Author: Geoffrey Ingham
Publisher: Polity
Keywords: capitalism
Number of Pages: 200
Published: 2008-12-03
List price: $69.95
ISBN-10: 0745636470
ISBN-13: 9780745636474

This book provides a basic introduction to the ’nuts and bolts’ of capitalism for the beginner. It starts by examining the classic accounts of capitalism found in the works of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter and John Maynard Keynes. Each placed emphasis on different institutional elements of capitalism - Smith on the market’s ’invisible hand’; Marx on capital’s exploitation of labour; Weber on the foundations of economic rationality; and Schumpeter and Keynes on the instability that results from capitalism’s essentially monetary and

Author: Maurice Meisner
Publisher: Polity
Keywords: political, profiles, series, portrait, intellectual, zedong, mao
Number of Pages: 232
Published: 2007-01-02
List price: $24.95
ISBN-10: 074563107X
ISBN-13: 9780745631073

  Revolutionary and ruler, Marxist and nationalist, liberator and despot, Mao Zedong takes a place among the iconic leaders of the twentieth century. In this book, Maurice Meisner offers a balanced portrait of the man who defined modern China. From his role as leader of a communist revolution in a war-torn and largely rural country to the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the relationship between Mao’s ideas and his political action is highly disputed. With unparalleled authority, Meisner shows how Mao’s unique sinification of Marxism provide

Author: Jack Goody
Publisher: Polity
Keywords: debate, modernity, capitalism
Number of Pages: 208
Published: 2004-05-28
List price: $24.95
ISBN-10: 0745631916
ISBN-13: 9780745631912

This important new book investigates how the West attained its current position of economic and social advantage. In an incisive historical analysis, Jack Goody examines when and why Europe (and Anglo-America) started to outstrip all other continents in socio-economic growth. Drawing on non-Western examples of economic and technical progress, Goody challenges assumptions about long-term European supremacy of a ’cultural’ kind, as was a feature of many theories current in social science. He argues that the divergence came with the Industrial Revolution and that the earlier bourgeois

Authors:Oliver Ramsbotham, Tom Woodhouse, Hugh Miall,
Publisher: Polity
Keywords: resolution, conflict, contemporary
Number of Pages: 424
Published: 2005-12-09
List price: $26.95
ISBN-10: 0745632130
ISBN-13: 9780745632131

Since the end of the Cold War, conflict prevention and resolution, peacekeeping and peacebuilding have risen to the top of the international agenda. The second edition of this hugely popular text charts the development of the field from its pioneers to its contemporary exponents and offers an assessment of its achievements and the challenges it faces in today’s changed security environment. Existing material has been thoroughly updated and new chapters added on peacebuilding from below, reconciliation, responses to terror, gender issues, the ethics of intervention, dialogue, discourse an

Author: Norman Fairclough
Publisher: Polity
Keywords: change, social, discourse
Number of Pages: 272
Published: 1993-06-14
List price: $39.95
ISBN-10: 0745612180
ISBN-13: 9780745612188

Now available in paperback, this book is a critical introduction to discourse analysis as it is practised in a variety of different disciplines today, from linguistics and sociolinguistics to sociology and cultural studies. The author shows how concern with the analysis of discourse can be combined, in a systematic and fruitful way, with an interest in broader problems of social analysis and social change. Fairclough provides a concise and critical review of the methods and results of discourse analysis, discussing the descriptive work of linguists and conversation analysts as well as the mo

Author: Ray Pahl
Publisher: Polity
Keywords: series, century, themes, friendship
Number of Pages: 200
Published: 2000-10-26
List price: $24.95
ISBN-10: 074562281X
ISBN-13: 9780745622811

Friends can help to form the basic structure of our lives but we very often take them for granted. Friends can sometimes be regarded as an oppressive burden when they appear to be greedily demanding too much of us. How to get the balance right is a perennial concern and the subject of much fiction and drama. But has this always been the case or is the nature and meaning of friendship changing in contemporary society? Ray Pahl explores these issues as well as discussing who needs friends most and when, how friends make us the people that we are and whether friendship is a new metaphor for mor

Author: Anthony Gidde
Publisher: Polity
Keywords: change, climate, politics
Number of Pages: 256
Published: 2009-05-04
List price: $22.95
ISBN-10: 074564693X
ISBN-13: 9780745646930

"A landmark study in the struggle to contain climate change, the greatest challenge of our era. I urge everyone to read it." Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the United States of America Climate change differs from any other problem that, as collective humanity, we face today. If it goes unchecked, the consequences are likely to be catastrophic for human life on earth. Yet for most people, and for many policy-makers too, it tends to be a ’back of the mind’ issue. We recognise its importance and even its urgency, but for the most part it is swamped by more immediate concerns. Polit