Politics

About: Politics is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 263762 publications have been published within this topic receiving 5388913 citations.

Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

Abstract: Pathologies of Power uses harrowing stories of life--and death--in extreme situations to interrogate our understanding of human rights. Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other. Farmer shows that the same social forces that give rise to epidemic diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis also sculpt risk for human rights violations. He illustrates the ways that racism and gender inequality in the United States are embodied as disease and death. Yet this book is far from a hopeless inventory of abuse. Farmer's disturbing examples are linked to a guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop in tandem with a more informed sense of social justice. Otherwise, he concludes, we will be guilty of managing social inequality rather than addressing structural violence. Farmer's urgent plea to think about human rights in the context of global public health and to consider critical issues of quality and access for the world's poor should be of fundamental concern to a world characterized by the bizarre proximity of surfeit and suffering.

The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education

Abstract: PROLOGUE PART I: THE ONE BEST SYSTEM IN MICROCOSM: COMMUNITY AND CONSOLIDATION IN RURAL EDUCATION The School as a Community and the Community as a School 'The Rural School Problem' and Power to the Professional PART II: FROM VILLAGE SCHOOL TO URBAN SYSTEM: BUREAUCRATIZATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Swollen Villages and the Need for Coordination Creating the One Best System Teachers and the Male Mystique Attendance, Voluntary and Coerced Some Functions of Schooling PART III: THE POLITICS OF PLURALISM: NINETEENTH-CENTURY PATTERNS Critics and Dissenters Configurations of Control Lives Routinized yet Insecure: Teachers and School Politics Cultural Conflicts: Religion and Ethnicity A Struggle Lonely and Unequal: The Burden of Race PART IV: CENTRALIZATION AND THE CORPORATE MODEL: CONTESTS FOR CONTROL OF URBAN SCHOOLS, 1890-1940 An Interlocking Directorate and Its Blueprint for Reform Conflicts of Power and Values: Case Studies of Centralization Political Structure and Political Behavior PART V: INSIDE THE SYSTEM: THE CHARACTER OF URBAN SCHOOLS, 1890-1940 Success Story: The Administrative Progressives Science Victims without "Crimes": Black Americans Americanization: Match and Mismatch Lady Labor Sluggers" and the Professional Proletariat EPILOGUE: THE ONE BEST SYSTEM UNDER FIRE, 1940-1973 NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

Abstract: Introduction: What Is to Be Done with Political Ecology? 1. Why Political Ecology Has to Let Go of Nature First, Get Out of the Cave Ecological Crisis or Crisis of Objectivity? The End of Nature The Pitfall of "Social Representations" of Nature The Fragile Aid of Comparative Anthropology What Successor for the Bicameral Collective? 2. How to Bring the Collective Together Difficulties in Convoking the Collective First Division: Learning to Be Circumspect with Spokespersons Second Division: Associations of Humans and Nonhumans Third Division between Humans and Nonhumans: Reality and Recalcitrance A More or Less Articulated Collective The Return to Civil Peace 3. A New Separation of Powers Some Disadvantages of the Concepts of Fact and Value The Power to Take into Account and the Power to Put in Order The Collective's Two Powers of Representation Verifying That the Essential Guarantees Have Been Maintained A New Exteriority 4. Skills for the Collective The Third Nature and the Quarrel between the Two "Eco" Sciences Contribution of the Professions to the Procedures of the Houses The Work of the Houses The Common Dwelling, the Oikos 5. Exploring Common Worlds Time's Two Arrows The Learning Curve The Third Power and the Question of the State The Exercise of Diplomacy War and Peace for the Sciences Conclusion: What Is to Be Done? Political Ecology! Summary of the Argument (for Readers in a Hurry...) Glossary Notes Bibliography Index

Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership

Abstract: Theories of social justice are necessarily abstract, reaching beyond the particular and the immediate to the general and the timeless. Yet such theories, addressing the world and its problems, must respond to the real and changing dilemmas of the day. A brilliant work of practical philosophy, Frontiers of Justice is dedicated to this proposition. Taking up three urgent problems of social justice neglected by current theories and thus harder to tackle in practical terms and everyday life, Martha Nussbaum seeks a theory of social justice that can guide us to a richer, more responsive approach to social co-operation. The idea of the social contract - especially as developed in the work of John Rawls - is one of the most powerful approaches to social justice in the Western tradition. But as Nussbaum demonstrates, even Rawls's theory, suggesting a contract for mutual advantage among approximate equals, cannot address questions of social justice posed by unequal parties. How, for instance, can we extend the equal rights of citizenship - education, health care, political rights and liberties - to those with physical and mental disabilities? How can we extend justice and dignified life conditions to all citizens of the world? And how, finally, can we bring our treatment of non-human animals into our notions of social justice? Exploring the limitations of the social contract in these three areas, Nussbaum devises an alternative theory based on the idea of 'capabilities.' She helps us to think more clearly about the purposes of political co-operation and the nature of political principles - and to look to a future of greater justice for all.

The Political Economy of International Relations

Abstract: After the end of World War II, the United States, by far the dominant economic and military power at that time, joined with the surviving capitalist democracies to create an unprecedented institutional framework. By the 1980s many contended that these institutions--the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund--were threatened by growing economic nationalism in the United States, as demonstrated by increased trade protection and growing budget deficits. In this book, Robert Gilpin argues that American power had been essential for establishing these institutions, and waning American support threatened the basis of postwar cooperation and the great prosperity of the period. For Gilpin, a great power such as the United States is essential to fostering international cooperation. Exploring the relationship between politics and economics first highlighted by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and other thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Gilpin demonstrated the close ties between politics and economics in international relations, outlining the key role played by the creative use of power in the support of an institutional framework that created a world economy. Gilpin's exposition of the in.uence of politics on the international economy was a model of clarity, making the book the centerpiece of many courses in international political economy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when American support for international cooperation is once again in question, Gilpin's warnings about the risks of American unilateralism sound ever clearer.