With the end of the Cold War, the death of Communism, and the decline of Socialism, what are the primary issues, ideologies, and parties that now structure politics? Melzer, Zinman, and Weinberger have compiled essays from prominent experts to examine the politics of the past to help plot the political future.The first half of the volume addresses “Identity Politics” and “Big Government” and their respective places in the shaping of the United States political environment since the...

In the third edition of his classic work, revised extensively and updated to include recent developments on the international scene, Jack Donnelly explains and defends a richly interdisciplinary account of human rights as universal rights. He shows that any conception of human rights—and the idea of human rights itself—is historically specific and contingent.Since publication of the first edition in 1989, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice has j...

“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...

The core of this book is a systematic treatment of the historic transformation of the West from monarchy to democracy. Revisionist in nature, it reaches the conclusion that monarchy is a lesser evil than democracy, but outlines deficiencies in both. Its methodology is axiomatic-deductive, allowing the writer to derive economic and sociological theorems, and then apply them to interpret historical events.A compelling chapter on time preference describes the progress of civilization ...

The Rights of Others examines the boundaries of political community by focusing on political membership - the principles and practices for incorporating aliens and strangers, immigrants and newcomers, refugees and asylum seekers into existing polities. Boundaries define some as members, others as aliens. But when state sovereignty is becoming frayed, and national citizenship is unravelling, definitions of political membership become much less clear. Indeed few issues in world politics toda...

Liberalism is egalitarian in principle, but why doesn’t it do more to promote equality in practice? In this book, the distinguished political philosopher Michael Walzer offers a critique of liberal theory and demonstrates that crucial realities have been submerged in the evolution of contemporary liberal thought.In the standard versions of liberal theory, autonomous individuals deliberate about what ought to be done-but in the real world, citizens also organize, mobilize, bargain, ...

Truth and reconciliation commissions and official governmental apologies continue to surface worldwide as mechanisms for coming to terms with human rights violations and social atrocities. As the first scholarly collection to explore the intersections and differences between a range of redress cases that have emerged in Canada in recent decades, Reconciling Canada provides readers with the contexts for understanding the phenomenon of reconciliation as it has played out in this mul...

This book fills a growing gap in the literature on international development by addressing the debates about good governance and institution-building within the context of political development.Political Development returns the key issues of human rights and democratization to the centre of the development debate and offers the reader an alternative to the conventional approach to, and definition of, the idea of ‘development’. Discussing political development in its broade...

In this sequel to A Critique of Modernity, Alain Touraine questions the social and cultural content of democracy today. At a time when state power is being increasingly eroded by the economic might of transnational capital, what possible value can we ascribe to a democratic idea that is defined merely as a set of guarantees against the totalitarian state?If democracy is to survive in the postcommunist world, Touraine argues, it must accomplish two urgent goals: It must somehow protect the ...

How should state-sponsored atrocities be judged and remembered? This controversial question animates contemporary debates on transitional justice and reconciliation. This book reconsiders the legacies of two institutions that transformed the theory and practice of transitional justice. Whereas the Nuremberg Trials exemplified the promise of legalism and international criminal justice, South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission promoted restorative justice and truth commissions. Lee...

Libertarianism isn’t about winning elections; it is first and foremost a political philosophy—a description of how, in the opinion of libertarians, free people ought to treat one another, at least when they use the law, which they regard as potentially dangerous. If libertarians are correct, the law should intrude into people’s lives as little as possible, rarely telling them what to do or how to live.A political and economic philosophy as old as John Locke and John Stuart Mill, bu...

A reference surveying the major concerns, findings, and terms of social history. The coverage includes major categories within social history (family, demographic transition, multiculturalism, industrialization, nationalism); major aspects of life for which social history has provided a crucial per