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The Myth Of Consensus
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Book Synopsis The Myth of Consensus by : Harriet Jones
Download or read book The Myth of Consensus written by Harriet Jones and published by Springer. This book was released on 1996-11-12 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking collection of essays challenges the notion that early postwar Britain was characterised by a consensus between the major political parties arising out of the experiences of the wartime coalition government. The volume collects for the first time the views of the revisionist historians who argue that fundamental differences between and within the parties continued to characterise British politics after 1945. Covering topics as diverse as industrial relations and decolonisation, the volume provides a welcome contrast to orthodox interpretations of contemporary Britain.
Book Synopsis The Myth of Digital Democracy by : Matthew Hindman
Download or read book The Myth of Digital Democracy written by Matthew Hindman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Matthew Hindman reveals here that, contrary to popular belief, the Internet has done little to broaden political discourse in the United States, but rather that it empowers a small set of elites - some new, but most familiar.
Book Synopsis The Myth of American Religious Freedom by : David Sehat
Download or read book The Myth of American Religious Freedom written by David Sehat and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-14 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the battles over religion and politics in America, both liberals and conservatives often appeal to history. Liberals claim that the Founders separated church and state. But for much of American history, David Sehat writes, Protestant Christianity was intimately intertwined with the state. Yet the past was not the Christian utopia that conservatives imagine either. Instead, a Protestant moral establishment prevailed, using government power to punish free thinkers and religious dissidents. In The Myth of American Religious Freedom, Sehat provides an eye-opening history of religion in public life, overturning our most cherished myths. Originally, the First Amendment applied only to the federal government, which had limited authority. The Protestant moral establishment ruled on the state level. Using moral laws to uphold religious power, religious partisans enforced a moral and religious orthodoxy against Catholics, Jews, Mormons, agnostics, and others. Not until 1940 did the U.S. Supreme Court extend the First Amendment to the states. As the Supreme Court began to dismantle the connections between religion and government, Sehat argues, religious conservatives mobilized to maintain their power and began the culture wars of the last fifty years. To trace the rise and fall of this Protestant establishment, Sehat focuses on a series of dissenters--abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, socialist Eugene V. Debs, and many others. Shattering myths held by both the left and right, David Sehat forces us to rethink some of our most deeply held beliefs. By showing the bad history used on both sides, he denies partisans a safe refuge with the Founders.
Book Synopsis The Myth of Race by : Robert Wald Sussman
Download or read book The Myth of Race written by Robert Wald Sussman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biological races do not exist—and never have. This view is shared by all scientists who study variation in human populations. Yet racial prejudice and intolerance based on the myth of race remain deeply ingrained in Western society. In his powerful examination of a persistent, false, and poisonous idea, Robert Sussman explores how race emerged as a social construct from early biblical justifications to the pseudoscientific studies of today. The Myth of Race traces the origins of modern racist ideology to the Spanish Inquisition, revealing how sixteenth-century theories of racial degeneration became a crucial justification for Western imperialism and slavery. In the nineteenth century, these theories fused with Darwinism to produce the highly influential and pernicious eugenics movement. Believing that traits from cranial shape to raw intelligence were immutable, eugenicists developed hierarchies that classified certain races, especially fair-skinned “Aryans,” as superior to others. These ideologues proposed programs of intelligence testing, selective breeding, and human sterilization—policies that fed straight into Nazi genocide. Sussman examines how opponents of eugenics, guided by the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas’s new, scientifically supported concept of culture, exposed fallacies in racist thinking. Although eugenics is now widely discredited, some groups and individuals today claim a new scientific basis for old racist assumptions. Pondering the continuing influence of racist research and thought, despite all evidence to the contrary, Sussman explains why—when it comes to race—too many people still mistake bigotry for science.
Book Synopsis The Myth of the Strong Leader by : Archie Brown
Download or read book The Myth of the Strong Leader written by Archie Brown and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the world's preeminent political historians, a magisterial study of political leadership around the world from the advent of parliamentary democracy to the age of Obama. All too frequently, leadership is reduced to a simple dichotomy: the strong versus the weak. Yet, there are myriad ways to exercise effective political leadership -- as well as different ways to fail. We blame our leaders for economic downfalls and praise them for vital social reforms, but rarely do we question what makes some leaders successful while others falter. In this magisterial and wide-ranging survey of political leadership over the past hundred years, renowned Oxford politics professor Archie Brown challenges the widespread belief that strong leaders -- meaning those who dominate their colleagues and the policy-making process -- are the most successful and admirable. In reality, only a minority of political leaders will truly make a lasting difference. Though we tend to dismiss more collegial styles of leadership as weak, it is often the most cooperative leaders who have the greatest impact. Drawing on extensive research and decades of political analysis and experience, Brown illuminates the achievements, failures and foibles of a broad array of twentieth century politicians. Whether speaking of redefining leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Margaret Thatcher, who expanded the limits of what was politically possible during their time in power, or the even rarer transformational leaders who played a decisive role in bringing about systemic change -- Charles de Gaulle, Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela, among them -- Brown challenges our commonly held beliefs about political efficacy and strength. Overturning many of our assumptions about the twentieth century's most important figures, Brown's conclusions are both original and enlightening. The Myth of the Strong Leader compels us to reassess the leaders who have shaped our world - and to reconsider how we should choose and evaluate those who will lead us into the future.
Download or read book The Myth of 1648 written by Benno Teschke and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2003 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize This book rejects a commonplace of European history: that the treaties of Westphalia not only closed the Thirty Years' War but also inaugurated a new international order driven by the interaction of territorial sovereign states. Benno Teschke, through this thorough and incisive critique, argues that this is not the case. Domestic 'social property relations' shaped international relations in continental Europe down to 1789 and even beyond. The dynastic monarchies that ruled during this time differed from their medieval predecessors in degree and form of personalization, but not in underlying dynamic. 1648, therefore, is a false caesura in the history of international relations. For real change we must wait until relatively recent times and the development of modern states and true capitalism. In effect, it's not until governments are run impersonally, with no function other than the exercise of its monopoly on violence, that modern international relations are born.
Book Synopsis Echoes of Greatness by : Lesley M. Smith
Download or read book Echoes of Greatness written by Lesley M. Smith and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Myth of José Martí by : Lillian Guerra
Download or read book The Myth of José Martí written by Lillian Guerra and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2006-03-13 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on a period of history rocked by four armed movements, Lillian Guerra traces the origins of Cubans' struggles to determine the meaning of their identity and the character of the state, from Cuba's last war of independence in 1895 to the consolidation of U.S. neocolonial hegemony in 1921. Guerra argues that political violence and competing interpretations of the "social unity" proposed by Cuba's revolutionary patriot, Jose Marti, reveal conflicting visions of the nation--visions that differ in their ideological radicalism and in how they cast Cuba's relationship with the United States. As Guerra explains, some nationalists supported incorporating foreign investment and values, while others sought social change through the application of an authoritarian model of electoral politics; still others sought a democratic government with social and economic justice. But for all factions, the image of Marti became the principal means by which Cubans attacked, policed, and discredited one another to preserve their own vision over others'. Guerra's examination demonstrates how competing historical memories and battles for control of a weak state explain why polarity, rather than consensus on the idea of the "nation" and the character of the Cuban state, came to define Cuban politics throughout the twentieth century.
Book Synopsis The Myth of American Individualism by : Barry Alan Shain
Download or read book The Myth of American Individualism written by Barry Alan Shain and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1996-08-25 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sharpening the debate over the values that formed America's founding political philosophy, Barry Alan Shain challenges us to reconsider what early Americans meant when they used such basic political concepts as the public good, liberty, and slavery. We have too readily assumed, he argues, that eighteenth-century Americans understood these and other terms in an individualistic manner. However, by exploring how these core elements of their political thought were employed in Revolutionary-era sermons, public documents, newspaper editorials, and political pamphlets, Shain reveals a very different understanding--one based on a reformed Protestant communalism. In this context, individual liberty was the freedom to order one's life in accord with the demanding ethical standards found in Scripture and confirmed by reason. This was in keeping with Americans' widespread acceptance of original sin and the related assumption that a well-lived life was only possible in a tightly knit, intrusive community made up of families, congregations, and local government bodies. Shain concludes that Revolutionary-era Americans defended a Protestant communal vision of human flourishing that stands in stark opposition to contemporary liberal individualism. This overlooked component of the American political inheritance, he further suggests, demands examination because it alters the historical ground upon which contemporary political alternatives often seek legitimation, and it facilitates our understanding of much of American history and of the foundational language still used in authoritative political documents.
Book Synopsis The Myth of American Exceptionalism by : Godfrey Hodgson
Download or read book The Myth of American Exceptionalism written by Godfrey Hodgson and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea that the United States is destined to spread its unique gifts of democracy and capitalism to other countries is dangerous for Americans and for the rest of the world, warns Godfrey Hodgson in this provocative book. Hodgson, a shrewd and highly respected British commentator, argues that America is not as exceptional as it would like to think; its blindness to its own history has bred a complacent nationalism and a disastrous foreign policy that has isolated and alienated it from the global community. Tracing the development of America’s high self regard from the early days of the republic to the present era, Hodgson demonstrates how its exceptionalism has been systematically exaggerated and—in recent decades—corrupted. While there have been distinct and original elements in America’s history and political philosophy, notes Hodgson, these have always been more heavily influenced by European thought and experience than Americans have been willing to acknowledge. A stimulating and timely assessment of how America’s belief in its exceptionalism has led it astray, this book is mandatory reading for its citizens, admirers, and detractors.
Book Synopsis The Myth of Leadership by : Jeffrey S. Nielsen
Download or read book The Myth of Leadership written by Jeffrey S. Nielsen and published by Nicholas Brealey. This book was released on 2011-05-16 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can we really run organizations without leaders? Yes, says organizational consultant Jeffery Nielson in this provocative book. According to Nielsen, it's time to stop structuring businesses as "rank-based" organizations run by a privileged elite who are so isolated from the front lines that they are downright counterproductive. Debunking the leadership myth, Nielsen calls for an end to leader-based corporate hierarchies, which foster secrecy, encourage miscommunication, and steal the joy and dignity from work. His new paradigm is the "peer-based" organization. No matter how you feel about Nielsen's theory of leaderless organizations, you are sure to find this book thought provoking. It will challenge your assumptions about the role of leadership in modern organizations.
Book Synopsis The Myth of Statistical Inference by : Michael C. Acree
Download or read book The Myth of Statistical Inference written by Michael C. Acree and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-07-05 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes and explores the idea that the forced union of the aleatory and epistemic aspects of probability is a sterile hybrid, inspired and nourished for 300 years by a false hope of formalizing inductive reasoning, making uncertainty the object of precise calculation. Because this is not really a possible goal, statistical inference is not, cannot be, doing for us today what we imagine it is doing for us. It is for these reasons that statistical inference can be characterized as a myth. The book is aimed primarily at social scientists, for whom statistics and statistical inference are a common concern and frustration. Because the historical development given here is not merely anecdotal, but makes clear the guiding ideas and ambitions that motivated the formulation of particular methods, this book offers an understanding of statistical inference which has not hitherto been available. It will also serve as a supplement to the standard statistics texts. Finally, general readers will find here an interesting study with implications far beyond statistics. The development of statistical inference, to its present position of prominence in the social sciences, epitomizes a number of trends in Western intellectual history of the last three centuries, and the 11th chapter, considering the function of statistical inference in light of our needs for structure, rules, authority, and consensus in general, develops some provocative parallels, especially between epistemology and politics.
Book Synopsis The Myth of Normal by : Gabor Maté, MD
Download or read book The Myth of Normal written by Gabor Maté, MD and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-09-13 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The instant New York Times bestseller By the acclaimed author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a bracing critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing. In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. So what is really “normal” when it comes to health? Over four decades of clinical experience, Maté has come to recognize the prevailing understanding of “normal” as false, neglecting the roles that trauma and stress, and the pressures of modern-day living, exert on our bodies and our minds at the expense of good health. For all our expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how today’s culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance. Now Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick, connects the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society—and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing. Cowritten with his son Daniel, The Myth Of Normal is Maté’s most ambitious and urgent book yet.
Download or read book The Covid Consensus written by Toby Green and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-01 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the onset of the pandemic, progressive opinion has been clear that hard lockdowns are the best way to preserve life, while only irresponsible and destructive conservatives like Trump and Bolsonaro oppose them. But why should liberals favor lockdowns, when all the social science research shows that those who suffer most are the economically disadvantaged, without access to good internet or jobs that can be done remotely; that the young will pay the price of the pandemic in future taxes, job prospects, and erosion of public services, when they are already disadvantaged in comparison in terms of pension prospects, paying university fees, and state benefits; and that Covid's impact on the Global South is catastrophic, with the UN predicting potentially tens of millions of deaths from hunger and declaring that decades of work in health and education is being reversed. Toby Green analyses the contradictions emerging through this response as part of a broader crisis in Western thought, where conservative thought is also riven by contradictions, with lockdown policies creating just the sort of big state that it abhors. These contradictions mirror underlying irreconcilable beliefs in society that are now bursting into the open, with devastating consequences for the global poor.
Book Synopsis The Myth of Political Correctness by : John K. Wilson
Download or read book The Myth of Political Correctness written by John K. Wilson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classics of Western culture are out, not being taught, replaced by second-rate and Third World texts. White males are a victimized minority on campuses across the country, thanks to affirmative action. Speech codes have silenced anyone who won't toe the liberal line. Feminists, wielding their brand of sexual correctness, have taken over. These are among the prevalent myths about higher education that John K. Wilson explodes. The phrase "political correctness" is on everyone's lips, on radio and television, and in newspapers and magazines. The phenomenon itself, however, has been deceptively described. Wilson steps into the nation's favorite cultural fray to reveal that many of the most widely publicized anecdotes about PC are in fact more myth than reality. Based on his own experience as a student and in-depth research, he shows what's really going on beneath the hysteria and alarmism about political correctness and finds that the most disturbing examples of thought policing on campus have come from the right. The image of the college campus as a gulag of left-wing totalitarianism is false, argues Wilson, created largely through the exaggeration of deceptive stories by conservatives who hypocritically seek to silence their political opponents. Many of today's most controversial topics are here: multiculturalism, reverse discrimination, speech codes, date rape, and sexual harassment. So are the well-recognized protagonists in the debate: Dinesh D'Souza, William Bennett, and Lynne Cheney, among others. In lively fashion and in meticulous detail, Wilson compares fact to fiction and lays one myth after another to rest, revealing the double standard that allows "conservative correctness" on college campuses to go unchallenged.
Download or read book Myths of Empire written by Jack Snyder and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Overextension is the common pitfall of empires. Why does it occur? What are the forces that cause the great powers of the industrial era to pursue aggressive foreign policies? Jack Snyder identifies recurrent myths of empire, describes the varieties of overextension to which they lead, and criticizes the traditional explanations offered by historians and political scientists.He tests three competing theories—realism, misperception, and domestic coalition politics—against five detailed case studies: early twentieth-century Germany, Japan in the interwar period, Great Britain in the Victorian era, the Soviet Union after World War II, and the United States during the Cold War. The resulting insights run counter to much that has been written about these apparently familiar instances of empire building.
Book Synopsis The Myth of International Order by : Arjun Chowdhury
Download or read book The Myth of International Order written by Arjun Chowdhury and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In February of 2011, Libyan citizens rebelled against Muammar Qaddafi and quickly unseated him. The speed of the regime's collapse confounded many observers, and the ensuing civil war showed Foreign Policy's index of failed states to be deeply flawed--FP had, in 2010, identified 110 states as being more likely than Libya to descend into chaos. They were spectacularly wrong, but this points to a larger error in conventional foreign policy wisdom: failed, or weak and unstable, states are not anomalies but are instead in the majority. More states resemble Libya than Sweden. Why are most states weak and unstable? Taking as his launching point Charles Tilly's famous dictum that 'war made the state, and the state made war, ' Arjun Chowdhury argues that the problem lies in our mistaken equation of democracy and economic power with stability. But major wars are the true source of stability: only the existential crisis that such wars produced could lead citizens to willingly sacrifice the resources that allowed the state to build the capacity it needed for survival. Developing states in the postcolonial era never experienced the demands major interstate war placed on European states, and hence citizens in those nations have been unwilling to sacrifice the resources that would build state capacity. For example, India and Mexico are established democracies with large economies. Despite their indices of stability, both countries are far from stable: there is an active Maoist insurgency in almost a quarter of India's districts, and Mexico is plagued by violence, drug trafficking, and high levels of corruption in local government. Nor are either effective at collecting revenue. As a consequence, they do not have the tax base necessary to perform the most fundamental tasks of modern states: controlling organized violence in a given territory and providing basic services to citizens. By this standard, the majority of states in the world--about two thirds--are weak states. Chowdury maintains that an accurate evaluation of international security requires a normative shift: the language of weakness and failure belies the fact that strong states are exceptions. Chowdhury believes that dismantling this norm is crucial, as it encourages developing states to pursue state-building via war, which is an extremely costly approach--in terms of human lives and capital. Moreover, in our era, such an approach is destined to fail because the total wars of the past are highly unlikely to occur today. Just as importantly, the non-state alternatives on offer are not viable alternatives. For better or worse, we will continue to live in a state-dominated world where most states are weak. Counterintuitive and sweeping in its coverage, The Myth of International Order demands that we fundamentally rethink foundational concepts of international politics like political stability and state failure.
