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This is a study of what it means, both strategically and intellectually, to take the center position in politics. The two specific political centers considered are the efforts in France and England after the Napoleonic Wars to establish middle class rule as a permanent center, or "juste milieu "between the extremes of revolution and reaction. The four prototypical political thinkers examined are Pierre Paul Royer-Collard and Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot in France, and the English reform Whigs, Henry Peter Brougham and Thomas Babington Macaulay. Starzinger carefully explains his choice of these critical figures, emphasizing in his new introduction a current climate of opinion that is far ...
The Western tradition of the constitutional state, with its ancient roots, defines political extremes as the epitome of that what must be absolutely rejected. It highlights tyranny, despotism, despotic rule, non-autonomy, ruthless enforcing of interests as ‘extreme’, contrasting this to a virtuous mean which guarantees moderation. In this volume, the culmination of twenty years of extensive research, Uwe Backes provides a conceptual history of the notions "extreme" and "extremism" from antiquity to the present day. The terminological history of political extremes had been related for more then two millennia with the term mesotês used in the Aristotelian ethics and the theory of mixed co...
In a tour de force of comparative intellectual history, Mark Hulliung sharply challenges conventional wisdom about the political nature of the "sister republics," America and France. Hulliung argues that the standard American account of a continuous Jacobin republican tradition--"illiberal to the core"--is fatally misleading. In reality it was the nineteenth-century French liberals who undermined the cause of liberalism, and it was French republicans who eventually saved liberal ideals. And comparison with France provides compelling evidence that the American republic was from the beginning both liberal and republican; Americans have been engaged in the "right debate, wrong country." Antiliberal intellectuals--New Leftists, neoconservatives, and communitarians alike--have disfigured much of the "republican" scholarship by falsely conjuring up a history of the United States wherein rooted and moral republicans once held sway where today we encounter uprooted and amoral liberals. Lively, stimulating, and sure to be controversial, Citizens and Citoyens is a valuable contribution to the political culture debate.
This book charts the varieties of political moderation in modern European history from the French Revolution to the present day. It explores the attempts to find a middle way between ideological extremes, from the nineteenth-century Juste Milieu and balance of power, via the Third Ways between capitalism and socialism, to the current calls for moderation beyond populism and religious radicalism. The essays in this volume are inspired by the widely-recognized need for a more nuanced political discourse. The contributors demonstrate how the history of modern politics offers a range of experiences and examples of the search for a middle way that can help us to navigate the tensions of the current political climate. At the same time, the volume offers a diagnosis of the problems and pitfalls of Third Ways, of finding the middle between extremes, and of the weaknesses of the moderate point of view.
From their beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century through the 1980's, political parties in Chile have displayed three discrete ideological tendencies, with two at opposite ends of the political spectrum and at least one in the center. This tripartite distribution made Chile's party system unlike any other in Latin America. How did Chile's distinctive system evolve? This book finds the answer in how three basic social cleavages--religious, urban, and rural--became polarized at three periods of critical juncture. Clerical-anticlerical conflict gave initial definition to the party system in the period 1857-61, and continued to shape the political arena long after specific issues had receded i...
Culture studies try to understand how people assume identities and how they perceive reality. In this perspective narration, as a basic form of cognitive processing, is a fundamental cultural technique. Narrations provide the coherence, temporal organization and semantic integration that are essential for the development and communication of identity, knowledge and orientation in a socio-cultural context. In essence, Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” need to be thought of as “Narrated Communities” from the beginning. Narration is made up by what people think; and vice versa, narration makes up people's thoughts. What is considered "fictitious" or "real" no longer separates narrativ...
*An examination of the survival of cultural values in a postmodern environment*
Emerging from two decades of the Great Depression and the New Deal and facing the rise of radical ideologies abroad, the American Right seemed beaten, broken, and adrift in the early 1950s. Although conservative luminaries such as T. S. Eliot, William F. Buckley Jr., Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin all published important works at this time, none of their writings would match the influence of Russell Kirk's 1953 masterpiece The Conservative Mind. This seminal book became the intellectual touchstone for a reinvigorated movement and began a sea change in Americans' attitudes toward traditionalism. In Russell Kirk, Bradley J. Birzer investigates the life and work of the man known as the founder ...
This spirited analysis--and defense--of American liberalism demonstrates the complex and rich traditions of political, economic, and social discourse that have informed American democratic culture from the seventeenth century to the present. The Virtues of Liberalism provides a convincing response to critics both right and left. Against conservatives outside the academy who oppose liberalism because they equate it with license, James T. Kloppenberg uncovers ample evidence of American republicans' and liberal democrats' commitments to ethical and religious ideals and their awareness of the difficult choices involved in promoting virtue in a culturally diverse nation. Against radical academic ...
The 2006 elections constitute a major redrawing of the political map in Israel due to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s exit from the Likud party and his creation of a new centre party, Kadima. Following Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, Sharon formed Kadima taking many former Likud MKs, and prominent members of the Labour party with him. Focusing particularly on the various political parties, the election campaign in the media and the main issues at stake in the election including: foreign and defence policies, social and economic issues, as well as, the issue of corruption, this book examines the impact of this reorganization of the political map. The impact of events in the Palestinian Authority and other external factors are also discussed, as well as the challenges for the new government, in the wake of the election results. This book was previously published as a special issue of Israel Affairs.