- Table View
- List View
Inventing Human Rights: A History
by Lynn Hunt"A tour de force."--Gordon S. Wood, New York Times Book Review How were human rights invented, and how does their tumultuous history influence their perception and our ability to protect them today? From Professor Lynn Hunt comes this extraordinary cultural and intellectual history, which traces the roots of human rights to the rejection of torture as a means for finding the truth. She demonstrates how ideas of human relationships portrayed in novels and art helped spread these new ideals and how human rights continue to be contested today.
Inventing the EU as a Democratic Polity: Concepts, Actors And Controversies (Palgrave Studies In European Political Sociology Series)
by Claudia WiesnerThe EU as a democratic polity has been invented: it is a product of creative and innovative actors and thinkers that conceptualized and by and by helped to realise it, from the beginning up to the present. But the concepts, ideas, and utopias of a democratic Europe differ considerably. The processes of inventing and building a democratic EU are marked by conceptual controversies in both public and academic debates. These are the resource for the present book, which focuses on the concepts, actors and controversies related to inventing the EU as a democratic polity. The chapters study exemplary long-term and detail cases related to inventing and institutionalizing the decisive elements of representative democracy in the EU—a parliament, citizens that vote for it in universal suffrage and governmental bodies that are linked to parliament in much the same way as government is in a parliamentary democracy.
Inventing the Future
by Alex Williams Nick SrnicekA major new manifesto for a high-tech future free from workNeoliberalism isn't working. Austerity is forcing millions into poverty and many more into precarious work, while the left remains trapped in stagnant political practices that offer no respite. Inventing the Future is a bold new manifest0 for life after capitalism. Against the confused understanding of our high-tech world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed. Instead of running from a complex future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams demand a postcapitaiist economy capable of advancing standards, liberating humanity from work and developing technologies that expand our freedoms.
Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy
by Katherine Benton-CohenIn 1907 the U.S. Congress created a joint commission to investigate what many Americans saw as a national crisis: an unprecedented number of immigrants flowing into the United States. Experts—women and men trained in the new field of social science—fanned out across the country to collect data on these fresh arrivals. The trove of information they amassed shaped how Americans thought about immigrants, themselves, and the nation’s place in the world. Katherine Benton-Cohen argues that the Dillingham Commission’s legacy continues to inform the ways that U.S. policy addresses questions raised by immigration, over a century later. Within a decade of its launch, almost all of the commission’s recommendations—including a literacy test, a quota system based on national origin, the continuation of Asian exclusion, and greater federal oversight of immigration policy—were implemented into law. Inventing the Immigration Problem describes the labyrinthine bureaucracy, broad administrative authority, and quantitative record-keeping that followed in the wake of these regulations. Their implementation marks a final turn away from an immigration policy motivated by executive-branch concerns over foreign policy and toward one dictated by domestic labor politics. The Dillingham Commission—which remains the largest immigration study ever conducted in the United States—reflects its particular moment in time when mass immigration, the birth of modern social science, and an aggressive foreign policy fostered a newly robust and optimistic notion of federal power. Its quintessentially Progressive formulation of America’s immigration problem, and its recommendations, endure today in almost every component of immigration policy, control, and enforcement.
Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism
by Larry SiedentopHere, in a grand narrative spanning 1,800 years of European history, a distinguished political philosopher firmly rejects Western liberalism's usual account of itself: its emergence in opposition to religion in the early modern era. Larry Siedentop argues instead that liberal thought is, in its underlying assumptions, the offspring of the Church.
Inventing the Job of President: Leadership Style from George Washington to Andrew Jackson
by Fred I. GreensteinHow the early presidents shaped America's highest officeFrom George Washington's decision to buy time for the new nation by signing the less-than-ideal Jay Treaty with Great Britain in 1795 to George W. Bush's order of a military intervention in Iraq in 2003, the matter of who is president of the United States is of the utmost importance. In this book, Fred Greenstein examines the leadership styles of the earliest presidents, men who served at a time when it was by no means certain that the American experiment in free government would succeed.In his groundbreaking book The Presidential Difference, Greenstein evaluated the personal strengths and weaknesses of the modern presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Here, he takes us back to the very founding of the republic to apply the same yardsticks to the first seven presidents from Washington to Andrew Jackson, giving his no-nonsense assessment of the qualities that did and did not serve them well in office. For each president, Greenstein provides a concise history of his life and presidency, and evaluates him in the areas of public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. Washington, for example, used his organizational prowess—honed as a military commander and plantation owner—to lead an orderly administration. In contrast, John Adams was erudite but emotionally volatile, and his presidency was an organizational disaster.Inventing the Job of President explains how these early presidents and their successors shaped the American presidency we know today and helped the new republic prosper despite profound challenges at home and abroad.
Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary
by Lynne A. HaneyThis ambitious, fluid, and engaging book explains the political and social transformation of the Hungarian state from 1948 to the present. Haney reconceptualizes how we might understand the momentous changes of 1989, resisting the usual categories of the socialist past and the capitalist present.
Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America
by Edmund Sears MorganThis book makes the provocative case here that America has remained politically stable because the Founding Fathers invented the idea of the American people and used it to impose a government on the new nation. His landmark analysis shows how the notion of popular sovereignty the unexpected offspring of an older, equally fictional notion, the "divine right of kings" has worked in our history and remains a political force today.
Inventing the Ties That Bind: Imagined Relationships in Moral and Political Life
by Francesca PollettaFrom deciding to hold the door for the person behind you, to resolving for whom you will cast your vote, every day we find ourselves charged with making moral decisions. What steers our choices? And how do we weigh competing priorities and moral convictions? In Inventing the Ties That Bind, Francesca Polletta shows that we do not solve these dilemmas, whether personal or political, based on self-interest alone. Instead, relationships serve as a kind of moral compass. People consider the nature of their ties to one another to know what their obligations are, and in situations that are unfamiliar, they sometimes figure out the right thing to do by imagining themselves in relationships they do not actually have. Polletta takes up a wide range of cases, from debt settlement agencies to the southern civil rights movement, revealing that our relationships and how we imagine them are at the heart of our moral lives—guiding us as we choose whom to help and how we define what it means to treat someone as our equal. In a time of growing polarization, understanding how we make sense of our ties to one another is more urgent than ever.
The Invention of a European Development Aid Bureaucracy: Recycling Empire (Palgrave Studies in European Union Politics)
by Véronique DimierA comprehensive analysis of how European development policy was shaped, this book explores the role of former colonial officials in shaping the policy agenda and explores this example of 'recycled empire.' Dimier argues that this post-colonial agenda only changed as a result of pressure from the OECD and World Bank in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York
by Suleiman OsmanThis book describes the gentrification of northwestern Brooklyn from about the 1950s to the 1970s.
The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking Of France
by Todd ShepardIn this account of the Algerian War's effect on French political structures and notions of national identity, Todd Shepard asserts that the separation of Algeria from France was truly a revolutionary event with lasting consequences for French social and political life.
The Invention of Fire: A Novel
by Bruce HolsingerThe author of the acclaimed medieval mystery A Burnable Book once again brings fourteenth-century London alive in all its color and detail in this riveting thriller featuring medieval poet and fixer John Gower—a twisty tale rife with intrigue, danger mystery, and murder.Though he is one of England’s most acclaimed intellectuals, John Gower is no stranger to London’s wretched slums and dark corners, and he knows how to trade on the secrets of the kingdom’s most powerful men. When the bodies of sixteen unknown men are found in a privy, the Sheriff of London seeks Gower’s help. The men’s wounds—ragged holes created by an unknown object—are unlike anything the sheriff’s men have ever seen. Tossed into the sewer, the bodies were meant to be found. Gower believes the men may have been used in an experiment—a test for a fearsome new war weapon his informants call the “handgonne,” claiming it will be the “future of death” if its design can be perfected.Propelled by questions of his own, Gower turns to courtier and civil servant Geoffrey Chaucer, who is working on some poems about pilgrims that Gower finds rather vulgar. Chaucer thinks he just may know who commissioned this new weapon, an extremely valuable piece of information that some will pay a high price for—and others will kill to conceal. . .
The Invention of Free Press
by Edoardo TortaroloTracking the relationship between the theory of press control and the realities of practicing daily press censorship prior to publication, this volume on the suppression of dissent in early modern Europe tackles a topic with many elusive and under-researched characteristics. Pre-publication censorship was common in absolutist regimes in Catholic and Protestant countries alike, but how effective it was in practice remains open to debate. The Netherlands and England, where critical content segued into outright lampoonery, were unusual for hard-wired press freedoms that arose, respectively, from a highly competitive publishing industry and highly decentralized political institutions. These nations remained extraordinary exceptions to a rule that, for example in France, did not end until the revolution of 1789. Here, the author's European perspective provides a survey of the varying censorship regulations in European nations, as well as the shifting meanings of 'freedom of the press'. The analysis opens up fascinating insights, afforded by careful reading of primary archival sources, into the reactions of censors confronted with manuscripts by authors seeking permission to publish. Tortarolo sets the opinions on censorship of well-known writers, including Voltaire and Montesquieu, alongside the commentary of anonymous censors, allowing us to revisit some common views of eighteenth-century history. How far did these writers, their reasoning stiffened by Enlightenment values, promote dissident views of absolutist monarchies in Europe, and what insights did governments gain from censors' reports into the social tensions brewing under their rule? These questions will excite dedicated researchers, graduate students, and discerning lay readers alike.
The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History
by Siep StuurmanFor much of history, strangers were seen as barbarians, seldom as fellow human beings. The notion of common humanity had to be invented. Drawing on global thinkers, Siep Stuurman traces ideas of equality and difference across continents and civilizations, from antiquity to present-day debates about human rights and the “clash of civilizations.”
The Invention of International Order: Remaking Europe after Napoleon
by Professor Glenda SlugaThe story of the women, financiers, and other unsung figures who helped to shape the post-Napoleonic global orderIn 1814, after decades of continental conflict, an alliance of European empires captured Paris and exiled Napoleon Bonaparte, defeating French military expansionism and establishing the Concert of Europe. This new coalition planted the seeds for today's international order, wedding the idea of a durable peace to multilateralism, diplomacy, philanthropy, and rights, and making Europe its center. Glenda Sluga reveals how at the end of the Napoleonic wars, new conceptions of the politics between states were the work not only of European statesmen but also of politically ambitious aristocratic and bourgeois men and women who seized the moment at an extraordinary crossroads in history.In this panoramic book, Sluga reinvents the study of international politics, its limitations, and its potential. She offers multifaceted portraits of the leading statesmen of the age, such as Tsar Alexander, Count Metternich, and Viscount Castlereagh, showing how they operated in the context of social networks often presided over by influential women, even as they entrenched politics as a masculine endeavor. In this history, figures such as Madame de Staël and Countess Dorothea Lieven insist on shaping the political transformations underway, while bankers influence economic developments and their families agitate for Jewish rights.Monumental in scope, this groundbreaking book chronicles the European women and men who embraced the promise of a new kind of politics in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, and whose often paradoxical contributions to modern diplomacy and international politics still resonate today.
The Invention of International Relations Theory: Realism, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the 1954 Conference on Theory
by Nicolas GuilhotThe 1954 Conference on Theory, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, featured a who's who of scholars and practitioners debating the foundations of international relations theory. Assembling his own team of experts, all of whom have struggled with this legacy, Nicolas Guilhot revisits a seminal event and its odd rejection of scientific rationalism.Far from being a spontaneous development, these essays argue, the emergence of a "realist" approach to international politics, later codified at the conference, was deliberately triggered by the Rockefeller Foundation. The organization was an early advocate of scholars who opposed the idea of a "science" of politics, pursuing, for the sake of disciplinary autonomy, a vision of politics as a prerational and existential dimension that could not be "solved" by scientific means. As a result, this nascent theory was more a rejection of behavioral social science than the birth of one of its specialized branches. The archived conversations reproduced here, along with unpublished papers by Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Nitze, speak to this defensive stance. International relations theory is critically linked to the context of postwar liberalism, and the contributors explore how these origins have played out in political thought and American foreign policy.
The Invention of Market Freedom
by Eric MacgilvrayHow did the value of freedom become so closely associated with the institution of the market? Why did the idea of market freedom hold so little appeal before the modern period and how can we explain its rise to dominance? In The Invention of Market Freedom, Eric MacGilvray addresses these questions by contrasting the market conception of freedom with the republican view that it displaced. After analyzing the ethical core and exploring the conceptual complexity of republican freedom, MacGilvray shows how this way of thinking was confronted with, altered in response to, and finally overcome by the rise of modern market societies. By learning to see market freedom as something that was invented, we can become more alert to the ways in which the appeal to freedom shapes and distorts our thinking about politics.
The Invention of Party Politics
by Gerald LeonardThis ambitious work uncovers the constitutional foundations of that most essential institution of modern democracy, the political party. Taking on Richard Hofstadter's classic The Idea of a Party System, it rejects the standard view that Martin Van Buren and other Jacksonian politicians had the idea of a modern party system in mind when they built the original Democratic party.Grounded in an original retelling of Illinois politics of the 1820s and 1830s, the book also includes chapters that connect the state-level narrative to national history, from the birth of the Constitution to the Dred Scott case. In this reinterpretation, Jacksonian party-builders no longer anticipate twentieth-century political assumptions but draw on eighteenth-century constitutional theory to justify a party division between "the democracy" and "the aristocracy." Illinois is no longer a frontier latecomer to democratic party organization but a laboratory in which politicians use Van Buren's version of the Constitution, states' rights, and popular sovereignty to reeducate a people who had traditionally opposed party organization. The modern two-party system is no longer firmly in place by 1840. Instead, the system remains captive to the constitutional commitments on which the Democrats and Whigs founded themselves, even as the specter of sectional crisis haunts the parties' constitutional visions.
Invention of Peace
by Michael HowardThroughout history the overwhelming majority of human societies have taken war for granted and made it the basis for their legal and social structures. Not until the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century did war come to be regarded as an unmitigated evil and one that could be abolished by rational social organization, and only after the massive slaughter of the two world wars did this become the declared objective of civilized states. Nevertheless, war in one form or another continues unabated. In this elegantly written book, a preeminent military historian considers why this is so. Is war in some sense still a necessary element in international order? Are war and peace in fact complementary? Does not peace itself breed the conditions that will ultimately lead to war? And if nuclear weapons have made war ultimately suicidal for mankind, what can be done about it? Having devoted half a century largely to studying these questions, Michael Howard offers us his reflections. Unless they can be answered, he notes, the twenty-first century is unlikely to be any more peaceful than the centuries that preceded it.
The Invention of Power: Popes, Kings, and the Birth of the West
by Bruce Bueno de MesquitaIn the tradition of Why Nations Fail, this book solves one of the great puzzles of history: Why did the West become the most powerful civilization in the world?Western exceptionalism—the idea that European civilizations are freer, wealthier, and less violent—is a widespread and powerful political idea. It has been a source of peace and prosperity in some societies, and of ethnic cleansing and havoc in others.Yet in The Invention of Power, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita draws on his expertise in political maneuvering, deal-making, and game theory to present a revolutionary new theory of Western exceptionalism: that a single, rarely discussed event in the twelfth century changed the course of European and world history. By creating a compromise between churches and nation-states that, in effect, traded money for power and power for money, the 1122 Concordat of Worms incentivized economic growth, facilitated secularization, and improved the lot of the citizenry, all of which set European countries on a course for prosperity. In the centuries since, countries that have had a similar dynamic of competition between church and state have been consistently better off than those that have not.The Invention of Power upends conventional thinking about European culture, religion, and race and presents a persuasive new vision of world history.
The Invention of Private Life: Literature and Ideas
by Sudipta KavirajThe essays in this volume, which lie at the intersection of the study of literature, social theory, and intellectual history, locate serious reflections on modernity's complexities in the vibrant currents of modern Indian literature, particularly in the realms of fiction, poetry, and autobiography. Sudipta Kaviraj shows that Indian writers did more than adopt new literary trends in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They deployed these innovations to interrogate fundamental philosophical questions of modernity. Issues central to modern European social theory grew into significant themes within Indian literary reflection, such as the influence of modernity on the nature of the self, the nature of historicity, the problem of evil, the character of power under the conditions of modern history, and the experience of power as felt by an individual subject of the modern state. How does modern politics affect the personality of a sensitive individual? Is love possible between intensely self-conscious people, and how do individuals cope with the transience of affections or the fragility of social ties? Kaviraj argues that these inquiries inform the heart of modern Indian literary tradition and that writers, such as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sibnath Sastri, performed immeasurably important work helping readers to think through the predicament of modern times.
The Invention of Religion in Japan (Elecronic Resource Ser.)
by Jason Ananda JosephsonThroughout its long history, Japan had no concept of what we call OC religion. OCO There was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning. But when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this Western idea. In this book, Jason Ananda Josephson reveals how Japanese officials invented religion in Japan and traces the sweeping intellectual, legal, and cultural changes that followed. aMore than a tale of oppression or hegemony, JosephsonOCOs account demonstrates that the process of articulating religion offered the Japanese state a valuable opportunity. In addition to carving out space for belief in Christianity and certain forms of Buddhism, Japanese officials excluded Shinto from the category. Instead, they enshrined it as a national ideology while relegating the popular practices of indigenous shamans and female mediums to the category of OC superstitionsOCOOCoand thus beyond the sphere of tolerance. Josephson argues that the invention of religion in Japan was a politically charged, boundary-drawing exercise that not only extensively reclassified the inherited materials of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto to lasting effect, but also reshaped, in subtle but significant ways, our own formulation of the concept of religion today. This ambitious and wide-ranging book contributes an important perspective to broader debates on the nature of religion, the secular, science, and superstition.
The Invention of Russia: The Rise of Putin and the Age of Fake News
by Arkady OstrovskyWINNER OF THE 2016 ORWELL PRIZEFINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARA highly original narrative history by The Economist's Moscow bureau chief that does for modern Russia what Evan Osnos did for China in Age of Ambition The end of communism and breakup of the Soviet Union was a time of euphoria around the world, but Russia today is violently anti-American and dangerously nationalistic. So how did we go from the promise of those heady days to the autocratic police state of Putin's new Russia? The Invention of Russia is a breathtakingly ambitious book that reaches back to the darkest days of the cold war to tell the story of the fight for the soul of a nation. With the deep insight only possible of a native son, Ostrovsky introduces us to the propagandists, oligarchs, and fixers who have set Russia's course since the collapse of the Soviet Union, inventing a new and more ominous identity for a country where ideas are all too often wielded like a cudgel. The Soviet Union yoked together dreamers and strongmen--those who believed in an egalitarian ideal and those who pushed for an even more powerful state. The new Russia is a cynical operation, where perpetual fear and war are fueled by a web of lies, as television presenters peddle the invasion of Ukraine and goad Putin to go nuclear. Twenty-five years after the Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin, Russia and America are again heading toward a confrontation--but this course was far from inevitable. With this riveting account of how we got here--of the many mistakes and false promises--Ostrovsky emerges as Russia's most gifted chronicler.From the Hardcover edition.
The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present (Routledge Revivals)
by Murray G. PittockA dynasty of high ability and great charm, the Stuarts exerted a compelling fascination over their supporters and enemies alike. First published in 1991, this title assesses the influence of the Stuart mystique on the modern political and cultural identity of Scotland. Murray Pittock traces the Stuart myth from the days of Charles I to the modern Scottish National Party, and discusses both pro- and anti-Union propaganda. He provides a unique insight into the ‘radicalism’ of Scottish Jacobitism, contrasting this ‘Jacobitisim of the Left’ with the sentimental image constructed by the Victorians. Dealing with a subject of great relevance to modern British society, this reissue provides an extensive analysis of Scottish nationhood, the Stuart cult and Jacobite ideology. It will be of great interest to students of literature, history, and Scottish culture and politics.