Author: Leslie G. Rubin File Type: pdf Aristotles political imagination capitalizes on the virtues of a middle-class republic. Americas experiment in republican liberty bears striking similarities to Aristotles best political regimeespecially at the point of the middling class and its public role. Author Leslie Rubin, by holding America up to the mirror of Aristotle, explores these correspondences and their many implications for contemporary political life. Rubin begins with thePolitics, in which Aristotle asserts the best political regime maintains stability by balancing oligarchic and democratic tendencies, and by treating free and relatively equal people as capable of a good life within a law-governed community that practices modest virtues. The second part of the book focuses upon America, showing how its founding opinion leaders prioritized the virtues of the middle in myriad ways. Rubin uncovers a surprising range of evidence, from moderate property holding by a large majority of the populace to citizen experience of both ruling and being ruled. She singles out the importance of the respect for the middle-class virtues of industriousness, sobriety, frugality, honesty, public spirit, and reasonable compromise. Rubin also highlights the educational institutions that foster the middle classpublic education affords literacy, numeracy, and job skills, while civic education provides the history and principles of the nation as well as the rights and duties of all its citizens. Wise voices from the past, both of ancient Greece and postcolonial America, commend the middle class. The erosion of a middle class and the descent of political debate into polarized hysteria threaten a democratic republic. If the rule of the people is not to fall into demagoguery, then the body politic must remind itself of the requirementsboth political and personalof free, stable, and fair political life. **

Author: Henry David Thoreau File Type: pdf

Author: Robert Dale File Type: pdf This book investigates the demobilization and post-war readjustment of Red Army veterans in Leningrad and its environs after the Great Patriotic War. Over 300,000 soldiers were stood down in this war-ravaged region between July 1945 and 1948. They found the transition to civilian life more challenging than many could ever have imagined. For civilian Leningraders, reintegrating the rapid influx of former soldiers represented an enormous political, economic, social and cultural challenge. In this book, Robert Dale reveals how these former soldiers became civilians in a society devastated and traumatized by total warfare. Dale discusses how, and how successfully, veterans became ordinary citizens. Based on extensive original research in local and national archives, oral history interviews and the examination of various newspaper collections, Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad peels back the myths woven around demobilization, to reveal a darker history repressed by society and concealed from historiography. While propaganda celebrated this disarmament as a smooth process which reunited veterans with their families, reintegrated them into the workforce and facilitated upward social mobility, the reality was rarely straightforward. Many veterans were caught up in the scramble for work, housing, healthcare and state hand-outs. Others drifted to the social margins, criminality or became the victims of post-war political repression. Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad tells the story of both the failure of local representatives to support returning Soviet soldiers, and the remarkable resilience and creativity of veterans in solving the problems created by their return to society. It is a vital study for all scholars and students of post-war Soviet history and the impact of war in the modern era. **Review One of the great virtues of this book is its comparative angle. Dale has read widely in the international history of veterans, and often comments on how the Soviet experience fits into wider transnational patterns. The other virtue is Dales unwillingness to write in one of the mushrooming sub-genres. Instead he combines social and cultural history, memory studies, and the history of medicine [A]nybody interested in the history of warfare and welfare in the twentieth century will benefit from reading this book. Journal of Social History Dales scrutiny of the issue of demobilization has a remarkable freshness. Although the arguments he advances in Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad will be familiar to most scholars of the Soviet Union, the book is original in its ability to illuminate Soviet soldiers embodied and intimate experience of homecoming. Dale masterfully brings to life individual experiences and expertly connects them to the larger tensions, conflicts and visions of model citizenship in late Stalinist society ... [This] is useful reading for any scholar interested in the comparative history of post-war transition. European History Quarterly [T]he research is excellent, and Dale competently uses local details and stories to illustrate this larger picture. American Historical Review As someone who has studied the Blockade of Leningrad and the Soviet experience of World War II for a decade, I welcome this kind of book, because what happened next? is quite important for RussianSoviet area studies and beyond. His data and narrative help fill in the picture, and scholars should have Dales contribution in their libraries or on their shelves as a good reference source, and his book or its chapters individually could serve as material for undergraduate courses on Russian history. The Russian Review Robert Dales book is a valuable addition to the re-examination of Soviet demobilization after WWII and its broader importance to Soviet societys difficult and, perhaps, unfinished transition from war to peace Dale successfully interrogates a central claim of Soviet post-war propaganda, long accepted by many historians, that veterans enjoyed significant upward mobility in employment, to reveal that for many veterans the quality and speed of this employment and, generally, of the mobility itself was low and debilitatingly slow. Dale thus looks behind the impressive statistics of veteran employment used as proof of their successful reintegration to question this criterion of success and, importantly, tell a human story in a closed society beyond the numbers. Slavic Review Dales case study of Leningrads and Leningraders experience of demobilization after World War II serves as a case study of the larger experience of Soviet demobilization, but with atypical, site-specific exceptions. Using not only local and national archives and newspapers, but also incorporating memoirs and first-hand oral testimony, Dale shows how local factors played an important part in shaping soldiers postwar transitions. This is an important study of late Stalinism, which reveals a protracted period of social transition, pervaded throughout with the tensions, divisions and conflicts created by veterans demobilization. The author makes useful comparisons between late Stalinist Leningrad and Britain, America, and Germany after both the First and Second World Wars, which gives a global context to Soviet demobilization and the veterans quest to reintegrate into normal Soviet society. Roger R Reese, Professor of History, Texas A&M University, USA Interesting and accessible. Robert Dale calmly leads us through the arguments and uses personal stories to illuminate them effectively.The Great Patriotic War did not end in 1945 -- at least not for the demobilized veterans. Soviet society had been torn apart. Turning soldiers back into civilians proved a formidable task. Robert Dale takes us through the painful process of reintegration, focussing on the extraordinary experiences of Leningraders. There could be no happy ending but, for surprising reasons, Dale also shows us how disaster was kept at bay. Joanna Bourke, Professor of History, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK Focusing on returning soldiers postwar struggles to obtain adequate housing, necessary medical care, and rewarding work in a city that was itself ravaged by war, Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad offers a fascinating picture of individuals and Soviet society in transition from war to peace. In Leningrad, where veterans had to compete with survivors of the blockade for scarce resources, the homecoming rarely resembled the official myth of returning heroes embraced by grateful civilians. Yet Dales study emphasizes the veterans remarkably successful reintegration into civilian life. Although soldiers returning to Leningrad faced exceptional material hardships, the city offered an important emotional advantage Veterans joined a community of civilian survivors who understood the horrors of modern warfare. Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Professor of History, West Chester University, USA Book Description An examination of the withdrawal and post-war adjustment of Red Army veterans in Leningrad in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Author: David Naguib Pellow File Type: epub Human societies have always been deeply interconnected with our ecosystems, but today those relationships are witnessing greater frictions, tensions, and harms than ever before. These harms mirror those experienced by marginalized groups across the planet. In this novel book, David Naguib Pellow introduces a new framework for critically analyzing Environmental Justice scholarship and activism. In doing so he extends the fields focus to topics not usually associated with environmental justice, including the IsraelPalestine conflict and the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. In doing so he reveals that ecological violence is first and foremost a form of social violence, driven by and legitimated by social structures and discourses. Those already familiar with the discipline will find themselves invited to think about the subject in a new way. This book will be a vital resource for students, scholars, and policy makers interested in transformative approaches to one of the greatest challenges facing humanity and the planet. **Review David Pellow has once again pushed the boundaries ofenvironmental justice scholarship with this pivotal new text.What is Critical Environmental Justice?offersa politically robust and theoretically informed way forward that enablesenvironmental justice to be more inclusive while not losing its oppositionalnature. This is the book that the environmental justice movement has been waiting for. Laura Pulido, University of Oregon Asking what environmental justice could look like if we moved beyond race and class, Pellow develops a robust, Critical Environmental Justice Studies framework that draws from numerous scholarly fields, which he then uses to skillfully unite issues such as Black Lives Matter, the U.S. prison industrial complex, and conflicts in Israel and Palestine. Julian Agyeman, Tufts University About the Author David Naguib Pellow is Dehlsen Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.