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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies > General
In the tradition of political realism, this book provides an important reappraisal of the concept of human nature in contemporary realist international-political theory. With special reference to the anthropology of Sigmund Freud, a consequential yet terribly neglected and underestimated thinker in International Relations, Schuett demonstrates that analytical and normative theorizing of all international-political reality, its nature, tragedies, and potentialities, requires a sophisticated theory of human nature. Developing a Freudian philosophical anthropology for political realism, he argues for the careful resurrection of the concept of human nature in the wider study of international relations.
Studies the nature and development of Dr. King's political ideas and his contributions to modern political thought.
The study of religion and politics is a strongly behavioral sub-discipline, and within the American context, scholars place tremendous emphasis on its influence on political attitudes and behaviors, resultuing in a better understanding of religion's ability to shape voting patterns, party affiliation, and views of public policy.
The problem of intergenerational justice is among the most important issues in contemporary politics. Yet contemporary philosophers and political theorists have had great difficulty coming to grips with the nature and extent of our intergenerational obligations. This book examines the historical roots of intergenerational justice and analyzes this concept critically. Contemporary approaches are critiqued for their inability to address adequately such essential intergenerational questions as whether, and under what circumstances, we have an obligation to perpetuate the human species, the moral implications of our power to affect the identity of future persons, and the nature of our obligations to the dead. The concluding chapters propose a broader understanding of intergenerational justice and the moral necessity of establishing a tradition of just intergenerational action as our legacy to posterity.
The Spirit of Laws, first published in 1750, is a detailed treatise on the structures and theory of government by French political philosopher Baron de Montesquieu. Unlike his well-loved Persian Letters, The Spirit of Laws scandalized the French-it was even banned by the Roman Catholic Church. The fact that it is hardly dated to modern readers is a testament to how revolutionary it must have seemed 250 years ago. Among its comparisons of different forms of governments, such as monarchies, despotic regimes, and republics, is the now-famous section on Montesquieu's concept of the separation of powers, dividing the ruling body into legislative, executive, and judicial branches.Also included is the author's thinking on slavery, religion in government, families and censuses, the influence of climate on politics and culture, and the making of laws. A powerful influence on the framers of the U.S. Constitution, this classic work will appeal to history buffs and anyone interested in the roots of modern political theory and government.CHARLES-LOUIS DE SECONDAT, BARON DE MONTESQUIEU (1689-1755), born in the South of France and often known simply as Montesquieu, was a political philosopher and social commentator known for his influential political views, especially for his "separation of power" theory, still used today in constitutions around the world. Some of his best-known work, the satirical Persian Letters, which made fun of life in Paris under Louis XIV, delighted France in the 1720s
A topical critical examination of the idea of social exclusion and the new political language of social cohesion, community, stakeholding and inclusion. The author examines the actions and rhetoric of the Labour Party and Labour Government under Tony Blair's leadership, and identifies three different discourses of social exclusion. Using this model, she explores views of inclusion put forward by Will Hutton and other stakeholders, by communitarians including Etzioni and Gray, and by the Labour Party from the Borrie and the Commission on Social Justice, to Blair and the Social Exclusion Unit. This work is intended for departments of politics (courses in British politics, social policy, comparative politics and political theory), sociology (courses in inequality and poverty), a more general political readership on social policy and politics of social exclusion and poverty, and politics of the Left among policymakers, think-tanks, pressure groups, and so on.
Rival understandings of the meaning and practice of the religious and the secular lead to rival public perspectives about religion and religious freedom in North America. This book explores how debates over the American Office of Religious Freedom and its International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA, 1998) and very recent debates over the Canadian Office of Religious Freedom (2013) have pitted at least six basic, but very different meanings of the religious and the secular against each other in often undisclosed and usually unproductive ways. Properly naming this 'religious problem' is a critical first step to acknowledging and conciliating their practically polar political prescriptions. It must be considered how we are to think about religion in political offices, both the Canadian and the American experience, as an essentially contested term, and one which demands better than postmodern paralysis, what the author terms political theology. This is especially critical since both of these cases are not just about how to deal with religion at home, but how to engage with religion abroad, where real peril, and real practical policy must be undertaken to protect increasingly besieged religious minorities. Finally, a principled pluralist approach to the religious and the secular suggests a way to think outside the 'religious problem' and productively enlist and engage the forces of religion resurging around the globe. The book will be of great use to scholars and students in religion and foreign affairs, secularization, political theology, and political theory, as well as professionals and policy makers working in issues relating to religion, religious freedom, and foreign affairs.
Twenty years have passed since the 1989 U.S. invasion that toppled Panama's military regime and initiated a period of democratization. This book represents the most comprehensive and empirically grounded analysis of the institutional and attitudinal factors that have shaped Panamanian politics since the invasion. Using quantitative and qualitative methods the book traces the development of the Panamanian nation-state from its early days after independence from Colombia, to the struggles to build democracy after the U.S. invasion, through the presidential elections of May 2009. The study makes use of extensive interviews with political and economic elites, as well as the most comprehensive series of public opinion surveys ever conducted in Panama. As such, they provide a wealth of data on democratic values and allow placing Panama in a comparative perspective.
This volume investigates various processes by which world religions become localized, as well as how local traditions in Southeast Asia and Melanesia become universalized. In the name of modernity and progress, the contemporary Southeast Asian states tend to press their populations to have a 'religion,' claiming that their local, indigenous practices and traditions do not constitute religion. Authors analyze this 'religionization,' addressing how local people appropriate religion as a category to define some of their practices as differentiated from others, whether they want to have a religion or are constrained to demonstrate that they profess one. Thus, 'religion' is what is regarded as such by these local actors, which might not correspond to what counts as religion for the observer. Furthermore, local actors do not always concur regarding what their religion is about, as religion is a contested issue. In consequence, each of the case studies in this volume purposes to elucidate what gets identified and legitimized as 'religion', by whom, for what purpose, and under what political conditions.
Adam Smith (1723-90) is well known as the author of The Wealth of Nations and as a champion of free enterprise but he also wrote on moral philosophy and lectured on rhetoric and jurisprudence. This collection reveals a new portrait of the well known economist, not as a simple-minded champion of free trade but as an interdisciplinary social scientist with a moral philosophy for the modern world. His legacy should not be restricted to economics and to the English-speaking world.
This is a book about political values - socialist, nationalist, liberal and democratic values - in five former communist countries: Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Based on eleven surveys involving extended interviews with 7350 members of the public and 504 Members of Parliament it provides an authoritative account of the extent to which politicians and the public in East Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union have rejected communist ideals and adopted nationalist and/or liberal democratic values.
A systematic comparison of three cases of democratization and regime transformation in Europe since 1945 (post-war Italy and West Germany; Southern Europe from the mid-1970s; and Eastern Europe in the 1990s), this book highlights diversities of historical context, political experience, democratic traditions, economic development, and cultural background. Unlike the majority of literature on the subject, this book views the democratization process as a whole, not just as either democratic transition or subsequent regime consolidation. Economic, state-building, or other forms of transformation are included where relevant.
This book assesses and compares the political response of nations to the environment. The book explores five major topics: state-society relations; environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs); Green parties and environmental movements; institutions of government and policy-making; variations in the capacities of states to protect the environment; and national responses to global problems. It compares and contrasts rich and poor nations, large and small countries, liberal democracies and authoritarian states.
"Cosmopolitan Borders" makes the case for processes of bordering being better understood through the lens of cosmopolitanism. Rather than 'world citizenship' an alternative understanding of cosmopolitanism is offered, emerging from a critique of the idea of 'openness', and founded on a different understanding of the relationship between globalization and cosmopolitanism. The core argument is that borders are 'cosmopolitan workshops' where 'cultural encounters of a cosmopolitan kind' take place and where entrepreneurial cosmopolitans advance new forms of sociality in the face of 'global closure'. The book outlines four cosmopolitan dimensions of borders: vernacularization, multiperspectivalism, fixity/unfixity, and connectivity.
The newest volume in the Elections in Israel series focuses on the twentieth Knesset elections held in March 2015 following the collapse of the third Netanyahu government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's main opposition party, the Zionist Camp, ran a negative personalized election campaign, assuming that Israelis had grown tired of him. Netanyahu, however, achieved a surprising and dramatic victory by enhancing and radicalizing the same identity politics strategies that helped him win in 1996. The Elections in Israel 2015 dissects these and other campaigns, from the perspective of the voters, the media and opinion polls, the political parties, and electoral competition. Several contributors delve into the Left and Arab fear mongering Likud campaign, which produced strategic identity voting. Other contributions analyze in-depth the Israeli party and electoral systems, highlighting the exceptional decline of the mainstream parties and the adoption of a higher electoral threshold. Providing a close analysis of electoral competition, legitimacy struggles, stability and change in the voting behavior of various groups, partisanship, personalization and political polarization, this volume is a crucial record of Israeli political history.
In this exciting new study, Don Dombowsky proposes that the
foundation of Nietzsche's political thought is the aristocratic
liberal critique of democratic society. But he claims that
Nietzsche radicalizes this critique through a Machiavellian
conversion, based on a reading of "The Prince," adapting
Machiavellian "virtbliog-- "(the shaping capacity of the
legislator), and immoralism (the techniques applied in political
rule), and that, consequently, Nietzsche is better understood in
relation to the political ideology of the neo-Machiavellian elite
theorists of his own generation.
How are the Germans coming to terms with reunification? Four issues are at the heart of this process and form the basis of this study. First, the question of the new German identity second, the role of nationalism in the new republic third, the role of inherited ideologies and finally, the role of Germany in Europe and the wider world. These issues are examined in terms of transformations in the political culture in eastern Germany, metamorphoses in the political ideology and philosophy of the former West Germany and relations with the political discourse of the West in general.
This book examines the contribution of mass media to modern democracies, in comparative perspective. Part I deals with the conceptualization and implementation of a systematic framework to assess democratic media performance, both in terms of media systems and content. Part II studies media effects on the quality of democracy.
During the last 15 years Latin American governments reformed their constitutions to recognize indigenous rights. The contributors to this book argue that these changes pose fundamental challenges to accepted notions of democracy, citizenship, and development in the region. Using case studies from Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia, and Peru, they analyze the ways in which new legal frameworks have been implemented, appropriated and contested within a wider context of accelerating economic and legal globalization, highlighting the key implications for social policy, human rights, and social justice.
For most of the twentieth century, social thinkers devoted their attention mainly to the issues of economic class. They generally dismissed the more primordial bonds of racial, ethnic, and national identities as irrational anachronisms that either communism or the liberal frameworks of democracy would dissolve. Today, communism is nearly dead and liberalism is on the wane. At the same time, older ethno-racial tribalisms, along with some newly invented ones, have shattered our illusions of a rationally manageable world. They find expression in chauvinistic nationalisms, multiculturalist ideologies, vicious civil wars, "ethnic cleansing" of whole regions, intensified racial and ethnic strife, a resurgence of prejudice, scapegoating, hate groups, and nativism, as well as new group-based challenges to the individualistic focus of Western liberalism. Bringing together prominent historians, sociologists, and political scientists, New Tribalisms examines early conceptions of racial and ethnic pluralism in the United States. The volume also confronts some of the causes, implications, and possible outcomes of resurgent tribalisms in the country and around the world.
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