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women of the mass society, who accordingly feel that they are without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power.” Mills goes on to detail how a small group of individuals occupying the “command centers” of the military, political offices, and corporations form an inner circle with the power to make decisions that “mightily affect the everyday worlds of men and women” (Mills, 2000 [1956 ], p. 3). Much has changed since the mid-1950s, and the intent of this chapter is to chronicle the ways in which the political life of people living
established global order has been greatly exaggerated, then you will doubt that those changes are likely to pose any existential challenge to the humanitarian international, be it in terms of the efficacy of what relief groups do in the field or in terms of the political and moral legitimacy they can aspire to enjoy. But if, on the contrary, you believe that we are living in the last days of a doomed system – established in the aftermath of World War II and dominated by the US – then the humanitarian international is no more likely to survive (or to put
Emotions matter to politics. Despite their importance, emotions tend to be neglected in the study of such routine aspects of politics as elections. Whereas emotions have certainly been studied in the context of spectacular political moments, this volume attends to the passions generated by elections, which have all too often been dismissed as a relatively banal dimension of politics. The volume delves into the passions evoked by India’s 2019 general election, widely billed as a ‘battle for India’s soul’. It explores the processes of social, economic and cultural change within which the election was embedded. Contributions from economists, sociologists, geographers, anthropologists and political scientists shed light on a significant political moment in India.
The Wesleyan missionaries eyed the world beyond their mission stations with profound suspicion, and neither colonialists nor Burmans knew quite what to make of the Wesleyans. Stephen Neill suggested that whatever their intentions, missionaries were ‘tools of governments’, and a young missionary in Kyaukse suspected that most Burmans assumed they were ‘part of the British Government’. 1 Proselytism was officially frowned upon in the Indian Empire. Conversion from one religion to another was highly political and
From Chaucer’s representations of the Knight and the Squire in the General Prologue one might deduce that domestic politics and administration formed no part of the gentry’s existence. The Knight spends his time, when not on pilgrimage, fighting for Christendom in far-flung places; his son has also seen military service abroad, but pursues ‘courtly love’ with at least
2 Politics Introduction The problem in America is that we don’t apologise, and we don’t learn. The protests against the Iraq War worldwide were enormous. I don’t think Americans got a sense of the protest or the damage in Iraq at all. The protests were not that big a story in the USA. The American press report on every story from an American viewpoint. It is what comes naturally to them. It’s not done out of malice; they don’t know any better.1 In his introduction to an episode of the PBS programme Open Mind, recorded in January 1992, host Richard Heffner
4 Saving politics Introduction If I were a Marxist, I would be very tempted to argue that the ascendancy of Trump and the Brexit result are signs that the internal contradictions within capitalism are finally starting to work out as expected. The revolution is near! It all seems ripe for a Marxist revolution, and indeed the rise of Momentum in the UK suggests something similar. However, history in this Hegelian sense is unlikely to return, and Momentum (the grassroots left-wing movement that supports Jeremy Corbyn), while popular, remains a minority
4 Political participation: continuity and change Not only is it the case that the vast majority of citizens are at best marginally engaged in civic or political activism, it is also far from clear how even a broader base of participation beyond elections and political parties could help address the decline of representative democracy. Wilks-Heeg, Blick and Crone, 2012 The changing patterns of political participation and support Political participation is part of a dynamic process of exchange between the citizen and the state. In Britain and Australia, as in