Outlink station Miranda has been destroyed by a nanomycelium, and the very nature of this sabotage suggests that the alien bioconstruct Dragon - a creature as untrustworthy as it is gigantic - is somehow involved. Sent out on a titanic Polity dreadnought, the Occam Razor, agent Cormac must investigate the disaster. Meanwhile, on the remote planet Masada, the long-term rebellion can never rise above-ground, as the slave population is subjugated by orbital laser arrays controlled by the Theocracy in their cylinder worlds, and by the fact that they cannot safely leave their labour compounds. For the wilderness of Masada lacks breathable air ... and out there roam monstrous predators called hooders and siluroynes, not to mention the weird and terrible gabbleducks.

Old enemies meet on new worlds in The Line of Polity, the second novel in Neal Asher's popular Agent Cormac series. At the frontiers of human-occupied space, the Miranda space station has been utterly destroyed. Earth Central assigns Agent Ian Cormac to discover the truth, because the alien bioconstruct Dragon seems the most likely culprit. Meanwhile, rebellion is brewing on Masada. The planet’s people are enslaved on the surface, living in fear of their overlords in orbit, who punish transgressions with laser strikes. Leaving their compounds also means death, as monstrous predators roam the toxic wilderness. Civil war looms, while a rebel biophysicist brings lethal Jain technology to this world. Agent Cormac must find out what connects these events, if he is to avert catastrophe. The Line of Polity is followed by Brass Man, the third title in the Agent Cormac series.

Americans have long prided themselves on living in a country that serves as a beacon of democracy to the world, but from the time of the founding they have also engaged in debates over what the criteria for democracy are as they seek to validate their faith in the United States as a democratic regime. In this book John Gunnell shows how the academic discipline of political science has contributed in a major way to this ongoing dialogue, thereby playing a significant role in political education and the formulation of popular conceptions of American democracy. Using the distinctive “internalist” approach he has developed for writing intellectual history, Gunnell traces the dynamics of conceptual change and continuity as American political science evolved from a focus in the nineteenth century on the idea of the state, through the emergence of a pluralist theory of democracy in the 1920s and its transfiguration into liberalism in the mid-1930s, up to the rearticulation of pluralist theory in the 1950s and its resurgence, yet again, in the 1990s. Along the way he explores how political scientists have grappled with a fundamental question about popular sovereignty: Does democracy require a people and a national democratic community, or can the requisites of democracy be achieved through fortuitous social configurations coupled with the design of certain institutional mechanisms?

"The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians" presents a quick overview of Sparta and Athens, outlining their natures and political systems. The book offers excellent insights into the Athenian democracy and compares it with the political order of Sparta, which could be described as "communist" today. It is perfect for anyone taking history lessons or interested in the Antique period.

Critics and scholars have long argued that the Renaissance was the period that gave rise to the modern individual. The Gargantuan Polity examines political, legal, theological, and literary texts in the late Middle Ages, to show how individuals were defined by contracts of mutual obligation, which allowed rulers to hold power due to approval of their subjects. Noting how the relationship between rulers and individuals changed with the rise of absolute monarchy, Michael Randall provides significant insight into Renaissance culture and politics by showing how individuals went from being understood in terms of their objective relations with the community to subjective beings. By studying this evolution, he challenges the argument that subjectivity enabled modern political autonomy to come into existence, and instead argues that subjectivity might have disempowered the outwardly directed and highly political individuals of the late Middle Ages. A profound and detailed study of one of the most drastic periods of change, The Gargantuan Polity will be of interest to scholars of French literature, the Renaissance, and intellectual history.

"This chapter introduces our holistic view of knowledge production in sociology and political science. Enlarging our view beyond the individualistic publication pipeline metaphor, we press the conception of academics as citizens of a knowledge polity with rights and responsibilities. Knowledge production does not just mean research, but encompasses teaching, reviewing, blogging, commenting, and other activities, which signal its communal nature. We then advance an explanation for knowledge production that situates academics in institutional and social contexts - including the family - while maintaining individual agency. We search for inequalities by gender and racial/ethnic identification, but are careful to consider the changing compositions of political science and sociology (both are diversifying steadily) and different situations (e.g., faculty rank) when making comparisons. The chapter describes our PASS study, which sampled academic departments and surveyed 1,700 faculty in 2017. Respondent reports were linked with data on lifetime publications, Twitter activity and other data"--

The case of Melos is relevant to the understanding of the processes of early state-formation and of the integration of small-scale societies into larger political units. As the contributors to this volume show, a small island provides a very suitable area in which to examine the processes of social, cultural and economic change and the forces.