In this elegant extended essay, Ralph Lerner concentrates on the politics of enlightenment--the process by which those who sought to set minds free went about their work. Eighteenth-century revolutionaries in America and Europe, Lerner argues, found that a revolution aimed at liberating bodies and minds had somehow to be explained and defended. Lerner first investigates how the makers of revolution sought to improve their public's aspirations and chances. He pays particular attention to Benjamin Franklin, to the tone and substance of revolutionaries' appeals on both sides of the Atlantic, and to the preoccupations of first- and second-generation enlighteners among the Americans. He then unfolds the art by which later political actors, confronting the profound political, constitutional, and social divisions of their own day, drew upon and reworked their national revolutionary heritage. Lerner's examination of the speeches and writings of Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, and Alexis de Tocqueville shows them to be masters of a political rhetoric once closely analyzed by Plato and his medieval student al-Farabi but now nearly forgotten. Originally published in 1994. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

The Scientific Revolution Revisited brings Mikuláš Teich back to the great movement of thought and action that transformed European science and society in the seventeenth century. Drawing on a lifetime of scholarly experience in six penetrating chapters, Teich examines the ways of investigating and understanding nature that matured during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, charting their progress towards science as we now know it and insisting on the essential interpenetration of such inquiry with its changing social environment. The Scientific Revolution was marked by the global expansion of trade by European powers and by interstate rivalries for a stake in the developing world market, in which advanced medieval China, remarkably, did not participate. It is in the wake of these happenings, in Teich's original retelling, that the Thirty Years War and the Scientific Revolution emerge as products of and factors in an uneven transition in European and world history: from natural philosophy to modern science, feudalism to capitalism, the late medieval to the early modern period. ??With a narrative that moves from pre-classical thought to the European institutionalisation of science – and a scope that embraces figures both lionised and neglected, such as Nicole Oresme, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Thaddeus Hagecius, Johann Joachim Becher – The Scientific Revolution Revisited illuminates the social and intellectual sea changes that shaped the modern world.

The year 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Up until recently, the book’s philosophical reception has been shaped, for the most part, by the debates and the climate in philosophy of science in the 1960s and 1970s; this new collection of essays takes a renewed look at this work. This volume concentrates on particular issues addressed or raised in light of recent scholarship and without the pressure of the immediate concerns scholars had at the time of the Structure’s publication. There has been extensive research on all of the major issues concerning the development of science which are discussed in Structure, work in which the scholars contributing to this volume have all been actively involved. In recent years they have pursued novel research on a number of topics relevant to Structure’s concerns, such as the nature and function of concepts, the complexity of logical positivism and its legacy, the relation of history to philosophy of science, the character of scientific progress and rationality, and scientific realism, all of which are brought together and given new light in this text. In this way, our book makes new connections and undertakes new approaches in an effort to understand the Structure’s significance in the canon of philosophy of science.

This study aims to update a classic of comparative revolutionary analysis, Crane Brinton's 1938 study The Anatomy of Revolution. It invokes the latest research and theoretical writing in history, political science, and political sociology to compare and contrast, in their successive phases, the English Revolution of 1640-60, the French Revolution of 1789-99, and the Russian Revolution of 1917-29. This book intends to do what no other comparative analysis of revolutionary change has yet adequately done. It not only progresses beyond Marxian socioeconomic "class" analysis and early "revisionist" stresses on short-term, accidental factors involved in revolutionary causation and process; it also finds ways to reconcile "state-centered" structuralist accounts of the three major European revolutions with postmodernist explanations of those upheavals that play up the centrality of human agency, revolutionary discourse, mentalities, ideology, and political culture.

The protracted global financial crisis and perceived rise in economic inequality has awakened the long-dormant debate as to whether the international monetary system is in need of fundamental reform. While not surprising given that there is now general agreement that excessive money and credit growth played a key role in the near collapse of the global financial system in 2008, John Butler makes a compelling case in this book that the only way to place the global economy back on the path of sustainable economic growth and to reverse the trend towards inequality is to remonetize gold. Already there are a number of major countries expressing concern about the stability of the existing monetary order. And concern is increasingly giving way to action. As the dollar′s international reserve role gradually declines and more trade is conducted in other currencies, global monetary arrangements are likely to become increasingly multipolar. As there is no single national currency that can realistically replace the dollar as the preeminent global monetary reserve, gold will re-emerge as the preferred international money. As students of economic history will note, it was precisely a multipolar world amid rapidly growing international trade that ushered in the classical gold standard in the 1870s. The world′s 40-year experiment with purely unbacked fiat currencies is thus rapidly approaching its conclusion. This book, however, goes much farther than predict a return to gold. It explores just what the transition might look like, including both orderly and disorderly scenarios and drawing on historical examples where relevant. It considers to what extent the price of gold will likely rise as it becomes remonetized. It surveys and evaluates recent developments in financial technology, including bitcoin, blockchain and digital gold. Most important, it prepares the reader with practical investment advice for a world of gold or gold-backed money, including thoughts on interest rates, exchange rates, credit spreads, equity market valuations, and risk premia for assets in general. Thus John Butler provides not only a compelling vision of the future, but also a detailed road map for navigating what is likely to be the most challenging investment landscape in generations

The year 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Up until recently, the book’s philosophical reception has been shaped, for the most part, by the debates and the climate in philosophy of science in the 1960s and 1970s; this new collection of essays takes a renewed look at this work. This volume concentrates on particular issues addressed or raised in light of recent scholarship and without the pressure of the immediate concerns scholars had at the time of the Structure’s publication. There has been extensive research on all of the major issues concerning the development of science which are discussed in Structure, work in which the scholars contributing to this volume have all been actively involved. In recent years they have pursued novel research on a number of topics relevant to Structure’s concerns, such as the nature and function of concepts, the complexity of logical positivism and its legacy, the relation of history to philosophy of science, the character of scientific progress and rationality, and scientific realism, all of which are brought together and given new light in this text. In this way, our book makes new connections and undertakes new approaches in an effort to understand the Structure’s significance in the canon of philosophy of science.

Originally published in the early 1970s, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China has proved to be one of the most significant and enduring books published in the field. In this new critical edition of that seminal work, Mark Selden revisits the central themes therein and reconsiders them in light of major new theoretical and documentary understandings of the Chinese communist revolution.

This edited volume provides the first fully comprehensive evaluation of Libya since the Qadhafi coup in 1969. Throughout the different chapters the authors explore the rise of the military in Libya, the impact of its self-styled revolution on Libyan society and economy.

Illuminates how the preservation of slavery was a motivating factor for the Revolutionary War The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the British. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne shows that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt. Prior to 1776, anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain and in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were in revolt. For European colonists in America, the major threat to their security was a foreign invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved. It was a real and threatening possibility that London would impose abolition throughout the colonies—a possibility the founding fathers feared would bring slave rebellions to their shores. To forestall it, they went to war. The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their right to enslave others. The Counter-Revolution of 1776 brings us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States.

The Vekhi (Landmarks) symposium (1909) is one of the most famous publications in Russian intellectual and political history. Its fame rests on the critique it offers of the phenomenon of the Russian intelligentsia in the period of crisis that led to the 1917 Russian Revolution. It was published as a polemical response to the revolution of 1905, the failed outcome of which was deemed by all the Vekhi contributors to exemplify and illuminate fatal philosophical, political, and psychological flaws in the revolutionary intelligentsia that had sought it. Landmarks Revisited offers a new and comprehensive assessment of the symposium and its legacy from a variety of disciplinary perspectives by leading scholars in their fields. It will be of compelling interest to all students of Russian history, politics, and culture, and the impact of these on the wider world.