Hobbes and the prophet Samuel on leviathan government

Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is one of the most important treatises in the history of political economy and has influenced writings on constitutional economics and public choice. In his treatise, Hobbes proposed the desirability of voluntary subjugation to an authoritarian ruler. Hobbes appealed to the authority of the prophet Samuel to make his case for Leviathan, a precedent that has remained unquestioned for some 350 years. Yet Samuel clearly warned against the dangers of appointing an all-powerful king. Hobbes’s argument in favor of Leviathan thus demands an authority other than Samuel.     

War, Rivalry, and State Building in Latin America

Scholars of Latin America have recently begun to apply the bellicist approach to state building to the region, the central claim of which is that wars are a great stimulus to centralizing state power and building institutional capacity. This article argues that current applications of these models of state building are too narrowly specified to be of much use in Latin America or elsewhere in the developing world. Replacing the focus on interstate war with the more general phenomenon of interstate rivalry, alongside the consideration of intrastate rivals, allows us to account for the impact of both external and internal forces on the development of the state. I demonstrate the utility of this approach through several cross-sectional time-series analyses that provide evidence that external and internal rivals affect the Latin American state in a manner consistent with the general nature of bellicist theory.     

Outfoxing leviathan: campaigning down Mexico way

This paper is concerned with the end of 71 years of single party government in Mexico. The paper explores the ways in which the opposition harnessed modern campaign techniques to the opportunities presented by democratisation to secure regime transition. A number of campaign features, such as the stress on personality and negative campaigning, have attracted considerable criticism, but the author argues that there are grounds for believing the 2000 election to have been a unique election, and that competition should be more clearly structured around parties and issues in the future. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

冷战结束后北美的马克思主义研究

冷战结束后,北美马克思主义研究领域涌现出许多新学派.在总结苏东剧变教训的基础上,这些学派大多认为马克思主义和社会主义没有"死亡",资本主义并不是历史的终结,并对马克思主义的未来发展方向和社会主义的未来发展道路进行了积极的探索,其中以分析的马克思主义、生态主义的马克思主义和市场社会主义的相关观点最具代表性.     

论美军院校学员身体素质培养特点及启示

美军院校注重学员身体素质的培养,学员通过大学四年系统的培养都具有良好的身体素质。培养过程中的课程设置、教学计划和教学保障等都具有显箸的特点。     

Fighting antisemitism with numbers in early twentieth-century Britain

ABSTRACT

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Jewish Health Organization of Great Britain (JHOGB) and its president, Redcliffe Nathan Salaman, championed the collection and analysis of demographic data about the Anglo-Jewish community as a way to counter rising antisemitism. In this article, Endelman discusses the belief in the ability of statistical research to undermine lies and distortions about the Jews of Britain that rested on untested Enlightenment assumptions about human nature and the sources of human behaviours and sentiments. While the JHOGB’s faith in statistical research as a bulwark of counter-propaganda never faltered, and while it obtained funding for a handful of projects, it failed to convince the leaders of Anglo-Jewry of the necessity to create and support a permanent statistical bureau. With the onset of the Second World War, the organization ceased its work, as more pressing communal priorities, especially caring for refugees from Nazism, rose to the fore.     

Democracy,interrupted: Regime change and partisanship in twentieth-century Argentina

Electoral volatility is much higher in new than in advanced democracies. Some scholars contend that weak partisan ties among the electorate lie behind this high volatility. Political parties in new democracies do not invest in building strong linkages with voters, they claim; hence partisanship is not widespread, nor does it grow over time. Our view is that democratic processes do encourage the spread of partisanship and hence the stabilization of electoral outcomes over time in new democracies. But this dynamic can be masked by countervailing factors and cut short by regime instability. We expect that, all else being equal, volatility will decline over time as a new democracy matures but increase again when democracy is interrupted. We use disaggregated ecological data from Argentina over nearly a century to show that electoral stability grows during democratic periods and erodes during dictatorships.