From Western Europe to Africa, many existing states are either combining into larger communities or falling apart. Many of their functions are likely to be taken over by a variety of organizations that, whatever their precise nature, are not states. In this unique volume Martin van Creveld traces the story of the state from its beginnings to its end. Starting with the simplest political organizations that ever existed, he guides the reader through the origins of the state, its development, its apotheosis during the two World Wars, and its spread from its original home in Western Europe to cover the globe. In doing so, he provides a fascinating history of government from its origins to the present day. This original book will of interest to historians, political scientists and sociologists.

    Not big enough, not nice enough, not fast or hip enough.The American dream is based on wanting more. But does God's dream for the world look like the American Dream?In this five-week study, unpack what the patterns of God's kingdom look like compared to the patterns of our world. What is the value of enough, and how do we become more like the God who is close to the poor, the hungry, the meek, and the merciful?Economy of Love will challenge individuals to join in community, journeying together as they begin to consider a new standard of living-a personal economic threshold oriented not around the size of a monthly paycheck, but around the value of enough.

    The principles of individual liberty, the rule of law, government by consent of the people, and the right to private property are taken for granted as fundamental to the human condition now. Most liberal theorists writing today look back to Locke as the source of their ideas. Some maintain that religious fundamentalism, "post-modernism," and socialism are today the only remaining ideological threats to liberalism. To the extent that this is true, these ideologies are ultimately attacks on the ideas that Locke, arguably more than any other, helped to make the universal vocabulary of political discourse.

    The protagonists are helpless victims of psychological maladies. Their suppressed libido and Oedipus complex are areas Tamil writers generally dared not enter - at any rate in the 1960s, when they were written.The brilliant introvert Rajaraman is the quintessential good boy. The play of circumstances kindles oedipal fancies in him. The incandescent consummation with Sarada Mami is a catharsis. A rishi is born looking at the world with a disdain at once benignly distant and compellingly personal.Well-educated and well-employed Janaki lives under the protective cover of her paranoid, possessive, puritanical mother. Her healthy friendship with a collegemate of yesteryear promises liberation. Her short-lived taste of freedom is stamped out and she is sucked back into her mother's bizarre, overwhelming orbit. The success of Jayakanthan lies in evoking in the reader a profound empathy with the tragically deviant characters of the two stories.

    They were part of the Pentagon’s most daring attempt since Vietnam to bring social science to the battlefield, a program called the Human Terrain System that is driven by the notion that you can’t win a war if you don’t understand the enemy. Developed by an eccentric anthropologist raised by hippie squatters in San Francisco and a patriotic ex-soldier who wanted nothing more than to help the army change the way it wages wars, the field team in Afghanistan that November day included an intrepid Texas blond, a former bodyguard for Afghan president Hamid Karzai, and an ex-military intelligence sergeant who had come to Afghanistan to make peace with his troubled past. But not all goes as planned. In this military thriller, veteran war reporter Vanessa Gezari follows these three idealists from the hope that brought them to Afghanistan through the events of the fateful day when one is gravely wounded, an Afghan is dead, and a proponent of cross-cultural engagement is charged with his murder. Through it all, these brave Americans ended up showing the world just how determined they were to get things right, how hard it was to really understand a place like Afghanistan where lying has been a major tool of survival, and why all future wars will involve this strange mix of fighting and listening. Gezari is the only reporter who has been given such open access to the lives of the people inside the Human Terrain Program, to the brilliant, ambitious, and mercurial figures who conceived it, and to the top military brass who believed in it. The Tender Soldier is the first and only account of a historic, little-known mission. It is a true story of war and sacrifice, in the best tradition of Horse Soldiers and The Good Soldiers.

    Published posthumously in Germany in the early 1920's, it has become a constitutive part of the modern sociological imagination. Economy and Society was the first strictly empirical comparison of social structures and normative orders in world-historical depth, containing the famous chapters on social action, religion, law, bureaucracy, charisma, the city, and the political community with its dimensions of class, status and power.Economy and Status is Weber's only major treatise for an educated general public. It was meant to be a broad introduction, but in its own way it is the most demanding textbook yet written by a sociologist. The precision of its definitions, the complexity of its typologies and the wealth of its historical content make the work a continuos challenge at several levels of comprehension: for the advanced undergraduate who gropes for his sense of society, for the graduate student who must develop his own analytical skills, and for the scholar who must match wits with Weber.When the long-awaited first complete English edition of Economy and Society was published in 1968, Arthur Stinchcombe wrote in the American Journal of Sociology: "My answer to the question of whether people should still start their sociological intellectual biographies with Economy and Society is yes." Reinhard Bendix noted in the American Sociological Review that the "publication of a compete English edition of Weber's most systematic work [represents] the culmination of a cultural transmission to the American setting...It will be a study-guide and compendium for years to come for all those interested in historical sociology and comparative study."In a lengthy introduction, Guenther Roth traces the intellectual prehistory of Economy and Society, the gradual emergence of its dominant themes and the nature of its internal logic.Mr. Roth is a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Mr. Wittich heads an economic research group at the United Nations.

    What Is Marriage? identifies and defends the reasons for this historic consensus and shows why redefining civil marriage is unnecessary, unreasonable, and contrary to the common good.Originally published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, this book’s core argument quickly became the year’s most widely read essay on the most prominent scholarly network in the social sciences. Since then, it has been cited and debated by scholars and activists throughout the world as the most formidable defense of the tradition ever written. Now revamped, expanded, and vastly improved, What Is Marriage? stands poised to meet its moment as few books of this generation have.Rhodes Scholar Sherif Girgis, Heritage Foundation Fellow Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George offer a devastating critique of the idea that equality requires redefining marriage. They show why both sides must first answer the question of what marriage really is. They defend the principle that marriage, as a comprehensive union of mind and body ordered to family life, unites a man and a woman as husband and wife, and they document the social value of applying this principle in law.Most compellingly, they show that those who embrace same-sex civil marriage leave no firm ground—none—for not recognizing every relationship describable in polite English, including polyamorous sexual unions, and that enshrining their view would further erode the norms of marriage, and hence the common good.Finally, What Is Marriage? decisively answers common objections: that the historic view is rooted in bigotry, like laws forbidding interracial marriage; that it is callous to people’s needs; that it can’t show the harm of recognizing same-sex couplings, or the point of recognizing infertile ones; and that it treats a mere “social construct” as if it were natural, or an unreasoned religious view as if it were rational.If the marriage debate in America is decided soon, it will be with this book’s help or despite its powerful arguments.

    Leach organizes his work not by chronology but by theme, exploring three important topics in Lévi-Strauss's work: human beings and their symbols, the structure of myth, and kinship theory. Written concisely and with great care and penetration, this brief book is both a fine introduction for the uninitiated reader of Lévi-Strauss and a critical analysis that will prove valuable to those more familiar with the anthropologist's work.

    In order to change the world one needs to know how to manipulate the media, not just march in the streets. Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, otherwise known as “Kos,” is today’s symbol of digital activism, giving a voice to everyday people. In Taking on the System, Kos has taken a cue from his revolutionary predecessor’s doctrine, Saul Alinksy’s Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, and places this epic hand-book in today’s digital era, empowering every American to make a difference in the 21st century. As founder of the largest political blog in the nation, Kos knows how it’s done, because he’s done it with tremendous success. In Taking on the System, he shares practical guidelines on how grassroots movements can thrive in the age of global information, while referencing historical and present examples of the tragedy caused without those actions. The walls between the people and the power—the so-called rabble and the so-called elite—are being torn down by technology, and a new army of amateurs are storming the barriers to effect political, cultural, and environmental transformation. Readers will come to understand how they too can change the world.

    Real-life cases and situations demonstrate the significance of ethics in the world of criminal justice today for those studying or contemplating a career in criminal justice.

    Johnson took on the heavyweights of science. And he got their attention, even provoking a response from neo-Darwinist Stephen Jay Gould in the pages of Scientific American. Now Johnson's back with a book that expands his critique from science to law, education and today's culture wars. Is God unconstitutional? Why is morality forced out of public school curriculum? Can Christians believe in God and evolution? Why aren't we getting anywhere in the debate over abortion? Will the Grand Unified Theory solve the riddle of the universe? Johnson dares to answer these and other tough, touchy questions. He reveals why naturalism (the philosophy that the material world is all there was, is and will be) has become "the established religious philosophy of America," supplanting Judeo-Christian belief. He shows how naturalism undergirds science, law, education and popular culture. And he argues that naturalism has even infiltrated the church--marginalizing opposition as irrational, and encouraging Christians to adopt a more "reasonable" stance. In Reason in the Balance, Johnson writes energetically and persuasively--chapter by chapter zeroing in on the chinks in the argument for naturalism. He explores nearly every acre of today's cultural battlefield: God, sex education, evolution, abortion, cosmology and particle physics, what our public schools should teach, the basis of law, the meaning of reason and a few other things that matter. Armed with biblical truth, common sense and a clear understanding of his foe, he steps out like David to fell the intellectual Goliath of our day.

    But Leland is also one of Carissa's patients, and he is beginning to realize that he has fallen in love with her. As love and legal obligations collide, Leland comes face-to-face with an ethical dilemma of enormous proportions.  Graceful, intelligent, and suspenseful, The Law of Similars is a powerful examination of the links between hope and hubris, love and deception.

    This new work is a major contribution to recent debates on the rule of law and the possibilities of democracy in postindustrial societies, but it is much more. The introduction by William Rehg succinctly captures the special nature of the work, noting that it offers a sweeping, sociologically informed conceptualization of law and basic rights, a normative account of the rule of law and the constitutional state, an attempt to bridge normative and empirical approaches to democracy, and an account of the social context required for democracy. Finally, the work frames and caps these arguments with a bold proposal for a new paradigm of law that goes beyond the dichotomies that have afflicted modern political theory from its inception and that still underlie current controversies between so-called liberals and civic republicans. The book includes a postscript written in 1994, which restates the argument in light of its initial reception, and two appendixes, which cover key developments that preceded the book. Habermas himself was actively involved in the translation, adapting the text as necessary to make it more accessible to English-speaking readers.

    In its entirety...you have the CSA "Confederate States of America" Constitution.This is a must read.....imagine a young country that just learned all the things wrong with their country and its government....then makes their own.The CSA was ahead of its time in many respects...(never mind the whole slavery thing)....If you are a History buff or just doing research...get this...read it....it is outstanding.

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