The Limits Of Government: An Essay On The Public Goods Argument

The most widely accepted justification for political authority is that coercive institutions are necessary to provide for public goods. Making use of the tools of rational choice theory, economics, and the law of contracts, David Schmidtz offers an incisive critique of this argument that will forever change the shape of the debate on this issue. Along the way, he makes significant contributions to our understanding of the logic of contractarian arguments, the prisoner's dilemma, and the institution of property. An important lesson is that a community is and must be primarily a voluntary association, and in his final chapter Schmidtz explores the implications of this lesson for the foundations of morality.

Business & Money

Schmidtz, David

Economics

Westview

The most widely accepted justification for political authority is that coercive institutions are necessary to provide for public goods. Making use of the tools of rational choice theory, economics, and the law of contracts, the author offers a critique of this argument. Along the way, he makes significant contributions to our understanding of the logic of contractarian arguments, the prisoner's dilemma, and the institution of property. An important lesson is that a community is and must be primarily a voluntary association, and in one final chapter the book explores the implications of this lesson for the foundations of morality.

When anthropologists discuss power, they may speak of individuals, a social class, or the state. When Jamaicans discuss power, they speak in terms of family. They point to the so-called twenty-one families who live in the hills surrounding the capital at Kingston and occupy the commanding heights of this Caribbean island nation.The Power of Sentiment looks at love and hierarchy in the kinship patterns of Jamaica's prominent business families--the privileged, mostly white Jamaicans who form what Douglass calls a "family elite." Douglass argues that in Jamaica structures and practices of power converge with the structures and practices of kinship. She suggests that the way they organize and carry out family life--such as by marrying almost exclusively within their group--supports and reproduces historically constituted hierarchies of gender, color, and class. Yet the kinship practices of the family elite do not merely serve to maintain their position or promote their interests, as some critics have suggested. The elite marry according to enduring cultural dispositions about the proper ordering of color, gender, and class relations, following their sense of what "feels right." In their view, they marry not out of self-interest, but "for love."The Power of Sentiment breaks new ground in ethnographic studies of kinship. Lisa Douglass examines the upper class, a group previously neglected in research on the Caribbean family despite its integral role in the kinship system. She provides fresh insights into what earlier studies termed the color/ class hierarchy by considering how gender both affects what these categories represent and is itself a distinct dimension of the social order. The author also makes a significant contribution to theories of ideology and practice. By exploring the power of sentiment, she emphasizes the perspective of the people studied and suggests that feelings such as love carry both ideological power and cultural meaning. Moving beyond a limited analysis of showing how meaning serves the structures of power, Douglass considers the power of meaning itself in constituting family and society.

The Power Of Sentiment: Love, Hierarchy, And The Jamaican Family Elite (Studies in the Ethnographic Imagination)

Politics & Social Sciences

Douglass Ph.D., Lisa

Social Sciences

The diary of a young Polish Jew reveals his attempt to protect himself against Nazi persecution by becoming a policeman in a ghetto near Warsaw

Am I A Murderer?: Testament Of A Jewish Ghetto Policeman

History

Calel Perechodnik

World

The Free Society

In the tradition of Milton Friedman's 1962 classic, Capitalism and Freedom, Lansing Pollock draws on moral, political, and economic theory to defend a libertarian vision of the good society. Pollock argues that mutual consent, derived from a fundamental Kantian moral equality, is the ideal standard for judging relations between persons.

Pollock, Lansing

Philosophy

Wilderness Wanderings slashes through the tangled undergrowth that Christianity in America has become to clear a space for those for whom theology still matters. Writing to a generation of Christians that finds itself at once comfortably at home” yet oddly fettered and irrelevant in America, Stanley Hauerwas challenges contemporary Christians to reimagine what it might mean to break back into Christianity” in a world that is at best semi-Christian. While the myth that America is a Christian nation has long been debunked, a more urgent constructive task remains; namely, discerning what it may mean for Christians approaching the threshold of the twenty-first century to be courageous in their convictions. Ironically, reclaiming the church's identity and mission may require relinquishing its purported gains”which often amount to little more than a sense of comfort, the seduction of feeling at ease in Zion” to take up again the risk and adventure of life on the way.” Accordingly, this book gives no comfort to the religious right or left, which continues to think Christianity can be made compatible with the sentimentalities of democratic liberalism.Such a re-visioned church will not establish itself through conquest or in a reconstituted Christendom, but rather must develop within its own life the patient, attentive skills of a wayfaring people. At least a church seasoned by a peripatetic life stands a better chance of noticing the changing directions of God's leading. The wilderness, therefore, ought not to appear to contemporary Christians in America as a foreboding and frightening possibility but as an opportunity to rediscover the excitement and spirit, but also the rigorous discipline, of faithful itinerancy. At such a crucial time as this, Hauerwas challenges Christians to eschew the insidious dangers that attend too permanent a habitation in a place called America and to assume instead the holy risks and hazards characteristic of people called out, set apart, and led by God. Wilderness Wanderings is a clarion call for Christians to relinquish the impermanent citizenship of a home that can never be the church's final resting place and confidently take up a course of life the horizons of which are as wide and expansive as the God who promises to lead.The book engages, often quite critically, with major theological and philosophical figures, such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Martha Nussbaum, Jeff Stout, Tristram Engelhardt, Iris Murdoch, John Milbank, and Martin Luther King Jr. These interrogations illumine why theology must reclaim its own politics and ethics. Intent on avoiding abstraction, Hauerwas intervenes in current debates around medicine, the culture wars, and race.

Wilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth-century Theology And Philosophy (Radical Traditions)

Religion & Spirituality

Hauerwas,Stanley

Christian Books & Bibles

Twice in this century, Germany initiated wars of unimagined terror and destruction. In both cases, defense of the Prussian” realm, the German homeland, was the perceived and vilified perpetrator. Few today understand with any precision what Prussia” means, either geographically or nationalistically, but neither would they deny the psychic resonance of the single word. To most, it means unbridled aggression, the image of the goose-stepping Junker .But what was once Prussia is now a significant portion of Eastern Europe, a contested homeland first won by Christian knights of the Teutonic Order. For centuries thereafter its terrain has been crisscrossed by war and partitioned by barbed wire. In its final catastrophe of 1945, nearly two million German refugees fled the region as Russian armies broke the eastern front, perhaps the greatest dislocation of a civilian population at any time during World War II. With the Berlin Wall now a memory and the Soviet Union in a state of collapse, this remains a geography in shambles. Modern travelers can now, for the first time in decades, see and ponder for themselves what Prussia really was and now is.James Charles Roy and Amos Elon, two writers noted for their inquisitive natures, have gone to search through the rubble themselves. They intermingle present-day observations with moving vignettes from the German and Prussian past, sketching a portrait of the Europe we know today. The story is spiced with interviews and reminiscences, unforgettable in their sadness, of people looking back at a life now gone, a life full of turmoil and heartache, memories both fond and tragic. The final result: a far deeper understanding of the tattered lands of today's Eastern Europe.

The Vanished Kingdom: Travels Through The History Of Prussia

Roy, James Charles

Americas

Mubarak's Egypt: Fragmentation Of The Political Order

Springborg, Robert

Middle East

Integrating a world-system perspective with historical case studies and empirical data, the author demonstrates the cyclical character of external indebtedness since the beginning of industrial capitalism in the early 19th century. Against this background, the author explains the current global debt crisis, in which creditor nations are encountering increasing problems servicing the massive debts incurred by Third World borrowers throughout the 1970s. The diverse causes of the periodic debt cycle are analyzed, and the management of each crisis is also discussed. In addition to showing how the current cycle fits into the larger pattern, the author offers recommendations for a long-term solution based on historical experience.

Debt Cycles In The World-economy: Foreign Loans, Financial Crises, And Debt Settlement, 1820-1990

Suter, Christian

Salant, CBS, and the Battle for the Soul of Broadcast Journalism tells the story of CBS News during its golden era. The late Richard S. Salant was president of CBS News for sixteen years throughout the 1960s and 1970s. He became widely recognized by journalists as the ”patron saint of television news.” During his tenure, Salant confronted issues of enormous importance - Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and Watergate - and launched the first thirty-minute E vening News, CBS Morning News , and 60 Minutes . Along the way, he hired Mike Wallace, Roger Mudd, Dan Rather, and Diane Sawyer. This first-person account, compiled and edited by Susan and Bill Buzenberg during the years since Salant's death in 1993, is an important part of the history of broadcast journalism, an inside story of the politicians and journalists who shaped our recent history, and an eloquent alarm about the current erosion of broadcast journalism standards.

Salant, CBS, and the Battle for the Soul of Broadcast Journalism: The Memoirs of Richard S Salant

Richard S Salant

Industries

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Books by Westview

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Westview publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Limits Of Government: An Essay On The Public Goods Argument

The Limits Of Government: An Essay On The Public Goods Argument

The Power Of Sentiment: Love, Hierarchy, And The Jamaican Family Elite (Studies in the Ethnographic Imagination)

Am I A Murderer?: Testament Of A Jewish Ghetto Policeman

The Free Society

Wilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth-century Theology And Philosophy (Radical Traditions)

The Vanished Kingdom: Travels Through The History Of Prussia

Mubarak's Egypt: Fragmentation Of The Political Order

Debt Cycles In The World-economy: Foreign Loans, Financial Crises, And Debt Settlement, 1820-1990

Salant, CBS, and the Battle for the Soul of Broadcast Journalism: The Memoirs of Richard S Salant