Product Description: "Art, Technology, Technique" examines the connections between these three terms, which come together in the term "Techne" as a recurring feature in the history of aesthetics. Whilst much recent interest in questions of art and technology has centred exclusively on the impacts of new technologies, this collection examines this problematic issue across a range of media and historical moments...read more

Product Description: Each of the contributions in this volume address at least two terms of the art, technology, technique or matter/form/work triad. They do this from various ‘techniques’ including philosophy, media and cultural studies and artistic practices as they inform art criticism and theory...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: After eight years of President Bush's trumpeting the virtues of promoting freedom and democracy abroad but achieving limited results, many Americans have grown suspicious of democratic development as a goal of American foreign policy...read more

Product Description: Will Africa’s recuperative powers have dispelled the shadows of historically imposed predicaments by the end of the century? This is the question posed to this group of scholars from all over Africa and the diaspora. Their comments cover a range of issues, from knowledge and its transformation to the need to manage natural resources...read more

In After Capitalism, David Schweickart moves beyond the familiar arguments against globalizing capitalism to contribute something absolutely necessary and long overdue--a coherent vision of a viable, desirable alternative to capitalism. He names this system Economic Democracy, a successor-system to capitalism which preserves the efficiency strengths of a market economy while extending democracy to the workplace and to the structures of investment finance. Drawing on both theoretical and empirical research, Schweickart shows how and why this model is efficient, dynamic, and superior to capitalism along a range of values.

Product Description: A grassroots movement for economic democracy based on cooperatives and local economies is quickly growing throughout the planet. After Capitalism, inspired by P.R. Sarkar's Progressive Utilization Theory (Prout), offers a compelling vision of an equitable, sustainable model which economically empowers individuals and communities...read more

Product Description: A brave and timely examination of America's great dilemma in the Muslim worldPublished just as the United States went to war in Iraq, After Jihad put Noah Feldman "into the center of an unruly brawl now raging in policy circles over what to do with the Arab world" (The New York Times Book Review)...read more

(view table of contents)

Product Description: In light of the predatory practices employed by massive corporations-some of which are even bigger than nations-and their wealthy owners, a movement arose from among the people known as the 99 percent, those who are not among the wealthiest 1 percent of the population...read more

Product Description: The Arab Uprisings that began in 2010 removed four presidents and made more mobilized mass publics an increased factor in the politics of regional states. The main initial problematic of the Arab Uprising was how to translate mass protest into democratization and ultimately democratic consolidation; yet four years later, there was little democratization...read more

Product Description: The End of Democracy?The fall of the Berlin Wall. The collapse of the Iron Curtain. The Orange Revolution. The Arab Spring.The rush of events in recent decades seems to confirm that Alexis de Tocqueville was right: the future belongs to democracy...read more

Product Description: The crisis in Ukraine that began in November 2013 constitutes a turning point in Euro-Atlantic security with potential global repercussions. It is the most significant security problem between Russia and the ‘West’ in the post Cold War period and the crisis has marked a new era in global politics...read more

This book argues that we can no longer envision a political system that might practically displace democracy or, more accurately, global democratic state capitalism. Democracy has become fundamental: It extends deeper and deeper into everyday life; it grounds and limits our political thought and values. That is the sense in which we do indeed live at history's end. But this end is not a happy one, because the system that we now have does not satisfy tests that we can legitimately put to it. In this situation, it is important to come to new terms with the fact that literature, at least until about 1945, was predominantly hostile to political democracy. Literature's deep-seated conservative, counterdemocratic tendencies, along with its capacity to make important distinctions among political, cultural, and experiential democracies and its capacity to uncover hidden, nonpolitical democracies in everyday life, is now a resource not just for cultural conservatives but for all those who take a critical attitude toward the current political, cultural, and economic structures. Literature, and certain novelists in particular, helps us not so much to imagine social possibilities beyond democracy as to understand how life might be lived both in and outside democratic state capitalism. Drawing on political theory, intellectual history, and the techniques of close reading, Against Democracy offers new accounts of the ethos of refusing democracy, of literary criticism's contribution to that ethos, and of the history of conservatism, as well as innovative interpretations of a range of writers, including Tocqueville, Disraeli, George Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Saul Bellow.

One of our most prescient political observers provides a sobering account of how pitched battles over scarce resources will increasingly define American politics in the coming years—and how we might avoid, or at least mitigate, the damage from these ideological and economic battles.   In a matter of just three years, a bitter struggle over limited resources has enveloped political discourse at every level in the United States. Fights between haves and have-nots over health care, unemployment benefits, funding for mortgage write-downs, economic stimulus legislation—and, at the local level, over cuts in police protection, garbage collection, and in the number of teachers—have dominated the debate. Elected officials are being forced to make zero-sum choices—or worse, choices with no winners.      Resource competition between Democrats and Republicans has left each side determined to protect what it has at the expense of the other. The major issues of the next few years—long-term deficit reduction; entitlement reform, notably of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; major cuts in defense spending; and difficulty in financing a continuation of American international involvement—suggest that your-gain-is-my-loss politics will inevitably intensify.