Strong Work Particulary for those who despise Statism
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<div id="video-block-R26UCGT4OGSCFA" class="a-section a-spacing-small a-spacing-top-mini video-block"></div><input type="hidden" name="" value="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/D1GDT-nLYvS.mp4" class="video-url"><input type="hidden" name="" value="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71pVG7cckCS.png" class="video-slate-img-url">&nbsp;This is a very good book and it outlines the dysfunctional way in which government over-regulates our businesses. It will particularly appear to those who are scientifically minded.
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Ordering Power presents a well-articulated and precise theory to explain the different experiences of Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other Southeast Asian leviathans. Tying together concepts from public finance and dominant tools in comparative politics, this book provides a convincing framework for explaining the region's diverse authoritarian routes.

In under 300 pages Slater lays out a type of recipe for a successful coercive (Asian) leviathan.  Importantly, the type of conflict, rather than the extent, is the crux for explaining state variation. Nominal regional conflict do little to drive states toward authoritarianism, unlike redistributive class politics that penetrate urban, industrial centers. As comparative scholars like James Scott have noted, rural movements are far easier for communal elites to manage than all-out urban class upheavals. Particularly potent are  conflicts that leave lasting, violent imprints within communities, or those that have the appearance of being "endemic and unmanageable."

Most interesting and novel is Slater's focus on taxes and elite collective action in sustaining authoritarian states. Contentious, endemic community and class conflict enable the state to centralize its authority, consolidate, and --importantly--impose direct taxes on threatened elites. However, it is not enough to merely dole out the rewards of state centralization amongst patrons--it must protect them from the contentious forces that had incited elite collective action in the first place. Thus, Slater suggests that contentious politics must drive a state to both "provide and protect."

Slater offers a lively-written and well researched tour of authoritarian Asia. While not as vast and complete as some classics of state building, Ordering Power presents a tightly argued story that maps quite well onto different political regimes, though relying much on the context of outside comparative research.  Political economists and scholars of comparative politics will have much to sink their teeth into. Asian Studies scholars may have less to gain, but may appreciate Slater's framework nonetheless. Oddly enough, as an economics person I found this much more gratifying than other dominant quantitative studies out there.
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In her exhaustively researched and mentally exhausting book, Making Democratic Governance Work, Pippa Norris spells out a strong case for her unified theory of liberal democracy and state capacity working together to create the most effective governance.

I apologize in advance if I screw up my summation, but my take is that she feels it is equally critical to have in place democratic processes to ensure the voices of the citizens are heard, as well as have a strong regime that can provide said citizens with education, health care, security, and decent living standards. She argues quite effectively that these concepts are codependent for providing the best governing arrangement. She bases her argument on staggering research of not only a host of nations, but also the basic human requirements for security and contentment, something any regime would be wise to pay the utmost attention to.

This was a very difficult book for me to read but that's easily as reflective of my own shortcomings as anything else. Others will better critique this book, but for me it was interesting enough to not give up but also so dense that it took me quite a while to muddle through.
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Strausss promotion of the study of Great Books is one reason he is usually seen by traditional conservatives as an ally in the defense of Western civilization. Readers with leftist sympathies, however, have accused Strauss of being an extremely subtle critic of liberal democracy. These readers attack him as a sneaky extremist who cleverly disguises a dangerous right-wing agenda.

Havers brilliantly cuts the Gordian knot of the debate to date over Strauss. After decades of carefully reading the writings of Strauss and the scholarship about him, Havers achieves a breakthrough by refusing to get sucked into the ideological clash of the warring right-wing and left-wing interpretations of Strauss. Instead, he painstakingly explores the strange ways that Strauss made use of the Great Books.

In his detailed study, Havers shows how a proper understanding of Strauss must also place him in his historical context. This means seeing him as a Cold War liberal with a secular bias that embraced some typically leftist and modern ideas about Christianity. Oddly enough, Strauss championed the study of the classical tradition because he wanted to bypass Christianity and make a purely secular argument in defense of modern, liberal democracy.

For this reason, Strauss adopted a romanticized view of the classic philosophical books of a traditional liberal arts education. He saw Greek philosophy as articulating the eternal and universal ideas at the basis of liberal democracy. Therefore, to defend modern liberal democracy, Strauss thinks we need to see the Greeks as its purest champions, and to downplay the Christian contribution to its foundations.

Because the claims of the Christian revelation are historically particular (since they unfolded locally, in a specific time and place), Strauss mistrusts them as much too weak for the task of opposing global tyranny and defending the universal ideals of truth, justice, and democracy. For the philosophic Strauss, the universal must defeat the particular. Strauss thinks that to fight for modern liberal democratic freedoms under any banner of Christianity is an unseemly, unworthy strategy, destined to lose.

Havers takes on the enormous task of working through Strauss extremely complex views and intricate arguments. With care and respect, he delineates how Strauss great intelligence articulates interpretations that are always serious and never without interest. Yet the unmistakable conclusion of Havers rigorous treatment is that the Straussian standpoint is ultimately unworthy for wielding the Great Books, to do battle with the dark forces of our age.

Havers demonstrates that this is because of Strauss failure to arrive at a proper appreciation of the essential role of Christianity in the drama of history.
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Inequality of incomes --- the widening gap between the very rich and the middle --- is bringing both the United States and the United Kingdom into grave danger, Tony Judt forcefully argues in his latest book. He produces graph after graph to show that inequality correlates with a range of social evils from crime to ill health. The remedy, he believes, is a turn from reckless market capitalism to rational social democracy.
Judt, a fine historian and professor at NYU, is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. This short book, "Ill Fares the Land," can be read as his last will and testament, the single most important message that he wants to leave with those two countries, the one in which he was born and the other in which he has come to live.
The weakness of the book is that he does not address the great questions why the United Kingdom turned away from social democracy a generation ago, and why --- as the dramatic struggle over health care reform recently  demonstrated --- a great many Americans have never accepted the idea.
And yet, for any reader who thinks about the future of the two countries and suspects that growing inequality is corroding our values, this book will be a valuable contribution to the debate. Incidentally, Judt summarized the book's main argument in an article he published in the April 29 issue of the New York Review of Books.
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The intellectual ancestor of this work is Foucault and Hiedegger, an Islamist-collaborater and a Nazi collaborator.  But don't let that change the view of the argument here, namely that all democratic states today are equivilent 'philosophically' to Nazi Germany, which after all was not 'legally' a dictatorship.  THis book is a perfect example of how high falutent language with flowery and latin mixed in, anything can become anything, thus democracy is nazism, refugee camps are concentration camps, dictatorship doesnt exist but if it did than it would be America.  The main problem with things like this is it focuses on a tiny philosophical view of seven thinkers, expands that to include four or five countries and tries to make an over-arching argument for a massively diverse world, using value judgements and creating a new language suhc as 'state of exception' which is meaningless, in order to condemn western democracy without offering an alternative.

Therefore it is not a suprise that in the name of 'democracy' and 'the people' philosophies and critiques like this have been used to murder millions and accomplish exactly the opposite of what they pretend to be in favor of.  This condemns the current situation as 'slavery' so that real slavery can be imposed, slavery of the mind, which is merely the precurser to the real thing.

Seth J. Frantzman
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This book is pretty academic (despite the "folksy" style) and quite leftist.  That being said, there is much food for thought in this slim volume.  The hardback is for folks with more money than judgment.

The isolation of racism as a cause of unequal opportunity, and the deeper issue of how opportunity and reward should be measured are the central themes.  Worth the time you spend reading it.
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Saul has unusual skill in making complex entanglements understandable, colorful, and often humorous.  His satire is biting.  His irony is satisfying. His writing is dense with fresh insights about difficult subjects, so reading him is challenging at times  but worth the effort.  In this book, Saul explores how the dictatorship of reason unbalanced by other human qualities (common sense, ethics, intuition, creativity, memory) leads to the rational but antidemocratic structures of corporatism.  He lays out the historical roots of corporatist doctrines (going back to Plato) and how they are so woven into our social fabric that they  threaten the practice of democracy.  He notes how our civilization is blinded to its true character by sentiment and ideology and argues that while Fascism was defeated in World War II, its corporatist doctrines are powerfully influencing our society today.

For Saul, one central aspect of the corporatist doctrine is its hijacking of the term "individualism," defining it as self-absorption or selfishness.  Both Left and Right positions are based upon that definition.  The Left agrees with the Right that individualism is selfishness, only it wants individual rights to be equally distributed and more fair.  Whereas Saul talks about individualism thus:  "Rights are a protection from society.  But only by fulfilling their obligations to society can the individual give meaning to that protection.  . .  Real individualism then is the obligation to act as a citizen."  And further:  "The very essence of corporatism is minding your own business.  And the very essence of individualism is the refusal to mind your own business.  This is not a particularly pleasant or easy style of life.  It is not profitable, efficient, competitive or rewarded.  It often consists of being persistently annoying to others as well as being stubborn and repetitive."  And further still:  "Criticism is perhaps the citizen's primary weapon in the exercise of her legitimacy.  That is why, in this corporatist society, conformism, loyalty, and silence are so admired and rewarded."

Saul discusses the role that four economic pillars play in either accentuating or reducing our unconscious state as citizens:  (1) the marketplace, (2) technology, (3) globalization, and (4) money markets.  Here is my summary of his lessons on these four.  (1) The danger of using the marketplace as our guide is that we are limiting ourselves to the narrow and short-term  interests of exclusion.  If we wish to lead society we must calculate inclusive costs.  (2) Business schools  (following the "scientific management" Frederick Taylor brought to Harvard) treat men and women as mechanisms to be managed along with machines.  And we are lining up students behind machines, educating them in isolation when what is really needed is to show them how they can function together in society.  (3) Trade cannot in and of itself solve societal problems.  The main effect of globalization has been to shift the tax burden from large corporations onto the middle class.  Adam Smith's repeated admonition has been ignored.  It is: high wages are essential to growth and prosperity.  (4) Money is not a value in itself.  Money in money markets is not available for taxation, and it doesn't really exist.  It is pure speculation.  We must see what is truly of value to society and reward those things.

This is only a bit of the clarity Saul's book gives us as citizens about what we are dealing with, empowering us with weaponry to overcome the Fascistic creation of corporatism.
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I have never particularly loved Economics as a subject. Therefore I found it difficult to be tremendously excited by this book. But the arguments made in it , concerning the wisdom of basing our economic life primarily on decisions of individuals, and not on government regulation do make sense to me. Also the whole tone of the work which is a gently persuasive one rather than one which harshly and angrily casts into the lower world all opposition, appealed to me.

Finally. It is clear that in providing opportunity to its citizens to realize their own potential and pursue their own happiness, the economies of the West, and most especially of the United States have done far better than those of the East including that of the now defunct Soviet Union.

It is important to note however that this system today is not simply a laissez - faire one which allows for an endless war of all upon all, but is modified by social welfare measures.
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Reilly is writing from a Catholic perspective, and the imprint (Ignatius Press) should also signal the intellectual context.  This study decries the advancing institutionalization of homosexuality.  He regards this advance as a logical development of the Sexual Revolution.  I found this book quite helpful even as I often found it difficult to read: difficult because Reilly articulates so compellingly two very different approaches to culture, self, society, and history (he terms them Aristotelian and Rousseau-an) and because, while Reilly tries to offer some hope in his Conclusion, his own analysis makes such hope very difficult to hold.  It's a depressing book, yet wonderfully insightful.  I am not well-versed in Natural Law, the perspective from which Reilly writes, but the gist of the matter seems plain enough: everything is ordered to some purpose--it has an inherent nature independent of our own desires, plans, and will.  If you accept this premise, it is difficult to disagree with Reilly's analysis or his conclusions.  If you are of the view that there is no such thing as Nature, then I suspect that Reilly's argument will be very frustrating for you.

Readers who are on the fence might appreciate Reilly's work for the evidence he offers and for the clarity of his arguments.  There are much larger issues at work here regarding the family, the state, and freedom.  Yes, there are some cranky moments in the book, but given the emotionally charged nature of the situation, this is forgivable.  What Reilly does such an excellent job of doing, and part of what makes the study so depressing, is forcefully demonstrating how people use reason to further will, to satisfy it, rather than ordering will to reason.  (Those horses tug pretty strongly!)  In other words, Reilly's argument ends up reminding us that we use "reason" as a respectable veneer for gratifying our appetites.

This work is definitely on my list of "must reads."  The transformation culture, society, notions of self, virtue, and truth, are not hard to see.  This book provides some help in trying to understand the forces at work.  It would be easy to dismiss Reilly and his book as the work of "a hater," etc.  Let yourself be challenged by this book; think your way through it.
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In this brief, forceful polemic, Parenti takes strong exception to the post-Soviet declaration of "the end of history". He does his best to vindicate the successes of socialist nations in the 20th century, and to account for their failures and distortions. He makes a irrefutable case for the continuing central relevance of Marxian class analysis in understanding society and combating oppresssion.

The opening section is the most valuable for those already familiar with the basics of Marxism-- in it Parenti offers a penetrating analysis of Mussolini and Hitler's rise, laying Fascism bare as the last refuge of the ruling elites in defending their privilege from mass social movements. This is an important corrective to the tendency of ruling ideologists to lump fascism and socialism together.

Parenti takes a few gratuitous potshots at other leftists along the way, and ultimately fails to adequately address the tendency towards authoritarianism in 20th century communism. But this is clear, cogent writing, and nourishing food for thought for communists, anarchists, liberals, and reactionaries alike.
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This work by the late great Venezuelan thinker Carlos Rangel is every bit as relevant today as it was when it was written in 1986. The book is a deconstruction of "thirdworldism", a marxism-inspired ideology prevalent in underdeveloped countries that asserts that all the ills of the third world are a result of exploitation by the rich capitalist countries.

Rangel shows the fallacy of thidworldism and the huge network of lies woven around it: Thirdworldism is an expedient device for crooked and ineffective politicians to avoid responsibility for their own actions, as well as a propaganda strategy for marxists everywhere (in fact, the main theses of thirdworldism were formulated in the Second Congress of the Communist International in Moscow). At the end, the ones not benefited by thirdworldism are the inhabitants of the third world themselves.

It may be thought that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this book is not as relevant today as it was during the cold war. However, as recent events show in places such as Rangel's native Venezuela, marxism and thirdworldism are alive and well, and pushing for a comeback with their load of hatred of free markets, backwardness, and depauperating policies.

Rangel was a brilliant intellectual of uncomprimising honesty and bravery - a rare species in the Latin American intellectual landscape. If you like his work, or if you are interested in an honest explanation of why Latin America remains underdevelped while the US has become the most powerful country in the world, you should also read Rangel's masterpiece "Del Buen Salvaje al Buen Revolucionario" (translated into english as "The Latin Americans: Their love-hate relationship with the United States")
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I've heard from many people who are interested in reading books about anarchism (allthough i think the term "anarchism" is incorrect) that most books about anarchy are "heavy" and difficult to get through much less understand because they aim their content to readers that have a good backround of political understanding (its terminologies, its "schools" of thought, its currents and so forth..).
If this happens to be your problem then this book will be ideal if you want to discover what this political philosophy stands for and what its issues are and, indeed, have been for a long time.
Emma Goldman, a woman with as fiery a personality as they come, has put together here a number of essays about anarchy that are easy to comprehend and definately thought inspiring.
  Despite this book having been first published in 1917 it loses nothing of its importance in the current state affairs as all of the issues Goldman deals with not only remain unsolved but they have -in the meantime- become a social burden or a social disaster much worse than back in her time. Oh, and back in her time things already looked bad enough.
What you get here is, summarily, the following:
-anarchy, what is it and what does it stand for? Beyond the mainstream media cliches anarchy stands for personal and societal freedom of the highest conceivable order. A freedom, anarchists insist, that is not a utopia. It's basically a hard lesson in crushing your illusions and opening unthought of doors of perception of what freedom really means. That would be then something other than being in a cage and having food thrown in. Even if the cage is invisible..
-Hard punching essays about the prison system and the everself-destructing notion of patriotism.. Funny how every line one reads in there could've been written yesterday. Not much has changed. After decades and decades of the imprisonment system has society become more law-abiding? That would be a thundering no. Why is that? As for patriotism, the incredible notion of dying for your country the same one that might be killing you slowly while draining you of all your resources and enslaving you in a wage system and a daily mindless-toil called "work" . here, Emma has to say a lot. There's always a reason to die if someone is going to make money out of it (that would be NOT you) and dress the whole "cause" up as patriotic..
-The hypocrisy of puritanism as well as the seemingly eternal joke of marriage and "love" are also given the treatment they deserve. In a society based on hypocrisy alltogether, you have to start on a personal level. You have to lose your personal chains before you attempt to free others. Your personal chains begin with the things you've been taught to hold most sacred (as is generally the case). The morals that are not yours. Whom do they really serve? The institutions that everyone notices they have fail and yet most continue to serve them. Why? How can this possibly be?
These are just some of the issues dealt with in Emma's essays.
A classic book that will basically reprogram your brain if you honestly think about the issues in it. But reprogrammed into what? Well, it will only reprogram you into thinking for yourself. For once. If you do, you'll find that the illusion you've been living in does indeed serve someone. Your long hard road to becoming an individual will thus commence.
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This is a brialliant yet problematic work.  It is primarily concerned with showing how the ideals of early capitalism were mirroed and shaped by the ideals of Calvinism.  It is NOT an attempt to show Protestantism as the  casue of capitalism. Weber regarded this as foolish, but too many who pick  up this book for the first time read it this way.  Weber's theory of the  Iron Cage is important and stunnningly extended by Daniel Bell in the  Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. This book was translated 17 years  before the next important work of Weber's, which caused much scholarship of  him to reduce him to the content of this text.  Don't fall into that trap.  Weber is one of the hardest thinkers to reliably abstract in history.  Most  Weberians and Neo-Weberians are still radically at odds with each other  over what his opus meant.  Heck, Thomas Burger almost gets violent in his  criticism of other Weberian interpretations. The primarary error of setting  this as Weber's monolithic work is to set Weber as Marx's counterbalance.  He "turned Marx on his head" mainly to Weber's contemporaries in  Germany, many of whom had accepted religion as an opiate of the masses  unworthy of scholarship.  It is far easier to understand Weber is you  compare him with Rickert.  Better yet, read Weber's on work on methodology  of the social sciences and his alter works that explored hte religious,  political and social worlds.
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In this book, David Harsanyi provides his readers with a much-needed critique of democracy.  Harsanyi details the problems that are caused by what might be termed "pure" democracy, and rightly notes that history is filled with numerous examples of democracies that have degenerated into mob rule.  (One can easily name examples of democracies gone wrong, including ancient Athens, whose democratic citizenry condemned Socrates to death; the Weimar Republic, which ultimately elected Adolf Hitler as Chancellor; Egypt, whose voters freely chose the Muslim Brotherhood; and the Palestinian Authority, whose citizens have more than once elected the Hamas, a known terrorist organization.)

Harsanyi's primary argument is that the more "pure" a democracy becomes - that is, the more voters who vote, and the more direct their votes are (that is, without mediating structures such as state legislatures choosing Senators for them - as was the case in Abraham Lincoln's day - or the often maligned Electoral College) the more likely it is that democratic rule will degenerate into mob rule, and thereafter, into a dictatorship.  On the other hand, Harsanyi argues that mixed forms of government - like  the United States' constitutional republic - with its combination of monarchial, aristocratic, and democratic structures, as well as its overlapping layers of checks and balances, is the safest form of self-government, because it prevents any one group of people from stampeding an entire nation into a misguided policy.

While I agree with much of Harsanyi's critique, and regard it as a much-needed contrarian voice in today's political environment, I also found this book depressing.  I found it depressing because he takes such a dour view of democracy, and because Harsanyi doesn't offer any solutions to the current problems of governance beyond pointing out that gridlock is actually a healthy exercise of democracy (he argues this is the case because gridlock protects the rights of those who might otherwise be trampled by fear-mongering politicians and a fearful electorate).

Still, I do recommend this book to those who care about democracy, as well as to those who care about the current state of politics in the United States.
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Don't be put off by the lame cover design.  The late Mr. Hofstadter's book deserves your attention, particularly in light of recent American history.

'The Paranoid Style' is in fact a collection of essays, the first four of which are thematically-related studies of American hyper-conservatism.  (I won't discuss the other essays in this review.)  In the first, Hofstadter brings to light earlier historical avatars of conservative paranoia, reaching back to 18th century fears of 'Illuminati' and Freemasons, and 19th century anti-Catholic sentiment.  Hofstadter then contextualizes the then-current anti-communist movement and McCarthyism as the latest examples of a 'style' of American political rhetoric that cannot brook coincidence, and that, in contrast, prefers to see historical events, which are largely beyond our control, as the evidence of a vast and perfect conspiracy to destroy America and its values.

In the next essays, Hofstadter engages with what he calls 'pseudo-conservatism,' a philosophy embodied in those ultra-right wing movements that do not seek to conserve or guide our social institutions at all, but instead wish to tear them out root and branch, on the grounds of their complete and utter corruption.  At the time, Hofstadter's targets were right-wing organizations like the John Birch Society, but above all Barry Goldwater and his supporters.  These 'pseudo-conservatives' rejected completely the moderate Republican leadership of the time, and sometimes went so far as to accuse them of treason.  What the pseudo-cons offered instead of the generally successful continuation of New Deal social policy or the careful stand-off of the Cold War, was the complete reversal of government intervention into social welfare and a hyper-aggressive stance toward communism that did not deem global thermo-nuclear war to be an unacceptable outcome.

The portrait of Barry Goldwater is particularly chilling.  Goldwater's instrumentalization of 'moral values' as an electoral wedge, and his Manichean and apocalyptic vision of world politics -- reflected in the title of his book "Why not Victory?" - thankfully did not seduce the American electorate of 1964.  But Goldwater's influence on Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush is beyond dispute.
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I studied this text as a graduate student at York University. I must admit that I did not understand the terse theoretical language for a long time. However, I had the good fortune of finding a fellow graduate student in Political Thought who was so well versed in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy that he could extol the hidden meanings of the text for hours on end! I called his ranting, "bible thumping"! But in all seriousness, once you understand the conceptual relationships presented in the book, you find a whole new way of conceptualizing the social, not as an accomplished fact, but as an ongoing practice of articulation. The problem with orthodox forms of Marxism? The fixing of the meaning of the "working class" at the point of production. During the whole development of Marxism up to the theoretical work of Gramsci, we have witnessed the "undoing" of the essentialist meaning/construction of the working class as determined by pure economistic forces. The problem? The larger mediating role of politics and culture. Working class identity is not fixed at the point of production, but is fragmented across other discursive spaces, e.g. nationalism, sports fan, father, mother, reader, lover, etc. There is no neccessary articulation between any of these. The moral lesson behind all this is thus: The Right has been very successful in practicing articulation, providing a broad-based appeal in relation to identities; on the other hand, the left has been "left" with a worn-out, 19th century, industrial model of "working class" identity. The second half of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy takes the reader into a post-Gramscian theoretical muse on the subject of emerging social movements and the discursive (poststructuralist) construction of subject positions, which are always open to new articulations, (both to the left and right), and are never finally fixed. From this theoretical standpoint, the social is open to ongoing struggles over meanings. For the Left to revitalize itself and become a viable force in the new century, it must become more sophisticated in the area of cultural politics and begin to strategically articulate discursive equivalents across social movements--to find common ground in what seems to be a multiple and fragemented emergence of movements. My only criticism is that, by reifying social movements, we lose site of the very complexity and pluralism found within such movements. Does this mean that by its macro perspective it loses sight of the mirco, everyday? On the contrary, no! The model given by Laclau and Mouffe has an applicability well beyond the study of social movement discourses. I utilized the notion of articulation found in the text and the notion of the openness of the social in my critical ethnography of a non-federally recognized Native American group and their struggles over the meaning of their contested identity, (Book Title: Native Americans in the Carolina Borderlands: A Critical Ethnography, Carolinas Press, 2000). The model can be applied in ethnographic works concerned with the social effectivity of larger articulated, social movement discourses. It is the type of contingent theorizing that is itself unfinished and open to new articulations! A must for students, academics, and cultural workers interested in the politics of culture, cultural studies, critical theory, social movements, and social theory in general.