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Author : Gordon Hewart Baron Hewart
Publisher : Praeger
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 1975-11-21
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780837183893
Author : Gordon Hewart Baron Hewart
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 1945
Category : Law
ISBN : UCR:31210012556187
First published 1929.
Author : Bülent Diken
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 157 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2021-03-15
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781786603906
Ours is a post-political society that cannot imagine radical change; a ‘one dimensional’ society in which politics is reduced to economic concerns. Paradoxically, however, everybody today is subjected to the imperative of regular radical change. Populations have grown accustomed to the idea that one constantly needs to adapt to radical transformations, modify one’s life strategy in tune with the demands of the market on the one hand and the politics of security on the other. Indeed, the idea that there are unquestionable authorities, the idea of ‘despotism’, no longer refers to exceptional circumstances in which politics is suspended but rather seems to have become normalized as part of daily life. This book aims to articulate the genealogy of the despotism-economy-voluntary servitude nexus focusing on their different constellations in the prism of social theory and political philosophy. As it traces the genealogy of this nexus its concern is the field of formation, intervention and intelligibility that arises when and as the three concepts encounter one another.
Author : Debasish Roy Chowdhury,John Keane
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2021-06-24
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780192588272
India is heralded as the world's largest democracy. Yet, there is now growing alarm about its democratic health. To Kill a Democracy gets to the heart of the matter. Combining poignant life stories with sharp scholarly insight, it rejects the belief that India was once a beacon of democracy but is now being ruined by the destructive forces of Modi-style populism. The book details the much deeper historical roots of the present-day assaults on civil liberties and democratic institutions. Democracy, the authors also argue, is much more than elections and the separation of powers. It is a whole way of life lived in dignity, and that is why they pay special attention to the decaying social foundations of Indian democracy. In compelling fashion, the book describes daily struggles for survival and explains how lived social injustices and unfreedoms rob Indian elections of their meaning, while at the same time feeding the decadence and iron-fisted rule of its governing institutions. Much more than a book about India, To Kill A Democracy argues that what is happening in the country is globally important, and not just because every third person living in a democracy is an Indian. It shows that when democracies rack and ruin their social foundations, they don't just kill off the spirit and substance of democracy. They lay the foundations for despotism.
Author : Brian Klaas
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2017-11-14
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781510735934
”[A] primer on the threat to democracy posed by—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—the current president of the United States.” —David Litt, New York Times bestselling author Donald Trump isn’t a despot. But he is increasingly acting like The Despot’s Apprentice, an understudy in authoritarian tactics that threaten to erode American democracy, including: Attacking the press Threatening rule of law by firing those who investigate his alleged wrongdoings Using nepotism to staff the White House and countless other techniques Donald Trump is borrowing tactics from the world’s dictators and despots. Trump’s fascination with the military, his obsession with his own cult of personality, and his deliberate campaign to blur the line between fact and falsehood are nothing new to the world of despots. But they are new to the United States. With each authoritarian tactic or tweet, Trump poses a unique threat to democratic government in the world’s most powerful democracy. At the same time, Trump’s apprenticeship has serious consequences beyond the United States. His bizarre adoration and idolization of despotic strongmen—from Russia’s Putin, to Turkey’s Erdogan, or to the Philippines’ Duterte—has transformed American foreign policy into a powerful cheerleader for some of the world’s worst regimes. In The Despot’s Apprentice, an ex-US campaign advisor who has sat with the world’s dictators explains Donald Trump’s increasingly authoritarian tactics and how Trump uniquely threatens American democracy... and how to save it from him.
Author : Paul Anthony Rahe
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 399 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2009-01-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780300144925
In 1989, the Cold War abruptly ended and it seemed as if the world was at last safe for democracy. But a spirit of uneasiness, discontent, and world-weariness soon arose and has persisted in Europe, in America, and elsewhere for two decades. To discern the meaning of this malaise we must investigate the nature of liberal democracy, says the author of this provocative book, and he undertakes to do so through a detailed investigation of the thinking of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. Paul A. Rahe argues that these political thinkers anticipated the modern liberal republic's propensity to drift in the direction of “soft despotism”—a condition that arises within a democracy when paternalistic state power expands and gradually undermines the spirit of self-government. Such an eventuality, feared by Tocqueville in the nineteenth century, has now become a reality throughout the European Union, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. So Rahe asserts, and he explains what must be done to reverse this unfortunate trend.
Author : John Keane
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2020-05-12
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780674660069
A disturbing in-depth exposé of the antidemocratic practices of despotic governments now sweeping the world. One day they’ll be like us. That was once the West’s complacent and self-regarding assumption about countries emerging from poverty, imperial rule, or communism. But many have hardened into something very different from liberal democracy: what the eminent political thinker John Keane describes as a new form of despotism. And one day, he warns, we may be more like them. Drawing on extensive travels, interviews, and a lifetime of thinking about democracy and its enemies, Keane shows how governments from Russia and China through Central Asia to the Middle East and Europe have mastered a formidable combination of political tools that threaten the established ideals and practices of power-sharing democracy. They mobilize the rhetoric of democracy and win public support for workable forms of government based on patronage, dark money, steady economic growth, sophisticated media controls, strangled judiciaries, dragnet surveillance, and selective violence against their opponents. Casting doubt on such fashionable terms as dictatorship, autocracy, fascism, and authoritarianism, Keane makes a case for retrieving and refurbishing the old term “despotism” to make sense of how these regimes function and endure. He shows how they cooperate regionally and globally and draw strength from each other’s resources while breeding global anxieties and threatening the values and institutions of democracy. Like Montesquieu in the eighteenth century, Keane stresses the willing complicity of comfortable citizens in all these trends. And, like Montesquieu, he worries that the practices of despotism are closer to home than we care to admit.
Author : Swagato Sarkar
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 185 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2022-07-29
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781000624526
This book explores the history of forced land acquisition and transformation of power in the Fifth Schedule areas in India. It examines the contradictory imperatives of extractive capitalism and primitive accumulation, on the one hand, and autonomy and devolution of power to local communities, on the other. The book traces the long history of conflict, displacement, and violence in these areas in central India which are home to the Adivasis or indigenous people and are rich in natural resources. Drawing from an analysis of public policy debates, land acquisition acts, and political and developmental interventions, the book critically looks at the relationship between capitalism, dispossession, and democracy. The author investigates how the state constructed a weak democracy amenable for primitive accumulation, the role of NGOs in this process, the struggle for sovereignty and autonomy by local communities, and the attempts made by human rights activists to find judicial redressal to state violence. Through this engagement, the book offers a new theory of power. This book will interest researchers and students of political science, political anthropology, governance and public policy, development studies, sociology, law and government, minority and indigenous studies, and Odisha and South Asian studies.
Author : Alex J. Wood
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 191 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2020-05-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781501748905
Despotism on Demand draws attention to the impact of flexible scheduling on managerial power and workplace control. When we understand paid work as a power relationship, argues Alex J. Wood, we see how the spread of precarious scheduling constitutes flexible despotism; a novel regime of control within the workplace. Wood believes that flexible despotism represents a new domain of inequality, in which the postindustrial working class increasingly suffers a scheduling nightmare. By investigating two of the largest retailers in the world he uncovers how control in the contemporary "flexible firm" is achieved through the insidious combination of "flexible discipline" and "schedule gifts." Flexible discipline provides managers with an arbitrary means by which to punish workers, but flexible scheduling also requires workers to actively win favor with managers in order to receive "schedule gifts": more or better hours. Wood concludes that the centrality of precarious scheduling to control means that for those at the bottom of the postindustrial labor market the future of work will increasingly be one of flexible despotism.
Author : Vickie B. Sullivan
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2017-09-05
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780226482910
Montesquieu is famous as a tireless critic of despotism, which he associates overtly with Asia and the Middle East and not with the apparently more moderate Western models of governance found throughout Europe. However, Vickie B. Sullivan argues that a creaful reading of Montesquieu's enormously influential The Spirit of the Law reveals the surprising result that he recognizes that Europe itself is susceptible to despotic practices - and that the threat emanates not from the East but rather from certain despotic ideas that inform Western institutions and practices. Sullivan guides readers through Montesquieu's sometimes veiled yet sharply critical accounts of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Aristotle, and Plato, as well as various Christian thinkers have brough forth despotic ideas in the form, for example, of brutal Machiavellianism, of Hobbes's justifications for the rule of one, of Plato's reasoning that denied slaves the right of natural defense, and of the Christian teachings that equated heresy with treason. Such ideas, Montesquieu shows, inform such revered European institutions as the French monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church. In this new reading of Montesquieu's masterwork, Sullivan corrects the misconception that it offers simple, objective observations, showing it to be instead a powerful critique of European politics that would become remarkably and regrettably prescient after Montesquieu's death, when despotism repeatedly emerged in Europe with virulent intensity. -- from dust jacket.
Author : Daron Acemoglu,James A. Robinson
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 576 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2019-09-24
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780735224391
"Why is it so difficult to develop and sustain liberal democracy? The best recent work on this subject comes from a remarkable pair of scholars, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. In their latest book, The Narrow Corridor, they have answered this question with great insight." -Fareed Zakaria, The Washington Post From the authors of the international bestseller Why Nations Fail, a crucial new big-picture framework that answers the question of how liberty flourishes in some states but falls to authoritarianism or anarchy in others--and explains how it can continue to thrive despite new threats. In Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argued that countries rise and fall based not on culture, geography, or chance, but on the power of their institutions. In their new book, they build a new theory about liberty and how to achieve it, drawing a wealth of evidence from both current affairs and disparate threads of world history. Liberty is hardly the "natural" order of things. In most places and at most times, the strong have dominated the weak and human freedom has been quashed by force or by customs and norms. Either states have been too weak to protect individuals from these threats, or states have been too strong for people to protect themselves from despotism. Liberty emerges only when a delicate and precarious balance is struck between state and society. There is a Western myth that political liberty is a durable construct, arrived at by a process of "enlightenment." This static view is a fantasy, the authors argue. In reality, the corridor to liberty is narrow and stays open only via a fundamental and incessant struggle between state and society: The authors look to the American Civil Rights Movement, Europe’s early and recent history, the Zapotec civilization circa 500 BCE, and Lagos’s efforts to uproot corruption and institute government accountability to illustrate what it takes to get and stay in the corridor. But they also examine Chinese imperial history, colonialism in the Pacific, India’s caste system, Saudi Arabia’s suffocating cage of norms, and the “Paper Leviathan” of many Latin American and African nations to show how countries can drift away from it, and explain the feedback loops that make liberty harder to achieve. Today we are in the midst of a time of wrenching destabilization. We need liberty more than ever, and yet the corridor to liberty is becoming narrower and more treacherous. The danger on the horizon is not "just" the loss of our political freedom, however grim that is in itself; it is also the disintegration of the prosperity and safety that critically depend on liberty. The opposite of the corridor of liberty is the road to ruin.
Author : Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink,Rolf Reichardt
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 1997-07-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9780822382751
This book is both an analysis of the Bastille as cultural paradigm and a case study on the history of French political culture. It examines in particular the storming and subsequent fall of the Bastille in Paris on July 14, 1789 and how it came to represent the cornerstone of the French Revolution, becoming a symbol of the repression of the Old Regime. Lüsebrink and Reichardt use this semiotic reading of the Bastille to reveal how historical symbols are generated; what these symbols’ functions are in the collective memory of societies; and how they are used by social, political, and ideological groups. To facilitate the symbolic nature of the investigation, this analysis of the evolving signification of the Bastille moves from the French Revolution to the nineteenth century to contemporary history. The narrative also shifts from France to other cultural arenas, like the modern European colonial sphere, where the overthrow of the Bastille acquired radical new signification in the decolonization period of the 1940s and 1950s. The Bastille demonstrates the potency of the interdisciplinary historical research that has characterized the end of this century, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, and taking its methodological tools from history, sociology, linguistics, and cultural and literary studies.
Author : Stephen D. Krasner
Publisher : Liveright Publishing
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2020-04-07
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781631496608
After generations of foreign policy failures, the United States can finally try to make the world safer—not by relying on utopian goals but by working pragmatically with nondemocracies. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has sunk hundreds of billions of dollars into foreign economies in the hope that its investments would help remake the world in its own image—or, at the very least, make the world “safe for democracy.” So far, the returns have been disappointing, to say the least. Pushing for fair and free elections in undemocratic countries has added to the casualty count, rather than taken away from it, and trying to eliminate corruption entirely has precluded the elimination of some of the worst forms of corruption. In the Middle East, for example, post-9/11 interventionist campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have proved to be long, costly, and, worst of all, ineffective. Witnessing the failure of the utopian vision of a world full of market-oriented democracies, many observers, both on the right and the left, have begun to embrace a dystopian vision in which the United States can do nothing and save no one. Accordingly, calls to halt all assistance in undemocratic countries have grown louder. But, as Stephen D. Krasner explains, this cannot be an option: weak and poorly governed states pose a threat to our stability. In the era of nuclear weapons and biological warfare, ignoring troubled countries puts millions of American lives at risk. “The greatest challenge for the United States now,” Krasner writes, “is to identify a set of policies that lie between the utopian vision that all countries can be like the United States . . . and the dystopian view that nothing can be done.” He prescribes a pragmatic new course of policy. Drawing on decades of research, he makes the case for “good enough governance”—governance that aims for better security, better health, limited economic growth, and some protection of human rights. To this end, Krasner proposes working with despots to promote growth. In a world where a single terrorist can kill thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people, the United States does not have the luxury of idealistically ignoring the rest of the world. But it cannot remake the world in its own image either. Instead, it must learn how to make love to despots.
Author : Immanuel Ness
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 234 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2011-09-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780252093371
Political scientist Immanuel Ness thoroughly investigates the use of guest workers in the United States, the largest recipient of migrant labor in the world. Ness argues that the use of migrant labor is increasing in importance and represents despotic practices calculated by key U.S. business leaders in the global economy to lower labor costs and expand profits under the guise of filling a shortage of labor for substandard or scarce skilled jobs. Drawing on ethnographic field research, government data, and other sources, Ness shows how worker migration and guest worker programs weaken the power of labor in both sending and receiving countries. His in-depth case studies of the rapid expansion of technology and industrial workers from India and hospitality workers from Jamaica reveal how these programs expose guest workers to employers' abuses and class tensions in their home countries while decreasing jobs for American workers and undermining U.S. organized labor. Where other studies of labor migration focus on undocumented immigrant labor and contend immigrants fill jobs that others do not want, this is the first to truly advance understanding of the role of migrant labor in the transformation of the working class in the early twenty-first century. Questioning why global capitalists must rely on migrant workers for economic sustenance, Ness rejects the notion that temporary workers enthusiastically go to the United States for low-paying jobs. Instead, he asserts the motivations for improving living standards in the United States are greatly exaggerated by the media and details the ways organized labor ought to be protecting the interests of American and guest workers in the United States.
Author : J. Barton Scott
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2016-07-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226368672
Spiritual Despots by historian of religion J. Barton Scott zeroes in on the quaint term "priestcraft" to track anticlerical polemics in Britain and South Asia during the colonial period. Scott's aim is to show how anticlerical rhetoric spread through the colonies alongside ideas about modern secular subjectivity. Through close readings of texts in English, Hindi, and Gujarati, he shows in compelling detail how the critique of priestly conspiracy gave rise to a new ideal of the self-disciplining subject and a vision of modern Hinduism that was based on unmediated personal experience and self-regulation rather than priestly tutelary power. Spiritual Despots offers a new perspective on what some scholars have called "Protestant Hinduism," and, more broadly, contributes to the emerging field of "post-secular" studies by shedding light on the colonial genealogy of secular subjectivity.