Demos Assembled

An intelligent, engaging, and in-depth reading of the nature of the state and the establishment of the modern political order in the mid-nineteenth century. Previous studies have covered in great detail how the modern state slowly emerged from the early Renaissance through the seventeenth century, but we know relatively little about the next great act: the birth and transformation of the modern democratic state. And in an era where our democratic institutions are rife with conflict, it’s more important now than ever to understand how our institutions came into being. Stephen W. Sawyer’s Demos Assembled provides us with a fresh, transatlantic understanding of that political order’s genesis. While the French influence on American political development is well understood, Sawyer sheds new light on the subsequent reciprocal influence that American thinkers and politicians had on the establishment of post-revolutionary regimes in France. He argues that the emergence of the stable Third Republic (1870–1940), which is typically said to have been driven by idiosyncratic internal factors, was in fact a deeply transnational, dynamic phenomenon. Sawyer’s findings reach beyond their historical moment, speaking broadly to conceptions of state formation: how contingent claims to authority, whether grounded in violence or appeals to reason and common cause, take form as stateness.

An intelligent, engaging, and in-depth reading of the nature of the state and the establishment of the modern political order in the mid-nineteenth century. Previous studies have covered in great detail how the modern state slowly emerged from the early Renaissance through the seventeenth century, but we know relatively little about the next great act: the birth and transformation of the modern democratic state. And in an era where our democratic institutions are rife with conflict, it’s more important now than ever to understand how our institutions came into being. Stephen W. Sawyer’s Demos Assembled provides us with a fresh, transatlantic understanding of that political order’s genesis. While the French influence on American political development is well understood, Sawyer sheds new light on the subsequent reciprocal influence that American thinkers and politicians had on the establishment of post-revolutionary regimes in France. He argues that the emergence of the stable Third Republic (1870–1940), which is typically said to have been driven by idiosyncratic internal factors, was in fact a deeply transnational, dynamic phenomenon. Sawyer’s findings reach beyond their historical moment, speaking broadly to conceptions of state formation: how contingent claims to authority, whether grounded in violence or appeals to reason and common cause, take form as stateness.

In the most original interpretation of Aristotle's Politics in years, Michael Davis delivers many memorable and provocative formulations of Aristotle's messages concerning the constitutive tensions of political life. He traces the uncanny parallel between politics and philosophy in Aristotle, arguing that their connection is much deeper than it is ordinarily understood to be and that, for Aristotle, understanding either requires understanding the other. Davis presents his interpretation with a striking clarity and accessibility that makes the book a pleasure to read.

FREAX – the biggest book ever written about the history of the computer demoscene. The book tells the complete history of the Commodore 64 and the Amiga, both about the machines and about the underground subcultures around them, from the cracker- and warez-scene to the demoscene, from hacking and phreaking to the ASCII art scene. Interviews with scene celebrities, former key persons of the computer industry, citations from contemporary magazines and fanzines make the narrative history of the big adventure complete. The book contains 350 pages and is illustrated with 480 color photos and screenshots. This is the comprehensive guide to the golden era of home computers.

"Explaining how evolution can account for the complexity of life is a significant question in biology. Whether or not complexity increases, what the mechanisms are that fuel this growth, and indeed even how we define complexity are difficult questions. In this book Christoph Adami draws on two strands of research - experimental evolution and information theory - to forward a mathematical theory that accounts for the evolution of complexity. While accounting for complexity is his primary goal, Adami also argues that information theory can do more for biology than just provide for a measure of complexity. As he argues, everything in biology uses information in one form or another, be it for communication (between cells, or organisms) or for prediction (via molecular as well as neural circuits). As a consequence, we can think of information theory as the unifying framework that allows us to understand complex systems, with biological life being only the prime example"--

The activist state of the New Deal started forming decades before the FDR administration, demonstrating the deep roots of energetic government in America. In the period between the Civil War and the New Deal, American governance was transformed, with momentous implications for social and economic life. A series of legal reforms gradually brought an end to nineteenth-century traditions of local self-government and associative citizenship, replacing them with positive statecraft: governmental activism intended to change how Americans lived and worked through legislation, regulation, and public administration. The last time American public life had been so thoroughly altered was in the late eighteenth century, at the founding and in the years immediately following. William J. Novak shows how Americans translated new conceptions of citizenship, social welfare, and economic democracy into demands for law and policy that delivered public services and vindicated peopleÕs rights. Over the course of decades, Americans progressively discarded earlier understandings of the reach and responsibilities of government and embraced the idea that legislators and administrators in Washington could tackle economic regulation and social-welfare problems. As citizens witnessed the successes of an energetic, interventionist state, they demanded more of the same, calling on politicians and civil servants to address unfair competition and labor exploitation, form public utilities, and reform police power. Arguing against the myth that America was a weak state until the New Deal, New Democracy traces a steadily aggrandizing authority well before the Roosevelt years. The United States was flexing power domestically and intervening on behalf of redistributive goals for far longer than is commonly recognized, putting the lie to libertarian claims that the New Deal was an aberration in American history.

Twenty-eight illustrations are included."--Jacket.