The development of the welfare state has been a central concern across the political spectrum since the breakdown of the Keynesian economic model in the 1970s. The Politics of Social Welfare examines how the apparent consensus on social welfare issues was undermined at both practical and theoretical levels. Major elements of the welfare state did survive the downsizing projects of the 1980s, but there was a significant and lasting transformation of the environment in which social welfare matters were discussed. European social democrats and American liberals effectively conceded that the welfare system does not always serve the best interests of the poor. The focus on the American experience highlights the manner in which the right have been able to deride previous antipoverty efforts and exploit concepts such as 'the feminization of poverty', the 'underclass' the and 'dependency culture'. In contrast the centre and the left, inhibited by their perception of the politics of taxing and spending, have been unable to articulate their ideas in a similarly populist fashion.

This book offers an original interpretation of the achievement of Leo Strauss, stressing how his ideas and followers reshaped the American conservative movement. According to this study, Strauss and his disciples came to influence the establishment Right almost by accident. The conservative movement that reached out to Strauss and his legacy was extremely fluid and lacked a self-confident leadership. Conservative activists and journalists felt a desperate need for academic acceptability, which they thought Strauss and his disciples would furnish. They also became deeply concerned with the problem of value relativism, which self-described conservatives thought Strauss had effectively addressed. But until recently, neither Strauss nor his disciples have considered themselves to be conservatives. Strauss's followers continue to view themselves as stalwart Truman-Kennedy Democrats and liberal internationalists. Contrary to another misconception, Straussians have never wished to convert Americans to ancient political ideals and practices, except in a very selective rhetorical fashion. Strauss and his disciples have been avid champions of American modernity, and timeless values as interpreted by Strauss and his followers often look starkly contemporary."

First published in 1980, The Meaning of Conservatism is now recognized as a major contribution to political thought, and the liveliest and most provocative modern statement of the traditional "paleo-conservative" position. Roger Scruton challenges those who would regard themselves as conservatives, and also their opponents. Conservatism, he argues, has little in common with liberalism, and is only tenuously related to the market economy, to monetarism, to free enterprise, or to capitalism. It involves neither hostility toward the state, not the desire to limit the state's obligation toward the citizen. Its conceptions of society, law, and citizenship regard the individual not as the premise but as the conclusion of politics. At the same time it is fundamentally opposed to the ethic of social justice, to equality of station, opportunity, income, and achievement, and to the attempt to bring major institutions of society - such as schools and universities - under government control. Its root conceptions are those of loyalty, allegiance, community, and tradition. The conservative vision of society is one in which autonomous institutions and private initiative predominate, and in which the law protects the shared values that bind the community together, rather than the rights of those who would blow the community apart.

Political analyst Mark Smith offers the most original and compelling explanation yet of why America has swung to the right in recent decades. How did the GOP transform itself from a party outgunned and outmaneuvered into one that defines the nation's most important policy choices?

Conventional wisdom attributes the Republican resurgence to a political bait and switch--the notion that conservatives win elections on social issues like abortion and religious expression, but once in office implement far-reaching policies on the economic issues downplayed during campaigns. Smith illuminates instead the eye-opening reality that economic matters have become more central, not less, to campaigns and the public agenda. He analyzes a half century of speeches, campaign advertisements, party platforms, and intellectual writings, systematically showing how Republican politicians and conservative intellectuals increasingly gave economic justifications for policies they once defended through appeals to freedom. He explains how Democrats similarly conceived economic justifications for their own policies, but unlike Republicans they changed positions on issues rather than simply offering new arguments and thus helped push the national discourse inexorably to the right.

"The Right Talk" brings clarity, reason, and hard-nosed evidence to a contentious subject. Certain to enrich the debate about the conservative ascendancy in America, this book will provoke discussions and reactions for years to come.

The transformation of Southern politics over the past fifty years has been one of the most significant developments in American political life. The emergence of formidable Republican strength in the previously solid Democratic South has generated a novel and highly competitive national battle for control of Congress. Tracing the slow and difficult rise of Republicans in the South over five decades, Earl and Merle Black tell the remarkable story of political upheaval. The Rise of Southern Republicans provides a compelling account of growing competitiveness in Southern party politics and elections. Through extraordinary research and analysis, the authors track Southern voters' shifting economic, cultural, and religious loyalties, black/white conflicts and interests during and after federal civil rights intervention, and the struggles and adaptations of congressional candidates and officials. A newly competitive South, the authors argue, means a newly competitive and revitalized America. The story of how the South became a two-party region is ultimately the story of two-party politics in America at the end of the twentieth century. Earl and Merle Black have written a bible for anyone who wants to understand regional and national congressional politics over the past half-century. Because the South is now at the epicenter of Republican and Democratic strategies to control Congress, The Rise of Southern Republicans is essential to understanding the dynamics of current American politics.

For more than a millennium, beginning in the early Middle Ages, most Western Christians lived in societies that sought to be comprehensively Christian--ecclesiastically, economically, legally, and politically. That is to say, most Western Christians lived in Christendom. But in a gradual process beginning a few hundred years ago, Christendom weakened and finally crumbled. Today, most Christians in the world live in pluralistic political communities. And Christians themselves have very different opinions about what to make of the demise of Christendom and how to understand their status and responsibilities in a post-Christendom world. Politics After Christendom argues that Scripture leaves Christians well-equipped for living in a world such as this. Scripture gives no indication that Christians should strive to establish some version of Christendom. Instead, it prepares them to live in societies that are indifferent or hostile to Christianity, societies in which believers must live faithful lives as sojourners and exiles. Politics After Christendom explains what Scripture teaches about political community and about Christians' responsibilities within their own communities. As it pursues this task, Politics After Christendom makes use of several important theological ideas that Christian thinkers have developed over the centuries. These ideas include Augustine's Two-Cities concept, the Reformation Two-Kingdoms category, natural law, and a theology of the biblical covenants. Politics After Christendom brings these ideas together in a distinctive way to present a model for Christian political engagement. In doing so, it interacts with many important thinkers, including older theologians (e.g., Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin), recent secular political theorists (e.g., Rawls, Hayek, and Dworkin), contemporary political-theologians (e.g., Hauerwas, O'Donovan, and Wolterstorff), and contemporary Christian cultural commentators (e.g., MacIntyre, Hunter, and Dreher). Part 1 presents a political theology through a careful study of the biblical story, giving special attention to the covenants God has established with his creation and how these covenants inform a proper view of political community. Part 1 argues that civil governments are legitimate but penultimate, and common but not neutral. It concludes that Christians should understand themselves as sojourners and exiles in their political communities. They ought to pursue justice, peace, and excellence in these communities, but remember that these communities are temporary and thus not confuse them with the everlasting kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. Christians' ultimate citizenship is in this new-creation kingdom. Part 2 reflects on how the political theology developed in Part 1 provides Christians with a framework for thinking about perennial issues of political and legal theory. Part 2 does not set out a detailed public policy or promote a particular political ideology. Rather, it suggests how Christians might think about important social issues in a wise and theologically sound way, so that they might be better equipped to respond well to the specific controversies they face today. These issues include race, religious liberty, family, economics, justice, rights, authority, and civil resistance. After considering these matters, Part 2 concludes by reflecting on the classical liberal and conservative traditions, as well as recent challenges to them by nationalist and progressivist movements.

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 the perception that America is in danger directly informs how Tea Party supporters think and act.

In a new afterword, Parker and Barreto reflect on the Tea Party's recent initiatives, including the 2013 government shutdown, and evaluate their prospects for the 2016 election.

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."

The failure of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism remains one of the most challenging problems of twentieth-century European history. The German Right, 1918-1930 sheds new light on this problem by examining the role that the non-Nazi Right played in the destabilization of Weimar democracy in the period before the emergence of the Nazi Party as a mass party of middle-class protest. Larry Eugene Jones identifies a critical divide within the German Right between those prepared to work within the framework of Germany's new republican government and those irrevocably committed to its overthrow. This split was only exacerbated by the course of German economic development in the 1920s, leaving the various organizations that comprised the German Right defenceless against the challenge of National Socialism. At no point was the disunity of the non-Nazi Right in the face of Nazism more apparent than in the September 1930 Reichstag elections.

An explosive expose of the man who devoted his career to shackling democracy - and succeeded. Libertarian billionaires are using their wealth and power to drastically curtail the US democratic process, disempowering ordinary citizens whilst entrenching the influence of corporations as never before. In Democracy in Chains, award-winning historian Nancy MacLean reveals how the ideas of Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan have been used to undermine the power of voters in a country whose Constitution is founded on the principle 'We the people'. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, this chilling movement has a loyalist in the White House, as well as supporters in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts. Democracy in Chains is a timely, important book, which should be read by anybody interested in the future of democracy.

England's Discontents unpacks the genealogy of British identities over the last two hundred years as they have been shaped by the main political cultures and their interactions with cultural politics. Conservatism, social liberalism, economic liberalism, social democracy and socialism in partnership and conflict, have forged different models of national belonging and identity. Wayne draws on Gramsci's work to reassess debates about Britishness and renew Gramsci's relevance to understanding our contemporary discontents. In doing so, he reveals that England's enduring attachment to economic liberalism is in danger of eroding all other political cultures, even conservatism, liberalism and the British state.

Since German reunification in 1990, there has been widespread concern about marginalized young people who, faced with bleak prospects for their future, have embraced increasingly violent forms of racist nationalism that glorify the country's Nazi past. The Management of Hate, Nitzan Shoshan's riveting account of the year and a half he spent with these young right-wing extremists in East Berlin, reveals how they contest contemporary notions of national identity and defy the cliches that others use to represent them. Shoshan situates them within what he calls the governance of affect, a broad body of discourses and practices aimed at orchestrating their attitudes toward cultural difference--from legal codes and penal norms to rehabilitative techniques and pedagogical strategies. Governance has conventionally been viewed as rational administration, while emotions have ordinarily been conceived of as individual states. Shoshan, however, convincingly questions both assumptions. Instead, he offers a fresh view of governance as pregnant with affect and of hate as publicly mediated and politically administered. Shoshan argues that the state's policies push these youths into a right-extremist corner instead of integrating them in ways that could curb their nationalist racism. His point is certain to resonate across European and non-European contexts where, amid robust xenophobic nationalisms, hate becomes precisely the object of public dispute. Powerful and compelling, The Management of Hate provides a rare and disturbing look inside Germany's right-wing extremist world, and shines critical light on a German nationhood haunted by its own historical contradictions.

Political economy had been studied long before Adam Smith. But Wealth of Nations (1776) established it for the first time as a separate science. Smith based his arguments on vast historical knowledge, and developed his principles with remarkable clarity. What set this work apart was its statement of the doctrine of natural liberty. Smith believed that "man's self-interest is God's providence" - that if government abstained from interfering with free competition, the invisible hand of capitalism would emerge from the competing claims of individual self-interest. Industrial problems would be resolved and maximum efficiency reached. After more than two centuries, Smith's work still stands as the best statement and defense of the fundamental principles of capitalism.

Organizing Against Democracy investigates some of the most important challenges modern democracies face, filling a distinctive gap in the literature, both empirically and theoretically. Ellinas examines the attempts of three of the most extreme European far-right parties to establish roots in local societies, and the responses of democratic actors. He offers a theory of local party development to analyze the many factors affecting the evolution of far-right parties at the subnational level. Using extraordinarily rich data, the author examines the 'lives' of local far-right party organizations in Greece, Germany and Slovakia, studying thousands of party activities and interviewing dozens of party leaders and functionaries, and antifascists. He goes on to explore how and why extreme parties succeed in some local settings while, in others, they fail. This book broadens our understanding of right-wing extremism, illuminating the factors limiting its corrosiveness.

This book is a creative synthesis of the published scholarly research on the contemporary American right wing from the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy to the election of Ronald Reagan as President. Unlike most other syntheses, it directly engages that research by critically analyzing the major explanations emerging from it. Emphasizing neither the lives and backgrounds of the scholars that he discusses nor paradigms within the social sciences as a whole, William Hixson focuses on the way the concepts of individual researchers have interacted with accumulating evidence on the American right, and how this evidence has led to new and more comprehensive theories. Hixson first summarizes and evaluates the research on the major developments analyzed by scholars--the social sources of "McCarthyism," the "radical right" of the early 1960s, George Wallace's constituency in his Presidential campaigns, and the emerging "new right" of the late 1970s. He then compares the interpretations of the two most influential students of the right wing, Seymour Martin Lipset and Michael Paul Rogin. Finally, he offers his own explanations, suggesting that the right wing is both a mass and elite phenomenon, that its durability comes from its appeal to the upwardly mobile, especially in economically expanding regions, and that far from being either "traditionalist" or reactive, it represents a proactive defense of values associated with late nineteenth-century "modernization." Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Second revised edition of a study of the Conservative government of 1970-74 which discusses and attacks recent revisionist interpretations which exonerate Heath from culpability for the economic and industrial meltdown of 1972-74. Reveals the economic, political and electoral misjudgements of the Heath government.

Faced with the ‘total onslaught’ by its enemies, in 1979, Apartheid South Africa established Vlakplaas’, a 100-hectare farm nestling in the hills outside Pretoria on the Hennops River – as a secret operation under the arm of C1, a counter-terrorism division of the South African Police headed by Brigadier Schoon.

The first phase of Vlakplaas operations, up until 1989, was aimed at fighting the enemy: the armed wings of the liberation movements, the African National Congress’s Umkhonto we Sizwe (or ‘MK’), the Pan Africanist Congress’s Azanian People’s Liberation Army (or APLA) and the South African Communist Party. The second phase was ‘fighting organized crime’ in which Vlakplaas itself seamlessly adopted the mantle of organized crime in the notorious downtown area of Johannesburg’s Hillbrow. The final phase, the most destructive, was as the murky ‘Third Force’ that destabilized the country in an orgy of violence in the run-up to its first democratic elections, in 1994.

Operating within South Africa as well as beyond the country’s borders, it will never been known how many victims can be attributed to the Vlakplaas agenda – with much of the execution taking place on the farm itself – but a conservative figure of 1,000 murders and assassinations has been mooted.

From President Nixon's historic visit to China in 1972 to the aftermath of the Tiananmen tragedy, this book examines the changing perceptions of the United States articulated by China's "America Watchers," whose occupation is to interpret the "beautiful imperialist" for China's elite and public. While other studies have looked at the behavioral history of U.S.-China relations, this is the first to probe the perceptual dimension.

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.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.

‘A witty, lucid investigation into one of the great political mysteries of our time: the enduring love felt by the British people for the party which regularly manages to persuade them, against all the evidence, that it has their best interests at heart’ JONATHAN COE, author of Bournville _________________________________________________________________________________ The story of the most successful political party in the world, and a nation made in its image.   Since 2010, the Conservative Party has presided over countless corruption scandals, blundered its way through a pandemic and trapped Britain in a cycle of permanent dysfunction. This has coincided with four election wins in a row, each one with a larger share of the vote than the last. How? The strange dissonance between the Conservatives’ destructive record in government and their record of victory – which has seen them suffer only seven major defeats in the last 150 years – is one of the defining riddles of British politics. Tory Nation sets out to solve this puzzle. With dazzling clarity and insight, Samuel Earle explores the roots of the current crisis and the real reasons for the Conservatives’ success, from their ruling class origins in the eighteenth century and their disproportionate influence on the British press to their stranglehold over national identity. He also sheds light on the Conservatives’ historic appeal among the working classes and why the Labour Party so often disappoints.   Tory Nation describes the making of Britain through one party’s astonishing staying power. It’s only by reaching into our history, Earle argues, that we can understand how we got here – and how we can find a way out _________________________________________________________________________________ 'Finally, someone has explained why the British electorate behaves like Turkeys voting for Christmas. Sam Earle has set out clearly and eloquently why our democracy is incapable of solving our political problems' ROBERT VERKAIK, author of Posh Boys ‘Eviscerating. Less a political book and more a mystery novel . . . untangles the riddle of the strange cognitive dissonance between the Tories’ bumbling, destructive political record and their inexplicable electoral success’i-D  

Since the 1980s, a ritualized opposition in legal thought between a conservative 'originalism' and a liberal 'living constitutionalism' has obscured the aggressively contested tradition committed to, and mobilization of arguments for, constitutional restoration and redemption within the broader postwar American conservative movement. Conservatives and the Constitution is the first history of the political and intellectual trajectory of this foundational tradition and mobilization. By looking at the deep stories told either by identity groups or about what conservatives took to be flashpoint topics in the postwar period, Ken I. Kersch seeks to capture the developmental and integrative nature of postwar constitutional conservatism, challenging conservatives and liberals alike to more clearly see and understand both themselves and their presumed political and constitutional opposition. Conservatives and the Constitution makes a unique contribution to our understanding of modern American conservatism, and to the constitutional thought that has, in critical ways, informed and defined it.