Naomi Zack’s Reviving the Social Compact:Inclusive Citizenship in an Age of Extreme Politics addresses current political and social upheaval and distress with new concepts for the relationship between citizens and government. Politics has become turbo-charged as a form of agonistic contest where candidates and the public become more focused on winning than on governing or holding the government accountable for the benefit of the people. This failure of the government to fulfill its part of the social contract calls for a new social compact wherein citizens as a collective whole make long-term resolutions outside of government institutions. Analyzing present and evolving events, Zackreveals how race has exceeded intersection after formal rights have failed to correct ongoing discrimination; how class is no longer based on real life interests and has been manufactured and manipulated for political contest; how women have made spectacular progress but how the fame of elite women has left out poor, non-white women, transgender people, and sex workers; how natural disasters have not been (and perhaps cannot be) adequately prepared for or responded to by government; how environmental preservation becomes politicized; how homelessness could be fixed through capitalism; and how immigration reform has pivoted from inclusion to expulsion and why hospitality is an important civic virtue. Reviving the Social Compact is a call for good citizenship. Voting is the first step—because in a divided two-party system, a change from one party to the other is tantamount to revolution—and a new understanding of the social compact can lead to the stable civic life we need at this time.

The New American Social Compact examines the need to redefine the social compact in twenty-first-century America. Grant explores the two components of this compact_the rights and obligations of citizenship_as well as what she sees as the four substantive areas that are critical to realizing a new social compact in America. Grant proposes a new social compact that would honor the expansion of civil, political, and social rights in America and would integrate these rights within a new civic procedural ethos, clarifying our obligations to each other, future generations, other nations, and other species.

In hard times, dissension mounts. The old social contract flounders and cannot be revived. Forces of reaction assert themselves. Danger intensifies. In dark times, opportunity appears. Such is our time. It is time to debate and define the next social contract, to articulate its political aims and action plan. It is time to change the world. In Digging Out: Global Crisis and the Search for a New Social Contract, two brothers from the social and environmental justice movements engage this debate with a revolutionary proposal rooted in the power dynamics of the world's rising service-based economy. They provide a theoretical framework to reinterpret and address festering world problems through local and global initiatives. They urge cultural reinvigoration to deploy our social skills and innovation in service of others. Their proposal confirms the leading role of civil society, and it calls for a worldwide commercial transaction fee to curb financial speculation while adequately and permanently funding a sustainable future. Digging Out proposes a new social contract to advance economic security, social justice, and ecological restoration worldwide. It is a clarion call, urging us to unite and demand the changes necessary for a better tomorrow.

Restoring the Republic: A New Social Contract for We the People provides an overview of political concepts essential to understanding the evolution of our political system. It describes the problems associated with too many citizens disconnected or loosely connected to the public sphere and the paths active citizens can take to restore the principles of the Founders of the Republic consistent with the knowledge, wisdom, and experience gained in the last 240 years. The work addresses the need to establish a new social contract, one that strengthens the ability of citizens to conduct their own affairs while guaranteeing all residents equality under the law and equality in accessing opportunities to improve their lives. The presentation uses events and ideas from a group of historical periods (ancient Athens, the first few centuries of the Rome Empire, Tudor England, the Thirty Years War, the twentieth century) to exemplify concepts still in use. The last few chapters of the book use the current presidential election the same way. When it comes right down to it, the most important aspect of any political system is the way it reflects popular will without diminishing the rights of minority populations in society.

Governments frequently compartmentalize issues of reform and reconstruction into separate strategies and separate ministries (the fate of poverty reduction as well). Donors do likewise, for each has its own responsibilities; the IMF focuses on reform, the UN concentrates on conflict resolution and reconstruction, and the World Bank - whole operations span both agendas - has yet to integrate reform and conflict issues. However, reform and reconstruction cannot be kept separate if conflict is to be halted and poverty reduced. Biases and public spending, predatory taxation, and bad policy encourage conflict by reducing the incomes, both absolute let and relative to others, of tensions, and gelsing demagogues recruit their followers.

Examines the political principles of Woodrow Wilson that influenced his presidency and the impact he had on United States and the progressive movement.

A National Review Best Book of the Year Americans today are anxious--about the economy, about politics, about our government. The institutions that once dominated our culture have become smaller, more diverse, and personalized. Individualism has come at the cost of dwindling solidarity. No wonder, then, that voters and politicians alike are nostalgic for a time of social cohesion and economic success. But the policies of the past are inadequate to the America of today. Both parties are stuck presenting old solutions to new problems. In The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin details his innovative answers to the dysfunctions of our fragmented national life. By embracing subsidiarity and diversity and rejecting extremism and nostalgia, he believes we can revive the middle layers of society and enable an American revival. Updated with a new epilogue, Levin helps us navigate our fraught political waters.

After an old university friend and fellow archeologist's murdered, forensic archeologist Ruth Galloway travels to Lancashire to examine the bones he found, which reveal a shocking fact about King Arthur, and discovers a campus living in fear of a sinister right-wing group called the White Hand.

Some analysts have called distrust the biggest governmental crisis of our time. It is unquestionably a huge problem, undermining confidence in our elected institutions, shrinking social capital, slowing innovation, and raising existential questions for democratic government itself. What’s behind the rising distrust in democracies around the world and can we do anything about it? In this lively and thought-provoking essay, Donald F. Kettl, a leading scholar of public policy and management, investigates the deep historical roots of distrust in government, exploring its effects on the social contract between citizens and their elected representatives. Most importantly, the book examines the strategies that present-day governments can follow to earn back our trust, so that the officials we elect can govern more effectively on our behalf.

This book provides a novel account of the public goods dilemma. The author shows how the social contract, in its quest for fairness, actually helps to breed the parasitic 'free riding' it is meant to suppress. He also shows how, in the absence of taxation, many public goods would be provided by spontaneous group co-operation. This would, however, imply some degree of free riding. Unwilling to tolerate such unfairness, co-operating groups would eventually drift from voluntary to compulsory solutions, heedless of the fact that this must bring back free riding with a vengeance. The author argues that the perverse incentives created by the attempt to render public provision assured and fair are a principal cause of the poor functioning of organised society.