Conservatism was born as an anguished attack on democracy. So argues Don Herzog in this arrestingly detailed exploration of England's responses to the French Revolution. "Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders" ushers the reader into the politically lurid world of Regency England.

Deftly weaving social and intellectual history, Herzog brings to life the social practices of the Enlightenment. In circulating libraries and Sunday schools, deferential subjects developed an avid taste for reading; in coffeehouses, alehouses, and debating societies, they boldly dared to argue about politics. Such conservatives as Edmund Burke gaped with horror, fearing that what radicals applauded as the rise of rationality was really popular stupidity or worse. Subjects, insisted conservatives, ought to defer to tradition--and be comforted by illusions.

Urging that abstract political theories are manifest in everyday life, Herzog unflinchingly explores the unsavory emotions that maintained and threatened social hierarchy. Conservatives dished out an unrelenting diet of contempt. But Herzog refuses to pretend that the day's radicals were saints. Radicals, he shows, invested in contempt as enthusiastically as did conservatives. Hairdressers became newly contemptible, even a cultural obsession. Women, workers, Jews, and blacks were all abused by their presumed superiors. Yet some of the lowly subjects Burke had the temerity to brand a swinish multitude fought back.

How were England's humble subjects transformed into proud citizens? And just how successful was the transformation? At once history and political theory, absorbing and disquieting, "Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders" challenges our own commitments to and anxieties about democracy.

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.

Often considered a lost decade, a pause between the liberal Sixties and Reagan's Eighties, the 1970s were indeed a watershed era when the forces of a conservative counter-revolution cohered. These years marked a significant moral and cultural turning point in which the conservative movement became the motive force driving politics for the ensuing three decades.

Interpreting the movement as more than a backlash against the rampant liberalization of American culture, racial conflict, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, these provocative and innovative essays look below the surface, discovering the tectonic shifts that paved the way for Reagan's America. They reveal strains at the heart of the liberal coalition, resulting from struggles over jobs, taxes, and neighborhood reconstruction, while also investigating how the deindustrialization of northern cities, the rise of the suburbs, and the migration of people and capital to the Sunbelt helped conservatism gain momentum in the twentieth century. They demonstrate how the forces of the right coalesced in the 1970s and became, through the efforts of grassroots activists and political elites, a movement to reshape American values and policies.

A penetrating and provocative portrait of a critical decade in American history, "Rightward Bound" illuminates the seeds of both the successes and the failures of the conservative revolution. It helps us understand how, despite conservatism's rise, persistent tensions remain today between its political power and the achievements of twentieth-century liberalism.

For more than four decades, George F. Will has attempted to discern the principles of the Western political tradition and apply them to America's civic life. Today, the stakes could hardly be higher. Vital questions about the nature of man, of rights, of equality, of majority rule are bubbling just beneath the surface of daily events in America. The Founders' vision, articulated first in the Declaration of Independence and carried out in the Constitution, gave the new republic a framework for government unique in world history. Their beliefs in natural rights, limited government, religious freedom, and in human virtue and dignity ushered in two centuries of American prosperity. Now, as Will shows, America has become an administrative state, just as destructive trends have overtaken family life and higher education. Semi-autonomous executive agencies wield essentially unaccountable power. Congress has failed in its duty to exercise its legislative powers. And the executive branch has slipped the Constitution's leash. In the intellectual battle between the vision of Founding Fathers like James Madison, who advanced the notion of natural rights that pre-exist government, and the progressivism first advanced by Woodrow Wilson, the Founders have been losing. It's time to reverse America's political fortunes. Expansive, intellectually thrilling, and written with the erudite wit that has made Will beloved by millions of readers, The Conservative Sensibility is an extraordinary new book from one of America's most celebrated political writers.

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.

From Derek Hunter-one of the most entertaining political writers today-comes an insightful, alarming look at how progressives have took over academia, pop culture, and journalism in order to declare everything liberal great, and everything great, liberal. Progressives love to attack conservatives as anti-science, wallowing in fake news, and culturally backwards. But who are the real denialists here There are three institutions in American life run by gatekeepers who have stopped letting in anyone who questions their liberal script: academia, journalism, and pop culture. They use their cult-like groupthink consensus as "proof" that science, reporting, and entertainment will always back up the Democrats. They give their most political members awards, and then say the awards make their liberal beliefs true. Worse, they are using that consensus to pull the country even further to the left, by bullying and silencing dissent from even those they've allowed in. Just a few years ago, the media pretended they were honest brokers. Now a CNN segment is seven liberals versus a sacrificial lamb. MSNBC ate their sacrificial lamb. Well, Chris Matthews did. Tired of being forced to believe or else, Derek Hunter exposes the manufactured truths and unwritten commandments of the Establishment. With research and a biting, sarcastic wit, he explains:, â The growing role of celebrities in the political world, and movies with a "message" that dominate awards season, but rarely the box office., â The unquestioning reporting on "studies" that don't prove what they say they prove., â The hidden bias of "fact-checking," when the media cherry picks which facts they check., â Celebrity scientists like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson blending liberal activism with pretend expertise outside their fields.Clever, controversial, and convincing, Derek Hunter's book gets to the root of America's biggest cultural war lies.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and demise of the Soviet Union, prominent Western thinkers began to suggest that liberal democracy had triumphed decisively on the world stage. Having banished fascism in World War II, liberalism had now buried communism, and the result would be an end of major ideological conflicts, as liberal norms and institutions spread to every corner of the globe. With the Brexit vote in Great Britain, the resurgence of right-wing populist parties across the European continent, and the surprising ascent of Donald Trump to the American presidency, such hopes have begun to seem hopelessly naïve. The far right is back, and serious rethinking is in order. In Dangerous Minds, Ronald Beiner traces the deepest philosophical roots of such right-wing ideologues as Richard Spencer, Aleksandr Dugin, and Steve Bannon to the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger—and specifically to the aspects of their thought that express revulsion for the liberal-democratic view of life. Beiner contends that Nietzsche's hatred and critique of bourgeois, egalitarian societies has engendered new disciples on the populist right who threaten to overturn the modern liberal consensus. Heidegger, no less than Nietzsche, thoroughly rejected the moral and political values that arose during the Enlightenment and came to power in the wake of the French Revolution. Understanding Heideggerian dissatisfaction with modernity, and how it functions as a philosophical magnet for those most profoundly alienated from the reigning liberal-democratic order, Beiner argues, will give us insight into the recent and unexpected return of the far right. Beiner does not deny that Nietzsche and Heidegger are important thinkers; nor does he seek to expel them from the history of philosophy. But he does advocate that we rigorously engage with their influential thought in light of current events—and he suggests that we place their severe critique of modern liberal ideals at the center of this engagement.

In this essential manifesto of the new libertarian movement, New York Times bestselling author and president of FreedomWorks Matt Kibbe makes a stand for individual liberty and shows us what we must do to preserve our freedom. Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff is a rational yet passionate argument that defends the principles upon which America was founded-principles shared by citizens across the political spectrum. The Constitution grants each American the right to self-determination, to be protected from others whose actions are destructive to their lives and property. Yet as Kibbe persuasively shows, the political and corporate establishment consolidates its power by infringing upon our independence-from taxes to regulations to spying-ultimately eroding the ideals, codified in law, that have made the United States unique in history. Kibbe offers a surefire plan for reclaiming our inalienable rights and regaining control of our lives, grounded in six simple rules: * Don't hurt people: Free people just want to be left alone, not hassled or harmed by someone else with an agenda or designs over their life and property. * Don't take people's stuff: America's founders fought to ensure property rights and our individual right to the fruits of our labors. * Take responsibility: Liberty takes responsibility. Don't sit around waiting for someone else to solve your problems. * Work for it: For every action there is an equal reaction. Work hard and you'll be rewarded. * Mind your own business: Free people live and let live. * Fight the power: Thanks to the Internet and the decentralization of knowledge, there are more opportunities than ever to take a stand against corrupt authority.

In this well-researched book, Philip Massolin takes a fascinating look at the forces of modernization that swept through English Canada, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century. Victorian values - agrarian, religious - and the adherence to a rigid set of philosophical and moral codes were being replaced with those intrinsic to the modern age: industrial, secular, scientific, and anti-intellectual. This work analyses the development of a modern consciousness through the eyes of the most fervent critics of modernity - adherents to the moral and value systems associated with Canada's tory tradition. The work and thought of social and moral critics Harold Innis, Donald Creighton, Vincent Massey, Hilda Neatby, George P. Grant, W.L. Morton, Northrop Frye, and Marshall McLuhan are considered for their views of modernization and for their strong opinions on the nature and implications of the modern age. These scholars shared concerns over the dire effects of modernity and the need to attune Canadians to the realities of the modern age. Whereas most Canadians were oblivious to the effects of modernization, these critics perceived something ominous: far from being a sign of true progress, modernization was a blight on cultural development. In spite of the efforts of these critics, Canada emerged as a fully modern nation by the 1970s. Because of the triumph of modernity, the toryism that the critics advocated ceased to be a defining feature of the nation's life. Modernization, in short, contributed to the passing of an intellectual tradition centuries in the making and rapidly led to the ideological underpinnings of today's modern Canada.

This collection of research explores the relationship between the Conservative party and British society since 1880 by focusing on the key themes of ideology, national identity, gender and policy. The focus of the text is not so much on the Conservative party as an institution, as on the party's wider significance in British political culture. It seeks to explain the Conservatives extraordinary electoral success in this period and asserts that this success was both problematic and historically contingent. Part one of this study addresses the question of conservative ideology; part two analyzes the role of national identity in Conservative discourse and policy; part three assesses how Conservatives negotiated the gendered nature of popular politics both before and after the arrival of the equal franchise, and part four examines how Conservative understanding of the relationship between state and society were translated into specific aspects of social and economic policy.

Radical partisanship among ordinary Americans is rising, and it poses grave risks for the prospects of American democracy. Political violence is rising in the United States, with Republicans and Democrats divided along racial and ethnic lines that spurred massive bloodshed and democratic collapse earlier in the nation's history. The January 6, 2021 insurrection and the partisan responses that ensued are a vivid illustration of how deep these currents run. How did American politics become so divided that we cannot agree on how to categorize an attack on our own Capitol? For over four years, through a series of surveys and experiments, Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason have been studying radicalism among ordinary American partisans. In this groundbreaking book, they draw on new evidence-as well as insights from history, psychology, and political science-to put our present partisan fractiousness in context and to explain broad patterns of political and social change. Early chapters reveal the scope of the problem, who radical partisans are, and trends over time, while later chapters identify the conditions that partisans say justify violence and test how elections, political violence, and messages from leaders enflame or pacify radical views. Kalmoe and Mason find that ordinary partisanship is far more dangerous than pundits and scholars have recognized. However, these findings are not a forecast of inevitable doom; the current climate also brings opportunities to confront democratic threats head-on and to create a more inclusive politics. Timely and thought-provoking, Radical American Partisanship is vital reading for understanding our current political landscape.

LIBERTARIANISM by John Hospers The Original Book that Inspired the Worldwide Political Movement John Hospers on What Libertarianism Is: 1) No one is anyone else's master, and no one is anyone else's slave. 2) Other people's lives are not yours to dispose of. 3) No human being should be a non-voluntary mortgage on the life of another. Dr. Hospers sees these as three versions of the same absolute right of personal liberty. In other words, assuming we are talking about mentally-able individuals, no person can make their life better by reducing the liberty of another person. For the same reason that slavery is wrong, it is equally wrong to involuntarily deprive others of their time or money. The basic human rights of life and liberty cannot exist without a right to property. The benefits I create for myself are MINE, and to take them away (or to make me work for another's benefit without my consent) is wrong. RIGHTS are ONLY to be understood as involving duties of forbearance or restraint. In other words, so-and-so's right to property is nothing more than the duty that others have to refrain from taking that property for themselves. Rights belong naturally to us. Rights are not something given to us by governments. Rights are claims that we make AGAINST governments If I have a right to benefit from my own labor, then the government is wrong to take any of those benefits from me without my consent. "The only proper role of government ... is that of the protector of the citizen against aggression by other individuals." Because governments has the role of "protector," government must possess enough force/power to protect its citizens (e.g., by having a police force and/or military and a related system for punishing or neutralizing those who practice aggression against others). Aggression against others includes unintended harms to others. Government also has a role in deciding and settling claims of harm by others. Other than providing for these legitimate functions, government has no right to tax its citizens for any purpose whatsoever. Government should intervene only in a RETALIATORY situation. The government must never INITIATE an action to create a better world -- it is not the business of government to make an advance decision about what counts as benefit. Through laws, government can prohibit various aggressive actions, but it cannot require the bringing about of supposedly beneficial ones. Government charity, social programs, public works, etc., require one person to pay for the benefits that another person will receive. However, doing this through involuntary taxation is theft of property. LIBERTARIANISM by John Hospers The POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY WHOSE TIME HAS COME "For many decades, news reports on the intellectual activities of the younger generation have been confined almost exclusively to advocates of statism and collectivism. Only recently have there appeared the first acknowledgements, in the newspapers, of a rising interest among the younger generation in political philosophy that stands in radical contrast to this authoritarian trend: Libertarianism. "Now, Professor John Hospers, Director of the School of Philosophy of the University of Southern California, has given us, in his latest book, a clear statement of the central political-economic positions of this young intellectual movement. The book is offered, not as an original work of philosophy, but rather as an attempt to delineate the major positions on which most Libertarians would agree -- and to answer many of the objections and questions with which Libertarians have to contend. "Libertarianism is very simply and clearly written and requires no technical knowledge on the part of the reader. Enjoyable, informative reading." - Nathaniel Branden, Author of THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-ESTEEM

From Subject to Citizen offers an original account of the Second Empire (1852-1870) as a turning point in modern French political culture: a period in which thinkers of all political persuasions combined forces to create the participatory democracy alive in France today. Here Sudhir Hazareesingh probes beyond well-known features of the Second Empire, its centralized government and authoritarianism, and reveals the political, social, and cultural advances that enabled publicists to engage an increasingly educated public on issues of political order and good citizenship. He portrays the 1860s in particular as a remarkably intellectual decade during which Bonapartists, legitimists, liberals, and republicans applied their ideologies to the pressing problem of decentralization. Ideals such as communal freedom and civic cohesion rapidly assumed concrete and lasting meaning for many French people as their country entered the age of nationalism. With the restoration of universal suffrage for men in 1851, constitutionalist political ideas and values could no longer be expressed within the narrow confines of the Parisian elite. Tracing these ideas through the books, pamphlets, articles, speeches, and memoirs of the period, Hazareesingh examines a discourse that connects the central state and local political life. In a striking reappraisal of the historical roots of current French democracy, he ultimately shows how the French constructed an ideal of citizenship that was "local in form but national in substance." Originally published in 1998. 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.

Since the nineteenth century, Greek financial and economic crises have been an enduring problem, most recently engulfing the European Union and EU member states. The latest crisis, beginning in 2010, has been - and continues to be - a headline news story across the continent. With a radically different approach and methodology, this anthropological study brings new insights to our understanding of the Greek crises by combining historical material from before and after the nineteenth century War of Independence with extensive longitudinal ethnographic research. The ethnography covers two distinct periods - the 1980s and the current crisis years - and compares Mystras and Kefala, two villages in southern Greece, each of which has responded quite differently to economic circumstances. Analysis of this divergence highlights the book's central point that an ideology of aspiration to work in the public sector, pervasive in Greek society since the nineteenth century, has been a major contributor to Greece's problematic economic development. Shedding new light on previously under-researched anthropological and sociological aspects of the Greek economic crisis, this book will be essential reading for economists, anthropologists and historians.

Dr. Thayer, who was American press attache in Tokyo from 1962 to 1965, presents a detailed account of conservative politics in Japan. Although he makes some historical comparisons, Dr. Thayer's main focus is on the contemporary workings of the Liberal Democratic Party, the ruling party in Japan. He identifies the political elements: the men are the Dietmen, the bureaucrats, the businessmen, the regional politicians, and the people; the institutions are the factions, the regional organizations of the Dietmen, the economic community and the various party organs. He shows how these elements work: how the Prime Minister is elected, how the cabinet is chosen, how party and government posts are filled, how policy is made, how a political decision is reached, and how the party is run. Contents: I. Introduction.; II. The Factions.; III. The Economic Community.; IV. The Party, the Prefectures, and the People.; V. The Elections.; VI. Choosing the President.; VII. Making a Cabinet.; VIII. Formulating Policy.; IX. Reaching a Decision.; X. Running the Party.; XI. Conclusions.; Index. Originally published in 1969. 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.