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The collected essays in this book provide a comparative examination of the process of grassroots mobilization and the development of community-based forms of popular democracy in Central and South America. The first part contains studies from individual countries on organizations ranging from those supported by governments and integrated into the country's political structure to groups that were organized against the existing political system. The organizations studied included those focusing on a particular concern, such as housing, and those with wide responsibility for community affairs; but all were organizations based on common interests where people lived and, in some cases, where people worked. The second part offers theme studies on men, women and differential participation; problems and meanings associated with decentralization, especially in relation to devolution of power to the local level and the construction of popular alternatives; and the competing theoretical paradigms of new social movements and resource mobilization.
Grass root democracy is a fascinating concept at present and is very often used nowadays. The functioning of the grassroot democracy largely depends on the congruence of the perception of policy makers at the top of the system and the beneficiaries at the bottom of the subject matter. If the leaders at the grass root level understand the spirit of the decentralisation of power in the backdrop of the context, the realization of the objectives of the devolution of power will be easier.
Grassroots Rising is a passionate call to action for the global body politic, providing practical solutions for how to survive--and thrive--in catastrophic times. Author Ronnie Cummins aims to educate and inspire citizens worldwide to organize and become active participants in preventing ecological collapse. This book offers a blueprint for building and supercharging a grassroots Regeneration Movement based on consumer activism, farmer innovation, political change, and regenerative finance--embodied most recently by the proposed Green New Deal in the US. Cummins asserts that the solution lies right beneath our feet and at the end of our forks through the transformation of our broken food system. Using regenerative agriculture practices that restore our agricultural and grazing lands, we can sequester massive amounts of carbon in the soil. Coupled with an aggressive transition toward renewables, he argues that we have the power to not only mitigate and slow down climate change, but actually reverse global warming. In synergy with the Sunrise Movement and the growing support of a Green New Deal, Grassroots Rising will impact millions of conscious consumers, farmers, and the general public during the crucial 2020 election year and beyond. This book shows that a properly organized and executed Regeneration Revolution can indeed offer realistic climate solutions while also meeting our everyday needs. If you're wondering what you can do to help address the global climate crisis, joining the Regeneration Revolution might be the best first step. " Grassroots Rising] is a 'good news' instructional book for Regeneration, a practical, shovel-ready plan of action for the United States and the world to transition to climate stability, peace, justice, health, prosperity, cooperation, and participatory democracy." --Ronnie Cummins
Over the course of a career that stretched from the early 1920s through the late 1970s, David Eli Lilienthal (1899-1981) became a larger-than-life symbol of American liberalism. Born in Morton, Illinois to Jewish immigrants from what later became Czechoslovakia, Lilienthal attended DePauw University and Harvard Law School. After practicing labor and public utility law in Chicago, Governor Philip La Follette appointed him to the Wisconsin Public Service Commission in 1931. In 1933, President Roosevelt appointed Lilienthal as one of three founding directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority. In 1946, President Truman appointed him as the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. Lilienthal left public service in 1950 but continued applying the TVA concept of coordinated development, including dams, irrigation, flood control and electric generation via his consulting firm, Development and Research Corporation, which operated internationally, including in Iran under the Shah. “This biography is a study of a fascinating man who, in his long career, embodied the achievements and tragedy of mid-century American liberalism. The author has mastered his sources and produced a wonderful portrait of a man and his times.” —Erwin C. Hargrove, Vanderbilt University “Steven Neuse’s biography of David Lilienthal fills an important gap in the history of twentieth-century American liberalism. It is a perceptive analysis of a complex character.” — William Bruce Wheeler, University of Tennessee “[A] well-written, exhaustively researched, and balanced perspective of [Lilienthal]... Steven Neuse has written one of the best studies to date on a prominent twentieth-century American and one that will be cited for many years to come.” — Michael V. Namorato, University of Mississippi, Journal of American History “In this exemplary biography, [Neuse] illuminates Lilienthal’s road to influence... This book merits the attention of all serious students of 20th-century American democracy.” — M. J. Birkner, Gettysburg College, Choice “Neuse offers a superbly crafted discussion of Lilienthal’s time as TVA commissioner... [and] traces the evolving controversies and achievements of TVA with exemplary clarity... [A] wise and wide ranging book. Based on an enviable command of private papers, personal interviews, and government documents, it is incomparably the finest existing study of this complicated and remarkable American and of absorbing interest to anyone interested in the New Deal, atomic politics, or the travails of American liberalism at home and abroad in the late twentieth century.” — Georgia Historical Quarterly “[A] splendidly perceptive analysis of this consummate bureaucratic politician and liberal who managed constructive programs in a destructive world.” — Journal of East Tennessee History “[A] quite readable biography based on enormous research... [this] book is important and deserves a wide readership.” — Howard P. Segal, University of Maine, Nature “Neuse has performed a very important service in providing scholars with a ‘life and times’ chronicle of Lilienthal... Neuse’s account is impressively researched, his prose admirably lucid... Neuse’s study stands as proof that narrative biography is still a vibrant scholarly enterprise.” — Gregory Field, University of Michigan, Technology and Culture “This is a well-written, extensively documented, informative narrative on a fascinating man...” — John Minton, Western Kentucky University, Tennessee Historical Quarterly “Steven Neuse’s exhaustive study of David Lilienthal is the much-needed and definitive biography of a highly significant figure, the very personification of American liberalism and grassroots democracy. All twentieth-century scholars must master it, and the general reader will be fascinated by this sensitive tale of a tortured crusader who dreamed so expansively and felt so deeply.” — Roy Talbert, Jr., Coastal Carolina University
The New Deal left a host of political, institutional, and economic legacies. Among them was the restructuring of the government into an administrative state with a powerful executive leader and a large class of unelected officials. This "leviathan" state was championed by the political left, and its continued growth and dominance in American politics is seen as a product of liberal thought—to the extent that "Big Government" is now nearly synonymous with liberalism. Yet there were tensions among liberal statists even as the leviathan first arose. Born in crisis and raised by technocrats, the bureaucratic state always rested on shaky foundations, and the liberals who built and supported it disagreed about whether and how to temper the excesses of the state while retaining its basic structure and function. Debating the American State traces the encounter between liberal thought and the rise of the administrative state and the resulting legitimacy issues that arose for democracy, the rule of law, and individual autonomy. Anne Kornhauser examines a broad and unusual cast of characters, including American social scientists and legal academics, the philosopher John Rawls, and German refugee intellectuals who had witnessed the destruction of democracy in the face of a totalitarian administrative state. In particular, she uncovers the sympathetic but concerned voices—commonly drowned out in the increasingly partisan political discourse—of critics who struggled to reconcile the positive aspects of the administrative state with the negative pressure such a contrivance brought on other liberal values such as individual autonomy, popular sovereignty, and social justice. By showing that the leviathan state was never given a principled and scrupulous justification by its proponents, Debating the American State reveals why the liberal state today remains haunted by programmatic dysfunctions and relentless political attacks.
Late in the 1930s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture set up a national network of local organizations that joined farmers with public administrators, adult-educators, and social scientists. The aim was to localize and unify earlier New Deal programs concerning soil conservation, farm production control, tenure security, and other reforms, and by 1941 some 200,000 farm people were involved. Even so, conservative anti–New Dealers killed the successful program the next year. This book reexamines the era’s agricultural policy and tells the neglected story of the New Deal agrarian leaders and their visionary ideas about land, democratization, and progressive social change.
Ideologues and Presidents argues that ideologues have been gaining influence in the modern presidency. There were plenty of ideologues in the New Deal, but they worked at cross purposes and could not count on the backing of the cagey pragmatist in the Oval Office. Three decades later, the Johnson White House systematically sought the help of hundreds of liberals in drawing up blueprints for policy changes. But when it came time to implement their plans, Lyndon Johnson's White House proved to have scant interest in ideological purity.By the time of the Reagan Revolution, the organizations that supported ideological assaults on government had never been stronger. The result was a level of ideological influence unmatched until the George W. Bush presidency. In Bush's administration, not only did anti-statists and social conservatives take up positions of influence throughout the government, but the president famously pursued an elective war that had been promoted for a decade by a networked band of ideologues.In the Barack Obama presidency, although progressive liberals have found their way into niches within the executive branch, the real ideological action continues to be Stage Right. How did American presidential politics come to be so entangled with ideology and ideologues? Ideologues and Presidents helps us move toward an answer to this vital question.
What is the distinctive character of America's cities? How have our metropolitan regions evolved since the Colonial period? What effect will local politics have on the future of the American city? These are the questions Daniel J. Elazar addresses in this third volume of his highly-acclaimed 'Cities of the Prairie' trilogy. Recognizing the growing alienation from local institutions on the part of city-dwellers nation-wide, Elazar explains why the restoration of local attachments should be a matter of first priority. Co-published with Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
In tackling America's worst depression the New Deal brought the federal government into unprecedented contact with most Americans and shaped the political economy of the contemporary United States. This major new study incorporates the results of many recent case studies of the New Deal and provides a detailed assessment of the impact of the depression and New Deal programmes on businessmen, industrial workers, farmers and the unemployed. In his thematic analysis of the implementation of particular programmes, rather than in a narrative of policymaking, Dr Badger explains the political and ideological constraints which limited the changes wrought by the New Deal.
Winner of the Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History, Organization of American Historians Co-Winner of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History Book Award Thinking Small tells the story of how the United States sought to rescue the world from poverty through small-scale, community-based approaches. And it also sounds a warning: such strategies, now again in vogue, have been tried before, with often disastrous consequences. “Unfortunately, far from eliminating deprivation and attacking the social status quo, bottom-up community development projects often reinforced them...This is a history with real stakes. If that prior campaign’s record is as checkered as Thinking Small argues, then its intellectual descendants must do some serious rethinking... How might those in twenty-first-century development and anti-poverty work forge a better path? They can start by reading Thinking Small.” —Merlin Chowkwanyun, Boston Review “As the historian Daniel Immerwahr demonstrates brilliantly in Thinking Small, the history of development has seen constant experimentation with community-based and participatory approaches to economic and social improvement...Immerwahr’s account of these failures should give pause to those who insist that going small is always better than going big.” —Jamie Martin, The Nation