Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition
by Milton Friedman
from University Of Chicago Press
How can we benefit from the promise of government while avoiding the threat it poses to individual freedom? In this classic book, Milton Friedman provides the definitive statement of his immensely influential economic philosophy—one in which competitive capitalism serves as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom. The result is an accessible text that has sold well over half a million copies in English, has been translated into eighteen languages, and shows every sign of becoming more and more influential as time goes on.
The Challenge Of Democracy
by Kenneth Janda
from Houghton Mifflin Company
This best-selling, mainstream American government text is both a comprehensive introduction and a complete program, with the print text and ancillaries carefully crafted to work together to benefit both instructor and student. The Ninth Edition maintains its highly acclaimed, non-ideological framework, exploring three themes: freedom, order, and equality as political values; the majoritarianism vs. pluralism debate; and globalization's effect on American politics. Extensively updated, this edition includes new examples, figures, and data and current discussions on such topics as the 2006 Congressional election, the Bush administration, campaign finance reform, Hurricane Katrina and FEMA, immigration policy, MEDICARE, and more.
Continuing to offer leading-edge technology for teaching and learning, the program now offers course content in Eduspace, Blackboard, and WebCT formats and In Our Own Words—downloadable chapter overviews in MP3 format narrated by the authors. Additional proven media tools include Talking Politics audio clips and marginal references to the award-winning site, IDEAlog.org.
- New! Eduspace/Blackboard/WebCT online course content includes an interactive eBook, customizable graded homework and quizzes, primary source documents, Associated Press Interactive animations, simulations, writing assignments and tutorials, discussion assignments, a threaded message board, and video clips of election ads.
- New! Revised and updated Chapter 5, "Public Opinion and Political Socialization," features updated information on religion, the role gender played in the 2004 presidential election, and the death penalty.
- New! Reorganized Chapter 9, "Nominations, Elections, and Campaigns," offers revised coverage of campaign finance to include information on campaign spending during the 2004 and 2006 elections.
- New! Revised and updated material in Chapter 10, "Interest Groups," presents new material on 527s, recent lobbyist scandals, and interest groups with no membership.
- New! Updated Chapter 12, "The Presidency," addresses the second George W. Bush administration, including the president's relationship with Congress and 2006 midterm election results.
- New! Revised Chapter 17, "Policymaking," highlights the latest on FEMA, Medicare, and legislating life and death issues (as in the case of Terri Schiavo).
- Current, relevant chapter-opening vignettes, nearly half of which are new to the Ninth Edition, introduce chapter topics and capture student interest.
- Politics in a Changing World boxes focus on the effect of globalization on American government by comparing how US politics affects the world and vice versa. These highlighted features appear in every other chapter, alternating with Looking to the Future.
- Can You Explain Why marginal features challenge students to use their critical-thinking skills to explain paradoxical political situations and/or concepts.
- Looking to the Future invites students to consider trends in American government such as declining voter turnout, or to evaluate questions, such as whether federal government is shrinking or expanding, and then to consider the implications of their answers.
- Talking Politics audio clips, found on both the Online Teaching and Study Centers and the student and instructor CDs, allow students to hear American politics in action through speeches and interviews.
- Compared With What? features in each chapter, nearly 50 percent new or revised, encourage students to evaluate our political system as compared with those of other countries.
- A new set of marginal tie-ins to IDEAlog.com directs students to this award-winning interactive site for analysis relevant to the chapter content.
Struggle for Democracy, The (8th Edition) (MyPoliSciLab Series)
by Edward S. Greenberg
from Longman
Democracy in America (Penguin Classics)
by Alexis de Tocqueville
from Penguin Classics
In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat and ambitious civil servant, made a nine-month journey throughout America. The result was Democracy in America, a monumental study of the life and institutions of the evolving nation. Tocqueville looked to the flourishing democratic system in America as a possible model for post-revolutionary France, believing that the egalitarian ideals it enshrined reflected the spirit of the age and even divine will. His insightful work has become one of the most influential political texts ever written on America and an indispensable authority on democracy.
This new edition is the only one that contains all Tocqueville's writings on America, including the rarely-translated Two Weeks in the Wilderness, an account of Tocqueville's travels in Michigan among the Iroquois, and Excursion to Lake Oneida.
The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, Revised Edition
by Fareed Zakaria
from W. W. Norton
differently."—Washington Post
A modern classic that uses historical analysis to shed light on the present, The Future of Freedom is, as the Chicago Tribune put it, "essential reading for anyone worried about the promotion and preservation of liberty." Hailed by the New York Times as "brave and ambitious...updated Tocqueville," it enjoyed extended stays on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post bestseller lists and has been translated into eighteen languages. Prescient in laying out the distinction between democracy and liberty, the book now contains a new afterword on the United States's occupation of Iraq.
"Intensely provocative and valuable," according to BusinessWeek, with an easy command of history, philosophy, and current affairs, The Future of Freedom calls for a restoration of the balance between liberty and democracy and shows how politics and government can be made effective and relevant for our time. This new edition includes a new afterword on America in Iraq.
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
by Noam Chomsky
from Holt Paperbacks
The United States has repeatedly asserted its right to intervene militarily against “failed states” around the globe. In this much-anticipated follow-up to his international bestseller Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky turns the tables, showing how the United States itself shares features with other failed states—suffering from a severe “democratic deficit,” eschewing domestic and international law, and adopting policies that increasingly endanger its own citizens and the world. Exploring the latest developments in U.S. foreign and domestic policy, Chomsky reveals Washington’s plans to further militarize the planet, greatly increasing the risks of nuclear war. He also assesses the dangerous consequences of the occupation of Iraq; documents Washington’s self-exemption from international norms, including the Geneva conventions and the Kyoto Protocol; and examines how the U.S. electoral system is designed to eliminate genuine political alternatives, impeding any meaningful democracy.
Forceful, lucid, and meticulously documented, Failed States offers a comprehensive analysis of a global superpower that has long claimed the right to reshape other nations while its own democratic institutions are in severe crisis. Systematically dismantling the United States’ pretense of being the world’s arbiter of democracy, Failed States is Chomsky’s most focused—and urgent—critique to date.
A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present (Perennial Classics)
by Howard Zinn
from Harper Perennial
Consistently lauded for its lively, readable prose, this revised and updated edition of A People's History of the United States turns traditional textbook history on its head. Howard Zinn infuses the often-submerged voices of blacks, women, American Indians, war resisters, and poor laborers of all nationalities into this thorough narrative that spans American history from Christopher Columbus's arrival to an afterword on the Clinton presidency.
Addressing his trademark reversals of perspective, Zinn--a teacher, historian, and social activist for more than 20 years--explains, "My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)--that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth."
If your last experience of American history was brought to you by junior high school textbooks--or even if you're a specialist--get ready for the other side of stories you may not even have heard. With its vivid descriptions of rarely noted events, A People's History of the United States is required reading for anyone who wants to take a fresh look at the rich, rocky history of America.
Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History of the United States is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers.
Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (Borzoi Books)
by Robert B. Reich
from Knopf
From the greatly admired author of The Work of Nations and The Future of Success, one of America's greatest economic and political thinkers as well as a distinguished public servant in three national administrations, a breakthrough book on the clash between capitalism and democracy.
Mid-twentieth-century capitalism has turned into global capitalism, and global capitalism—turbocharged, Web-based, and able to find and make almost anything just about anywhere—has turned into supercapitalism. But as Robert B. Reich makes clear in this eye-opening book, while supercapitalism is working wonderfully well to enlarge the economic pie, democracy—charged with caring for all citizens—is becoming less and less effective under its influence.
Reich explains how widening inequalities of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and the spreading effects of global warming are the logical outcomes of supercapitalism. He shows us why companies, fighting harder than ever to maintain their competitive positions, have become even more deeply involved in politics; and how average citizens, seeking great deals and invested in the stock market to an unprecedented degree, are increasingly loath to stand by their values if it means biting the hands that feed them. He makes clear how the tools traditionally used to temper America's societal problems—fair taxation, well-funded public education, trade unions—have withered as supercapitalism has burgeoned.
Reich sets out a clear course to a vibrant capitalism and a concurrent, equally vibrant democracy. He argues forcefully that the spheres of business and politics must be kept distinct. He calls for an end to the legal fiction that corporations are citizens, as well as the illusion that corporations can be "socially responsible" until laws define social needs. Reich explains why we must stop treating companies as if they were people—and must therefore abolish the corporate income tax and levy it on shareholders instead, hold individuals rather than corporations guilty of criminal conduct, and not expect companies to be "patriotic." For, as Reich says, only people can be citizens, and only citizens should be allowed to participate in democratic decision making.
Moyers on Democracy
by Bill Moyers
from Doubleday
Bill Moyers on America today:
“Here in the first decade of the twenty-first century the story that becomes America’s dominant narrative will shape our collective imagination and our politics for a long time to come. In the searching of our souls demanded by this challenge . . . kindred spirits across the nation must confront the most fundamental liberal failure of the current era: the failure to embrace a moral vision of America based on the transcendent faith that human beings are more than the sum of their material appetites, our country is more than an economic machine, and freedom is not license but responsibility—the gift we have received and the legacy we must bequeath.
“Although our sojourn in life is brief, we are on a great journey. For those who came before us and for those who follow, our moral, political, and religious duty to make sure that this nation, which was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are equal under the law, is in good hands on our watch.”
—from “For America’s Sake”
People know Bill Moyers mostly from his many years of path-breaking journalism on television. But he is also one of America’s most sought-after public speakers. His appearances draw sell-out crowds across the country and are among the most reproduced on the Web. “And one reason,” writes noted journalist Bill McKibben, “is that Moyers pulls no punches. His understanding of America’s history is at least as deep as his understanding of Christian tradition, which is an integral part of his background . . . With his feet firmly planted in the deepest American traditions, Bill Moyers is helping to keep alive an oratorical tradition that is fading after two centuries. Trained by his career in broadcasting, he writes for the ear, his cadences and his repetitions timed to bring an audience to full realization of its role and its power.”
And that is the message of this book. Moyers on Democracy collects many of Bill Moyers’s most moving statements to connect the dots on what is happening to our country—the twinned growth of private wealth and public squalor, the assault on our Constitution, the undermining of the electoral process, the accelerating class war against ordinary (and vulnerable) Americans inherent in the growth of economic inequality, the dangers of an imperial executive, the attack on the independence of the press, the despoiling of the earth we share as our common gift—and to rekindle the reader’s conviction that “the gravediggers of democracy will not have the last word.” Richly insightful and alive with a fierce, abiding love for our country, Moyers on Democracy is essential reading in this fateful presidential year.
Democracy
by Charles Tilly
from Cambridge University Press
Democracy identifies the general processes causing democratization and de-democratization at a national level across the world over the last few hundred years. It singles out integration of trust networks into public politics, insulation of public politics from categorical inequality, and suppression of autonomous coercive power centers as crucial processes. Through analytic narratives and comparisons of multiple regimes, mostly since World War II, this book makes the case for recasting current theories of democracy, democratization, and de-democratization.
Democracy identifies the general processes causing democratization and de-democratization at a national level across the world over the last few hundred years. Through analytic narratives and comparisons of multiple regimes, mostly since World War II, this book makes the case for recasting current theories of democracy, democratization, and de-democratization.
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