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Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdications (Politics, History, and Culture)
What induces groups to commit political suicide? This book explores the decisions to surrender power and to legitimate this surrender: collective abdications. Commonsensical explanations impute such actions to coercive pressures, actors’ miscalculations, or their contamination by ideologies at odds with group interests. Ivan Ermakoff argues that these explanations are either incomplete or misleading. Focusing on two paradigmatic cases of voluntary and unconditional surrender of power—the passing of an enabling bill granting Hitler the right to amend the Weimar constitution without parliamentary supervision (March 1933), and the transfer of full executive, legislative, and constitutional powers to Marshal Pétain (Vichy, France, July 1940)— Ruling Oneself Out recasts abdication as the outcome of a process of collective alignment. Ermakoff distinguishes several mechanisms of alignment in troubled and uncertain times and assesses their significance through a fine-grained examination of actors’ beliefs, shifts in perceptions, and subjective states. To this end, he draws on the analytical and methodological resources of perspectives that usually stand apart: primary historical research, formal decision theory, the phenomenology of group processes, quantitative analyses, and the hermeneutics of testimonies. In elaborating this dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, Ruling Oneself Out restores the complexity and indeterminate character of pivotal collective decisions and demonstrates that an in-depth historical exploration can lay bare processes of crucial importance for understanding the formation of political preferences, the paradox of self-deception, and the makeup of historical events as highly consequential..
Price: $22.95
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King George III (the Mad King)
George III (George William Frederick; 4 June 1738 – 29 January 1820 ) was King of Great Britain and King of Ireland from 25 October 1760 until 1 January 1801, and thereafter of the United Kingdom, formed by the union of Great Britain and Ireland, He was the third British monarch of the House of Hanover, and the first of Hanover to be born in Britain and speak English as his first language. George III's long reign was marked by a series of military conflicts involving his kingdom, much of the rest of Europe, and further afield in Africa, the Americas and Asia. Early in his reign, Great Britain defeated France in the Seven Years' War, becoming the dominant European power in North America and India. However, many of its American colonies were soon lost in the American Revolutionary War, which led to the establishment of the United States. A series of wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France, over a twenty-year period, finally concluded in the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. In the latter half of his life, George III suffered from recurrent and, eventually, permanent mental illness. This baffled medical science at the time, although it is now generally thought that he suffered from the blood disease porphyria. Porphyria can be triggered by the poison arsenic, and recent studies have shown high levels of arsenic in locks of King George's hair. After a final relapse in 1810, his eldest son, George, Prince of Wales ruled as Prince Regent. .
Price: $0.99
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The People's King: The True Story of the Abdication
The People's King follows the six intense weeks leading up to the abdication of Edward VIII, considered by many to be among the most compelling love stories of the last century. Just six months before their wedding, the only people who had heard of Wallis Simpson were those people who belonged to the tiny social circle surrounding the royal family. Press coverage and newsreels were strictly censored. Through contemporary letters and diaries, many never before published, Susan Williams demonstrates the huge popularity of the King and the events that led to his downfall. .
Price: $113.35
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Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Studies of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University)
This new and abridged edition of Scenarios of Power is a concise version of Richard Wortman's award-winning study of Russian monarchy from the seventeenth century until 1917. The author breaks new ground by showing how imperial ceremony and imagery were not simply displays of the majesty of the sovereign and his entourage, but also instruments central to the exercise of absolute power in a multinational empire. In developing this interpretation, Wortman presents vivid descriptions of coronations, funerals, parades, trips through the realm, and historical celebrations and reveals how these ceremonies were constructed or reconstructed to fit the political and cultural narratives in the lives and reigns of successive tsars. He describes the upbringing of the heirs as well as their roles in these narratives and relates their experiences to the persistence of absolute monarchy in Russia long after its demise in Europe. .
Price: $32.87
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