One of the over-arching political questions of the last two centuries has been to understand how capitalism has managed to survive. The answer from those on the left has often focused on the State. While Marx predicted collapse and the rise of socialism, theorists of the State have focused on the process by which capitalism managed to escape its fate and endure against all odds. This book follows the development of modern State theory from Gramsci and Nicos Poulantzas, to Stuart Hall, Pierre Bourdieu, Erik Wright, and the recent writers Jules Boykoff, Naomi Klein and George Monbiot. This book provides the reader with a fresh interpretation of these very important ideas. It allows the reader to come face to face with the original texts with as little confusion as possible. This book will be of interest to senior undergraduates and graduate students in politics, sociology and cultural studies, as well as lay readers keen to gain the theoretical tools to understand what the State is up to in the 21st century. These theories are among the most elaborate and sophisticated political theories ever written, and they tell us much about our present political situation, and what may happen in the future.

In 1869, President Grant nominated his old friend Elihu Washburne as secretary of state and then as minister to France. Washburne presented his credentials to Napoleon III and was present in 1870 for the Franco-German War. Following the war with the Germans, the people of Paris rose up in revolt and proclaimed a leftist commune. The poor response of the French government to feed the people of Paris after the peace treaty contributed to the political turmoil. This sixth volume explores the life of the American minister to France, Elihu Washburne, during the years following the Franco-German War and Paris Commune as the French government and people tried to rebuild their country following those dramatic events.

This vividly detailed revisionist history opens a new vista on the great Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century, a key period often seen as the eve of Tanzimat westernizing reforms and the beginning of three distinct histories—ethnic nationalism in the Balkans, imperial modernization from Istanbul, and European colonialism in the Middle East. Christine Philliou brilliantly shines a new light on imperial crisis and change in the 1820s and 1830s by unearthing the life of one man. Stephanos Vogorides (1780–1859) was part of a network of Christian elites known phanariots, institutionally excluded from power yet intimately bound up with Ottoman governance. By tracing the contours of the wide-ranging networks—crossing ethnic, religious, and institutional boundaries—in which the phanariots moved, Philliou provides a unique view of Ottoman power and, ultimately, of the Ottoman legacies in the Middle East and Balkans today. What emerges is a wide-angled analysis of governance as a lived experience at a moment in which there was no clear blueprint for power.

His Way is the only authorised biography of New Zealand prime minister Robert Muldoon - one of the dominant political figures of the last half-century in that country. His Way was based on many hours of conversation with Muldoon himself as well as colleagues, friends, and family, and wide access to the prime minister's official and private papers and diaries. Leading political biographer Barry Gustafson shows Muldoon is shown as a champion of the ordinary people whose vision over time became anachronistic and inflexible.