Political science and theory

A Times book of the year A Guardian book of the year‘Magnificent’The Times ‘Dazzling’ New Statesman ‘It filled me with hope’ Zadie Smith What happens to our behaviour when we live most of our lives online? What does it mean to ‘always be optimising’?...

In the early 1970s, Australian governments began to treat Aborigines and Torres Strait Islander as 'peoples' with capacities for self-government. Forty years later, confidence in Indigenous self-determination has been eroded by accounts of Indigenous...

Charities play an outsize role in the social, cultural and economic life of the nation, delivering goods and services on which lives depend. To effectively serve their communities, charities also participate in politics: campaigning for changes to law...

The years 1956-72 were as eventful as any that had gone before, and Julius Stone touched on many international issues. The hydrogen bomb and the space race were popular topics. Decolonisation and independence in Asia and Africa were covered, especially...

Queen Elizabeth's visit showed a strong remaining affection for the crown, despite the nation's shift of its power alliances to the USA. In the USA, McCarthyism crashed with the discrediting of its leading figure; in Argentina the autocratic populist...

In the Pacific, Australia entered the multi-lateral ANZUS treaty, consolidatingthe nation's independence of Britain; Communist China pressed its claims toreplace Taiwan on the Security Council; Queen Elizabeth II began her longreign; and adventurism by...

Originally broadcast by the ABC between 1942 and 1972 and re-discovered in 2006, these conversational opinion pieces by jurist Julius Stone take the reader back to the mid-20th century, bringing to life the people, events and the sweep of affairs during...

Letters to Australia is a collection of Julius Stone's radio talks, originally broadcast by the ABC between 1942 and 1972. Recently discovered in the nation's archives, they take the reader back to the mid-20th century, bringing to life the...

Letters to Australia is a collection of Julius Stone's radio talks, originally broadcast by the ABC between 1942 and 1972. Recently discovered in the nation's archives, they take the reader back to the mid-20th century, bringing to life the...

The acclaimed book Oliver Stone called “the best account I have read of this tragedy and its significance,” JFK and the Unspeakable details not just how the conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy was carried out, but WHY it was done…and why...

In The Great Reset: Joe Biden and the Rise of Twenty-First-Century Fascism, New York Times bestselling author and nationally syndicated radio host Glenn Beck argues that the American way of life will not survive the Great Reset and warns us to stop it...

"Insightful...empathetic...a thoughtful consideration of a topic that will have a substantial impact on our future."-BooklistReadable Feast, Book Award Winner for Socially Conscious Writing * Civil Eats' Food and Farming Book PickEver wonder if there's a...

American Power and the New Mandarins is Noam Chomsky's first political book, widely considered to be among the most cogent and powerful statements against the American war in Vietnam. Long out of print, this collection of early, seminal essays helped to...

Over the last three decades the historian Gabriel Kolko has redefined the way we look at modern warfare and its social and political effects. Century of War gives us a masterly synthesis of the effects of war on civilian populations and the political...

Winner of Outstanding Book Award of Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human RightsAn award-winning and canonical history of radical feminism, whose activist heat and intellectual audacity powered second-wave feminism-30th anniversary edition A...

An innovative argument that vindicates our normative commitment to basic equality, synthesising philosophy, history, and psychology.What makes human beings one another's equals? That we are 'basic equals' has become a bedrock assumption...

The postwar United States enjoyed large, widely distributed economic rewards - and most Americans accepted that taxes were a reasonable price to pay for living in a society of shared prosperity. Then in 1978 California enacted Proposition 13, a property...

This description is based on the MIT professor's writings on linguistics in the 1950s; but beginning with his criticism of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Chomsky became much better known for his radical politics than for his theories of language. Over the...

Surveying the pressures, external and internal, on the United States today, Lens concludes that like any other empire, the reign of the U.S. will end -- and he examines how this time of reckoning may come about.

Neil Davidson explores classic themes of nation, state, and revolution in this collection of essays. Ranging from the extent to which nationalism can be a component of led-wing politics to the difference between bourgeois and socialist revolutions, the...

America Besieged deals with the underlying forces within U.S. society that deeply affect our lives. Showing how we are being misled and harmed by those who profess to have our interests at heart, Michael Parenti writes: "We are indeed a nation besieged,...

A rousing commentary on the history of labor and the future of work. An Atlantic Edition, featuring long-form journalism by Atlantic writers, drawn from contemporary articles or classic storytelling from the magazine's 165-year archive.On Work gathers a...

Finalist, 2024 Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction Finalist, 2024 Writers' Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing These days, everyone feels insecure. We are financially stressed and emotionally overwhelmed. The status quo isn't...

'Wade Davis is a true wayfinder, and these essays offer new insight into his visionary approach to culture, landscape, and the planet he loves as fiercely as any writer working today.' John Vaillant, author of Fire WeatherThe essays in...

A powerful case for why majority rule not representation is the defining feature of democratic politics.The idea that democratic governance rests on active self-rule by citizens plays surprisingly little part in current theories of democracy, which...

After the dissolution of empires, was the nation-state the only way to unite people politically, culturally and economically? In Post-Imperial Possibilities, historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper examine three large-scale, transcontinental...

Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960), the Dutch astronomer and Marxist revolutionary, was a key theoretician of council communism-a Marxist alternative to both Leninism and Social Democracy that instead emphasized working-class self-emancipation through workers'...

Howrace shapes expectations about whose losses matterIn democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can't always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally. Propped up...

In 2017, the Government's attempt to trigger Article 50 and so leave the European Union resulted in a judgement by the Supreme Court, which stated that the Government was unentitled to do so without the consent of Parliament, directly citing the Bill of...

A powerful case for democracy and how it can adapt and survive - if we want it to.Is democracy in trouble, perhaps even dying? Pundits say so, and polls show that most Americans believe that their country's system of governance is being...

How the utopian tradition offers answers to today's environmental crisesIn the face of Earth's environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won't save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound...

A provocative new history of liberalism that also provides a road map for today's liberalsFreedom from Fear offers a striking new account of the dominant political and social theory of our time: liberalism. In a pathbreaking reframing of the historical...

Tracing the origins of modern political thought through three sets of arguments over history, morality, and freedom.In this wide-ranging work, Michael Sonenscher traces the origins of modern political thought and ideologies to a question, raised by...

Utopia poses a question. Not simply in the sense of a problem to be resolved and at the same time eliminated . . . but in the sense that, within the economy of the human condition, utopia, the aim of social alterity of all social otherness is ceaselessly...

The term "Mexican Drug War" misleads. It implies that the ongoing bloodbath, which has now killed well over 100,000 people, is an internal Mexican affair.But this diverts attention from the U.S. role in creating and sustaining the carnage. It's not just...

The manifesto that launched the Situationist International (SI) into the public eye and sparked an uprising is back-with the story of its creation and the histories of its publication told like never before.When the Situationist International was a...

Mario Tronti was the principal theorist of the radical political movement of the 1960s known in Italy asoperaismoand in the Anglophone world as Italian workerism, a current which went on to inform the development of autonomist Marxism. His "Copernican...

A prize-winning examination of why nation-states wall themselves off despite widespread proclamations of global connectedness.Why do walls marking national boundaries proliferate amid widespread proclamations of global connectedness and despite...

An intellectual history of sovereignty that reveals how the Habsburg Empire became a crucible for our contemporary world order.Sprawled across the heartlands of Europe, the Habsburg Empire resisted all the standard theories of singular sovereignty. The...

A constitutionalist reading of Plato's political thought.Plato famously defends the rule of knowledge. Knowledge, for him, is of the good. But what is rule? In this study, Melissa Lane reveals how political office and rule were woven together in Greek...

From the Great Depression to the pandemic, a new history of British democracy, revealing how politics is transformed through fear.Over Britain's first century of mass democracy, politics has lurched from crisis to crisis. How does this history of...

How Robespierre's career and legacy embody the dangerous contradictions of democracy.Maximilien Robespierre (17581794) is arguably the most controversial and contradictory figure of the French Revolution, inspiring passionate debate like no other...

Dissidents of the International Left gives a clear-headed look at the many different strands of the international and domestic leftist currents pulsing throughout the world. With 77 interviews it gives lesser known dissidents, leftists, secularists and...

"Senator Hart's voice can heal the country and chart a real course toward equality, freedom, and hope for all." -Hugh Jackman In 1776, America's Founders proclaimed the new nation a republic with a democratic form of government. Although American...

On Shedding an Obsolete Pastprovides a much-needed and comprehensive critique of recent US national security policies in both the Trump and Biden administrations. These policy decisions have produced a series of costly disappointments and outright...

After Lifeis a collective history of how Americans experienced, navigated, commemorated, and ignored mass death and loss during the global COVID-19 pandemic, mass uprisings for racial justice, and the near presidential coup in 2021 following the 2020...

Kevin Slack sounds the alarm on how America's failed neoliberal regime has given way to a woke oligarchy that has deployed a radical toolkit to rapidly strip away the rights of citizens. Americans often use the wordsprogressive,liberal, andradicalmore or...

After the Democratic Party divided Americans along gender and racial lines, F.H. Buckley argues that the Republican Party can become the natural governing party again by uniting Americans around a return to their roots-championing the common good,...