State And Politics

A detailed analysis of how Deleuze and Guattari's work engaged with the upheavals of their time. Often approached through their “micropolitics of desire,” the joint works of Deleuze and Guattari are rarely part of the discussion when classical and contemporary problems of political thought come under scrutiny. Yet if we follow the trajectory from Anti-Oedipus (1972) to A Thousand Plateaus (1980), it becomes clear that these problems were redeveloped during a period of historical transition marked by the end of the wars of decolonization, the transformation of global capitalism, and by recombinations of the forces of collective resistance that were as deep as they were uncertain. In State and Politics, Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc measures how Deleuze and Guattari engage with the upheavals of their time by confronting their thought with its main interlocutor, Marxism, with its epistemological field (historical materialism), with its critical program (the critique of political economy), and with its political grammar (class struggle). Three new hypotheses emerge from these encounters: the hypothesis of the Urstaat, embodying an excess of sovereign violence over the State apparatus and over its political investments; the hypothesis of a power of the “war machine” that States can only ever appropriate partially, and to which they can be subordinated; and the hypothesis of an excess of “destructivism” in capitalist accumulation over its productive organization. These three excesses betray the haunting presence of the period between the wars in the political thought of Deleuze and Guattari, but they also allow Deleuze and Guattari's ideas to communicate with contemporary thinkers of the impolitical. The reader discovers not only a new political theory but also the plurality of ways in which extreme violence—violence capable of destroying politics itself—can arise.

When it comes to voting, taxes, environmental regulations, social services, education, criminal justice, political parties, property rights, gun control, marriage and a whole host of other modern American issues, the state in which a citizen resides makes a difference. That idea—that the political decisions made by those in state-level offices are of tremendous importance to the lives of people whose states they govern—is the fundamental concept explored in this book. Gary F. Moncrief and Peverill Squire introduce students to the very tangible and constantly evolving implications, limitations, and foundations of America’s state political institutions, and accessibly explain the ways that the political powers of the states manifest themselves in the cultures, economies, and lives of everyday Americans, and always will.

This accessible introduction to comparative politics offers a fresh, state-centered perspective on the fundamentals of political science.

This major new textbook will equip students with a complete understanding of contemporary politics, state and society in the United Kingdom today. Key underlying themes include: The differences between traditional and alternative ‘sites of power’ and what we mean by ‘political’ the relationships between politics, society and how individuals become and remain engaged with politics the rapid transformations in contemporary social structures and their impact on social and political life the role of human agency and its significance to social and political action and movements contemporary cultural and social dislocations and their impact on some of the major contested areas of political life today. Key features include: Key concepts and issues Key theorists and writers Discussion questions Comprehensive and accessible, An Introduction to Politics, State & Society is an essential text for all undergraduate students of politics, the contemporary state, power and political sociology.

This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political history of the United States in the twentieth century, and chronicles its transformation into a key mediating institution between citizens and the state. Framed around the three major federal higher education policies of the twentieth century--the 1944 GI Bill, the 1958 National Defense Education Act, and the 1965 Higher Education Act--the book charts the federal government's various efforts to deploy education to ready citizens for the national, bureaucratized, and increasingly global world in which they lived. Loss details the myriad ways in which academic leaders and students shaped, and were shaped by, the state's shifting political agenda as it moved from a preoccupation with economic security during the Great Depression, to national security during World War II and the Cold War, to securing the rights of African Americans, women, and other previously marginalized groups during the 1960s and '70s. Along the way, Loss reappraises the origins of higher education's current-day diversity regime, the growth of identity group politics, and the privatization of citizenship at the close of the twentieth century. At a time when people's faith in government and higher education is being sorely tested, this book sheds new light on the close relations between American higher education and politics.

Governance discourse centers on an "ideal type" of modern statehood that exhibits full internal and external sovereignty and a legitimate monopoly on the use of force. Yet modern statehood is an anomaly, both historically and within the contemporary international system, while the condition of "limited statehood," wherein countries lack the capacity to implement central decisions and monopolize force, is the norm. Limited statehood, argue the authors in this provocative collection, is in fact a fundamental form of governance, immune to the forces of economic and political modernization. Challenging common assumptions about sovereign states and the evolution of modern statehood, particularly the dominant paradigms supported by international relations theorists, development agencies, and international organizations, this volume explores strategies for effective and legitimate governance within a framework of weak and ineffective state institutions. Approaching the problem from the perspectives of political science, history, and law, contributors explore the factors that contribute to successful governance under conditions of limited statehood. These include the involvement of nonstate actors and nonhierarchical modes of political influence. Empirical chapters analyze security governance by nonstate actors, the contribution of public-private partnerships to promote the United Nations Millennium Goals, the role of business in environmental governance, and the problems of Western state-building efforts, among other issues. Recognizing these forms of governance as legitimate, the contributors clarify the complexities of a system the developed world must negotiate in the coming century.

In The Politics of State and City Administration, Abney and Lauth take a penetrating look at the relationships of state and city administrators to the people with whom they work: legislators, councilors, chief executives, and numerous interest groups seeking to influence administrative decisions and upon whom administrators depend to achieve their objectives. The analysis is based upon information obtained from national surveys of approximately 800 state and 600 city government department heads. The reader of this book will learn, for example, that governors are perceived by their department heads to be more interested in management than in policy leadership, interest groups are viewed as allies rather than enemies of state administrators, and the emergence of professionalism in administration has reduced the ability of mayors to be chief administrators. The Politics of State and City Administration will be of interest to scholars and students of public administration, state and local government, and public policy.

Since the Reagan presidency, more and more public policymaking authority has devolved to the states, a trend that the contributors to this volume argue is unlikely to abate soon. Public Opinion in State Politics is an innovative collection of recent research developed in response to signs of this growing importance of state politics. It updates and expands the previous work on public opinion and state politics, taking into account new data and methods, and drawing comparisons across states. The book is organized around three major themes: the conceptualization and measurement of public opinion in the states; explanations of variation in state public opinion; and the impact of public opinion on state politics and policy.