This work looks at the way in which the new global economy works, examining its effect on the power and legitimacy of individual states. It argues that national sovereignty has not eroded, but states have begun to reconfigure, to decide where their resonsi
The inspiring idea for the vision of writing this book was to give you the reader a new complete resuscitation on the birth and history of America of which I believe. The author was born in the early days of the Depression, thus having been raised during WW II and spent his youth at the time of President Harry S. Truman, later President Dwight Eisenhower. Now through the eyes of an everyday older American who spent most of his life in the trucking industry whose goal was to build and acquire a small trucking business, having a piece of the proverbial pie. Meanwhile building a home and to live happily ever after. In the process, the author would read and above all observe the changes in America, from the earlier ones back during the Depression, where hard work was the key to achievement and “proud to be an American” was more than words in a song. As a result the author now is old, bold, and audacious enough to try and bring what he has read about, observed, and believed as the real America, from the first English colonies before these noble men of imposing stature. As George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, then fell upon inferior men as Abe Lincoln, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and the Bush dynasty, with many, many factors in between. This with all their underlings was for the author quite a vision of degeneration, from the once celebrated God-granted sovereignty for its citizens, We the People and the nation. The author hopes that God will somehow use this small effort to His glory.
Now in paperback—with a new preface by the author Americans have long been protective of the country's sovereignty—all the way back to George Washington who, when retiring as president, admonished his successors to avoid “permanent” alliances with foreign powers. Ever since, the nation has faced periodic, often heated, debates about how to maintain that sovereignty, and whether and when it is appropriate to cede some of it in the form of treaties and the alliances about which Washington warned. As the 2016 election made clear, sovereignty is also one of the most frequently invoked, polemical, and misunderstood concepts in politics—particularly American politics. The concept wields symbolic power, implying something sacred and inalienable: the right of the people to control their fate without subordination to outside authorities. Given its emotional pull, however, the concept is easily high-jacked by political opportunists. By playing the sovereignty card, they can curtail more reasoned debates over the merits of proposed international commitments by portraying supporters of global treaties or organizations as enemies of motherhood and apple pie. Such polemics distract Americans from what is really at stake in the sovereignty debate: the ability of the United States to shape its destiny in a global age. The United States cannot successfully manage globalization, much less insulate itself from cross-border threats, on its own. As global integration deepens and cross-border challenges grow, the nation's fate is increasingly tied to that of other countries, whose cooperation will be needed to exploit the shared opportunities and mitigate the common risks of interdependence. The Sovereignty Wars is intended to help today's policymakers think more clearly about what is actually at stake in the sovereignty debate and to provide some criteria for determining when it is appropriate to make bargains over sovereignty—and how to make them.
"This is an extraordinarily original, powerfully argued book; provocative in the best sense of the word. The sheer juxtaposition of the terrible history of Zaire as painted by a Zairean popular artist who lived through some of the worst of it, the artist's precise and eloquent explications of his work, a bluntly factualist account of the events depicted, and Fabian's searching ethnographical commentary, without privileging any of these so different types of discourse over any of the others, raises some of the most fundamental and most difficult questions in history, art, and anthropology. Remembering the Present is a major step forward in both the presentation of cultural materials and in their analysis."--Clifford Geertz
Examines the democratic legitimacy of international organisations from a republican perspective, diagnoses the EU as suffering from a democratic disconnect and offers 'demoicracy' as the cure.
The U.S. Constitution found in school textbooks and under glass in Washington is not the one enforced today by the Supreme Court. In Restoring the Lost Constitution, Randy Barnett argues that since the nation's founding, but especially since the 1930s, the courts have been cutting holes in the original Constitution and its amendments to eliminate the parts that protect liberty from the power of government. From the Commerce Clause, to the Necessary and Proper Clause, to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, to the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court has rendered each of these provisions toothless. In the process, the written Constitution has been lost. Barnett establishes the original meaning of these lost clauses and offers a practical way to restore them to their central role in constraining government: adopting a "presumption of liberty" to give the benefit of the doubt to citizens when laws restrict their rightful exercises of liberty. He also provides a new, realistic and philosophically rigorous theory of constitutional legitimacy that justifies both interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning and, where that meaning is vague or open-ended, construing it so as to better protect the rights retained by the people. As clearly argued as it is insightful and provocative, Restoring the Lost Constitution forcefully disputes the conventional wisdom, posing a powerful challenge to which others must now respond. This updated edition features an afterword with further reflections on individual popular sovereignty, originalist interpretation, judicial engagement, and the gravitational force that original meaning has exerted on the Supreme Court in several recent cases.
Written during a moment in English history when the political and social structures were in flux and open to interpretation, Leviathan played an essential role in the development of the modern world.
What is sovereignty? Often taken for granted or seen as the ideology of European states vying for supremacy and conquest, the concept of sovereignty remains underexamined both in the history of its practices and in its aesthetic and intellectual underpinnings. Using global intellectual history as a bridge between approaches, periods, and areas, The Scaffolding of Sovereignty deploys a comparative and theoretically rich conception of sovereignty to reconsider the different schemes on which it has been based or renewed, the public stages on which it is erected or destroyed, and the images and ideas on which it rests. The essays in The Scaffolding of Sovereignty reveal that sovereignty has always been supported, complemented, and enforced by a complex aesthetic and intellectual scaffolding. This collection takes a multidisciplinary approach to investigating the concept on a global scale, ranging from an account of a Manchu emperor building a mosque to a discussion of the continuing power of Lenin’s corpse, from an analysis of the death of kings in classical Greek tragedy to an exploration of the imagery of “the people” in the Age of Revolutions. Across seventeen chapters that closely study specific historical regimes and conflicts, the book’s contributors examine intersections of authority, power, theatricality, science and medicine, jurisdiction, rulership, human rights, scholarship, religious and popular ideas, and international legal thought that support or undermine different instances of sovereign power and its representations.