The Vote
The Vote

Author: Paul Foot

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2024-05-28

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 1804294691

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The dramatic story of the peoples' fight for the right to vote in Britain The culmination of a lifetime's work by the great journalist and historian Paul Foot, The Vote tells the thrilling story of the hard, long-fought struggle for the right to vote in Britain, and the slow erosion that followed. In the tradition of "history from below," Paul Foot examines the great democratic debates that dominated the fight for electoral democracy. Taking readers from the smoke-filled church of the Putney debates, to the dramatic arguments between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke in the aftermath of the French Revolution, to the rise of Chartism and the struggles for votes for women. Throughout, Foot shows how vested interested first delayed and then hobbled the progress of parliamentary democracy. Concentrating on the vital role played by direct action, he shows how rank-and-file resistance to ruling-class injustice was followed by retreat into parliamentary impotence. Into the twentieth-century, Foot exposes the gaps between the promises of a succession of Labour governments and their actions once in power, and its abandonment of any aspiration to economic democracy. A gripping work of narrative history, written in Paul Foot's inimitable energy and engaged style, this book is a classic work of history, and a must-read for anyone interested in how today's political scene was formed.

The People's Science
The People's Science

Author: Noel W. Thompson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-05-02

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 9780521893428

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The work details the emergence, in the post-Napoleonic War period, of a growing popular interest in the critical potentialities of political economy. It considers why this occurred and discusses how the conceptual and analytical tools of political economy were utilised to formulate a critique of early industrial capitalism. The book examines the theories of labour exploitation and capitalist crisis which represented the essence of that critique both as they were elaborated by early-nineteenth-century British anti-capitalist and socialist writers and as they were popularised by writers in the working-class press of the period 1816-34. The book argues that by 1834 in consequence of the efforts of writers such as Hodgskin, Thompson, Gray, Owen and their popularisers the foundations of a distinctively anti-capitalist and socialist political economy had been established and widely disseminated. But these foundations were theoretically flawed. They were flawed by an overconcentration on the sphere of exchange which derived from a particular conception of the determination of exchange value under capitalism; an overconcentration which led on to the suggestion of remedies for the problem of working-class poverty and distress which were necessarily doomed to failure.

Truth and Privilege
Truth and Privilege

Author: Lyndsay Campbell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-12-16

Total Pages: 491

ISBN-13: 1009037811

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This fascinating study analyzes the evolution of libel law in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts, in the crucible of conflicts over democratic institution-building, gender roles, slavery and other religious and social reform movements. It demonstrates how individuals shaped the law, as they navigated societal change and fought with their neighbors.

Contemporary Thought on Nineteenth Century Socialism
Contemporary Thought on Nineteenth Century Socialism

Author: Ophélie Siméon

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-14

Total Pages: 489

ISBN-13: 0429839502

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This first volume will showcase the richness and diversity of the Owenite movement, which spanned decades (from Owen’s first published books in 1813-16 to the late 1840s), political allegiances, genders and continents. This volume therefore calls for a variety of sources not easily available elsewhere - including books, pamphlets, correspondence and newspaper articles - and a variety of often overlapping voices - from Chartists to early co-operators, secularists, non-British Owenites and proponents of women’s rights. The sheer range of Owenite ventures (intentional communities, co-operatives, labour exchanges and experiments in popular education) will be covered, thus blending social and political history. The attempt to map the Owenite movement will eventually lead to the identification of its shared, core principles and values: internationalism, co-operation, concepts of political change, and above all, the ideal of community.