Power, Profit and Prestige applies incisive historical and sociological analysis to make sense of the United States’ post-Cold War imperial behavior. Philip Golub studies imperial identity formation and shows how an embedded culture of force and expansion has shaped American foreign policy. He argues that the US logic of world power and deeply rooted assumptions about American primacy inhibits democratic transformation at domestic and international levels. This resistance to change may lead the US empire into a crisis of its own making. This enlightening book will be particularly useful to students of history and international relations as they explore a world where America is no longer able to set the global agenda.

A provocative history of the changing values that have given rise to our present discontents. We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning—cost-benefit analysis—to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton shows, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the iron cage of instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives. Wootton guides us through four centuries of Western thought—from Machiavelli to Madison—to show how new ideas about politics, ethics, and economics stepped into a gap opened up by religious conflict and the Scientific Revolution. As ideas about godliness and Aristotelian virtue faded, theories about the rational pursuit of power, pleasure, and profit moved to the fore in the work of writers both obscure and as famous as Hobbes, Locke, and Adam Smith. The new instrumental reasoning cut through old codes of status and rank, enabling the emergence of movements for liberty and equality. But it also helped to create a world in which virtue, honor, shame, and guilt count for almost nothing, and what matters is success. Is our world better for the rise of instrumental reasoning? To answer that question, Wootton writes, we must first recognize that we live in its grip.

"First published in Great Britain in 1989 by Macmillan London Limited"--T.p. verso. Bibliography: p. 195-226.

King Leopold II of Belgium built palaces, public buildings, castles, and monuments to remember his greatness as a king. People still praise him even though he killed millions of people. The question of accountability is raised, not only in the case of Leopold, but all in power who have caused the death of millions of human beings. The terrible wars of the recent past have all been followed with excuses by those who planned the wars. In this military and political history and commentary, the author--a U.S. Army veteran--covers more than one hundred years leading up to the present day. In addition to Leopold II, he highlights figures such as Otto von Bismarck, the chancellor of Prussia who united Germany; Japanese Emperor Hirohito; Adolf Hitler; President Franklin D. Roosevelt; President Lyndon B. Johnson; and many others. From the rise of colonial empires to World War I and World War II to fighting in Korea, Vietnam, and beyond, we must study the past to determine what we might do better moving forward. Learn the fascinating history of the Western world's major conflicts and gain an appreciation for those who've fought and died in Killing for Power and Profit.

America's national pastime has been marked from its inception by bitter struggles between owners and players over profit, power, and prestige. In this book, the first installment of a highly readable, comprehensive labor history of baseball, Robert Burk d

This book provides a local journalist’s perspective on a four-decade long regional contribution to global news production. It shows how the fixers’ risky news pursuits made possible for global media to access distant regions and dangerous caves on Pakistan and Afghanistan borders, causing unprecedented deaths of the local reporters in the context of the U.S-led war on terror. The book analyzes the fixer as a role in its relationship with militarization. It is not a coincidence that fixers become valuable to commercial media only during the height of violence or crises. Emerging under conditions of scarcity or war, the value of this role, in turn, is intrinsically tied to the fear of extinction. It is this vulnerability or perceived expendability— imposed by the need to find work—that binds fixers in a symbiotic relationship with global market and global war. This book, then, serves as a vantage point from which one can clearly see the connection between the regional wars and commercial media, as well as local journalists’ transformation into daily wage earners in a global media shift toward neoliberalism.

These essays emerge from different crucial and complex conflicts: from the memory of a bishop, Bartolome de las Casas, urging the pope of his time to cleanse the church of complicity with violence, oppression, and slavery; from the lament and defiance of so many Middle Eastern women, victims of male domination and too many wars; from the voices bursting out from the colonial margins that dare to question and transgress the norms and laws imposed by colonizers and conquerors; from the emerging and diverse theological disruptions of traditional orthodoxies and rigid dogmatisms; from the denial of human rights to immigrant communities, living in the shadows of opulent societies; from the use of the sacred Hebrew Scriptures to displace and dispossess the indigenous peoples of Palestine. The essays belong to different intellectual genres and conceptual crossroads and are thus illustrative of the dialogic imagination that the Russian intellectual Mikhail Bakhtin considered basic to any serious intellectual enterprise. They are also the literary sediment of years of sharing lectures, dialogues, and debates in several academic institutions in the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Switzerland, Germany, and Palestine.

The unprecedented resurgence, renewal, and rebirth of twenty-first century Christianity in postcolonial societies, such as Asia, Africa, and Latin America, calls for new insights, methodologies, and paradigms since the West can no longer be regarded as the sole citadel and cradle of the Christian faith. The Christian message has been reshaped and reappropriated in different contexts and cultures and, through this cross-cultural transmission and transformation, it has become a world religion. Contextualizing the Christian faith also entails decolonizing its theology, precepts, and dogma. These efforts continue to engender new initiatives and efforts in the intercultural, interconfessional, intercontinental, and interreligious dimensions of world Christianity. A New Day is a collection of essays in honor of Lamin Sanneh, one of the most adamant advocates and apostles of the radical change in the face of Christianity in the twenty-first century. The essays in this book by recognized scholars deal with issues, themes, and perspectives that are important for understanding Christianity as a world religious movement.