Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1
Author: Karl Marx
Das Kapital, Karl Marx's masterwork, is the book that above all others formed the twentieth century. From Kapital sprung the economic and political systems that in our time dominated half the earth and for half a century kept the world on the brink of war. Even today, one billion Chinese remain in the power of the Marxist system. Yet this important and powerful work has been passed over by many readers frustrated by Marx's difficult style and his preoccupation with nineteenth-century events of little relevance to today's reader. Now Serge Levitsky presents a new revised version of this masterpiece, carefully retranslated for the modern reader and abridged to emphasize the political and philosophical core of Marx's work, while trimming away much that is now unimportant. Here then is a fresh and highly readable version of a work whose ideas have influenced the lives of nearly every person alive today.
Books about: Avid Editing or The Future of Reputation
The Liberal Hour: The 1960s and the Remaking of American Life
Author: G Calvin MacKenzi
A vibrant and revelatory history of the liberal moment of the 1960s, one which argues that Washington was not simply a target of reform but was, in fact, the era's most effective engine of change
In most accounts of the 1960s, Washington is portrayed as a target of reform-a reluctant group of politicians coaxed into accepting the radical spirit the day demanded. In the newest volume in the award-winning Penguin History of American Life, Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot argue that the most powerful agents of change in the 1960s were, in fact, those in the traditional seats of power, not the counterculture. A masterly new interpretation of this pivotal decade, The Liberal Hour explores the seismic shifts that led to an era when demands that had lingered on the political agenda for years finally entered the realm of possibility.
By the time John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960, the political system that had prevailed for most of the century was based on crumbling economic, social, and demographic realities. The growth of the suburbs meant power had shifted out of the cities, rendering urban political machines and party bosses increasingly irrelevant, which in turn allowed younger, more independent-minded politicians to rise. In Congress, Democrats retained their long held control, but the Southern wing of the party was finally loosening its grip. Postwar prosperity led many Americans to believe there was enough wealth to go around, an optimism that lent powerful support to antipoverty programs, not to mention civil rights. And for once the Supreme Court, which has traditionally served the country's dominant interests, was aligned with the progressivespirit of the age. The 1960s all in all represented a rare convergence-a public ready for change, and a government ready to act.
Liberal reform may have begun with JFK's New Frontier, but his assassination only gave emotional urgency to his agenda. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, knew he had a brief window of opportunity before the forces of reaction would set in, an awareness that may have fostered his occasionally bullying tactics to push legislation through Congress. Still, the result was a burst in government initiatives-for civil rights, consumer protection, and environmental reform, among others-that has not been matched in American history. Ultimately, as our authors reveal, the liberal hour promised too much, and couldn't afford both a costly and unpopular war abroad and a Great Society at home, but when it passed it left in its wake a vastly altered American landscape.
With elegant and accessible prose, The Liberal Hour casts one of the most dramatic periods in American history in a new light, revealing that for all that has been written about the more attention-grabbing protest movements, the most powerful engine of change in that tumultuous decade was Washington itself.
The New York Times - Barry Gewen
Granted, it's more fun to read about Abbie Hoffman than about Edmund Muskie, but Mr. Mackenzie and Mr. Weisbrot have a persuasive case to make, and even if much of their story has been told before, their overall argument is a valuable corrective to a lot of hackneyed thinking about the significance of the '60s.
Publishers Weekly
Mackenzie and Weisbrot (Maximum Danger), professors of government and history respectively at Colby College, provide an insightful and well-argued analysis of the 1960s' social, economic and policy dynamics that opened both the public and the government to great and necessary social legislation. The authors argue that the postwar movement of political power from the cities to the suburbs, the decline of conservative Southern Democrats' power in the party and the confident climate of prosperity facilitated the greatest and most far-reaching federal legislation since the New Deal. Unlike many historians of this period, Weisbrot and Mackenzie, in addition to telling of key civil rights legislation and Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, also give due and detailed diligence to environmental legislation, such as the Clean Air Act and the Wilderness Act, which defined strict rules to ensure federally owned wilderness largely remained wilderness. Throughout, the authors reveal how prosperity and a rare window of real opportunity with Democrats in power on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue fueled domestic reform. (July 7)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Karl Helicher - Library Journal
From 1963 to 1966, liberalism reigned in the United States, and during this brief time a breathtaking number of laws were passed, creating the enduring legacy of the 1960s, say Mackenzie (government, Colby Coll.; The Politics of Presidential Appointments) and Weisbrot (history, Colby Coll.; Maximum Danger: Kennedy, the Missiles, and the Crisis of American Confidence). Their informed political history reveals how President Kennedy, a liberal work in progress, and President Johnson, "the most skilled and ingenious legislative leader, perhaps of all time," supported by the 89th and 90th Congresses and by the liberal Warren Court, passed such monumental legislation as the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, Head Start, and new laws to protect the environment and to expand aid to higher education. The authors show that liberalism lost public support when it could not meet its overly optimistic goals of ending poverty, healing the racial divide, and, most significantly, financing and winning the Vietnam War. By 1966, liberalism had run its course; the conservative movement gradually emerged to fill the void. This book provides a balance to the many accounts that view the 1960s as most noted for the counterculture, antiwar protestors, and sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll. Strongly recommended for larger public and all academic collections.
Kirkus Reviews
The '60s were not just about the shaggy counterculture-as much was accomplished in reshaping the status quo by "the institutions of national politics and the politicians and bureaucrats who inhabited them."So write Mackenzie (Government/Colby Coll.; The Irony of Reform: Roots of American Political Disenchantment, 1996, etc.) and Weisbrot (History/Colby Coll.; Maximum Danger: Kennedy, the Missiles, and the Crisis of American Confidence, 2001, etc.), who submit that the story of these often faceless civil servants is little known. Yet, they convincingly demonstrate, the '60s afforded perhaps the last time that a liberal government and a liberally inclined voting populace agreed that government could be an agent of change for social good, and that it could both lead the people and follow their will. At the beginning of the decade, note the authors, much of America was locked in a state of racial apartheid, while Dixiecrat segregationists controlled nearly three-quarters of the standing committees in Congress; women scarcely figured in politics, and not a single major corporation had a woman at its head; the environment was a mess; many cities were impoverished and crime-ridden, their white middle-class population having begun to depart for the suburbs en masse. But since the people largely trusted government, it could do something about all these things and, moreover, actually did do something. Mackenzie and Weisbrot trace the shift of political power to younger liberals such as Philip Hart, Eugene McCarthy and Dan Rostenkowski through the workings of the Democratic Study Group, a party within the Democratic Party that "allowed its leaders to . . . galvanize a liberal coalition onsignificant pieces of legislation." So thorough was the shift that Lyndon Johnson would quietly complain that "John F. Kennedy was a little too conservative to suit my taste." During the years 1963-66, the liberals forced significant progress in almost every aspect of American life. Yet, as the authors suggest, it was the failings of the Johnson administration-particularly the Vietnam War-that eventually ended the liberal moment. Apart from a good, sturdy narrative history, there are useful lessons here for political activists and progressives.
Table of Contents:
1 America in the Postwar Years 11
2 Politics and the Liberal Arc 38
3 The Federal Colossus 84
4 Free at Last 134
5 To Protect the Planet 184
6 The Hour of Maximum Danger 228
7 A TVA in the Mekong Valley 285
8 The End of the Liberal Hour 326
Conclusion: The Durable Decade 370
Acknowledgments 378
Notes 380
Index 409
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