This is a study of the transmission of political ideas across languages and cultures, and in particular of a notably fruitful encounter between two distinct branches of eighteenth-century political discourse: the reception of Scottish civic ideas, developed most powerfully in the works of theEdinburgh historian-philosopher Adam Ferguson, by Geman intellectuals of the Enlightenment and Romantic eras.Fania Oz-Salzberger's detailed and challenging analysis places Ferguson in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment, and explores the impact of his theories on German Enlightenment thinkers. She traces the passage of Ferguson's civic humanism across linguistic and cultural borders, and highlightsthe linguistic stumbling-blocks and conceptual tensions that resulted. Dr Oz-Salzberger argues that there resulted a complex and largely unintentional shift of Scottish civic concepts into a German vocabulary of spiritual perfection and inner life, and that the misreading of Ferguson and otherScottish thinkers contributed much to the richness of German intellectual life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Ellen Meiksins Wood is a leading contemporary political theorist who has been described as the founder, together with Robert Brenner, of Political Marxism,' a distinct version of historical materialism which has inspired a research program that spans a number of academic disciplines. Organized thematically, this Reader provides an overview of her original interpretations of capitalism, and many different topics.

In 1993 the Liberals came to power on a traditional party platform of social spending and strong federalism. Yet under the pressures of office, they moved to slash spending and to cede power to the provinces. The Liberals led the fight against Quebec separatism, confident of an easy victory. Yet the separatists lost by a razor-thin margin in a shocking referendum that brought Canada to the brink of dissolution. Here is the inside story of the Jean Chretien government: the high drama, the low gossip, the secret deals and blunders, as men and women jockeyed for power while the nation faced momentous challenges--restoring its fiscal stability and preserving its very existence. Told by two of Canada's most respected journalists, Double Vision is a compelling inside account of a party in search of its soul...and a country in search of its future.

Covenantal Rights is a groundbreaking work of political theory: a comprehensive, philosophically sophisticated attempt to bring insights from the Jewish political tradition into current political and legal debates about rights and to bring rights discourse more fully into Jewish thought. David Novak pursues these aims by presenting a theory of rights founded on the covenant between God and the Jewish people as that covenant is constituted by Scripture and the rabbinic tradition. In doing so, he presents a powerful challenge to prevailing liberal and conservative positions on rights and duties and opens a new chapter in contemporary Jewish political thinking. For Novak, "covenantal rights" are rooted in God's primary rights as creator of the universe and as the elector of a particular community whose members relate to this God as their sovereign. The subsequent rights of individuals and communities flow from God's covenantal promises, which function as irrevocable entitlements. This presents a sharp contrast to the liberal tradition, in which rights flow above all from individuals. It also challenges the conservative idea that duties can take precedence over rights, since Novak argues that there are no covenantal duties that are not backed by correlative rights. Novak explains carefully and clearly how this theory of covenantal rights fits into Jewish tradition and applies to the relationships among God, the covenanted community, and individuals. This work is a profound and provocative contribution to contemporary religious and political theory.

In just a decade, blogging changed from a fad to a phenomenon with an estimated 51 million participants, mostly creative citizens with something to say or express. Citizens who want to participate in media rather than be subjected to it. Blogothon is a selection of blogs and essays posted by raconteur par excellence, gadfly of the media, and "News Dissector" Danny Schechter in an award-winning daily blog that he began writing in 2000. In Blogothon Schechter demonstrates the importance of blogging as an alternative media in an age when mainstream media has come under increasing scrutiny for a lack of credibility, real news and social value. This compilation of Schechter's blog posts describes the financial crisis developed during the first decade of the 21st century, the influence of activists such as Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson on Occupy Wall Street, the ascent of Al Jazeera, the expulsion of Helen Thomas and Keith Olbermann from mainstream media, and increased partisanship and polarization in U.S. politics. Blogothon is a fascinating read for followers of Schechter's blog, anyone interested in an authentic account of historic events still unfolding, and aspiring bloggers. A graduate of Cornell University and the London School of Economics, DANNY SCHECHTER is a writer, television producer, and independent filmmaker who also speaks about media and financial issues. He is the editor of Mediachannel1.org, the global media issues site, and blogs daily as the News Dissector at NewsDissector.net. Schechter is the author of fourteen books and has produced and directed more than thirty documentaries and television specials. His blog was named the 2009 "Blog of the Year" by the Hunter College Media Department of the City University of New York.

The title of political theorist Alan L. Mittleman's captivating new book is drawn from the patriarch Jacob's blessing to his children and grandchildren. The blessing contains the promise that Judah will become a royal house, perhaps forever. Kings, of course, ceased in Israel, but politics did not. Regime replaced regime. National independence was compromised and lost, regained and lost again. Yet the attention to things political was never lost. Old texts were applied to new political realities. Political awareness and thought, constantly transformed and adapted to new historical exigencies, persisted among the Jews. In The Scepter Shall Not Depart from Judah , Mittleman looks at some of the central problems of political philosophy-such as fundamental rights and the common good-from the point of view of rabbinic Judaism. At the same time, he considers conceptual issues in Judaism-such as covenant and tradition-from the perspective of political philosophy. Mittleman's sources range from the ancient rabbis to contemporary political theorists, making this volume an important one for courses and research in both Jewish studies and political theory.

The period from 1509 to 1688 was one of great social turbulence in Britain, and a key period in the history of political thought. This work covers the major themes of the time, including conceptions of the state and of natural rights, consent and property. It provides an examination of the main texts, situating them in their social and historical context. It looks at the role of the canonical thinkers - Thomas More, Hobbes, and Locke - and the participation of Sir Thomas Smith and radical thinkers such as the Levellers. These figures are viewed in the context both of their time, and of the wider social, economic and political arena. The authors set out to show how specific patterns of historical development relate to distinctive traditions in political thought.

Excerpt from The Negro in Hollywood Films The lecture, which dealt with fundamental and theoretical aspects of the film medium and the Negro question, and which projected a rounded program for uniting Negro and white Americans in the fight against chauvinism in the film and other cultural areas, was received with enthusiasm by the audience, and its publication urged upon the sponsors of the meeting. The author, V. I. Jerome, is editor of Political Affairs, leading journal of Marxist thought and opinion in the United States, and also chairman of the Communist Party's National Cul tural Commission. He is the author of several books and pamphlets, including social-democracy and the War, War and the Intellectuals, The Treatment of. Defeated Germany, and Culture In a Changing World, which has been translated in a number of European countries. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

International Library Of Sociology And Social Reconstruction.

This book is designed to present a fully developed theory of international crisis and conflict, along with substantial evidence of these two closely related phenomena. The book begins with a discussion of these topics at a theoretical level, defining and elaborating on core concepts: international crisis, interstate conflict, severity, and impact. This is followed by a discussion of the international system, along with two significant illustrations, the Berlin Blockade crisis (1948) and the India-Pakistan crisis over Kashmir (1965-66). The book then presents a unified model of crisis, focusing on the four phases of an international crisis, which incorporate the four periods of foreign policy crises for individual states. Findings from thirteen conflicts representing six regional clusters are then analyzed, concluding with a set of hypotheses and evidence on conflict onset, persistence, and resolution.

This book sets forth both a theory and a comparative empirical analysis of stagflation, that peculiar combination of high unemployment, slow growth, and spurts of high inflation bedeviling the advanced industrial nations during the past fifteen years. The authors first construct a small macroeconomic model that takes full account of aggregate demand and supply forces in the determination of output, employment, and the price level, in both a single-economy and a multi-economy setting. They then apply the model to provide an understanding of comparative performance of industrial countries in the areas of unemployment, inflation, productivity, and investment growth. They argue convincingly that the decay of the major economies during this period resulted from the supply shocks of the 1970s, such as the two major OPEC oil-price increases, and from the consequent policy-induced decrease in demand in response to inflationary pressures. Their analysis differs markedly from similar studies in that it takes specific account of institutional differences in the labor markets of the various economies. This helps to explain in particular the divergent adjustment profiles of the United States and Europe. Bruno and Sachs make several key recommendations for the mix of demand management and incomes policies necessary to combat stagflation in individual countries as well as for the coordination of macroeconomic policies among the major industrial nations.

Isaak Ilyich Rubin (1886-1937) was a Soviet economist who participated in the Russian Revolution and was a researcher at the Marx-Engels Institute Though his ideas were suppressed by the Soviet Union and he was eventually killed after being accused of Trotskyism, his ideas have since been rehabilitated within modern Marxism. Essays on Marx's Theory of Value (1924) emphasizes the importance of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism within the labor theory of value. It also argues that Marx's mature economic work represented the culmination of his lifetime project to understand how human creative power is shaped by social structures. He also discusses commodity production as a mere theoretical abstraction that only explains one aspect of a developed capitalist economy. The concept of value, as understood by Rubin, cannot exist without the other elements of a full-blown capitalist economy: money, capital, the existence of a proletariat, and so on. This Radical Reprint by Pattern Books is made to be accessible and as close to only manufacturing cost as possible.

This important new study in Canadian politics discusses the role of socialism in Canada. By means of comparison between the English-Canadian and the American political importance of socialism in Canada than the United States. In this section Louis Hartz's theory of "fragment" cultures is carried forward and applied to Canada. The remainder of the book is devoted to a detailed historical study of the relationship between the labour movement and the socialist parties in Canada. It starts in the early years of the century and follows the story through to its significant conclusion—the support (and formation) by many Canadian unions of a labour party. The brilliant analysis of Canadian politics in Hartzian terms restores ideology to a place in our political culture, and the meticulous, objective recounting of labour's involved in the formation of the NDP is a timely and valuable contribution to our limited understanding of how Canadian political parties "live and move and have their being." The main sources used by the author were correspondence, minutes, and other materials in the files of the NDP and the Canadian Labour Congress, and personal interviews with labour leaders and socialist politicians. (Studies in the Structure of Power: Decision Making in Canada No. 4.)

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This companion volume to The Roots of American Communism brings to completion what the author describes as the essence of the relationship of American Communism to Soviet Russia in the first decade after the Bolsheviks seized power. The outpouring of new archive materials makes it plain that Draper's premise is direct and to the point: The communist movement "was transformed from a new expression of American radicalism to the American appendage of a Russian revolutionary power." Each generation must find this out for itself, and no better guide exists than the work of master historian Theodore Draper. American Communism and Soviet Russia is acknowledged to be the classic, authoritative history of the critical formative period of the American Communist Party. Based on confidential minutes of the top party committees, interviews with party leaders, and public records, this book carefully documents the influence of the Soviet Union on the fundamental nature of American Communism. Draper's reflections on that period in this edition are a fitting capstone to this pioneering effort.

This book uncovers the basic contradictions between contemporary China's complex ideological marketplace and Western liberalism. It describes and puts into critical context three versions of Western liberalism (those of F. A. Hayek, John Rawls, and John Dunn), three versions of Chinese liberalism (those of Yang Kuo-shu, Li Qiang, and Ambrose Y.C. King), two versions of modern Confucian humanism (those of T'ang Ch ̧n-i, and Henry K.H. Woo), and various versions of Chinese Marxism, including Kao Li-k'o's in the early 1990s and some of the recent New Left writings. It shows that all these Chinese political theories, not only Chinese Marxism, depend on a number of premises at odds with Western liberalism, especially epistemological optimism and an extravagantly optimistic concept of political practicability. It also argues that not only these Chinese theories but also Western liberalism have failed to offer adequate normative guidelines for the improvement of political life. This study combines a deep understanding of the history of Chinese thought with a strong grasp of modern philosophical trends and an innovative methodology for the description and criticism of political theories. It will be useful to students of modern Chinese intellectual history, of political philosophy, of political culture, of the comparative study of cultures, and of U.S.-Chinese relations.

The stories in this book come to life through the voices of remarkable individuals; child laborers in Dickensian England, visionary women on Parisian barricades, gun-toting railway strikers in Americas Wild West, and beer-swilling German metalworkers who tried to stop World War I.It is a story of urban slums, self-help cooperatives, choirs and brass bands, free love, and self-education by candlelight. And, as the author shows, in the developing industrial economies of the world, it is still with us. Live Working or Die Fighting celebrates a common history of defiance, idealism, and self-sacrifice, one as alive and active today as it was two hundred years ago. It is a unique and inspirational book.

Originally published in 1976, this book was written specifically to guide students of political theory who want to understand Hegel's political ideas as they appear in The Phenomenology of Mind. Professor Shklar's commentary uses plain language and English translations of references wherever possible. The core of Hegel's argument is that freedom is the identity of the personal goals of individual citizens and the public ends of the polity as a whole. This is a dynamic process, in which all laws are created by each and all, and in turn expressed and realised in the minds and actions of every member of society. The text emphasises Hegel's criticism of every type of subjectivity. The failure to recognise the cultural character of all experience is the core of Hegel's critical review of all past philosophy, and led him to develop his own theory of history and of knowledge as retrospective thinking.

This book is an attempt to explain the premiership of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative administration, outlining its history, current trends and predictions for its future.