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A stirring account of the years that the leftist Jewish lawyer Ernst Fraenkel spent in Nazi Germany resisting the regime.
This book offers an intellectual history of Ernst Fraenkel's classic The Dual State (1941), recently republished by OUP, and one of the most erudite books on the theory of dictatorship ever written. It was the first comprehensive analysis of the nature and rise of Nazism, and the only such analysis written from within Hitler's Germany.
To date, the relationship between Otto Kirchheimer and Carl Schmitt has invariably been described as friendly, despite their political differences. Kirchheimer has even beeen attributed the role of the godfather of today's left-Schmittianism. With reference to previously unknown archival materials, conversations with personal contacts, and through a new reading of the theoretical works of both authors, including an analysis of the Nazi vocabulary used by Schmitt, Hubertus Buchstein exposes this view as a politically motivated legend. Buchstein claims that the best way to characterize their relationship from their first meeting in Bonn in 1926 up until Kirchheimer's death in 1965 is as enduring enmity - in a political, a theoretical, and even a personal sense.
In recent years there has been great interest in new forms of citizen participation, such as citizens' assemblies or deliberative polls that involve ordinary citizens in political decision-making. Many see these innovations as the best solution to the current crisis of democracy. The most radical among them propose replacing elections with the random selection of ordinary citizens, transforming electoral democracy into a lottocracy. These developments are driven by a lottocratic mentality that is deeply transforming our understanding of democracy, political equality, representation, and more. In The Lottocratic Mentality, Lafont and Urbinati focus on this way of thinking, which is flourishin...
This volume makes use of the first-generation Frankfurt School political and legal theorist, Franz L. Neumann, in conjunction with his famous successor, Jürgen Habermas, to try to understand the momentous political and legal transformations generated by globalization.
After two centuries during which it had nearly disappeared in Western countries, sortition is used again as a method of selecting people who could speak for, and in certain cases decide for, all the citizenry. What is the meaning of this comeback? To answer this question, this book offers a historical analysis. It brings together a number of the best specialists on political sortition from antiquity to contemporary experiments, in Europe but also in the Ancient Middle East and in imperial China. With a transdisciplinary perspective, this volume demonstrates that sortition has been a crucial device in political history; that the instruments and places where sortition was practised matter for the understanding of the social and political logics at stake; and that these logics have been quite different, random selection being sometimes an instrument of radical democracy and in other contexts a tool for solving conflicts among elites. Will sortition in politics helps to democratize democracy in the twenty-first century?
The New Deal left a host of political, institutional, and economic legacies. Among them was the restructuring of the government into an administrative state with a powerful executive leader and a large class of unelected officials. This "leviathan" state was championed by the political left, and its continued growth and dominance in American politics is seen as a product of liberal thought—to the extent that "Big Government" is now nearly synonymous with liberalism. Yet there were tensions among liberal statists even as the leviathan first arose. Born in crisis and raised by technocrats, the bureaucratic state always rested on shaky foundations, and the liberals who built and supported it ...
Sheds new light on the ways that policy is communicatively created, conveyed, understood, and implemented
What is Europe? What are the contents of the concept of Europe? And what defines European identity? Instead of only asking these classical questions, this volume also explores who asks these questions, and who is addressed with such questions. Who answers the questions, from which standpoints and for what reasons? Which philosophical, historical, religious or political traditions influence the answers? This book addresses its task in three parts. The first concentrates on the controversies around the meaning of Europe. The second focuses on the role of the European Union. The third discusses Europe and its relations to different types of otherness, or rather, non-European-ness. The volume produces a complex and plural picture of the concepts, ideas, debates and (ex)changes associated with the concept of Europe, and has a clear significance for today’s debates on European identity, Europeanization, and the EU.
New Challenges for Maturing Democracies in Korea and Taiwan takes a creative and comparative view of the new challenges and dynamics confronting these maturing democracies. Numerous works deal with political change in the two societies individually, but few adopt a comparative approach—and most focus mainly on the emergence of democracy or the politics of the democratization processes. This book, utilizing a broad, interdisciplinary approach, pays careful attention to post-democratization phenomena and the key issues that arise in maturing democracies. What emerges is a picture of two evolving democracies, now secure, but still imperfect and at times disappointing to their citizens—a common feature and challenge of democratic maturation. The book demonstrates that it will fall to the elected political leaders of these two countries to rise above narrow and immediate party interests to mobilize consensus and craft policies that will guide the structural adaptation and reinvigoration of the society and economy in an era that clearly presents for both countries not only steep challenges but also new opportunities.