Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> History & Theory - General

Jewish legal and political thought developed in conditions of exile, where Jews had neither a state of their own nor citizenship in any other. What use, then, can this body of thought be today to Jews living in Israel or as emancipated citizens in secular democratic states? Can a culture of exile be adapted to help Jews find ways of being at home politically today? These questions are central in Law, Politics, and Morality in Judaism, a collection of essays by contemporary political theorists, philosophers, and lawyers.

How does Jewish law accommodate--or fail to...

Since emerging in the late nineteenth century, political science has undergone a radical shift--from constructing grand narratives of national political development to producing empirical studies of individual political phenomena. What caused this change? Modern Political Science--the first authoritative history of Anglophone political science--argues that the field's transformation shouldn't be mistaken for a case of simple progress and increasing scientific precision. On the contrary, the book shows that political science is deeply historically contingent, driven both by its own...

In Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory, Nancy Hirschmann demonstrates not merely that modern theories of freedom are susceptible to gender and class analysis but that they must be analyzed in terms of gender and class in order to be understood at all. Through rigorous close readings of major and minor works of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Mill, Hirschmann establishes and examines the gender and class foundations of the modern understanding of freedom. Building on a social constructivist model of freedom that she developed in her award-winning book The...

If "slavery" is defined broadly to include bonded child labor and forced prostitution, there are upward of 25 million slaves in the world today. Individuals and groups are freeing some slaves by buying them from their enslavers. But slave redemption is as controversial today as it was in pre-Civil War America. In Buying Freedom, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martin Bunzl bring together economists, anthropologists, historians, and philosophers for the first comprehensive examination of the practical and ethical implications of slave redemption.

While recognizing the obvious...

This comprehensive and in-depth look at southern politics in the United States challenges conventional notions about the rise of the Republican Party in the South. David Lublin argues that the evolution of southern politics must be seen as part of a process of democratization of the region's politics. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 provided a sharp jolt forward in this process by greatly expanding the southern electorate.

Nevertheless, Democrats prevented Republicans from capitalizing rapidly on these changes. The overwhelming dominance of the region's politics by Democrats and...

True Faith and Allegiance is a provocative account of nationalism and the politics of turning immigrants into citizens and Americans. Noah Pickus offers an alternative to the wild swings between emotionally fraught positions on immigration and citizenship of the past two decades. Drawing on political theory, history, and law, he argues for a renewed civic nationalism that melds principles and peoplehood.

This tradition of civic nationalism held sway at America's founding and in the Progressive Era. Pickus explores how, from James Madison to Teddy Roosevelt, its...

This book argues that many of the basic concepts that we use to describe and analyze our governmental system are out of date. Developed in large part during the Middle Ages, they fail to confront the administrative character of modern government.

These concepts, which include power, discretion, democracy, legitimacy, law, rights, and property, bear the indelible imprint of this bygone era's attitudes, and Arthurian fantasies, about governance. As a result, they fail to provide us with the tools we need to understand, critique, and improve the government we actually...

If you were to examine an 1816 map of the world, you would discover that half the countries represented there no longer exist. Yet since 1945, the disappearance of individual states from the world stage has become rare. State Death is the first book to systematically examine the reasons why some states die while others survive, and the remarkable decline of state death since the end of World War II.

Grappling with what is a core issue of international relations, Tanisha Fazal explores two hundred years of military invasion and occupation, from eighteenth-century Poland...

How does cooperation emerge in a condition of international anarchy? Michael Tomz sheds new light on this fundamental question through a study of international debt across three centuries. Tomz develops a reputational theory of cooperation between sovereign governments and foreign investors. He explains how governments acquire reputations in the eyes of investors, and argues that concerns about reputation sustain international lending and repayment.

Tomz's theory generates novel predictions about the dynamics of cooperation: how investors treat first-time borrowers, how access...

It is Matthews's intent to "extricate Jefferson from the myths that surround, envelop, and ultimately distort him." The interpretation of Jefferson's idea...

In The Dance with Community Robert Booth Fowler reflects upon these and related questions. "My goal," he writes, "is to present contemporary political thought about community for what it is--a conversation interactive, spirited, and sometimes tough."

There have been many...

American constitutionalism in general, he argues, and judicial review in particular, cannot be fully understood without acknowledging their roots in both common law and liberal political theory. But for the most part, the common law underpinnings of constitutionalism have received short shrift.

Through close study of liberal political philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the writings of Edward Coke, a seventeenth-century judge and parliamentarian whose opinion in Doctor Bonham's Case...

Beating Plowshares into Swords inaugurates an extraordinarily ambitious effort by Paul Koistinen to compose a comprehensive and wide-ranging study on the economics of American warfare from the colonial period to the present. When completed, this multi-volume project will stand as the definitive work on a complex subject that until now has been superficially treated or completely ignored.

Koistinen focuses not upon battlefields and battles but upon the means used to make...

Bourne is also...

This first book by a political theorist devoted exclusively to James's theory argues that political concerns were in fact central to...

The authors consider whether the critiques advanced in recent legal theory can truly be called radical and what form a...

Since the appearance in the 1950s of Strauss's Natural Right and History and Voegelin's Order and History, conservatives like Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, and Allan Bloom have increasingly turned to these thinkers to support their attacks on liberalism and the modernist mindset.

Like so many conservatives,...

"I can play...

Robert Ferrell, one of America's most distinguished historians, offers the first book-length account of the Coolidge presidency in thirty years, drawing on the recently opened papers of White House physician Joel T. Boone to provide a more personal appraisal of the thirtieth president than has...