Freedom Is an Endless Meeting
Title | Freedom Is an Endless Meeting PDF eBook |
Author | Francesca Polletta |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Total Pages | 297 |
Release | 2012-06-12 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0226924289 |
This “excellent study of activist politics in the United States over the past century” challenges the conventional wisdom about participatory democracy (Times Literary Supplement). Freedom Is an Endless Meeting offers vivid portraits of American experiments in participatory democracy throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on meticulous research and more than one hundred interviews with activists, Francesca Polletta upends the notion that participatory democracy is worthy in purpose but unworkable in practice. Instead, she shows that social movements have often used bottom-up decision making as a powerful tool for political change. Polletta traces the history of democracy from early labor struggles and pre-World War II pacifism, through the civil rights, new left, and women’s liberation movements of the sixties and seventies, and into today’s faith-based organizing and anti-corporate globalization campaigns. In the process, she uncovers neglected sources of democratic inspiration—such as Depression-era labor educators and Mississippi voting registration workers—as well as practical strategies of social protest. Polletta also highlights the obstacles that arise when activists model their democracies after nonpolitical relationships such as friendship, tutelage, and religious fellowship. She concludes with a call to forge new kinds of democratic relationships that balance trust with accountability, respect with openness to disagreement, and caring with inclusiveness. For anyone concerned about the prospects for democracy in America, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting will offer abundant historical, theoretical, and practical insights.
Passionate Politics
Title | Passionate Politics PDF eBook |
Author | Jeff Goodwin |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Total Pages | 320 |
Release | 2009-03-09 |
Genre | Psychology |
ISBN | 9780226304007 |
Emotions are back. Once at the center of the study of politics, emotions have receded into the shadows during the past three decades, with no place in the rationalistic, structural, and organizational models that dominate academic political analysis. With this new collection of essays, Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta reverse this trend, reincorporating emotions such as anger, indignation, fear, disgust, joy, and love into research on politics and social protest. The tools of cultural analysis are especially useful for probing the role of emotions in politics, the editors and contributors to Passionate Politics argue. Moral outrage, the shame of spoiled collective identities, or the joy of imagining a new and better society, are not automatic responses to events. Rather, they are related to moral institutions, felt obligations and rights, and information about expected effects, all of which are culturally and historically variable. With its look at the history of emotions in social thought, examination of the internal dynamics of protest groups, and exploration of the emotional dynamics that arise from interactions and conflicts among political factions and individuals, Passionate Politics will lead the way toward an overdue reconsideration of the role of emotions in social movements and politics generally. Contributors: Rebecca Anne Allahyari Edwin Amenta Collin Barker Mabel Berezin Craig Calhoun Randall Collins Frank Dobbin Jeff Goodwin Deborah B. Gould Julian McAllister Groves James M. Jasper Anne Kane Theodore D. Kemper Sharon Erickson Nepstad Steven Pfaff Francesca Polletta Christian Smith Arlene Stein Nancy Whittier Elisabeth Jean Wood Michael P. Young
Freedom Manifesto
Title | Freedom Manifesto PDF eBook |
Author | Steve Forbes |
Publisher | Crown Currency |
Total Pages | 611 |
Release | 2012-08-21 |
Genre | Business & Economics |
ISBN | 0307951596 |
From Steve Forbes, the iconic editor in chief of Forbes Media, and Elizabeth Ames coauthors of How Capitalism Will Save Us—comes a new way of thinking about the role of government and the morality of free markets. Americans today are at a turning point. Are we a country founded on the values of freedom and limited government, as envisioned by the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? Or do we want to become a European-style socialist democracy? What best serves the public good—freedom or Big Government? In Freedom Manifesto, Forbes and Ames offer a new twist on this historic debate. Today’s bloated and bureaucratic government, they argue, is anything but a force for compassion. Instead of assuring fairness, it promotes favoritism. Instead of furthering opportunity, it stifles economic growth. Instead of unleashing innovation and material abundance, its regulations and price controls create rigidity and scarcity. Not only are Big Government’s inefficient and ever-expanding bureaucracies ill-equipped to deliver on their promises—they are often guilty of the very greed, excess, and corruption routinely ascribed to the private sector. The only way to a truly fair and moral society, the authors say, is through economic freedom—free people and free markets. Throughout history, open markets have helped the poor and everyone else by unleashing unprecedented creativity, generating wealth, and raising living standards. Promoting trust, generosity, and democracy, economic freedom has been a more powerful force for individual rights, self-determination—and humanity—than any government bureaucracy. Freedom Manifesto captures the spirit of a new movement that is questioning old ideas about the morality of government and markets for the first time since the Great Depression. Going beyond the familiar explanations and sound bites, the authors provide a fully developed framework of “first principles” for a true understanding of the real moral and ethical distinctions between more and less government. This timely and provocative book shows why free markets and liberty are the only way to a better future and a fair and humane society.
Networked Press Freedom
Title | Networked Press Freedom PDF eBook |
Author | Mike Ananny |
Publisher | MIT Press |
Total Pages | 309 |
Release | 2023-10-31 |
Genre | Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | 0262549662 |
Reimagining press freedom in a networked era: not just a journalist's right to speak but also a public's right to hear. In Networked Press Freedom, Mike Ananny offers a new way to think about freedom of the press in a time when media systems are in fundamental flux. Ananny challenges the idea that press freedom comes only from heroic, lone journalists who speak truth to power. Instead, drawing on journalism studies, institutional sociology, political theory, science and technology studies, and an analysis of ten years of journalism discourse about news and technology, he argues that press freedom emerges from social, technological, institutional, and normative forces that vie for power and fight for visions of democratic life. He shows how dominant, historical ideals of professionalized press freedom often mistook journalistic freedom from constraints for the public's freedom to encounter the rich mix of people and ideas that self-governance requires. Ananny's notion of press freedom ensures not only an individual right to speak, but also a public right to hear. Seeing press freedom as essential for democratic self-governance, Ananny explores what publics need, what kind of free press they should demand, and how today's press freedom emerges from intertwined collections of humans and machines. If someone says, “The public needs a free press,” Ananny urges us to ask in response, “What kind of public, what kind of freedom, and what kind of press?” Answering these questions shows what robust, self-governing publics need to demand of technologists and journalists alike.
Freedom Rising
Title | Freedom Rising PDF eBook |
Author | Christian Welzel |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 473 |
Release | 2013-12-23 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 1107034701 |
This is the first study to demonstrate the role of cultural change in the global rise of freedoms. In multiple ways, the author illustrates how emerging "emancipative values" intertwine technological and institutional changes into a single trend toward human empowerment. The author interprets his broad and far-reaching findings from societies around the world in a new and coherent framework: the evolutionary theory of emancipation.
The People Vs. Democracy
Title | The People Vs. Democracy PDF eBook |
Author | Yascha Mounk |
Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Total Pages | 401 |
Release | 2018-03-05 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 0674976827 |
Uiteenzetting over de opkomst van het populisme en het gevaar daarvan voor de democratie.
Liberty Defined
Title | Liberty Defined PDF eBook |
Author | Ron Paul |
Publisher | Grand Central Publishing |
Total Pages | 352 |
Release | 2011-04-19 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 1455504432 |
In Liberty Defined, congressman and #1 New York Times bestselling author Ron Paul returns with his most provocative, comprehensive, and compelling arguments for personal freedom to date. The term "Liberty" is so commonly used in our country that it has become a mere cliché. But do we know what it means? What it promises? How it factors into our daily lives? And most importantly, can we recognize tyranny when it is sold to us disguised as a form of liberty? Dr. Paul writes that to believe in liberty is not to believe in any particular social and economic outcome. It is to trust in the spontaneous order that emerges when the state does not intervene in human volition and human cooperation. It permits people to work out their problems for themselves, build lives for themselves, take risks and accept responsibility for the results, and make their own decisions. It is the seed of America. This is a comprehensive guide to Dr. Paul's position on fifty of the most important issues of our times, from Abortion to Zionism. Accessible, easy to digest, and fearless in its discussion of controversial topics, LIBERTY DEFINED sheds new light on a word that is losing its shape.