Imperial Democracy

Imperial Democracy PDF Author: Ernest R. May
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9780061316944
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description

Imperial Democracy

Imperial Democracy PDF Author: Ernest R. May
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9780061316944
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book Here

Book Description


Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan

Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan PDF Author: Andrew Gordon
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520913302
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan examines the political role played by working men and women in prewar Tokyo and offers a reinterpretation of the broader dynamics of Japan's prewar political history. Gordon argues that such phenomena as riots, labor disputes, and union organizing can best be understood as part of an early twentieth-century movement for "imperial democracy" shaped by the nineteenth-century drive to promote capitalism and build a modern nation and empire. When the propertied, educated leaders of this movement gained a share of power in the 1920s, they disagreed on how far to go toward incorporating working men and women into an expanded body politic. For their part, workers became ambivalent toward working within the imperial democratic system. In this context, the intense polarization of laborers and owners during the Depression helped ultimately to destroy the legitimacy of imperial democracy. Gordon suggests that the thought and behavior of Japanese workers both reflected and furthered the intense concern with popular participation and national power that has marked Japan's modern history. He points to a post-World War II legacy for imperial democracy in both the organization of the working class movement and the popular willingness to see GNP growth as an index of national glory. Importantly, Gordon shows how historians might reconsider the roles of tenant farmers, students, and female activists, for example, in the rise and transformation of imperial democracy.

Practicing Democracy

Practicing Democracy PDF Author: Margaret Lavinia Anderson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691229538
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
What happens when manhood suffrage, a radically egalitarian institution, gets introduced into a deeply hierarchical society? In her sweeping history of Imperial Germany's electoral culture, Anderson shows how the sudden opportunity to "practice" democracy in 1867 opened up a free space in the land of Kaisers, generals, and Junkers. Originally designed to make voters susceptible to manipulation by the authorities, the suffrage's unintended consequence was to enmesh its participants in ever more democratic procedures and practices. The result was the growth of an increasingly democratic culture in the decades before 1914. Explicit comparisons with Britain, France, and America give us a vivid picture of the coercive pressures--from employers, clergy, and communities--that German voters faced, but also of the legalistic culture that shielded them from the fraud, bribery, and violence so characteristic of other early "franchise regimes." We emerge with a new sense that Germans were in no way less modern in the practice of democratic politics. Anderson, in fact, argues convincingly against the widely accepted notion that it was pre-war Germany's lack of democratic values and experience that ultimately led to Weimar's failure and the Third Reich. Practicing Democracy is a surprising reinterpretation of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany and will engage historians concerned with the question of Germany's "special path" to modernity; sociologists interested in obedience, popular mobilization, and civil society; political scientists debating the relative role of institutions versus culture in the transition to democracy. By showing how political activity shaped and was shaped by the experiences of ordinary men and women, it conveys the excitement of democratic politics.

Sexual Decoys

Sexual Decoys PDF Author: Zillah Eisenstein
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1848137796
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
In this book, Zillah Eisenstein continues her unforgiving indictment of neoliberal imperial politics. She charts its most recent militarist and masculinist configurations through discussions of the Afghan and Iraq wars, violations at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the 2004 US Presidential election, and Hurricane Katrina. She warns that women’s rights rhetoric is being manipulated, particularly by Condoleezza Rice and other women in the Bush administration, as a ploy for global dominance and a misogynistic capture of democratic discourse. However, Eisenstein also believes that the plural and diverse lives of women will lay the basis for an assault on these fascistic elements. This new politics will both confound and clarify feminisms, and reconfigure democracy across the globe.

The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia

The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia PDF Author: Tomila V. Lankina
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009080393
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
A devastating challenge to the idea of communism as a 'great leveller', this extraordinarily original, rigorous, and ambitious book debunks Marxism-inspired accounts of its equalitarian consequences. It is the first study systematically to link the genesis of the 'bourgeoisie-cum-middle class' – Imperial, Soviet, and post-communist – to Tzarist estate institutions which distinguished between nobility, clergy, the urban merchants and meshchane, and peasants. It demonstrates how the pre-communist bourgeoisie, particularly the merchant and urban commercial strata but also the high human capital aristocracy and clergy, survived and adapted in Soviet Russia. Under both Tzarism and communism, the estate system engendered an educated, autonomous bourgeoisie and professional class, along with an oppositional public sphere, and persistent social cleavages that continue to plague democratic consensus. This book also shows how the middle class, conventionally bracketed under one generic umbrella, is often two-pronged in nature – one originating among the educated estates of feudal orders, and the other fabricated as part of state-induced modernization.

Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882-1917)

Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882-1917) PDF Author: Eric Blanc
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004449930
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
This groundbreaking study rediscovers the socialists of Tsarist Russia’s imperial borderlands, upending conventional interpretations of working-class politics, the Russian Revolution, and Second International socialism. Based on archival research in eight languages, Revolutionary Social Democracy is the first comparative account of the numerous socialist parties that fought for democracy and workers’ power across the entire span of the Russian Empire, from the factories of Warsaw, to the oil fields of Baku, to the autonomous parliament of Finland. By demonstrating that the Russian Revolution was far less Russian than commonly assumed, Eric Blanc challenges long-held assumptions of historians, sociologists, and activists about the dynamics of revolutionary change under autocratic and democratic conditions. Listen to Lay Led Unions' episode on Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882-1917) featuring Eric Blanc. Also, listen to a panel discussion of Eric Blanc's groundbreaking new book , .

Democracy and Imperialism

Democracy and Imperialism PDF Author: William S Smith
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472125931
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Following costly U.S. engagement in two wars in the Middle East, questions about the appropriateness of American military interventions dominate foreign policy debates. Is an interventionist foreign policy compatible with the American constitutional tradition? This book examines critic Irving Babbitt’s (1865–1933) unique contribution to understanding the quality of foreign policy leadership in a democracy. Babbitt explored how a democratic nation’s foreign policy is a product of the moral and cultural tendencies of the nation’s leaders, arguing that the substitution of expansive, sentimental Romanticism for the religious and ethical traditions of the West would lead to imperialism. The United States’ move away from the restraint and order of sound constitutionalism to involve itself in the affairs of other nations will inevitably cause a clash with the “civilizational” regions that have emerged in recent decades. Democracy and Imperialism uses the question of soul types to address issues of foreign policy leadership, and discusses the leadership qualities that are necessary for sound foreign policy.

A Concise History of Japan

A Concise History of Japan PDF Author: Brett L. Walker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316239691
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
To this day, Japan's modern ascendancy challenges many assumptions about world history, particularly theories regarding the rise of the west and why the modern world looks the way it does. In this engaging new history, Brett L. Walker tackles key themes regarding Japan's relationships with its minorities, state and economic development, and the uses of science and medicine. The book begins by tracing the country's early history through archaeological remains, before proceeding to explore life in the imperial court, the rise of the samurai, civil conflict, encounters with Europe, and the advent of modernity and empire. Integrating the pageantry of a unique nation's history with today's environmental concerns, Walker's vibrant and accessible new narrative then follows Japan's ascension from the ashes of World War II into the thriving nation of today. It is a history for our times, posing important questions regarding how we should situate a nation's history in an age of environmental and climatological uncertainties.

Blood in the Sand

Blood in the Sand PDF Author: Stephen Bronner
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 9780813123677
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Blood in the Sand is Stephen Eric Bronner’s powerful critique of the current state of American foreign and domestic policy, ranging from the government’s initial response to 9/11 and the assault on Afghanistan through the Iraqi War and the ramifications of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Bronner, who just months before the war began spent time in Iraq as part of a peace delegation, examines the state of twenty-first century America, a nation in which security against future terrorist attacks has become an obsession, “moral values” have turned into a slogan, and belief in the right to engage in a preemptive strike has come to define foreign policy. In Blood in the Sand, Bronner develops a bold new framework for a modern democratic foreign policy. In doing so, he passionately warns of the consequences of failure to alter the current course of events in America: extreme economic inequalities of power, political authoritarianism, imperialist ambitions, and an increasingly constrained cultural climate.

Freedom and Democracy in an Imperial Context

Freedom and Democracy in an Imperial Context PDF Author: Robert Nichols
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135053820
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Freedom and Democracy in an Imperial Context: Dialogues with James Tully gathers leading thinkers from across the humanities and social sciences in a celebration of, and critical engagement with, the recent work of Canadian political philosopher James Tully. Over the past thirty years, James Tully has made key contributions to some of the most pressing questions of our time, including: interventions in the history of moral and political thought, contemporary political philosophy, democracy, citizenship, imperialism, recognition and cultural diversity. In 2008, he published Public Philosophy in a New Key, a two-volume work that promises to be one of the most influential and important statements of legal and political thought in recent history. This work, along with numerous other books and articles, is foundational to a distinctive school of political thought, influencing thinkers in fields as diverse as Anthropology, History, Indigenous Studies, Law, Philosophy and Political Science. Critically engaging with James Tully’s thought, the essays in this volume take up what is his central, and ever more pressing, question: how to enact democratic practices of freedom within and against historically sedimented and actually existing relationships of imperialism?