With all of the provocative, sometimes highly destructive acts committed in the name of anarchy, this enlightening volume invites readers to discover the true meaning of anarchism, exploring its vivid history and its resurgent relevance for addressing today's most vexing social problems. In Anarchism Today, an acclaimed scholar and one of the world's foremost advocates for the anarchistic tradition cuts through common misconceptions and caricatures to explore what is perhaps the most poorly understood of all political theories. As author Randall Amster explains, rather than being an anti-everything rationale for defiance and destruction, anarchism is in fact a coherent set of values and practices with a rich history and contemporary relevance. Passionate and provocative, Amster's book offers readers an expert's perspective on what anarchism really means, including its relationship to other political approaches, its careful balancing of individual liberty and a functioning society, and its controversial image as a wellspring of violence. Along the way, Amster addresses a number of current issues from the perspective of anarchism, including corporate globalization, environmentalism, warfare, nationalism, education, technology, alternative economics, criminal justice, and even spirituality. He concludes with a frank assessment of anarchism's impact and the role it can play in building a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world.

The phrase "solidarity of the shaken" was introduced into the today's political vocabulary by Jan Patocka, one of the last students of the philosopher Edmund Husserl and undoubtedly the most important Czech philosopher of the twentieth century. In January 1977, Patocka became - together with Vaclav Havel and Jiri Hajek -- one of the first three spokespersons of Charter 77, Czechoslovakia's anti-communist resistance movement. He died less than three months later, as a result of total exhaustion caused by days-long police interrogations. Patocka's Socratic death is an unavoidable component of his philosophical legacy. Is his main message still relevant today, after the "short" twentieth century ended with the collapse of communism in Europe in 1989? Is it still in circulation and perceived as an important Central European contribution to the new "dialogue of mankind" taking place today, as we approach the end of the second decade of new millennium? Six years ago, the Vaclav Havel Library organized a seminar in Prague where a group of scholars sought to answer these questions. This book offers any readers concerned with human rights the results of these incisive discussions. Patocka's life and work are decidedly not diminishing with time. On the contrary, they have been actualized by our current spiritual crisis.

These original essays contributed by leading thinkers aim to revitalize utopian thinking and apply it to contemporary national and international politics. Radical political thought of the 20th century was dominated by utopia, but the failure of communism in Eastern Europe and its disavowal in China has brought on the need for a new model of utopian thought. This book thus seeks to redefine the concept of utopia and bring it to bear on today's politics. The original essays, contributed by key thinkers such as Gianni Vattimo and Jean-Luc Nancy, highlight the connection between utopian theory and practice. The book reassesses the legacy of utopia and conceptualizes alternatives to the neo-liberal, technocratic regimes prevalent in today's world. It argues that only utopia in its existential sense, grounded in the lived time and space of politics, can distance itself from mainstream ideology and not be at the service of technocratic regimes, while paying attention to the material conditions of human life. "Existential Utopia" offers a new and exciting interpretation of utopia in contemporary culture and a much-needed intervention into the philosophical and political discussion of utopian thinking that is both accessible to students and comprehensive.

The city of Manila is uniquely significant to Philippine, Southeast Asian and world history. It played a key role in the rise of Western colonial mercantilism in Asia, the extinction of the Spanish Empire and the ascendancy of the USA to global imperial hegemony, amongst other events. This book examines British and American writing on the city, situating these representations within scholarship on empire, orientalism and US, Asian and European political history. Through analysis of novels, memoirs, travelogues and journalism written about Manila by Westerners since the early eighteenth century, Tom Sykes builds a picture of Western attitudes towards the city and the wider Philippines, and the mechanics by which these came to dominate the discourse. This study uncovers to what extent Western literary tropes and representational models have informed understandings of the Philippines, in the West and elsewhere, and the types of counter-narrative which have emerged in the Philippines in response to them.

This volume provides a thorough and crucial account of the political work of Edmund Burke. "Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers" provides comprehensive accounts of the works of seminal conservative thinkers from a variety of periods, disciplines and traditions - the first series of its kind. Even the selection of thinkers adds another aspect to conservative thinking, including not only theorists but also thinkers in literary forms and those who are also practitioners. This volume includes an intellectual biography, historical context, critical exposition on Burke's work, reception and influence, contemporary relevance, bibliography including references to electronic resources and an index. The series comprises twenty volumes, each including an intellectual biography, historical context, critical exposition of the thinker's work, reception and influence, contemporary relevance, bibliography including references to electronic resources and an index.

"Van der Burg presents an innovative transregional study of Napoleonic governance in the often-overlooked northern periphery of the Empire. This book carefully examines the Empire's administrative structure in the north, focusing on the heterogeneous community of prefects and subprefects as 'tools of incorporation', binding the regions to the central state. His rich comparative analysis highlights the incomplete integration of the north and makes important contributions to our understanding of the Empire and its legacy of state building."-Katherine Aaslestad, West Virginia University, Morgantown, USA "Martijn van der Burg makes a vital contribution to the burgeoning scholarly literature on Napoleonic Europe in this well researched, carefully constructed volume. His analysis of this somewhat neglected, but important, part of Napoleon's hegemony will become essential reading for all students and specialists of Napoleonic Europe. Van der Burg brings the riches of recent Dutch and German scholarship on the Napoleonic period, hitherto denied to an Anglophone readership, to say nothing of his own insight into Napoleonic rule in these complex regions. He delineates the course of Napoleonic rule here with clarity and acute attention to detail. This is a worthy addition to the Napoleonic renaissance in historiography."-Michael Broers, University of Oxford, UK "A thorough, transparent and important comparative study into the content, dynamics, limits and results of Napoleonic governance, and the role of the (sub)prefects here within, in the Netherlands and Northwest Germany. Original, well-written and a very welcome contribution to the historiography of these still understudied areas in the Napoleonic years, as well as to Napoleonic historiography in general."-Johan Joor, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, the Netherlands This open access Palgrave Pivot explores the ways in which French Emperor Napoleon tried to integrate the present-day Netherlands and Northwest Germany into his Empire, by replacing traditional institutions and governing practices with French ones ('Napoleonic governance'). The northern periphery of the Napoleonic Empire continues to be overlooked by the bulk of historians; this study shows that a transregional approach can yield important findings. In a broader sense, the study does not deal with these regions alone, but also with the difficulties that are inherent to European integration.

British philosopher Michael Oakeshott is widely considered as one of the key conservative thinkers of the 20th century. After publishing many works on religion, he became mostly known for his works on political theory. This valuable volume by Edmund Neill sets out to Oakeshott's thought in an accessible manner, considering its initial reception and long-term influence. "Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers" provides comprehensive accounts of the works of seminal conservative thinkers from a variety of periods, disciplines and traditions - the first series of its kind. Even the selection of thinkers adds another aspect to conservative thinking, including not only theorists but also thinkers in literary forms and those who are also practitioners. The series comprises twenty volumes, each including an intellectual biography, historical context, critical exposition of the thinker's work, reception and influence, contemporary relevance, bibliography including references to electronic resources and an index.

This Pivot explores the uses of the Mughal past in the historical fiction of colonial India. Through detailed reconsiderations of canonical works by Rudyard Kipling, Flora Annie Steel and Romesh Chunder Dutt, the author argues for a more complex and integral understanding of the part played by the Mughal imaginary in colonial and early Indian nationalist projections of sovereignty. Evoking the rich historical and transnational contexts of these literary narratives, the study demonstrates the ways in which, at successive moments of crisis and contestation in the later Raj, the British Indian state continued to be troubled by its early and profound investments in models of despotism first located by colonial administrators in the figure of the Mughal emperor. At the heart of these political fictions lay the issue of territoriality and the founding problem of a British claim to sole proprietorship of Indian land - a form of Orientalist exceptionalism that at once underpinned and could never fully be integrated with the colonial rule of law. Alongside its recovery of a wealth of popular and often overlooked colonial historiography, The Return of the Mughal emphasises the relevance of theories of political theology - from Carl Schmitt and Ernst Kantorowicz to Talal Asad and Giorgio Agamben - to our understanding of the fictional and jurisprudential histories of colonialism. This study aims to show just how closely the pageantry and romance of empire in India connects to its early politics of terror and even today continues to inform the figure of the Mughal in the sectarian politics of Hindu Nationalism.

Based on five years of archival research, this book offers a radical reinterpretation of Britain and Spain's relationship during the growth, apogee and decline of the British Empire. It shows that from the early nineteenth century Britain turned Spain into an 'informal' colony, using its economic and military dominance to achieve its strategic and economic ends. Britain's free trade campaign, which aimed to tear down the legal barriers to its explosive trade and investment expansion, undermined Spain's attempts to achieve industrial take-off, demonstrating that the relationship between the two countries was imperial in nature, and not simply one of unequal national power. Exploring five key moments of crisis in their relations, from the First Carlist War in the 1830s to the Second World War, the author analyses Britain's use of military force in achieving its goals, and the consequences that this had for economic and political policy-making in Spain. Ultimately, the Anglo-Spanish relationship was an early example of the interaction between industrial power and colonies, formal and informal, that characterised the post-World War Two period. An insightful read for anyone researching the British Empire and its colonies, this book offers an innovative perspective by closely examining the volatile relationship between two European powers.

This book examines public discussions around France's four most prominent royal women during the first and second Restoration and July Monarchy: the duchesse d'Angouleme, the duchesse de Berry, Queen of the French Marie-Amelie, and Adelaide d'Orleans. These were the most powerful women of the last decades of the French monarchy, but the new roles women were assigned in post-revolutionary France did not permit them to openly exercise political influence. This book explores continuities and variations in narratives of royal legitimacy, and how historians, authors, and politicians used national history - particularly medieval and early modern history - to either legitimize or undermine the French monarchy, and to define women's social and political roles.

In Projectland, anthropologist Holly High combines an engaging first-person narrative of her fieldwork with a political ethnography of Laos, more than forty years after the establishment of the Lao PDR and more than seven decades since socialist ideologues first "liberated" parts of upland country. In a remote village of Kandon, High finds that although socialism has declined significantly as an economic model, it is ascendant and thriving in the culture of politics and the politics of culture. Kandon is remarkable by any account. The villagers are ethnic Kantu (Katu), an ethnicity associated by early ethnographers above all with human sacrifice. They had repelled French control, and as the war went on, the revolutionary forces of Sekong were headquartered in Kandon territories. In 1996, Kandon village moved and resettled in a plateau area. "New Kandon" has become Sekong Province's first certified "Culture Village," the nation's very first "Open Defecation Free and Model Health Village," and the president of Laos personally granted the village a Labor Flag and Medal. High provides a unique and timely assessment of the Lao Party-state's resettlement politics, and she recounts with skillful nuance the stories that are often cast into shadows by the usual focus on New Kandon as a success. Her book follows the lives of a small group of villagers who returned to the old village in the mountains, effectively defying policy but, in their words, obeying the presence that animates the land there. Revealing her sensibility with tremendous composure, High tells the experiences of women who, bound by steep bride-prices to often violent marriages, have tasted little of the socialist project of equality, unity, and independence. These women spoke to the author of "necessities" as a limit to their own lives. In a context where the state has defined the legitimate forms of success and agency, "necessity" emerged as a means of framing one's life as nonconforming but also nonagentive.

What goes by the description of "conservatism" these days is a far cry from its past incarnations. Forget the legacy of moderate conservatism promoted by Dwight Eisenhower. Today's conservatism, according to Robert Brent Toplin, has taken a decidedly radical turn.

Toplin offers an intriguing critique of this fast-growing movement that resembles religious fundamentalism - a rigid true believer's mindset that dismisses opposing views and leaves almost no room for dialogue. Toplin observes that the right's orthodox approach represents a significant rejection of the more open-minded and practical outlook that characterized both liberal and conservative politics in earlier years.

Toplin considers three major subgroups within radical conservatism: stealth libertarians, who espouse free markets and small government, culture warriors, who crusade for morality and "values," and hawkish nationalists, who favor military solutions in foreign affairs. He points out that, whatever their differences, these groups manage to unite behind a common loathing. Conservatives demonize liberals, blaming them for most everything they dislike in American life. But, as Toplin shows, their view of "liberals" has little to do with reality, for it treats everyone from the center to the far-left as a liberal and equates liberal ideas with extremism.

When Americans talk about radical conservatism, they usually think of strident commentators on radio and television such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter. Toplin offers a much broader picture of the radical, fundamentalist mentality. He shows that a religious-like approach to political ideas can also be found in the thinking of prominent scholars, journalists, and public officials such as Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, Irving Kristol, Allan Bloom, George Will, Fred Barnes, William J. Bennett, and Ronald Reagan. Toplin finds political fundamentalism at work, too, in media outlets like the Fox News Network and the "Wall Street Journal" and at think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute.

Offering a roadmap of the radical right's emergence over the past half century, Toplin reveals how enthusiasm for a conservative "faith" helped to erect a bully pulpit in an increasingly powerful political church.

In this volume, Dr Bunce (University of Cambridge) introduces Hobbes' ambitious philosophical project to discover the principles that govern the social world. If Hobbes' immodest assessment that he successfully attained this goal may be disputed, Bunce nevertheless captures the extraordinary enduring value of Hobbes' work for the contemporary reader. Thomas Hobbes's name and the title of his most famous work, "Leviathan," have come to be synonymous with the idea that the natural state of humankind is 'nasty, brutish, and short' and only the intervention of a munificent overlord may spare men and women from this unenviable fate by imposing order where there would otherwise be chaos. The problem that Hobbes formulated resonates through the centuries as the enduring dilemma of political organisation and social cooperation. Indeed it can be seen today in fields as diverse as theoretical game theory and international relations.

Maristow House in West Devon has a rich, remarkable yet little-known history. In the seventeenth century two sons from a family of Exeter merchants helped establish the sugar plantations of Jamaica and the resulting trade in African slaves. One became the island's governor while the other married the daughter of a Civil War hero and one of the first owners of the house. His Jamaican grandson took over the estate in the 1730s and produced an heir who rebuilt the mansion to reflect the style and architecture of Georgian England. These changes were paid for largely by the proceeds of slave plantations, even though this family never visited the source of their wealth. Instead, they frequented he fashionable salons of Bath and London arranging the marriages of their four daughters. The eldest, Sophia, married off against her will to an immensely rich but boring husband, spent all her adult life in the fashion-conscious court of the Prince of Wales. Another sister helped to save the life of a distant member of the family indicted as a mutineer on the infamous HMS Bounty. Finally, the house and its thousands of acres were bought by another West Indian, this time from a family of successful financiers and traders. Their Jewish heritage placed obstacles in their path but despite widespread antisemitism the buyer created an astonishing political career in the House of Commons and played an important role in the career of Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel. Equally remarkably, Manasseh Lopes, despite having no children of his own, founded a dynasty of successful men and women who to this day are close to Britain's royal family. Slave-generated wealth impacted both urban and rural areas of Britain. Many of the country's finest country houses owe their origins to this wellspring of money. What this book reveals is that even in one house, this wealth fuelled an extraordinary range of political and cultural activity. Maristow House, as Malcolm Cross explains, remains a portal through which to appreciate economic and social change on a much larger canvas.

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"With his characteristic verve, Professor Gerald Horne has written an excellent book about the fascinating and mysterious Lawrence Dennis. This pairing of the leftist black intellectual Horne and the racially-closeted fascist Dennis makes for an exciting exploration of obscure terrain that warrants more notice. Professor Horne has performed an important service by revealing so vividly Dennis's strange but instructive career."
--Randall Kennedy, Harvard Law School

aShedding light on both passing and the formation of a proposed afascism with a human face, a this book will prove useful for scholars of race and class in the US as well as scholars of fascist doctrine and theory.a--"Choice"

"I am almost certainly not alone in expressing surprise that Lawrence Dennis, the principal American intellectual fascist, was an African American who 'passed' for white. In the process of explaining Dennis's rise and how his secret minority status shaped his political extremism, Gerald Horne has researched and written a compelling and significant history of American fascism."
--Kenneth Janken, author of "White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP"

What does it mean that Lawrence Dennis--arguably the "brains" behind U.S. fascism--was born black but spent his entire adult life passing for white? Born in Atlanta in 1893, Dennis began life as a highly touted African American child preacher, touring nationally and arousing audiences with his dark-skinned mother as his escort. However, at some point between leaving prep school and entering Harvard University, he chose to abandon his family and his former life as an African American in orderto pass for white. Dennis went on to work for the State Department and on Wall Street, and ultimately became the public face of U.S. fascism, meeting with Mussolini and other fascist leaders in Europe. He underwent trial for sedition during World War II, almost landing in prison, and ultimately became a Cold War critic before dying in obscurity in 1977.

Based on extensive archival research, The Color of Fascism blends biography, social history, and critical race theory to illuminate the fascinating life of this complex and enigmatic man. Gerald Horne links passing and fascism, the two main poles of Dennis's life, suggesting that Dennis's anger with the U.S. as a result of his upbringing in Jim Crow Georgia led him to alliances with the antagonists of the U.S. and that his personal isolation which resulted in his decision to pass dovetailed with his ultimate isolationism.

Dennis's life is a lasting testament to the resilience of right-wing thought in the U.S. The first full-scale biographical portrait of this intriguing figure, The Color of Fascism also links the strange career of a prominent American who chose to pass.

The War for Legitimacy in Politics and Culture 1936-1946 presents the first investigation of how the phenomenon of political legitimacy operated within Europe's political cultures during the period of the Second World War. Amidst the upheavals of that turbulent period in Europe's twentieth-century history, a wide variety of contenders for power emerged, each of which claimed to possess the right to rule.Exploring political discourse, state propaganda, and high and low culture, the book argues that legitimacy lay not with rulers, and still less in the barrel of a gun, but in the values behind differing approaches to "good" government. An important contribution to the study of the political culture of wartime Europe, this volume will be essential reading for both political scientists and twentieth-century historians.