Mortal Republic

Learn why the Roman Republic collapsed -- and how it could have continued to thrive -- with this insightful history from an award-winning author. In Mortal Republic, prize-winning historian Edward J. Watts offers a new history of the fall of the Roman Republic that explains why Rome exchanged freedom for autocracy. For centuries, even as Rome grew into the Mediterranean's premier military and political power, its governing institutions, parliamentary rules, and political customs successfully fostered negotiation and compromise. By the 130s BC, however, Rome's leaders increasingly used these same tools to cynically pursue individual gain and obstruct their opponents. As the center decayed and dysfunction grew, arguments between politicians gave way to political violence in the streets. The stage was set for destructive civil wars -- and ultimately the imperial reign of Augustus. The death of Rome's Republic was not inevitable. In Mortal Republic, Watts shows it died because it was allowed to, from thousands of small wounds inflicted by Romans who assumed that it would last forever.

The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome tells the story of 2200 years of the use and misuse of the idea of Roman decline by ambitious politicians, authors, and autocrats as well as the people scapegoated and victimized in the name of Roman renewal. It focuses on the long history of a way of describing change that might seem innocuous, but which has cost countless people their lives, liberty, or property across two millennia.

Violence exploding in public spaces, corruption by political figures and economic elites, the will of the people thwarted in both elections and votes in the senate, military misadventures abroad, and rampant economic inequality at home diminishing a shared sense of the common good – in sum, a republic in disarray. These descriptions are not only familiar from ancient Roman political and social life but are also recognizable to any United States citizen who follows the news and American civic life. On the Republic proceeds chronologically through the fall of the Roman Republic beginning in 133 BCE and continuing down to around 14 CE, providing a continuous narrative of the fall of the Roman Republic juxtaposed with the contemporary political landscape of the United States. In 20 short chapters, On the Republic explores how the United States now faces many of the same challenges that toppled the Roman Republic - political divisions, economic inequality, and creeping authoritarianism. How we respond to these challenges today will determine the future of American democracy.

From one of the leading intellectuals of the digital age, The Digital Republic is the definitive guide to the great political question of our time: how can freedom and democracy survive in a world of powerful digital technologies? A Financial Times “Book to Read” in 2022 Not long ago, the tech industry was widely admired, and the internet was regarded as a tonic for freedom and democracy. Not anymore. Every day, the headlines blaze with reports of racist algorithms, data leaks, and social media platforms festering with falsehood and hate. In The Digital Republic, acclaimed author Jamie Susskind argues that these problems are not the fault of a few bad apples at the top of the industry. They are the result of our failure to govern technology properly. The Digital Republic charts a new course. It offers a plan for the digital age: new legal standards, new public bodies and institutions, new duties on platforms, new rights and regulators, new codes of conduct for people in the tech industry. Inspired by the great political essays of the past, and steeped in the traditions of republican thought, it offers a vision of a different type of society: a digital republic in which human and technological flourishing go hand in hand.

With over 40 million people still enslaved around the world, this book takes a closer look at the role of culture in society and how certain practices, beliefs or behaviors are fueling human trafficking beyond what the law can curtail.

This book explores the deterioration of the promise of the American dream, particularly for Black Americans. Cal Jillson traces the source and cause of that decline to race prejudice, first in the stark form of human slavery and later in various forms of racial and ethnic discrimination, that has distorted American progress over the past four centuries and now portends American decline. Employing historical analysis of race and ethnicity in American life from colonial to modern times, the chapters examine the various understandings of race and ethnicity in American public life and politics and ask what those understandings imply for political and policy approaches to addressing injustice and restoring the American dream. Drawing on sources from political science, history, sociology, and economics, this book will supplement a main text in upper division courses on race and ethnicity, political sociology, public opinion, demography, and public policy.

A dual biography of Julius Caesar and Cato the Younger that offers a dire warning: republics collapse when personal pride overrides the common good. In Uncommon Wrath, historian Josiah Osgood tells the story of how the political rivalry between Julius Caesar and Marcus Cato precipitated the end of the Roman Republic. As the champions of two dominant but distinct visions for Rome, Caesar and Cato each represented qualities that had made the Republic strong, but their ideological differences entrenched into enmity and mutual fear. The intensity of their collective factions became a tribal divide, hampering their ability to make good decisions and undermining democratic government. The men's toxic polarity meant that despite their shared devotion to the Republic, they pushed it into civil war. Deeply researched and compellingly told, Uncommon Wrath is a groundbreaking biography of two men whose hatred for each other destroyed the world they loved.

In this sixtieth anniversary edition of The Idea of Nationalism, Craig Calhoun probes the work of Hans Kohn and the world that first brought prominence to this unparalleled defense of the national ideal in the modern West. At its publication, Saturday Review called it "an enduring and definitive treatise.... [Kohn] has written a book which is less a history of nationalism than it is a history of Western civilization from the standpoint of the national idea." This edition includes an extensive new introduction by Craig Calhoun, which in itself is a substantial contribution to the history of ideas. The Idea of Nationalism comprehensively analyzes the rise of nationalism, the idea's content, and its worldwide implications from the days of Hebrew and Greek antiquity to the eve of the French Revolution. As Calhoun explains, Kohn was particularly qualified to undertake this study. He grew up in Prague, the vigorous heart of Czech nationalism, participated in the Zionist student movement, studied the question of nationality in multinational cultures, spent the World War One years in Asian Russia, and later traveled extensively in the Near East studying the nationalist movements of western and southern Asia. The work itself is the product of Kohn's later years at Harvard University. In The Idea of Nationalism, Kohn presents the single most influential articulation of the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism. This has shaped nearly all ensuing research and public discussion and deeply informed parallel oppositions of early and late, Western and Eastern varieties of nationalism. Kohn also argues that the age of nationalism represents the first period of universal history. Civilizations and continents are brought into ever closer contact; popular participation in politics is enormously increased; and the secular state is ever more significant. The Idea of Nationalism is important both in itself and because it so deeply shaped all the work that followed it. After sixty years his interpretations and analyses remain acute and instructive.