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This book shows the importance of political ideas in policy-making and demonstrates the extent to which pragmatic considerations preclude the imposition of rigid ideological programmes. It charts the decline of the postwar British 'consensus', the changing face of both the Conservative and Labour parties under the long shadow of Thatcherism, and the growing emergence of single issue policies such as environmentalism and feminism. With an extensive bibliography and suggested seminar and essay topics, Principles and Politics can be used on any course which focuses on contemporary British politics as well as having general appeal to those interested in looking at the contemporary political and ideological debate in the context of wider issues and trends. This second edition is completely revised and updated.
Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) was born in Switzerland and became one of France's leading writers, as well as a journalist, philosopher, and politician. His colourful life included a formative stay at the University of Edinburgh; service at the court of Brunswick, Germany; election to the French Tribunate; and initial opposition and subsequent support for Napoleon, even the drafting of a constitution for the Hundred Days. Constant wrote many books, essays, and pamphlets. His deepest conviction was that reform is hugely superior to revolution, both morally and politically. While Constant's fluid, dynamic style and lofty eloquence do not always make for easy reading, his text forms a coherent whole, and in his translation Dennis O'Keeffe has focused on retaining the 'general elegance and subtle rhetoric' of the original. Sir Isaiah Berlin called Constant 'the most eloquent of all defenders of freedom and privacy' and believed to him we owe the notion of 'negative liberty', that is, what Biancamaria Fontana describes as "the protection of individual experience and choices from external interferences and constraints." To Constant it was relatively unimportant whether liberty was ultimately grounded in religion or metaphysics -- what mattered were the practical guarantees of practical freedom -- "autonomy in all those aspects of life that could cause no harm to others or to society as a whole." This translation is based on Etienne Hofmann's critical edition of Principes de politique (1980), complete with Constant's additions to the original work.
The foundations upon which our democracies stand are inherently flawed, vulnerable to corrosion from within. What is the remedy? A. C. Grayling makes the case for a clear, consistent, principled and written constitution, and sets out the reforms necessary – among them addressing the imbalance of power between government and Parliament, imposing fixed terms for MPs, introducing proportional representation and lowering the voting age to 16 (the age at which you can marry, gamble, join the army and must pay taxes if you work) – to ensure the intentions of such a constitution could not be subverted or ignored. As democracies around the world show signs of decay, the issue of what makes a good state, one that is democratic in the fullest sense of the word, could not be more important. To take just one example: by the simplest of measures, neither Britain nor the United States can claim to be truly democratic. The most basic tenet of democracy is that no voice be louder than any other. Yet in our ‘first past the post’ electoral systems a voter supporting a losing candidate is unrepresented, his or her voice unequal to one supporting a winning candidate, who frequently does not gain a majority of the votes cast. This is just one of a number of problems, all of them showing that democratic reform is a necessity in our contemporary world.
Over Britain’s first century of mass democracy, politics has lurched from crisis to crisis. How does this history of political agony illuminate our current age of upheaval? To find out, journalist Phil Tinline takes us back to two past eras when the ruling consensus broke down, and the future filled with ominous possibilities – until, finally, a new settlement was born. How did the Great Depression’s spectres of fascism, bombing and mass unemployment force politicians to think the unthinkable, and pave the way to post-war Britain? How was Thatcher’s road to victory made possible by a decade of nightmares: of hyperinflation, military coups and communist dictatorship? And why, since the Crash in 2008, have new political threats and divisions forced us to change course once again? Tinline brings to life those times, past and present, when the great compromise holding democracy together has come apart; when the political class has been forced to make a choice of nightmares. This lively, original account of panic and chaos reveals how apparent catastrophes can clear the path to a new era. The Death of Consensus will make you see British democracy differently.
The search for universal principles and laws in world politics is a colossal common task for all civilisations. It should not be monopolised by the Western liberal paradigm. Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, global conflicts have been satisfactorily resolved neither by communism nor liberalism. Humanitarian intervention, now under the cover of the responsibility to protect (R2P), has destabilised many societies, leaving justice undone. This inspiring book invites debates on the post-liberal imagination of 'emancipated Leviathan': an almighty political authority which exercises awe and force to restore order, as well as enshrines globally-negotiated values of common conscience and reinvented cosmopolitanism. Human well-being will truly become reality when we synergise pre-modern and pre-liberal ways of thinking, worldviews, ethics, and aesthetic styles by means of cross-civilisational, cross-disciplinary fundamental research, and let an emancipated Leviathan exercises principles and laws of virtue derived from the study.The starting point of such intellectual innovation is China. This book explores the application of classical Chinese resources to the innovation of thoughts in contemporary Chinese international relations (IR). It examines whether 'Knowledge Archaeology of Chinese International Relations' (KACIR), coined by the author, responds sensibly to today's issues of international ethics and global justice. The book contends that emancipative hermeneutics holds the key to the Chinese soft power puzzle. A bottom-up, non-nationalistic, and non-ethnocentric approach to the Chinese civilisation will reinvent intellectual pluralism and cosmopolitan elements in the Chinese tradition that interact constructively with and ultimately transcend the liberal Western model. Strolling from contemporary IR back to ancient Chinese philosophy, then striding into the future searching for common principles and laws, this insightful book is a must-read for those who want to reflect on global conflicts in this era of great uncertainty and transformation, as well as those who love to make our world a better place to live in.
The period from 1680 to about 1720 was one of the most complex and difficult in the history of British politics, to contemporaries as well as to posterity. The parameters of political obligation were decisively shifted by the Revolution of 1688; statesmen and politicians had now to accustom themselves to the novelty of a parliament in session every year; Britain was almost continuously engaged in the most ambitious and expensive wars in her history to date; political parties were slow to form, and of doubtful repute when they did. Professor Kenyon's Ford Lectures, delivered in Oxford in 1976 and now published as a paperback for the first time, remain a standard account of the period. For this reissue, Professor Kenyon has written a new preface which discusses the book in the light of recent historiography.
Based on new and revealing survey data, this is the most authoritative picture to date of what the British people and their politicians really think about the fundamentals of politics.