet this narrow view leaves many to question: How did Donald Trump win the presidency? And what is the future of the Republican Party? In The Right, Matthew Continetti gives a sweeping account of movement conservatism's evolution, from the Progressive Era through the present. He tells the story of how conservatism began as networks of intellectuals, developing and institutionalizing a vision that grew over time, until they began to buckle under new pressures, resembling national populist movements. Drawing out the tensions between the desire for mainstream acceptance and the pull of extremism, Continetti argues that the more one studies conservatism's past, the more one becomes convinced of its future. Deeply researched and brilliantly told, The Right is essential reading for anyone looking to understand American conservatism.

Known as the Father of His Country, George Washington is viewed as a demigod for what he was and did, not what he thought. In addition to being a popular icon for the forces of American nationalism, he served as commander-in-chief of the victorious Continental Army. That he played a key role in securing the adoption of the Constitution is well known, but few credit him with a political philosophy that actively shaped the constitutional tradition.

In this revisionist study, Glenn Phelps argues that Washington's political thought influenced the principles informing the federal government then and now. Disinclined to enter the debates by which the framers hammered out a consensus, Washington instead sought to promote his way of thinking through private correspondence, and the example of his public life.

From these sources Phelps draws out his political ideas and demonstrates that Washington developed a coherent and consistent view of a republican government on a continental scale long before Madison, Hamilton, and other nationalists-a view grounded in classically conservative republicanism and continentally-minded commercialism. That he was only partially successful in building the constitutional system that he intended does not undercut his theoretical contribution. Even his failures affected the way our constitutional tradition developed.

Phelps examines Washington's political ideas not as they were perceived by his contemporaries but in his own words, that is, he shows what Washington believed, not what others thought he believed. He shows how Washington's political values remained consistent over time, regardless of who his counselors or "ghost writers" were. Using letters Washington wrote to friends and family--written free from the constraints of public politics--Phelps reveals "a man with a passionate commitment to a fully developed idea of a constitutional republic on a continental scale."

In recent years scholarship about Washington has seemed to focus on mythmaking. For readers interested in the founding period, the framing of what Hamilton called the "frail fabric," and constitutionalism, Phelps explores the substance behind the myth.

It's not easy being Catholic and conservative in secular 'Blue State' New York, but that's what George J. Marlin is, always has been, and always will be. Don't ask him to change. Besides, like America, it's the Empire State that needs to change. Generation after generation of elitists have put in place their plans for making the machineries of state work more efficiently and more equitably, and they've succeeded in wrecking what was never broken in the first place. And Mr. Marlin has a name for political types who think they know better than the rest of us: narcissists. Narcissists have been fouling up societies since the beginning of time. As Marlin writes: Throughout history, a subset of people have viewed themselves as superior to the rest of the population due to their perceived distinctive qualities: intelli-gence, breeding, class, or wealth. These elites have generally held that because they are exceptional persons they were best suited to conduct the affairs of state. They are wrong. But they have succeeded, and they appear to be ascendant in America today, although the Tea Party may have something to say about that. But consider the following contemporary examples: * The elitist imposition of Obamacare upon an unwilling nation * The lionizing by the Left of eugenicists, such as Margaret Sanger and Ruth Bader Ginsburg * The way "Catholic" politicians such as New York governors George Pataki and David Paterson and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani run roughshod over Church teaching * The way contemporary education - from nursery school through college - infantilizes and fails our kids, preparing them poorly for the rigors of adulthood With an acid pen and a ready wit, George Marlin takes on many of modern America's most revered intellectuals and shows conclusively that they're just not as smart as they think they are.

It's not easy being Catholic and conservative in secular 'Blue State' New York, but that's what George J. Marlin is, always has been, and always will be. Don't ask him to change. Besides, like America, it's the Empire State that needs to change. Generation after generation of elitists have put in place their plans for making the machineries of state work more efficiently and more equitably, and they've succeeded in wrecking what was never broken in the first place. And Mr. Marlin has a name for political types who think they know better than the rest of us: narcissists. Narcissists have been fouling up societies since the beginning of time. As Marlin writes: Throughout history, a subset of people have viewed themselves as superior to the rest of the population due to their perceived distinctive qualities: intelli-gence, breeding, class, or wealth. These elites have generally held that because they are exceptional persons they were best suited to conduct the affairs of state. They are wrong. But they have succeeded, and they appear to be ascendant in America today, although the Tea Party may have something to say about that. But consider the following contemporary examples: * The elitist imposition of Obamacare upon an unwilling nation * The lionizing by the Left of eugenicists, such as Margaret Sanger and Ruth Bader Ginsburg * The way "Catholic" politicians such as New York governors George Pataki and David Paterson and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani run roughshod over Church teaching * The way contemporary education - from nursery school through college - infantilizes and fails our kids, preparing them poorly for the rigors of adulthood With an acid pen and a ready wit, George Marlin takes on many of modern America's most revered intellectuals and shows conclusively that they're just not as smart as they think they are.

Since Thailand's prolonged political crisis began with royalist mobilization against prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2005, international observers have been treated to easy cliches about reactionary Thai elites. The chapters in this book invite readers to hold back quick judgement and instead engage with the conservative norms of sections of the middle class, the military, intellectuals and state ideologues. The opening chapter by the editors provides a historical overview of relevant themes and introduces the translated pieces. It also argues that the concept of a supra-constitution - first introduced by legal scholar Somchai Preechasilpakul in a brilliant lecture to the Pridi Banomyong Institute in 2007 - is a powerful frame for interpreting conservative Thai politics. Somchai's lecture, now translated here, explains that an unwritten supra-constitution sits above the many failed constitutions that litter Thai history. Like a guiding spirit it contains evolving norms on military and monarchical power which circumscribe democratic political contest. Other translations include chapters from Nakharin Metrairat's seminal Thoughts, Knowledge and Political Power in the Siamese Revolution (1990) and the unsurpassed Political Thought of the Thai Military (1990) by Chalermkiat Phi-nuan. Nakarin's account of vibrant traditionalist thought and Chalermkiat's interrogation of the cosmological underpinnings of military thought offer profound insights unavailable in English-language scholarship. On royalism, the translation of Kramol Thongthammachat's "National Ideology" illuminates how an important state ideologue co-developed a cross-class royalist ideology that emerged as a powerful force after the polarized 1970s. The Thai politician Pramuan Rajunaseri's sensational book Royal Powers, in part translated here, helped in 2005 to mobilize royalist sentiment against Thaksin. Work by Saichon Sattayanurak and Pasuk Phongpaichit, both national award-winning scholars, complete the collection. Pasuk's prescient contribution, originally written in English, warned about new forms of bureaucratic-political patronage emerging during the 1990s that limited civil society activism. Relatedly, Saichon explores how Sino-Thai middle-class dependency on royal power and the judiciary emerges from its historical experience of political insecurity. This is a must-have reference, one that enables a better understanding of the forces that have shaped Thailand's democracy struggles.

Can libertarians care about social justice? In "Free Market Fairness," John Tomasi argues that they can and should. Drawing simultaneously on moral insights from defenders of economic liberty such as F. A. Hayek and advocates of social justice such as John Rawls, Tomasi presents a new theory of liberal justice. This theory, free market fairness, is committed to both limited government and the material betterment of the poor. Unlike traditional libertarians, Tomasi argues that property rights are best defended not in terms of self-ownership or economic efficiency but as requirements of democratic legitimacy. At the same time, he encourages egalitarians concerned about social justice to listen more sympathetically to the claims ordinary citizens make about the importance of private economic liberty in their daily lives. In place of the familiar social democratic interpretations of social justice, Tomasi offers a "market democratic" conception of social justice: free market fairness. Tomasi argues that free market fairness, with its twin commitment to economic liberty and a fair distribution of goods and opportunities, is a morally superior account of liberal justice. Free market fairness is also a distinctively American ideal. It extends the notion, prominent in America's founding period, that protection of property and promotion of real opportunity are indivisible goals. Indeed, according to Tomasi, free market fairness is social justice, American style.

Provocative and vigorously argued, "Free Market Fairness" offers a bold new way of thinking about politics, economics, and justice--one that will challenge readers on both the left and right.

At a time when the label "conservative" is indiscriminately applied to fundamentalists, populists, libertarians, fascists, and the advocates of one or another orthodoxy, this volume offers a nuanced and historically informed presentation of what is distinctive about conservative social and political thought. It is an anthology with an argument, locating the origins of modern conservatism within the Enlightenment and distinguishing between conservatism and orthodoxy. Bringing together important specimens of European and American conservative social and political analysis from the mid-eighteenth century through our own day, "Conservatism" demonstrates that while the particular institutions that conservatives have sought to conserve have varied, there are characteristic features of conservative argument that recur over time and across national borders.

The book proceeds chronologically through the following sections: Enlightenment Conservatism (David Hume, Edmund Burke, and Justus Moser), The Critique of Revolution (Burke, Louis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, James Madison, and Rufus Choate), Authority (Matthew Arnold, James Fitzjames Stephen), Inequality (W. H. Mallock, Joseph A. Schumpeter), The Critique of Good Intentions (William Graham Sumner), War (T. E. Hulme), Democracy (Carl Schmitt, Schumpeter), The Limits of Rationalism (Winston Churchill, Michael Oakeshott, Friedrich Hayek, Edward Banfield), The Critique of Social and Cultural Emancipation (Irving Kristol, Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, Hermann Lubbe), and Between Social Science and Cultural Criticism (Arnold Gehlen, Philip Rieff). The book contains an afterword on recurrent tensions and dilemmas of conservative thought."

Are Tea Party supporters merely a group of conservative citizens concerned about government spending? Or are they racists who refuse to accept Barack Obama as their president because he's not white? "Change They Can't Believe In" offers an alternative argument--that the Tea Party is driven by the reemergence of a reactionary movement in American politics that is fueled by a fear that America has changed for the worse. Providing a range of original evidence and rich portraits of party sympathizers as well as activists, Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto show that what actually pushes Tea Party supporters is not simple ideology or racism, but fear that the country is being stolen from "real Americans"--a belief triggered by Obama's election. From civil liberties and policy issues, to participation in the political process, the perception that America is in danger directly informs how Tea Party supporters think and act.

The authors argue that this isn't the first time a segment of American society has perceived the American way of life as under siege. In fact, movements of this kind often appear when some individuals believe that "American" values are under threat by rapid social changes. Drawing connections between the Tea Party and right-wing reactionary movements of the past, including the Know Nothing Party, the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, and the John Birch Society, Parker and Barreto develop a framework that transcends the Tea Party to shed light on its current and future consequences.

Linking past and present reactionary movements, "Change They Can't Believe In" rigorously examines the motivations and political implications associated with today's Tea Party.

The populist phenomenon is often identified with the election of Donald Trump in November 2016. But the political, moral, and social realities for which Trump was a symbol both predated his candidacy and achieved independent fulfillment in countries as disparate as the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Brazil. At the center of the populist challenge, this volume proposes, are two questions. The first revolves around the question of sovereignty: who governs a country? This question is at the center of all contemporary populist initiatives and has been posed with increasing urgency as the bureaucratic burden of what has come to be called the administrative state has intruded more and more forcefully upon the political and social life of Western democracies. The second key question, one related to the issue of sovereignty, concerns what Lincoln called "public sentiment": the widespread, almost taken-for-granted yet nonetheless palpable affirmation by a people of their national identity. The erosion of national sovereignty to which populism is a response has been accompanied by an erosion of that shared national consensus. Increasingly, the traditional pillars of this consensus-the binding forces of family, religion, civic duty, and patriotic filiation-have faltered before the blandishments of transnational progressivism. The debate sparked by these problems has turned on a number of high-profile issues which this volume seeks to address, including immigration, free trade, foreign policy, religious freedom, and the question of citizenship.

This book examines attempts by the Conservative party in the interwar years to capture the 'brains' of the new electorate and create a counter-culture to what they saw as the intellectual hegemony of the Left. It tells the fascinating story of the Bonar Law Memorial College, Ashridge, founded in 1929 as a 'College of citizenship' to provide political education through both teaching and publications. The College aimed at creating 'Conservative Fabians' who were to publish and disseminate Conservative literature, which meant not only explicitly political works but literary, historical and cultural work that carried implicit Conservative messages. This book modifies our understanding of the history of the Conservative party and popular Conservatism, but also more generally of the history of intellectual debate in Britain. It sheds new light on the history of the 'middlebrow' and how that category became a weapon for the Conservatives. -- .

Only the second woman to hold office at 10 Downing Street, Theresa May inherits the most difficult political mandate of recent times: to negotiate Britain's exit from the European Union and re-establish its place in the wider world. She is known as an uncompromising and fiercely moral political operator who has risen through the ranks through profound competence, instead of cronyism. Her premiership promises to overthrow what she calls the "Nasty Party" image the Conservative Party has brought upon itself through infighting, career-politicking, and dishonesty, and restore a steady hand to the tiller of a nation in turmoil. But there is much more to her story than has emerged in the wake of the Brexit vote. Here, experienced journalist and political observer Virginia Blackburn examines the astonishing career, the politics, and the quite remarkable life of the woman who is tasked with changing not just the public face of the Conservatives, but the very fabric of the United Kingdom itself.

The sensational second volume of Charles Moore's bestselling authorized biography of the Iron Lady In June 1983 Margaret Thatcher won the biggest increase in a government's Parliamentary majority in British electoral history. Over the next four years, as Charles Moore relates in this central volume of his uniquely authoritative biography, Britain's first woman prime minister changed the course of her country's history and that of the world, often by sheer force of will. The book reveals as never before how she faced down the Miners' Strike, transformed relations with Europe, privatized the commanding heights of British industry and continued the reinvigoration of the British economy. It describes her role on the world stage with dramatic immediacy, identifying Mikhail Gorbachev as 'a man to do business with' before he became leader of the Soviet Union, and then persistently pushing him and Ronald Reagan, her great ideological soulmate, to order world affairs according to her vision. For the only time since Churchill, she ensured that Britain had a central place in dealings between the superpowers. But even at her zenith she was beset by difficulties. The beloved Reagan two-timed her during the US invasion of Grenada. She lost the minister to whom she was personally closest to scandal and almost had to resign as a result of the Westland affair. She found herself isolated within her own government over Europe. She was at odds with the Queen over the Commonwealth and South Africa. She bullied senior colleagues and she set in motion the poll tax. Both these last would later return to wound her, fatally. In all this, Charles Moore has had unprecedented access to all Mrs Thatcher's private and government papers. The participants in the events described have been so frank in interview that we feel we are eavesdropping on their conversations as they pass. We look over Mrs Thatcher's shoulder as she vigorously annotates documents, so seeing her views on many particular issues in detail, and we understand for the first time how closely she relied on a handful of trusted advisors to help shape her views and carry out her will. We see her as a public performer, an often anxious mother, a workaholic and the first woman in western democratic history who truly came to dominate her country in her time. In the early hours of 12 October 1984, during the Conservative party conference in Brighton, the IRA attempted to assassinate her. She carried on within hours to give her leader's speech at the conference (and later went on to sign the Anglo-Irish agreement). One of her many left-wing critics, watching her that day, said 'I don't approve of her as Prime Minister, but by God she's a great tank commander.' This titanic figure, with all her capacities and all her flaws, storms from these pages as from no other book.

In Identifying a Free Society Milan Zafirovski offers a holistic sociological approach to modern free society as a total social system. The book examines the main conditions and indicators of modern free society such as democracy, a free economy, a free culture, and a free civil society, hence political, economic, cultural, and individual liberty entwined with equality and justice. It provides specific and aggregate free-society estimates for Western and related societies based on a variety of objective rankings, data, and reports.

The Christian Right of the 1980s forged its political identity largely in response to what it perceived as liberal 'judicial activism'. Robert Daniel Rubin tells this story as it played out in Mobile, Alabama. There, a community conflict pitted a group of conservative evangelicals, a sympathetic federal judge, and a handful of conservative intellectuals against a religious agnostic opposed to prayer in schools, and a school system accused of promoting a religion called 'secular humanism'. The twists in the Mobile conflict speak to the changes and continuities that marked the relationship of 1980s' religious conservatism to democracy, the courts, and the Constitution. By alternately focusing its gaze on the local conflict and related events in Washington, DC, this book weaves a captivating narrative. Historians, political scientists, and constitutional lawyers will find, in Rubin's study, a challenging new perspective on the history of the Christian Right in the United States.

A former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State and currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Kim R. Holmes surveys the state of liberalism in America today and finds that it is becoming its opposite-illiberalism-abandoning the precepts of open-mindedness and respect for individual rights, liberties, and the rule of law upon which the country was founded, and becoming instead an intolerant, rigidly dogmatic ideology that abhors dissent and stifles free speech. Tracing the new illiberalism historically to the radical Enlightenment, a movement that rejected the classic liberal ideas of the moderate Enlightenment that were prominent in the American Founding, Holmes argues that today's liberalism has forsaken its American roots, incorporating instead the authoritarian, anti-clerical, and anti-capitalist prejudices of the radical and largely European Left. The result is a closing of the American liberal mind. Where once freedom of speech and expression were sacrosanct, today liberalism employs speech codes, trigger warnings, boycotts, and shaming rituals to stifle freedom of thought, expression, and action. It is no longer appropriate to call it liberalism at all, but illiberalism-a set of ideas in politics, government, and popular culture that increasingly reflects authoritarian and even anti-democratic values, and which is devising new strategies of exclusiveness to eliminate certain ideas and people from the political process. Although illiberalism has always been a temptation for American liberals, lurking in the radical fringes of the Left, it is today the dominant ideology of progressive liberal circles. This makes it a new danger not only to the once venerable tradition of liberalism, but to the American nation itself, which needs a viable liberal tradition that pursues social and economic equality while respecting individual liberties.