An Empire Of Ideals

Justin D. Garrison provides an original and groundbreaking analysis of Ronald Reagan’s imagination as it was expressed mainly in his presidential speeches. He argues that the predominant strain of Reagan’s imagination is "chimeric," that is, imbued with a high degree of optimism, romantic dreaminess, naiveté, and illusion. Reagan spoke often about religion, democracy, freedom, conservatism, progress, America’s role in the world, the American people, the American Founding, and peace. These are for him important symbols, which together express his general vision of politics and human existence. These symbols have to be analyzed in depth in order to understand who Reagan really was and what he represented to his admirers. The book concludes that Reagan’s vision contains many dubious elements that present dangers for practical politics and claims that the popularity of Reagan’s imagination among Americans suggests a problematic self-understanding. Surpassing, existing works on Reagan’s ideas and speeches, this book systematically explains the general quality and major components of Reagan’s vision, and it draws upon political theory, aesthetics, and American political thought to analyze his imagination.

The United States is the global leader in higher education, but this was not always the case and may not remain so. William Kirby examines sources of—and threats to—US higher education supremacy and charts the rise of Chinese competitors. Yet Chinese institutions also face problems, including a state that challenges the commitment to free inquiry.

Empire of Ideas examines the origins of the U. S. government's programs in public diplomacy and how the nation's image in the world became an essential component of U. S. foreign policy.

First published in 2004. This 6 volume set focuses on the influential economic and political commentators who saw weaknesses in the infrastructure of the British Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. Dubbed Idealists of Empire, they saw that the British Empire seemed to have no governing principles, no structure and no guiding ideals. Sir John Seeley's famous quote of 1883 sums up this view: 'we seem to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind'. The mission of the idealists was to find an Imperial solution to this problem. The idealists of Empire documented their findings as they looked more systematically at the Empire's external challenges and internal workings, in terms of politics, economics and strategy. The texts published in this collection represent their most important contributions to the early twentieth-century debate on the fate of the Empire. Volume 6 includes The Nation and the Empire (1913).

Christopher Star uncovers significant points of contact between Seneca and Petronius, two important Roman writers long thought to be antagonists. In The Empire of the Self, Christopher Star studies the question of how political reality affects the concepts of body, soul, and self. Star argues that during the early Roman Empire the establishment of autocracy and the development of a universal ideal of individual autonomy were mutually enhancing phenomena. The Stoic ideal of individual empire or complete self-command is a major theme of Seneca’s philosophical works. The problematic consequences of this ideal are explored in Seneca’s dramatic and satirical works, as well as in the novel of his contemporary Petronius. Star examines the rhetorical links between these diverse texts. He also demonstrates a significant point of contact between two writers generally thought to be antagonists—the idea that imperial speech structures reveal the self.

From a noted historian and foreign-policy analyst, a groundbreaking critique of the troubling symbiosis between Washington and the human rights movement The United States has long been hailed as a powerful force for global human rights. Now, drawing on thousands of documents from the CIA, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and development agencies, James Peck shows in blunt detail how Washington has shaped human rights into a potent ideological weapon for purposes having little to do with rights—and everything to do with furthering America's global reach. Using the words of Washington's leaders when they are speaking among themselves, Peck tracks the rise of human rights from its dismissal in the cold war years as "fuzzy minded" to its calculated adoption, after the Vietnam War, as a rationale for American foreign engagement. He considers such milestones as the fight for Soviet dissidents, Tiananmen Square, and today's war on terror, exposing in the process how the human rights movement has too often failed to challenge Washington's strategies. A gripping and elegant work of analysis, Ideal Illusions argues that the movement must break free from Washington if it is to develop a truly uncompromising critique of power in all its forms.