Wyniki wyszukiwania:

Its existence is a reality of everyday life, yet the notion of the state is not well understood. How did the state originate and what is the source of its authority? This is the primary focus of Martin Sicker's "Genesis of the State." Sicker does not consider this as just another academic question: The citizen's moral obligation to obey the state is intimately related to the legitimacy of the state's authority and the latter depends largely on its sources. This work examines several major approaches to the question of the genesis of political authority that are reflected in the works of a...

Sicker examines the early stages of the process by which Palestine, an obscure and relatively miniscule backwater of the Ottoman Empire, became a critical factor in the history and convoluted politics of the modern Middle East. In doing this, he describes relevant aspects of the history of Palestine in the little known and poorly understood period from the Napoleonic intrusion in the Middle East to the end of the Ottoman Empire and the beginnings of British rule. Developments in this period are analyzed within the geopolitical context of the rivalries among the great European powers that...

In the view of Dr. Martin Sicker, it was with the emergence of Islam that the combination of geopolitics and religion reached its most volatile form and provided the ideological context for war and peace in the Middle East for more than a millennium. The conflation of geopolitics and religion in Islam is predicated on the concept of "jihad" (struggle), which may be understood as a "crescentade," in the same sense as the later Christian "crusade," which seeks to achieve a religious goal, the conversion of the world to Islam, by militant means. This equates to a concept of perpetual war with...

Sicker examines the role of the United States within the Western Hemisphere and the geopolitical and geostrategic factors that have helped shape its policies in the region. He demonstrates that such factors have contributed heavily to establishing the patterns of state development and interstate relations in the Western Hemisphere throughout its modern history. The prevailing geopolitical environment has been conditioned to a large extent by the emergence of the United States as the unquestionably dominant power in the extensive region. However, that status did not exist at the time it...

When Congress enacted Social Secuirty in 1935, with the age of retirement set at age 65, average life expectancy was 62 years. By the time Medicare was enacted 30 years later, life expectancy had risen to age 70. Since the enactment of Medicare, life expectancy has risen to age 76 today and may be expected to increase further in the decades to come. Clearly, the increase in post-retirement life expectancy has significant implications for the level of national expenditures attributable to an aging population. One of the approaches suggested as a solution to the so-called income transfer...