You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
For a growing number of people, democracy has become synonymous with broken promises and abandoned commitments. Governments everywhere are not listening to their citizens’ concerns on matters of fundamental importance. As a result, ordinary men and women of all political persuasions are demanding transformations, not just to government policies, but to the methods of governance themselves. They realize that in the periods between general elections, they have great difficulty having their voices heard, because they have no formal role in constructing political agendas. This book focuses on one way to address this problem, by establishing a continual dialogue between individuals and their go...
This Reader includes selections from Ellen Meiksins Wood’s groundbreaking scholarship, providing an overview of her original interpretations of capitalism, precapitalist societies, the state, political theory, democracy, citizenship, liberalism, civil society, the Enlightenment, globalization, imperialism, and socialism.
First comparative study of landless households brings out their major role in European history and society.
This book examines the social, economic and political aftermath of the famous Anglo-American 'destroyers-for-bases' deal of 2nd September 1940 that saw fifty obsolete U.S. destroyers exchanged for 'base colonies' in Trinidad, Bermuda, Newfoundland and the Bahamas.
Austerity is a bitter pill to swallow. But it is even the more galling when we realize that it is the wrong medicine for our ailing economy.
A cryptodemocracy is cryptographically-secured collective choice infrastructure on which individuals coordinate their voting property rights. Drawing on economic and political theory, a cryptodemocracy is a more fluid and emergent form of collective choice. This book examines these theoretical characteristics before exploring specific applications of a cryptodemocracy in labor bargaining and corporate governance. The analysis of the characteristics of a more emergent and contractual democratic process has implications for a wide range of collective choice.
Between 1760 and 1860, the English countryside was subject to constant attempts at agricultural improvement. Most often these meant depriving cottagers and rural workers of access to land they could cultivate, despite evidence that they were the most productive farmers in a country constantly short of food. Drawing from a wide range of contemporary sources, Apostles of Inequality argues that such attempts, driven by a flawed faith in the wonders of capital, did little to increase agricultural productivity and instead led to a century of increasing impoverishment in rural England. Jim Handy rejects the assertions about the benefits that accompanied the transition to "improved" agriculture and...
This narrative and empirical analysis investigates Hilary's claim that in his day they would not have left a man behind to die. The authors examine over 60 years of Himalayan climbing data and stories in order to test the changes in cooperation in this extreme life and death environment.
This edited volume builds and expands on the groundbreaking work of Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood on the origins of capitalism. Whereas Brenner and Wood focused mostly on the emergence of capitalism in the English countryside (agrarian capitalism), this book utilizes their approach to offer original, theoretically sophisticated, and empirically informed accounts of transitions to capitalism – both agrarian and industrial – in a wide range of countries in order to provide within a single volume a diverse collection of relatively brief yet detailed case studies of the historical transition to capitalism distributed across three continents. Offering a new and highly original analysis of the global spread of capitalism, this book will be a unique contribution to the longstanding debate on the transition to capitalism.
Neoliberalism has been the defining paradigm in global health since the latter part of the twentieth century. What started as an untested and unproven theory that the creation of unfettered markets would give rise to political democracy led to policies that promoted the belief that private markets were the optimal agents for the distribution of social goods, including health care. A vivid illustration of the infiltration of neoliberal ideology into the design and implementation of development programs, this case study, set in post-Soviet TajikistanÕs remote eastern province of Badakhshan, draws on extensive ethnographic and historical material to examine a Òrevolving drug fundÓ programÑused by numerous nongovernmental organizations globally to address shortages of high-quality pharmaceuticals in poor communities.ÊProvocative, rigorous, and accessible, Blind Spot offers a cautionary tale about the forces driving decision making in health and development policy today, illustrating how the privatization of health care can have catastrophic outcomes for some of the worldÕs most vulnerable populations.