Other books that might interest you

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  The Broken Contract - Making Our...

  Saqib Iqbal Qureshi

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  A democracy should reflect the views of its citizens and offer a direct connection between government and those it serves. So why, more than ever, does it seem as if our government exists in its own bubble, detached from us?In reality, our democracy is not performing as it should, which has left us fed up with a system we no longer trust. Moreover, we lack a mechanism to fix what’s broken, because there is no incentive for politicians and civil servants to make government more accountable, efficient, and representative.Saqib Iqbal Qureshi is calling on his fellow citizens to assert their voice in the dialogue of democracy. In The Broken Contract, he puts forth solutions—many involving easy-to-implement technologies. It’s up to us to turn the ship around. If you’re looking for the best way to start a conversation with your elected and unelected officials, this is the book you need.

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  The Opposite of Hate - A Field...

  Sally Kohn

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  As a progressive commentator on Fox News and now CNN, Sally Kohn has made a career out of bridging intractable political differences, learning how to talk civilly to people whose views she disagrees with passionately. Famously "nice," she even gave a TED Talk about what she termed emotional correctness. But these days, even Kohn has found herself wanting to breathe fire at her enemies. 
  It was time, she decided, to look into the ugliness erupting all around us. In The Opposite of Hate, Kohn talks to leading scientists and researchers, investigating the evolutionary and cultural roots of hate and how simple incivility can be a gateway to much worse. She travels to Rwanda, to the Middle East, and across the United States, introducing us to terrorists, white supremacists, and even some of her own Twitter trolls, drawing surprising lessons from these dramatic examples—including inspiring stories of those who left hate behind. As Kohn boldly confronts her own shameful moments, whether it's the girl she bullied as a child or her own deep partisan resentment, she points the way toward change. 
  No one is more poised to lead us out of this wilderness of hate than Sally Kohn. Her engaging, fascinating, and often funny book will open your eyes and your heart.

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  Necropolitics

  Achille Mbembe

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  In Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side—what he calls its "nocturnal body"—which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates on biopolitics, war, and race as well as Fanon's notion of care as a shared vulnerability to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude but as a person with whom to build a more just world.

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  Struggle and Suffrage in Leeds -...

  Tina Jackson

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  The story of Leeds is bound up in the stories of its women workers. But what were conditions like for ordinary women, and how did their lives change in the hundred years between 1850 and 1950? Who were the women who toiled in the mills, factories and sweatshops that transformed the city’s landscape? Where and how did they live? What did they do in their leisure time? What happened to them when they needed medical care? What did the campaign for suffrage mean in real-life terms for the women who had no vote and whose voices have rarely been heard?  In Leeds, the campaign for suffrage was set against a backdrop of industry that relied on women workers for whom hardship was a fact of life. As the campaign for votes for women gained traction from the 1860s, social and political reformers and activists worked to improve conditions not just in industry, but in schools, hospitals and in the opportunities available to women and girls.  Some of the women, like the prominent suffragette Leonora Cohen and Leeds’ first female MP, Alice Bacon, are still talked about, but the city’s history is full of the stories of exceptional, inspirational women who in their own ways did their bit, broke the mould, and refused to fit into proscribed roles. In doing so, they opened the door for women to achieve some of the freedoms we now take for granted. This new, fully illustrated book brings them back from obscurity and lets their voices to heard.

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  Law Legislation and Liberty...

  Friedrich A. Hayek

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  F. A. Hayek made many valuable contributions to the field of economics as well as to the disciplines of philosophy and politics. This volume represents the second of Hayek's comprehensive three-part study of the relations between law and liberty. Here, Hayek expounds his conviction that he continued unexamined pursuit of "social justice" will contribute to the erosion of personal liberties and encourage the advent of totalitarianism.

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  Comic Democracies - From Ancient...

  Angus Fletcher

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  “Invites its readers to note the leaders and people who are willing and able to laugh, with and at themselves . . . Our political life may depend upon it.” —The Review of Politics 
   
  For two thousand years, democratic authors treated comedy as a toolkit of rhetorical practices for encouraging problem-solving, pluralism, risk-taking, and other civic behaviors that increased minority participation in government. Over the past two centuries, this pragmatic approach to extending the franchise has been displaced by more idealistic democratic philosophies that focus instead on promoting liberal principles and human rights. But in the wake of the recent “democracy recession” in the Middle East, the Third World, and the West itself, there has been renewed interest in finding practical sources of popular rule. Comic Democracies joins in the search by exploring the value of the old comic tools for growing democracy today. 
   
  Drawing on new empirical research from the political and cognitive sciences, Angus Fletcher deftly analyzes the narrative elements of two dozen stage plays, novels, romances, histories, and operas written by such authors as Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, William Congreve, John Gay, Henry Fielding, and Washington Irving. He unearths five comic techniques used to foster democratic behaviors in antiquity and the Renaissance, then traces the role of these techniques in Tom Paine’s Common Sense, Jefferson’s preamble to the Declaration of Independence, Washington’s farewell address, Mercy Otis Warren’s federalist history of the Revolution, Frederick Douglass’s abolitionist orations, and other documents that played a pivotal role in the development of the American Republic. 
   
  After recovering these lost chapters of our democratic past, Comic Democracies concludes with a draft for the future, using the old methods of comedy to envision a modern democracy—rooted in the diversity, ingenuity, and power of popular art. 
   
  “Fletcher’s main theory is convincing and will open up new fields of inquiry. This accessible work is for those interested in political science, cultural history, and comic theory as well as classical literature.” —Choice

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