Buckley made a confession to Corey Robin. Capitalism is "boring," said the founding father of the American right. "Devoting your life to it," as conservatives do, "is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." With this unlikely conversation began Robin's decade-long foray into the conservative mind. What is conservatism, and what's truly at stake for its proponents? If capitalism bores them, what excites them?Tracing conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution, Robin argues that the right is fundamentally inspired by a hostility to emancipating the lower orders. Some conservatives endorse the free market, others oppose it. Some criticize the state, others celebrate it. Underlying these differences is the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality.Despite their opposition to these movements, conservatives favor a dynamic conception of politics and society--one that involves self-transformation, violence, and war. They are also highly adaptive to new challenges and circumstances. This partiality to violence and capacity for reinvention has been critical to their success.Written by a keen, highly regarded observer of the contemporary political scene, The Reactionary Mind ranges widely, from Edmund Burke to Antonin Scalia, from John C. Calhoun to Ayn Rand. It advances the notion that all rightwing ideologies, from the eighteenth century through today, are historical improvisations on a theme: the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.

    The "one Nation under God, indivisible" of the Pledge of Allegiance is passing away. In a few decades, that America will be gone forever. In its place will arise a country unrecognizable to our parents. This is the thrust of Pat Buchanan's Suicide of a Superpower, his most controversial and thought-provoking book to date.Buchanan traces the disintegration to three historic changes: America's loss of her cradle faith, Christianity; the moral, social, and cultural collapse that have followed from that loss; and the slow death of the people who created and ruled the nation. And as our nation disintegrates, our government is failing in its fundamental duties, unable to defend our borders, balance our budgets, or win our wars.How Americans are killing the country they profess to love, and the fate that awaits us if we do not turn around, is what Suicide of a Superpower is all about.

    Here, Strauss sets forth the thesis that many philosophers, especially political philosophers, have reacted to the threat of persecution by disguising their most controversial and heterodox ideas.

    An invaluable addition to the libraries of instructors, students, and anyone interested in history, government, and anarchist thought.

    This work is both entertaining and thought-provoking. Great food for thought and (dare we say) conversation starters for your own debates with friends. Scroll up and click Buy Now and you can start reading immediately. If you don't have a Kindle, no problem! You can read this e-book on any device using Amazon's free Kindle app.

    Robert Kagan, a leading scholar of American foreign policy, forces both sides to see themselves through the eyes of the other. Europe, he argues, has moved beyond power into a self-contained world of laws, rules, and negotiation, while America operates in a “Hobbesian” world where rules and laws are unreliable and military force is often necessary.Tracing how this state of affairs came into being over the past fifty years and fearlessly exploring its ramifications for the future, Kagan reveals the shape of the new transatlantic relationship. The result is a book that promises to be as enduringly influential as Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations.

    No understanding of Western civilization is possible without it. Inevitably, Left-wing academics want to introduce gender studies and race theory to the field—and punish those who refuse to conform. When one University of Chicago professor dared to publicly celebrate the Christian identity of the Middle Ages, she was branded a ‘violent fascist’ and ‘white supremacist’ by her colleagues. Now Medieval Studies scholars are tearing their own discipline apart with witch-hunts, name-calling, boycotts and intimidation. The damage done to academia could be incalculable. In this influential essay, originally published to widespread online acclaim, New York Times-bestselling author and award-winning journalist Milo Yiannopoulos explains why we should all care about the newest front in the cultural war, the academic battle for the Middle Ages.

    Jonathan Wolff looks at the works of Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, and Rawls (among others), examining how the debates between philosophers have developed, and searching for possible answers to these provocative questions. His final chapter looks at more recent issues, particularly feminist political theory.

    And anyone with a more than cursory knowledge of history knows that there was once an entity called Christendom - a political society self-consciously in obeisance to a total Christian view of life.Here in one concise volume is St. Augustine's brilliant analysis of where faith and politics meet - casting a penetrating light on Roman civilization, the coming Middle Ages, ecclesiastical politics, and some of the most powerful ideas in the Western tradition, including Augustine's famous "just war theory" and his timeless ideas of how men should live in society. With the classic introduction by Henry Paolucci and an analysis by Dino Bigongiari.

    Moreover both political systems have some similar objectives. What communism tried to achieve with the use of most brutal measures on a massive scale has been to a considerable degree achieved in a liberal democracy through a more or less spontaneous development and more or less humane social engineering – an almost total identification of man with a political regime, politicization of culture and social relations, omnipresence of ideology, and a peculiar combination of a utopian impulse with the insistence of human mediocrity. Both systems reduce human nature to that of the common man who is led to believe himself liberated from unnecessary obligations of the past, unaware that he shackled himself with other chains which dramatically narrowed his perspective. Both the communist man and the liberal democratic man refuse to admit that there exists anything of value outside the political systems to which they pledged their loyalty and both refuse to undertake any critical examination of their ideological prejudices.

    Its principles can be found in our Bill of Rights and in the Constitution. But what was this strange document that dwells on tax relief and greater fishing rights, and how did it gain legendary status?Dan Jones takes us back to 1215, the turbulent year when the Magna Carta was just a peace treaty between England’s King John and a group of self-interested, violent barons who were tired of his high taxes and endless foreign wars. The treaty would fail within two months of its confirmation. But this important document marked the first time a king was forced to obey his own laws. Jones’s 1215 follows the story of the Magna Carta’s creation, its failure, and the war that subsequently engulfed England and is book that will appeal to fans of microhistories of pivotal years like 1066, 1491, and especially 1776—when American patriots, inspired by that long-ago defiance, dared to pick up arms against another English king.

    Coup d'Etat outlines the mechanism of the coup & analyzes the conditions political, military & social, that gives rise to it. In doing so, the book sheds much light on societies where power does indeed grow out of the barrel of a gun & the role of law is a concept little understood.List of FiguresList of TablesForewordPreace to the 1st EditionPreface to the 1979 EditionWhat is the coup d'état? --When is a coup d'état possible?The strategy of the coup d'étatThe planning of the coup d'étatThe execution of the coup d'étatAppendicesTablesIndex

    He made headlines during his tenure as governor for supporting school vouchers, a freeze on all taxes, real cuts in government agency funding and the decriminalization of marijuana. In 2012, he is running for President of the United States on the Libertarian Party ticket. He will be campaigning aggressively through the fall in all 50 states.

    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.

    Thomas Jefferson, a brilliant political thinker, is perhaps best known for the Declaration of Independence, but he was a man of extraordinarily wide interests.He was exceptionally controversial in his own time, and many of his ideas remain the subject of national debate. In his arguments for a system of general education, for local rather than central authority, for caution in international affairs, for religious and intellectual freedom, and for economic and social justice, Jefferson defined the issues that still direct our national political life centuries after the nation's formation. This volume will give readers the opportunity to reassess one of our most influential presidents.Jefferson's First Inaugural Address is a resounding statement of faith in a democracy of enlightened people. His Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) is an invaluable record of the landscape, inhabitants, life, and daily customs of America in the Revolutionary and early national eras. His letters, more than two hundred and fifty of which are gathered here, are brilliant urbane missives to such men as Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, Lafayette, John Adams and James Madison. His slim Autobiography (1821), written "for my own more ready reference, and for the information of my family," hardly hints at the influence and impact he had as Secretary of State under George Washington, Minister to France, opposition-party Vice President to John Adams, and, after leaving the presidency, founder of the University of Virginia.His public papers and addresses fully demonstrate both the breadth of his interests and the power of his expressive mind. Extensively read (his personal library of ten thousand volumes became the foundation of the Library of Congress) and widely traveled, Jefferson wrote with ease and spontaneity about science, archaeology, botany and gardening, religion, literature, architecture, education, the habits of his fellow citizens, and, of course, his beloved home, Monticello.Jefferson's prose has an energy, clarity, and charming off-handedness, consistent with his conviction that style in writing should impose no barrier between the most educated and the most common reader. For those who want a renewed sense of the opportunity for human freedom that the United States represented to its founders, this is an indispensable book.