Federal Union, Modern World

Federal Union, Modern World PDF

Author: Peter S. Onuf

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780945612346

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In this thought-provoking analysis of international relations, the authors relate the emergence of the modern state-societies to the experiments in constitution-making in the United States.

State of the Union

State of the Union PDF

Author: Nelson Lichtenstein

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012-10-26

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1400838525

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In a fresh and timely reinterpretation, Nelson Lichtenstein examines how trade unionism has waxed and waned in the nation's political and moral imagination, among both devoted partisans and intransigent foes. From the steel foundry to the burger-grill, from Woodrow Wilson to John Sweeney, from Homestead to Pittston, Lichtenstein weaves together a compelling matrix of ideas, stories, strikes, laws, and people in a streamlined narrative of work and labor in the twentieth century. The "labor question" became a burning issue during the Progressive Era because its solution seemed essential to the survival of American democracy itself. Beginning there, Lichtenstein takes us all the way to the organizing fever of contemporary Los Angeles, where the labor movement stands at the center of the effort to transform millions of new immigrants into alert citizen unionists. He offers an expansive survey of labor's upsurge during the 1930s, when the New Deal put a white, male version of industrial democracy at the heart of U.S. political culture. He debunks the myth of a postwar "management-labor accord" by showing that there was (at most) a limited, unstable truce. Lichtenstein argues that the ideas that had once sustained solidarity and citizenship in the world of work underwent a radical transformation when the rights-centered social movements of the 1960s and 1970s captured the nation's moral imagination. The labor movement was therefore tragically unprepared for the years of Reagan and Clinton: although technological change and a new era of global economics battered the unions, their real failure was one of ideas and political will. Throughout, Lichtenstein argues that labor's most important function, in theory if not always in practice, has been the vitalization of a democratic ethos, at work and in the larger society. To the extent that the unions fuse their purpose with that impulse, they can once again become central to the fate of the republic. State of the Union is an incisive history that tells the story of one of America's defining aspirations.

Peace Pact

Peace Pact PDF

Author: David C. Hendrickson

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2003-04-29

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0700614931

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That New England might invade Virginia is inconceivable today. But interstate rivalries and the possibility of intersectional war loomed large in the thinking of the Framers who convened in Philadelphia in 1787 to put on paper the ideas that would bind the federal union together. At the end of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin rejoiced that the document would "astonish our enemies, who are waiting to hear with confidence . . . that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another's throats." Usually dismissed as hyperbole, this and similar remarks by other Founders help us to understand the core concerns that shaped their conception of the Union. By reexamining the creation of the federal system of the United States from a perspective that yokes diplomacy with constitutionalism, Hendrickson's study, according to Karl Walling, "introduces a new way to think about what is familiar to us." This ground breaking book, then, takes a fresh look at the formative years of American constitutionalism and diplomacy. It tells the story of how thirteen colonies became independent states and found themselves grappling with the classic problems of international cooperation, and it explores the intellectual milieu within which that problem was considered. The founding generation, Hendrickson argues, developed a sophisticated science of international politics relevant both to the construction of their own union and to the foreign relations of "the several states in the union of the empire." The centrality of this discourse, he contends, must severely qualify conventional depictions of early American political thought as simply "liberal" or "republican." Hendrickson also takes issue with conventional accounts of early American foreign policy as "unilateralist" or "isolationist" and insists that the founding generation belonged to and made distinguished contributions to the constitutional tradition in diplomacy, the antecedent of twentieth-century internationalism. He describes an American system of states riven by deep sectional animosities and powerful loyalties to colonies and states (often themselves described as "nations") and explains why in such a milieu the creation of a durable union often appeared to be a quixotic enterprise. The book culminates in a consideration of the making of the federal Constitution, here styled as a peace pact or experiment in international cooperation. Peace Pact is an important book that promises to revolutionize our understanding of the era of revolution and constitution-making. Written in a lucid and accessible style, the book is an excellent introduction to the American founding and its larger significance in American and world history.

Jefferson's Empire

Jefferson's Empire PDF

Author: Peter S. Onuf

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780813922041

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Thomas Jefferson believed that the American revolution was atransformative moment in the history of political civilization. He hoped that hisown efforts as a founding statesman and theorist would help construct a progressiveand enlightened order for the new American nation that would be a model andinspiration for the world. Peter S. Onuf's new book traces Jefferson's vision of theAmerican future to its roots in his idealized notions of nationhood and empire.Onuf's unsettling recognition that Jefferson's famed egalitarianism was elaboratedin an imperial context yields strikingly original interpretations of our nationalidentity and our ideas of race, of westward expansion and the Civil War, and ofAmerican global dominance in the twentiethcentury. Jefferson's vision of an American "empirefor liberty" was modeled on a British prototype. But as a consensual union ofself-governing republics without a metropolis, Jefferson's American empire would befree of exploitation by a corrupt imperial ruling class. It would avoid the cycle ofwar and destruction that had characterized the European balance ofpower. The Civil War cast in high relief thetragic limitations of Jefferson's political vision. After the Union victory, as thereconstructed nation-state developed into a world power, dreams of the United Statesas an ever-expanding empire of peacefully coexisting states quickly faded frommemory. Yet even as the antebellum federal union disintegrated, a Jeffersoniannationalism, proudly conscious of America's historic revolution against imperialdomination, grew up in its place. In Onuf's view, Jefferson's quest to define a new American identity also shaped his ambivalentconceptions of slavery and Native American rights. His revolutionary fervor led himto see Indians as "merciless savages" who ravaged the frontiers at the Britishking's direction, but when those frontiers were pacified, a more benevolentJefferson encouraged these same Indians to embrace republican values. AfricanAmerican slaves, by contrast, constituted an unassimilable captive nation, unjustlywrenched from its African homeland. His great panacea: colonization. Jefferson's ideas about race revealthe limitations of his conception of American nationhood. Yet, as Onuf strikinglydocuments, Jefferson's vision of a republican empire--a regime of peace, prosperity, and union without coercion--continues to define and expand the boundaries ofAmerican national identity.

The Mightie Frame

The Mightie Frame PDF

Author: Nicholas Greenwood Onuf

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-07-05

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0190879815

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Inspired by Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, this book tells a story about epochal change in the modern world. Like Foucault, Nicholas Onuf is concerned with how we moderns think about ourselves and our world, but in this book he emphasizes the conceptual links in the ways we think, talk, get things done, conduct ourselves, and run societies, from age to age. As with his previous work, Onuf emphasizes the "rules for rule" that have solidified over time through repeated behaviors that work themselves out into a system of social uniformity and hierarchy. Rules set out who is a member of society, establish goals, provide opportunities to act, and dictate who sits on top -- in other words, what any political society looks like in a particular time and place. This book looks at the political society that has evolved since the Renaissance, or what might be called "the modern world," in order to consider what is yet to come. Onuf argues that modernity, although consisting of a succession of epochs or ages separated by great ruptures, has continued to change within the confines of a "mightie frame" (a turn of phrase he borrows from John Milton). Epoch by epoch, this frame has linked the limits of our knowledge, à la Michel Foucault, to conditions of rule, and it points to a plausible ethics for what comes next. But unlike Foucault, Onuf argues that modernism marked an end to societal and political transitions, and that we have entered a period during which established conditions of rule are likely to be reinforced -- and the mighty frame will grow ever mightier.

Beyond the Anarchical Society

Beyond the Anarchical Society PDF

Author: Edward Keene

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-07-11

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9780521008013

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Edward Keene argues that the conventional idea of an 'anarchical society' of equal and independent sovereign states is an inadequate description of order in modern world politics. International political and legal order has always been dedicated to two distinct goals: to try to promote the toleration of different ways of life, while advocating the adoption of one specific way, that it labels 'civilization'. The nineteenth-century solution to this contradiction was to restrict the promotion of civilization to the world beyond Europe. That discriminatory way of thinking has now broken down, with the result that a single, global order is supposed to apply to everyone, but opinion is still very much divided as to what the ultimate purpose of this global order should be, and how its political and legal structure should be organised.

Which European Union?

Which European Union? PDF

Author: Sergio Fabbrini

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-02-26

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1107103940

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This book asks how the European Union can tackle the constitutional conundrum caused by the Euro crisis.

Whiggish International Law

Whiggish International Law PDF

Author: Christopher R. Rossi

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-03-25

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 9004379517

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Christopher Rossi’s Whiggish International Law refreshes English School and Cambridge contextualist concerns for historical abridgment as jurists and scholars revive complexities and discussions of international law’s turbulent history in the Americas.