Two Words, One Answer.
1891-1937
 Gramsci and Contemporary Politics: Beyond Pessimism of the Intellect (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory, 4) $170.00 Can politics now be both radical and realistic? This book is a collection of Anne Showstack Sassoon's writing which spans the major transitions from Thatcher and Reagan to Clinton and Blair; the collapse of communism to the regeneration of social democracy. Looking at the role of intellectuals in rethinking politics, she argues that drawing from the past, and broadening contemporary sources of political and academic knowledge can contribute to a grounded, radical hegemonic politics which can shape change. Applying original interpretations of Antonio Gramsci's ideas on intellectuals, political language, civil society and political leadership, Anne Showstack Sassoon goes well beyond his framework to examine key contemporary political issues including citizenship, modernising the welfare state, and the relationship between parents and teachers. Informed by feminist debates, and reflecting on womens changing socio-economic roles, she argues that in periods of rapid change, we should see that the inconsistencies and contradictions of social change can produce valuable theoretical, and practical, insights. Engaging with radical claims of centre-left politics, this book brings together theoretical discussion with empirical and personal examples to suggest how to negotiate difficult the line between wishful thinking and weary fatalism in order to create the basis for widespread consent for political and social reforms. Gramsci and Contemporary Politics is aimed at graduate students of politics, political theory, gender studies and sociology.  Edith Wharton: Vol 1. Collected Stories:1891-1910 (Library of America) $35.00 A master of the American short story, in a two-volume collector's editionOver the course of a long and astonishingly productive literary career that stretched from the early 1890s to just before World War II, Edith Wharton published nearly a dozen story collections, leaving a body of work as various as it is enduring. With this two-volume set, The Library of America presents the finest of Wharton's achievement in short fiction: 67 stories drawn from the entire span of her writing life, including the novella-length works The Touchstone, Sanctuary, and Bunner Sisters, eight shorter pieces never collected by Wharton, and many stories long out-of-print. Her range of setting and subject matter is dazzling, and her mastery of style consistently sure. Here are all the aspects of Wharton's art: her satire, sometimes gentle, sometimes dark and despairing, of upper-class manners; her unblinking recognition of the power of social convention and the limits of passion; her merciless exposure of commercial motivations; her candid exploration of relations between the sexes. The stories range with cosmopolitan ease from her native New York to the salons and summer hotels of Newport, Paris, and the Italian lakes. The depth of her response to World War I is registered in such works as "The Marne." Of particular interest are the remarkable stories, which treat occult and supernatural themes rarely encountered in her novels, such as the classic ghost stories "The Eyes" and "Pomegranate Seed."  Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (Cambridge Studies in International Relations) $68.00 The essays collected here relate the writings of Antonio Gramsci and others to the contemporary reconstruction of historical materialist theories of international relations. The contributors analyze the contradiction between globalizing and territorially based social and political forces in the context of past, present, and future world orders, and view the emerging world order as undergoing a structural transformation, a "triple crisis" involving economic, political and "socio-cultural" change. The prevailing trend of the 1980s and early 1990s toward the marketization and commodification of social relations leads the contributors to argue that socialism needs to be redefined away from the totalizing visions associated with Marxism-Leninism, toward the idea of the self defense of society and social choice to counter the disintegrating and atomizing effects of globalizing and unplanned market forces. |
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