It's a belief that unites the left and right, psychologists and philosophers, writers and historians. It drives the headlines that surround us and the laws that touch our lives. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Dawkins, the roots of this belief have sunk deep into Western thought. Human beings, we're taught, are by nature selfish and governed by self-interest.

Humankind makes a new argument: that it is realistic, as well as revolutionary, to assume that people are good. By thinking the worst of others, we bring out the worst in our politics and economics too.

In this major book, internationally bestselling author Rutger Bregman takes some of the world's most famous studies and events and reframes them, providing a new perspective on the last 200,000 years of human history. From the real-life Lord of the Flies to the Blitz, a Siberian fox farm to an infamous New York murder, Stanley Milgram's Yale shock machine to the Stanford prison experiment, Bregman shows how believing in human kindness and altruism can be a new way to think - and act as the foundation for achieving true change in our society.

It is time for a new view of human nature.

The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs is a passionate yet analytical critique of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptural fundamentalists. Schimmel examines the ways in which otherwise intelligent and bright Jews, Christians, and Muslims defend their belief in the divine authorship of the Bible or of the Koran, and other religious beliefs derived from those claims, against overwhelming evidence and argument to the contrary from science, scholarship, common sense, and rational analysis. He also examines the motives, fears, and anxieties of scriptural fundamentalists that induce them to cling so tenaciously to their unreasonable beliefs.
Schimmel begins with reflections on his own journey from commitment to Orthodox Judaism, through doubts about its theological dogmas and doctrines, to eventual denial of their truth. He follows this with an examination of theological and philosophical debates about the proper relationships between faith, reason, and revelation. Schimmel then devotes separate chapters to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptural fundamentalism, noting their similarities and differences. He analyzes in depth the psychological and social reasons why people acquire, maintain, and protect unreasonable religious beliefs, and how they do so. Schimmel also discusses unethical and immoral consequences of scriptural fundamentalism, such as gender inequality, homophobia, lack of intellectual honesty, self-righteousness, intolerance, propagation of falsehood, and in some instances, the advocacy of violence and terrorism. He concludes with a discussion of why, when, and where it is appropriate to critique, challenge, and combat scriptural fundamentalists. The Tenacity ofUnreasonable Beliefs is thoughtful and provocative, written to encourage self-reflection and self-criticism, and to stimulate and to enlighten all who are interested in the psychology of religion and in religious fundamentalism.

Although conflict is a normal aspect of human life, mass media technologies are changing the dynamics of conflict and shaping strategies for deploying rituals. Rituals can provoke or escalate conflict; they can also mediate it. Media representations have long been instrumental in establishing, maintaining, and challenging political and economic power, as well as in determining the nature of religious practice. This collection of essays emerged from a two-year project based on collaboration between the Faculty of Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the Ritual Dynamics Collaborative Research Center at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Here, an interdisciplinary team of twenty-four scholars locates, describes, and explores cases in which media-driven rituals or ritually saturated media instigate, disseminate, or escalate conflict. Each chapter, built around global and local examples of ritualized, mediatized conflict, is multi-authored. The book's central question is: "When ritual and media interact (either by the mediatizing of ritual or by the ritualizing of media), how do the patterns of conflict change?"

Cognisant of the globalising context in which we find ourselves, as intellectuals we ought to ensure relevance in what we teach. This orientation, that prizes pedagogic relevance, has been raised as an objection to the decolonial call, being – at times – used to resist democratic change in the South African University. The contributions in this volume highlight the implications of the global relevance discourse through revealing the impact of decontextualised curricula.

Similarly, institutional democratisation and decolonisation ought not to be a turn to fundamentalist positions that recreate the essentialisms resisted through calls for decolonisation. As a critical response to such resistance to democratisation, this book showcases how decolonisation protects the constitutionally enshrined ideal of academic freedom and the freedom of scientific research. We argue that this framing of decoloniality should not be used to protect interests that seek to undermine the transformation of higher education. Concurrently, however, it is critical of decolonial positions that are essentialist and narrow in their manifestation and articulation.

Decolonisation as Democratisation suggests what is intended by a curriculum revisionist agenda that prizes decolonisation through bringing together academics working in South Africa and the global academy. This collaborative approach aims to facilitate critical reflexivity in our curriculum reform strategies while developing pragmatic solutions to current calls for decolonisation.

Black Natural Law offers a new way of understanding the African American political tradition. Iconoclastically attacking left (including James Baldwin and Audre Lorde), right (including Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson), and center (Barack Obama), Vincent William Lloyd charges that many Black leaders today embrace secular, white modes of political engagement, abandoning the deep connections between religious, philosophical, and political ideas that once animated Black politics. By telling the stories of Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Lloyd shows how appeals to a higher law, or God's law, have long fueled Black political engagement. Such appeals do not seek to implement divine directives on earth; rather, they pose a challenge to the wisdom of the world, and they mobilize communities for collective action. Black natural law is deeply democratic: while charismatic leaders may provide the occasion for reflection and mobilization, all are capable of discerning the higher law using our human capacities for reason and emotion. At a time when continuing racial injustice poses a deep moral challenge, the most powerful intellectual resources in the struggle for justice have been abandoned. Black Natural Law recovers a rich tradition, and it examines just how this tradition was forgotten. A Black intellectual class emerged that was disconnected from social movement organizing and beholden to white interests. Appeals to higher law became politically impotent: overly rational or overly sentimental. Recovering the Black natural law tradition provides a powerful resource for confronting police violence, mass incarceration, and today's gross racial inequities. Black Natural Law will change the way we understand natural law, a topic central to the Western ethical and political tradition. While drawing particularly on African American resources, Black Natural Law speaks to all who seek politics animated by justice.

This is one of four projected volumes to emerge from a massive, Pew-funded study that sought to answer the question: What happens when a revivalist religion based on scriptural orthodoxy participates in the volatile politics of the Third World? Is the result a democratic politics of the ballot box, or is it more like an authoritarian politics of command from on high? Does the evangelical faith of the Bible hinder or promote a politics of the ballot box? At a time when the global-political impact of another revivalist and scriptural religion - Islam - fuels vexed debate among analysts the world over, these volumes offer an unusual comparative perspective on a critical issue: The often combustible interaction of resurgent religion and the developing world's unstable politics. Three of the volumes focus on particular regions (Africa, Latin America and Asia). The fourth will address the broader question of evangelical Christianity and democracy in the global setting. The present volume considers the case of Asia. In his introduction, editor David Lumsdaine offers a historical overview of evangelicalism in the region, provides a theoretical framework for understanding evangelical impact on the global south, and summarizes the findings presented in the remainder of the book. Six individual case studies follow, focusing respectively on the situation in China, Western India, Northeast India, Indonesia, South Korea, and the Philippines. The contributors, mainly younger scholars based in Asia, bring first hand-knowledge to their chapters and employ both field and archival research to develop their data and analyses. The result is a groundbreaking work that will be indispensable to everyoneconcerned with the future of the region.

What is wrong with the news? To answer this dismaying question, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alex S. Jones has written Losing the News, a probing look at the epochal changes sweeping the media which are eroding the core news that has been the essential food supply of our democracy. At a time of dazzling technological innovation, Jones says that what stands to be lost is the fact-based reporting that serves as a watchdog over government, holds the powerful accountable, and gives citizens what they need. In a tumultuous new media era, with cutthroat competition and panic over profits, the commitment of the traditional news media to serious news is fading. Should we lose a critical mass of this news, our democracy will weaken or even fail. As the old economic model for news is being shattered by digital technology, the news media are making a painful passage that is taking a toll on journalistic values and standards. Journalistic objectivity and ethics are under assault, as is the bastion of the First Amendment. Jones characterizes himself not as a pessimist about news, but a realist. The breathtaking possibilities that the web offers are undeniable, but at what cost? Pundits and talk show hosts have persuaded Americans that the crisis in news is bias and partisanship. Not so, says Jones. The real crisis is the erosion of the iron core of news, something that hurts Republicans and Democrats alike. In its concluding chapters, Losing the News looks over the horizon, exploring ways the core can be preserved. Losing the News, the penultimate title in Oxford's highly successful Annenberg Institutions of Democracy series, depicts an unsettling situation in which theAmerican birthright of fact-based, reported news is in danger. But it is also a call to arms to fight to keep the core of news intact.

Here is the Cape Town underworld laid bare, explored through the characters who control the protection industry, the bouncers and security at nightclubs and strip clubs.

At the centre of this turf war is Nafiz Modack, the latest kingpin to have seized control of the industry, a man often in court on various charges, including extortion. Investigative journalist Caryn Dolley has followed Modack and his predecessors for six years as power has shifted in the nightclub security industry, and she focuses on how closely connected the criminal underworld is with the police services. In this suspenseful page turner of an investigation, she writes about the overlapping of the state with the underworld, the underworld with the upperworld, and how the associated violence is not confined to specific areas of Cape Town, but is happening inside hospitals, airports, clubs and restaurants and putting residents at risk.

A book that lays bare the myth that violence and gangsterism in Cape Town is confined to the ganglands of the Cape Flats, wherever you find yourself, you’re only a hair’s breadth away from the enforcers.

The "Encyclopedia" is the only resource available that focuses exclusively on the expanding role of minorities in U.S. politics. Containing more than 2,000 entries, this two-volume set is divided into four distinct sections covering African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans. It makes a broad range of information readily accessible, including historical and contemporary biographies, descriptions of major events, and coverage of important legal decisions and organizations.

No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others, how we organise our politics. Sven Beckert situates the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework in this fascinating new book.

Capitalism, argues Beckert, was born global. Emerging from merchant communities across Asia, Africa and Europe, capitalism’s radical recasting of economic life rooted itself only gradually. Then it burst onto the world scene, as European states and merchants built a powerful alliance that would propel them across the oceans. This epic drama corresponded at no point to an idealised dream of free markets. All along, state-backed institutions and imperial expansions shaped its dynamics.

Capitalism decentres the European perspective, highlighting agency, resistance, innovation and ruthless coercion around the world through to the present with the rise of Asian economies, particularly China. Sven Beckert doesn’t merely add up capitalism’s debits and credits in this monumental book, but allows us to think afresh about the past to help us re-imagine the future.

While the depth and sophistication of South Africa’s financial and capital markets are lauded by indices the world over, South Africa is also considered to be the most unequal society in the world. The Economy On Your Doorstep probes the reasons for this tragic paradox of South African life and tries to go through and beyond the graphs, margin calls, trading updates, indices and earnings reports to explain how economic ‘actions’ frame the lives of South Africans in a transitional society faced with the challenges of unemployment, poverty and inequality.

The economy is and always has been primarily about ‘people’. How they live, what they produce, under what conditions and what social, political and environmental factors influence decisions of consumption, investment and distribution – and how they act under conditions of uncertainty, scarcity, need and crisis. After all, economies are about people coming together to produce, exchange, distribute and consume goods and services that emerge from their communities and those of others. How and under what conditions can we ensure the expansion of our productive forces, while expanding access to the base of assets, services and support that allow for the social reproduction of our entire society and workforce?

Ayabonga Cawe outlines some key areas that can and should define a policy agenda towards a ‘people’s economy’ in South Africa and the long-term objectives of such a policy programme, and engages with the political economy of 21st century South Africa through an analysis of a few selected areas of the economy and the implications of this for policy action. This is what this book is about – an exposition of what we see around us and an explanation and discussion of possible ways beyond it.

In this well-researched book, Ayabonga Cawe, a development economist, columnist and broadcaster, makes sense of the post-apartheid political economy through the lives of the many people who live and survive in it every day.

The United States has never had an officially established church. Since the time of the first British colonists, it has instead developed a strong civil religion that melds national symbols to symbols of God. In a deft exploration of American civil religious symbols ranging from the Liberty Bell and Vietnam Memorial to Mount Rushmore and Disney World, Peter Gardella explains how the places, objects, and symbols that Americans hold sacred came into being and how they have changed over time. In addition to examining revered historical sites and structures, he analyzes such sacred texts as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, the Kennedy Inaugural, and the speeches of Martin Luther King, and shows how five patriotic songs-''The Star-Spangled Banner,'' ''The Battle Hymn of the Republic'' ''America the Beautiful,'' ''God Bless America,'' and ''This Land Is Your Land''-have been elevated into hymns. Arguing that certain values-personal freedom, political democracy, world peace, and cultural tolerance-have held American civil religion together, this book chronicles the numerous forms those values have taken, from Jamestown and Plymouth to the September 11, 2001, Memorial in New York.

In the 1970s, South Africa’s wine industry was a closed shop – dominated by monopolies, Afrikaner nationalism and Apartheid-era control. Red Tape tells the remarkable story of Tim Hamilton Russell, a maverick entrepreneur and founder of Hamilton Russell Vineyards, who was determined to challenge this status quo. Defying restrictive laws, industry boycotts, and scepticism from the establishment, Tim pursued his vision to plant noble grape varietals in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley – a region few believed in – proving the country could produce world-class table wines.

This richly detailed account, written by his daughter Bridgid Hamilton-Russell, uncovers the political obstacles he faced, the court battles he waged, and the legacy he built in establishing a wine region now recognised worldwide. Blending biography, social history, and an insider’s view of a transformative era, Red Tape reveals how courage and vision can reshape an industry.

On April 30, 1980, six heavily armed gunmen burst into the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate, overlooking Hyde Park in London. There they took 26 hostages, including embassy staff, visitors, and three British citizens.

A tense six-day siege ensued as millions gathered around screens across the country to witness the longest news flash in British television history, in which police negotiators and psychiatrists sought a bloodless end to the standoff, while the SAS – hitherto an organisation shrouded in secrecy – laid plans for a daring rescue mission: Operation Nimrod.

Drawing on unpublished source material, exclusive interviews with the SAS, and testimony from witnesses including hostages, negotiators, intelligence officers and the on-site psychiatrist, bestselling historian Ben Macintyre takes readers on a gripping journey from the years and weeks of build-up on both sides, to the minute-by-minute account of the siege and rescue.

Recreating the dramatic conversations between negotiators and hostages, the cutting-edge intelligence work happening behind-the-scenes, and the media frenzy around this moment of international significance, The Siege is the remarkable story of what really happened on those fateful six days, and the first full account of a moment that forever changed the way the nation thought about the SAS – and itself.

Iranian history has long been a source of fascination for European and American observers. The country's ancient past preoccupied nineteenth-century historians and archaeologists as they attempted to construct a unified understanding of the ancient world. Iran's medieval history has likewise preoccupied scholars who have long recognized the Iranian plateau as a cultural crossroad of the world's great civilizations. In more recent times, Iran has continued to demand the attention of observers when, for example, the revolution of 1978-79 dramatically burst onto the world stage, or more recently, when the Iranian democracy movement has come to once again challenge the status quo of the clerical regime. Iran's dominance in the Middle East has brought it into conflict with the United States and so it is the subject of almost daily coverage from reporters. Sympathetic observers of Iran-students, scholars, policy makers, journalists, and the educated public-tend to be perplexed and confused by this tangled web of historical development. Iran, as it appears to most observers, is a foreboding, menacing, and far away land with a history that is simply too difficult to fathom.
The Handbook is a guide to Iran's complex history. The book emphasizes the large-scale continuities of Iranian history while also describing the important patterns of transformation that have characterized Iran's past. Each of the chapters focuses on a specific epoch of Iranian history and surveys the general political, social, cultural, and economic issues of that era. The ancient period begins with chapters considering the anthropological evidence of the prehistoric era, through to the early settled civilizations of the Iranian plateau, and continuing to the rise of the ancient Persian empires. The medieval section first considers the Arab-Muslim conquest of the seventh century, and then moves on to discuss the growing Turkish influence filtering in from Central Asia beginning in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The last third of the book covers Iran in the modern era by considering the rise of the Safavid state and its accompanying policy of centralization and the introduction of Shi'ism, followed by essays on the problems of reform and modernization in the Qajar and Pahlavi periods, and finally with a chapter on the revolution of 1978-79 and its aftermath.
The book is a collaborative exercise among scholars specializing in a variety of sub-fields, and across a number of disciplines, including history, art history, classics, literature, politics, and linguistics. Here, readers can find a reliable and accessible narrative that can serve as an introduction to the field of Iranian studies. While the number of monographs published within specialized subfields of Iranian history continues to proliferate, there have been, to date, no books that attempt to produce a comprehensive single-volume history of Iranian civilization.

In 1972, when Mahmood Mamdani came home to Uganda, he found a country transformed by ‘an orgy of violence’. Two years earlier, with support from the colonial powers of Great Britain and Israel, Idi Amin had forcefully cemented his rule.

He soon expelled Uganda’s Indian inority in hopes of fostering a nation for Black Ugandans.

The plan backfired. Amin was followed by Yoweri Museveni, who has now ruled for nearly four decades. Whereas Amin tried to create a Black nation out of the majority, Museveni sought to fragment this majority into multiple ethnic minorities, recreating a version of colonial indirect rule.

Slow Poison is Mamdani’s firsthand account of the tragic unraveling of his country’s struggle for decolonialization. A witness to East Africa’s endlessly intricate power plays, and one of the most insightful political philosophers of his generation, Mamdani casts a learned and wary eye on Amin, internationally depicted as a buffoon, the radical scholar Museveni, and the global heavyweights that exploited and manipulated Uganda before and after its independence.

Each leader made violence central to his project, but Mamdani sees a signal difference between Amin, who retained popular support to the end, and Museveni, who has not. The Asian expulsion made Amin a monster in the eyes of the West.

In contrast, Museveni was hailed as standard bearer of the ‘war on terror’ in Africa and was protected from accountability for far greater crimes.

In exchange for adopting the package of neoliberal reforms known as the Washington Consensus, he became Africa’s poster child.

Amin, who aimed to create a nation of Black millionaires, never became one himself. Meanwhile, Uganda’s surrender to privatization has brought Museveni’s family immense wealth, even as the country remains one of the world’s poorest.

Packed with insight into contemporary issues and analysis of the latest developments in UK and US Politics, including the 2019 UK General Election and 2020 US election, this textbook is specially designed to help your students perform to the best of their abilities in the AQA Politics Paper 1 and Paper 2 exams. This Student Textbook: - Strengthens your students' understanding of comparative politics through dedicated comparative politics chapters and synoptic links throughout - Builds your students' confidence by highlighting key terms and connections between different topics in the specification - Develops your students' skills of analysis and evaluation through activities, debates and exam-style questions - Provides answer guidance for exam-style questions online at www.hoddereducation.co.uk

"In Caring for Our Own, Sandra Levitsky has written a moving and perceptive account of the dilemma facing those who provide care for frail family members. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation with family caregivers and the social workers that attempt to ameliorate their burden, this book uncovers the complex ideological and political factors that have made long term care the neglected stepchild of the welfare state in the United States."-Jill Quadagno, Mildred and Claude Pepper Eminent Scholar in Social Gerontology, Florida State University Aging populations and dramatic changes in health care provision, household structure, and women's labor force participation over the last half century have created what many observers have dubbed a "crisis in care": demand for care of the old and infirm is rapidly growing, while the supply of private care within the family is substantially contracting. And yet, despite the well-documented adverse effects of contemporary care dilemmas on the economic security of families, the physical and mental health of family care providers, the bottom line of businesses, and the financial health of existing social welfare programs, American families have demonstrated little inclination for translating their private care problems into political demands for social policy reform. Caring for Our Own inverts an enduring question of social welfare politics. Rather than asking why the American state hasn't responded to unmet social welfare needs by expanding social entitlements, this book asks: Why don't American families view unmet social welfare needs as the basis for demands for new state entitlements? How do traditional beliefs in family responsibility for social welfare persist even in the face of well-documented unmet need? The answer, this book argues, lies in a better understanding of how individuals imagine solutions to the social welfare problems they confront and what prevents new understandings of social welfare provision from developing into political demand for alternative social arrangements. Caring for Our Own considers the powerful ways in which existing social policies shape the political imagination, reinforcing longstanding values about family responsibility, subverting grievances grounded in notions of social responsibility, and in some rare cases, constructing new models of social provision that would transcend existing ideological divisions in American social politics.

Historians and archaeologists define primary states-"cradles of civilization" from which all modern nation states ultimately derive-as significant territorially-based, autonomous societies in which a centralized government employs legitimate authority to exercise sovereignty. The well-recognized list of regions that witnessed the development of primary states is short: Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, China, Mesoamerica, and Andean South America. Drawing on archaeological and ethnohistorical sources, Robert J. Hommon demonstrates that Polynesia, with primary states in both Hawaii and Tonga, should be added to this list. The Ancient Hawaiian State is a study of the ancient Hawaiians' transformation of their Polynesian chiefdoms into primary state societies, independent of any pre-existing states. The emergence of primary states is one of the most revolutionary transformations in human history, and Hawaii's metamorphosis was so profound that in some ways the contact-era Hawaiian states bear a closer resemblance to our world than to that of their closely-related East Polynesian contemporaries, 4,000 kilometers to the south. In contrast to the other six regions, in which states emerged in the distant, pre-literate past, the transformation of Hawaiian states are documented in an extensive body of oral traditions preserved in written form, a rich literature of early post-contact eyewitness accounts of participants and Western visitors, as well as an extensive archaeological record. Part One of this book describes three competing Hawaiian states, based on the islands of Hawai`i, Maui, and O`ahu, that existed at the time of first contact with the non-Polynesian world (1778-79). Part Two presents a detailed definition of state society and how contact-era Hawaii satisfies this definition, and concludes with three comparative chapters summarizing the Tongan state and chiefdoms in the Society Islands and Marquesas Archipelagos of East Polynesia. Part Three provides a model of the Hawaii State Transformation across a thousand years of history. The results of this significant study further the analysis of political development throughout Polynesia while profoundly redefining the history and research of primary state formation.