First published in 1987. Similar in content to Sherman’s previous book, Radical Political Economy, it covers most of the same issues and reaches the same overall conclusion in favour of democracy and socialism. Many of the analyses and conclusions on particular subjects, however, have changed because of the flood of new literature in every area of radical political economy and because the world has changed. The most important issue is the prevention of nuclear war.

This book is a critical study of the dramatic works of W. S. Gilbert -- not only the famous libretti for other composers, but also his comedies and farces, his serious dramas, and his blank-verse plays. Aspects of his craft such as plot construction, lyric writing, and "stage management" (directing) are discussed. The bulk of the book explores the ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the plays, with particular attention to his concern with irony and inversion.

Latin American democracies of the sixties and seventies, most theories hold, collapsed because they had become incompatible with the structural requirements of capitalist development. In this groundbreaking application of game theory to political phenomena, Youssef Cohen argues that structural conditions in Latin American countries did not necessarily preclude the implementation of social and economic reforms within a democratic framework. Focusing on the experiences of Chile and Brazil, Cohen argues that what thwarted democratic reforms in Latin America was a classic case of prisoner's dilemma. Moderates on the left and the right knew the benefits of coming to a mutual agreement on socio-economic reforms. Yet each feared that, if it cooperated, the other side could gain by colluding with the radicals. Unwilling to take this risk, moderate groups in both countries splintered and joined the extremists. The resulting disorder opened the way for military control. Cohen further argues that, in general, structural explanations of political phenomena are inherently flawed; they incorrectly assume that beliefs, preferences, and actions are caused by social, political, and economic structures. One cannot explain political outcomes, Cohen argues, without treating beliefs and preferences as partly independent from structures, and as having a causal force in their own right.

Therefore, argues Schweizer, traveling during the 1930s was more than just a means to engage the burning political questions of the day: traveling, and in turn travel writing, registered the travelers' growing sense of futility and powerlessness in an especially turbulent world.

How do you use the word "radical?" Committed to the progressive? The cooperative? The communal? The equalitarian? In so far as social, political, and economic power is sought and wielded in malice, just so far is benevolence radical. The history of social, political, and economic power has been mostly the history of malice. The history of benevolence has been mostly the history of radicalism. The sensibility that loves benevolence has been a radical sensibility. In An Essay in the History of the Radical Sensibility in America, L.S. Halprin argues that before the middle of the nineteenth century the work of all American radicals was organized to defend some form of sentimental faith in millennial progress; that the work of the great writers of the middle of the nineteenth century was the first to be fundamentally free of the constraints of sentimentality; that despite that generation’s accomplishments, the old sentimentalities have persisted, perpetuating the cycle in which illusions designed to make radicalism’s chances seem better than they are become the disillusions which make them seem worse. Along the way, Halprin unfolds something of the contribution of Edgar Alan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman to the specific content of the radical sensibility in America. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the radical’s work has been primarily to accomplish political power. That work and the frustrations of it often leave little energy for the pursuit of a thoroughgoing self-awareness. Halprin's analysis is particularly useful now to remind readers of both the sentimentalities and the wisdoms from which we come.

Volume 6, nos. 5 and 6 and v. 7, no. 1 form "Transactions of the Illinois society for child-study".

Stephen M. Ward is assistant professor at the University of Michigan in the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies and the Residential College. --Book Jacket.