Modern Free Society and Its Nemesis explores whether and to what extent conservatism represents a negation to free society and liberty in Western countries.
This book identifies and documents the several ways conservatism functions as the nemesis of the democracy and the free market. He provides discussion on forms of conservative government and the rise of nationalism, imperialism, and militarism, with special attention to wars of aggression and the threat of mutually assured destruction (MAD).
This nontechnical book provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary survey of political economy that can easily be understood by any reader with an introductory-level background in economics. As 21st-century political debate becomes polarized across ideological lines, students and citizens need to understand the underlying values on which contending arguments are based. The current political gridlock calls for a deeper appreciation of the competing perspectives in political economy. Now revamped for a third edition, Political Economy: A Comparative Approach supplies a truly interdisciplinary examination of the development and evolution of political economy from the Enlightenment onward, drawing material from the realms of political theory, sociology, philosophy, and history as well as from economics to present detailed comparisons of competing perspectives on a variety of current issues. The book begins with an introduction to political economy that provides readers with an overview of the historical development of the discipline, followed by in-depth analyses of four ideological perspectives in political economy—Classical Liberalism, Radicalism, Conservatism, and Modern Liberalism. The author then applies each of the four ideological perspectives to a range of contemporary issues, such as the role of government, economic instability, poverty, labor relations, discrimination, education, culture, the environment, and international trade. Readers will gain insight into the methods and practice of political economics as well as better understand the history of political/economic thought and the effects of historical processes—European industrialization, for example—on modern debates.
When police agencies began grabbing more power in the 1960s, it began a vicious cycle of relying on imprisonment to solve socio-political, financial, and mental health problems. The reality is that this approach hasn't worked, and it's actually diminished our quality of freedom. Meanwhile, police officers have begun to look at citizens not as people to serve and protect but as enemies. Tim Anderson takes an in-depth look into how the misguided prison-industrial complex unfairly targets minorities, the mentally ill, and the poor. It supports the argument made by Angela Davis, who said, ?Prisons give the appearance of performing a magic trick. However, prisons don't make problems disappear?they make people disappear.? Neoliberals continue to try to convince the public that we need to equip our police officers with weapons that make them seem more like military ground troops. But if we continue down this course, we?ll all just be one more target to be eliminated in The United States of Incarceration.
This wide ranging book provides readers with a reliable and lively guide to contemporary American political practices, processes and institutions. Essays in the proposed volume will cover phenomena such as the Tea Party upsurge in the Republican Party, Obama’s health care reforms, recent changes to campaign funding emanating from the key Citizens’ United Supreme Court decision, US foreign policy after the War on Terror, Obama's presidential strategy and issues relating to polarisation and partisanship in US politics. This work is essential reading for all students of American Politics and US Foreign Policy.
In Identifying a Free Society Milan Zafirovski offers a holistic sociological approach to modern free society as a total social system. The book examines the main conditions and indicators of modern free society such as democracy, a free economy, a free culture, and a free civil society, hence political, economic, cultural, and individual liberty entwined with equality and justice. It provides specific and aggregate free-society estimates for Western and related societies based on a variety of objective rankings, data, and reports. On the basis of these estimates, the book identifies liberal societies as the freest as a whole, and their anti-liberal opposites as the most unfree.
Examining history through the lens of Bertrand de Jouvenel's "high-low vs. middle" mechanism, C. A. Bond shows that liberalism-far from a force for decentralization and peace-results rather in hyper-centralization and chronic conflict. Ranging over such phenomena as Athenian democracy, radical Islam, Black Lives Matter, NGOs, the Enlightenment, the civil rights era, and feminism, Bond offers a secure theoretical basis for the illiberal revolt currently engulfing our world.
If there has been a unifying theme of Barack Obama’s presidency, it is the inexorable growth of the administrative state. Its expansion has followed a pattern: First, expand federal powers beyond their constitutional limits. Second, delegate those powers to agencies and away from elected politicians in Congress. Third, insulate civil servants from politics and accountability. Since its introduction in American life by Woodrow Wilson in the 20th Century, the administrative state’s has steadily undermined democratic self-government, reduced the sphere of individual liberty, and burdened the free market and economic growth. In Liberty’s Nemesis, Dean Reuter and John Yoo collect the brightest political minds in the country to expose this explosive, unchecked growth of power in government agencies ranging from health care to climate change, financial markets to immigration, and more. Many Americans have rightly shared the Founders’ fear of excessive lawmaking, but Liberty’s Nemesis is the first book to explain why the concentration of power in administrative agencies in particular is the greatest – and most overlooked – threat to our liberties today. If we fail to curb it, our constitutional republic might easily devolve into something akin to the statist governments of Europe. President Obama’s ongoing efforts to encourage just such a devolution, and the problems his administration faces as a consequence, present a critical opportunity to defend the original vision of the Constitution.
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Set in a close-knit Newark neighborhood during a terrifying polio outbreak in 1944, a “book [that] has the elegance of a fable and the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama” (The New Yorker)—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral. Bucky Cantor is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director during the summer of 1944. A javelin thrower and weightlifter, he is disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As the devastating disease begins to ravage Bucky’s playground, Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain. Moving between the streets of Newark and a pristine summer camp high in the Poconos, Nemesis tenderly and startlingly depicts Cantor’s passage into personal disaster, the condition of childhood, and the painful effect that the wartime polio epidemic has on a closely-knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children.