Revered by Americans across the political spectrum, Barbara Jordan was "the most outspoken moral voice of the American political system," in the words of former President Bill Clinton, who awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994. Throughout her career as a Texas senator, U.S. congresswoman, and distinguished professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, Barbara Jordan lived by a simple creed: "Ethical behavior means being honest, telling the truth, and doing what you said you were going to do." Her strong stand for ethics in government, civil liberties, and democratic values still provides a standard around which the nation can unite in the twenty-first century.
This volume brings together several major political speeches that articulate Barbara Jordan's most deeply held values. They include:
Accompanying the speeches are context-setting introductions by volume editor Max Sherman. The book concludes with the eloquent eulogy that Bill Moyers delivered at Barbara Jordan's memorial service in 1996, in which he summed up Jordan's remarkable life and career by saying, "Just when we despaired of finding a hero, she showed up, to give the sign of democracy.... This is no small thing. This, my friends, this is grace. And for it we are thankful."
Why hasn’t democracy been embraced worldwide as the best form of government?
Aesthetic critics of democracy such as Carlyle and Nietzsche have argued that modern democracy, by removing the hierarchical institutions that once elevated society’s character, turns citizens into bland, mediocre souls. Joel A. Johnson now offers a rebuttal to these critics, drawing surprising inspiration from American literary classics.
Addressing the question from a new perspective, Johnson takes a fresh look at the worth of liberal democracy in these uncertain times and tackles head-on the thorny question of cultural development. Examining the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells, he shows that through their fiction we can gain a better appreciation of the rich detail of everyday life, making the debate relevant to contemporary discussions of liberal democracy.
Johnson focuses on an issue that liberals have inadequately addressed: whether people tend to develop fully as individuals under liberal democracy when such a regime does little formally to encourage their development. He argues that, though the liberal fear of state-guided culture is well founded, it should not prevent us from evaluating liberalism’s effect on individual flourishing. By extending the debate over the worthiness of liberal democracy to include democracy’s effect on individual development, he contends that the democratic experience is much fuller than the aristocratic one and thus expands the faculties of its citizens.
Critics of American democracy such as John Rawls have sought to transform it into a social or egalitarian democracy in the European style. Johnson shows that neither the debate between Rawls and his communitarian critics nor the ongoing discussion of the globalization of American values adequately addresses the fundamental critique of democratic culture advanced by the aesthetic critics. Johnson’s cogent analysis reaches out to those readers who are ready for a more comprehensive evaluation of liberal democracy, offering new insight into the relationship between the state and the individual while blazing new trails in the intersection of politics and literature.
Despite black gains in modern America, the end of racism is not yet in sight. Nikhil Pal Singh asks what happened to the worldly and radical visions of equality that animated black intellectual activists from W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1930s to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s. In so doing, he constructs an alternative history of civil rights in the twentieth century, a long civil rights era, in which radical hopes and global dreams are recognized as central to the history of black struggle.
It is through the words and thought of key black intellectuals, like Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, C. L. R. James, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and others, as well as movement activists like Malcolm X and Black Panthers, that vital new ideas emerged and circulated. Their most important achievement was to create and sustain a vibrant, black public sphere broadly critical of U.S. social, political, and civic inequality.
Finding racism hidden within the universalizing tones of reform-minded liberalism at home and global democratic imperatives abroad, race radicals alienated many who saw them as dangerous and separatist. Few wanted to hear their message then, or even now, and yet, as Singh argues, their passionate skepticism about the limits of U.S. democracy remains as indispensable to a meaningful reconstruction of racial equality and universal political ideals today as it ever was.
Notions of Christian love, or charity, strongly shaped the political thought of John Winthrop, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln as each presided over a foundational moment in the development of American democracy. Matthew Holland examines how each figure interpreted and appropriated charity, revealing both the problems and possibilities of making it a political ideal.
Holland first looks at early American literature and seminal speeches by Winthrop to show how the Puritan theology of this famed 17th century governor of the Massachusetts Colony (he who first envisioned America as a "City upon a Hill") galvanized an impressive sense of self-rule and a community of care in the early republic, even as its harsher aspects made something like Jefferson's Enlightenment faith in liberal democracy a welcome development . Holland then shows that between Jefferson's early rough draft of the Declaration of Independence and his First Inaugural Jefferson came to see some notion of charity as a necessary complement to modern political liberty.
However, Holland argues, it was Lincoln and his ingenious blend of Puritan and democratic insights who best fulfilled the promise of this nation's "bonds of affection." With his recognition of the imperfections of both North and South, his humility in the face of God's judgment on the Civil War, and his insistence on "charity for all," including the defeated Confederacy, Lincoln personified the possibilities of religious love turned civic virtue.
Weaving a rich tapestry of insights from political science and literature and American religious history and political theory, Bonds of Affection is a major contribution to the study of American political identity. Matthew Holland makes plain that civic charity, while commonly rejected as irrelevant or even harmful to political engagement, has been integral to our national character.
The book includes the full texts of Winthrop's speech "A Model of Christian Charity"; Jefferson's rough draft of the Declaration and his First Inaugural; and Lincoln's Second Inaugural.
At most recent count, there are no fewer than forty-five women in Brazil directing or codirecting feature-length fiction or documentary films. In the early 1990s, women filmmakers in Brazil were credited for being at the forefront of the rebirth of filmmaking, or retomada, after the abolition of the state film agency and subsequent standstill of film production. Despite their numbers and success, films by Brazilian women directors are generally absent from discussions of Latin American film and published scholarly works.
John Courtney Murray, SJ (1904-1967), is most renowned for his ethical writings, which distinguish between the secular and the sacred, and for his defense of civil religious freedom based on natural law philosophy. His later theological writings, however, in which he sought to reintegrate the temporal and the spiritual, civil society and the church, philosophy and theology, have been largely ignored. In this new collection of essays—previously scattered among various periodicals over the course of thirty years—J. Leon Hooper, S.J., presents a selection of Murray's theological writings that not only outlines and highlights the integrity of Murray's moves towards a public theological discourse but also contributes to the ongoing post-conciliar task of integrating the secular and the sacred, thereby invigorating American public conversation today.
In his editorial introductions, Hooper furthers Murray scholarship by identifying two distinct links between Murray's well known non-theological writings and the explicitly theological work that also spans his public life. Common to both areas are Murray's deepening appreciation of the historicity of all human knowing and the cognitional operations that the human person brings to both sacred and profane living.
By making available Murray's explicitly theological and Christian humanism writings, this collection further enriches American ethical, theological and philosophical debate.
Although everyone agrees on the need to make government work better, few understand public bureaucracy sufficiently well to offer useful suggestions, either theoretical or practical. In fact, some consider bureaucratic efficiency incompatible with democratic government.
Douglas Yates places the often competing aims of efficiency and democracy in historical perspective and then presents a unique and systematic theory of the politics of bureaucracy, which he illustrates with examples from recent history and from empirical research. He argues that the United States operates under a system of “bureaucratic democracy,” in which governmental decisions increasingly are made in bureaucratic settings, out of the public eye. He describes the rational, self-interested bureaucrat as a “minimaxer,” who inches forward inconspicuously, gradually accumulating larger budgets and greater power, in an atmosphere of segmented pluralism, of conflict and competition, of silent politics.
To make the policy process more competitive, democratic, and open, Yates calls for strategic debate among policymakers and bureaucrats and insists that bureaucrats should give a public accounting of their significant decisions rather than bury them in incremental changes. He offers concrete proposals, applicable to federal, state, and local governments, for simplifying the now-chaotic bureaucratic policymaking system and at the same time bolstering representation and openness.
This is a book for all political scientists, policymakers, government officials, and concerned citizens. It may well become a classic statement on the workings of public bureaucracy.
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