Author: Pierre Manent
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691125678
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
We live in the grip of a great illusion about politics, Pierre Manent argues in A World beyond Politics? It's the illusion that we would be better off without politics--at least national politics, and perhaps all politics. It is a fantasy that if democratic values could somehow detach themselves from their traditional national context, we could enter a world of pure democracy, where human society would be ruled solely according to law and morality. Borders would dissolve in unconditional internationalism and nations would collapse into supranational organizations such as the European Union. Free of the limits and sins of politics, we could finally attain the true life. In contrast to these beliefs, which are especially widespread in Europe, Manent reasons that the political order is the key to the human order. Human life, in order to have force and meaning, must be concentrated in a particular political community, in which decisions are made through collective, creative debate. The best such community for democratic life, he argues, is still the nation-state. Following the example of nineteenth-century political philosophers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, Manent first describes a few essential features of democracy and the nation-state, and then shows how these characteristics illuminate many aspects of our present political circumstances. He ends by arguing that both democracy and the nation-state are under threat--from apolitical tendencies such as the cult of international commerce and attempts to replace democratic decisions with judicial procedures.
Author: Gary F. Moncrief
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442268077
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
When it comes to voting, taxes, environmental regulations, social services, education, criminal justice, political parties, property rights, gun control, marriage and a whole host of other modern American issues, the state in which a citizen resides makes a difference. That idea—that the political decisions made by those in state-level offices are of tremendous importance to the lives of people whose states they govern—is the fundamental concept explored in this book. Gary F. Moncrief and Peverill Squire introduce students to the very tangible and constantly evolving implications, limitations, and foundations of America’s state political institutions, and accessibly explain the ways that the political powers of the states manifest themselves in the cultures, economies, and lives of everyday Americans, and always will.
Author: John Hoffman
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9780745611815
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
This is an accessible yet challenging introduction to the state and state theory, the author makes the distinction between "state" and "government" and discusses a world beyond the state.
Author: Carmen E. Pavel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019754391X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
Despite growing skepticism about the value of international law and its compatibility with state sovereignty, states should improve and strengthen international law because it makes a critical contribution to an international order characterized by peace and justice. In recent years, international agreements and institutions have become particularly contentious. China is refusing to abide by the decision of an international arbitration decision implementing UNCLOS rules in the South China Sea, and Donald Trump has withdrawn the US from international agreements including the Paris Agreement on Climate Change of 2015. Such retreats expose widespread ambivalence towards cooperation through international law, and reverse the gains made by long-standing processes of legalization. In Law Beyond the State, Carmen Pavel responds to the ambivalent attitude states have with respect to international law by offering moral and legal reasons for them to improve, strengthen, and further institutionalize its capacity. She argues that the same reasons which support the development of law at the domestic level, namely the cultivation of peace, the protection of individual rights, the facilitation of complex forms of cooperation, and the resolution of collective action problems, also support the development of law at the international level. The argument thus engages in institutional moral reasoning. Pavel shows why it should matter to individuals that their states are part of a rule-governed international order. When states are bound by common rules of behavior, their citizens reap the benefits. International law encourages states to protect individual rights and provides a forum where they can communicate, negotiate, and compromise on their differences in order to protect themselves from outside interference and pursue their domestic policies more effectively, including those directed at enhancing their citizen's welfare. Thus, Pavel shows that international law makes a critical, irreplaceable, and defining contribution to an international order characterized by peace and justice. At a time when challenges of cooperation beyond state boundaries include climate change, health epidemics, and large-scale human rights violations, Law Beyond the State issues a powerful reminder of the tools we have to address them.
Author: Michael P. Vandenbergh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131685664X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 495
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Book Description
Private sector action provides one of the most promising opportunities to reduce the risks of climate change, buying time while governments move slowly or even oppose climate mitigation. Starting with the insight that much of the resistance to climate mitigation is grounded in concern about the role of government, this books draws on law, policy, social science, and climate science to demonstrate how private initiatives are already bypassing government inaction in the US and around the globe. It makes a persuasive case that private governance can reduce global carbon emissions by a billion tons per year over the next decade. Combining an examination of the growth of private climate initiatives over the last decade, a theory of why private actors are motivated to reduce emissions, and a review of viable next steps, this book speaks to scholars, business and advocacy group managers, philanthropists, policymakers, and anyone interested in climate change.
Author: Jonathan Bell
Publisher:
ISBN: 0812251857
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
"This collection of essays seeks to explore the impact that gay rights politics and activism have had on the wider American political landscape since the rights revolutions of the 1960s"--
Author: Jackie Smith
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815627432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
"Transnational Social Movements and Global Social Politics examines a cast of global actors left out of the traditional studies of international politics. It generates a theoretically informed view of the relationships between an emerging global civil society - partly manifested in transnational social movements - and international political institutions. This book consists of fifteen essays, all written by experts in the field. The first three parts analyze the rise of transnational social movements in the context of broad twentieth-century trends. A fourth part builds a theoretical framework from which organizations influencing global governance can be viewed."--
Author: Dmitry Shumsky
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300241097
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
A revisionist account of Zionist history, challenging the inevitability of a one-state solution, from a bold, path-breaking young scholar The Jewish nation-state has often been thought of as Zionism’s end goal. In this bracing history of the idea of the Jewish state in modern Zionism, from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century until the establishment of the state of Israel, Dmitry Shumsky challenges this deeply rooted assumption. In doing so, he complicates the narrative of the Zionist quest for full sovereignty, provocatively showing how and why the leaders of the pre-state Zionist movement imagined, articulated and promoted theories of self-determination in Palestine either as part of a multinational Ottoman state (1882-1917), or in the framework of multinational democracy. In particular, Shumsky focuses on the writings and policies of five key Zionist leaders from the Habsburg and Russian empires in central and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Leon Pinsker, Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and David Ben-Gurion to offer a very pointed critique of Zionist historiography.
Author: Christopher P. Loss
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691148279
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political history of the United States in the twentieth century, and chronicles its transformation into a key mediating institution between citizens and the state. Framed around the three major federal higher education policies of the twentieth century--the 1944 GI Bill, the 1958 National Defense Education Act, and the 1965 Higher Education Act--the book charts the federal government's various efforts to deploy education to ready citizens for the national, bureaucratized, and increasingly global world in which they lived. Loss details the myriad ways in which academic leaders and students shaped, and were shaped by, the state's shifting political agenda as it moved from a preoccupation with economic security during the Great Depression, to national security during World War II and the Cold War, to securing the rights of African Americans, women, and other previously marginalized groups during the 1960s and '70s. Along the way, Loss reappraises the origins of higher education's current-day diversity regime, the growth of identity group politics, and the privatization of citizenship at the close of the twentieth century. At a time when people's faith in government and higher education is being sorely tested, this book sheds new light on the close relations between American higher education and politics.
Author: Jérôme Melançon
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538153092
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
The contributors to this book offer productive new readings of Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy and of other facets of his thought. They each deploy his theories to adopt a critical stance on urgent political issues and contemporary situations within society. Each essay focuses on a different aspect of political transformation, be it at the personal, social, national, or international level. The book as a whole maps out possibilities for thinking phenomenologically about politics without a sole focus on the state, turning instead toward contemporary human experience and existence.
