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Mulford Sibley, for many years a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, used to frequently quote Plato's complaint in the Laws "that man never legislates but accidents of all sorts . . . legislate for us in all sorts of ways. The violence of war and the hard necessity of poverty are constantly overturning governments and changing laws." But even if most legislation is a result of accident, Mulford Sibley holds out to us the idea that politics is a sphere of human freedom, in which men and women can collectively determine the conditions of their common life.
Comprising critical writings in civil-military relations theory and research, this book of essays integrates the ideas and insights drawn from political science, particularly its subfields of comparative politics, theory and methodology both normative and empirical, with those from the combined disciplines of philosophy of science, history, sociology, and development studies, bringing out the relevance of these ideas and insights for understanding and analysing the issues central to the place and role of military in the Nigerian society. This book will be useful to students, academics, journalists and activists working on Nigeria in particular, and Africa in general. Print edition not for sale in Nigeria.
Love Valley is a small town in rural North Carolina. Its genesis in 1954 marked the fulfillment of a dream for founder Andy Barker. Barker cultivated two visions as a young man--he wanted to build a Christian community, and he wanted to be a cowboy. The result of his vision is Barker's utopian experiment. The town boasts a saloon, general store, hitching posts, and rodeos. Yet, above all of this stands a little church--the heart of what Barker conceived as his Christian utopia. This unique combination has led to more than forty years of philanthropic ventures, controversial events such as the Love Valley Rock Festival, stories and legends, and political ambition. Love Valley: An American Utopia captures the history of this town in narrative form while arguing that Love Valley's founders were motivated by utopian goals.
This book draws on Professor Arend Lijphart’s lifetime experience of research and publication in democracy and comparative politics and collects together for the first time his most significant and influential work.
In Europe after World War II, U.S. economic aid helped to ensure economic revival, political stability, and democracy. In the Third World, however, aid has been associated with very different tendencies: uneven political development, violence, political instability, and authoritarian rule in most countries. Despite these differing patterns of political change in Europe and the Third World, however, American conceptions of political development have remained largely constant: democracy, stability, anti-communism. Why did the objectives and theories of U.S. aid officials and social scientists remain largely the same in the face of such negative results and despite the seeming inappropriateness...
Idioms of Inquiry reflects the most recent and creative thinking in the field of political theory. The contributors agree that the old orthodox political theory is no longer viable, arguing instead for a pluralism of approaches. Each takes a particular idiom of inquiry on its own terms and analyzes its plausibility and internal limitations. The idioms discussed cover the current leading theories: rational choice, Popperian situational analysis, hermeneutics, phenomenology, critical theory, feminism, Foucauldian deconstructionism, and metascientific realism.
A Stanford University Press classic.
The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (AJISS), established in 1984, is a quarterly, double blind peer-reviewed and interdisciplinary journal, published by the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), and distributed worldwide. The journal showcases a wide variety of scholarly research on all facets of Islam and the Muslim world including subjects such as anthropology, history, philosophy and metaphysics, politics, psychology, religious law, and traditional Islam.
Monster studies, dystopian literature and film studies have become central to research on the now-proliferating works that give voice to culture-specific anxieties. This new development in scholarship reinforces the notion that the genres of fantasy and science fiction call for interpretations that see their spaces of imagination as reflections of reality, not as spaces invented merely to escape the real world. In this vein, Displacing the Anxieties of Our World discusses fictive spaces of literature, film, and video gaming. The eleven essays that follow the Introduction are grouped into four parts: I. “Imagined Journeys through History, Gaming and Travel”; II. “Political Anxieties and...
The Adversary First Amendment presents a unique and controversial rethinking of modern American democratic theory and free speech. Most free speech scholars understand the First Amendment as a vehicle for or protection of democracy itself, relying upon cooperative or collectivist theories of democracy. Martin Redish reconsiders free speech in the context of adversary democracy, arguing that individuals should have the opportunity to affect the outcomes of collective decision-making according to their own values and interests. Adversary democracy recognizes the inevitability of conflict within a democratic society, as well as the need for regulation of that conflict to prevent the onset of tyranny. In doing so, it embraces pluralism, diversity, and the individual growth and development deriving from the promotion of individual interests. Drawing on previous free speech scholarship and case studies of controversial speech, Redish advances a theory of free expression grounded in democratic notions of self-promotion and controlled adversary conflict, making a strong case for its application across such areas as commercial speech, campaign spending, and anonymous speech.