The Political Power of Bad Ideas
The Political Power of Bad Ideas

Author: Mark Lawrence Schrad

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-03-24

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 0199742359

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In The Political Power of Bad Ideas, Mark Schrad uses one of the greatest oddities of modern history--the broad diffusion throughout the Western world of alcohol-control legislation in the early twentieth century--to make a powerful argument about how bad policy ideas achieve international success. His could an idea that was widely recognized by experts as bad before adoption, and which ultimately failed everywhere, come to be adopted throughout the world? To answer the question, Schrad utilizes an institutionalist approach and focuses in particular on the United States, Sweden, and Russia/the USSR. Conventional wisdom, based largely on the U.S. experience, blames evangelical zealots for the success of the temperance movement. Yet as Schrad shows, ten countries, along with numerous colonial possessions, enacted prohibition laws. In virtually every case, the consequences were disastrous, and in every country the law was ultimately repealed. Schrad concentrates on the dynamic interaction of ideas and political institutions, tracing the process through which concepts of dubious merit gain momentum and achieve credibility as they wend their way through institutional structures. He also shows that national policy and institutional environments count: the policy may have been broadly adopted, but countries dealt with the issue in different ways. While The Political Power of Bad Ideas focuses on one legendary episode, its argument about how and why bad policies achieve legitimacy applies far more broadly. It also extends beyond the simplistic notion that "ideas matter" to show how they influence institutional contexts and interact with a nation's political actors, institutions, and policy dynamics.

Smashing the Liquor Machine
Smashing the Liquor Machine

Author: Mark Lawrence Schrad

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 753

ISBN-13: 0190841575

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When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, gin runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American event.Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American prohibition was just one piece of a global wave of prohibition laws that occurred around the same time. Schrad's counterintuitiveglobal history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Thomas Masaryk, founder of Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, and anti-colonial activists in India. Schrad argues that temperance wasn't "Americanexceptionalism" at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. In fact, Schrad offers a fundamental re-appraisal of this colorful era to reveal that temperance forces frequently aligned with progressivism, social justice, liberalself-determination, democratic socialism, labor rights, women's rights, and indigenous rights. By placing the temperance movement in a deep global context, he forces us to fundamentally rethink all that we think we know about the movement. Rather than a motley collection of puritanical Americanevangelicals, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory "liquor machine" that had become exceedingly rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to central Europe to the Indian reservations ofthe American west.Unlike many traditional "dry" histories, Smashing the Liquor Machine gives voice to minority and subaltern figures who resisted the global liquor industry, and further highlights that the impulses that led to the temperance movement were far more progressive and variegated than American readers havebeen led to believe.

Evangelical Belief and Enlightenment Morality in the Australian Temperance Movement
Evangelical Belief and Enlightenment Morality in the Australian Temperance Movement

Author: Nicole Starling

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-03-13

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1003860761

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This book explores the history of the Australian temperance movement and the ideas that informed it, offering a detailed examination of the beliefs of evangelicals involved. The temperance movement in Australia was large and influential, and played a vital role in shaping the cultural and political life of the emerging nation across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The study focuses on the relationship between evangelicalism and 'Moral Enlightenment' ideas within the temperance movement between 1832 and 1930. It considers the complex and varied ways in which they interacted within the thinking of the movement’s leaders, enriches discussions regarding religion and secularisation, and offers new insight into the involvement of women. Against the larger horizon of global evangelicalism, the international temperance movement, and the evolution of Australian political culture, the chapters look at the reported words and actions of six key temperance leaders: John Saunders, George Washington Walker, John McEncroe, Alfred Stackhouse, Mary Ann Thomas and Elizabeth Webb Nicholls. The book will be relevant to scholars of religious history and those with an interest in the evangelical Protestant tradition.

Union and Disunion in the Nineteenth Century
Union and Disunion in the Nineteenth Century

Author: James Gregory

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-12-06

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 0429756429

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This volume examines the nineteenth century not only through episodes, institutions, sites and representations concerned with union, concord and bonds of sympathy, but also through moments of secession, separation, discord and disjunction. Its lens extends from the local and regional, through to national and international settings in Britain, Europe and the United States. The contributors come from the fields of cultural history, literary studies, American studies and legal history.

Transnational Communities
Transnational Communities

Author: Marie-Laure Djelic

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-05-20

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1139488740

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Transnational communities are social groups that emerge from mutual interaction across national boundaries, oriented around a common project or 'imagined' identity. This common project or identity is constructed and sustained through the active engagement and involvement of at least some of its members. Such communities can overlap in different ways with formal organizations but, in principle, they do not need formal organization to be sustained. This book explores the role of transnational communities in relation to the governance of business and economic activity. It does so by focusing on a wide range of empirical terrains, including discussions of the Laleli market in Istanbul, the institutionalization of private equity in Japan, the transnational movement for open content licenses, and the mobilization around environmental certification. These studies show that transnational communities can align the cognitive and normative orientations of their members over time and thereby influence emergent transnational governance arrangements.

Frederick Douglass and Ireland
Frederick Douglass and Ireland

Author: Christine Kinealy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-06-22

Total Pages: 622

ISBN-13: 1351211099

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Frederick Douglass spent four months in Ireland at the end of 1845 that proved to be, in his own words, ‘transformative’. He reported that for the first time in his life he felt like a man, and not a chattel. Whilst in residence, he became a spokesperson for the abolition movement, but by the time he left the country in early January 1846, he believed that the cause of the slave was the cause of the oppressed everywhere. This book adds new insight into Frederick Douglass and his time in Ireland. Contemporary newspaper accounts of the lectures that Douglass gave during his tour of Ireland (in Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork, Limerick, and Belfast) have been located and transcribed. The speeches are annotated and accompanied by letters written by Douglass during his stay. In this way, for the first time, we hear Douglass in his own words. This unique approach allows us to follow the journey of the young man who, while in Ireland, discovered his own voice.