In Politics on a Human Scale, Jeff Taylor examines political decentralization in the United States, including agrarianism, states’ rights, the abandonment of the decentralist impulse by the national leadership of the Democratic and Republican parties, and the dissident tradition on the contemporary political scene.

Big government, big business, big everything: Kirkpatrick Sale took giantism to task in his 1980 classic, Human Scale, and today takes a new look at how the crises that imperil modern America are the inevitable result of bigness grown out of control--and what can be done about it. The result is a keenly updated, carefully argued case for bringing human endeavors back to scales we can comprehend and manage--whether in our built environments, our politics, our business endeavors, our energy plans, or our mobility. Sale walks readers back through history to a time when buildings were scaled to the human figure (as was the Parthenon), democracies were scaled to the societies they served, and enterprise was scaled to communities. Against that backdrop, he dissects the bigger-is-better paradigm that has defined modern times and brought civilization to a crisis point. Says Sale, retreating from our calamity will take rebalancing our relationship to the environment; adopting more human-scale technologies; right-sizing our buildings, communities, and cities; and bringing our critical services--from energy, food, and garbage collection to transportation, health, and education--back to human scale as well. Like Small is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher, Human Scale has long been a classic of modern decentralist thought and communitarian values--a key tool in the kit of those trying to localize, create meaningful governance in bioregions, or rethink our reverence of and dependence on growth, financially and otherwise. Rewritten to interpret the past few decades, Human Scale offers compelling new insights on how to turn away from the giantism that has caused escalating ecological distress and inequality, dysfunctional governments, and unending warfare and shines a light on many possible pathways that could allow us to scale down, survive, and thrive.

A third of a century ago, E. F. Schumacher rang out a timely warning against the idolatry of giantism with his book Small Is Beautiful. Schumacher, a highly respected economist and adviser to third-world governments, broke ranks with the accepted wisdom of his peers to warn of impending calamity if rampant consumerism, technological dynamism, and economic expansionism were not checked by human and environmental considerations. Joseph Pearce revisits Schumacher’s arguments and examines the multifarious ways in which Schumacher’s ideas themselves still matter. Faced though we are with fearful new technological possibilities and the continued centralization of power in large governmental and economic structures, there is still the possibility of pursuing a saner and more sustainable vision for humanity. Bigger is not always best, Pearce reminds us, and small is still beautiful. Humanity was lurching blindly in the wrong direction, argued Schumacher. Its obsessive pursuit of wealth would not, as so many believed, ultimately lead to utopia but more probably to catastrophe. Schumacher's greatest achievement was the fusion of ancient wisdom and modern economics in a language that encapsulated contemporary doubts and fears about the industrialized world. The wisdom of the ages, the perennial truths that have guided humanity throughout its history, serves as a constant reminder to each new generation of the limits to human ambition. But if this wisdom is a warning, it is also a battle cry. Schumacher saw that we needed to relearn the beauty of smallness, of human-scale technology and environments.

Based on case studies of three transnational groups, it argues that in addition to lobbying governments, activists operate within and across societies to effect widespread change. They work through transnational social, economic, and cultural networks to alter corporate practices, educate vast numbers of people, pressure multilateral development banks, and shift standards of good conduct. Wapner argues that because this activity takes place outside the formal arena of inter-state politics, environmental activists practice "world civic politics"; they politicize global civil society.

This book provides systematic coverage of the key concepts in the study of environmental politics; the evolution of environmental thinking; the national and international actors involved in environmental policy; and a selection of specific environmental problems including their causes, the challenges and results of addressing them to date.

Depending on the breadth or narrowness of the understanding of politics and the political, "politics" in human geography is defined as either the operation of power in all social relations or the workings of power directed to or by the state. This volume avoids the two extremes by acknowledging the transformation of approaches to the political in human geography over the past few decades but also by highlighting the continued importance of the more traditional state-based conception of politics. The selected articles are clustered around six themes: new agendas in political geography, state territoriality, international relations and globalization, internal territorial organisation and geographical scale, social movements and electoral participation, and identities and citizenship.

This new edition of Will Kymlicka's best selling critical introduction to contemporary political theory has been fully revised to include many of the most significant developments in Anglo-American political philosophy in the last 11 years, particularly the new debates over issues of democratic citizenship and cultural pluralism. The book now includes two new chapters on citizenship theory and multiculturalism, in addition to updated chapters on utilitarianism, liberal egalitarianism, libertarianism, socialism, communitarianism, and feminism. The many thinkers discussed include G. A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, William Galdston, Carol Gilligan, R. M. Hare, Chandran Kukathas, Catherine Mackinnon, David Miller, Philippe Van Parijs, Susan Okin, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, John Roemer, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, and Iris Young. Extended guides to further reading have been added at the end of each chapter, listing the most important books and articles on each school of thought, as well as relevant journals and websites. Covering some of the most advanced contemporary thinking, Will Kymlicka writes in an engaging, accessible, and non-technical way to ensure the book is suitable for students approaching these difficult concepts for the first time. This second edition promises to build on the original edition's success as a key text in the teaching of modern political theory.

The first comprehensive study of Santayana’s political thought as connected to his cultural criticism. It ranges over topics such as Santayana’s political ontology, his criticism of democracy, liberalism, and communism, his views on freedom and forms of human servitude.

Are all governments--east and west, Muslim and secular, authoritarian and constitutional, Republican and Democratic--fundamentally the same, all of them under the extraordinary, growing power of "technique" and bureaucracy? Is all politics, then, just an illusory affair of lies, deception, propaganda, partisan passions, and chaos on the surface of government and party? In his vast and penetrating writings, Bordeaux sociologist Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) points in those directions. Political Illusion and Reality is a collection of twenty-three essays on Ellul's political thought. Veteran as well as younger Ellul scholars, political leaders, activists, and pastors, discuss aspects of Ellul's thought as they relate to their own fields of study and political experience. Beginning with his 1936 essay "Fascism, Son of Liberalism," translated and published here in English for the first time, Ellul and these authors will provoke readers to think some new thoughts about politics and government, and think more deeply about the main issues we face in our politically divided and troubled times.

Many Americans are longing for alternative politics rooted in strong communities, recognition of limits, and respect for the natural world. These issues are not the possession of one political party. Rather, they refer to ideas rooted deeply in the best aspects of our common tradition, and they represent yearnings that many, regardless of political affiliation, share. This book articulates a cultural and political vision that leads one off the couch and into the garden, out of the shopping mall and into the farmersÆ market, and away from Washington in the direction of home. In this postpartisan call to action, political theorist Mark T. Mitchell develops the concept of the ôpolitics of gratitude,ö which revolves around four ideas: creatureliness, gratitude, human scale, and place, culminating in a distinctive, fruitful view of human nature and community at odds with the prevailing norms of individualism (and, not so paradoxically, statism), giantism, and hypermobility. Going beyond the liberal-conservative factionalism that has reduced our political and cultural discourse to clichTs and vitriol, he urges us to become responsible stewards of the earth who are committed to family and community and who abide in gratitude, taking nothing for granted. The result is a political and cultural vision that is at once local, limited, modest, republican, greenùand grateful.