"This absolutely splendid book is a triumph on every level. A first-rate history of the United States, it is beautifully written, deeply researched, and filled with entertaining stories. For anyone who wants to see our democracy flourish, this is the book to read."-Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals To all who say our democracy is broken riven by partisanship, undermined by extremism, corrupted by wealth history offers hope. In nearly every generation since the nation's founding, critics have lodged similar complaints, and yet the nation is still standing. In Democracy: A Case Study, Harvard Business School professor David Moss reveals that the United States has often thrived on conflict. Democracy's nineteen case studies take us from James Madison and Alexander Hamilton's debates in the run up to the Constitutional Convention to Citizens United. They were honed in Moss's popular and highly influential course at the Harvard Business School and are now being taught in high schools across the country. Each one presents readers with a pivotal moment in U.S. history and raises questions facing key decision makers at the time: Should the delegates support Madison's proposal for a congressional veto over state laws? Should President Lincoln resupply Fort Sumter? Should Florida lawmakers approve or reject the Equal Rights Amendment? Readers are asked to weigh the choices and consequences, wrestle with momentous decisions, and come to their own conclusions. Moss invites us to consider what distinguishes a constructive from a destructive conflict, to engage in the passionate debates that are crucial to a healthy society, and to experience American history anew. You will come away from this engaging and thought-provoking book with a deeper understanding of American democracy's greatest strengths and weaknesses-and a new appreciation of its extraordinary resilience.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith's canonical book on political science turned conventional wisdom on its head. They started from a single assertion: leaders do whatever keeps them in power. They don't care about the "national interest"-or even their subjects-unless they must. Newly updated to reflect the global rise of authoritarianism, this clever and accessible book illustrates how leaders amass and retain power. As Bueno de Mesquita and Smith show, democracy is essentially just a convenient fiction. Governments do not differ in kind, but only in the number of essential supporters or backs that need scratching. The size of this group determines almost everything about politics: what leaders can get away with, and the quality of life or misery under them. And it is also the key to returning power to the people.

Reaching for Utopia brings together insightful essays and profiles chronicling the remarkable political and cultural transformations of the last decade - from the fall of Gordon Brown, to the rise of Corbyn and the radical left, to Brexit. Cowley is fascinated by the men and women who are creating the history of our era as well as those who document it. He has met and interviewed nearly all the major political players shaping and changing the way we live today. The book features fascinating, wide-ranging narrative profiles of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn, Alex Salmond, Nigel Farage, David Cameron, George Osborne and Theresa May. Cowley is unusual in having access to party leaders and prime ministers on both the left and right. The book also features penetrating essays on writers such as George Orwell, John le Carre, Kazuo Insiguro, and Ian McEwan, personal essays, an investigation into the so-called Brexit Murder, and a striking conversation with the political philosopher Michael Sandel. Cowley is one of the most influential journalists in Britain. He is notable for being both a political and literary journalist. And he also writes about sport, especially football, and covered the 2006 World Cup in Germany for the Observer. He has been widely credited with transforming the fortunes of the New Statesman, which in 2017 has recorded its highest print circulation for nearly 40 years as well as becoming a major digital title with rapidly growing online profile. According to the European Press Prize, 'Cowley has succeeded in revitalising the New Statesman and re-establishing its position as an influential political and cultural weekly. He has given the New Statesman an edge and a relevance to current affairs it hasn't had for years.' In 2017, at the British Society of Magazine Editors awards, Cowley won the editor of the year award (politics and current affairs) for the third time. In 2018, he launched New Statesman America.

A New Yorker staff writer, investigates his grandfather, a Nazi Party Chief, in this "unflinching, gorgeously written, and deeply moving exploration of morality, family, and war” Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain ‘The book we need right now’ Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal What do we owe the past? How to make peace with a dark family history? Burkhard Bilger hardly knew his grandfather growing up. His parents immigrated to Oklahoma from Germany after World War II, and though his mother was an historian, she rarely talked about her father or what he did during the war. Then one day a packet of letters arrived from Germany, yellowing with age, and a secret history began to unfold. Karl Gönner was a schoolteacher and Nazi party member from the Black Forest. In 1940, he was sent to a village in occupied France and tasked with turning its children into proper Germans. A fervent Nazi when the war began, he grew close to the villagers over the next four years, till he came to think of himself as their protector, shielding them from his own party’s brutality. Yet he was arrested in 1946 and accused of war crimes. Was he guilty or innocent? A vicious collaborator or just an ordinary man, struggling to atone for his country’s crimes? Bilger goes to Germany to find out. What follows is a literary suspense story: a tale of chance encounters and serendipitous discoveries in villages and dusty archives across Germany and France. Intimate and far-reaching, Fatherland is an extraordinary odyssey through the great upheavals of the past century, tracing one family’s path through history’s wreckage. For readers of Bart van Es’s The Cut Out Girl or Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with the Amber Eyes, this is a story of middle lands, torn allegiances and loaded family inheritance.

One of the last great untold stories of the Holocaust, The Survivor is an astonishing account of one man's unbreakable spirit, unshakeable faith, and extraordinary courage in the face of evil. At only 16 years old, Josef Lewkowicz became a number, prisoner 85314. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland, he and his father were separated from their family and herded to the Krakow-Plaszow concentration camp. Forced to carry out hard labour in brutal conditions, and to live under the constant threat of extreme violence and sudden death, before the war was over Josef would witness the unique horrors of six of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Ebensee. From salt mines to forced marches, summary executions to Amstetten, where prisoners were used as human shields in Allied bombing, Josef lived under the spectre of death for many years. When he was liberated from Ebensee at the end of the war, conditions were amongst the worst witnessed by allied forces. With his freedom, Josef returned home to find that he was the only one left alive in an extended family of 150. Compelled by the need to do something to avenge that loss, he joined the Jewish police while still in a displaced persons' camp, and was recruited as an intelligence officer for the US Army who gave him a team to search for Nazis in hiding. Whilst rounding up SS leaders, he played a critical role in identifying and bringing to justice his greatest tormentor, the Butcher of Plaszow, Amon Goeth, played by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List. He then committed his life to helping the orphaned children of the Holocaust rebuild their lives. The Survivor is Josef's extraordinary testimony.

Nobel Laureate James Buchanan collects in this volume original and recent hard-to-find essays exploring liberalism and conservatism as distinct ways of looking at and thinking about the realm of human interaction. Classical liberalism is presented here as a coherent political and economic position, as distinguished from both modern liberalism and conservatism. The book comprises chapters which, taken together, assign a central and critical role to individual liberty. The liberalism is classical in its continuation of normative arguments made by the great liberal thinkers of three centuries, including the American Founders and culminating in the recent works of F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman. The author discusses the status quo in the conservative position, normative presuppositions for democracy, and examines what seem to be the conservative assumptions about the nature of human beings. The introductory and concluding chapters, written specifically for this volume, are designed to place both the essays and his own position in the broader perspective of political philosophy. Students and scholars of economics, political science and philosophy will find this collection a provocative and necessary addition to their library. Liberals and conservatives alike will find the arguments insightful and absorbing.

This year's Socialist Register continues its coverage of the economic crisis. It deepens the analysis with essays on: * The global roots of the crisis * The place of the city as a site of capital accumulation and resistance * The dismantling of the public sector * The fraudulence of neoliberal "environmentalism" * The intensification of global austerity It extends regional coverage of the crisis, with essays on the United States, Latin America, China, Eastern Europe, Ireland, and the Middle East. The volume also opens up a debate on possible strategies for the Left, which it will continue in the forthcoming volume in 2013 on socialist strategy for the 21st century.

Although most people believe that some form of government is necessary, until recently it was merely an assumption that had never been analyzed from an economic point of view. This changed in the 1970s when economists at the Center for the Study of Public Choice engaged in a systematic exploration of the issue. This stimulating collection, the first book-length treatment on the public choice theory of government, continues and extends the research program begun more than three decades ago. The book reprints the main articles from the 1972 volume Explorations in the Theory of Anarchy, and contains a response to each chapter, as well as new comments by Gordon Tullock, James Buchanan, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel and Peter Boettke. The younger economists are notably less pessimistic about markets and more pessimistic about government than their predecessors. Much of the new analysis suggests that private property rights and contracts can exist without government, and that even though problems exist, government does not seem to offer a solution. Might anarchy be the best choice after all? This provocative volume explores this issue in-depth and provides some interesting answers. Economists, political scientists, philosophers and lawyers interested in public choice, political economy and spontaneous order will find this series of essays illuminating.

Why are discussions of human rights largely absent from Hayek's writings? Focusing primarily on Hayek's writings in law and politics, the author examines the building blocks of Hayek's legal theorizing - the notions of coercion, the Rule of Law ideal, justice, negative duties, and liberal as opposed to majoritarian constitutionalism - arguing that each element of Hayek's writing contributes to his overall perspective on human rights. The author concludes by summarizing the relationship between the twin themes that drive Hayek's work: his understanding of the consequences of the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft forms of social interaction and the implications of an increasing degree of functional specialization in society. Hayek's vision of the political and economic future has to a remarkable extent come to pass, and his writings can now be seen to contain much that is orthodox and widely accepted. The tight weaving of insights from diverse academic disciplines into a coherent social theory make his work of heightened relevance today, and many of the core constructs and concerns of his theorizing are useful for discussions of human rights. Students and scholars interested in a multidisciplinary approach to libertarian or liberal theory, legal and political theory, or market liberalism, will find this an insightful reading of one of our great thinkers.

'the first man from the midst of the working class who completely understood them, completely championed them ...never deserted them, never turned his back on a single principle which he had professed, never drifted away from his class in thought, in feeling or in faith.' John Bruce Glasier'France had her Jaures, Germany her Bebel and Liebknecht, Austria her Victor Adler, Russia her Lenin. Britain produced, and continues to produce, men to carry on the struggle of the poor, but no one who more personifies the spirit of that struggle than the miner from the coalfields of Lanarkshire.' James Maxton

'An indelible feat of reporting and an urgent read ... It's a privilege to read books like these' Te-Ping Chen, author of Land of Big Numbers 'A powerful reminder of the ways in which China's future depends on who controls the past' Peter Hessler A documentary filmmaker who spent years uncovering a Mao-era death camp; an independent journalist who gave voice to the millions who suffered through Covid; a magazine publisher who dodges the secret police: these are some of the people who make up Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, a vital account of how some of China's most important writers, filmmakers, and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to challenge the Chinese Communist Party on its most sacred ground - its monopoly on history. In traditional China, dynasties rewrote history to justify their rule by proving that their predecessors were unworthy of holding power. Marxism gave this a modern gloss, describing history as an unstoppable force heading toward Communism's triumph. The Chinese Communist Party builds on these ideas to whitewash its misdeeds and justify its rule. But in recent years, critical thinkers from across the land have begun to challenge this state-led disremembering. Using digital technologies to bypass China's legendary surveillance state, their samizdat journals, guerilla media posts, and underground films document a pattern of disasters: from past famines and purges to the ethnic clashes and virus outbreaks of the present. Based on years of research in Xi Jinping's China, Sparks challenges stereotypes of a China where the state has quashed all free thought, revealing instead a country engaged in one of humanity's great struggles of memory against forgetting - a battle that will shape the China that emerges in the mid-21st century.

In July 1950, Avi Shlaim, only five, and his family were forced into exile, fleeing from their beloved Iraq into the new state of Israel. Now the rump of a once flourishing community of over 150,000, dating back 2,600 years, has dwindled to single figures. For many, this tells the story of the timeless clash of the Arab and Jewish civilisations, the heroic mission of Zionism to rescue Eastern Jews from their backwards nations, and unceasing persecution as the fate and history of Jewish people. Avi Shlaim tears up this script. His mother had many Muslim friends in Baghdad, but no Zionist ones. The Iraqi Jewish community, once celebrated for its ancient heritage and rich culture, was sprayed with DDT upon arrival in Israel. As anti-Semitism gathered pace in Iraq, the Zionist underground may have inflamed it – deliberately. This memoir celebrates the disappearing heritage of Arab-Jews – caught in the crossfire of secular ideologies.

Americans find themselves in genuine confusion and dismay concerning the actions of President Obama's administration. None of Obama's most important campaign promises--ending the Iraq war, abolishing torture, closing Guantanamo, changing Washington's culture of corruption--has come to pass. Instead, he has bailed out the bankers, escalated the conflict in Afghanistan, launched a new war in Libya, and institutionalized the civil rights abuses of the Bush regime.

Roger D. Hodge makes the provocative case that substantive reform was never even on the table. Behind the euphoria of Obama's victory was in fact a business-as-usual corporate machine. Obama's presidency has demonstrated that mere hope is never enough, that change will come only when the American people take charge of their own politics. A brilliantly crafted call to arms, The Mendacity of Hope offers an essential analysis of the American political system and the powerful interests that control our government.

Define and rule focuses on the turn in late nineteenth-century colonial statecraft when Britain abandoned the attempt to eradicate difference between conqueror and conquered and introduced a new idea of governance, as the definition and management of difference. Mahmood Mamdani explores how lines were drawn between settler and native as distinct political identities, and between natives according to tribe. Out of that colonial experience issued a modern language of pluralism and difference. A mid-nineteenth-century crisis of empire attracted the attention of British intellectuals and led to a reconception of the colonial mission, and to reforms in India, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. The new politics, inspired by Sir Henry Maine, established that natives were bound by geography and custom, rather than history and law, and made this the basis of administrative practice. Maine's theories were later translated into "native administration" in the African colonies. Mamdani takes the case of Sudan to demonstrate how colonial law established tribal identity as the basis for determining access to land and political power, and follows this law's legacy to contemporary Darfur. He considers the intellectualand political dimensions of African movements toward decolonization by focusing on two key fi gures: the Nigerian historian Yusuf Bala Usman, who argued for an alternative to colonial historiography, and Tanzania's first president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who realized that colonialism's political logic was legal and administrative, not military, and could be dismantled through nonviolent reforms.

This collection gathers together 31 previously out-of-print titles focusing on revolution - the political, economic, military and social aspects of the overthrow of state power. Ranging from nineteenth-century France to late-twentieth-century Caribbean, these books analyse the forms of revolt and the aftermaths of revolution, examining the types of government that result and the reactions of international opinion.

Organized around single country studies embedded in key historical moments, this book introduces students to the shifting and varied guerrilla history of Latin America from the late 1950s to the present. It brings together academics and those directly involved in aspects of the guerrilla movement, to understand each country's experience with guerrilla warfare and revolutionary activism. The book is divided in four thematic parts after two opening chapters that analyze the tradition of military involvement in Latin American politics and the parallel tradition of insurgency and coup effort against dictatorship. The first two parts examine active guerrilla movements in the 1960s and 1970s with case studies including Bolivia, Nicaragua, Peru, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Part 3 is dedicated to the Central American Civil Wars of the 1980s and 1990s in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. Part 4 examines specific guerrilla movements which require special attention. Chapters include Colombia's complicated guerrilla scenery; the rivalling Shining Path and Tupac Amaru guerrillas in Peru; small guerrilla movements in Mexico which were never completely documented; and transnational guerrilla operations in the Southern Cone. The concluding chapter presents a balance of the entire Latin American guerrilla at present. Superbly accessible, while retaining the complexity of Latin American politics, Latin American Guerrilla Movements represents the best historical account of revolutionary movements in the region, which students will find of great use owing to its coverage and insights.

Bruno Jossa expertly illustrates that the creation of a system of cooperative firms is tantamount to a revolution giving rise to a new production mode capable of reversing the existing relationship between capital and labour. The book also demonstrates a revolution enacted by peaceful and democratic means in order for worker-managed organisations to outnumber capitalistic ones. Providing a comprehensive insight into these models, Jossa examines the relations between political power and economic democracy, ownership and bankruptcy risks within democratic organisations. Using the theories of Marx and Engels, the book offers a new model of socialism, allowing for a worker-led system and suppressing capitalism, whilst inviting a more theoretical approach without the suppression of markets. Thought-provoking in its approach, On Market Socialism will provide an excellent resource for policy makers in labour and political economics and also scholars of the history of economics and radical economics.

In 1979, aged only seven, Monica Macias was transplanted from West Africa to the unfamiliar surroundings of North Korea. She was sent by her father Francisco, the first president of post-Independence Equatorial Guinea, to be educated under the guardianship of his ally, Kim Il Sung. Within months, her father was executed in a military coup; her mother became unreachable. Effectively orphaned, she and two siblings had to make their life in Pyongyang. At military boarding school, Monica learned to mix with older children, speak fluent Korean and handle weapons on training exercises. After university, she went in search of her roots, passing through Beijing, Seoul, Madrid, Guinea, New York and finally London - forced at every step to reckon with damning perceptions of her adoptive homeland. Optimistic yet unflinching, Monica's astonishing and unique story challenges us to see the world through different eyes.

This volume of new, original essays reflects the lifelong concerns and writings of the person they honor, Professor Howard Sherman. Sherman wrote on a wide range of topics - the causes of recessions, depressions and mass unemployment under capitalism; the difficulties and challenges of establishing viable democratic planning systems under socialism; the down-to-earth realities of economic life in the United States, the Soviet Union and elsewhere; and the theoretical traditions he drew upon to inform these empirical studies, i.e. Keynesianism, institutionalism and, most especially, Marxism. The contributors follow in Sherman's tradition through their careful analysis of topics such as the long-term trends in contemporary global capitalism; the relationship between Marxism and institutionalism; debates over the usefulness of class analysis; the political economy of financial liberalization; lessons from the demise of socialism in the Soviet Union and China; and the possibilities for advancing a workable egalitarian economic agenda. This book demonstrates the continued vibrancy and relevance of radical political economy as a mode of social scientific analysis. Scholars and students in economics, sociology, history, philosophy and political science will find the essays thought-provoking and informative.

The New York Times-bestselling "skeptical environmentalist" argues that panic over climate change is causing more harm than good Hurricanes batter our coasts. Wildfires rage across the American West. Glaciers collapse in the Artic. Politicians, activists, and the media espouse a common message: climate change is destroying the planet, and we must take drastic action immediately to stop it. Children panic about their future, and adults wonder if it is even ethical to bring new life into the world. Enough, argues bestselling author Bjorn Lomborg. Climate change is real, but it's not the apocalyptic threat that we've been told it is. Projections of Earth's imminent demise are based on bad science and even worse economics. In panic, world leaders have committed to wildly expensive but largely ineffective policies that hamper growth and crowd out more pressing investments in human capital, from immunization to education. False Alarm will convince you that everything you think about climate change is wrong -- and points the way toward making the world a vastly better, if slightly warmer, place for us all.

Approaches focusing on ideological and cognitive factors to analyse public policy have moved to centre-stage in political science. This book presents the great variety of theoretical and empirical research on the role of ideas which has emerged in recent years.How can you quantify ideas? Ideas are objective entities, not conducive to empirical research. The appeal of this book lies in the juxtaposition of a careful exploration and discussion of the theories behind the role of ideas in policy making and policy areas, and their detailed contextualisation. Through carefully researched contemporary examples offering single country studies, comparative studies and examples from the European Union, these 'ideas' show themselves to be a double-edged sword. Ideas are revealed as both a societal and political resource, crucial to both promoting and inhibiting policy change. A clear understanding of the impact and influences of ideas on the crucial process of policy is essential to all political scientists and analysts of public policy, as well as individuals interested in the effects on policy decisions.