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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political science & theory
This second edition explores the relationship between politics and
media, with a particular emphasis on the significant disruptive
changes to media and technology that have faced journalists,
campaigners, and the public in recent years. The first edition, in
2014, described the earliest elements of social and online media:
Web 2.0, the 'information economy,' and the changes from
traditional broadcast media to the early online world. With the
rise of TikTok, the 'fake news' claims of Donald Trump, the decline
of local news, and the anti-democratic impulses that drove the
January 6, 2021 coup attempts, the last decade has provided a rich
and sometimes confounding set of disruptions to political
communication that deserve attention. Technology has disrupted
political communication in the online environment exceptionally
quickly over the last decade, and this book provides a framework
for understanding the intersections of these disruptions and their
effect on an already-fragile democratic circumstance in the United
States.
This is the first comprehensive volume to offer a state of the art
investigation both of the nature of political ideologies and of
their main manifestations. The diversity of ideology studies is
represented by a mixture of the range of theories that illuminate
the field, combined with an appreciation of the changing complexity
of concrete ideologies and the emergence of new ones. Ideologies,
however, are always with us. The Handbook is divided into three
sections: The first reflects some of the latest thinking about the
development of ideology on an historical dimension, from the
standpoints of conceptual history, Marx studies, social science
theory and history, and leading schools of continental philosophy.
The second includes some of the most recent interpretations and
theories of ideology, all of which are sympathetic in their own
ways to its exploration and close investigation, even when
judiciously critical of its social impact. This section contains
many of the more salient contemporary accounts of ideology. The
third focuses on the leading ideological families and traditions,
as well as on some of their cultural and geographical
manifestations, incorporating both historical and contemporary
perspectives. Each chapter is written by an expert in their field,
bringing the latest approaches and understandings to their task.
The Handbook will position the study of ideologies in the
mainstream of political theory and political analysis and will
attest to its indispensability both to courses on political theory
and to scholars who wish to take their understanding of ideologies
in new directions.
The founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, came to power
in 1923 with a radical and wide-ranging programme of reforms, known
collectively as Kemalism. This philosophy - which included adopting
a western alphabet and securing a secular state apparatus - has
since the early 1930s, when the Turkish state endeavored to impose
a monolithic definition of the term, been connected to the
development of the personality cult of Mustafa Kemal himself. This
book argues that in fact Kemalism can only be fully understood from
a transnational perspective: just as a uniquely national frame is
not the only appropriate scale of analysis for shedding light on
the process of the nationalization of societies and nationalism
itself, the Turkish national lens is not necessarily the most
adequate one for understanding the genesis and evolution of what
Kemalism stood for from the early 1920s onward. Featuring case
studies from across the former Ottoman Empire and using new primary
source research, each chapter examines the different ways in which
national borders refracted and transformed Kemalist ideology.
Across the Balkans and the Middle East Kemalism influenced the
development of language and the alphabet, the life of women, the
law, and everyday dress. A particular focus on the interwar period
in Turkey, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Albania, Yugoslavia, and Egypt reveals
how, as a practical tool, Kemalism must be relocated as a global
movement, whose influence is still felt today.
This book problematizes the ways in which the discourses of
colorblindness and post-raciality are articulated in the age of
Obama. Pinder debunks the myth that race does not matter and
reconsiders the presumptive hegemony of whiteness through the
dialectics of visibility and invisibility of race.
Product of a Post-doctoral research done at the University of
Washington, (Seattle), USA, the present work is an attempt to
conceptualise and analyse the postulates underlying India's Foreign
Policy from its formative years in the early fifties to its
maturation in the early eighties of the last century. It subjects
the management of foreign relations by India to a full scale
theoretical examination from the political economy angle-an
exercise few scholars then or now have undertaken .Notions of
security, national interest, diplomatic leverage, decision making
process and so on have, in this work, been revisited in the
decisive context of a domestic-external continuum in which forces
of economic origin were seen as defining the rationale of a foreign
policy that was supposed to take a developing nation to the
fulfilment of its legitimate aspirations. At the same time, the
innovations that were made with practically no earlier precedent to
go by and the kind of institution building required for the purpose
have been dealt with critically so as to bring out the interplay of
domestic development aspirations and the art of ensuring policy
independence by appropriate diplomacy. In the turbulent context of
the Cold War the Indian experiment in the management of foreign
relations and the positive gains it reaped in collectivising the
principle of non-alignment did constitute a subject that demanded a
non-conventional approach to get to the bottom of it. That is
precisely what distinguishes the book by one of the most qualified
experts in International Relations, enjoying intellectual acclaim
both at home and abroad. The book starts with a theoretical
discourse on the applicability or otherwise of the political
economy approach as it stood at the time of writing. In subsequent
chapters it examines a dependent economy's quest for an independent
foreign policy, the central challenge before the external affairs
ministry of the country. It needed, among other things handling of
external aid, and foreign investment to recharge the developmental
enterprises at home in a manner that would not interfere with the
autonomy in judging and reacting to external events. Economic
restructuring at home which brought a strong public sector as
complementary to a fledgling private sector constituted an
essential aspect. So also came up the new experiment of building a
collective economic front with other developing nations. In its
compact, yet well documented, analysis the book provides the most
engaging scholarly presentation of the subject in all its relevant
technicalities.
In this timely and important work, eminent political theorist John
Dunn argues that democracy is not synonymous with good government.
The author explores the labyrinthine reality behind the basic
concept of democracy, demonstrating how the political system that
people in the West generally view as straightforward and obvious
is, in fact, deeply unclear and, in many cases, dysfunctional.
Consisting of four thought-provoking lectures, Dunn's book sketches
the path by which democracy became the only form of government with
moral legitimacy, analyzes the contradictions and pitfalls of
modern American democracy, and challenges the academic world to
take responsibility for giving the world a more coherent
understanding of this widely misrepresented political institution.
Suggesting that the supposedly ideal marriage of liberal economics
with liberal democracy can neither ensure its continuance nor even
address the problems of contemporary life, this courageous analysis
attempts to show how we came to be so gripped by democracy's spell
and why we must now learn to break it.
The much-anticipated definitive account of China's Great
Famine
An estimated thirty-six million Chinese men, women, and children
starved to death during China's Great Leap Forward in the late
1950s and early '60s. One of the greatest tragedies of the
twentieth century, the famine is poorly understood, and in China is
still euphemistically referred to as "the three years of natural
disaster."
As a journalist with privileged access to official and
unofficial sources, Yang Jisheng spent twenty years piecing
together the events that led to mass nationwide starvation,
including the death of his own father. Finding no natural causes,
Yang attributes responsibility for the deaths to China's
totalitarian system and the refusal of officials at every level to
value human life over ideology and self-interest.
"Tombstone" is a testament to inhumanity and occasional heroism
that pits collective memory against the historical amnesia imposed
by those in power. Stunning in scale and arresting in its detailed
account of the staggering human cost of this tragedy, "Tombstone"
is written both as a memorial to the lives lost--an enduring
tombstone in memory of the dead--and in hopeful anticipation of the
final demise of the totalitarian system. Ian Johnson, writing in
"The New York Review of Books," called the Chinese edition of
"Tombstone ""groundbreaking . . . One of the most important books
to come out of China in recent years."
Fully revised and extended, the new edition of this innovative and
engaging textbook introduces the central elements of political
theory from an applied perspective. Focusing on 12 high-profile
contemporary social and political case studies, both domestic and
global, this text shows how political theory illuminates and helps
makes sense of important debates in public life. This is the
perfect introduction for students interested in how political
theory can be used to help us solve the political questions of our
time, whether at a beginner's level, or building upon an
introduction to theories and concepts. New to this Edition: - Draws
on an even wider range of contemporary and historical political
thinkers from different philosophical traditions - Updated to take
recent important cases and controversies into account - Includes a
new chapter which examines leaking classified information
Alfred Sohn-Rethel located the origin of philosophical abstraction
in the "false conciousness" brought about by the new money economy
of Greek Antiquity. In the Enlightenment the conceptual barrier
Kant put between phenomenal reality and the "thing-in-itself"
expressed, in Sohn-Rethel s view, the reified consciousness
stemming from commodity-exchange and the division of mental and
manual labor. Because Sohn-Rethel saw the entire history of
philosophy as branded by a timeless universal logic, he dismissed
Hegel s concept of "totality" as "idealist" and Hegel s critique of
Kantian dualism as irrelevant to Marx s critique of political
economy. David Black, in the title essay of The Philosophical Roots
of Anti-Capitalism, suggests, contra Sohn-Rethel, that Marx s
exposition of the fetishism of commodities is historically-specific
to capitalist production, and therefore cannot explain the origins
of philosophy, which Black shows to have involved various
historical developments in Greek society and culture as well as
monetization. Just as Hegel s critique of Kantian formalism informs
Marx s critique of capital, Hegel s writings on how the proper
organization of labor might abolish the barrier Aristotle put
between production and the "Realm of Freedom" prefigure Marx's
efforts to formulate of an alternative to capitalism. Part Two,
Critique of the Situationist Dialectic: Art, Class Consciousness
and Reification, begins with Surrealism, whose "disappearance" as a
revolutionary artistic and social force Guy Debord and the
Situationists sought to make up for by superseding the poetry of
Art with the poetry of Life. As well highlighting Debord s
achievements in both theory and practice, Black points to his
philosophical shortcomings and relates these to Debord s later
"pessimistic" assessment of the possibility of revolutionary class
consciousness within globalizing capitalism. The four essays in
Part Three cover the Aristotelian anarchism, the ambivalent legacy
of Lukacs' theory of reification, Raya Dunayevskaya s
Hegelian-Marxist concept of "absolute negativity" as "revolution in
permanance," and Gillian Rose s philosophical challenge to both
postmodernism and "traditional" Marxism.
Why do voters support different parties at elections when given the
opportunity of casting two votes to elect the same representative
body? This book relaxes common assumptions in the voting behaviour
literature to provide an in-depth study of split-ticket voting
across ten established and non-established democracies. It proposes
an original framework and combines a theoretical investigation with
a purely methodological analysis to test the reliability of the
predictive models. The broader picture that emerges is the one of a
'simple' voter with 'sophisticated' preferences. Parties still
function as the principal cue for voting, but voters appear
sophisticated in that they often like more than one party or choose
candidates regardless of their party affiliation. Despite
mixed-member systems being one of the most complicated electoral
systems of all, there is no evidence supporting the conclusion that
voters are not able to cope with the complexity of the electoral
rules.
Intelligence is currently facing increasingly challenging
cross-pressures from both a need for accurate and timely
assessments of potential or imminent security threats and the
unpredictability of many of these emerging threats. We are living
in a social environment of growing security and intelligence
challenges, yet the traditional, narrow intelligence process is
becoming increasingly insufficient for coping with diffuse,
complex, and rapidly-transforming threats. The essence of
intelligence is no longer the collection, analysis, and
dissemination of secret information, but has become instead the
management of uncertainty in areas critical for overriding security
goals--not only for nations, but also for the international
community as a whole. For its part, scientific research on major
societal risks like climate change is facing a similar
cross-pressure from demand on the one hand and incomplete data and
developing theoretical concepts on the other. For both of these
knowledge-producing domains, the common denominator is the
paramount challenges of framing and communicating uncertainty and
of managing the pitfalls of politicization National Intelligence
and Science is one of the first attempts to analyze these
converging domains and the implications of their convergence, in
terms of both more scientific approaches to intelligence problems
and intelligence approaches to scientific problems. Science and
intelligence constitute, as the book spells out, two remarkably
similar and interlinked domains of knowledge production, yet ones
that remain traditionally separated by a deep political, cultural,
and epistemological divide. Looking ahead, the two
twentieth-century monoliths--the scientific and the intelligence
estates--are becoming simply outdated in their traditional form.
The risk society is closing the divide, though in a direction not
foreseen by the proponents of turning intelligence analysis into a
science, or the new production of scientific knowledge.
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