Wishing to be helpful, Nurturing the Imperial Presidency by Brien Hallett illuminates the 5,000-year-old invariant practice of executive war-making. Why has the nation's war leader always decided and declared war? Substituting a speech act approach for the traditional "separation of powers" approach, Hallett argues that he who controls the drafting of the declaration of war also controls the decision to go to war. However, recent legislation calling for legislated "approvals" or “authorization to use force” before the executive can go to war, in no way hinder the executive's ancient...

The Aporia of Freedom systematizes social theories in a new manner, alternative both to the pluralistic concept, according to which social theories are incommensurable, and to the concept which postulates a theoretical synthesis in social sciences. Kaczmarczyk argues that famous social theories constitute interrelated attempts to solve the same problem, called the aporia of freedom. The problem concerns the relation between existential assumptions of social determinism and human freedom. Although these ideas turn out to be mutually exclusive, they seem to be necessary for the construction of...