Paradigms And Sand Castles

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Examining 36 democracies from 1945 to 2010, this text arrives at conclusions about what type of democracy works best. It demonstrates that consensual systems stimulate economic growth, control inflation and unemployment, and limit budget deficits.

State structures, international forces, and class relations: Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations. Social revolutions have been rare but undeniably of enormous importance in modern world history. States and Social Revolutions provides a new frame of reference for analyzing the causes, the conflicts, and the outcomes of such revolutions. It develops a rigorous, comparative historical analysis of three major cases: the French Revolution of 1787 through the early 1800s, the Russian Revolution of 1917 through the 1930s, and the Chinese Revolution of 1911 through the 1960s. Believing that existing theories of revolution, both Marxist and non-Marxist, are inadequate to explain the actual historical patterns of revolutions, Skocpol urges us to adopt fresh perspectives. Above all, she maintains that states conceived as administrative and coercive organizations potentially autonomous from class controls and interests must be made central to explanations of revolutions.

Employing analytical tools borrowed from game theory, Carles Boix offers a complete theory of political transitions, in which political regimes ultimately hinge on the nature of economic assets, their distribution among individuals, and the balance of power among different social groups. Backed up by detailed historical work and extensive statistical analysis that goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, this book explains, among many other things, why democracy emerged in classical Athens. It also discusses the early triumph of democracy in both nineteenth-century agrarian Norway, Switzerland and northeastern America and the failure in countries with a powerful landowning class.

Human awareness – which forms the basis of all interpersonal relationships – is perhaps the most fascinating phenomenon of biological and socio-cultural evolution. In this innovative book, originally published in 1987, the author introduces the subject of human awareness from the perspective of developmental and social psychology. Using a wide range of psychological and other sources, both classic and more recent from around the world, the book begins with a discussion of awareness as a biological and cultural-historical phenomenon. The reader is then guided through such issues as one’s awareness of others, self-awareness, interpersonal communication, and the search of human beings for recognition by others. The final chapter focuses on human awareness as a relationship between the self and society, with particular emphasis on social stability and change. Human Awareness provided the first comprehensive account of human consciousness in a text that reflected the most exciting recent research in the field at the time and emphasized the need for an integrated and coherent understanding of the various psychological disciplines.

This book uses rational choice theory to understand the behaviour of dictators.

Explains how dictatorships rise, survive, and fall, along with why some but not all dictators wield vast powers.

In this volume, the study of legislatures has traditionally been a central preoccupation of political scientists. Legislatures provide good laboratories for testing theories and methodologies of significance in the discipline and, more broadly, for contributing to an understanding of how representative government works.