The Long Detour is an intellectually engaging overview of the history of socialism in the United States and of the continuing relevance of socialist principles today. Historian and journalist James Weinstein, a lifelong socialist and one-time Communist, takes readers from the movement's early years of utopian communities, through the heyday of engagement with the makers of corporate America, and into the future of a de-industrializing era. He contends that socialism as a political movement was sidetracked when Communist domination of the American left stifled creative social thought and diverted the traditional left into sterile disputes over the true nature of the Soviet Union. And he argues that while "real existing socialism" -- which is what the Soviets called their system -- is dead, the humane social principles articulated by Marx and the leaders of the pre-1917 socialist movement remain vitally important to those on the left who seek to realize the promise of American democracy.
The Long Detour is an intellectually engaging overview of the history of socialism in the United States and its continuing relevance for today. Historian and journalist James Weinstein, a lifelong socialist and one-time Communist, takes readers from the movement's early years of utopian communities, though the heyday of engagement with the makers of corporate America, and into the future of our de-industrializing era. He argues that socialism, as a political movement, lost its way when Communist domination of the American left stifled social thought and diverted it into disputes over the true nature of the Soviet Union. Socialism is not dead, according to Weinstein; indeed, it is a vital force than can contribute to the growth of a political movement in the United States based on humane social principles, one that can once again play a positive role in our democratic development.
In These Times, the national, biweekly magazine of news and opinion, has provided groundbreaking coverage of the labor movement, the environment, feminism, grassroots politics, minority communities, and the media for twenty-five years. Filled with new writing commissioned specially for this anniversary volume, images, and text highlights of the last quarter-century in the magazine, Appeal to Reason: The First 25 Years of In These Times showcases contributors to the magazine like Noam Chomsky, David Brower, and Alice Walker, to name just a few. But it also asks an important question: Where do we go from here? For answers, Appeal to Reason turns to more than twenty leading progressive writers—including Barbara Ehrenreich, Juan Gonzalez, Salim Muwakkil, and Robert W. McChesney—who take a fresh look at the lessons of the past and suggest directions for the future. Exploring issues ranging from globalization and criminal justice to the environment and culture, Appeal to Reason lays a political and intellectual foundation for the debates, discussions, and movements of the next twenty-five years.
Ethnically homogenous communities often do a better job than diverse communities of producing public goods such as satisfactory schools and health care, adequate sanitation, and low levels of crime. Coethnicity reports the results of a landmark study that aimed to find out why diversity has this cooperation-undermining effect. The study, conducted in a neighborhood of Kampala, Uganda, notable for both its high levels of diversity and low levels of public goods provision, hones in on the mechanisms that might account for the difficulties diverse societies often face in trying to act collectively. The Mulago-Kyebando Community Study uses behavioral games to explore how the ethnicity of the person with whom one is interacting shapes social behavior. Hundreds of local participants interacted with various partners in laboratory games simulating real-life decisions involving the allocation of money and the completion of joint tasks. Many of the subsequent findings debunk long-standing explanations for diversity's adverse effects. Contrary to the prevalent notion that shared preferences facilitate ethnic collective action, differences in goals and priorities among participants were not found to be structured along ethnic lines. Nor was there evidence that subjects favored the welfare of their coethnics over that of non-coethnics. When given the opportunity to act altruistically, individuals did not choose to benefit coethnics disproportionately when their actions were anonymous. Yet when anonymity was removed, subjects behaved very differently. With their actions publicly observed, subjects gave significantly more to coethnics, expected their partners to reciprocate, and expected that they would be sanctioned for a failure to cooperate. This effect was most pronounced among individuals who were otherwise least likely to cooperate. These results suggest that what may look like ethnic favoritism is, in fact, a set of reciprocity norms—stronger among coethnics than among non-coethnics—that make it possible for members of more homogeneous communities to take risks, invest, and cooperate without the fear of getting cheated. Such norms may be more subject to change than deeply held ethnic antipathies—a powerful finding for policymakers seeking to design social institutions in diverse societies. Research on ethnic diversity typically draws on either experimental research or field work. Coethnicity does both. By taking the crucial step from observation to experimentation, this study marks a major breakthrough in the study of ethnic diversity. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust
Biosocial Surveys analyzes the latest research on the increasing number of multipurpose household surveys that collect biological data along with the more familiar interviewerâ€"respondent information. This book serves as a follow-up to the 2003 volume, Cells and Surveys: Should Biological Measures Be Included in Social Science Research? and asks these questions: What have the social sciences, especially demography, learned from those efforts and the greater interdisciplinary communication that has resulted from them? Which biological or genetic information has proven most useful to researchers? How can better models be developed to help integrate biological and social science information in ways that can broaden scientific understanding? This volume contains a collection of 17 papers by distinguished experts in demography, biology, economics, epidemiology, and survey methodology. It is an invaluable sourcebook for social and behavioral science researchers who are working with biosocial data.
This book is a melding of a few genres. First and foremost it's a memoir about the creative process I went though that I believe reveals new insights into the universe we live. The book also deals with the history of big bang theory, which is the current narrative on how our universe came to be.
The authors study a class of periodic Schrodinger operators, which in distinguished cases can be proved to have linear band-crossings or ``Dirac points''. They then show that the introduction of an ``edge'', via adiabatic modulation of these periodic potentials by a domain wall, results in the bifurcation of spatially localized ``edge states''. These bound states are associated with the topologically protected zero-energy mode of an asymptotic one-dimensional Dirac operator. The authors' model captures many aspects of the phenomenon of topologically protected edge states for two-dimensional bulk structures such as the honeycomb structure of graphene. The states the authors construct can be realized as highly robust TM-electromagnetic modes for a class of photonic waveguides with a phase-defect.
Individualism: The Cultural Logic of Modernity explores ideas of the modern sovereign individual in the western cultural tradition. Divided into two sections, this volume surveys the history of western individualism in both its early and later forms: chiefly from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and then individualism in the twentieth century. These essays boldly challenge not only the exclusionary framework and self-assured teleology, but also the metaphysical certainty of that remarkably tenacious narrative on 'the rise of the individual.' Some essays question the correlation of realist characterization to the eighteenth-century British novel, while others champion the continuing political relevance of selfhood in modernist fiction over and against postmodern nihilism. Yet others move to the foreground underappreciated topics, such as the role of courtly cultures in the development of individualism. Taken together, the essays provocatively revise and enrich our understanding of individualism as the generative premise of modernity itself. Authors especially considered include Locke, Defoe, Freud, and Adorno. The essays in this volume first began as papers presented at a conference of the American Comparative Literature Association held at Princeton University. Among the contributors are Nancy Armstrong, Deborah Cook, James Cruise, David Jenemann, Lucy McNeece, Vivasvan Soni, Frederick Turner, and Philip Weinstein.
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