"Politics in a Half Made Society tells the story of contemporary politics in the twin island of Trinidad and Tobago. The book provides a narrative and analytical account beginning in 1925, when the first elections were held, and continuing up to 2001 with the two major political parties in a historical deadlock for which formal constitutional arrangement did no cater. The book is divided into four sections, each underlining the important stages of Trinidad's political history, Part One - Prelude to Self-government - deals with Trinidad's move towards the establishment of party politics between 1925 and 1953; Part Two - The Long Reign of Eric Williams - recounts the political shrewdness of this prime minister and the peculiar challenges he faced while in power; Part Three - Paved with Good Intentions: The Rise and Fall of the National Alliance for Reconstruction - examines the failure of the Chambers administration to sustain the political and economic gains made during the Williams years, covers the attempted coup of 1990 and assesses the NAR's performance; Part Four - Toward Stalemate: Structural Adjustment, Indian Arrival and Slim Majorities - looks at the political configuration of the 1990s after structural adjustment and Basdeo Panday's coming to power. "

Noelle Molé Liston's The Truth Society seeks to understand how a period of Italian political spectacle, which regularly blurred fact and fiction, has shaped how people understand truth, mass-mediated information, scientific knowledge, and forms of governance. Liston scrutinizes Italy's late twentieth-century political culture, particularly the impact of the former prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi. By doing so, she examines how this truth-bending political era made science, logic, and rationality into ideas that needed saving. With the prevalence of fake news and our seeming lack of shared reality in the "post-truth" world, many people struggle to figure out where this new normal came from. Liston argues that seemingly disparate events and practices that have unfolded in Italy are historical reactions to mediatized political forms and particular, cultivated ways of knowing. Politics, then, is always sutured to how knowledge is structured, circulated, and processed. The Truth Society offers Italy as a case study for understanding the remaking of politics in an era of disinformation.

Almost fifty years ago, the author wrote the first comprehensive critical study of social issues in computing, The Conquest of Will (1976). This new book revisits this seminal study, featuring an overview of technological advances over the past half century, and provides a unique comparison between what was believed and expected of computers back in 1976, and actual outcomes up to the present time. Despite the extraordinary changes in technology, much of what has emerged in contemporary society was anticipated fifty years ago, and we are still grappling with some of the same basic challenges. For example, the computer’s threat to privacy has been a constant issue ever since the late 1950s, but the regulatory framework designed in the 1960s has been upended by the Internet. Artificial Intelligence too has been a contentious issue since the late 1950s, but until recently discussion was largely confined to academia, and there was little urgency to regulate its further development and application. The comparisons offered in this book will highlight what we got right and wrong in the past, and point to the sources of good and bad predictions. While there have been many studies of social issues in computing published since The Conquest of Will appeared in 1976, this is an unusual and valuable longitudinal comparison of the current situation with what prevailed and was predicted half a century ago.

"How much does it cost?" We think of this question as one that preoccupies the nation's shoppers, not its statesmen. But, as Pocketbook Politics dramatically shows, the twentieth-century American polity in fact developed in response to that very consumer concern. In this groundbreaking study, Meg Jacobs demonstrates how pocketbook politics provided the engine for American political conflict throughout the twentieth century. From Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, national politics turned on public anger over the high cost of living. Beginning with the explosion of prices at the turn of the century, every strike, demonstration, and boycott was, in effect, a protest against rising prices and inadequate income. On one side, a reform coalition of ordinary Americans, mass retailers, and national politicians fought for laws and policies that promoted militant unionism, government price controls, and a Keynesian program of full employment. On the other, small businessmen fiercely resisted this low-price, high-wage agenda that threatened to bankrupt them. This book recaptures this dramatic struggle, beginning with the immigrant Jewish, Irish, and Italian women who flocked to Edward Filene's famous Boston bargain basement that opened in 1909 and ending with the Great Inflation of the 1970s. Pocketbook Politics offers a new interpretation of state power by integrating popular politics and elite policymaking. Unlike most social historians who focus exclusively on consumers at the grass-roots, Jacobs breaks new methodological ground by insisting on the centrality of national politics and the state in the nearly century-long fight to fulfill the American Dream of abundance.

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

Can international community step up to defend civilians whose basic rights are been jeopardized? What is the limit of sovereignty in the face of a human rights crisis? Should international community been legitimated to take action in defense of helpless civilians? Who ́s to determine when to act, if so? To address these and other question, this book will present you the concept of R2P – Responsibility to Protect. Throughout the work we will conduct you to analyze in which extent the responsibility to protect theory can influence the States behavior in intervention for human protection and discuss whether or not R2P has all the ingredients to be considered a customary international law. All of that will be done in the light of factual evidences conducting a comparative case study involving the interventions in Kosovo (late 1990's) and Libya (early 2010's). We will show and analyze changes in actions and procedures according to the new premises of R2P, addressing the legality of the intervention, the quickness of the response and the refrain in the use of veto power in the United Nations Security Council. If you are any interested in politics, international community and human rights, we invite you to travel together with us in this book for new concepts, reflections and a (potential) glimpse of the future.

This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work on the fringe groups that influence American electoral politics offers an invaluable perspective on contemporary domestic affairs.In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups. With such other classic essays as “Free Silver and the Mind of 'Coin' Harvey” and “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?, ” The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains both a seminal text of political history and a vital analysis of the ways in which political groups function in the United States.