John Locke

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David P. Barash

Traces liberalism back to the Bill of Rights, and lauds such liberal achievements as Social Security, unemployment compensation, and environmental protection.

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Giovanni Sartori

The second edition of this pathbreaking, highly innovative comparative study in state-building by a major political scientist is a fully updated examination of the problems of making democratic government work. He concludes with a detailed proposal for a new type of government: alternating presidentialism. This meets the need for strong parliamentary control and efficient government, with safeguards against both parliamentary obstructionism and government by decree, and so could help to avoid political paralysis in Latin America, in the post-communist countries of Europe and in countries with dysfunctional parliamentary systems such as Italy and Israel.

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Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett

"This revised and updated work shows how the resurgence of the French Far Right has a long pedigree and has entered into all areas of political, social, cultural and religious life, flourishing on concepts of race and nationhood. While the French Right, like most political movements and sets of ideas, may not have a coherent, consistent and dogmatic structure with a single ideology, there are powerful connecting links throughout modern French history. These stretch from Legitimatist support for the Bourbon monarchy, a nostalgia for imperialism, the occasional craving for a 'man of order', to the kind of rabid anti-semitism that produced the Dreyfus affair, and support for Petain's pro Nazi Vichy regime or the right-wing zealotry over Algeria which challenged de Gaulle. Le Pen's Front National is just the latest incarnation of a familiar demon. The Right in France is vital reading for anyone concerned with its re-emergence."--BOOK JACKET.

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Anne de Courcy

Margot Asquith was perhaps the most daring and unconventional Prime Minister's wife in British history. Known for her wit, style and habit of speaking her mind, she transformed 10 Downing Street into a glittering social and intellectual salon. Yet her last five years at Number 10 were a period of intense emotional and political turmoil in her private and public life. In 1912, when Anne de Courcy's book opens, rumblings of discontent and cries for social reform were encroaching on all sides - from suffragettes, striking workers and Irish nationalists. Against this background of a government beset with troubles, the Prime Minister fell desperately in love with his daughter's best friend, Venetia Stanley; to complicate matters, so did his Private Secretary. Margot's relationship with her husband was already bedevilled by her stepdaughter's jealous, almost incestuous adoration of her father. The outbreak of the First World War only heightened these swirling tensions within Downing Street. Drawing on unpublished material from personal papers and diaries, Anne de Courcy vividly recreates this extraordinary time when the Prime Minister's residence was run like an English country house, with socialising taking precedence over politics, love letters written in the cabinet room and gossip and state secrets exchanged over the bridge table. By 1916, when Asquith was forced out of office, everything had changed. For the country as a whole, for those in power, for a whole stratum of society, but especially for the Asquiths and their circle, it was the end of an era. Life inside Downing Street would never be the same again.