Democracy, Agency, and the State: Guillermo O'Donnell. Democracy, Agency, and the State aims to contribute to a comparatively informed theory of democracy. Professor O'Donnell begins by arguing that conceptions of 'the state' and 'democracy', and their respective defining features, significantly influence each other. Using an approach that is both historical and analytical, he traces this relationship through the idea of legally sanctioned and backed agency which grounds democratic citizenship.
From this standpoint he explores several aspects of the democratic regime and of the state, distinguishing four constitutive dimensions (bureaucracy, legality, focus of collective identity, and filter). He goes on to examine the role played by the idea of 'the nation' or 'the people', and the ways in which the state represents itself to different sections of society, especially in countries marred by deep inequality and pervasive poverty. Guillermo O'Donnell. The Illusion of Free Markets - Bernard E. Harcourt. It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society.
Just as fundamental as faith in the free market is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and the punishment arena. This curious incendiary combination of free market efficiency and the Big Brother state has become seemingly obvious, but it hinges on the illusion of a supposedly natural order in the economic realm. The Illusion of Free Markets argues that our faith in “free markets” has severely distorted American politics and punishment practices.
Bernard Harcourt traces the birth of the idea of natural order to eighteenth-century economic thought and reveals its gradual evolution through the Chicago School of economics and ultimately into today’s myth of the free market. This modern vision rests on a simple but devastating illusion. Bernard E. Harcourt | University of Chicago Law School. Website: Professor Harcourt is the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Political Science at The University of Chicago.
Professor Harcourt's scholarship intersects social and political theory, the sociology of punishment, and penal law and procedure. He is the author of the book, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard University Press 2011) and the co-editor with Fabienne Brion of Michel Foucault's Mal faire, dire vrai (in French 2012 here at PUL and in English forthcoming at the University of Chicago Press). He is also the author of Against Prediction: Punishing and Policing in an Actuarial Age (University of Chicago Press 2007), Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press 2005), and Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken-Windows Policing (Harvard University Press 2001). Education: AB ,1984, Princeton University; JD, 1989, and PhD, 2000, Harvard University. Quiet Politics and Business Power. Corporate Control in Europe and Japan Pepper D.
Culpepper, European University Institute, Florence Publication date:January 2011 248pages 17 b/w illus. 19 tables Dimensions: 234 x 156 mm Weight: 0.48kg In stock. Ps_3401seb2011. Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. What forces lead to democracy's creation? Why does it sometimes consolidate only to collapse at other times? Written by two of the foremost authorities on this subject in the world, this volume develops a framework for analyzing the creation and consolidation of democracy.
It revolutionizes scholarship on the factors underlying government and popular movements toward democracy or dictatorship. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that different social groups prefer different political institutions because of the way they allocate political power and resources. Their book, the subject of a four-day seminar at Harvard's Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences, was also the basis for the Walras-Bowley lecture at the joint meetings of the European Economic Association and Econometric Society in 2003 and is the winner of the John Bates Clark Medal.
Daron Acemoglu is Charles P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Conditions of Democracy in Europe 1919-39. Between 1918 and 1945 there were many changes in European politics - old empires disappeared and new independent political systems emerged. Over the same period most countries faced similar problems - the world economic crisis and the rise of new ideologies and new political movements. But the political effects of these varied, and this study looks at the following key questions: why did democracy survive in some countries but not in others? How were some political institutions able to contain or manage the crises they faced but others collapsed or underwent radical transformation?
This book outlines a new approach to this problem through the systematic analysis of eighteen polities within a common analytical framework. What is innovative is the weight given to economic, social and cultural factors in explaining the survival of democracy and the origins of fascism as well as the systematic incorporation of a range of political factors. Models of Democracy by David Held.
Welcome to the website for Models of Democracy Welcome to the website for the third edition of Models of Democracy. It contains a number of useful resources, including information about the author, a detailed study guide, an interview and a postscript to the book. All of these resources can be accessed by clicking on the above links. About the book The first two editions of Models of Democracy have proven immensely popular among students and specialists worldwide.
In a succinct and far-reaching analysis, David Held provides an introduction to central accounts of democracy from classical Greece to the present and a critical discussion of what democracy should mean today. This new edition has been extensively revised and updated to take account of significant transformations in world politics, and a new chapter has been added on deliberative democracy which focuses not only on how citizen participation can be increased in politics, but also on how that participation can become more informed. The Primacy of Politics. Political history in the industrial world has indeed ended, argues this pioneering study, but the winner has been social democracy - an ideology and political movement that has been as influential as it has been misunderstood. Berman looks at the history of social democracy from its origins in the late nineteenth century to today and shows how it beat out competitors such as classical liberalism, orthodox Marxism, and its cousins, Fascism and National Socialism by solving the central challenge of modern politics - reconciling the competing needs of capitalism and democracy.
Bursting on to the scene in the interwar years, the social democratic model spread across Europe after the Second World War and formed the basis of the postwar settlement. This is a study of European social democracy that rewrites the intellectual and political history of the modern era while putting contemporary debates about globalization in their proper intellectual and historical context. Sheri Berman | Political Science. Colin Crouch - Post-Democracy. Description Post-Democracy is a polemical work that goes beyond current complaints about the failings of our democracy and explores the deeper social and economic forces that account for the current malaise.
Colin Crouch argues that the decline of those social classes which had made possible an active and critical mass politics has combined with the rise of global capitalism to produce a self-referential political class more concerned with forging links with wealthy business interests than with pursuing political programmes which meet the concerns of ordinary people. He shows how, in some respects, politics at the dawn of the twenty-first century returns us to a world familiar well before the start of the twentieth, when politics was a game played among elites.
However, Crouch maintains that the experience of the twentieth century remains salient and it reminds us of possibilities for the revival of politics. Hardcover Status Available Edition First Edition Publication Dates ROW: Jun 2004 Format. In Search of Politics - Zygmunt Bauman. Zygmunt Bauman | The Bauman Institute | University of Leeds. Violence and Social Orders. International Political Economy / IR - reading... The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Mearsheimer boldly states that great-power rivalry is not over. The major powers still fear each other, and dangerous security competition lurks. This view is built on an "offensive realist" theory of world politics: the deep insecurity generated by the anarchic (hence "tragic") international system leads great powers to act aggressively toward each other, thwarting rivals from gaining power even if such moves risk war. Moreover, great powers are rarely satisfied with the status quo and instead seek hegemony.
Mearsheimer tests his theory across the last two centuries, citing the territorial conquests of Japan and Germany before 1945 and Soviet policies after 1917 as evidence. The United States and the United Kingdom do not fit as well into Mearsheimer's framework, but he argues that the "offshore balancing" strategies of these maritime states are just more sophisticated versions of calculated aggression. Peter Gowan: A Calculus of Power. New Left Review 16, July-August 2002 John Mearsheimer’s Tragedy of Great Power Politics disdains liberal-imperial rhetoric for a tough-minded theory of ‘offensive realism’. Peter Gowan argues that, whatever its merits, the behaviour of states in the international system cannot be dissociated from the internal dynamics of the political orders they protect. Forget globalization. Clear your mind of euphemisms like planetary ‘governance’. Intellectually, Mearsheimer is a product of the post-war tradition of neo-realist international-relations theory founded by Kenneth Waltz.
But Mearsheimer breaks with Waltz in a number of crucial ways. Given the difficulty of determining how much power is enough for today and tomorrow, great powers recognize that the best way to ensure their security is to achieve hegemony now, thus eliminating any possibility of a challenge by another great power. Records of conquest The United States emerges, inevitably, in a bleak light. State power and social order. Review of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Author: Charles A. Kupchan , Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow September 2003 The Tragedy of Great Power Politics John J.
Mearsheimer New York: W. Pp. xvi, 555. $27.95 (US) In this important and impressive book, John J. Offensive realism rests on the assumption that great powers ‘are always searching for opportunities to gain power over their rivals, with hegemony as their final goal’ (p. 29). To test the validity of offensive realism, Mearsheimer asserts that ‘we should almost always find leaders thinking that it is imperative to gain more power to enhance their state’s prospects for survival’ (p. 169). As Mearsheimer navigates the historical record of the past two centuries, he marshals an impressive array of evidence to back up his claim that states onsistently capitalize on opportunities to increase their power and that this dynamic explains much of great-power behaviour.
Mearsheimer also fails to address how offensive realism explains peaceful change. John J. Mearsheimer - Home Page. Political theory. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. The Invention of Tradition. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality - Eric J. Hobsbawm. Benedict Anderson. The Past is a Foreign Country.
In this remarkably wide-ranging book Professor Lowenthal analyses the ever-changing role of the past in shaping our lives. A heritage at once nurturing and burdensome, the past allows us to make sense of the present whilst imposing powerful constraints upon the way that present develops. Some aspects of the past are celebrated, others expunged, as each generation reshapes its legacy in line with current needs. Drawing on all the arts, the humanities and the social sciences, the author uses sources as diverse as science fiction and psychoanalysis to examine how rebellion against inherited tradition has given rise to the modern cult of preservation and pervasive nostalgia. Profusely illustrated, The Past is a Foreign Country shows that although the past has ceased to be a sanction for inherited power or privilege, as a focus of personal and national identity and as a bulwark against massive and distressing change it remains as potent a force as ever in human affairs.
Questions Of Modernity - Timothy Mitchell. The Decline and Fall of the American Republic - Bruce Ackerman. Bruce Ackerman shows how the institutional dynamics of the last half-century have transformed the American presidency into a potential platform for political extremism and lawlessness. Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the War on Terror are only symptoms of deeper pathologies. Ackerman points to a series of developments that have previously been treated independently of one another—from the rise of presidential primaries, to the role of pollsters and media gurus, to the centralization of power in White House czars, to the politicization of the military, to the manipulation of constitutional doctrine to justify presidential power-grabs. He shows how these different transformations can interact to generate profound constitutional crises in the twenty-first century—and then proposes a series of reforms that will minimize, if not eliminate, the risks going forward.
The book aims to begin a new constitutional debate. Bruce Ackerman. Carbon Democracy. As tumultuous events in Egypt unfold at speed, with former President Morsi currently in custody, we present Verso's updated reading list of key titles and articles addressing the challenges facing Egypt and the Middle East. Seamus Milne considers the current situation in Egypt in the context of the Arab Spring and its historical precedents in the "Spring of Nations" of 1848 in his latest article for the Guardian. His latest book, The Revenge of History, follows the events of the Arab Spring as they unfold, as well as providing a rich geopolitical context for the uprisings. The Journey to Tahrir: Revolution, Protest, and Social Change in EgyptEdited by Jeannie Sowers and Chris Toensing The account of how it all began, this collection of reports from the region details the causes that underpinned the revolution before it amassed in scale.
Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen: Egypt's Road to Revoltby Hazem Kandil Continue Reading. Timothy Mitchell. Taxation and Democracy - Steinmo, Sven. Democracy - Charles Tilly. Charles Tilly. Coercion, Capital, and European States, Ad 990-1992 - Charles Tilly.