Political Traditions in Foreign Policy Series – Serie
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4 produkter
4 produkter
334 kr
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Dante Germino's biography of the Italian communist and political theorist Antonio Gramsci offers a major reassessment of this important twentieth-century thinker. Germino analyses Gramsci's remarkable life as well as his extensive oeuvre, from the early Turin articles to the meditative Prison Notebooks.Gramsci saw society as composed of a small but powerful political center and a large body of emarginati, marginalized people at the periphery of society who are denied access to traditional positions of power. That vision led Gramsci to concentrate on the significance of the ""common man"" as he developed his theory of the political organisation of society. The persistent theme in Gramsci's work is how the ordinary man thinks, feels, and endures, and how the course of political institutions is shaped by the efforts of the marginalized to erode the boundaries of the center. Gramsci's approach is perhaps best expressed as a reunion of philosophy and experience and a revaluation of the quotidian.Gramsci's new politics of inclusion anticipated by well over a half-century the recent epoch-making developments in the USSR and in Eastern Europe. His antiauthoritarian leadership style as secretary of the Italian Communist party in the 1920s prefigured Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost. Gramsci's insistence on the international Communist movement's openness to new social formations at the grass roots is supremely relevant to developments in Romania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland, where forces hitherto kept at the margins of political life by ossified Communist-party structures have burst on the scene with unprecedented vitality.Gramsci refused to revere Marx as a ""shepherd with a crook."" Equating history with the ""rhythm of liberty,"" he emerges as a prophetic voice in the desert of a bureaucratic and dogmatic communism. The dramatic recent changes in the Italian Communist party under Achille Ochetto also owe their ultimate inspiration to this diminutive, hunchbacked theorist-practitioner from Italy's periphery.Germino's compelling study of Gramsci's personal life and intellectual development offers fresh insights into Gramsci's work that will be of interest to all students of cultural and political theory. Of particular interest is his extensive consideration of the preprison writings both in their own right and for the light they cast on the Prison Notebooks.
314 kr
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In this informed and comprehensive assessment of current issues in international policies, Kenneth W. Thompson addresses the role that traditions and values play in shaping change and in helping us to understand its implications. He challenges the idea that the enormous changes in contemporary national and international life have rendered the consideration of traditions and values obsolete. Thompson's purpose is to illuminate the problems we face and to set forth general principles directed toward an informing theory on traditions and values as they affect politics and diplomacy, while at the same time warning of the pitfalls and limitations of theory.In the first section of this book, Thompson draws on classical and Judaeo-Christian traditions in defining the relationship between philosophy, religion, and politics. He then examines the application of abstract values to such political realities as national interest, and goes on to consider the question of moral values in international diplomacy and politics.In a series of case studies, Thompson reflects on human rights, disarmament and arms control, and human survival. Maintaining that the implementation of traditions and values is sometimes uniquely the task of the American presidency, he studies the administrations of four postwar presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon, in the light of the executives' attitudes toward ethics and politics. Finally, Thompson considers the implications of national decline and the breakdown of international order for the future of the United States.The vast knowledge of international affairs and the literature of politics that Kenneth W. Thompson brings to this timely and reflective books makes it exceptionally readable as well as intellectually challenging.
391 kr
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Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) is best known for The Decline of the West, in which he propounded his pathbreaking philosophy of world history and penetrating diagnosis of the crisis of modernity. This monumental work launched a seminal attack on the idea of progress and supplanted the outmoded Eurocentric understanding of history. His provocative pessimism seems to be confirmed in retrospect by the twentieth-century horrors of economic depression, totalitarianism, genocide, the dawn of the nuclear age, and the emerging global environmental crisis.In Prophet of Decline, John Farrenkopf takes advantage of the historical perspective the end of the millennium provides to reassess this visionary thinker and his challenging ideas on world history and politics and modern civilisation. Farrenkopf's assessment ranges widely, placing Spengler's philosophy in its intellectual historical context and covering Spengler's ideas on democracy, capitalism, science and technology, cities, Western art, social change, and human exploitation of the environment. He also illuminates the implications of Spengler's thought for contemplating from a fresh perspective the future of the United States, the leading power of the West.Prophet of Decline is highly relevant today as many take the opportunity at the turn of the century to ponder again the direction in which humankind and our global community are moving and approach with concern the uncertain future amid globalization, hypercomplexity, and accelerating change. An interdisciplinary book about an interdisciplinary thinker, it is a substantial contribution to the literature of historical philosophy, political science, international relations, and German studies.
Righteous Realists
Political Realism, Responsible Power, and American Culture in the Nuclear Age
Häftad, Engelska, 2002
261 kr
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Political realism in post-World War II America has not been about power alone, but about reconciling power with moral and ethical considerations. The caricature of realism as an expression of amoral realpolitik has been inadequate and false, for realism in the nuclear age has pivoted as much on moral principles as on power politics. Joel H. Rosenthal's survey of five noteworthy self-proclaimed political realists explores the realists' overarching commitment to transforming traditional power politics into a form of ""responsible power"" commensurate with American values.Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Lippman, and Dean Acheson, the most important and prolific of the American realists, all fought the excesses of crusading moralism while simultaneously promoting a concept of power politics that retained a moral component at its core. This is the story of how architects of containment, present at the creation of the new bipolar world shaped by the threat of ""mutual assured destruction,"" became ardent critics of that world. It describes realism as a product of a particular time and place, a set of values, assumptions, processes of moral reasoning, and views about America's role in the world.Much of the current scholarship on the modern American realists dwells on the alleged inconsistencies of realism as a political theory, and the tortuous mixture of piety and detachment exhibited in the lives of the realists themselves. Rosenthal takes the opposite tack, assembling the ties that bind realism into a coherent world view, rather than deconstructing it into irreconcilable fragments.Rosenthal maintains that the postwar American realists may be best understood as products of the historical and cultural context from which they emerged. Their attempts to articulate a ""public philosophy"" and integrate values into decision making in international affairs reflected their views on both the way the world ""is"" and the way the world ""ought to be."" This study explains realism as an effort to articulate a prescriptive framework for working toward the ideal while living in the real. In doing so, it reveals the realists' insistence on evaluating competing claims and on accepting paradox as an inevitable component of moral choice.