Title: Regarding politics: essays on political theory, stability, and change 
Author: Eckstein, Harry
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Politics | Political Theory
Publisher's Description: After World War II political science, especially comparative politics, was transformed by a "scientific revolution." Harry Eckstein, an influential spokesman in the revolution's forefront, went on to make a great variety of contributions in subsequent decades. These eleven essays, written over thirty years, cover the major issues in comparative politics, from civil war to "civic inclusion" - that is, "the tendency over time to include in politics, in workplace decision-making, in education, and in other institutional realms, people previously excluded from participation." Eckstein also deals with political science as a field: how it relates to political practice, how it developed in the prewar period, and how it emerged from the first postwar reshaping.In this first collection of his work, Eckstein reflects on the issues and events - his personal experiences as a refugee from Nazi Germany and as an observer of European politics and cultures - that underlie and unify his thinking. Regarding Politics presents in one powerful volume the career of one of the leading comparative political scientists of our times.   [brief]
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Title: The problems of a political animal: community, justice, and conflict in Aristotelian political thought
Author: Yack, Bernard 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Politics | Philosophy | Political Theory | Social and Political Thought | Social Theory
Publisher's Description: A bold new interpretation of Aristotelian thought is central to Bernard Yack's provocative new book. He shows that for Aristotle, community is a conflict-ridden fact of everyday life, as well as an ideal of social harmony and integration. From political justice and the rule of law to class struggle and moral conflict, Yack maintains that Aristotle intended to explain the conditions of everyday political life, not just, as most commentators assume, to represent the hypothetical achievements of an idealistic "best regime."By showing how Aristotelian ideas can provide new insight into our own political life, Yack makes a valuable contribution to contemporary discourse and debate. His work will excite interest among a wide range of social, moral, and political theorists.   [brief]
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Title: The natural history of Big Sur
Author: Henson, Paul 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Environmental Studies | California and the West | Natural History | Ecology
Publisher's Description: Each year millions of people visit the area of rugged California coastline and wild mountains known as Big Sur. Finally here is a book that is both a natural history of this beautiful region and an excellent guide to its extensive public lands. The first section introduces the area's geology, climate, flora, fauna, and human history. The second section describes selected sites, trails, and features that are mentioned in Part One.Although Big Sur is world famous for awe-inspiring scenery, it is less known for its great ecological diversity and its significance as a haven for many species of terrestrial and marine wildlife. In no other part of the world do fog-loving coastal redwoods thrive on one slope of a canyon while arid-climate yuccas grow on the other. Similarly, sea otters and cormorants live near dry-climate creatures like canyon wrens and whiptail lizards. The area's staggering beauty and forbidding wilderness have inspired artists, poets, naturalists, and hikers - and also real estate developers.As increasing tourism, development pressure, and land-use decisions continue to affect Big Sur, this book will do much to heighten awareness of the region's biotic richness and fragility. Written in nontechnical language, with generous color photographs, drawings, maps, species lists, and a bibliography, it will attract both the casual and the serious naturalist, as well as anyone concerned about preserving California's natural heritage.   [brief]
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Title: The political landscape: constellations of authority in early complex polities
Author: Smith, Adam T
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Archaeology | Political Theory | Geography
Publisher's Description: How do landscapes - defined in the broadest sense to incorporate the physical contours of the built environment, the aesthetics of form, and the imaginative reflections of spatial representations - contribute to the making of politics? Shifting through the archaeological, epigraphic, and artistic remains of early complex societies, this provocative and far-reaching book is the first systematic attempt to explain the links between spatial organization and politics from an anthropological point of view. The Classic-period Maya, the kingdom of Urartu, and the cities of early southern Mesopotamia provide the focal points for this multidimensional account of human polities. Are the cities and villages in which we live and work, the lands that are woven into our senses of cultural and personal identity, and the national territories we occupy merely stages on which historical processes and political rituals are enacted? Or do the forms of buildings and streets, the evocative sensibilities of architecture and vista, the aesthetics of place conjured in art and media constitute political landscapes - broad sets of spatial practices critical to the formation, operation, and overthrow of polities, regimes, and institutions? Smith brings together contemporary theoretical developments from geography and social theory with anthropological perspectives and archaeological data to pursue these questions.   [brief]
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Title: Foundations of political economy: some early Tudor views on state and society
Author: Wood, Neal
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Political Theory | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: Conventional wisdom claims that the seventeenth century gave birth to the material and ideological forces that culminated in the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism. Not true, according to Neal Wood, who argues that much earlier reformers - Dudley, Starkey, Brinklow, Latimer, Crowley, Becon, Lever, and Thomas Smith, as well as the better-known More and Fortescue - laid the groundwork by fashioning an economic conception of the state in response to social, economic and political conditions of England. Wood's innovative study of these early Tudor thinkers, who upheld the status quo yet condemned widespread poverty and suffering, will interest historians, political scientists, and social and political theorists.   [brief]
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Title: Thucydides and the ancient simplicity: the limits of political realism 
Author: Crane, Gregory 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Classics | Politics | Political Theory | History | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is the earliest surviving realist text in the European tradition. As an account of the Peloponnesian War, it is famous both as an analysis of power politics and as a classic of political realism. From the opening speeches, Thucydides' Athenians emerge as a new and frightening source of power, motivated by self-interest and oblivious to the rules and shared values under which the Greeks had operated for centuries. Gregory Crane demonstrates how Thucydides' history brilliantly analyzes both the power and the dramatic weaknesses of realist thought. The tragedy of Thucydides' history emerges from the ultimate failure of the Athenian project. The new morality of the imperialists proved as conflicted as the old; history shows that their values were unstable and self-destructive. Thucydides' history ends with the recounting of an intellectual stalemate that, a century later, motivated Plato's greatest work. Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity includes a thought-provoking discussion questioning currently held ideas of political realism and its limits. Crane's sophisticated claim for the continuing usefulness of the political examples of the classical past will appeal to anyone interested in the conflict between the exercise of political power and the preservation of human freedom and dignity.   [brief]
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Title: Late modernism: politics, fiction, and the arts between the world wars 
Author: Miller, Tyrus 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Literature | Fiction | Art Theory | Cinema and Performance Arts | Politics | Political Theory | History
Publisher's Description: Tyrus Miller breaks new ground in this study of early twentieth-century literary and artistic culture. Whereas modernism studies have generally concentrated on the vital early phases of the modernist revolt, Miller focuses on the turbulent later years of the 1920s and 1930s, tracking the dissolution of modernism in the interwar years.In the post-World War I reconstruction and the worldwide crisis that followed, Miller argues, new technological media and the social forces of mass politics opened fault lines in individual and collective experience, undermining the cultural bases of the modernist movement. He shows how late modernists attempted to discover ways of occupying this new and often dangerous cultural space. In doing so they laid bare the ruin of the modernist aesthetic at the same time as they transcended its limits.In his wide-ranging theoretical and historical discussion, Miller relates developments in literary culture to tendencies in the visual arts, cultural and political criticism, mass culture, and social history. He excavates Wyndham Lewis's hidden borrowings from Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer ; situates Djuna Barnes between the imagery of haute couture and the intellectualism of Duchamp; uncovers Beckett's affinities with Giacometti's surrealist sculptures and the Bolshevik clowns Bim-Bom; and considers Mina Loy as both visionary writer and designer of decorative lampshades. Miller's lively and engaging readings of culture in this turbulent period reveal its surprising anticipation of our own postmodernity.   [brief]
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Title: Iconography of power: Soviet political posters under Lenin and Stalin
Author: Bonnell, Victoria E
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Sociology | Popular Culture | European Studies | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Politics | Art Criticism | History | European History
Publisher's Description: Masters at visual propaganda, the Bolsheviks produced thousands of vivid and compelling posters after they seized power in October 1917. Intended for a semi-literate population that was accustomed to the rich visual legacy of the Russian autocracy and the Orthodox Church, political posters came to occupy a central place in the regime's effort to imprint itself on the hearts and minds of the people and to remold them into the new Soviet women and men. In this first sociological study of Soviet political posters, Victoria Bonnell analyzes the shifts that took place in the images, messages, styles, and functions of political art from 1917 to 1953. Everyone who lived in Russia after the October revolution had some familiarity with stock images of the male worker, the great communist leaders, the collective farm woman, the capitalist, and others. These were the new icons' standardized images that depicted Bolshevik heroes and their adversaries in accordance with a fixed pattern. Like other "invented traditions" of the modern age, iconographic images in propaganda art were relentlessly repeated, bringing together Bolshevik ideology and traditional mythologies of pre-Revolutionary Russia. Symbols and emblems featured in Soviet posters of the Civil War and the 1920s gave visual meaning to the Bolshevik worldview dominated by the concept of class. Beginning in the 1930s, visual propaganda became more prescriptive, providing models for the appearance, demeanor, and conduct of the new social types, both positive and negative. Political art also conveyed important messages about the sacred center of the regime which evolved during the 1930s from the celebration of the heroic proletariat to the deification of Stalin. Treating propaganda images as part of a particular visual language, Bonnell shows how people "read" them - relying on their habits of seeing and interpreting folk, religious, commercial, and political art (both before and after 1917) as well as the fine art traditions of Russia and the West. Drawing on monumental sculpture and holiday displays as well as posters, the study traces the way Soviet propaganda art shaped the mentality of the Russian people (the legacy is present even today) and was itself shaped by popular attitudes and assumptions. Iconography of Power includes posters dating from the final decades of the old regime to the death of Stalin, located by the author in Russian, American, and English libraries and archives. One hundred exceptionally striking posters are reproduced in the book, many of them never before published. Bonnell places these posters in a historical context and provides a provocative account of the evolution of the visual discourse on power in Soviet Russia.   [brief]
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Title: Tragedy and enlightenment: Athenian political thought, and the dilemmas of modernity 
Author: Rocco, Christopher 1958-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Classics | Classical Philosophy | Classical History | Classical Literature and Language | Social and Political Thought | Social Theory
Publisher's Description: Weaving together ancient Greek texts and postmodernist theory, Christopher Rocco addresses the debate between modernity and postmodernity that dominates contemporary theory. Interpreting Greek drama within a critical framework informed by contemporary theorists Foucault, Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno, Tragedy and Enlightenment makes a sophisticated argument for the continuing relevance of the classical past, focusing on the subject of democracy.The starting point for Rocco's analysis is the impasse in contemporary political and cultural theory over the possibility and desirability of democracy in a postmodern world. After explaining the competing positions in the current debate, Rocco argues that ancient Greek tragedy and dialogue - specifically Sophocles' Oedipus , Plato's Republic and Gorgias , and Aeschylus' Oresteia - suggest alternate constructions for this and other postmodern problems.Rocco gives a detailed analysis of the contemporary divide over the theories of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault and provides a provocative reading of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. This original contribution to political and cultural discourse brings us to a new understanding of familiar texts and will alter the grounds of debate for students and scholars of the classical and the contemporary worlds.   [brief]
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Title: Cicero's social and political thought
Author: Wood, Neal
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Classics | Classical Philosophy | Political Theory
Publisher's Description: In this close examination of the social and political thought of Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.), Neal Wood focuses on Cicero's conceptions of state and government, showing that he is the father of constitutionalism, the archetype of the politically conservative mind, and the first to reflect ex . . . [more]
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Title: Radicalism and reverence: the political thought of Gerrard Winstanley 
Author: Shulman, George M
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Politics | European History
Publisher's Description: One of the most undeservedly neglected political theorists of the seventeenth century, Gerrard Winstanley is a fascinating figure who wrote broadly and creatively on issues that appear surprisingly modern to his present-day readers. His theoretical approach to the English revolution knit together such diverse concerns as Puritanism, the emerging market economy, and the dilemmas of radical politics. His strong commitment to both personal autonomy and collective action led him towards an alternative to the Puritanism, market institutions, and political violence that he analyzed.In his incisive new book, George Shulman examines the life and work of this important thinker. He traces Winstanley's movement from theorizing about God and the "rebirth" of the self to active leadership of the "diggers," a group of radical activists who occupied not yet enclosed common lands. As Winstanley both used and moved beyond his own Puritan heritage, he was able to confront the social and political realities of his time in a language that related them to psychological experience. His richly metaphoric language, and the vision of freedom it embodied, joined psychological, social, and political dimensions of life.By imaginatively reconstructing Winstanley's unified approach to the 1640s, this book seeks to illuminate what was at stake at that time and relate it to contemporary debates about the self, politics, and language. Shulman creates a conversation across time about questions that still animate thinkers today.   [brief]
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Title: The green fuse: an ecological odyssey 
Author: Harte, John 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Natural History | Ecology
Publisher's Description: A widely respected ecological scientist and activist draws on the poet's image and his own environmental research to demonstrate the many interconnections among the world's ecosystems. John Harte takes us from Alaskan salmon runs and the Florida everglades to South Pacific coral reefs and the bleak Tibetan plateau. The result is that rare book that bridges the cultures of science and art. Lyrical, vivid portraits of natural wonders and the threats to them are combined with precise scientific accounts of natural processes and their disturbances. The Green Fuse will show nonscientists the fascination of ecological detective work and renew scientists' love for the beauty of the world under their microscopes.Harte's stories illuminate, without sermonizing, the damage to natural systems brought about by technological hubris and calculated political ruthlessness. "The green fuse" symbolizes the basic unity behind natural diversity. But a fuse may also be the weak link in an overloaded system or the slow burning wick on an ecological bomb. As The Green Fuse reminds us, the energies that created human liberation from nature can also be those that lead to the human destruction of nature.   [brief]
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Title: Placing movies: the practice of film criticism
Author: Rosenbaum, Jonathan
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film
Publisher's Description: Jonathan Rosenbaum, longtime contributor to such publications as Film Quarterly, Sight and Sound, and The Village Voice , is arguably the most eloquent, insightful film critic writing in America today. Placing Movies , the first collection of his work, gathers together thirty of his most distinctive and illuminating pieces. Written over a span of twenty-one years, these essays cover an extraordinarily broad range of films - from Hollywood blockbusters to foreign art movies to experimental cinema. They include not just reviews but perceptive commentary on directors, actors, and trends; and thoughtful analysis of the practice of film criticism.It is this last element - Rosenbaum's reflections on the art of film criticism - that sets this collection apart from other volumes of film writing. Both in the essays themselves and in the section introductions, Rosenbaum provides a rare insider's view of his profession: the backstage politics, the formulation of critical judgments, the function of film commentary. Taken together, these pieces serve as a guided tour of the profession of film criticism.They also serve as representative samples of Rosenbaum's unique brand of film writing. Among the highlights are memoirs of director Jacques Tati and maverick critic Manny Farber, celebrations of classics such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and The Manchurian Candidate , and considered reevaluations of Orson Welles and Woody Allen.   [brief]
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Title: Bicycle citizens: the political world of the Japanese housewife
Author: LeBlanc, Robin M 1966-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Politics | Japan | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: While the typical Japanese male politician glides through his district in air-conditioned taxis, the typical female voter trundles along the side streets on a simple bicycle. In this first ethnographic study of the politics of the average female citizen in Japan, Robin LeBlanc argues that this taxi-bicycle contrast reaches deeply into Japanese society.To study the relationship between gender and liberal democratic citizenship, LeBlanc conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in suburban Tokyo among housewives, volunteer groups, consumer cooperative movements, and the members of a committee to reelect a female Diet member who used her own housewife status as the key to victory. LeBlanc argues that contrary to popular perception, Japanese housewives are ultimately not without a political world.Full of new and stimulating material, engagingly written, and deft in its weaving of theoretical perspectives with field research, this study will not only open up new dialogues between gender theory and broader social science concerns but also provide a superb introduction to politics in Japan as a whole.   [brief]
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Title: It did happen here: recollections of political repression in America
Author: Schultz, Ruth
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Politics | Sociology | American Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: In this moving book, two skilled oral historians collect the words of Americans who have been victims of political repression in their own country. Disturbing and provocative, It Did Happen Here is must-reading for everyone who cares about protecting the rights and liberties upon which this country . . . [more]
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Title: Dryden in revolutionary England 
Author: Bywaters, David A
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | European History
Publisher's Description: In 1681, when he wrote Absalom and Achitophel , John Dryden was poet laureate and historiographer royal at the court of his patron Charles II, and the acknowledged champion of a successful political cause. Only a few years later, Dryden's conversion to Roman Catholicism, followed by James II's deposition for favoring Catholics, had cost the poet both his honors and his public. In no way, however, did Dryden accept the status of a political has-been. David Bywaters argues convincingly that this post-revolutionary phase of Dryden's career reveals a polemic as consistent as that of earlier periods.Dryden not only lived on in the country that had metaphorically cast him out but also remained a public literary figure, responding in his work to contemporary political changes. Between 1687 and 1700 he developed a subtle and powerful rhetoric in order to reconstruct his political and literary authority. Discussing both major and less-studied works, Dryden in Revolutionary England tells us much about the relation between politics and literature during a crucial, formative moment.   [brief]
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Title: The power of position: Beijing University, intellectuals, and Chinese political culture, 1898-1929
Author: Weston, Timothy B 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | Asian Studies | China
Publisher's Description: Throughout the twentieth century, Beijing University (or Beida) has been at the center of China's greatest political and cultural upheavals - from the May Fourth Movement of 1919 to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s to the tragic events in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Why this should be - how Beida's historical importance has come to transcend that of a mere institution of higher learning--is a question at the heart of this book. A study of intellectuals and political culture during the past century's tumultuous early decades, The Power of Position is the first to focus on Beida, China's oldest and best-known national university. Timothy B. Weston portrays the university as a key locus used by intellectuals to increase their influence in society. Weston analyzes the links between intellectuals' political and cultural commitments and their specific manner of living. He also compares Beijing's intellectual culture with that of the rising metropolis of Shanghai. What emerges is a remarkably nuanced and complex picture of life at China's leading university, especially in the decades leading up to the May Fourth Movement.   [brief]
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Title: Flight from Eden: the origins of modern literary criticism and theory 
Author: Cassedy, Steven
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Literature | European Literature
Publisher's Description: Steven Cassedy takes aim at two of the most enduring myths of modern criticism: that it is secular, and that it is new and autonomous. He argues that though modern criticism is often forbiddingly scientific and technical, the modern critic remains something of a mystic. Every school of modern criticism - from structuralism to postmodern criticism - rests on a faith in an "Eden," an irreducible essence, a myth, like the common myth that there is an intrinsic distinction between "poetic" language and "ordinary" language. The modern critic attempts to abandon all mystical faith; this is the "flight from Eden." But it is always in vain.It is traditionally assumed that modern literary criticism and theory came from France, and relatively recently. In fact, according to Cassedy, the entire modern critical consciousness was already formed by the early twentieth century in the minds of writers who were primarily neither professional critics nor philosophers, but poets. Some were French (Mallarmé, and Valéry); others were not (Rilke, Bely, and the Russian avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov). In them we find the same Edenic faith, the same effort to abandon it, and the same failure of that effort.   [brief]
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Title: Representation and its discontents: the critical legacy of German romanticism 
Author: Seyhan, Azade
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Philosophy | Literary Theory and Criticism | German Studies
Publisher's Description: Azade Seyhan provides a concise, elegantly argued introduction to the critical theory of German Romanticism and demonstrates how its approach to the metaphorical and linguistic nature of knowledge is very much alive in contemporary philosophy and literary theory. Her analysis of key thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis explores their views on rhetoric, systematicity, hermeneutics, and cultural interpretation. Seyhan examines German Romanticism as a critical intervention in the debates on representation, which developed in response to the philosophical revolution of German Idealism.Facing a chaotic political and intellectual landscape, the eighteenth-century theorists sought new models of understanding and new objectives for criticism and philosophy. Representation and Its Discontents identifies the legacy of this formative moment in modern criticism and suggests its relevance to contemporary discussions of post-structuralism, orientalism, theories of textuality, and the nature of philosophical discourse.   [brief]
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Title: Politics, death, and the devil: self and power in Max Weber and Thomas Mann
Author: Goldman, Harvey
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Sociology | Social Theory | European History | Literary Theory and Criticism | Political Theory | Philosophy
Publisher's Description: This sequel to Harvey Goldman's well-received Max Weber and Thomas Mann continues his rich exploration of the political and cultural critiques embodied in the more mature writings of these two authors. Combining social and political thought, intellectual history, and literary interpretation, Goldman examines in particular Weber's "Science as a Vocation" and "Politics as a Vocation" and Mann's The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus .Goldman deals with the ways in which Weber and Mann sought an antidote to personal and cultural weakness through "practices" for generating strength, mastery, and power, drawing primarily on ascetic traditions at a time when the vitality of other German traditions was disappearing. Power and mastery concerned both Weber and Mann, especially as they tried to resolve problems of politics and culture in Germany. Although their resolutions of the problems they confronted seem inadequate, they show the significance of linking social and political thought to conceptions of self and active worldly practices.Trenchant and illuminating, Goldman's book is essential reading for anyone interested in political theory, social thought, and the intellectual history of Germany.   [brief]
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