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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies > Liberalism & centre democratic ideologies
This book addresses the relationship between the 'liberal' values of Anglo-Saxon cultures and the way that they conduct themselves when they are fighting - or preparing to fight - wars. The United States and the United Kingdom are characterised by a consensus that their social and political arrangements are, in a very broad sense, 'liberal'. Liberalism is not pacifism; nor are liberals necessarily respectful of traditional prohibitions that have set out to moderate excessive violence. But liberals do seek to understand their violent actions as part of a wider project of defending or expanding liberal freedoms. The perceived alternative is to undermine the will to keep on fighting. Sustaining a liberal picture of what is going on is an indispensable part of a liberal strategy. Contributors with disciplinary backgrounds in history, international relations, and strategic studies discuss what 'liberalism' means in this particular context and how it might relate to 'strategy', both in the recent past and in the future. The chapters consider how liberal states understand the wars they fight, the constraints liberal values place on these states, the role of public opinion and the appropriate strategies for modern liberal states. Topics addressed include civilian bombing, the nature of US military culture, the British 'Iraq inquiries', the effects of the erosion of Westphalian sovereignty and the rise of new ideas about 'globalization', and the decline in popular involvement. This book will be of much interest to students of strategic studies, political philosophy, foreign policy, security studies and IR in general.
More than two hundred years after his birth, and 150 years after the publication of his most famous essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill remains one of the towering intellectual figures of the Western tradition. This book combines an up-to-date assessment of the philosophical legacy of Mill's arguments, his complex version of liberalism and his account of the relationship between character and ethical and political commitment. Bringing together key international and interdisciplinary scholars, including Martha Nussbaum and Peter Singer, this book combines the latest insights of Mill scholarship with a long-term appraisal of the ways in which Mill's work has been received and interpreted from the time of his death in 1873 to today. The book offers compelling insights into Mill's posthumous fate and reputation; his youthful political and intellectual activism; his views on the formation of character; the development of his thought on logic; his differences from his father and Bentham; his astonishingly prescient, environmentally sensitive and 'green' thought; his relation to virtue ethics; his conception of higher pleasures and its relation to his understanding of justice; his feminist thought and its place in contemporary debates and feminist discourses; his defence of free speech and its fundamental significance for his liberalism; and his continued contemporary relevance on a number of major issues. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Politics, Political Theory, Philosophy, History, English, Psychology, and also Cultural Studies, Empire studies, nationalism and ethnicity studies.
In what is the first sustained analysis of Marx's attitude to the puzzle of the individual in history and society, this book, first published in 1990, challenges received views on the importance of class analysis and the place of a theory of human nature in Marx's thought. The radical possibilities of individual agency in society are explored within a Marxian framework, and without recourse to the current fashions of methodological individualism or rational choice theory. In the context of the apparent antagonism between collectivist and individualist approaches to political explanation and social change, the author establishes that a 'New Individual', of singular importance for the understanding of contemporary society, can be identified. For the first time, the Grundrisse provides the basis of a major analysis of Marx's thoughts on the individual. By illustrating the nature of the connections between collective existence and individual experience, Ian Forbes makes an important contribution towards the revitalization of socialist thought. He also develops a valuable counterpoint to rational actor models of politics and liberal theories of justice alike, by establishing the importance of a political theory that values human agency as much as it understands social and historical processes.
This study defines the relationship between humanism and liberalism by comparing the two Victorian figures who were most concerned with the preservation of humanistic values in a free and democratic society: Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill. The book sets apart Arnold and Mill from their contemporaries and points out their similarities to one another in discussions of their theories of history, poetry, their celebration of the contemplative life and their willingness to welcome democracy. At the same time it examines the differences between the two men, which he uses to create a dialogue between humanism and liberalism on the question of how a high cultural ideal can be realized in democratic society.
This book contributes to the literature on the change of governance in the context of its European multilevel organization. The integration of Europe is a process of fundamental social change: a process of constructing a European society and of deconstructing the national societies. Munch demonstrates that there is a movement away from republican and representative features of a democracy and towards liberal and pluralistic features. The book illustrates this change in the nature of European political regulation, European jurisdiction and the intellectual debates in France, Germany and Britain on legitimising the emerging system of multilevel governance. He discusses how far the new European regime of liberal governmentality converges with the US-American type of constitutional liberalism. Following a sociological approach, the book focuses on identifying the causes, features and consequences of the fundamental social change taking place in the process of European integration. This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students from political science, sociology, law and philosophy interested in political theory, comparative politics, international relations and political communication as well as practitioners of policy-making in governments, administration, parties, associations and the media.
"One of the most important political books of 2018."-Rod Dreher, American Conservative Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century-fascism, communism, and liberalism-only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism's proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.
This book addresses the contemporary debate about the 'third way' in European social democracy, by analysing the exemplar case of social democracy - 'the Swedish model' - this book challenges the recent 'third way' perspective. The author argues strongly against the widely held belief that the nature of contemporary capitalist restructuring and globalisation has rendered traditional social democracy obsolete.
This compelling and convincing study represents the culmination of the authors' several decades of research on the pivotal role played by elites in the success or failure of political regimes. Revising the classical theory of elites and politics, John Higley and Michael Burton distinguish basic types of elites and associated political regimes. They canvas political change during the modern historical and contemporary periods to identify circumstances and ways in which the sine qua non of liberal democracy, a consensually united elite, has formed and persisted. The book considers an impressive body of cases, examining how consensually united elites have fostered forty-five liberal democracies and how disunited or ideologically united elites have thus far prevented liberal democracy in more than one hundred other countries. The authors argue that obstacles to the emergence of elites propitious for liberal democracy are more formidable than democratization enthusiasts recognize. They assess prospects for the transformation of disunited and ideologically united elites where they now exist, ask whether current challenges to Western liberal democracies will undermine their consensually united elites, and explore what the rise of the distinctive elite clustered around George W. Bush may portend for America's liberal democracy. The authors' powerful and important argument reframes our thinking about liberal democracy and questions optimistic assumptions about the prospects for its spread in the twenty-first century.
Scholars within the Hayekian-Austrian tradition of classical liberalism have done virtually no work on the family as an economic and social institution. In addition, there is a real paucity of scholarship on the place of the family within classical liberal and libertarian political philosophy. Hayek's Modern Family offers a classical liberal theory of the family, taking Hayekian social theory as the main analytical framework. Horwitz argues that families are social institutions that perform certain irreplaceable functions in society. These functions change as economic, political, and social circumstances change, and the family form adapts accordingly, kicking off the next wave of developments in the social structure. In Hayekian terms, the family is an evolving and undesigned social institution. Horwitz offers a non-conservative defense of the family as a social institution against the view that either the state or "the village" is able or required to take over its irreplaceable functions.
In Poeticized Culture, James Hersh shows the John Rawls' framework of liberal public reason (Political Liberalism, 1993), within which he proposes his scheme of justice as fairness, includes an unacknowledged call for a Richard Rortian 'poeticized culture.' Hersh argues that, despite Rawls's intentions, his framework within which he proposes justice as fairness demands a Rortian ironic perspective and does not allow for citizens to hold absolute or literal religious beliefs. Hersh argues that this Rortian perspective makes Rawls's justice as fairness the most reasonable scheme for the world's emerging democracies, particularly for those democracies emerging in the Middle East where literal religious beliefs are held with such fervor.
According to received wisdom parties have played a mainly destructive role in French political development. Of questionable legitimacy, pursuing narrow sectarian goals, often corruptly, they have brought about division, weakness and the collapse of regimes. A proper reading of history suggests differently. By combining historical research and contemporary political science theory about party, the author shows that for over a century party has irrigated French democracy in often invisible ways, brokering working compromises between groups divided strongly along social, political and cultural lines. The key to this success is the party system, which allowed for a high degree of collusion and cooptation between political elites, rhetoric notwithstanding. This hidden logic has persisted to this day despite the advent of presidentialism and remains the key to the continuing prosperity of French democracy.
John Gray's previous book "Beyond the New Right" developed a radical critique of the New Right from the standpoint of traditional conservatism. This study goes on to stake out the elements of a new position, whose starting point is the obsolescence of the received traditions of thought, conservative as well as liberal. The author argues that all the intellectual traditions of modernity are applications of the Enlightenment project and thereby suffer the fate of that project, which has proved to be self-undermining. From this position, Gray argues that both the desire of fundamentalist liberalism to salvage the Enlightenment, and the traditionalist or reactionary desire to reverse it, are doomed to failure. The central problem of contemporary political thought and practice, he contends, is that of securing peaceful co-existence for incommensurable world-views in an intellectual and cultural context.
According to received wisdom parties have played a mainly destructive role in French political development. Of questionable legitimacy, pursuing narrow sectarian goals, often corruptly, they have brought about division, weakness and the collapse of regimes. A proper reading of history suggests differently. By combining historical research and contemporary political science theory about party, the author shows that for over a century party has irrigated French democracy in often invisible ways, brokering working compromises between groups divided strongly along social, political and cultural lines. The key to this success is the party system, which allowed for a high degree of collusion and cooptation between political elites, rhetoric notwithstanding. This hidden logic has persisted to this day despite the advent of presidentialism and remains the key to the continuing prosperity of French democracy.
By exploring the writings of Mandeville, Hume and Smith, this book offers a critique of Hayek's theory of cultural evolution and explores the roots of his powerful defence of liberalism. This book is an original contribution to the debate, and vital reading for researchers in politics, political theory, and economics.
First published in 1985, The Subject of Tragedy takes the drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the starting point for an analysis of the differential identities of man and woman. Catherine Belsey charts, in a range of fictional and non-fictional texts, the production in the Renaissance of a meaning for subjectivity that is identifiably modern. The subject of liberal humanism - self-determining, free origin of language, choice and action - is highlighted as the product of a specific period in which man was the subject to which woman was related.
Based on new archival research, G. Williams Domhoff challenges popular conceptions of the 1930's New Deal. Arguing instead that this period was one of increasing corporate dominance in government affairs, affecting the fate of American workers up to the present day. While FDR's New Deal brought sweeping legislation, the tide turned quickly after 1938. From that year onward nearly every major new economic law passed by Congress showed the mark of corporate dominance. Domhoff accessibly portrays documents of the Committee's vital influence in the halls of government, supported by his interviews with several of its key employees and trustees. Domhoff concludes that in terms of economic influence, liberalism was on a long steady decline, despite two decades of post-war growing equality, and that ironically, it was the successes of the civil rights, feminist, environmental, and gay-lesbian movements-not a new corporate mobilisation-that led to the final defeat of the liberal-labour alliance after 1968.
Based on new archival research, G. Williams Domhoff challenges popular conceptions of the 1930's New Deal. Arguing instead that this period was one of increasing corporate dominance in government affairs, affecting the fate of American workers up to the present day. While FDR's New Deal brought sweeping legislation, the tide turned quickly after 1938. From that year onward nearly every major new economic law passed by Congress showed the mark of corporate dominance. Domhoff accessibly portrays documents of the Committee's vital influence in the halls of government, supported by his interviews with several of its key employees and trustees. Domhoff concludes that in terms of economic influence, liberalism was on a long steady decline, despite two decades of post-war growing equality, and that ironically, it was the successes of the civil rights, feminist, environmental, and gay-lesbian movements-not a new corporate mobilisation-that led to the final defeat of the liberal-labour alliance after 1968.
The global history of liberalism has paid too much attention to the West, neglecting the contributions of liberals from colonial nations. This book mines the thought of Filipino propagandist and novelist, Jose Rizal, to present a vision of liberalism for the colonized. It is both an introduction to Rizal and a treatise on rights, freedom, and tyranny in colonial contexts. Though a work on history, it responds to the illiberal present of rising authoritarianism and populism.
Neoliberalism is based on the systematic use of state power to impose, under the veil of 'non-intervention', a hegemonic project of recomposition of capitalist rule in most areas of social life. The tensions and displacements embedded within global neoliberalism are nowhere more evident than in the middle-income countries. At the domestic level, the neoliberal transitions have transformed significantly the material basis of social reproduction in these countries. These transformations include, but they are not limited to, shifts in economic and social policy. They also encompass the structure of property, the modality of insertion of the country into the international economy, and the domestic forms of exploitation and social domination. The political counterpart of these processes is the limitation of the domestic political sphere through the insulation of 'markets' and investors from social accountability and the imposition of a stronger imperative of labour control, allegedly in order to secure international competitiveness. These economic and political shifts have reduced the scope for universal welfare provision and led to regressive distributive shifts and higher unemployment and job insecurity in most countries. They have also created an income-concentrating dynamics of accumulation that has proven immune to Keynesian and reformist interventions. This book examines these challenges and dilemmas analytically, and empirically in different national contexts. This edited collection offers a theoretical critique of neoliberalism and a review of the contrasting experiences of eight middle-income countries (Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey and Venezuela). The studies included are interdisciplinary, ranging across economics, sociology, anthropology, international relations, political science and related social sciences. The book focuses on a materialist understanding of the workings of neoliberalism as a modality of social and economic reproduction, and its everyday practices of dispossession and exploitation. It will therefore be of particular interest to scholars in industrial policy, neoliberalism and development strategy.
John Stuart Mill's thought has been central in recent (as well as older) works of political theory discussing the relationship between liberal democratic politics and nationality or nationalism -- which is far from surprising, given his undisputed influence on liberal attitudes towards nationality from the 1860s to the present. This book provides the first thorough critical study of the attitude of this pillar of the liberal tradition towards nationality, nationhood, patriotism, cosmopolitanism, intervention/non-intervention, and international politics more generally. Based on exhaustive research in a great range or writings by Mill, as well as by his contemporaries and later students, it establishes for the first time clearly and subtly where exactly Mill stood with regard to nationhood, nationalism, patriotism, cosmopolitanism, national self-determination, intervention/non-intervention and other important issues in international ethics. It thus exposes and challenges all sorts of misconceptions, half-truths, or myths surrounding Mill's views on, and attitude towards, nationality and related issues in a vast literature from the mid-nineteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first century. At the same time, it offers a timely contribution to contemporary debates among political theorists on the relationship between liberal democratic values and nationalism, patriotism and cosmopolitanism, not least through its articulation of a distinct sense in which patriotism and cosmopolitanism can be compatible and mutually reinforcing (based on Varouxakis's interpretation of Mill's thought on this question). The reader will find critical discussions of the pronouncements on some of the issues examined (or on Mill's contributions to them) of some of the most important late-twentieth-century political theorists as well as of contemporaries or near-contemporaries of Mill.
When Adam Smith published his celebrated writings on economics and moral philosophy he famously referred to the operation of an 'invisible hand'. Adam Smith's Political Philosophy makes visible this hand by examining its significance in Smith's political philosophy and relating it to similar concepts used by other philosophers, thus revealing a distinctive approach to social theory that stresses the importance of the unintended consequences of human action. The first book to examine the history of Smith's political philosophy from this perspective, this work introduces greater conceptual clarity to the discussion of the invisible hand and the related notion of unintended order in the work of Smith, as well as in political theory more generally. By examining the application of spontaneous order ideas in the work of Smith, Hume, Hayek and Popper, this important volume traces similarities in approach, and from these constructs a conceptual, composite model of an invisible hand argument. While setting out a clear framework of the idea of spontaneous order, the book also builds the case for using this as an explanatory social theory, with chapters on its application in the fields of science, moral philosophy, law and government.
The effects of neoliberal economic reforms in the Southern Mediterranean are now widely regarded as a main underlying cause of the Arab uprisings. An often neglected dimension is that of the reforms' implications for local governance. The contributions to this edited volume examine how state power is being re-articulated but also challenged at sub-national levels in Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon and Turkey. They explore the effects of neoliberal economic and local governance reforms such as decentralization, public-private partnerships, and outsourcing in the area of public service delivery, poverty alleviation, and labor market reforms on local patronage networks, public accountability, and state-society relations. The findings show that such reforms are often subordinated to established patterns of political contestation among actors who seize on the opportunities that reforms offer to advance their political agendas, thereby illustrating the local specificity of 'actually existing neoliberalisms'. The book thus fills an important knowledge gap by combining public policy and management theories with those on patron-client networks and public accountability at the local level, and situating them within the critical literature on neoliberalism. This book was published as a special issue of Mediterranean Politics.
"How did an eloquent progressive who voted for Norman Thomas in the
1930s become a cheerleader for Joe McCarthy? This well-crafted
biography rescues the memory of John T. Flynn, a true American
original, and illuminates a large and neglected terrain of
twentieth-century political history." "An informative, insightful account of the career of a
once-popular opinion-maker." "John T. Flynn is a subject richly deserving of a scholarly and
readable biography, and, thanks to John. E. Moser, he now has
one." aGiven current debates over global intervention and government's
role in the economy, this volume could not be more timely.a "Provides a helpful backdrop to current debaes over social
welfare and foreign policy, which have thier roots in another
time." "With Right Turn John Moser has made a major contribution to the
historical literature of American intellectual dissent. John T.
Flynn, the subject of this extremely well written and carefully
researched biography, was an eloquent and hyperbolic critic of the
developing national security state, the Cold War consensus as well
as American imperialism. Moser captures the essence of the man, his
many contradictions, his considerable influence, and his great
courage. A very good read!" "Much-neededand well-researched."BR>--"Claremont Review of Books" John T. Flynn, a prolific writer, columnist for the New Republic, Harper's Magazine, and Collier's Weekly, radio commentator, and political activist, was described by the "New York Times" in 1964 as "a man of wide-ranging contradictions." In this new biography of Flynn, John E. Moser fleshes out his many contradictions and profound influence on U.S. history and political discourse. In the 1930s, Flynn advocated extensive regulation of the economy, the breakup of holding companies, and heavy taxes on the wealthy. A mere fifteen years later he was denouncing the New Deal as "creeping socialism," calling for an abolition of the income tax, and hailing Senator Joseph McCarthy and his fellow anticommunists as saviors of the American Republic. Yet throughout his career he insisted that he had remained true to the principles of liberalism as he understood them. It was America's political culture that changed, he argued, and not his values and views. Drawing on Flynn's life and his prolific writings, Moser illuminates how liberalism in America changed during the mid-twentieth century and considers whether Flynn's ideological odyssey was the product of opportunism, or the result of a set of deep-seated principles that he championed consistently over the years. In addition, Right Turn examines Flynn's role in laying the foundations for the "culture war" that would be played out in American society for the rest of the century, helping to define modern American conservatism.
Alive to history in the making (and the weight of the past) this volume examines Obama's presidency and Lyndon Johnson's, the killing of Trayvon Martin and the death of Andrew Breitbart, Occupy Wall Street and "America Beyond Capitalism." It presents essays, poems, and plays that speak to our times and challenge the liberal imagination. The title, That Floating Bridge, evokes Representative John Lewis' line--"Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma"--as it quotes a track on Gregg Allman's Low Country Blues, which Scott Spencer lauds here in a review for the Ages. That Floating Bridge's peerless range of contributors includes Amiri Baraka, Gar Alperovitz, Bernard Avishai, Uri Avnery, Bill Ayers, Paul Berman, John Chernoff, Mark Dudzic, Carmelita Estrellita, Henry Farrell, Fr. Rick Frechette, Donna Gaines, David Golding, Eugene Goodheart, Lawrence Goodwyn, Lisa Guenther, Alec Harrington, Malcolm Harris, Casey Hayden, Christopher Hayes, Patterson Hood, Roxane Johnson, Ben Kessler, Bob Levin, Philip Levine, Bongani Madondo, Greil Marcus, Scott McLemee, Judy Oppenheimer, Jedediah Purdy, Nick Salvatore, Aram Saroyan, Tom Smucker, Fredric Smoler, Violet Socks, A. B. Spellman, Scott Spencer, Richard Torres, Jesmyn Ward, and Pablo Yglesias. An account of how Franz Boas "did more to combat race prejudice than any other person" anchorsone section, but the volume also addresses devolutions of "diversity" linked with careerism in the art world and academe. An un-scholastic section titled "Criticism of Life"celebrates older and younger critics/poets. Songs are key to this volume's good times. Music writing--ranging from Eddie Hinton's Very Extremely Dangerous to Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet--enhances the pleasures of this text.
As the United States and the countries of Western Europe have sought to promote democratic rule in those parts of the world that have not enjoyed the blessings of liberty, they have failed to consider an important factor. Competitive elections, the sine qua non of democratic government, often gives rise to serious bouts of political violence: mob riots, inter-party fighting, and internal wars. The essays collected in this volume evaluate the relationship between terrorist activity and electoral politics. Do democratic elections themselves undermine the development and stability of the democratic institutions the United States and its allies seek to promote? Under what conditions are democratic elections effective at bringing terrorist organizations into the political process, thereby quelling violence? When and how might terrorist organizations use democratic elections to foment violence? This book was published as a special issue of Terrorism and Political Violence. |
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