Bringing together historians and political scientists, this unique collaboration compares nineteenth-century civil societies that failed to develop lasting democracies with civil societies that succeeded. Much of the current literature on the connection between civil society and consolidating democracy focuses exclusively on single, contemporary polities that are ever-changing and uncertain. By studying historical cases, the authors are able to demonstrate which civil societies developed i...

A fresh and sharp-eyed history of political conservatism from its nineteenth-century origins to today’s hard RightFor two hundred years, conservatism has defied its reputation as a backward-looking creed by confronting and adapting to liberal modernity. By doing so, the Right has won long periods of power and effectively become the dominant tradition in politics. Yet, despite their success, conservatives have continued to fight with each other about how far to comp...

“No one has written with more penetrating skepticism about the history of human rights.”—Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal“Moyn breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness.”—George SorosThe age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. While state violations of political rights have garnered unprecedented attention in recent decades, a commitment to material equality h...

A compelling history of liberalism from the nineteenth century to todayDespite playing a decisive role in shaping the past two hundred years of American and European politics, liberalism is no longer the dominant force it once was. In this expanded and updated edition of what has become a classic history of liberalism, Edmund Fawcett traces its ideals, successes, and failures through the lives and ideas of exemplary thinkers and politicians from the early nineteent...

You may be OK with standard stuff like Conservatism and Democracy, but do you really know what Patrimonialism is? And what about Oligarchy? Anarcho-syndicalism?Politics is, we are willing to bet, the most passionately argued-over subject matter, and yet how many of us flounder around in confrontational debates because we have no grip on political theory, just a vague notion that they are all out to get us?30-Second Politics will help dispel this fog mistrust and para...

Concern and hostility towards populism has become a distinctive feature of contemporary political culture. In Europe such concerns are frequently directed at Eurosceptics, whose opposition to the European Union is often portrayed as a cultural crime. Ancient anti-democratic claims about the gullibility, ignorance and irrationality of the masses are frequently recycled through the anti-populist condemnation of people who vote the wrong way.This book argues that the current outburst ...

State structures, international forces, and class relations: Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations. Social revolutions have been rare but undeniably of enormous importance in modern world history. States and Social Revolutions provides a new frame of reference for analyzing the causes, the conflicts, and the outcomes of such revolutions. It develops a rigorous, comparative historical analysis of three ma...

Old Gods, New Enigmas is the highly-anticipated book by the best-selling author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums. Mike Davis spent years working factory jobs and sitting behind the wheel of an eighteen wheeler before his profile as one of the world's leading urbanists emerged with the publication of his sober, if dystopian survey of Los Angeles. Since then, he's developed a reputation not only for his caustic analysis of ecological catastrophe and colonial h...

"Globalization" has become a popular buzzword for explaining today's world. The expression achieved terminological stardom in the 1990s and was soon embraced by the general public and integrated into numerous languages.But is this much-discussed phenomenon really an invention of modern times? In this work, Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels Petersson make the case that globalization is not so new, after all. Arguing that the world did not turn "global" overnight, the book traces the emer...

In his new book, G�ran Therborn - author of the now standard comparative work on classical sociology and historical materialism, Science, Class and Society - looks at successive state structures in an arrestingly fresh perspective. Therborn uses the formal categories of modern system analysis - input mechanisms, processes of transformation, output flows - to advance a substantive Marxist analysis of state power and state apparatuses. His account of these is comparative in the most...

How competing visions of world order in the 1940s gave rise to the modern concept of globalismDuring and after the Second World War, public intellectuals in Britain and the United States grappled with concerns about the future of democracy, the prospects of liberty, and the decline of the imperial system. Without using the term "globalization," they identified a shift toward technological, economic, cultural, and political interconnectedness and developed a "globali...