The USA in the making of the USSR

Sample

Carole Hodge

"Britain and the Balkans presents an empirical account and analysis of Britain's role in international policy in Yugoslavia and its successor states from 1991 to the present day."--Jacket.

Sample

James Mulvihill

"This study examines the use and abuse of rhetoric in English public life from 1790 to the end of the Regency. It begins from the premise that the period's rhetoric can employ reasoned arguments while also exhibiting regressive tendencies not so much supplanting rational discourse as using it in unexpected ways. its underlying premise is that, however distinct were the positions taken by various political constituencies at this time, these positions could be advocated by means of rhetorical techniques common to all. The materialist emphasis of current cultural studies provides a useful corrective to the grand schemas of intellectual history but overcompensates by employing only the most nominal generalizations. While revisionist treatments of the "public sphere" have succeeded in breaking the concept down into divers political constituencies, this study examines assumptions about public discourse shared by these constituencies." "The discipline of rhetoric developing alongside logic since the Reformation was a creature of both instrumental agency and subliminal suggestion, at once tool and medium. The ambivalent associations still surrounding the term "rhetoric" today are the result of this checkered history, a history portraying logic and rhetoric alternately at odds with, and absorbing aspects of, one another until finally settling into occasionally converging paths with rhetoric often on the low road. In the last half of the eighteenth century, two schools of rhetoric, the Elocutionary movement and the New Rhetoricians, began to explore ways of adapting to the theory and practice of rhetoric certain epistemological advances made in empirical philosophy since Locke. An inference of these rhetorical assimilations of empirical psychology is the reduction of truth to an impression. Such latitude as sensationalist thought introduced into rhetorical practice made a very flexible instrument of rhetoric indeed. It rendered hopes expressed by moralists/critics like Samuel Taylor Coleridge - who in his reflections on modern rhetoric speaks of "securing a purity in the principle without mischief from the practice" - all the more quixotic." "A result of this tendency was the systematizing of rhetorical imposture. The techniques of rhetorical imposture in the public life of Romantic England are not reducible to party allegiance or even generic ideological disposition. They may be employed by pragmatists and idealists of either a sentimental or rational nature; any party or ideology may appropriate seemingly characteristic techniques of the other. In its purest (and most insidious) form, this ethos, which is comparable to Machiavellian virtu in its exploitation of contingency, enables the rational manipulation of irrational energies to effect whatever end it happens to be pursuing. Opening chapters examine rhetorical imposture in practical guides to rhetoric, parliamentary speaking, and the queen's trial in 1820. A chapter on William Cobbett - who, developing his polemical techniques in both the ministerial and reform presses, is the exemplary case - traces in his writings the career of reasoned argument along a rhetorically conditioned bias leading at once away from and toward imposture. A final chapter examines how the narratives of several well-known Romantic texts - including Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, William Wordsworth's play The Borderers, William Godwin's Caleb Williams, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and William Blake's prophetic poetry - run along this same bias."--BOOK JACKET.

Sample

Walter D. Gray

Interpreting American Democracy in France is a study of the French savant, liberal, politician, and Americanist Edouard Laboulaye. Laboulaye, who was a professor at the College de France, is perhaps best known in America today as president of the Union Franco-Americaine, which raised funds in France for the Statute of Liberty. He was also well known to Americans in the nineteenth century, particularly for his staunch support of the Union in the American Civil War. He and his circle influenced French public opinion and were instrumental in preventing the government of Napoleon III from recognizing the Confederacy. After the Revolutions of 1848, the aftermath of which disillusioned him, a dominant theme in Laboulaye's writings was that America provided France with a model constitution that guaranteed individual liberties and a stable political system; it was his great hope that his country would follow this example. As France's leading Americanist, Laboulaye's energies were devoted to lectures on American history and politics and work on behalf of the North during the Civil War. He was also a translator of the works of those Americans for whom he had a special devotion: Franklin, Channing, and Mann. As a founding father of the Third Republic, Laboulaye drew great satisfaction from the fact that some principles drawn from the American political tradition were embodied in its constitutional laws. Additionally, Laboulaye was the first Frenchman to give a course on American history at a French university, and he later published a three-volume history of the United States, which stands as his masterpiece. He was a member of the liberal opposition to Napoleon III and after 1870 became active in the Third Republic, serving as deputy and later senator for life. In France Laboulaye is primarily known as a professor at the respected College de France, a position he maintained throughout his entire career, and as a member of the Institut de France. He was also president of the French Anti-Slavery Society. Laboulaye was, in fact, a savant of almost universal interests who held a place at the center of French intellectual life during the Second Empire and the early Third Republic. His bibliography, comprised of books, pamphlets, essays, children's stories, and articles, totals over two hundred entries. His final years as a senator for life were devoted in large part to a successful fundraising campaign for the Statute of Liberty, which he did not live to see erected in New York Harbor, and to carrying on the fight for political liberty as he envisioned it. . This book is based on extensive research into the unpublished papers of Laboulaye, which are still in his family's possession, and manuscripts in other depositories in France and the United States.

Sample

Tony Smith

The strength and prestige of democracy worldwide at the end of the twentieth century are due in good measure to the impact of America on international affairs, argues Tony Smith. Here for the first time is a book that documents the extraordinary history of American foreign policy with respect to the promotion of democracy worldwide, an effort whose greatest triumph came in the occupations of Japan and Germany but whose setbacks include interventions in Latin America and Vietnam. As Americans ponder the challenges of world affairs at the end of the Cold War, Smith suggests that they think back to other times when Washington's decisions were critical: not only to the end of the World Wars in 1918 and 1945, but to the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the Civil War in 1865 as well. They will find that in the aftermath of victory, Washington determined to win the peace by promoting a concept of national security calling ultimately for democratic government in Europe, Latin America, and the Far East. So the Congress set out to "reconstruct" the South in 1867; America aimed to democratize the Philippines in 1898; Wilson sought to "make the world safe for democracy," first in Latin America and then, after 1918, in Central and Eastern Europe; FDR and Truman dictated the democratization of Japan and Germany and called for democracy in Eastern Europe after 1945; Kennedy promoted the Alliance for Progress in Latin America; Carter launched his human rights campaign; Reagan (the most Wilsonian of Wilson's successors) heralded an international "democratic revolution"; Bush called for a "new world order"; and Clinton declared that "our overriding purpose must be to expand and strengthen the world's community of market-based democracies.". Through a study of selected countries - most notably Germany, Japan, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Iran, and Nicaragua (but also Mexico, Chile, Guatemala, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Greece, South Africa, and Russia) - Smith reviews the American record both in local terms and with respect to its impact on world politics. Smith's story is at once that of the central thrust of American foreign policy in the twentieth century, and that of the central international political struggle of the period among nationalists wedded to rival ideologies of fascism, communism, and democracy, each striving to dominate world affairs. Now that this struggle appears to be over, the question is whether democracy can consolidate its position as the sole legitimate form of government worldwide, so creating a common form of government to express the nationalist sentiments that continue to be the hallmark of this century.