Twilight Of Liberty

This work is the sequel to the author's The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union, but with a change in emphasis. Instead of challenging the ACLU's nonpartisan reputation as in the earlier work, Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, seeks to demonstrate how and why recent ACLU policy undermines the process of liberty. He compares a conception of liberty which maintains that freedom is best achieved when individual rights and the needs of the social order are balanced, with a conception of liberty which is concerned solely with the rights of the individual. The original edition was published in 1994. This revised edition contains a new afterword by the author. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Twilight of Liberty is a sequel to Donohue's highly regarded The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union, but with a marked change in emphasis. Instead of challenging the ACLU's nonpartisan reputation, as he did in the earlier volume, Donohue now seeks to demonstrate why and how recent ACLU policy undermines the process of liberty. He argues that the ACLU, by relentlessly warring with mediating institutions, and by pushing a radical individualism in its policies, is not making us more, but less free. Two conceptions of liberty are discussed. The first considers the social context in which the struggle for freedom takes place. It maintains that freedom is best achieved through a delicate balancing of individual rights with the legitimate needs of the social order. The other conception of liberty is atomistic, exclusively concerned with the rights of the individual. According to Donohue, such a definition assures the triumph of the state over the mediating institutions of society, thus reducing prospects for freedom. This is the first book to critically analyze contemporary ACLU policy and to challenge its reputation as the preeminent voice of freedom in the United States. It aims to move beyond the idea that freedom is best served by pushing individual rights to extremes. Twilight of Liberty will appeal to scholars in the fields of law, social policy, and culture. Students in civil liberties courses will also find this book a valuable resource.

"We had thought, or our forefathers had, that modern liberal democracy would be spared the kind of erosion and decay that both Plato and Aristotle declared endemic in all forms of state. Now we are not so sure." So wrote Robert Nisbet in the first edition of Twilight of Authority, published by Oxford University Press in 1975. "The centralization and, increasingly, individualization of power is matched in the social and cultural spheres by a combined hedonism and egalitarianism, each in its own way a reflection of the destructive impact of power on the hierarchy that is native to the social bond," he writes. Robert Nisbet (1913-1996) taught at Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, Smith College, and the University of Bologna. Robert G. Perrin is Professor of Sociology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

The larger issue of defining hegemony and dominance has gained a greater importance over the last dozen years. Whether addressed explicitly or implicitly, it is the issue that lies behind the many recent books on international relations. The ongoing "financial crisis" has given these issues new urgency. This book provides new and startling evidence drawn from foreign exchange markets and capital flow statistics. They demonstrate that the problem dates back to the end of 2000 and has been driven by political events as much as structural economic issues. Combined with the development of a structural energy problem, the financial problem generated a global economic crisis that has not ended. In Twilight's Last Gleaming, Edmund Clingan uses economic measurements to establish measures of political and military power. Clingan examines the changes in these measurements over the last two hundred years to establish how international power relations have been affected by changes in economic power. He considers the factors that contribute to and detract from economic power. Using these quantitative measures, he provides consistent definitions of "dominance" and "hegemony" that should become commonly used and contribute to more precise discourse in history and political science. These tools uncover the deeper issues behind the current problems of the United States.

The author, a conservative lawyer, examines the powers of government which in his opinion were increasing past the limits imposed by the Constitution. He concludes that the government acted illegally during the time period encompassing the Animal Industries Act of 1884 through the New Deal of the 1930's.

Argues that the efforts of the ACLU have silenced the church, undermined parental authority, and cheapened human life.

Winner of the 1997 Jewish Book Committee award for scholarship on a Canadian Jewish subject. Ever since Abella and Troper (None Is too Many, 1982) exposed the anti-Semitism behind Canada’s refusal to allow Jewish escapees from the Third Reich to immigrate, the Canadian churches have been under a shadow. Were the churches silent or largely silent, as alleged, or did they speak? In How Silent Were the Churches? a Jew and a Christian examine the Protestant record. Old letters, sermons and other church documents yield a profile of contemporary Protestant attitudes. Countless questions are raised — How much anti-Semitism lurked in Canadian Protestantism? How much pro-German feeling? How accurately did the churches of Canada read the signs of the times? Or did they bury their heads in the sand? Davies and Nefsky discover some surprising answers. The theologies and the historical and ethnic configurations of Protestant Canada, encompassing religious communities from the United Church to the Quakers, are brought into relief against the background of the Great Depression, the rise of fascism in Europe and the resurgence of nativism in Canadian society. The authors conclude their study with an evaluation of the limits to Protestant influence in Canada and the dilemmas faced by religious communities and persons of conscience when confronted by the realities of power.