Political Science

The term “Caucasian” is a curious invention of the modern age. Originating in 1795, the word identifies both the peoples of the Caucasus Mountains region as well as those thought to be “Caucasian”. Bruce Baum explores the history of the term and the category of the “Caucasian race” more broadly in the light of the changing politics of racial theory and notions of racial identity. With a comprehensive sweep that encompasses the understanding of "race" even before the use of the term “Caucasian,” Baum traces the major trends in scientific and intellectual understandings of “race” from the Middle Ages to the present day.
Baum’s conclusions make an unprecedented attempt to separate modern science and politics from a long history of racial classification. He offers significant insights into our understanding of race and how the “Caucasian race” has been authoritatively invented, embraced, displaced, and recovered throughout our history.

2009 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) was not only one of the most important leaders of the nineteenth century women’s rights movement but was also the movement’s principal philosopher. Her ideas both drew from and challenged the conventions that so severely constrained women’s choices and excluded them from public life.
In The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sue Davis argues that Cady Stanton’s work reflects the rich tapestry of American political culture in the second half of the nineteenth century and that she deserves recognition as a major figure in the history of political ideas. Davis reveals the way that Cady Stanton’s work drew from different political traditions ranging from liberalism, republicanism, inegalitarian ascriptivism, and radicalism. Cady Stanton’s arguments for women’s rights combined approaches that in contemporary feminist theory are perceived to involve conflicting strategies and visions. Nevertheless, her ideas had a major impact on the development of the varieties of feminism in the twentieth century.
Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton draws on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources and promises to fill a gap in the literature on the history of political ideas in the United States as well as women’s history and feminist theory.

In recent years, China has become a major actor in the global economy, making a remarkable switch from a planned and egalitarian socialism to a simultaneously wide-open and tightly controlled market economy. Against the establishment wisdom, Minqi Li argues in this provocative and startling book that far from strengthening capitalism, China’s full integration into the world capitalist system will, in fact and in the not too distant future, bring about its demise. The author tells us that historically the spread and growth of capitalist economies has required low wages, taxation, and environmental costs, as well as a hegemonic nation to prevent international competition from eroding these requirements. With the decline of the economic power of the United States, its current hegemonic role will deteriorate and the unprecedented growth of China will so erode the foundations of capital accumulation—by pushing wages and environmental costs up, for example—that the entire capitalist system will be shaken to its core. This is essential reading for those who still believe that there is no alternative.

<p>What to make of the Tea Party? To some, it is a grassroots movement
aiming to reclaim an out-of-touch government for the people.
To others, it is a proto-fascist organization of the misinformed and
manipulated lower middle class. Either way, it is surely one of the
most significant forms of reaction in the age of Obama.</p>
<p>In this definitive socio-political analysis of the Tea Party, Anthony
DiMaggio examines the Tea Party phenomenon, using a vast array
of primary and secondary sources as well as first-hand observation.
He traces the history of the Tea Party and analyzes its organizational
structure, membership, ideological coherence, and relationship to
the mass media. And, perhaps most importantly, he asks: is it really
a movement or just a form of “manufactured dissent” engineered
by capital? DiMaggio’s conclusions are thoroughly documented,
surprising, and bring much needed clarity to a highly controversial
subject.</p>

In this impressive book, Edward S. Herman and David Peterson examine the uses and abuses of the word “genocide.” They argue persuasively that the label is highly politicized and that in the United States it is used by the government, journalists, and academics to brand as evil those nations and political movements that in one way or another interfere with the imperial interests of U.S. capitalism. Thus the word “genocide” is seldom applied when the perpetrators are U.S. allies (or even the United States itself), while it is used almost indiscriminately when murders are committed or are alleged to have been committed by enemies of the United States and U.S. business interests. One set of rules applies to cases such as U.S. aggression in Vietnam, Israeli oppression of Palestinians, Indonesian slaughter of so-called communists and the people of East Timor, U.S. bombings in Serbia and Kosovo, the U.S. war of “liberation” in Iraq, and mass murders committed by U.S. allies in Rwanda and the Republic of Congo. Another set applies to cases such as Serbian aggression in Kosovo and Bosnia, killings carried out by U.S. enemies in Rwanda and Darfur, Saddam Hussein, any and all actions by Iran, and a host of others.
With its careful and voluminous documentation, close reading of the U.S. media and political and scholarly writing on the subject, and clear and incisive charts, The Politics of Genocide is both a damning condemnation and stunning exposé of a deeply rooted and effective system of propaganda aimed at deceiving the population while promoting the expansion of a cruel and heartless imperial system.

Through the voices of women activists in the welfare rights
movement across the United States, The Price of Progressive
Politics exposes the contemporary reality of welfare rights
politics, revealing how the language of colorblind racism undermines
this multiracial movement. Through in-depth interviews
with activists in eight organizations across the United
States, Rose Ernst presents an intersectional analysis of how
these activists understand the complexities of race, class
and gender and how such understandings have affected
their approach to their grassroots work. Engaging and accessible,
The Price of Progressive Politics offers a refreshing
examination of how those working for change grapple with
shifting racial dynamics in the United States, arguing that
organizations that fail to develop a consciousness that reflects
the reality of multiple marginalized identities ultimately
reproduce the societal dynamics they seek to change.

<p>What to make of the Tea Party? To some, it is a grassroots movement
aiming to reclaim an out-of-touch government for the people.
To others, it is a proto-fascist organization of the misinformed and
manipulated lower middle class. Either way, it is surely one of the
most significant forms of reaction in the age of Obama.</p>
<p>In this definitive socio-political analysis of the Tea Party, Anthony
DiMaggio examines the Tea Party phenomenon, using a vast array
of primary and secondary sources as well as first-hand observation.
He traces the history of the Tea Party and analyzes its organizational
structure, membership, ideological coherence, and relationship to
the mass media. And, perhaps most importantly, he asks: is it really
a movement or just a form of “manufactured dissent” engineered
by capital? DiMaggio’s conclusions are thoroughly documented,
surprising, and bring much needed clarity to a highly controversial
subject.</p>

Among the major Marxist thinkers of the Russian Revolution era, Rosa Luxemburg stands out as one who speaks to our own time. Her legacy grows in relevance as the global character of the capitalist market becomes more apparent and the critique of bureaucratic power is more widely accepted within the movement for human liberation.
The Rosa Luxemburg Reader is the definitive one-volume collection of Luxemburg's writings in English translation. Unlike previous publications of her work from the early 1970s, this volume includes substantial extracts from her major economic writings—above all, The Accumulation of Capital (1913)—and from her political writings, including Reform or Revolution (1898), the Junius Pamphlet (1916), and The Russian Revolution (1918).
The Reader also includes a number of important texts that have never before been published in English translation, including substantial extracts from her Introduction to Political Economy (1916), and a recently-discovered piece on slavery. With a substantial introduction assessing Luxemburg's work in the light of recent research, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader is an indispensable resource for scholarship and an inspiration for a new generation of activists.

The recent revival of democracy across much of the globe, and the fragility of many of the new regimes, has inspired renewed interest in the origins of dictatorship and democracy in modern times. Assembling renowned specialists on Eastern and Western Europe, the U.S., Latin America and Japan, The Social Construction of Democracy explores the reasons for the success and failure of democracies over the past 100 years. With its sharp portraits of nations on four continents, George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman shed light on the historical process by which state institutions and social movements interact to create political systems based on the principle of popular sovereignty.

In 1966, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy published Monopoly Capital,
a monumental work of economic theory and social criticism
that sought to reveal the basic nature of the capitalism of their
time. Their theory, and its continuing elaboration by Sweezy, Harry
Magdoff, and others in Monthly Review magazine, infl uenced generations
of radical and heterodox economists. They recognized
that Marx’s work was unfi nished and itself historically conditioned,
and that any attempt to understand capitalism as an evolving
phenomenon needed to take changing conditions into account.
Having observed the rise of giant monopolistic (or oligopolistic)
fi rms in the twentieth century, they put monopoly capital at the
center of their analysis, arguing that the rising surplus such fi rms
accumulated—as a result of their pricing power, massive sales
efforts, and other factors—could not be profi tably invested back
into the economy. Absent any “epoch making innovations” like the
automobile or vast new increases in military spending, the result
was a general trend toward economic stagnation—a condition that
persists, and is increasingly apparent, to this day. Their analysis
was also extended to issues of imperialism, or “accumulation on
a world scale,” overlapping with the path-breaking work of Samir
Amin in particular.


John Bellamy Foster is a leading exponent of this theoretical perspective
today, continuing in the tradition of Baran and Sweezy’s
Monopoly Capital. This new edition of his essential work, The
Theory of Monopoly Capitalism, is a clear and accessible explication
of this outlook, brought up to the present, and incorporating
an analysis of recently discovered “lost” chapters from Monopoly
Capital and correspondence between Baran and Sweezy. It also
discusses Magdoff and Sweezy’s analysis of the fi nancialization
of the economy in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, leading up to the
Great Financial Crisis of the opening decade of this century. Foster
presents and develops the main arguments of monopoly capital
theory, examining its key exponents, and addressing its critics in a
way that is thoughtful but rigorous, suspicious of dogma but adamant
that the deep-seated problems of today’s monopoly-fi nance
capitalism can only truly be solved in the process of overcoming
the system itself.

What does it mean to be black in a nation increasingly infatuated with colorblindness? In The Tie That Binds, Andrea Y. Simpson seeks to answer this crucial question through the prism of ethnic and political identification.
Historically, African Americans have voted overwhelmingly Democratic in governmental elections. In recent years, however, politically conservative blacks--from Clarence Thomas to Louis Farrakhan to Ward Connerly–have attracted much of the media's gaze. What is the nature of black conservatives' constituency, and is it as strong and numerous as conservatives would have us believe? To what extent, if at all, does black conservatism stem from a weakened sense of collective racial identity?
Simpson tackles the peculiar institution of black conservatism by interviewing college students to determine their political attitudes and the ways in which these are shaped. The result is a penetrating interrogation of the relations between political affiliation, racial identity, and class situation.

What does it mean to be black in a nation increasingly infatuated with colorblindness? In The Tie That Binds, Andrea Y. Simpson seeks to answer this crucial question through the prism of ethnic and political identification.
Historically, African Americans have voted overwhelmingly Democratic in governmental elections. In recent years, however, politically conservative blacks--from Clarence Thomas to Louis Farrakhan to Ward Connerly–have attracted much of the media's gaze. What is the nature of black conservatives' constituency, and is it as strong and numerous as conservatives would have us believe? To what extent, if at all, does black conservatism stem from a weakened sense of collective racial identity?
Simpson tackles the peculiar institution of black conservatism by interviewing college students to determine their political attitudes and the ways in which these are shaped. The result is a penetrating interrogation of the relations between political affiliation, racial identity, and class situation.

In 1966, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy published Monopoly Capital,
a monumental work of economic theory and social criticism
that sought to reveal the basic nature of the capitalism of their
time. Their theory, and its continuing elaboration by Sweezy, Harry
Magdoff, and others in Monthly Review magazine, infl uenced generations
of radical and heterodox economists. They recognized
that Marx’s work was unfi nished and itself historically conditioned,
and that any attempt to understand capitalism as an evolving
phenomenon needed to take changing conditions into account.
Having observed the rise of giant monopolistic (or oligopolistic)
fi rms in the twentieth century, they put monopoly capital at the
center of their analysis, arguing that the rising surplus such fi rms
accumulated—as a result of their pricing power, massive sales
efforts, and other factors—could not be profi tably invested back
into the economy. Absent any “epoch making innovations” like the
automobile or vast new increases in military spending, the result
was a general trend toward economic stagnation—a condition that
persists, and is increasingly apparent, to this day. Their analysis
was also extended to issues of imperialism, or “accumulation on
a world scale,” overlapping with the path-breaking work of Samir
Amin in particular.


John Bellamy Foster is a leading exponent of this theoretical perspective
today, continuing in the tradition of Baran and Sweezy’s
Monopoly Capital. This new edition of his essential work, The
Theory of Monopoly Capitalism, is a clear and accessible explication
of this outlook, brought up to the present, and incorporating
an analysis of recently discovered “lost” chapters from Monopoly
Capital and correspondence between Baran and Sweezy. It also
discusses Magdoff and Sweezy’s analysis of the fi nancialization
of the economy in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, leading up to the
Great Financial Crisis of the opening decade of this century. Foster
presents and develops the main arguments of monopoly capital
theory, examining its key exponents, and addressing its critics in a
way that is thoughtful but rigorous, suspicious of dogma but adamant
that the deep-seated problems of today’s monopoly-fi nance
capitalism can only truly be solved in the process of overcoming
the system itself.

The World We Wish to See presents a sweeping view of twentieth-century political history and a stirring appeal to take political culture seriously. Samir Amin offers a provocative analysis of resistance to capitalism and imperialism and calls for a new politics of opposition. Capitalism is a global system, so ultimately any successful challenge to it must be organized on the same level: an “internationalism of peoples.”
Throughout the twentieth century the socialist and communist internationals, national liberation movements, and great revolutions have presented challenges to the world order. Amin provides a succinct discussion of the successes and failures of these mobilizations, in order to assess the present struggle. Neoliberalism and the drive for military hegemony by the United States have spawned new political and social movements of resistance and attempts at international organization through the World Social Forum. Amin assesses the potential and limitations of these movements to confront global capitalism in the twenty-first century. The World We Wish to See makes a distinction between “political cultures and conflict” and “political cultures of consensus.” A new politics of struggle is needed; one that is not afraid to confront the power of capitalism, one that is both critical and self-critical.
In this persuasive argument, Amin explains that effective opposition must be based on the construction of a “convergence in diversity” of oppressed and exploited people—whether they are workers, peasants, students, or any other opponent of capitalism and imperialism. What is needed is a new “international” that has an open and flexible organizational structure to coordinate the work of opposition movements around the world.
The World We Wish to See is a bold book, calling for an international movement that can successfully transcend the current world order, in order to pursue a better world. Amin’s lucid analysis provides a firm basis for furthering this objective.

Examines the coded language of the Republican Party

In The Wrongs of the Right, Matthew W. Hughey and Gregory S. Parks set postracial claims into relief against a background of pre- and post-election racial animus directed at President Obama, his administration, and African Americans. They show how the political Right deploys racial fears, coded language and implicit bias to express and build opposition to the Obama administration. Racial meanings are reservoirs rich in political currency, and the race card remains a potent resource for othering the first black president in a context rife with Nativism, xenophobia, white racial fatigue, and serious racial inequality.

A fascinating collection of predictions for the end-times in the year 2000

The Year 2000 is at hand. The end of the millennium means many things to many people, but it has significance for almost everyone. A thousand years ago, monks stopped copying manuscripts and religious building projects came to a halt as panic swept Europe. Today, anxiety about global warming, government power, superviruses, even recycling, is on some level rooted in the fear of irreversible cataclysm. In a landscape shadowed by racial conflict, technological upheaval, AIDS, and nuclear weapons, we reasonably fear the end of history. 2000 looms large in our religious, political, and cultural imagination. But while 2000 brings dread it also raises the prospect of transformation. There is hope to be found in the apocalyptic.

This panoramic volume explores how the Year 2000 operates in contemporary political discourse, from Black evangelical politics to radical right-wing rhetoric. One section is devoted specifically to apocalyptic violence, analyzing twentieth-century cults and cultural movements, from David Koresh—who renamed his Waco compound Ranch Apocalypse and perished in a modern-day Armageddon that fueled the millennialist angst of other extremist groups—to environmental campaigns like Earth First! that also rely on the language of violence and imminent doom in their greening of the Apocalypse.

A fascinating collection of predictions for the end-times in the year 2000

The Year 2000 is at hand. The end of the millennium means many things to many people, but it has significance for almost everyone. A thousand years ago, monks stopped copying manuscripts and religious building projects came to a halt as panic swept Europe. Today, anxiety about global warming, government power, superviruses, even recycling, is on some level rooted in the fear of irreversible cataclysm. In a landscape shadowed by racial conflict, technological upheaval, AIDS, and nuclear weapons, we reasonably fear the end of history. 2000 looms large in our religious, political, and cultural imagination. But while 2000 brings dread it also raises the prospect of transformation. There is hope to be found in the apocalyptic.

This panoramic volume explores how the Year 2000 operates in contemporary political discourse, from Black evangelical politics to radical right-wing rhetoric. One section is devoted specifically to apocalyptic violence, analyzing twentieth-century cults and cultural movements, from David Koresh—who renamed his Waco compound Ranch Apocalypse and perished in a modern-day Armageddon that fueled the millennialist angst of other extremist groups—to environmental campaigns like Earth First! that also rely on the language of violence and imminent doom in their greening of the Apocalypse.

With 16 original essays all published here for the first time, Theory and Practice focuses on the relationship between philosophical tradition and everyday life in the Western tradition. In this comprehensive volume, Ian Shapiro and Judith Wagner DeCew have gathered contributions from some of the most influential thinkers of our generation including Cass Sunnstein, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Martha Nussbaum, Jeremy Waldron, and Kent Greenwalt.
What are the relations between philosophical theories and everyday life? This question, as old as it is profound, is the central focus of Theory and Practice. The contributors include some of the most influential thinkers of our generation, among them Cass Sunnstein, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Martha Nessbaum, Jeremy Waldron, and Kent Greenwalt. In sixteen chapters--all published here for the first time—the authors examine major attempts to reconcile theory with practice in the Western tradition from Herodotus, Plato, and Aristotle to Kant and Heidegger.
Considerable attention is devoted to the role of theory in judicial decision-making, debates between defenders of the value of pure theory and those who argue for the priority of practice, the political implications of theory, practical problems such as global warming, and the theoretical commitments of practitioners from Karl Marx to Vaclav Havel. One of the most expansive volumes in the NOMOS series to date, Theory and Practice will be of interest to philosophers, lawyers, and social scientists from a wide range of disciplines.

To Secure These Rights enters the fascinating--and often contentious--debate over constitutional interpretation. Scott Douglas Gerber here argues that the Constitution of the United States should be interpreted in light of the natural rights political philosophy of the Declaration of Independence and that the Supreme Court is the institution of American government that should be primarily responsible for identifying and applying that philosophy in American life.
Importantly, the theory advanced in this book--what Gerber calls liberal originalism--is neither consistently liberal nor consistently conservative in the modern conception of those terms. Rather, the theory is liberal in the classic sense of viewing the basic purpose of government to be safeguarding the natural rights of individuals. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men. In essence, Gerber maintains that the Declaration articulates the philosophical ends of our nation and that the Constitution embodies the means to effectuate those ends. Gerber's analysis reveals that the Constitution cannot be properly understood without recourse to history, political philosophy, and law.

The World We Wish to See presents a sweeping view of twentieth-century political history and a stirring appeal to take political culture seriously. Samir Amin offers a provocative analysis of resistance to capitalism and imperialism and calls for a new politics of opposition. Capitalism is a global system, so ultimately any successful challenge to it must be organized on the same level: an “internationalism of peoples.”
Throughout the twentieth century the socialist and communist internationals, national liberation movements, and great revolutions have presented challenges to the world order. Amin provides a succinct discussion of the successes and failures of these mobilizations, in order to assess the present struggle. Neoliberalism and the drive for military hegemony by the United States have spawned new political and social movements of resistance and attempts at international organization through the World Social Forum. Amin assesses the potential and limitations of these movements to confront global capitalism in the twenty-first century. The World We Wish to See makes a distinction between “political cultures and conflict” and “political cultures of consensus.” A new politics of struggle is needed; one that is not afraid to confront the power of capitalism, one that is both critical and self-critical.
In this persuasive argument, Amin explains that effective opposition must be based on the construction of a “convergence in diversity” of oppressed and exploited people—whether they are workers, peasants, students, or any other opponent of capitalism and imperialism. What is needed is a new “international” that has an open and flexible organizational structure to coordinate the work of opposition movements around the world.
The World We Wish to See is a bold book, calling for an international movement that can successfully transcend the current world order, in order to pursue a better world. Amin’s lucid analysis provides a firm basis for furthering this objective.

Criminal
tribunals, truth commissions, reparations, apologies and memorializations are
the characteristic instruments in the transitional justice toolkit that can help
societies transition from authoritarianism to democracy, from civil war to
peace, and from state-sponsored extra-legal violence to a rights-respecting
rule of law. Over the last several decades, their growing use has established
transitional justice as a body of both theory and practice whose guiding norms
and structures encompasses the range of institutional mechanisms by which
societies address the wrongs committed by past regimes in order to lay the
foundation for more legitimate political and legal order.

In Transitional
Justice, a group of leading
scholars in philosophy, law, and political science settles some of the key
theoretical debates over the meaning of transitional justice while opening up
new ones. By engaging both theorists and empirical social scientists in debates
over central categories of analysis in the study of transitional justice, it
also illuminates the challenges of making strong empirical claims about the
impact of transitional institutions.

Contributors:
Gary J. Bass, David Cohen, David Dyzenhaus, Pablo de Greiff, Leigh-Ashley
Lipscomb, Monika Nalepa, Eric A. Posner, Debra Satz, Gopal
Sreenivasan, Adrian
Vermeule, and Jeremy Webber.

The acceleration of economic globalization and the rapid
global flows of people, culture, and information have intensified the
importance of developing transnational understandings of contemporary issues.
Transnational feminist perspectives have provided a unique outlook on women’s
lives and have deepened our understanding of the gendered nature of global
processes. Transnational Feminism in the
United States examines how transnational perspectives shape the ways in
which we create and disseminate knowledge about the world within the United
States, and how the paradigm of transnational feminism is affected by national
narratives and public discourses within the country itself.


An innovative theoretical
project that is both deconstructive and constructive, this bookinterrogates the limits of feminist
thought, primarily through case
studies that illustrate its power to create new fields of research out of
traditionally interdisciplinary lines of inquiry. Leela Fernandes discusses
ways to approach, analyze, and capture processes that exceed and unsettle the
nation-state within the transnational feminist paradigm. Examining the links
between power and knowledge that bind interdisciplinary theory and research, she shines new light on issues such
as human rights as well as academic debates about transnational feminist
perspectives on global issues. A thought-provoking analysis, Transnational Feminism in the United States powerfully
contributes to the field of Women’s
Studies and related cross-disciplinary scholarship on feminist theory and
gender from a global perspective.

The more citizens trust their government, the better democracy functions. However, African Americans have long suffered from the lack of equal protection by their government, and the racial discrimination they have faced breaks down their trust in democracy. Rather than promoting democracy, the United States government has, from its inception, racially discriminated against African American citizens and other racial groups, denying them equal access to citizenship and to protection of the law. Civil rights violations by ordinary citizens have also tainted social relationships between racial groups—social relationships that should be meaningful for enhancing relations between citizens and the government at large. Thus, trust and democracy do not function in American politics the way they should, in part because trust is not color blind.

Based on the premise that racial discrimination breaks down trust in a democracy, Trust in Black America examines the effect of race on African Americans' lives. Shayla Nunnally analyzes public opinion data from two national surveys to provide an updated and contemporary analysis of African Americans' political socialization, and to explore how African Americans learn about race. She argues that the uncertainty, risk, and unfairness of institutionalized racial discrimination has led African Americans to have a fundamentally different understanding of American race relations, so much so that distrust has been the basis for which race relations have been understood by African Americans. Nunnally empirically demonstrates that race and racial discrimination have broken down trust in American democracy.

“Many Americans are unsatisfied with politics. Simultaneously, we are hesitant to question the basic soundness of our constitutional system. In this refreshingly provocative book, David Orentlicher explains why it is due time for us to reconsider dominant ideas about the presidency, now arguably our most powerful political institution. Challenging the conventional wisdom that the best executive is necessarily a unitary executive, Orentlicher makes a wonderful case for why ‘two presidents are better than one.’ Sure to be of interest to political scientists, legal scholars, as well as informed citizens justifiably worried about the fate of American democracy, this fascinating book dares to challenge everything you thought you knew about one of our favorite political institutions.”
—William E. Scheuerman, Indiana University

“Can Orentlicher be serious in calling for a plural executive? The answer is yes, and he presents thoughtful and challenging arguments responding to likely criticisms. Any readers who are other than completely complacent about the current state of American politics will have to admire Orentlicher’s distinctive audacity and to respond themselves to his well-argued points.”
—Sanford Levinson, author of Framed: America’s 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance

When talking heads and political pundits make their “What’s Wrong with America” lists, two concerns invariably rise to the top: the growing presidential abuse of power and the toxic political atmosphere in Washington. In Two Presidents Are Better Than One, David Orentlicher shows how the “imperial presidency” and partisan conflict are largely the result of a deeper problem—the Constitution’s placement of a single president atop the executive branch. Accordingly, writes Orentlicher, we can fix our broken political system by replacing the one person, one-party presidency with a two-person, two-party executive branch.

Orentlicher contends that our founding fathers did not anticipate the extent to which their checks and balances would fail to contain executive power and partisan discord. They also did not foresee how the imperial presidency would aggravate partisan conflict. As the stakes in presidential elections have grown ever higher since the New Deal, battles to capture the White House have greatly exacerbated partisan differences. Had the framers been able to predict the future, Orentlicher argues, they would have been far less enamored with the idea of a single leader at the head of the executive branch and far more receptive to the alternative proposals for a plural executive that they rejected. Like their counterparts in Europe, they might well have created an executive branch in which power is shared among multiple persons from multiple political parties.

Analyzing the histories of other countries with a plural executive branch and past examples of bipartisan cooperation within Congress, Orentlicher shows us why and how to implement a two-person, two-party presidency. Ultimately, Two Presidents Are Better Than One demonstrates why we need constitutional reform to rebalance power between the executive and legislative branches and contain partisan conflict in Washington.

Named an "Outstanding Book" by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America
"Abramovitz introduces the reader to cutting edge socioeconomic analysis. . . . It is not possible to come away from Under Attack, Fighting Back with a sense that welfare is a simplistic topic or that the human consequences of adjustments in the existing system are inconsequential."
--Labor History
"This lively and informative book deserves to be widely read. It provides an excellent history of AFDC and the activities of various women's groups who have campaigned hard over the years for improvements in services to the poor."
--Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare
"Extraordinarily lucid and useful . . . "
--In These Times
In this short, eye-opening book, Mimi Abramovitz describes the heartless assault on impoverished single mothers in the name of "ending welfare dependency." Outlining the history of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Abramovitz shows how the manipulation of gender, race, and class have made welfare vulnerable to attack. This new edition brings a well-received work completely up to date with analysis of recent developments in welfare "reform" and activism.

Marta Harnecker's interviews with Hugo Chavez began soon after one of the most dramatic moments of Chavez's presidency—the failed coup of April 2002, which ended with Chavez restored to power by a massive popular movement of protest and resistance. In the aftermath of the failed coup, Chavez talks to Harnecker about the formation of his political ideas, his aspirations for Venezuela, its domestic and international policies, problems of political organization, relations with social movements in other countries, and more, constantly relating these to concrete events and to strategies for change.
The exchange between Harnecker and Chavez—sometimes reflective, sometimes anecdotal, always characterized by their passionate commitment to the struggles of the oppressed—brings to light the process of thought and action behind the public pronouncements and policies of state.
The interviews are supplemented by extracts from Chavez’s most recent pronouncements on the ongoing transformation in Venezuela and Latin America, an analysis by Harnecker of the role of the military, and a chronology.
Chavez has become a symbol of defiance of U.S. imperialism throughout Latin America. His importance for the future of the region makes this book essential reading.

Paperback Edition: Updated and with a New Foreword
The nation will not soon forget the drama of the 2000 presidential election. For five weeks we were transfixed by the legal clashes that enveloped the country from election night to the Gore concession. It was instant history, and will be studied by historians, lawyers, political scientists, media critics and others for years to come.
Even for those who followed the events most closely, the legal twists and turns of the post-election struggles seemed at times bewildering. We witnessed manual recounts of election ballots, GOP federal court lawsuits challenging those recounts, two Florida Supreme Court opinions, lawsuits over butterfly and absentee ballots, questions about the role of the Florida legislature and the United States Congress in resolving presidential election disputes, and two United States Supreme Court decisions, the second of which finally handed the election to Bush. Although the 2000 Presidency was decided through much legal wrangling, one should not have to be a lawyer to understand how we came to have Bush rather than Gore as our President in that hotly contested election.
Understanding the 2000 Election offers an accessible, comprehensive guide to the legal battles that finally gave George W. Bush the Presidency five weeks after election night. Meant to stand next to and clarify the numerous journalistic and personal accounts of the election drama, Understanding the 2000 Election offers a offers a step-by-step, non-partisan explanation and analysis of the major legal issues involved in resolving the presidential contest. The volume also offers a clear overview of the Electoral College, its history, what would be involved in switching over to a direct election, and the likely future of the Presidential electoral process. While some still decry the 2000 election outcome as the result of political manipulation rather than the rule of law, Greene shows that almost every legal conclusion of the post-election struggle can be understood through the application of legal principle, rather than politics.

Marta Harnecker's interviews with Hugo Chavez began soon after one of the most dramatic moments of Chavez's presidency—the failed coup of April 2002, which ended with Chavez restored to power by a massive popular movement of protest and resistance. In the aftermath of the failed coup, Chavez talks to Harnecker about the formation of his political ideas, his aspirations for Venezuela, its domestic and international policies, problems of political organization, relations with social movements in other countries, and more, constantly relating these to concrete events and to strategies for change.
The exchange between Harnecker and Chavez—sometimes reflective, sometimes anecdotal, always characterized by their passionate commitment to the struggles of the oppressed—brings to light the process of thought and action behind the public pronouncements and policies of state.
The interviews are supplemented by extracts from Chavez’s most recent pronouncements on the ongoing transformation in Venezuela and Latin America, an analysis by Harnecker of the role of the military, and a chronology.
Chavez has become a symbol of defiance of U.S. imperialism throughout Latin America. His importance for the future of the region makes this book essential reading.

The standard, linear view of history is founded on the belief that political outcomes are predetermined by what has gone before. This book challenges this view, arguing for what Samuel A. Chambers calls an untimely politics which renders the past problematic and the future unpredictable. This pathbreaking argument is advanced through a close reading of key texts in political theory and by entering into debates involving metaphysics, philosophy of language, and psychoanalysis versus discursive analysis.
Chambers focuses on the theme of the relevance of language analysis to political debate, answering those critics who insist discourse approaches to politics are irrelevant. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida are used to challenge the political burden which is placed on language analysis to prove its value in the real world. Drawing from political theory and cultural studies Chambers takes on the same-sex marriage debate, showing how the use and misuse of language has contributed to an impasse that is not likely to be broken.
Wide ranging and insightful, Untimely Politics makes a timely plea for a more politically relevant and culturally engaged form of intellectual engagement.

The life of the great Guyanese scholar and revolutionary Walter Rodney burned with a rare intensity. The son of working class parents, Rodney showed great academic promise and was awarded scholarships to the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and the School of African and Oriental Studies in London. He received his PhD from the latter at the age of twenty-four, and his thesis was published as A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, now a classic of African history. His most famous work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, is a mainstay of radical literature and anticipated the influential world systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein.


Not content merely to study the world, Rodney turned to revolutionary politics in Jamaica, Tanzania, and in Guyana. In his homeland, he helped form the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) and was a consistent voice for the oppressed and exploited. As Rodney became more popular , the threat of his revolutionary message stirred fears among the powerful in Guyana and throughout the Caribbean, and he was assassinated in 1980.

This book presents a moving and insightful portrait of Rodney through by the words of academics, writers, artists, and political activists who knew him intimately or felt his influence. These informal recollections and reflections demonstrate why Rodney is such a widely admired figure throughout the world, especially in poor countries and among oppressed peoples everywhere.

Why do some conflicts escalate into violence while others dissipate harmlessly? Under what circumstances will people kill, and why?
While homicide has been viewed largely in the pathological terms of "crime" and "deviance," violence, Mark Cooney contends, is a naturally-occurring form of conflict found throughout history and across cultures under certain social conditions. Cooney has analyzed the social control of homicide within and across over 30 societies and interviewed several dozens of prisoners incarcerated for murder or manslaughter, as well as members of their families. Violence such as homicide can only be understood, he argues, by transcending the traditional focus on the social characteristics of the killer and victims, and by looking at the role played by family members, friends, neighbors, onlookers, police officers, and judges. These third parties can be a source of peace or violence, depending on how they are configured in particular cases. Violence flourishes, Cooney demonstrates, when authority is either very strong or very weak and when third-party ties are strong and boundaries between groups sharply defined.
Drawing on recent theory in the lively new sociological speciality of conflict management, Mark Cooney has culled a vast array of evidence from modern and preindustrial societies to provide us with the first general sociological analysis of human violence.

When, in 1992, the citizens of Colorado ratified Amendment 2, effectively stripping lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals of protection from discrimination under the state's constitution, the vote divided the state and left the gay population disspirited and angry. Their psychological predicament offered an opportunity to examine the precise intersection at which the individual meets social oppression.
Voted Out is the first to document the psychological impact of anti-gay legislation on the gay community, illustrating the range of reactions, from depression, anger, and anxiety to a sense of empowerment and a desire to mobilize, which such legislation can engender. It also offers a detailed account of an innovative team approach to the qualitative coding and analysis process. Blending traditional quantitative methods with more innovative qualitative analyses, it provides a valuable opportunity to compare quantitative and qualitative data focused on the same issue within one volume.
The volume specifically addresses researchers' use of the results of their research beyond publication and the ways in which research undertaken to examine a social issue can be returned to the community.

For more than forty years, Western policymakers defined communism as the central threat to international peace and stability. They responded by confronting it with a counterbalancing threat of force, and pursuing a strategy of containment. With the collapse of communism, the challenge to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic community has changed. Soviet expansionism has been supplanted by powerful, internal forces arising out of the clash of competing ethnic nationalisms. This challenge, argues Steven L. Burg, cannot be met by force alone, or neutralized through a strategy of containment. It requires Western states to act decisively to influence the internal political development of the post- communist states themselves.
Burg surveys the challenges that the ethnic diversity in Eastern Europe present to domestic stability, international peace, and American interests, and suggests policies and practices by which the United States and its allies might contribute to the consolidation of peace in the region. He provides a concise explanation and analysis of the issues, evaluates the usefulness of scholarly approaches to the resolution of ethnic conflicts, and offers a strategy of what he calls preventive engagement by which policymakers may prevent conflicts such as the one that destroyed the former Yugoslavia.
War or Peace? offers clear and direct recommendations to guide both interested citizens and national policymakers as they attempt to grapple with the complexities of ethnic and nationalist politics in Europe.

The more citizens trust their government, the better democracy functions. However, African Americans have long suffered from the lack of equal protection by their government, and the racial discrimination they have faced breaks down their trust in democracy. Rather than promoting democracy, the United States government has, from its inception, racially discriminated against African American citizens and other racial groups, denying them equal access to citizenship and to protection of the law. Civil rights violations by ordinary citizens have also tainted social relationships between racial groups—social relationships that should be meaningful for enhancing relations between citizens and the government at large. Thus, trust and democracy do not function in American politics the way they should, in part because trust is not color blind.

Based on the premise that racial discrimination breaks down trust in a democracy, Trust in Black America examines the effect of race on African Americans' lives. Shayla Nunnally analyzes public opinion data from two national surveys to provide an updated and contemporary analysis of African Americans' political socialization, and to explore how African Americans learn about race. She argues that the uncertainty, risk, and unfairness of institutionalized racial discrimination has led African Americans to have a fundamentally different understanding of American race relations, so much so that distrust has been the basis for which race relations have been understood by African Americans. Nunnally empirically demonstrates that race and racial discrimination have broken down trust in American democracy.

This is the book that Alex Boraine never wanted to write. As a native South African and a witness to the worst years of apartheid, he has known many of the leaders of the African National Congress in exile. He shared the jubilation of millions of South Africans when the ANC won the first democratic elections in 1994 and took up the reins of government under the presidency of Nelson Mandela.

Now, two decades later, he is forced to wonder what exactly has gone wrong in South Africa. Intolerance and corruption are the hallmarks of the governing party, while the worsening state of education, health, safety and security and employment strengthen the claim that South Africa is a failing state. Boraine explores this urgent and critical issue from the vantage point of wide experience as a minister, parliamentarian, co-founder of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA) and Vice Chairperson of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee. He digs deep into the history of the ANC and concludes that both in exile and today, the ANC is slavishly committed to one party as the dominant ruling factor. All else – the Executive, Parliament, the Judiciary, civil society and the media – take second and third place. The ANC, Boraine claims, seeks to control every institution.

What’s Gone Wrong? pulls no punches, but it also goes beyond strong criticism and offers a number of constructive proposals, including the re-alignment of politics as a way of preventing South Africa becoming a failed state. As South Africa mourns the loss of Mandela and embarks on another national election, with the ANC likely to begin a third decade of rule, this incisive, detailed critique is required reading for all who are interested in the fate of this young nation.

Recent controversies surrounding the war on terror and American intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought rule of law rhetoric to a fevered pitch. While President Obama has repeatedly emphasized his Administration’s commitment to transparency and the rule of law, nowhere has this resolve been so quickly and severely tested than with the issue of the possible prosecution of Bush Administration officials. While some worry that without legal consequences there will be no effective deterrence for the repetition of future transgressions of justice committed at the highest levels of government, others echo Obama’s seemingly reluctant stance on launching an investigation into allegations of criminal wrongdoing by former President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, and members of the Office of Legal Counsel. Indeed, even some of the Bush Administration’s harshest critics suggest that we should avoid such confrontations, that the price of political division is too high. Measured or partisan, scholarly or journalistic, clearly the debate about accountability for the alleged crimes of the Bush Administration will continue for some time.
Using this debate as its jumping off point, When Governments Break the Law takes an interdisciplinary approach to the legal challenges posed by the criminal wrongdoing of governments. But this book is not an indictment of the Bush Administration; rather, the contributors take distinct positions for and against the proposition, offering revealing reasons and illuminating alternatives. The contributors do not ask the substantive question of whether any Bush Administration officials, in fact, violated the law, but rather the procedural, legal, political, and cultural questions of what it would mean either to pursue criminal prosecutions or to refuse to do so. By presuming that officials could be prosecuted, these essays address whether they should.
When Governments Break the Law provides a valuable and timely commentary on what is likely to be an ongoing process of understanding the relationship between politics and the rule of law in times of crisis.
Contributors: Claire Finkelstein, Lisa Hajjar, Daniel Herwitz, Stephen Holmes, Paul Horwitz, Nasser Hussain, Austin Sarat, and Stephen I. Vladeck.

Recent controversies surrounding the war on terror and American intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought rule of law rhetoric to a fevered pitch. While President Obama has repeatedly emphasized his Administration’s commitment to transparency and the rule of law, nowhere has this resolve been so quickly and severely tested than with the issue of the possible prosecution of Bush Administration officials. While some worry that without legal consequences there will be no effective deterrence for the repetition of future transgressions of justice committed at the highest levels of government, others echo Obama’s seemingly reluctant stance on launching an investigation into allegations of criminal wrongdoing by former President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, and members of the Office of Legal Counsel. Indeed, even some of the Bush Administration’s harshest critics suggest that we should avoid such confrontations, that the price of political division is too high. Measured or partisan, scholarly or journalistic, clearly the debate about accountability for the alleged crimes of the Bush Administration will continue for some time.
Using this debate as its jumping off point, When Governments Break the Law takes an interdisciplinary approach to the legal challenges posed by the criminal wrongdoing of governments. But this book is not an indictment of the Bush Administration; rather, the contributors take distinct positions for and against the proposition, offering revealing reasons and illuminating alternatives. The contributors do not ask the substantive question of whether any Bush Administration officials, in fact, violated the law, but rather the procedural, legal, political, and cultural questions of what it would mean either to pursue criminal prosecutions or to refuse to do so. By presuming that officials could be prosecuted, these essays address whether they should.
When Governments Break the Law provides a valuable and timely commentary on what is likely to be an ongoing process of understanding the relationship between politics and the rule of law in times of crisis.
Contributors: Claire Finkelstein, Lisa Hajjar, Daniel Herwitz, Stephen Holmes, Paul Horwitz, Nasser Hussain, Austin Sarat, and Stephen I. Vladeck.

Examines how giving up the vote became a fundamental aspect of modern American life

Public involvement in the electoral process has all but disappeared. Not since World War I has even half the electorate cast ballots in an off-year election. Even at the presidential level, voting has plummeted dismally. Nonvoting has, over the past century, become ingrained at the heart of American politics.

It was not always this way. With the integration of America's mass electorate into the electoral system in the 1830s, eligible voters were intensely participatory and remained highly mobilized throughout the nineteenth century. The turning point in American politics came during the early twentieth century when, from unmatched heights in the 1890s, voter turnouts fell repeatedly election after election.

Examining mass political behavior in twenty successive national elections, Why America Stopped Voting combines political analysis with social analysis to place voter participation within the larger context of American culture and society. A milestone in the evolution of our understanding of electoral politics, Why America Stopped Voting shows that the enduring decline of voter participation has been gradual and not the direct result of particular political events. Rather, Kornbluh shows that fundamental social changes that restructured virtually every aspect of American life at the turn of the century were at the heart of the decline in voter participation that still plagues our electoral process today.

In early 2011, the nation was stunned to watch Wisconsin’s
state capitol in Madison come under sudden and unexpected
occupation by union members and their allies. The protests
to defend collective bargaining rights were militant and practically
unheard of in this era of declining union power. Nearly
forty years of neoliberalism and the most severe economic
crisis since the Great Depression have battered the labor
movement, and workers have been largely complacent in the
face of stagnant wages, slashed benefits and services, widening
unemployment, and growing inequality.

That is, until now. Under pressure from a union-busting governor
and his supporters in the legislature, and inspired by the
massive uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, workers in Wisconsin
shook the nation with their colossal display of solidarity and
outrage. Their struggle is still ongoing, but there are lessons
to be learned from the Wisconsin revolt. This timely book
brings together some of the best labor journalists and scholars
in the United States, many of whom were on the ground
at the time, to examine the causes and impact of events, and
suggest how the labor movement might proceed in this new
era of union militancy.

The life of the great Guyanese scholar and revolutionary Walter Rodney burned with a rare intensity. The son of working class parents, Rodney showed great academic promise and was awarded scholarships to the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and the School of African and Oriental Studies in London. He received his PhD from the latter at the age of twenty-four, and his thesis was published as A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, now a classic of African history. His most famous work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, is a mainstay of radical literature and anticipated the influential world systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein.


Not content merely to study the world, Rodney turned to revolutionary politics in Jamaica, Tanzania, and in Guyana. In his homeland, he helped form the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) and was a consistent voice for the oppressed and exploited. As Rodney became more popular , the threat of his revolutionary message stirred fears among the powerful in Guyana and throughout the Caribbean, and he was assassinated in 1980.

This book presents a moving and insightful portrait of Rodney through by the words of academics, writers, artists, and political activists who knew him intimately or felt his influence. These informal recollections and reflections demonstrate why Rodney is such a widely admired figure throughout the world, especially in poor countries and among oppressed peoples everywhere.

In this eye-opening book, Joan Greenbaum tells the story of changes in management policies, work organization, and the design of office information systems from the 1950s to the present. She describes the impact of new technologies on the organization of working life with a keen awareness of the social forces that seek to benefit from them, showing how the process is driven by the needs of capitalist profit and control over the workforce rather than the good of society or greater efficiency.
Windows on the Workplace takes as its starting-point the experience of office workers and their own accounts of it. The book includes interviews with a wide range of workers, including young people entering a workplace in which the expectation of stable, long-term employment has all but disappeared. Greenbaum's approach is to locate their experiences and expectations within broader social and economic patterns, and to show how these patterns are constantly changing.
In a field that is constantly changing, this book captures the moment and clarifies the direction in which it is moving. It exposes the myth that technological advance and free market economics are creating a better future for all, and reveals the reality behind the myth.

In this eye-opening book, Joan Greenbaum tells the story of changes in management policies, work organization, and the design of office information systems from the 1950s to the present. She describes the impact of new technologies on the organization of working life with a keen awareness of the social forces that seek to benefit from them, showing how the process is driven by the needs of capitalist profit and control over the workforce rather than the good of society or greater efficiency.
Windows on the Workplace takes as its starting-point the experience of office workers and their own accounts of it. The book includes interviews with a wide range of workers, including young people entering a workplace in which the expectation of stable, long-term employment has all but disappeared. Greenbaum's approach is to locate their experiences and expectations within broader social and economic patterns, and to show how these patterns are constantly changing.
In a field that is constantly changing, this book captures the moment and clarifies the direction in which it is moving. It exposes the myth that technological advance and free market economics are creating a better future for all, and reveals the reality behind the myth.

Why do some conflicts escalate into violence while others dissipate harmlessly? Under what circumstances will people kill, and why?
While homicide has been viewed largely in the pathological terms of "crime" and "deviance," violence, Mark Cooney contends, is a naturally-occurring form of conflict found throughout history and across cultures under certain social conditions. Cooney has analyzed the social control of homicide within and across over 30 societies and interviewed several dozens of prisoners incarcerated for murder or manslaughter, as well as members of their families. Violence such as homicide can only be understood, he argues, by transcending the traditional focus on the social characteristics of the killer and victims, and by looking at the role played by family members, friends, neighbors, onlookers, police officers, and judges. These third parties can be a source of peace or violence, depending on how they are configured in particular cases. Violence flourishes, Cooney demonstrates, when authority is either very strong or very weak and when third-party ties are strong and boundaries between groups sharply defined.
Drawing on recent theory in the lively new sociological speciality of conflict management, Mark Cooney has culled a vast array of evidence from modern and preindustrial societies to provide us with the first general sociological analysis of human violence.

"The intellectual lodestone for the international Left since 1964."
--Mike Davis
"Compulsory reading."
--Daniel Singer
Socialist Register 2001 examines the concept and the reality of class as it affects workers at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Theoretical contributions explore today's old and new working classes, workers "north" and "south," peasants and workers, gender and the working class, as well as migrant and knowledge workers. Other essays examine critically important regional experiences in East Asia, India, South Africa, Brazil, Iran, Russia, Europe and North America.
Contributions include: Giovanni Arrighi, Beverly Silver, Henry Bernstein, Peter Kwong, Eric Mann, Ursula Huws, Andree Levesque, Pat & Hugh Armstrong, Rosemary, Brigitte Young, Rohini Banaji, Gerard Greenfield, Barbara Harriss-White & Nandini Gooptu, Patrick Bond, Darlene Miller, Greg Ruiter, Huw Beynon & Jose Ramalho, Justin Paulson, Haideh Moghissi, Saeed Rahnema, David Mandel, Michael Goldfield, and Steve Jeffreys.

"The intellectual lodestone for the international Left since 1964."
--Mike Davis
"Compulsory reading."
--Daniel Singer
Socialist Register 2001 examines the concept and the reality of class as it affects workers at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Theoretical contributions explore today's old and new working classes, workers "north" and "south," peasants and workers, gender and the working class, as well as migrant and knowledge workers. Other essays examine critically important regional experiences in East Asia, India, South Africa, Brazil, Iran, Russia, Europe and North America.
Contributions include: Giovanni Arrighi, Beverly Silver, Henry Bernstein, Peter Kwong, Eric Mann, Ursula Huws, Andree Levesque, Pat & Hugh Armstrong, Rosemary, Brigitte Young, Rohini Banaji, Gerard Greenfield, Barbara Harriss-White & Nandini Gooptu, Patrick Bond, Darlene Miller, Greg Ruiter, Huw Beynon & Jose Ramalho, Justin Paulson, Haideh Moghissi, Saeed Rahnema, David Mandel, Michael Goldfield, and Steve Jeffreys.

There was a time, in this century, when liberals championed the working class, when Democrats were indisputably the party of those who worked rather than invested for a living. Today, however, most Americans have come to see liberals as drifting and aimless, somehow lacking in backbone and moral fiber, beholden to radical ideologies that have little to do with the average American's life. Few incidents cast this phenomenon into greater relief than George Bush's successful tarring of Michael Dukakis as a liberal in 1988--and, tellingly, Dukakis's subsequent flight from the liberal tradition.
How has it come to this? Why have liberals allowed themselves to be so portrayed? In this book, Gordon MacInnes--state senator, fiscal conservative, frustrated Democrat, and a man who believes deeply in America's civic culture--reveals how progressive forces have retreated from the battle of ideas, at great cost. Squarely at the nexus of race, poverty, and politics, Wrong for All the Right Reasons charts the sources of liberal decline and the high costs of conservative rule.
Tracing the origins of the liberal retreat to the fall-out over Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on the black family in the 1960s, MacInnes claims that white liberals have somewhere along the way stopped taking black people seriously enough to argue with them. Continuously put on the desfensive, liberals have been unable to forge an aggressive, proactive agenda of that addresses the needs of working-class and poor Americans. This has led to a breakdown of honest dialogue which to this day continues to plague liberal Democrats, as evidenced by Bill Bradley's withdrawal from active party politics last fall.
Finding room for optimism in the groundswell of grass-roots progressivism, Wrong for All the Right Reasons is a timely, necessary call to arms for liberal, progressive Democrats, outlining ways in which they can reverse their party's dangerous decline.

Since 1964, the Socialist Register has brought together leading writers on the left to investigate aspects of a common theme. Coming to Terms with Nature: Socialist Register 2007 examines whether capitalism can come to terms with today's ecological challenges and whether socialist thought has developed sufficiently to help us do so. Topics include: the ecological contradictions of capitalist accumulation and the growing social conflicts they create; the relationship between imperialism, markets, oil politics, and renewable energy; the significance of the impasse over the Kyoto protocol; and whether market forces and technology can overcome the “limits to growth” while preserving the biosphere.
These essays also analyze how deeply consumerism affects working class politics and the shortcomings of Green parties and “green commerce.” In addition, they address the necessity to redefine standards of living chiefly in the countries of the North in order to allow for the global redistribution of wealth and income that are critical for development in the South.
The international roster of contributors includes Mike Davis and Neil Smith, Enrique Leff, Joan Martinez-Alier, Elmar Altvater, and Michael Lowy.

An in-depth analysis of nearly all chemical and biological weapons, their effects, and the politics surrounding their deployment.

"This spirited collection is indispensable reading for anyone who wants to know what it will take for unions to inspire and mobilize a mass movement that will transform our nation, deepen our commitment to justice and democracy, and promote the inclusiveness that is key both to the labor movement and sustained economic growth."
--Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., President, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition

This thoughtful, controversial book, by one of the country's leading Latin America scholars, examines the fundamental tenets and ideologies behind America's policy towards Latin America over the course of the last three administrations.
Howard Wiarda, who has served as a consultant for the State Department, the Department of the Army, the National Security Council, the Kissinger Commission, and the White House, is ideally situated to provide an insider account of policy decisions and process during the Reagan-Bush era. The combination of Wiarda's academic background and his hands-on knowledge of Washington practices and processes results in a volume that is extremely readable and will serve as a vital link between the scholarly and policymaking communities. Wiarda supplements his incisive analysis on the role of the military in Latin America, shifting U.S. strategic policy, democracy and human rights, and the problems presented by dictators in decline with illuminating case studies of Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, South America, and the Caribbean.
The result is a book that will be of interest to both scholars and students of American foreign policy and Latin American studies, as well as policymakers and analysts.

One of the twentieth century’s foremost Marxian economists discusses the dialectical method, the contradictions of capitalism, and the future of Marxism.

"This book contributes significantly ot the conversation seeking to understand the international forces at play in the threatening war on Iraq."
—Nelson Mandela
"Behind the Invasion of Iraq . . .synthesizes the seemingly disparate threads of the U.S. war drive in a blistering indictment of American foreign policy . . .The effect is of puzzle pieces clicking into place."
—Counterpunch
Since September 11, 2001, there have been many accounts of the ways in which the alignment of global power is changing or will be changed by the U.S.'s "war on terrorism." Most of them take as their starting point the options facing the wealthy and powerful nations of the world seeking to control an ever larger share of the world's resources. Behind the Invasion of Iraq is written from a different perspective, and one that makes possible a far more comprehensive point of view.
Its authors, Research Unit for Political Economy, are rooted in the politics of a Third World country—India—which has long been on the receiving end of imperialist power. As a consequence, they have a more sober view of the workings of global power. In clear and accessible prose, weighing the evidence carefully and tracing events to their root causes, they move beyond moral outrage to a clear view of the process being set in motion by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. They show that the invasion of Iraq is a desperate gamble by a section of the U.S. ruling elite to preserve their power, driven by the wish to stave off economic crisis through military means. Their efforts will not end with Iraq, but will require the recolonization of the middle East.
Behind the Invasion of Iraq exposes the idea that war will bring democracy to the Middle East as so much propaganda. In a context where so many rulers are themselves clients of the United States, the war is aimed not at the rulers but at the masses of ordinary people whose hostility to imperialism has not been broken even by corrupt and autocratic rulers. This book describes the remaking of global power with a truly global awareness of what is at stake.

Global Flashpoints critically examines today’s neoliberal order and the new resistance movements which it has sparked across the globe. This timely and panoramic work offers penetrating historical analysis of the role of politics, religion and imperialism in shaping the contemporary crisis in the Middle East and of the prospects for the Left throughout the Islamic world. Global Flashpoints also explores the present state of resistance movements in Europe and the United States and highlights developments in Latin America, including Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, the recent uprising in Oaxaca, indigenous agrarian movements in Bolivia, and Brazil's landless movement. Global Flashpoints offers a uniquely powerful and provocative account of the worldwide struggle against imperialism and neoliberalism in the new century.
Contributors: Aijaz Ahmad, Gilbert Achcar, Asef Bayat, Sabbah Alnasseri, Bashir Abu-Manneh, Yildiz Atasoy, Hidayat Greenfield, Ana Esther Cecena, Margarita Lopez Maya, Jack Hammond, William Robinson, Wes Enzinna, Joao Pedro Stedile & Atilio Boron, Richard Roman & Edur Velasco Arregui, G.M. Tamas, Raghu Krishnan & Adrien Thomas, Peter Burnham, Kim Moody, Alfredo Saad Filho, Elmar Altvater & Greg Albo.

In early 2011, the nation was stunned to watch Wisconsin’s
state capitol in Madison come under sudden and unexpected
occupation by union members and their allies. The protests
to defend collective bargaining rights were militant and practically
unheard of in this era of declining union power. Nearly
forty years of neoliberalism and the most severe economic
crisis since the Great Depression have battered the labor
movement, and workers have been largely complacent in the
face of stagnant wages, slashed benefits and services, widening
unemployment, and growing inequality.

That is, until now. Under pressure from a union-busting governor
and his supporters in the legislature, and inspired by the
massive uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, workers in Wisconsin
shook the nation with their colossal display of solidarity and
outrage. Their struggle is still ongoing, but there are lessons
to be learned from the Wisconsin revolt. This timely book
brings together some of the best labor journalists and scholars
in the United States, many of whom were on the ground
at the time, to examine the causes and impact of events, and
suggest how the labor movement might proceed in this new
era of union militancy.

Explores Marx’s attitude to “developing” societies. Includes translations of Marx’s notes from the 1880s, among the most important finds of the last century.

Military interventions on supposedly humanitarian grounds have become an established feature of the post-Cold War global order. Since September 11, this form of militarism has taken on new and unpredictable proportions. Diana Johnstone's well-documented study demonstrates that a crucial moment in establishing in the public mindand above all, within the political context of liberalism and the leftthe legitimacy of such interventions was the "humanitarian" bombing of the former Yugoslavia in 1999.
In the course of the civil wars that led to the break-up of Yugoslavia, a complex history came to be presented as a morality play in which the parts were scripted to meet the moral needs of the capitalist West. The identification of Muslims as defenseless victims and Serbs as genocidal monsters inflamed fears and hatreds within Yugoslavia, and prepared the way for power to be shifted from the people of the region to such international agencies as NATO.
Deceptions and Self-Deceptionstests the popular myths against the reality of Yugoslav history. Johnstone identifies the common geopolitical interests running through such military interventions, and argues persuasively that they create problems rather than solving them. She shows that the "Kosovo war" was in reality the model for future destruction of countries seen as potential threats to the hegemony of an "international community" currently being redefined to exclude or marginalize all but those who conform to the interests of the United States.
A concluding chapter shows how the script prepared for Yugoslavia is being re-enacted in Afghanistan. Whether Milosevic's trial before the International Court at the Hague or the capture of bin Laden will provide an adequate conclusion to this ideological play-making, remains an open question.

"The intellectual lodestar for the international Left since 1964."
-Mike Davis.
For almost forty years the Socialist Register has brought together the leading socialist writers from around the world to consider themes of vital importance. As new global conflicts are being shaped around questions of race, religion, and nationality, the forthcoming Register focuses on this theme.
Contributors include:
Aijaz Ahmad, "Fundamentalisms: Religious, National and Imperial,"
John S. Saul, "The Marxism of Race, Nationalism and Religion"
Manning Marable, "The Black Reparations Controversy"
Mahmood Mamdani, "Reflections on the Rwanda Genocide"
Bill Fletcher, Jr., "Race and Labor in the United States"
Amory Starr, "Is the Anti-Globalization Movement Racist?"
Peter Gowan, "American Global Government: Will It Work?"

Details a pattern of development and investment in the American economy that produces diminished growth and increased stagnation.

This collection of Colletti's (1924-2001) principal Marxist essays will be welcomed by non-Italian readers. Colletti's concern as a Marxist was twofold: to interpret Marxism as profoundly and as flexibly as possible; and to investigate the relationships between Marx's thought and that of a number of other thinkers as widely separated in time as Rousseau and Marcuse. His thought ranges widely through philosophy, history, sociology, politics, and economics, without pausing at boundaries. Colletti's work from his Marxist period attempted to place the work of Marx in a line of descent that de-emphasizes Hegel, while giving a novel focus to the relationship between Marxism and Kant.

Bukharin’s 1919 anticipation of the growth of the internationalization of capital.

In the decades after 1945, as colonial possessions became independent states, it was widely believed that imperialism as a historical phenomenon was coming to an end. The six essays collected in this volume demonstrate that a new form of imperialism was, in fact, taking shape—imperialism defined not by colonial rule but by the global capitalist market. From the outset, the dominant power in this imperialism without colonies was the United States.
Magdoff's essays explain how this imperialism works, why it generates ever greater inequality, repression, and militarism, and the essential role it plays in the development of U.S. capitalism.
Written in the 1960s and 70s, Magdoff's essays constituted a major contribution to Marxist theory and provided a model of rigorous argument in which theory is constantly checked against the economic reality. They provide an indispensable guide to the basic forces at work in the global politics of the twenty-first century.

This introduction to socialist thought is by two men perhaps better qualified than any other Americans to have written it. Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, founding editors and publishers of the independent socialist magazine Monthly Review, built an impressive reputation as keen observers, acute analysts, and lucid writers on the world and domestic scenes. In this book, they present in clear and direct language the basic elements of the socialist critique of capitalist society.

"Persuasive. A welcome addition."
—The Journal of Legal History
"A masterly exposition of the complex details of Holmes' Supreme Court work."
—The Core Review
In this work, H.L. Pohlman calls for a new interpretation of Holmes as a moderate defender of free speech, and provides a window into Holmes' basic understanding of American constitutionalism. Pohlman argues that Holmes played a crucial role in the development of the idea that the Constitution is a living entity, an idea that differed radically from nineteenth-century antecedents.

Marxism and Philosophy is Karl Korsch’s masterwork. In it he argues for a reexamination of the relationship between Marxist theory and bourgeois philosophy, and insists on the centrality of the Hegelian dialectic and a commitment to revolutionary praxis. Although widely attacked in its time, Marxism and Philosophy has attained a place among the most important works of twentieth-century Marxist theory, and continues to merit critical reappraisal from scholars and activists today.

Morbid Symptoms sees health as a major field of political economy, one that focuses on the struggle between commercial forces seeking to make it into a field of profit, and popular forces fighting to keep it—or make it—a public service with equal access for all.
Central to this volume is an analysis of the global health industry—the pharmaceutical, insurance, medical technology, and healthcare provider corporations. Essays by leading authorities in the field include Vicente Navarro on the impact of globalization on health services, Julian Tudor Hart on mental health in sick societies, Meri Koivusalo on international organizations and capitalist health policies, Sanjay Basu on HIV/AIDS and the resurrection of comprehensive primary care in the "south," and Julie Feinsilver on Cuba’s health care system and its role in Cuba’s foreign policy. Separate essays review the state of health care around the world, while others deal with a variety of key issues such as obesity, the "fitness" industry, and the significance of ever-popular hospital-based television programs.
Contributors: Robert Albritton, Julian Ammirante, Kalman Applbaum, Pat and Hugh Armstrong, Sanjay Basu, David Coburn, Hans Ulrich Deppe, Julie Feinsilver, Marie Gottschalk, Julian Tudor Hart, Lesley Henderson, Christoph Herman, Meri Koivusalo, Colin Leys, Roddy Loeppky, Maureen Mackintosh, Vicente Navarro, Mohan Rao, Thomas Seibert, and Wang Shaoguang.

Preeminent theoreticians of the world economy set out their understanding of the long-term dynamics of global capitalism.

The focus of this book is the emerging economic confrontation between
European and U.S. capitalism at the end of the "golden age" of
capitalism in the late 1960s. Ernest Mandel here paints a remarkably
clear, comprehensive, and detailed portrait of trends at that critical
period. Mandel moves with ease from the most general international
problems to the specifics of corporate activity, and few developments in
the business and economic worlds seem to have escaped his attention.

Since 1964, the Socialist Register has brought together leading writers on the left to investigate aspects of a common theme. Telling the Truth: Socialist Register 2006 examines how contemporary social and political debate is structured, how ideas and ideologies come to inform policy making, research, education, and our conceptions of truth more generally.
It also discusses the role of the state in intellectual life and the media, and the role of think-tanks, foundations, political parties and global institutions such as the World Bank in the dissemination of knowledge and ideas. Such questions are not always at the center of public debate, but are essential to establishing freedom for critical thought and reflection, and for the formation of a new generation of intellectuals.
Contributors include Terry Eagleton, Barbara Ehrenreich and Frances Fox Piven, Doug Henwood, Robert McChesney, and Michael Burawoy.

From the sprawling remnants of the Soviet empire to the southern tip of Africa, attempts are underway to replace arbitrary political regimes with governments constrained by the rule of law. This ideal which subordinates the wills of individuals, social movements--and even, sometimes, democratically elected majorities--to the requirements of law, is here explored by leading legal and political thinkers.
Part I of The Rule of Law examines the interplay of democracy and the rule of law, while Part II focusses on the centuries-old debate about the meaning of the rule of law itself. Part III takes up the constraints that rationality exercises on the rule of law. If the rule of law is desirable partly because it is rational, then departures from that rule might also be desirable in the event that they can be shown to be rational. Part IV concentrates on the limits of the rule of law, considering the tensions between liberalism and the rule of law which exist despite the fact that reasoned commitment to the rule of the law is preeminently a liberal commitment.
Contributing to the volume are: Robert A. Burt (Yale University), Steven J. Burton (University of Iowa), William N. Eskridge, Jr. (Georgetown University), John Ferejohn (Stanford University), Richard Flathman (Johns Hopkins University), Gerald F. Gaus (University of Minnesota, Duluth), Jean Hampton (University of Arizona), Russell Hardin (University of Chicago), James Johnson (University of Rochester), Jack Knight (Washington University), Stephen Macedo (Harvard University), David Schmidtz (Yale University), Lawrence B. Solum (Loyola Marymount University), Michael Walzer (Princeton University), Catherine Valcke (University of Toronto), and Michael P. Zuckert (Carleton College).

Details the history of the first thirty years of the system of aid and credit in which the IMF is the keystone.

Explores the full sweep of Marxist thinking on social change in the light of the 1968 French explosion.

When Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa in 1994, freedom-loving people around the world hailed a victory over racial domination, injustice and inequality. The end of apartheid did not change the basic conditions of life for the majority of oppressed South Africans, however. Material inequality has deepened and new forms of resistance have emerged in commnities that have discovered a common oppression and solidarty and forged new and dynamic political identities.
Desai's book follows the growth of the most unexpected of these community movements, describing from the inside the process through which the downtrodden regain their dignity and defend the most basic conditions of life. His book begins with one specific community, with local government enforcing cut-offs of water and electricity, and evicting families from their houses whose breadwinners have lost their jobs. As the Chatsworth community begins to organize and discover leaders among its ranks, so their example spreads to other communities in Durban and the KwaZulu-Natal region, and their struggles build links with those in other parts of the new South Africa.
We Are the Poors was a major event in the life of the South African Left when the first edition was published there in 2000. This new edition follows the ongoing course of events to the present.

This landmark text by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy is a classic of
twentieth-century radical thought, a hugely influential book that
continues to shape our understanding of modern capitalism. “This book…
deals with a vital area of economics, has a unique approach, is
stimulating and well written. It represents the first serious attempt to
extend Marx’s model of competitive capitalism to the new conditions of
monopoly capitalism.” — Howard J. Sherman, American Economic Review

Since 1964, the annual Socialist Register has brought together leading writers on the left to investigate aspects of a common theme. The theme of this issue is the new U.S.-led imperialist project which is currently transforming relations of global power. Contributors to this volume include:
Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, "The new imperialism: relations between the states of the USA and the advanced capitalist countries."
Colin Leys and John S. Saul, "Development under the new imperialism."
Greg Albo, "The economics of the new imperialism"
David Harvey, "The geography of the new imperialism"
Aijaz Ahmad, "Culture and the new imperialism."
Saskia Sassen, "The imperial city, north and south."
John Bellamy Foster, "Imperialism and the Ecosphere."

Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016

From the presidential race to the battle for the office of New York City mayor, American political candidates’ approach to new media strategy is increasingly what makes or breaks their campaign. Targeted outreach on Facebook and Twitter, placement of a well-timed viral ad, and the ability to roll with the memes, flame wars, and downvotes that might spring from ordinary citizens’ engagement with the issues—these skills are heralded as crucial for anyone hoping to get their views heard in a chaotic election cycle. But just how effective are the kinds of media strategies that American politicians employ? And what effect, if any, do citizen-created political media have on the tide of public opinion?

In Controlling the Message, Farrar-Myers and Vaughn curate a series of case studies that use real-time original research from the 2012 election season to explore how politicians and ordinary citizens use and consume new media during political campaigns. Broken down into sections that examine new media strategy from the highest echelons of campaign management all the way down to passive citizen engagement with campaign issues in places like online comment forums, the book ultimately reveals that political messaging in today’s diverse new media landscape is a fragile, unpredictable, and sometimes futile process. The result is a collection that both interprets important historical data from a watershed campaign season and also explains myriad approaches to political campaign media scholarship—an ideal volume for students, scholars, and political analysts alike.

A careful analysis of the Bank’s own policy papers and reports, which outlines its philosophy of development and the concrete effects of its projects.

Helps us to better understand the dangers of U.S. nuclear strategy, and reminds us that it is a strategy we can resist.

The first of a three-volume series on the interaction of the US and China in different regions of the world, China, the United States, and the Future of Central Asia explores the delicate balance of competing foreign interests in this resource-rich and politically tumultuous region. Editor David Denoon and his internationally renowned set of contributors assess the different objectives and strategies the U.S. and China deploy in the region and examine how the two world powers are indirectly competitive with one another for influence in Central Asia. While the US is focused on maintaining and supporting its military forces in neighboring states, China has its sights on procuring natural resources for its fast-growing economy and preventing the expansion of fundamentalist Islam inside its borders.





This book covers important issues such as the creation of international gas pipelines, the challenges of building crucial transcontinental roadways that must pass through countries facing insurgencies, the efforts of the US and China to encourage and provide better security in the region, and how the Central Asian countries themselves view their role in international politics and the global economy. The book also covers key outside powers with influence in the region; Russia, with its historical ties to the many Central Asian countries that used to belong to the USSR, is perhaps the biggest international presence in the area, and other countries on the region’s periphery like Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, and India have a stake in the fortunes and future of Central Asia as well. A comprehensive, original, and up-to-date collection, this book is a wide-ranging look from noted scholars at a vital part of the world which is likely to receive more attention and face greater instability as NATO forces withdraw from Afghanistan.

The global economic crisis that closed the first decade of the twenty-first century has demonstrated that the contradictions of capitalism cannot be overcome. The challenge for socialist analysis is to reveal both the nature of these contradictions in the neo-liberal era of globalized finance, and their consequences in our time. Crises need to be understood as turning points that open up opportunities. How to facilitate this is the sharpest challenge posed to socialists by the most severe global economic crisis since the 1930s.
What implications does the crisis this time have in terms of capitalist economic and political restructuring? Does it portend the end of neo-liberalism? Can working classes reverse the pattern of defeat in recent decades, build new capacities, and impose their own template for types of economic and political renewal that can put back on the agenda the need to transcend capitalism itself? What additional costs will they be expected to bear as capitalists states prepare their ‘exit strategies’? This edition of the “Socialist Register” addresses these questions and more with typically wide-ranging analysis from contributorsaround the globe.
Provisional Contributors: Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin, Alfredo Saad Filho, Hugo Radice, Anwar Shaikh, David McNally, Doug Henwood, Johanna Brenner,Michael Moran, Julie Froud, Adriana Nilsson, Karel Williams, Riccardo Bellofiore, R. Taggart Murphy, Ho-Fung Hung, Adam Hanieh, Ben Fine, Samantha Ashman, Susan Newman, Susanne Soederberg, Larry Lohmann, Dick Bryan, Michael Rafferty, Ursula Huws, and Greg Albo.

The first of a three-volume series on the interaction of the US and China in different regions of the world, China, the United States, and the Future of Central Asia explores the delicate balance of competing foreign interests in this resource-rich and politically tumultuous region. Editor David Denoon and his internationally renowned set of contributors assess the different objectives and strategies the U.S. and China deploy in the region and examine how the two world powers are indirectly competitive with one another for influence in Central Asia. While the US is focused on maintaining and supporting its military forces in neighboring states, China has its sights on procuring natural resources for its fast-growing economy and preventing the expansion of fundamentalist Islam inside its borders.





This book covers important issues such as the creation of international gas pipelines, the challenges of building crucial transcontinental roadways that must pass through countries facing insurgencies, the efforts of the US and China to encourage and provide better security in the region, and how the Central Asian countries themselves view their role in international politics and the global economy. The book also covers key outside powers with influence in the region; Russia, with its historical ties to the many Central Asian countries that used to belong to the USSR, is perhaps the biggest international presence in the area, and other countries on the region’s periphery like Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, and India have a stake in the fortunes and future of Central Asia as well. A comprehensive, original, and up-to-date collection, this book is a wide-ranging look from noted scholars at a vital part of the world which is likely to receive more attention and face greater instability as NATO forces withdraw from Afghanistan.

Since 1964, the Socialist Register has brought together leading writers on the left to investigate aspects of a common theme. This issue examines the new U.S.-led imperialist project that is currently transforming the global order, its impact on different regions of the world, and on gender, media, and popular culture.
Contributors and essays include:
Stephen Gill, American Supremacy and the New World OrderChris Rude, Financial Discipline: Imperial Strategy Since the Asian CrisisChandra Mohanty, Patriarchy in the New World OrderVivek Chibber, The New Imperialism and the South: The Passing of the "National Bourgeoisie"Yuezhi Zhao, China and Global Capitalism: The Cultural DimensionEd Comor, Media and Communications in the U.S. Empire

The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 and the US government response, especially after the bombing of Afghanistan, transformed US and global politics.
—Will the US-led war on terrorism rid the world of this scourge, or fuel the hatred and suffering on which it feeds?
—Will the middle East and central Asia be stabilized once Afghanistan is reduced to rubble and starvation, or become a zone of enduring war?
—Within the United States, will it bring about new forms of patriotism and solidarity, or provide a platform for intensified racism, new assaults on civil liberties, and on the living standards of ordinary Americans?
This book locates ongoing events in the aftermath of September 11 in historical context, analyzes their motive forces and possible outcomes, and examines the alternatives that face the anti-globalization movement and opponents of racism and war. The New Crusade sets out the main historical and political issues at stake clearly, accessibly, and comprehensively. It examines US policy in the middle East from the break-up of the Soviet Union, ongoing sanctions against Iraq, and the quest for a US oil pipeline from the former Soviet republics through Afghanistan; the ideology of the National Security State and its implications for global conflict; the nature of humanitarian interventions in the Third World; and the questions of international law raised by terrorism. It concludes with a fresh appraisal of the options facing us today.
Reflecting both deep knowledge of the region and the commitment and hands-on experience of a seasoned activist, Mahajan provides a powerful interpretation of events that will be decisive in the making of our time.

Acts of violence assume many forms: they may travel by
the arc of a guided missile or in the language of an economic policy, and they
may leave behind a smoldering village or a starved child. The all-pervasiveness
of violence makes it seem like an unavoidable, and ultimately incomprehensible,
aspect of the modern world. But, in this detailed and expansive book, Marc Pilisuk and Jen Rountree demonstrate
otherwise. Widespread violence, they argue, is in fact an expression of the
underlying social order, and whether it is carried out by military forces or by
patterns of investment, the aim is to strengthen that order for the benefit of
the powerful.

The Hidden
Structure of Violence marshals vast amounts of evidence to examine the
costs of direct violence, including military preparedness and the social
reverberations of war, alongside the costs of structural violence, expressed as
poverty and chronic illness. It also documents the relatively small number of
people and corporations responsible for facilitating the violent status quo,
whether by setting the range of permissible discussion or benefiting directly as
financiers and manufacturers. The result is a stunning indictment of our
violent world and a powerful critique of the ways through which violence is
reproduced on a daily basis, whether at the highest levels of the state or in
the deepest recesses of the mind.

Millions of laborers, from the Philippines to the Caribbean, performed the work of the United States empire. Forging a global economy connecting the tropics to the industrial center, workers harvested sugar, cleaned hotel rooms, provided sexual favors, and filled military ranks. Placing working men and women at the center of the long history of the U.S. empire, these essays offer new stories of empire that intersect with the “grand narratives” of diplomatic affairs at the national and international levels. Missile defense, Cold War showdowns, development politics, military combat, tourism, and banana economics share something in common—they all have labor histories.





This collection challenges historians to consider the labor that formed, worked, confronted, and rendered the U.S. empire visible. The U.S. empire is a project of global labor mobilization, coercive management, military presence, and forced cultural encounter. Together, the essays in this volume recognize the United States as a global imperial player whose systems of labor mobilization and migration stretched from Central America to West Africa to the United States itself.





Workers are also the key actors in this volume. Their stories are multi-vocal, as workers sometimes defied the U.S. empire’s rhetoric of civilization, peace, and stability and at other times navigated its networks or benefited from its profits. Their experiences reveal the gulf between the American ‘denial of empire’ and the lived practice of management, resource exploitation, and military exigency. When historians place labor and working people at the center, empire appears as a central dynamic of U.S. history.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016

From the presidential race to the battle for the office of New York City mayor, American political candidates’ approach to new media strategy is increasingly what makes or breaks their campaign. Targeted outreach on Facebook and Twitter, placement of a well-timed viral ad, and the ability to roll with the memes, flame wars, and downvotes that might spring from ordinary citizens’ engagement with the issues—these skills are heralded as crucial for anyone hoping to get their views heard in a chaotic election cycle. But just how effective are the kinds of media strategies that American politicians employ? And what effect, if any, do citizen-created political media have on the tide of public opinion?

In Controlling the Message, Farrar-Myers and Vaughn curate a series of case studies that use real-time original research from the 2012 election season to explore how politicians and ordinary citizens use and consume new media during political campaigns. Broken down into sections that examine new media strategy from the highest echelons of campaign management all the way down to passive citizen engagement with campaign issues in places like online comment forums, the book ultimately reveals that political messaging in today’s diverse new media landscape is a fragile, unpredictable, and sometimes futile process. The result is a collection that both interprets important historical data from a watershed campaign season and also explains myriad approaches to political campaign media scholarship—an ideal volume for students, scholars, and political analysts alike.

In a little more than a decade, economist Michael A. Lebowitz has written several major works about the transition from socialism to capitalism: Beyond Capital(winner of the Deutscher Prize), Build It Now, The Socialist Alternative, and The Contradictions of “Real Socialism.” Here, he develops and deepens the analysis contained in those pathbreaking works by tracing major issues in socialist thought from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first.

Lebowitz explores the obvious but almost universally ignored fact that as human beings work together to produce society’s goods and services, we also “produce” something else: namely, ourselves. Human beings are shaped by circumstances, and any vision of socialism that ignores this fact is bound to fail, or, at best, reproduce the alienation of labor that is endemic to capitalism. But how can people transform their circumstances in a way that allows them to re-organize production and, at the same time, fulfill their human potential? Lebowitz sets out to answer this question first by examining Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, and from there investigates the experiences of the Soviet Union and more recent efforts to build socialism in Venezuela. He argues that socialism in the twenty-first century must be animated by a central vision, in three parts: social ownership of the means of production, social production organized by workers, and the satisfaction of communal needs and communal purposes. These essays repay careful reading and reflection, and prove Lebowitz to be one of the foremost Marxist thinkers of this era.

Acts of violence assume many forms: they may travel by
the arc of a guided missile or in the language of an economic policy, and they
may leave behind a smoldering village or a starved child. The all-pervasiveness
of violence makes it seem like an unavoidable, and ultimately incomprehensible,
aspect of the modern world. But, in this detailed and expansive book, Marc Pilisuk and Jen Rountree demonstrate
otherwise. Widespread violence, they argue, is in fact an expression of the
underlying social order, and whether it is carried out by military forces or by
patterns of investment, the aim is to strengthen that order for the benefit of
the powerful.

The Hidden
Structure of Violence marshals vast amounts of evidence to examine the
costs of direct violence, including military preparedness and the social
reverberations of war, alongside the costs of structural violence, expressed as
poverty and chronic illness. It also documents the relatively small number of
people and corporations responsible for facilitating the violent status quo,
whether by setting the range of permissible discussion or benefiting directly as
financiers and manufacturers. The result is a stunning indictment of our
violent world and a powerful critique of the ways through which violence is
reproduced on a daily basis, whether at the highest levels of the state or in
the deepest recesses of the mind.

Traces the expansive influence of The Council of Foreign Relations in advancing Wall Street's foreign policy agendas and U.S. influence abroad

The Council on Foreign Relations is the most influential foreign-policy think tank in the United States, claiming among its members a high percentage of government officials, media figures, and establishment elite. For decades it kept a low profile even while it shaped policy, advised presidents, and helped shore up U.S. hegemony following the Second World War. In 1977, Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter published the first in-depth study of the CFR, Imperial Brain Trust, an explosive work that traced the activities and influence of the CFR from its origins in the 1920s through the Cold War.

Now, Laurence H. Shoup returns with this long-awaited sequel, which brings the story up to date. Wall Street’s Think Tank follows the CFR from the 1970s through the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present. It explains how members responded to rapid changes in the world scene: globalization, the rise of China, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the launch of a “War on Terror,” among other major developments. Shoup argues that the CFR now operates in an era of “Neoliberal Geopolitics,” a worldwide paradigm that its members helped to establish and that reflects the interests of the U.S. ruling class, but is not without challengers. Wall Street’s Think Tank is an essential guide to understanding the Council on Foreign Relations and the shadow it casts over recent history and current events.

In a little more than a decade, economist Michael A. Lebowitz has written several major works about the transition from socialism to capitalism: Beyond Capital(winner of the Deutscher Prize), Build It Now, The Socialist Alternative, and The Contradictions of “Real Socialism.” Here, he develops and deepens the analysis contained in those pathbreaking works by tracing major issues in socialist thought from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first.

Lebowitz explores the obvious but almost universally ignored fact that as human beings work together to produce society’s goods and services, we also “produce” something else: namely, ourselves. Human beings are shaped by circumstances, and any vision of socialism that ignores this fact is bound to fail, or, at best, reproduce the alienation of labor that is endemic to capitalism. But how can people transform their circumstances in a way that allows them to re-organize production and, at the same time, fulfill their human potential? Lebowitz sets out to answer this question first by examining Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, and from there investigates the experiences of the Soviet Union and more recent efforts to build socialism in Venezuela. He argues that socialism in the twenty-first century must be animated by a central vision, in three parts: social ownership of the means of production, social production organized by workers, and the satisfaction of communal needs and communal purposes. These essays repay careful reading and reflection, and prove Lebowitz to be one of the foremost Marxist thinkers of this era.

As John Bellamy Foster writes in his foreword to the present book, “István Mészáros is one of the greatest philosophers that the historical materialist tradition has yet produced. His work stands practically alone today in the depth of its analysis of Marx’s theory of alienation, the structural crisis of capital, the demise of Soviet-style post-revolutionary societies, and the necessary conditions of the transition to socialism. His dialectical inquiry into social structure and forms of consciousness—a systematic critique of the prevailing forms of thought—is unequaled in our time.”

Mészáros is the author of magisterial works like Beyond Capital and Social Structures of Forms of Consciousness, but his work can seem daunting to those unacquainted with his thought. Here, for the first time, is a concise and accessible overview of Mészáros’s ideas, designed by the author himself and covering the broad scope of his work, from the shortcomings of bourgeois economics to the degeneration of the capital system to the transition to socialism.

On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 earthquake off Japan’s northeast coast triggered a tsunami that killed more than 20,000 people, displaced 600,000, and caused billions of dollars in damage as well as a nuclear meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Japan, the world’s third largest economy, was already grappling with recovery from both its own economic recession of the 1990s and the global recession following the US-driven financial crisis of 2008 when the disaster hit, changing its fortunes yet again. This small, populous Asian nation—once thought to be a contender for the role of the world’s number one power—now faces a world of uncertainty. Japan’s economy has shrunk, China has challenged its borders, and it faces perilous demographic adjustments from decreased fertility and an aging populace, with the country’s population expected to drop to less than 100 million by 2048.

In Japan: The Precarious Future, a group of distinguished scholars of Japanese economics, politics, law, and society examine the various roads that might lie ahead. Will Japan face a continued erosion of global economic and political power, particularly as China’s outlook improves exponentially? Or will it find a way to protect its status as an important player in global affairs? Contributors explore issues such as national security, political leadership, manufacturing prowess, diplomacy, population decline, and gender equality in politics and the workforce, all in an effort to chart the possible futures for Japan. Both a roadmap for change and a look at how Japan arrived at its present situation, this collection of thought-provoking analyses will be essential for understanding the current landscape and future prospects of this world power.

On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 earthquake off Japan’s northeast coast triggered a tsunami that killed more than 20,000 people, displaced 600,000, and caused billions of dollars in damage as well as a nuclear meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Japan, the world’s third largest economy, was already grappling with recovery from both its own economic recession of the 1990s and the global recession following the US-driven financial crisis of 2008 when the disaster hit, changing its fortunes yet again. This small, populous Asian nation—once thought to be a contender for the role of the world’s number one power—now faces a world of uncertainty. Japan’s economy has shrunk, China has challenged its borders, and it faces perilous demographic adjustments from decreased fertility and an aging populace, with the country’s population expected to drop to less than 100 million by 2048.

In Japan: The Precarious Future, a group of distinguished scholars of Japanese economics, politics, law, and society examine the various roads that might lie ahead. Will Japan face a continued erosion of global economic and political power, particularly as China’s outlook improves exponentially? Or will it find a way to protect its status as an important player in global affairs? Contributors explore issues such as national security, political leadership, manufacturing prowess, diplomacy, population decline, and gender equality in politics and the workforce, all in an effort to chart the possible futures for Japan. Both a roadmap for change and a look at how Japan arrived at its present situation, this collection of thought-provoking analyses will be essential for understanding the current landscape and future prospects of this world power.

The Haitian Revolution, the product of the first successful slave revolt, was truly world-historic in its impact. When Haiti declared independence in 1804, the leading powers—France, Great Britain, and Spain—suffered an ignominious defeat and the New World was remade. The island revolution also had a profound impact on Haiti’s mainland neighbor, the United States. Inspiring the enslaved and partisans of emancipation while striking terror throughout the Southern slaveocracy, it propelled the fledgling nation one step closer to civil war. Gerald Horne’s path breaking new work explores the complex and often fraught relationship between the United States and the island of Hispaniola. Giving particular attention to the responses of African Americans, Horne surveys the reaction in the United States to the revolutionary process in the nation that became Haiti, the splitting of the island in 1844, which led to the formation of the Dominican Republic, and the failed attempt by the United States to annex both in the 1870s.
Drawing upon a rich collection of archival and other primary source materials, Horne deftly weaves together a disparate array of voices—world leaders and diplomats, slaveholders, white abolitionists, and the freedom fighters he terms Black Jacobins. Horne at once illuminates the tangled conflicts of the colonial powers, the commercial interests and imperial ambitions of U.S. elites, and the brutality and tenacity of the American slaveholding class, while never losing sight of the freedom struggles of Africans both on the island and on the mainland, which sought the fulfillment of the emancipatory promise of 18th century republicanism.