Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> Political Ideologies - General

In today's society, we see angry groups in many forms--from animal rights and climate crisis activists to citizens opposed to allowing more immigrants of certain ethnicities or religions into the country, militia groups frustrated by acts of domestic terrorism and legislation that limits gun ownership and the ability to carry weapons in public, and those outraged by what they see as police brutality or the unnecessary use of deadly force against people of color.

More than just evidence of civil unrest in society, angry groups across history and nations often ultimately affect...

This study attempts to explain the development of Tokugawa-period political attitudes, as shown in the writings of the major thinkers of the time and as exemplified in the life of a nineteenth-century samurai. Emphasis is placed on attitudes toward emperor and nation, a subject that also involved the role of the Bakufu, or Tokugawa shogunate government.

The Challenge of the Exception is the key that unlocked the ideas of Carl Schmitt, a leading political theorist and jurist who influenced the thoughts of, among others, Hannah Arendt, Carl Joachim Friedrich, Otto Kirchheimer, Hans Morgenthau, Franz Neumann, and Leo Strauss. Professor Schwab clearly articulates Schmitt's key concepts and relates their centrality to politics and the state, to the political theory of liberalism, democracy and authoritarianism, and to international relations. When Schwab treats Schmitt's interpretations of constitutional questions, for example, he shows...

Cultural hegemony theory is a branch of political sociology that concerns the way in which political sociology is transmitted. "Democracy Upside Down" weaves together, for the first time, the central arguments and the most important threads of empirical work on the theory of cultural hegemony in the U.S. Whereas most research on political socialization concludes that it is unclear exactly where the most cogent influences on political learning lie, this volume focuses upon the top-down process of political learning: the extent to which elites can impose their ideology on masses by...

Douglas N. Walton considers the question of whether the conventions of informal conversation can be articulated more precisely than they are at present. Specifically, he addresses the problem of the fallacy of ad hominem argumentation as it occurs in natural settings. Can rules be formulated to determine if criticisms of apparent hypocrisy in an argument are defensible or refutable? Walton suggests that they can, and ultimately defends the thesis that ad hominem reasoning is not fallacious per se. He carries his analysis to the core of action--theoretic reasoning--by examining a number of...

The seeds of this volume were contained in a series of lectures delivered by Leszak Nowak to his co-interned activists of Solidarity in a Polish prison in 1982. From the stance of a political philosopher, Nowak suggests statements about power; as a social theorist, he proposes a systematization of hypotheses into idealized models of increasing realism. Most books on socialism are based on either radical or conservative ideologies; "Power and Civil Society," however begins with radical assumptions but reaches rather conservative conclusions. Nowak's discussion of the three independent main...

This interdisciplinary study on liberalism explores the history of liberal thought in philosophy, the social sciences, cultural theory, and American political theory. The discussion focuses on an internal conflict between cultural and political values that favor political elitism and doctrines that favor some form of political democracy. Telling the story of the liberal elite and its ambivalent relationship to democracy, Hollingers show why the decline of liberalism does not pave the way for democratic participation. Addressing the current political and cultural climate, Hollinger outlines...

Sharpe examines Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem as a case study of Arendt's theoretical work on judgment. In addition, he seeks to illustrate two dimensions of judgment: modesty--who am I to judge? and arrogance--how dare you judge me? He demonstrates the extent to which modesty and arrogance are linked with distance. The claims who am I to judge? and how dare you judge me? become questions of how much distance--in time, space, and imagination--is necessary or appropriate for judgment. Sharpe sees Eichmann as an unintentionally ironic demonstration of this feature of...

Sicker argues that it is the achievement of orthocracy as the motivating concept of the state rather than democracy as its optimum form that is crucial for mankind in the 21st century, notwithstanding that the widespread adoption of substantive democracy may be the best currently conceivable means for reaching the goal of universal responsible statehood. In a critique of much modern political theory, Sicker reexamines the essential idea of the state as well as its purpose as understood from a variety of perspectives, a subject that has largely been neglected over the past several decades...

Many dictatorships are short-lived, but a few manage to stay in power for decades. Lewis takes three Latin fascist tyrants--Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar--and shows how they perpetuated their rule through the careful recruitment and circulation of top-echelon subordinates to carry out their orders.

Long-established dictatorships have to respond to political and social pressures surrounding them, just as democracies do, but it is harder to study them because they are closed systems. One possible way of viewing their internal processes is by observing who they recruit into top leadership...

The status of the modern age has long been debated, but since post-modernism, it has assumed centrality as if it were the issue of philosophy. Gardner brings a new approach to the problem of modernity, based on theories of Rene Girard and others. While modernity is commonly seen as an ideological project or interpretation of Being, Gardner sees it in terms of the structure of human relations and their impact on philosophy. The decisive feature of the modern world is what Tocqueville called equality of conditions, which has wrought a revolution in the self-image of the individual and in...

Quantum physics, according to Theodore Becker, provides the means for replacing outdated eighteenth-century political and economic philosophies with a new paradigm more appropriate to our current understanding of physical reality. Becker had selected contributions by a number of political scientists who subscribe to the view that a Newtonian worldview is inadequate to explain today's political phenomena. These theorists believe that the laws and findings of quantum physics provide a more appropriate scientific paradigm. Becker terms intellectual forays exploring this hypothesis thought...

This book is the fourth in a projected eight-volume series that addresses the origins and development of the idea of legislative sovereignty and the legislative state. A. London Fell's study, which traces ideas and contributions from the Renaissance thinker and legal scholar Corasius to the present, has been praised by such scholars as J. Russell Major in American Historical Review and Dennis M. Patterson in "The American Political Science Review." In this volume, the focus is on ancient, medieval, and early modern Europe, as Fell charts the overall patterns of historiographical debates in...

This collection explores the various dimensions of social scientists' participation in policy-making, with special emphasis on their roles within policy communities and their relationship to the state. Several of the chapters examine the role of research institutes and think tanks within policy communities in the United States, Canada, and Eastern Europe. This book will appeal to readers interested in the sociology of knowledge and the policy-making process, particularly political scientists and sociologists.

Die Begrundung oder Legitimation des Rechts ist eine Aufgabe, welche die Menschen verschiedener Zeitalter in unterschiedlicher Weise zu losen versuchten. Das in diesem Band dokumentierte wissenschaftliche Kolloquium analysiert die Legitimierung von Recht in ihren geschichtlichen Erscheinungsformen und Entwicklungsstufen. Die Beitrage decken den historischen Raum vom romischen Recht, dessen umfassende Wurdigung einen Schwerpunkt bildet, bis zum Neukantianismus ab.