This collection of essays breaks new ground by providing an unparalleled snapshot of new work in political philosophy. The book brings together up-and-coming scholars from across the globe using such diverse methodologies as critical theory and social choice theory, historical analysis and conceptual analysis. The volume demonstrates the vibrancy of contemporary political theorizing not only when treating perennial topics-democracy, equality, legitimacy, liberty, patriotism, political freedom, rationality-but also when revivifying topics briefly out of favor-human needs, ideology, judgment, political aesthetics-and tackling topics more recently put on the agenda-citizenship, collective agency, cultural contexts, feminism, identity, multiculturalism, social suffering, subjectivity.

This book examines the impact of states and their policies on visual art. States shape the role of art and artists in society, influence the development of audiences, support artistic work, and even affect the very nature of artistic production. The book contrasts developments in the United States with art policies in Britain and in the social democratic states of Norway and Sweden. In addition, it analyzes revealing transitions - the changes brought about in East Germany after unification and the experiences of artists who left the Soviet Union for the west. The result is a significant contribution to the sociology and the political economy of art.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Around 18 million young Chinese people were sent to the countryside between 1966 and 1976 as part of the Cultural Revolution. In this collection of interviews with former Red Guards, members of the first generation to be born under Chairman Mao talk frankly about the dramatic changes which have occurred in China since 1980. In discussing the impact these changes have had on their own lives, the former revolutionaries give a direct insight into how ex-Maoists view contemporary China, revealing an attitude perhaps more critical than that of most Western commentators. These memoirs tell the very personal stories of how people from all walks of life were affected by both the cultural revolution and Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. They cover subjects as diverse as marriage and divorce, the privatization of industry, family relationships, universities and the stock market.

Communism's collapse both prompted and was accelerated by the long-anticipated reunification of Germany. What were the political and social undercurrents that led to the abrupt collapse of East Germany? What problems have arisen since reunification? Clearly, communism has left a cultural and political void that begs to be assessed.

Laurence McFalls here offers a full understanding of communism's collapse, providing an explanation for the cultural conflicts and the identity crisis that have afflicted Germany since reunification. Testing the validity of the common theories of Eastern European collapse, the work criticizes these systemic explanations of East Germany's demise for failing to take into account the motivations of ordinary citizens who, McFalls asserts, ultimately toppled the regime. To answer the question who overthrew Honecker?, McFalls has interviewed over 200 East Germans, identifying the primary players who brought about the East German revolution of 1989.

In his in-depth examination of the artificial German state, McFalls exposes the historical, economic, social, and political legacy of communism. challenging and provocative, "Communism's Collapse, Democracy's Demise?" will be of interest to a broad scope of scholars of sociology, historians, political philosophers, and political scientiests.

How and why should hope play a key role in a twenty-first century democratic politics?
Alan Mittleman offers a philosophical exploration of the theme, contending that a modern construction of hope as an emotion is deficient. He revives the medieval understanding of hope as a virtue, reconstructing this in a contemporary philosophical idiom. In this framework, hope is less a spontaneous reaction than it is a choice against despair; a decision to live with confidence and expectation, based on a rational assessment of possibility and a faith in the underlying goodness of life.
In cultures shaped by biblical teaching, hope is thought praiseworthy. Mittleman explores the religious origins of the concept of hope in the Hebrew Scriptures, New Testament, rabbinic literature and Augustine. He traces the roots of both the praise of hope, in Jewish and Christian thought, and the criticism of hope in Greco-Roman thought and in the tradition of philosophical pessimism. Arguing on behalf of a straightened, sober form of hope, he relates hope-as-a-virtue to the tasks of democratic citizenship. Without diminishing the wisdom found in tragedy, a strong argument emerges in favour of hope as a way of taking responsibility for the world. Drawing on insights from scriptural and classical texts, philosophers, and theologians - ancient and modern, Mittleman builds a compelling case for placing hope at the centre of democratic political systems.

Pratt uses Hillquit's career to probe the nature of the socialist movement in America.

This study explores modern Scotland and examines how Scottish politics, culture and identities have interacted within the national and international contexts in the last thirty years. It considers which voices and opinions have proven influential and defining and charts the boundaries of public conversation to and beyond the independence referendum

Understanding Political Islam retraces the human and intellectual development that led Francois Burgat to a very firm conviction: that the roots of the tensions that afflict the Western world's relationship with the Muslim world are political rather than ideological. In his compelling account of the interactions between personal life-history and professional research trajectories, Burgat examines how the rise of political Islam has been expressed: first in the Arab world, then in its interactions with European and Western societies. An essential continuation of his work on Islamism, Burgat's unique field research and 'political trespassing' marks an overdue challenge to the academic mainstream. -- .

It is rare for a scholar to revisit the scene of earlier research with a view to evaluating how that research has stood up over time. Here David E Apter does that and more. In a lengthy new introductory chapter to this classic study of bureaucratic nationalism, he reviews the efficacy of the concepts in his original study of Uganda of almost a century ago, including some, such as consociationalism', which have entered into the mainstream of comparative politics.

Examines the ideas and organization of new Islamic, Hindu and other movements. Considers the creation of new traditions and ethnicities in these movements as well as the key themes of liberation central to many of them, such as purity and pollution. Bhatt also looks at the relationship between right wing and progressive social movements.

A comprehensive analysis of the rise of Boko Haram from a small religious cult to a major terrorist group, placing them within the context of Nigerian politics and the international War on Terror. In 2009, Nigerian security forces stormed a religious cult by the name of Boko Haram, killing its leader and thousands of followers. Six years later, Boko Haram is an enemy to reckon with, boasting 15,000 members and taking credit for 20,000 deaths. This book looks at the successful rise of this terrorist group, probing the religious and political environment that enabled a relatively small cult to threaten a nation. The study draws on the author's fieldwork in Nigeria, where she had access to officials, activists, psychologists, and military personnel. Written in a clear and accessible manner, it offers a micro-to-macro investigation of the Boko Haram as a phenomenon. It also provides readers with an understanding of the regional dynamics that obstructed political and military cooperation among neighboring countries, enabling Boko Haram's success. This book traces the group's religious origins in the early 2000s and documents its violent political claims in Nigeria and across the border in Northern Cameroon, Niger, and Chad. Finally, it examines the impact of the international War on Terror and presents a comparative study of other contemporary terrorism movements and their networks. Takes a comprehensive approach to the political, historical, social, economic, and international dynamics that enabled the rise and transformation of Boko Haram Draws on field work in Nigeria, including interviews with military representatives, politicians, activists, psychologists, security operatives, and victims of the Boko Haram war Offers a comprehensive analysis of contemporary Nigeria at a crucial point in its history Makes an original contribution to the study of violent non-state actors by examining similarities and differences between Boko Haram and other like-minded terrorist movements

This book links contemporary thinking on global and regional governance to the recent experience of the Americas. It offers fresh insights into understanding the processes of order and change in the region, and in the broader international system. A particular concern is to reveal the changing contours of regional governance, whether in terms of actors, issue areas and relations with global structures.

What is the future of democracy? Is it steadily improving in scope, depth, and accountability? Is it being marginalized by economic forces? Or has it already progressed too far? This book argues that none of these assessments is right, and instead that democracy is becoming 'hyper.' An increasingly well-educated citizenry and freer flow of information contribute to the intensification of democracy, but at the same time begin to impede decision-making by contesting more and more of the cognitive preconditions that decision-making rests upon. Under hyperdemocracy, democracy begins to undermine itself. This book applies the idea of 'reflexive modernization' to democratic theory, setting out a new perspective on the challenges democracy faces.

The movies that document American history during the interwar years still hold relevance today. While we may be put off by the corny sentimentality popular at the time, we feel attracted, despite our 1990s veneer of sophistication, to healthy portions of unadulterated American spirit. Americans resist encumbering themselves with political labels, Kelley asserts, content to remain simultaneously fragmented between elitism and populism, isolationism and interventionism even today, yet remain somehow united by a fundamental essence they can't quite define but readily recognize as the American can-do attitude. Using the unique vantage point of eight classic American movies--Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Magnificent Ambersons, Gabriel Over the White House, Citizen Kane, Casablanca All Quiet on the Western Front, Daily Bread, and The Fountainhead--Kelley and her colleagues explore the political ideologies thrumming through the American psyche. The stock market crash and ensuing depression proved a defining experience. For the first time, the national psyche was sent careening toward alien political ideologies; the seductiveness of communism and fascism took hold in the wreckage wrought by the Depression. American foreign policy likewise fluctuated from the isolationist stance adopted after fighting the "war to end all wars" to an interventionist response to the intensifying pressure to vanquish communist and fascist bullies. Students, scholars, and the general public will find intriguing insights on a period of national catastrophe and triumph.

The new edition of Steve Bruce's Fundamentalism grapples with the combination of social strains and religious ideas that have produced an explosion of fundamentalist activity in the wake of 9/11.
In a direct and punchy style, the new edition of his book investigates what lies behind the actions of Al-Qaeda, suicide bombings and the 'war against terror', and also gets to grips with the continuing rise of the Christian Right in the USA. It offers new insights into the Protestant fundamentalism of the American political right-wing, looking at the influence issues such as abortion, gay rights and 'intelligent design' have had on US foreign policy and domestic politics.
Bruce's broad sociological analysis rejects the narrowly-conceived notion that fundamentalists are suffering from some kind of abnormal psychology, persuasively demonstrating fundamentalism's importance as a symptom of rapid social change.
Social science has generally focused on the social circumstances that produce extremist movements and regarded their religious ideologies as window-dressing. This study takes the religious elements of fundamentalism seriously.
Topics tackled in the book include:
* Why are some religions more likely than others to produce fundamentalism?
* Why do they differ in their willingness to use violence to pursue their goals?
* Does fundamentalism pose a serious challenge or sustainable alternative to the secular, liberal democracy of Western society?
This thought-provoking and highly topical book will be essential reading for students of any discipline drawing on the sociology of religion. It will also appeal to those beyond the academic community who want to know what fundamentalism really means today.

What can creative methods offer our understanding of military power and militarised cultures? What constitutes ‘creative research’ in military studies? And, what are some of the challenges of this type of work? This edited volume brings together authors working at the cutting edge of creative research in military studies, to explore how creativity and creative practice can shed new light on often taken for granted concepts in critical military research. In twelve empirically and conceptually rich chapters, authors from a diverse range of disciplinary fields draw on theatre, model-making, songwriting, dance, spoken word, paper making, and more, to question what military research can and should look like. As a collection, the book explores topics of central concern in military studies such as militarism, military experience, and militarised cultures, as well as more practical questions around ethics, positionality, and research relationships. This path-breaking new volume considers what exactly constitutes creativity in critical military research, while offering the tools for researchers to think anew about big questions in the field.

A series of culture wars are being fought in America today; Lerner, Nagai, and Rothman contend that one key battleground is the nation's high school texts. The authors argue that today's textbook controversies, as exemplified in the proposed National Standards for the Study of United States and World History, reflect changes in American public philosophy and the education profession. Conventional wisdom among students of the curriculum is that the major threat to freedom of the schools comes from the religious right. While this may have been true at one time, Lerner, Nagai, and Rothman assert that the major thrust today involves the imposition on schools of the ideology of particular groups that seek to use education as a mechanism for changing society. They document the growing influence of these groups, and their supporters among educators, through an extensive quantitative content analysis of leading high school history texts over the past 40 years and a historical analysis of how this outlook and the willingness to impose it became part of educators' conventional wisdom.

The authors document the growing influence of these groups, and their supporters among educators, in two ways. First, they present an extensive quantitative content analysis of leading high school history texts over the past 40 years, demonstrating in detail the feminist and multicultural perspectives that have come to dominate them. Second, they provide a historical analysis of how this outlook and the willingness to impose it became part of educators' conventional wisdom, tracing current policies back to the influence of the Progressive education movement led by John Dewey. This controversial book will be of exceptional interest to the general public as well as to researchers and students of education, public policy, and American intellectual history.

The primary objective of this book is to unearth the Mosul Incident, place it in a historical narrative and introduce it to the literature. Despite creating a historical turning point, the incident has not attracted the necessary attention in neither the Ottoman nor Iraqi historiography until now. By interpreting the preferences, policies and practices associated with this particular incident, the book is engaged to analyze the Post-Constitutional power shifts, perceptions of collective violence and the origins of Arab-Kurdish Dispute. The banishment and murder of Sheikh Said Barzanji who was the family head of Sadaat al-Barzanjiyya as the most influential religious organization of region, created a critical threshold in the history of Mosul. As the urban shootout on January 5 turned into a provincial bloodshed, Kurdish Sayyids, tribes and religious orders consolidated and revolted against the Ottoman authorities. Governors who were polarized as Anti Sâdât and Pro Sâdât allegedly misconducted their offices and misguided the authorities of law enforcement and judiciary. By overcoming the historical rupture between Ottoman Mosul and Modern Iraq, the book introduces an analytical framework to associate the origins of collective violence and ethnic fragmentation experienced in today’s Iraq with the past.

The period between World Wars I and II was a time of turbulent political change, with suffragists, labor radicals, demagogues, and other voices clamoring to be heard. One group of activists that has yet to be closely examined by historians is World War I veterans. Mining the papers of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the American Legion (AL), Stephen R. Ortiz reveals that veterans actively organized in the years following the war to claim state benefits (such as pensions and bonuses), and strove to articulate a role for themselves as a distinct political bloc during the New Deal era.

Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill is unique in its treatment of World War I veterans as significant political actors during the interwar period. Ortiz's study reinterprets the political origins of the "Second" New Deal and Roosevelt's electoral triumph of 1936, adding depth not only to our understanding of these events and the political climate surrounding them, but to common perceptions of veterans and their organizations. In describing veteran politics and the competitive dynamics between the AL and the VFW, Ortiz details the rise of organized veterans as a powerful interest group in modern American politics.

Among the violent acts perpetrated by radical Islamist groups in Europe, the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris has been one of those that has challenged established categories of public debate the most. Through a multifaceted and detailed analysis of the public discourse around the Charlie Hebdo episode in France, Germany, Italy, and the UK, Discursive Turns and Critical Junctures offers an in-depth analysis of how political groups and religious organizations have reacted to the event, which claims they have made in the public sphere, and how they have justified such claims. Drawing on newspaper sources and discourse analysis, the authors navigate the complexities caused by political violence. They develop a threefold comparison that considers how the debate differs across countries; how it evolved over time; and how it varies when one looks at mainstream media compared to social movement arenas. Based on a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative analyses, the volume pays particular attention to radical left, radical right and religious actors and to issues related to migration and integration, secularism and cultural diversity, security and civil rights. In particular, they focus on the way in which transformative events act as critical junctures within different public spheres. Starting from the nefarious attacks on January 2015, this highly relevant, theoretically compelling, and methodologically sophisticated study of public debates in Europe adds substantially to the growing body of research into critical junctures as discursive turning points and gives insights into into a number of debates ranging including citizenship and political violence.

This book's central claim is that although Niebuhr and Morgenthau were critics of what they referred to as utopian thought, the core of their criticism constituted an attack on the inability of utopianism to produce politically stimulating and democratically mobilizing utopias. In their minds utopianism was rhetorically barren and imaginatively sterile as a political narrative, the inability of which to move and dedicate its citizenry ultimately led to conformity and homogeneity. Arguing that the same sterility is present in current visions of democracy--traditional as well as radical--the book seeks to render Niebuhr and Morgenthau's attempt at re-opening the democratic imagination relevant for contemporary purposes as well.