The fundamental question of political theory, one that precedes all other questions about the nature of political life, is why there is a state at all. Is human cooperation feasible without a political authority enforcing it? Or do we need a state to live together? This problem then opens up two further questions. If a state is necessary to establish order, how does it come into place? And, when it does, what are the consequences for the political status and economic welfare of its citizens? Combining ethnographical material, historical cases, and statistical analysis, this book describes the foundations of stateless societies, why and how states emerge, and the basis of political obligation. As a result of this inquiry, it explains the economic and political roots of inequality, describes the causes of the stagnation of the preindustrial world, and explores what led to the West’s prosperity of the past two centuries.
The first book to offer (from an empirical/positive - as opposed to normative - point of view) a complete theory of political order, integrating Olson's work (of a Hobbesian nature) with consent-based theories of state formation
The first book to offer a theory of inequality
Challenges the main paradigm of economic growth today - institutionalism - offering a new explanation of economic growth/stagnation

Review
"Wealth into Power is a masterful exploration of the convergence of economic and political power in China. Carefully, lucidly, and convincingly, Bruce Dickson demonstrates that economic development in China has generated crony communism rather than demands for democracy though the cozy relationships between private entrepreneurs and party leaders come at huge costs in terms of corruption and inequality. This book should be widely read by anyone trying to understand contemporary China."
-Joseph Fewsmith, Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Boston University, and author of China Since Tiananmen
"In Wealth into Power, Bruce Dickson describes with remarkable clarity why it is that the economic advances in China will not lead to democratization. He lays out in detail how the Chinese Communist Party has co-opted the country's entrepreneurs and has turned them into a force for preservation of the existing political order rather than as agents of political change. Dickson's cogent book effectively rebuts the common assumption that China, with advancing wealth, will inevitably develop an independent civil society."
-James Mann, author of The China Fantasy and author-in-residence, Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
"Wealth into Power provides a penetrating analysis of the complex relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and China's thriving private sector. In this ground-breaking study of the political orientations, social backgrounds, and survival strategies of Chinese private entrepreneurs, Bruce Dickson shows that China's new capitalists, far from becoming a driving force for democratic change, have become part of the authoritarian order. By challenging the conventional wisdom about the relationship between economic development and democratization, Dickson presents a sobering political reality that has often been missed in the current discourse on China's future."
-Minxin Pei, senior associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and author of China's Trapped Transition
"Bruce Dickson's superb new study is mandatory reading for all serious analysts of China's socio-economic and political future. The study's data are unique, the narrative is nuanced, the analysis is sophisticated, and the findings are sobering. Dickson has put his finger on a key actor in China political future, and finds evidence that the emerging business class is being effectively co-opted by the [Communist] party-state, rather than being proto-democratic agents of political change. A major contribution to our understanding of China's political landscape."
-David Shambaugh, Professor of Political Science and International Affiars, George Washington University & The Brookings Institution
"Based on original diachronic survey data and years of studying Leninst-style one-party systems, Wealth into Power expertly demonstrates that China's capitalists represent the source of communist resilience rather than a force for political change. Once again, Bruce Dickson's scholarship is a model of clarity, analytic fluency, and empirically-grounded conclusions. Anyone interested in the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and capitalists should read this book."
-Kellee S. Tsai, Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, and author of Capitalism without Democracy: The Private Sector in Contemporary China
"The rapidly changing Chinese political economy places high demands on us to update our understanding of the business-government relationship and its implications for regime change. Wealth into Power is the rare empirical study that meets these demands. In it, Bruce Dickson meticulously follows up, with new surveys of private entrepreneurs and local officials, on conclusions from the 1990s. The new research confirms and strengthens previous arguments: over the past decade, Dickson demonstrates, the communist party has fairly successfully consolidated 'crony communism' in its strategic alliance with the country's most vital economic group-'red capitalists,' whose interests and values are not proto-democratic. Wealth into Power provides strong empirical support for the provocative view of an adaptive and resilient communist party."
-Melanie Manion, Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Product Description
In Wealth into Power, Bruce Dickson challenges the notion that economic development is leading to political change in China, or that China's private entrepreneurs are helping to promote democratization. Instead, they have become partners with the ruling Chinese Communist Party to promote economic growth while maintaining the political status quo. Dickson's research illuminates the Communist Party's strategy for incorporating China's capitalists into the political system and how the shared interests, personal ties, and common views of the party and the private sector are creating a form of "crony communism." Rather than being potential agents of change, China's entrepreneurs may prove to be a key source of support for the party's agenda. Based on years of research and original survey data, this book will be of interest to all those interested in China's political future and in the relationship between economic wealth and political power.

Patterns of Empire comprehensively examines the two most powerful empires in modern history: the United States and Britain. Challenging the popular theory that the American empire is unique, Patterns of Empire shows how the policies, practices, forms and historical dynamics of the American empire repeat those of the British, leading up to the present climate of economic decline, treacherous intervention in the Middle East and overextended imperial confidence. A critical exercise in revisionist history and comparative social science, this book also offers a challenging theory of empire that recognizes the agency of non-Western peoples, the impact of global fields and the limits of imperial power.

The best-selling English Pronunciation in Use is a comprehensive reference and practice book suitable for self-study or classroom work. Sixty easy-to-use units cover all aspects of pronunciation, including individual sounds, word stress, connected speech and intonation. An additional reference section offers a glossary of specialized terms, help with the pronunciation of numbers and geographical names, and fun exercises on phonemic symbols and minimal pairs. Versions with audio CDs, supporting each unit with audio material in a range of accents. and with a CD-ROM, are available to purchase separately.

This book collects essays by Professor Pocock concerned principally with the history of British political thought in the eighteenth century. Several of the essays have been previously published (though they have not all been widely available), and several appear here for the first time in print.

The power of music to influence mood, create scenes, routines and occasions is widely recognised and this is reflected in a strand of social theory from Plato to Adorno that portrays music as an influence on character, social structure and action. There have, however, been few attempts to specify this power empirically and to provide theoretically grounded accounts of music's structuring properties in everyday experience. Music in Everyday Life uses a series of ethnographic studies - an aerobics class, karaoke evenings, music therapy sessions and the use of background music in the retail sector - as well as in-depth interviews to show how music is a constitutive feature of human agency. Drawing together concepts from psychology, sociology and socio-linguistics it develops a theory of music's active role in the construction of personal and social life and highlights the aesthetic dimension of social order and organisation in late modern societies.

Many of the traditions which we think of as very ancient in their origins were not in fact sanctioned by long usage over the centuries, but were invented comparatively recently. This book explores examples of this process of invention - the creation of Welsh and Scottish ‘national culture’; the elaboration of British royal rituals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the origins of imperial rituals in British India and Africa; and the attempts by radical movements to develop counter-traditions of their own. It addresses the complex interaction of past and present, bringing together historians and anthropologists in a fascinating study of ritual and symbolism which poses new questions for the understanding of our history.

Arising out of the author's lifetime fascination with the links between the formal language of mathematical models and natural language, this short book comprises five essays investigating both the economics of language and the language of economics. Ariel Rubinstein touches the structure imposed on binary relations in daily language, the evolutionary development of the meaning of words, game-theoretical considerations of pragmatics, the language of economic agents and the rhetoric of game theory. These short essays are full of challenging ideas for social scientists that should help to encourage a fundamental rethinking of many of the underlying assumptions in economic theory and game theory. As a postscript two economists, Tilman Borgers (University College London) and Bart Lipman (University of Wisconsin, Madison), and a logician, Johan van Benthem (University of Amsterdam, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation and Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and Information) offer comments.

This book is a detailed study of the plays of Sophocles through examination of a single ethical principle. Sophocles has traditionally been considered the least philosophical of the three great Greek tragedians, but Professor Whitlock Blundell offers an important new examination of the ethical content of the plays by focusing primarily on the traditional Greek popular moral code of 'helping friends and harming enemies'. Five of the extant plays are discussed in detail both from a dramatic and an ethical standpoint, and the author concludes that ethical themes are not only integral to each drama, but are subjected to an implicit critique through the tragical consequences to which they give rise. Greek scholars and students of Greek drama and Greek thought will welcome this book, which is presented in such a way as to be accessible to specialists and non-specialists alike. No knowledge of Greek is required.

This famous book, first published in 1929 was considerably revised and enlarged in its fourth edition, which is being reprinted now. This edition had the addition of a postscript by Professor I. Bernard Cohen containing a list of reading, with comments on them to guide the readers.

This major addition to Ideas in Context examines the development of natural law theories in the early stages of the Enlightenment in Germany and France. T. J. Hochstrasser investigates the influence exercised by theories of natural law from Grotius to Kant, with a comparative analysis of the important intellectual innovations in ethics and political philosophy of the time. Hochstrasser includes the writings of Samuel Pufendorf and his followers who evolved a natural law theory based on human sociability and reason, fostering a new methodology in German philosophy. This book assesses the first histories of political thought since ancient times, giving insights into the nature and influence of debate within eighteenth-century natural jurisprudence. Ambitious in range and conceptually sophisticated, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment will be of great interest to scholars in history, political thought, law and philosophy.

In this major addition to the literature on modern Japanese development, Bai Gao emphasizes the role of ideas and ideology in industrial policy, and explores how the Japanese themselves perceived the issue of economic development. During the Great Depression and World War II, the ideology of developmentalism - characterized by a nationalistic perspective, a production orientation, and a strategic view of the economy including restraint of market competition and rejection of the profit principle - emerged and strongly influenced policy innovation in Japan and institutional reforms in its economy. Liberal capitalism in the postwar era demilitarized the Japanese economy, and forced developmentalism to adapt to democratic political institutions and the free trade regime. Nevertheless, the economic principles that served to combat the Great Depression and sustain total war during the period 1931-45 survived. Transformed from a military to a trade strategy, developmentalism became the basic framework of Japanese industrial policy, facilitating economic growth and the development of modern economic institutions.

The establishment of electoral systems in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan presents both a complex set of empirical puzzles and a theoretical challenge. Why did three states with similar cultural, historical, and structural legacies establish such different electoral systems? How did these distinct outcomes result from strikingly similar institutional design processes? Explaining these puzzles requires understanding not only the outcome of institutional design but also the intricacies of the process that led to this outcome. Moreover, the transitional context in which these three states designed new electoral rules necessitates an approach that explicitly links process and outcome in a dynamic setting. This book provides such an approach. Finally, it both builds on the key insights of the dominant approaches to explaining institutional origin and change and transcends these approaches by moving beyond the structure versus agency debate.
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Advanced praise of the hardback: 'This is one of the best works of social science available on an important but dimly understood region. Luong's intensive field research and keen grasp of politics have paid off in what will become a standard work on postcommunist politics.' Steven Fish, University of California, Berkeley
Review of the hardback: 'This book tackles head on some of the most important questions in contemporary democratization studies. In particular, why do states that start out with similar levels of political and cultural development end up with such diverse outcomes? Based on an impressive detailed knowledge of the Central Asian states and a sophisticated application of existing theories of institutional design, in her analysis of patterns of continuity and change Luong transcends these approaches by stressing the complex dynamics of the transitional process itself. This is an original ground-breaking study that makes an important contribution to comparative politics and area studies alike. The book represents an important advance in studies of the postcommunist transitions.' Richard Sakwa, University of Kent, Canterbury
Review of the hardback: 'Pauline Jones Luong illuminates the politics behind the genuinely puzzling divergence of three strategically important political regimes in Central Asia. Along the way, she combines the advantages of historical institutionalism and rational choice theory, using each to redress the shortcomings of the other. This is an innovative work that deserves to be emulated.' Michael Coppedge, University of Notre Dame
Review of the hardback: 'It was a great historical irony that Marxism succeeded first in Russia, Europe's backwater. It is perhaps a greater irony that the richest Soviet legacy was bequeathed to Central Asia, the region most often accused of anti-Soviet cryptonationalism. Pauline Jones Luong, basing her compelling narrative on meticulous field research, shows why Soviet-crated regional power structures prevailed in three Central Asian republics, and how, in the post-Soviet transition, Islamic fundamentalism and democratic liberalism were forestalled. This book merits the attention not only of Central Asianists, but all who are seeking a theoretical understanding of political transitions.' David D. Laitin, Stanford University
Review of the hardback: 'This book will hopefully be the first of many applying the tools of comparative politics to Central Asia, thereby furthering our understanding of the region. Its combination of theory and quality of research will ensure that this book is warmly welcomed by both Central Asia specialists and transitologists alike.' Slavonic & East European Review

Between the early seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, major European political thinkers first began to look outside their national borders and envisage a world of competitive, equal sovereign states inhabiting an international sphere that ultimately encompassed the whole globe. In this insightful and wide-ranging work, David Armitage - one of the world's leading historians of political thought - traces the genesis of this international turn in intellectual history. Foundations of Modern International Thought combines important methodological essays, which consider the genealogy of globalisation and the parallel histories of empires and oceans, with fresh considerations of leading figures such as Hobbes, Locke, Burke and Bentham in the history of international thought. The culmination of more than a decade's reflection and research on these issues, this book restores the often overlooked international dimensions to intellectual history and recovers the intellectual dimensions of international history.

《十年轮回(从亚洲到全球的金融危机)》从内部人的视角对当前世界金融风暴进行了独特描述。作者是一个亚洲金融的监管者，曾亲身参与有关监管政策和国际金融体系设计的重要讨论。在书中，他结合自身经历，从制度及其演进的角度，在历史、宏观、微观三个层面审视了导致20世纪90年代后期和2007～2009 年这场目前仍在进行的全球危机的种种原因：陈旧的思维模式、市场原教旨主义、宽松的货币政策、利差交易、松懈的监管、贪婪、裙带关系以及金融工程等。作者全面生动地回顾了亚洲金融危机期间各国（地区）的遭遇和危机发生前后的经济金融状况，并对危机各国（地区）采取的应对措施及国际金融机构的救援措施进行了反思，读者可以从中了解到，日本抵抗通缩的零利率政策诱发了利差交易，利差交易催生了亚洲的泡沫，而泡沫的破灭则摧毁了亚洲的经济。这一研究的主要目的是要表明，全球金融互相关联、互相影响的程度是如此之深，以致我们目前用以应对关键事件的工具和组织结构完全是过时的。《十年轮回(从亚洲到全球的金融危机)》揭示了目前的金融政策和监管是无力应对全球泡沫的，并对需要变革的领域提出了建议。作者认为，“没有一次金融危机是完全相同的，但它们有着共同的因素，有望帮助我们发现并且缓和下一次危机。”“一国的危机与国内市场、政策和制度的失败相关，而全球危机则与在网络化世界中通过各国经济相互依存而传导的失败有关。”“我们一直未能及时察觉危机的出现，因为我们在社会行为准则、政策制定及实施上，在思想、法律和行政体系上有太多的条条框框在起作用，每一方面都有盲点。如果这在一个国家里是很糟糕的事，那么它在全球范围中就是灾难性的。”这可以看作是一个金融监管者最深刻的反省。《十年轮回(从亚洲到全球的金融危机)》披露了相当多的重要文献，并涉及国际金融界的许多重要人物，他们在历史重要时刻的言行堪称《十年轮回(从亚洲到全球的金融危机)》的一大看点。
This is a unique insider account of the new world of unfettered finance. The author, an Asian regulator, examines how old mindsets, market fundamentalism, loose monetary policy, carry trade, lax supervision, greed, cronyism, and financial engineering caused both the Asian crisis of the late 1990s and the current global crisis of 2008-2009. This book shows how the Japanese zero interest rate policy to fight deflation helped create the carry trade that generated bubbles in Asia whose effects brought Asian economies down. The study's main purpose is to demonstrate that global finance is so interlinked and interactive that our current tools and institutional structure to deal with critical episodes are completely outdated. The book explains how current financial policies and regulation failed to deal with a global bubble and makes recommendations on what must change.

Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger's lectures on the history and philosophy of science are legendary. Here the texts of some of his most famous lectures are made available for the first time in many years. As Roger Penrose's foreword confirms, they are as relevant today as when they were first published.

This book uses game theory to analyse the creation, evolution and function of economic and social institutions. The author illustrates his analysis by describing the organic or unplanned evolution of institutions such as the conventions of war, the use of money, property rights and oligopolistic pricing conventions. Professor Schotter begins by linking his work with the ideas of the philosophers Rawls, Nozick and Lewis. Institutions are regarded as regularities in the behaviour of social agents, which the agents themselves tacitly create to solve a wide variety of recurrent problems. The repetitive nature of the problems permits them to be described as a recurrent game or 'supergame.' The agents use these regularities as informational devices to supplement the information contained in competitive prices. The final chapter explores the applicability of this theory, first by relating it to previous work on the theory of teams, hierarchies, and non-maximizing decision theory, and then by using it to provide a new approach to a variety of questions both within and outside economics.