by Christopher Pierson (1996)
'The Modern State' offers a clear, comprehensive and provocative introduction to one of the most important phenomena of contemporary life. Topics covered include the nation state and its historical context.
Patrick Dunleavy and Brendan O'Leary
Discusses Pluralist, New Right, Elitist, Marxist and Neo-pluralist theories. Provides summary of intellectual origins, methodology and key strengths and weaknesses with examples from United States, Western Europe, etc.
William B. Hixson, Jr
This book is a creative synthesis of the published scholarly research on the contemporary American right wing from the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy to the election of Ronald Reagan as President. Unlike most other syntheses, it directly engages that research by critically analyzing the major explanations emerging from it. Emphasizing neither the lives and backgrounds of the scholars that he discusses nor paradigms within the social sciences as a whole, William Hixson focuses on the way the concepts of individual researchers have interacted with accumulating evidence on the American right, and how this evidence has led to new and more comprehensive theories. Hixson first summarizes and evaluates the research on the major developments analyzed by scholars - the social sources of "McCarthyism," the "radical right" of the early 1960s, George Wallace's constituency in his Presidential campaigns, and the emerging "new right" of the late 1970s. He then compares the interpretations of the two most influential students of the right wing, Seymour Martin Lipset and Michael Paul Rogin. Finally, he offers his own explanations, suggesting that the right wing is both a mass and elite phenomenon, that its durability comes from its appeal to the upwardly mobile, especially in economically expanding regions, and that far from being either "traditionalist" or reactive, it represents a proactive defense of values associated with late nineteenth-century "modernization."
Heinrich Meier
Carl Schmitt is the most famous and controversial defender of political theology in our century. But in his best-known work, The Concept of the Political, issued in 1927, 1932, and 1933, political considerations led him to conceal the dependence of his entire political theory on his faith in divine revelation. In 1932 political philosopher Leo Strauss published a critical review of The Concept of the Political that earned him Schmitt's respect and initiated an extremely subtle interchange between Schmitt and Strauss regarding Schmitt's critique of liberalism. Although Schmitt never answered Strauss publicly, in the third edition of his book he changed key passages in response to Strauss's criticisms without ever acknowledging them. In the present book Heinrich Meier astutely follows the trail left by the interlocutors. The present volume includes a new translation of Strauss's classic essay and the first English version of three letters to Schmitt from Strauss. It is essential reading for students of politics, political theory, and philosophy.
Ronald H. Chilcote
Extensively revised and updated, this classic text revisits the central problem of searching for mainstream and alternative paradigms to guide us in comparative political inquiry. Chilcote reminds us that in a post-Cold War world in which challenges to comparative inquiry abound - ethnic conflict, authoritarian repression, state building and disintegration, new industrialization and postindustrialization, security systems redefined - the search for new paradigms that Theories of Comparative Politics represents gains in importance daily.