Grassroots Leviathan

Grassroots Leviathan PDF Author: Ariel Ron
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421439336
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Get Book Here

Book Description
How a massive agricultural reform movement led by northern farmers before the Civil War recast Americans' relationships to market forces and the state. Recipient of The Center for Civil War Research's 2021 Wiley-Silver Book Prize, Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award by the Agricultural History Society In this sweeping look at rural society from the American Revolution to the Civil War, Ariel Ron argues that agricultural history is central to understanding the nation's formative period. Upending the myth that the Civil War pitted an industrial North against an agrarian South, Grassroots Leviathan traces the rise of a powerful agricultural reform movement spurred by northern farmers. Ron shows that farming dominated the lives of most Americans through almost the entire nineteenth century and traces how middle-class farmers in the "Greater Northeast" built a movement of semipublic agricultural societies, fairs, and periodicals that fundamentally recast Americans' relationship to market forces and the state.

Grassroots Leviathan

Grassroots Leviathan PDF Author: Ariel Ron
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421439336
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Get Book Here

Book Description
How a massive agricultural reform movement led by northern farmers before the Civil War recast Americans' relationships to market forces and the state. Recipient of The Center for Civil War Research's 2021 Wiley-Silver Book Prize, Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award by the Agricultural History Society In this sweeping look at rural society from the American Revolution to the Civil War, Ariel Ron argues that agricultural history is central to understanding the nation's formative period. Upending the myth that the Civil War pitted an industrial North against an agrarian South, Grassroots Leviathan traces the rise of a powerful agricultural reform movement spurred by northern farmers. Ron shows that farming dominated the lives of most Americans through almost the entire nineteenth century and traces how middle-class farmers in the "Greater Northeast" built a movement of semipublic agricultural societies, fairs, and periodicals that fundamentally recast Americans' relationship to market forces and the state.

The New Leviathan

The New Leviathan PDF Author: David Horowitz
Publisher: Forum Books
ISBN: 0307716473
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
At a time when the national political debate is about inequality and fairness, bestselling au­thor David Horowitz and coauthor Jacob Laksin have written an unsettling book about the distribu­tion of power in America. Thoroughly researched and amply documented, The New Leviathan over­turns the conventional wisdom about which end of the political spectrum represents the rich and pow­erful, and which represents the people. The Democratic Party presents itself to the electorate as the party of working families and the poor. In the 2000 election campaign, Democrat Al Gore ran on the slogan “The People vs. the Powerful,” while President Obama describes him­self as a “grassroots organizer” and a spokesman for “fairness” and “progressive change.” Such is the world of political myth. In reality, the Demo­crats and the Obama progressives represent the richest and most powerful political machine in American history. Backed by a near trillion-dollar treasury in America’s oldest and largest tax-exempt foundations, progressives outspend conservatives by a factor of seven to one. In The New Leviathan, David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin examine this growing financial power of left-wing organizations and politicians. They show how left-wing foundations under­wrote the political career of Barack Obama and how massive funding advantages for progressive proposals have disenfranchised American voters and shifted the national policy debate dramatically to the left. The New Leviathan draws connections between the Obama administration and progres­sive organizations from labor unions to media outlets to nonprofits to political groups, and shows how on key policy fronts—national security, immigration, citizenship, environment, and health care—the sheer force of left-wing financial resources has reconfigured the nation’s political agenda.

Climate Leviathan

Climate Leviathan PDF Author: Joel Wainwright
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1786634317
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description
**Winner of the 2019 Sussex International Theory Prize** -- How climate change will affect our political theory - for better and worse Despite the science and the summits, leading capitalist states have not achieved anything close to an adequate level of carbon mitigation. There is now simply no way to prevent the planet breaching the threshold of two degrees Celsius set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. What are the likely political and economic outcomes of this? Where is the overheating world heading? To further the struggle for climate justice, we need to have some idea how the existing global order is likely to adjust to a rapidly changing environment. Climate Leviathan provides a radical way of thinking about the intensifying challenges to the global order. Drawing on a wide range of political thought, Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann argue that rapid climate change will transform the world's political economy and the fundamental political arrangements most people take for granted. The result will be a capitalist planetary sovereignty, a terrifying eventuality that makes the construction of viable, radical alternatives truly imperative.

Patchwork Leviathan

Patchwork Leviathan PDF Author: Erin Metz McDonnell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691197369
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book Here

Book Description
Corruption and ineffectiveness are often expected of public servants in developing countries. However, some groups within these states are distinctly more effective and public oriented than the rest. Why? Patchwork Leviathan explains how a few spectacularly effective state organizations manage to thrive amid general institutional weakness and succeed against impressive odds. Drawing on the Hobbesian image of the state as Leviathan, Erin Metz McDonnell argues that many seemingly weak states actually have a wide range of administrative capacities. Such states are in fact patchworks sewn loosely together from scarce resources into the semblance of unity. McDonnell demonstrates that when the human, cognitive, and material resources of bureaucracy are rare, it is critically important how they are distributed. Too often, scarce bureaucratic resources are scattered throughout the state, yielding little effect. McDonnell reveals how a sufficient concentration of resources clustered within particular pockets of a state can be transformative, enabling distinctively effective organizations to emerge from a sea of ineffectiveness. Patchwork Leviathan offers a comprehensive analysis of successful statecraft in institutionally challenging environments, drawing on cases from contemporary Ghana and Nigeria, mid-twentieth-century Kenya and Brazil, and China in the early twentieth century. Based on nearly two years of pioneering fieldwork in West Africa, this incisive book explains how these highly effective pockets differ from the Western bureaucracies on which so much state and organizational theory is based, providing a fresh answer to why well-funded global capacity-building reforms fail—and how they can do better.

After the Internet

After the Internet PDF Author: Ramesh Srinivasan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509506217
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 120

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations, and concern that the internet has heightened rather than combated various forms of political and social inequality, it is time we ask: what comes after a broken internet? Ramesh Srinivasan and Adam Fish reimagine the internet from the perspective of grassroots activists and citizens on the margins of political and economic power. They explore how the fragments of the existing internet are being utilized - alongside a range of peoples, places, and laws - to make change possible. From indigenous and non-Western communities and activists in Tahrir Square, to imprisoned hackers and whistleblowers, this book illustrates how post-digital cultures are changing the internet as we know it - from a system which is increasingly centralized, commodified, and "personalized," into something more in line with its original spirit: autonomous, creative, subversive. The book looks past the limitations of the internet, reconceptualizing network technology in relation to principles of justice and equality. Srinivasan and Fish advocate for an internet that blends the local concerns of grassroots communities and activists with the need to achieve scalable change and transformation.

Grassroots Tyranny

Grassroots Tyranny PDF Author: Clint Bolick
Publisher: Cato Institute
ISBN: 9781882577019
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shows how local government is sometimes the biggest violator of individual rights.

The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation

The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation PDF Author: Steven Hahn
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469621460
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume represents one of the first efforts to harvest the rapidly emerging scholarship in the field of American rural history. Building on the insights and methodologies that social historians have directed toward urban life, the contributors explore the past as it unfolded in the rural settings in which most Americans have lived during most of American history. The essays cover a broad range of topics: the character and consequences of manufacturing and consumerism in the antebellum countryside of the Northeast; the transition from slavery to freedom in Southern plantation and nonplantation regions; the dynamics of community-building and inheritance among Midwestern native and immigrant farmers; the panorama of rural labor systems in the Far West; and the experience of settled farming communities in periods of slowed economic growth. The central theme is the complex and often conflicting development of commercial and industrial capitalism in the American countryside. Together the essays place rural societies within the context of America's "Great Transformation."

Warfare State

Warfare State PDF Author: James T. Sparrow
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199791074
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although common wisdom and much scholarship assume that "big government" gained its foothold in the United States under the auspices of the New Deal during the Great Depression, in fact it was the Second World War that accomplished this feat. Indeed, as the federal government mobilized for war it grew tenfold, quickly dwarfing the New Deal's welfare programs. Warfare State shows how the federal government vastly expanded its influence over American society during World War II. Equally important, it looks at how and why Americans adapted to this expansion of authority. Through mass participation in military service, war work, rationing, price control, income taxation, and the war bond program, ordinary Americans learned to live with the warfare state. They accepted these new obligations because the government encouraged all citizens to think of themselves as personally connected to the battle front, linking their every action to the fate of the combat soldier. As they worked for the American Soldier, Americans habituated themselves to the authority of the government. Citizens made their own counter-claims on the state-particularly in the case of industrial workers, women, African Americans, and most of all, the soldiers. Their demands for fuller citizenship offer important insights into the relationship between citizen morale, the uses of patriotism, and the legitimacy of the state in wartime. World War II forged a new bond between citizens, nation, and government. Warfare State tells the story of this dramatic transformation in American life.

A New Politics from the Left

A New Politics from the Left PDF Author: Hilary Wainwright
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509523669
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Get Book Here

Book Description
Millions passionately desire a viable alternative to austerity and neoliberalism, but they are sceptical of traditional leftist top-down state solutions. In this urgent polemic, Hilary Wainwright argues that this requires a new politics for the left that comes from the bottom up, based on participatory democracy and the everyday knowledge and creativity of each individual. Political leadership should be about facilitation and partnership, not expert domination or paternalistic rule. Wainwright uses lessons from recent movements and experiments to build a radical future vision that will be an inspiration for activists and radicals everywhere.

The Fragile Fabric of Union

The Fragile Fabric of Union PDF Author: Brian D. Schoen
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801897815
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner, 2010 Bennett H. Wall Award, Southern Historical Association In this fresh study Brian Schoen views the Deep South and its cotton industry from a global perspective, revisiting old assumptions and providing new insights into the region, the political history of the United States, and the causes of the Civil War. Schoen takes a unique and broad approach. Rather than seeing the Deep South and its planters as isolated from larger intellectual, economic, and political developments, he places the region firmly within them. In doing so, he demonstrates that the region’s prominence within the modern world—and not its opposition to it—indelibly shaped Southern history. The place of “King Cotton” in the sectional thinking and budding nationalism of the Lower South seems obvious enough, but Schoen reexamines the ever-shifting landscape of international trade from the 1780s through the eve of the Civil War. He argues that the Southern cotton trade was essential to the European economy, seemingly worth any price for Europeans to protect and maintain, and something to defend aggressively in the halls of Congress. This powerful association gave the Deep South the confidence to ultimately secede from the Union. By integrating the history of the region with global events, Schoen reveals how white farmers, planters, and merchants created a “Cotton South,” preserved its profitability for many years, and ensured its dominance in the international raw cotton markets. The story he tells reveals the opportunities and costs of cotton production for the Lower South and the United States.