"Vito Stagliano's book represents the history and comprehensive analysis of 65 years of energy policy-making with an insider's view of the four years invested by the White house and Congress to the making of the Energy Policy Act of 1992 - the last comprehensive energy legislation enacted by Congress. Placed in the context of U.S. energy policy-making since the New Deal, Stagliano presents a case study against which can be assessed the newly released energy policy of the Bush Administration."--Jacket.
In this timely and provocative volume, some of the world's leading political and constitutional theorists come together to debate Michael Sandel's celebrated thesis that the United States is in the the grip of a flawed public philosophy - "procedural liberalism". Beginning with an originalstage-setting introduction by Ronald Beiner, and ending with a reply by Michael Sandel, Sandel's liberal and feminist critics square off with his communitarian and civic republican sympathizers in a lively and wide-ranging discussion spanning constitutional law, culture, and political economy.Practical, topical issues of immigration, gay marriage, federalism, adoption, abortion, corporate speech, militias, and economic disparity are debated alongside theories of civic virtue, citizenship, identity, and community. Not only does this volume provide the most comprehensive and insightfulcritique of Sandel's Democracy's Discontent to date - it also makes a very significant, substantive contribution to contemporary political and legal philosophy in its own right. It will prove essential reading for all those interested in the future of American politics, law, and publicphilosophy.
This book rethinks economic theory and calls for a creative and pragmatic approach to policymaking. It examines what development and sustenance of economic progress mean, and how these may be facilitated. The relevance of this issue has received fresh impetus from the significant changes in the degree and pattern of international economic relations that are unfolding across the world, posing both opportunities and challenges. While globalisation of goods and financial markets may have delivered high growth for some nations, the distribution of the benefits has often been highly unequal, with gains to owners of capital and skills being disproportionately higher compared to that of labour, especially the unskilled. Widening and persistent inequalities have been at the heart of rising polarisation and spread of conflicts that threaten the social fabric. This work emphasises the relevance of a broad policy framework based on building individual capabilities and in line with a human-centric perspective. At the same time, it points out the crucial need to create policy space for macroeconomic stability and to accommodate heterodox influences, especially when conventional wisdom proves inadequate, as starkly demonstrated inter alia during the recent global financial crisis. This festschrift, dedicated to Deepak Nayyar, presents chapters on diverse themes that address the persisting global problems of poverty, inequality and sustaining development. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of economics, development studies, public policy and governance, and also to policymakers, government officials and those in media.
This book is openly available in digital formats thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Many of today’s insurgent Black movements call for an end to racial capitalism. They take aim at policing and mass incarceration, the racial partitioning of workplaces and residential communities, the expropriation and underdevelopment of Black populations at home and abroad. Scholars and activists increasingly regard these practices as essential technologies of capital accumulation, evidence that capitalist societies past and present enshrine racial inequality as a matter of course. In Prophet of Discontent, Andrew J. Douglas and Jared A. Loggins invoke contemporary discourse on racial capitalism in a powerful reassessment of Martin Luther King Jr.’s thinking and legacy. Like today’s organizers, King was more than a dreamer. He knew that his call for a “radical revolution of values” was complicated by the production and circulation of value under capitalism. He knew that the movement to build the beloved community required sophisticated analyses of capitalist imperialism, state violence, and racial formations, as well as unflinching solidarity with the struggles of the Black working class. Shining new light on King’s largely implicit economic and political theories, and expanding appreciation of the Black radical tradition to which he belonged, Douglas and Loggins reconstruct, develop, and carry forward King’s strikingly prescient critique of capitalist society.
The social contract that has underpinned growth and political stability in the Western world since World War II has broken down. Houses, health care and higher education have become unaffordable to a majority of people, while the burden of unregulated monopolies, globalization and uncontrolled immigration has fallen disproportionately on the lower and middle classes. Wrapped in political correctness, an increasingly out of touch Western elite continues catering to special interests and fails to grasp the urgency for change. Populist movements harnessing public anger appear unable to propose and implement effective solutions. The last financial crisis was bad enough. But the next crisis will spread deeper and wider. And yet we stand economically, politically and most of all intellectually unprepared. This book is the story of how we have arrived at the brink of disaster and how we can move away from the win-lose policies of recent decades to restore much-needed balance.
Holding fast to traditional values in the face of unprecedented economic hardship, nearly a million American women joined right-wing organizations during the Great Depression and World War II. Days of Discontent provides a new perspective for understanding why the far right appealed to these women, whose political self-awareness grew with the tumultuous times. Influenced by the conventional image of women as mothers and nurturers, many women viewed the right-wing movement as a way to protect and maintain American morality. The radical right leaders, such as Elizabeth Dilling and Grace Wick, held ideas in common with European fascists but based their politics on a uniquely American mixture of nativism, anticommunism, anti-Semitism, and racism. Benowitz's insight into their motivations sheds new light on the interaction between women's daily lives and national politics.
The Progressive Era, a few brief decades around the turn of the last century, still burns in American memory for its outsized personalities: Theodore Roosevelt, whose energy glinted through his pince-nez; Carry Nation, who smashed saloons with her axe and helped stop an entire nation from drinking; women suffragists, who marched in the streets until they finally achieved the vote; Andrew Carnegie and the super-rich, who spent unheard-of sums of money and became the wealthiest class of Americans since the Revolution. Yet the full story of those decades is far more than the sum of its characters. In Michael McGerr's A Fierce Discontent America's great political upheaval is brilliantly explored as the root cause of our modern political malaise. The Progressive Era witnessed the nation's most convulsive upheaval, a time of radicalism far beyond the Revolution or anything since. In response to the birth of modern America, with its first large-scale businesses, newly dominant cities, and an explosion of wealth, one small group of middle-class Americans seized control of the nation and attempted to remake society from bottom to top. Everything was open to question -- family life, sex roles, race relations, morals, leisure pursuits, and politics. For a time, it seemed as if the middle-class utopians would cause a revolution. They accomplished an astonishing range of triumphs. From the 1890s to the 1910s, as American soldiers fought a war to make the world safe for democracy, reformers managed to outlaw alcohol, close down vice districts, win the right to vote for women, launch the income tax, take over the railroads, and raise feverish hopes of making new men and women for a new century. Yet the progressive movement collapsed even more spectacularly as the war came to an end amid race riots, strikes, high inflation, and a frenzied Red scare. It is an astonishing and moving story. McGerr argues convincingly that the expectations raised by the progressives' utopian hopes have nagged at us ever since. Our current, less-than-epic politics must inevitably disappoint a nation that once thought in epic terms. The New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, the Great Society, and now the war on terrorism have each entailed ambitious plans for America; and each has had dramatic impacts on policy and society. But the failure of the progressive movement set boundaries around the aspirations of all of these efforts. None of them was as ambitious, as openly determined to transform people and create utopia, as the progressive movement. We have been forced to think modestly ever since that age of bold reform. For all of us, right, center, and left, the age of "fierce discontent" is long over.
The 2016 presidential election was unlike any other in recent memory, and Donald Trump was an entirely different kind of candidate than voters were used to seeing. He was the first true outsider to win the White House in over a century and the wealthiest populist in American history. Democrats and Republicans alike were left scratching their heads-how did this happen? In American Discontent, John L. Campbell contextualizes Donald Trump's success by focusing on the long-developing economic, racial, ideological, and political shifts that enabled Trump to win the White House. Campbell argues that Trump's rise to power was the culmination of a half-century of deep, slow-moving change in America, beginning with the decline of the Golden Age of prosperity that followed the Second World War. The worsening economic anxieties of many Americans reached a tipping point when the 2008 financial crisis and Barack Obama's election, as the first African American president, finally precipitated the worst political gridlock in generations. Americans were fed up and Trump rode a wave of discontent all the way to the White House. Campbell emphasizes the deep structural and historical factors that enabled Trump's rise to power. Since the 1970s and particularly since the mid-1990s, conflicts over how to restore American economic prosperity, how to cope with immigration and racial issues, and the failings of neoliberalism have been gradually dividing liberals from conservatives, whites from minorities, and Republicans from Democrats. Because of the general ideological polarization of politics, voters were increasingly inclined to believe alternative facts and fake news. Grounded in the underlying economic and political changes in America that stretch back decades, American Discontent provides a short, accessible, and nonpartisan explanation of Trump's rise to power.
This book addresses a central problem often ignored by students of twentieth-century Mexico: the breakdown of the old order during the first years of the revolutionary era. That process was more contested and gradual in Yucatan than in any other Mexican region, and this close examination of the Yucatan experience sheds light on an issue of particular relevance to students of Central America, South America’s southern cone, and other postcolonial societies: the capacity of national oligarchies to “hang on” in the face of escalating social change, the outbreak of local rebellions, and the mobilization of multiclass coalitions. Latin American historiography has generally failed to integrate the study of popular movements and rebellions with examinations of the determined efforts of elite establishments to prevent, contain, crush, and, ultimately, ideologically appropriate such rebellions. Most often, these problems are treated separately. This volume seeks to redress this imbalance by probing a set of linkages that is central to the study of Mexico’s modern past: the complex, reciprocal relationship between modes of contestation and structures and discourses of power.
