Author: Anthony Lewis Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com ISBN: 1458758389 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 262
Book Description
More than any other people on earth, we Americans are free to say and write what we think. The press can air the secrets of government, the corporate boardroom, or the bedroom with little fear of punishment or penalty. This extraordinary freedom results not from America’s culture of tolerance, but from fourteen words in the constitution: the free expression clauses of the First Amendment.InFreedom for the Thought That We Hate, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Lewis describes how our free-speech rights were created in five distinct areas—political speech, artistic expression, libel, commercial speech, and unusual forms of expression such as T-shirts and campaign spending. It is a story of hard choices, heroic judges, and the fascinating and eccentric defendants who forced the legal system to come face to face with one of America’s great founding ideas.
Author: Annelien De Dijn Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674988337 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 433
Book Description
The invention of modern freedom—the equating of liberty with restraints on state power—was not the natural outcome of such secular Western trends as the growth of religious tolerance or the creation of market societies. Rather, it was propelled by an antidemocratic backlash following the Atlantic Revolutions. We tend to think of freedom as something that is best protected by carefully circumscribing the boundaries of legitimate state activity. But who came up with this understanding of freedom, and for what purposes? In a masterful and surprising reappraisal of more than two thousand years of thinking about freedom in the West, Annelien de Dijn argues that we owe our view of freedom not to the liberty lovers of the Age of Revolution but to the enemies of democracy. The conception of freedom most prevalent today—that it depends on the limitation of state power—is a deliberate and dramatic rupture with long-established ways of thinking about liberty. For centuries people in the West identified freedom not with being left alone by the state but with the ability to exercise control over the way in which they were governed. They had what might best be described as a democratic conception of liberty. Understanding the long history of freedom underscores how recently it has come to be identified with limited government. It also reveals something crucial about the genealogy of current ways of thinking about freedom. The notion that freedom is best preserved by shrinking the sphere of government was not invented by the revolutionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who created our modern democracies—it was invented by their critics and opponents. Rather than following in the path of the American founders, today’s “big government” antagonists more closely resemble the counterrevolutionaries who tried to undo their work.
Author: Yevgeny Zamyatin Publisher: Diamond Pocket Books Pvt Ltd ISBN: 9356844836 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
We is a dystopian novel written by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. Originally drafted in Russian, the book could be published only abroad. It was translated into English in 1924. Even as the book won a wide readership overseas, the author's satiric depiction led to his banishment under Joseph Stalin's regime in the then USSR. The book's depiction of life under a totalitarian state influenced the other novels of the 20th century. Like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, We describes a future socialist society that has turned out to be not perfect but inhuman. Orwell claimed that Brave New World must be partly derived from We, but Huxley denied this. The novel is set in the future. D-503, a spacecraft engineer, lives in the One State which assists mass surveillance. Here life is scientifically managed. There is no way of referring to people except by their given numbers. The society is run strictly by reason as the primary justification for the construct of the society. By way of formulae and equations outlined by the One State, the individual's behaviour is based on logic.
Author: Daniel Hannan Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0062231758 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 315
Book Description
Why does the world speak English? Why does every country at least pretend to aspire to representative government, personal freedom, and an independent judiciary? In The New Road to Serfdom, British politician Daniel Hannan exhorted Americans not to abandon the principles that have made our country great. Inventing Freedom is a much more ambitious account of the historical origin and spread of those principles, and their role in creating a sphere of economic and political liberty that is as crucial as it is imperiled. According to Hannan, the ideas and institutions we consider essential to maintaining and preserving our freedoms—individual rights, private property, the rule of law, and the institutions of representative government—are not broadly "Western" in the usual sense of the term. Rather they are the legacy of a very specific tradition, one that was born in England and that we Americans, along with other former British colonies, inherited. The first English kingdoms, as they emerged from the Dark Ages, already had unique characteristics that would develop into what we now call constitutional government. By the tenth century, a thousand years before most modern countries, England was a nation-state whose people were already starting to define themselves with reference to inherited common-law rights. The story of liberty is the story of how that model triumphed. How, repressed after the Norman Conquest, it reasserted itself; how it developed during the civil wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into the modern liberal-democratic tradition; how it was enshrined in a series of landmark victories—the Magna Carta, the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, the U.S. Constitution—and how it came to defeat every international rival. Yet there was nothing inevitable about it. Anglosphere values could easily have been snuffed out in the 1940s. And they would not be ascendant today if the Cold War had ended differently. Today we see those ideas abandoned and scorned in the places where they once went unchallenged. The current U.S. president, in particular, seems determined to deride and traduce the Anglosphere values that the Founders took for granted. Inventing Freedom explains why the extraordinary idea that the state was the servant, not the ruler, of the individual evolved uniquely in the English-speaking world. It is a chronicle of the success of Anglosphere exceptionalism. And it is offered at a time that may turn out to be the end of the age of political freedom.
Author: Daniel Hannan Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1781857539 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 466
Book Description
This book tells the story of freedom and explains how it is a uniquely 'British', rather than 'Western', invention. It shows how the inhabitants of a damp island at the western tip of the Eurasian landmass stumbled upon the extraordinary idea that the state was the servant, and not the master, of the individual. This revolutionary concept created security of property and contract which, in turn, led to industrialization and modern capitalism. For the first time in the history of the species, a system grew up which, on the whole, rewarded production over predation. The system was carried across the oceans by English-speakers – sometimes colonial administrators, sometimes patriotic settlers – where in Philadelphia 1787, it was distilled into its purest and most sublime form as the US Constitution. Freedom is the key to the success of the English-speaking peoples and this book teaches us to keep fast to that legacy and, in our turn, to pass it intact to the next generation.
Author: Michael Kenny Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 1509516646 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 224
Book Description
The idea of an alliance between Britain and its old Commonwealth colonies has recently made a remarkable comeback in the context of Brexit. Based on belief in a special bond between the English-speaking peoples of the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, it has been dubbed the 'Anglosphere' by supporters and 'Empire 2.0' by critics. In this book, leading commentators Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce trace the historical origins of this idea back to the shadow cast by the British Empire in the late Victorian era. They show how leading British political figures, from Churchill to Thatcher, consistently reworked it and how it was revived by a group of right-wing politicians, historians and pamphleteers to support the case for Brexit. They argue that, while the contemporary idea of the Anglosphere as an alternative to European Union membership is seriously flawed, it nonetheless represents an enduring account of Britain’s role in the world that runs through the heart of political life over the last century. Shadows of Empire will be essential reading for everyone interested in British politics and post-Brexit foreign policy.
Author: Matthias D. Berger Publisher: Boydell & Brewer ISBN: 1843846578 Category : Languages : en Pages : 271
Book Description
How ideas and ideals of an imagined, protean, national Middle Ages have once again become a convergence point for anxieties about politics, history and cultural identity in our time - and why. After a period of abeyance, the link forged in the nineteenth century between the Middle Ages and national identity is increasingly being reclaimed, with numerous groups and individuals mining an imagined medieval past to present ideas and ideals of modern nationhood. Today's national medievalism asserts itself at the interface of culture and politics: in literature and television programming, in journalism and heritage tourism, and in the way political actors of various stripes use a deep past that supposedly proves the nation's steady exceptionalism in a hectic globalised world. This book traces these ongoing developments in Switzerland and Britain, two countries where the medieval past has recently been much invoked in negotiations of national identity, independence and Euroscepticism. Through comparative analysis, it explores examples of reemerging stories of national exceptionalism - stories that, ironically, echo those of other nations. The author analyses depictions of Robert the Bruce and Wilhelm Tell; medievalism in the discourse surrounding Brexit as well as at the Welsh Senedd; novels like Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake; community-based art such as the Great Tapestry of Scotland; and elaborate public commemorations of Swiss victories (and defeats) in battle. Basing his critical readings in current theories of cultural memory, heritage and nationalism, the author explores how the protean national Middle Ages have once again become a convergence point for anxieties about politics, history and cultural identity in our time - and why.
Author: Daniela Keller Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag ISBN: 3823394142 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
This volume explores the cultural significance of Brexit, situating it in debates about nation and identity. Contributors to this collection seek to contextualize Britain's decision to leave the EU and to assess its reverberations in language, literature, and culture. Addressing such aspects as British exceptionalism, myth-making, medievalism, and nostalgia, contributions range from travelogues, Ladybird books, and rural cinema-going to ageing. An important focus lies on marginalized groups and geographical fringes, as contributors attend to the Irish situation and the scarcity of EU migrants in Brexit literature (BrexLit). Finally, two essays widen the perspective to assess American parallels to the discourses about a Brexit that is still far from "done."
Author: Martin Parsons Publisher: WestBow Press ISBN: 1973683490 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 580
Book Description
Good for Society: Christian Values and Conservative Politics In ‘Good for Society’ Martin Parsons has written a book well worthy of its sub title ‘Christian Values and Conservative Politics.’. Good for Society is a robust defence of both our Christian heritage and the Conservative Party. Rt Hon Lord Tebbit CH, former Chairman of the Conservative Party, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and Secretary of State for Employment This is a magnificent, detailed and authoritative examination of the relevance of Christian teaching to today’s Conservative Party. Even when you do not agree with a deduction you are still challenged. Rt Hon Ann Widdecombe, former Conservative MP and Shadow Home Secretary Dr Parsons brings together expertise in politics, careful biblical study, research in Islam and experience of life under the Taliban in Afghanistan. He mounts a powerful case for identifying Christian values and view of the world in the development of the laws, liberties and institutions of the English speaking peoples. He also identifies these values in the approaches of Conservative politics and politicians. These must be recovered in order to develop a narrative and values to address the threat of Islamism which seeks to impose sharia both subtly and violently. Liberal secularists who might disagree with Dr Parsons need to demonstrate a more convincing case than he presents on all fronts. Canon Dr Chris Sugden, Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life Christians in many parts of the world, who are influenced by progressivism, reject Conservative values on social policy by default. They uncritically assume that big government, redistribution of wealth and other leftist policies are closer to the teaching of Scripture, while capitalism, wealth creation, individualism and other Conservative values represent greed, oppression and injustice. Dr Martin Parsons turns this myth on its head. Exploring the great philosophical and historical traditions of Conservatism and expounding the teaching of the Bible, he demonstrates that Conservatism is firmly rooted in the Judeo-Christian worldview. Dr Parsons has written the definitive book on Conservatism and Christianity. I wish this book were written years ago. It would have saved me from years of wandering in the desert of progressivism. Rev. Dr Jules Gomes, theologian and political journalist
Author: Roy J. Shephard Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3319116711 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 1095
Book Description
This book examines the health/fitness interaction in an historical context. Beginning in primitive hunter-gatherer communities, where survival required adequate physical activity, it goes on to consider changes in health and physical activity at subsequent stages in the evolution of “civilization.” It focuses on the health impacts of a growing understanding of medicine and physiology, and the emergence of a middle-class with the time and money to choose between active and passive leisure pursuits. The book reflects on urbanization and industrialization in relation to the need for public health measures, and the ever-diminishing physical demands of the work-place. It then evaluates the attitudes of prelates, politicians, philosophers and teachers at each stage of the process. Finally, the book explores professional and governmental initiatives to increase public involvement in active leisure through various school, worksite, recreational and sports programmes.
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Author: Anthony Lewis
Author: Annelien De Dijn
Author: Yevgeny Zamyatin
Author: Daniel Hannan
Author: Daniel Hannan
Author: Michael Kenny
Author: Matthias D. Berger
Author: Daniela Keller
Author: Martin Parsons
Author: Roy J. Shephard