Christian democracy has been one of the most successful political movements in post-war Western Europe yet its crucial impact on the development of the modern European welfare state has been neglected. In this study, Kees van Kersbergen demonstrates the precise nature of the links between Christian democracy and the welfare state. Using a variety of sources the author describes the origin and development of the Christian Democratic movement and presents comparative accounts of the varying degrees of political entrenchment of national Christian Democratic parties. Drawing upon cross-national indicators of welfare state development he identifies and explains the existence of a distinctively Christian Democratic (as opposed to a liberal or social democratic) welfare-state regime which he labels "social capitalism".

This lively book will be essential to all those attempting to understand the state of Cultural Studies in the West today. Ion Davies, who was in at the birth of Cultural Studies in Britain and followed its development in many parts of the world, is uniquely qualified to add historical depth and comparative breadth to this subject. Introducing the central theoretical issues, as well as the key personalities, Cultural Studies and Beyond traces the origins, growth and diffusion of the subject.

This lively book will be essential to all those attempting to understand the state of Cultural Studies in the West today. Ion Davies, who was in at the birth of Cultural Studies in Britain and followed its development in many parts of the world, is uniquely qualified to add historical depth and comparative breadth to this subject. Introducing the central theoretical issues, as well as the key personalities, Cultural Studies and Beyond traces the origins, growth and diffusion of the subject.

To shed light on the global reassertion of authoritarianism in recent years, this volume analyses transnational diffusion and international cooperation among non-democratic regimes. How and with what effect do authoritarian regimes learn from each other? For what purpose and how successfully do they cooperate? The volume highlights that present-day autocrats pursue mainly pragmatic interests, rather than ideological missions. Consequently, the connections among authoritarian regimes have primarily defensive purposes, especially insulation against democracy promotion by the West. As a result, the authors do not foresee a major recession of democracy, as occurred with the rise of fascism during the interwar years. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of Democratization.

This analysis of every facet of a national identity makes it less likely that the next great explosion in the Commmunist world - and its consequences - will come as a surprise. It investigates tendencies in China that might lead it down the same path as Russia and Yugoslavia.

This analysis of every facet of a national identity makes it less likely that the next great explosion in the Communist world - and its consequences - will come as a surprise. It investigates tendencies in China that might lead it down the same dangerous path as Russia and Yugoslavia.

"American exceptionalism" was once a rather obscure and academic concept, but in the 2012 presidential election campaign the phrase attained unprecedented significance in political rhetoric. President Obama's conservative critics-most notably Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and Mitt Romney-accused the president of disbelieving in American exceptionalism and thereby offending the nation's civil religion. This creed traditionally has included the notion that America is a political "new Israel" called by God and guided by His Providence to be the exemplar, vanguard, and champion of liberal democracy and the free market for all humanity. The newly politicized narrative of exceptionalism portrayed Obama as a president embarrassed by his own country and intent on remaking the United States in the image of the secularist and socialist countries of Europe. This book takes a step back from the partisan rhetorical bluster and examines afresh the historical and analytical meanings of American exceptionalism, and the extent to which religion-both "real" religion and the more ambiguous "civil" religion-has shaped these meanings and their uses/abuses. This book was published as a special issue of The Review of Faith and International Affairs.

This book addresses the nature of factionalism in parties that are created or rebuilt after a period of dictatorship. It maintains that, while party leaders often view factions in negative terms as divisive, factional behaviour can also be constructive. The volume brings together detailed case studies from post-authoritarian Spain, Greece and Portugal, from Turkey (where factionalism has hampered democratization) and from the post-communist states in Eastern Europe.

Factional Politics and Democratization addresses the nature of factionalism in parties that are created or rebuilt after a period of dictatorship. It maintains that, while party leaders often view factions in negative terms as divisive, factional behaviour can be constructive and can contribute to the building of political parties as viable electoral organizations. Factionalism as a process involves fusion as well as fission. The volume brings together detailed case studies from post-authoritarian Spain, Greece and Portugal, from Turkey (where factionalism has hampered democratization) and from the post-communist states of Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. Several chapters provide comparative analysis which goes beyond a particular party or national experience. Together with introductory and concluding chapters, this combination of case studies and comparative analysis provides pointers to what is generalizable and what is specific to particular cases. Equally, the book offers a framework within which further studies of party factionalism in the context of democratization may be undertaken.

In this collection, a group of historians explores the role of masculinity in the modern history of politics and war. Building on three decades of research in women's and gender history, the book opens up new avenues in the history of masculinity. The essays by social, political and cultural historians therefore map masculinity's part in making revolution, waging war, building nations, and constructing welfare states. Although the masculinity of modern politics and war is now generally acknowledged, few studies have traced the emergence and development of politics and war as masculine domains in the way this book does. Covering the period from the American Revolution to the Second World War and ranging over five continents, the essays in this book bring to light the many "masculinities" that shaped--and were shaped by--political and military modernity.

Following the life of one man, Piero de' Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent's son, Alison Brown sheds new light on several of the most important themes of Renaissance history and culture by combining political history, the history of ideas, and cultural history. This interdisciplinary study weaves together an understudied period of crisis in Italy which brought down three leading dynasties, the revolution that in turn led to the new political realism of writers like Machiavelli, Guicciardini and Francesco Vettori, and, finally, the transition from the civic culture of the early Renaissance to the courtly or princely culture of the Cinquecento. Focusing on Piero's full life and colourful character, Brown grants us a unique and contextualised insight into the patronage, culture and politics of Renaissance Italy whilst grounding broader trends within the lived experience of Florence's most famous ruling family.

Ultras are often compared to punks, Hell's Angels, hooligans or the South American Barras Bravas. But in truth, they are a thoroughly Italian phenomenon... From the author of The Dark Heart of Italy, Blood on the Altar and A Place of Refuge. Italy's ultras are the most organised and violent fans in European football. Many groups have evolved into criminal gangs, involved in ticket-touting, drug-dealing and murder. A cross between the Hell's Angels and hooligans, they're often the foot-soldiers of the Mafia and have been instrumental in the rise of the far-right. But the purist ultras say that they are are insurgents fighting against a police state and modern football. Only amongst the ultras, they say, can you find belonging, community and a sacred concept of sport. They champion not just their teams, they say, but their forgotten suburbs and the dispossessed. Through the prism of the ultras, Jones crafts a compelling investigation into Italian society and its favourite sport. He writes about not just the ultras of some of Italy's biggest clubs - Juventus, Torino, Lazio, Roma and Genoa - but also about its lesser-known ones from Cosenza and Catania. He examines the sinister side of football fandom, with its violence and political extremism, but also admires the passion, wit, solidarity and style of a fascinating and contradictory subculture.

Since the beginning of the New Deal, American liberals have insisted that the government must do more--much more--to help the poor, to increase economic security, to promote social justice and solidarity, to reduce inequality, and to mitigate the harshness of capitalism. Nonetheless, liberals have never answered, or even acknowledged, the corresponding question: What would be the size and nature of a welfare state that was not contemptibly austere, that did not urgently need new programs, bigger budgets, and a broader mandate? Even though the federal government's outlays have doubled every eighteen years since 1940, liberal rhetoric is always addressed to a nation trapped in Groundhog Day, where every year is 1932, and none of the existing welfare state programs that spend tens of billions of dollars matter, or even exist. Never Enough explores the roots and consequences of liberals' aphasia about the welfare state's ultimate size. It assesses what liberalism's lack of a limiting principle says about the long-running argument between liberals and conservatives, and about the policy choices confronting America in a new century. Never Enough argues that the failure to speak clearly and candidly about the welfare state's limits has grave policy consequences. The worst result, however, is the way it has jeopardized the experiment in self-government by encouraging Americans to regard their government as a vehicle for exploiting their fellow-citizens, rather than as a compact for respecting one another's rights and safeguarding the opportunities of future generations.

This text examines the emergence of nationalist, racist and anti-feminist ideologies in post-socialist Eastern Europe. In a political context that includes ethnic wars, post-socialist totalitarianism, capitalist moral majority ideologies, and a virulent new patriarchy, this study asks what has become of the notions of democracy and human rights since the collapse of socialism. It also challenges the "political correctness" movement and western theoretical responses to the events which have occurred in former Communist countries. "The Spoils of Freedom" views major social and political change through contemporary theory. Using psychoanalytic, post-structuralist and feminist theories, Salecl argues that the success of the new nationalist and anti-liberal ideologies can be understood through the concept of fantasy, and the willingness of individuals to identify with the hidden fantasies embedded in political discourse. In doing so, she offers a new approach to human rights, feminism and other liberal theories grounded in her own active participation in the struggles against communism, nationalism and anti-feminism.

Market life is increasingly conducted in the shadow of global events like 9/11, the Sub-Prime crisis and Brexit. Within International political economy (IPE) two broad positions can be discerned: either the event is 'just an event', a superficial spectacle in an otherwise straightforward story of power and hierarchy; or the event is large enough to be considered a 'crisis'. While sympathetic to such arguments, this book develops a more performative politics of the global event, arguing that the very idea of the event must be placed in question. How is the event constructed? How are market subjects performed in relation to the event? This book argues that emotional and psychological discourses of 'trauma' and 'resilience' provide an important affective register for understanding how the global event is 'known', how it is governed, and how the affective dimensions of market life might be lived. By identifying the contingent rise of these discourses, the author de-stabilises and re-politicises the apparent existential veracity of the global event. The critical possibilities and limits of the affective turn in market life can then be rendered according to classic questions of IPE: who wins, who loses, and how might it be changed? An important work for advanced scholars and students of international political economy, 'everyday and cultural political economy', crisis and resilience, as well as broader debates on globalisation.

The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism explores the possible and potential relevance of Giorgio Agamben's political thoughts and writings for the theory and the practice of architecture and urban design. It sketches out the potentiality of Agamben's politics, which can affect change in current architectural and design discourses. The book investigates the possibility of an inoperative architecture, as an ethical shift for a different practice, just a little bit different, but able to deactivate the sociospatial dispositive and mobilize a new theory and a new project for the urban now to come. This particular reading from Agamben's oeuvre suggests a destituent mode of both thinking and practicing of architecture and urbanism that could possibly redeem them from their social emptiness, cultural irrelevance, economic reductionism and proto-avant-garde extravagance, contributing to a renewed critical 'encounter' with architecture's aesthetic-political function.

In "Postmodern Revisionings of the Political", Anna Yeatman examines the implications of postmodernist theory for the institutions of liberal and social democracy. In this study, she rethinks the role of modern emancipatory values, such as equality, in the context of postmodern politics of difference. Yeatman discusses the relation of a politics of difference to existing traditions of modern citizenship. While she affirms modern democratic achievements, she argues that our concept of democracy must be informed by postmodern critical theory. She explores the relationship between these two sets of concepts in terms of the politics of knowledge, the university and in the modern body politic.

We live under an ideology that preys on every aspect of our our education and our jobs; our healthcare and our leisure; our relationships and our mental wellbeing; even the planet we inhabit – the very air we breathe. So pervasive has it become that, for most people, it has no name. It seems unavoidable, like a natural law.

But trace it back to its roots, and we discover that it is neither inevitable nor immutable. It was conceived, propagated, and then concealed by the powerful few. It is time to bring it into the light - and, in doing so, to find an alternative worth fighting for.

Neoliberalism. Do you know what it is?

"Citizens and Subjects" is an essay on the nature and condition of democracy in Britain at the end of the 20th century. It looks at the commonly held view that Britain is a model democracy, and exposes it as a dangerous myth inhibiting both radical thought and actual constitutional change. The text explores the tradition of political and constitutional thought in Britain, and contemporary political reality, revealing a wide gulf between the two. Anthony Wright, a recently-elected Labour MP, considers Britain's particularly acute form of a general problem of modern government. While the nation thinks of itself as a liberal democracy, its liberalism was in place well before democracy came onto the agenda. Consequently, from the outset, democracy was seen as a problem by both Conservatives and Liberals. Constitutional issues have re-emerged on the political agenda in recent years. The author discusses the means by which we might move towards a pluralistic, open and participatory democracy; he also argues, however, that practical reforms will not be possible unless they are linked to a new tradition of radical constitutional thought.

First published in 1984. Revisionism or reformism has long been recognised as one of the main intellectual ancestors of democratic socialism, the last survivor of the tradition of Enlightenment progressivism and the only viable alternative to conservatism on the one hand and Marxist-Leninism on the other. Both as a movement and as an ideology, revisionism, like Marxism, had its origins in Germany, but has not received anything like the same attention. This study is concerned with two relatively neglected aspects of German revisionism - its diversity and its international relations theorising - while focusing on those revisionists who were associated with Joseph Bloch's journal, the Sozialistische Monatshefte. Roger Fletcher demonstrates that the revisionist movement consisted of neo-Kantians, 'pragmatists' and reformists of several kinds as well as theoretical revisionists like Edward Bernstein, the alleged 'father of revisionism', and that the political importance of Bernstein, who was primarily a transplanted British Radical, has been widely misunderstood and exaggerated. He shows that the most influential figure in pre-1914 German revisionism was not Bernstein but Bloch, the leader of a small band of socialist imperialists who hoped to use nationalist ideology as a means of integrating the German working class into the Wilhelmine state and society. He argues that despite the limited success enjoyed by this grey eminence of Wilhelmine Social Democracy, Bloch and Bernstein both came to grief on the masses' rock-like indifference to all theory. This is the first serious study of revisionism as a movement and one of the only studies of right-wing German socialist foreign policy views in the Wilhelmine era. While revealing the central importance of the previously neglected Bloch, and his journal in Wilhelmine Social Democracy, it also sheds fresh light on the thought of Bernstein and his role in classical German Social Democracy. The result of extensive research in Germany and Austria, it is based on a solid grasp of the secondary literature as well as thorough mastery of all the relevant primary sources.

Political factionalism and ideological polarization have run high in Italian history. They must be taken into account in any attempt to explain the frailty of Italian public institutions - their instability, inefficiency, feeble legitimacy, inability to win citizens' respect, and subservience to sectional interests. Moreover, Italian politics since the Risorgimento can be interpreted as a 150 year-long attempt to prevent factionalism and polarization from spinning out of control and becoming disruptive for the country. This book deals with the historical question of political factionalism and ideological polarization in post-1945 Italy from the point of view of delegitimation. In our definition, delegitimation occurs when one political subject denies another in principle the right to exist, and in more concrete terms that of governing the country, by arguing that it is incompatible with one or more of the values on which the public sphere is founded. The essays in this book chart the story of political delegitimation in post-1945 Italy as it occurred in different political parties, exploited different discursive arguments, was instrumental to different political projects, and was met with counter-arguments aimed at defusing it, or even at trying to counter-delegitimize the delegitimizers. The chapters originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Modern Italian Studies.

How do dictatorships justify their rule and with what effects? This and similar questions guide the contributions to this edited volume. Despite the recent resurgence of political science scholarship on autocratic resilience, many questions remain unanswered about the role of legitimation in contemporary non-democracies and its relationship with neighbouring concepts, like ideology, censorship, and consent. The overarching thesis of this book is that autocratic legitimation has causal influence on numerous outcomes of interest in authoritarian politics. These outcomes include regime resilience, challenger-state interactions, the procedures and operations of elections, social service provision, and the texture of everyday life in autocracies. Researchers of autocratic politics will benefit from the rich contributions of this volume. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of Contemporary Politics.

These pioneering essays provide a unique study of the development of political ideas in Ireland from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. The book breaks away from the traditional emphasis in Irish historiography on the nationalism/unionism debate to focus instead on previously neglected areas such as the role of the Scottish Enlightenment and early Irish socialism and conservatism. A wide range of original primary sources are used from pamphlets to journalism, devotional tracts to poetry.

The ability to organize millions of people for political purposes is a potent and relatively recent weapon in the struggle for power. Political scientists have studied two types of mass organization, the political party and the interest group. In this book Gregory Kasza examines a third type, which he calls the administered mass organization. AMOs are mass civilian bodies created by authoritarian regimes to implement public policy. Officials use them to organize youths, workers, women, or members of other social sectors into bodies resembling the mass conscript army. A network of AMOs produces a conscription society, a major force in twentieth-century politics in over 45 countries. Using comparative history and organization theory, Kasza analyzes the politics of the conscription society in both military and single-party regimes. He discusses the origins of AMOs in Japan, the Soviet Union, and Fascist Italy and their subsequent spread to China, Egypt, Nazi Germany, Peru, Poland, and Yugoslavia. He focuses on the use of AMOs to curb political opposition, to mobilize for war, and to shift control over the means of production. Kasza shows how, in the hands of despotic rulers, AMOs have contributed to the extremes of political barbarism characteristic of the twentieth century.