Oligarchy

Author : Scarlett Thomas
Publisher : Catapult
ISBN 13 : 1640094628
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Oligarchy written by Scarlett Thomas and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Seed Collectors comes a darkly comic take on power, privilege, and the pressure put on young women to fit in—and be thin—at their all–girls boarding school It's already the second week of term when Natasha, the daughter of a Russian oligarch, arrives at a vast English country house for her first day of boarding school. She soon discovers that the headmaster gives special treatment to the skinniest girls, and Tash finds herself thrown into the school's unfamiliar, moneyed world of fierce pecking orders, eating disorders, and Instagram angst. The halls echo with the story of Princess Augusta, the White Lady whose portraits—featuring a hypnotizing black diamond—hang everywhere and whose ghost is said to haunt the dorms. It's said that she fell in love with a commoner and drowned herself in the lake. But the girls don't really know anything about the woman she was, much less anything about one another. When Tash's friend Bianca mysteriously vanishes, the routines of the school seem darker and more alien than ever before. Tash must try to stay alive—and sane—while she uncovers what's really going on. Darkly hilarious, Oligarchy is Heathers for the digital age, a Prep populated with the teenage children of the European elite, exploring youth, power, and affluence. Scarlett Thomas captures the lives of these privileged young women, in all their triviality and magnitude, seeking acceptance and control in a manipulative world.

Author : Jeffrey A. Winters
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 113949564X
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Oligarchy written by Jeffrey A. Winters and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-18 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, oligarchs were viewed as empowered by wealth, an idea muddled by elite theory early in the twentieth century. The common thread for oligarchs across history is that wealth defines them, empowers them and inherently exposes them to threats. The existential motive of all oligarchs is wealth defense. How they respond varies with the threats they confront, including how directly involved they are in supplying the coercion underlying all property claims and whether they act separately or collectively. These variations yield four types of oligarchy: warring, ruling, sultanistic and civil. Moreover, the rule of law problem in many societies is a matter of taming oligarchs. Cases studied in this book include the United States, ancient Athens and Rome, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, medieval Venice and Siena, mafia commissions in the United States and Italy, feuding Appalachian families and early chiefs cum oligarchs dating from 2300 BCE.

Author : Larry Gillespie
Publisher : Mason Crest Publishers
ISBN 13 : 9781422240212
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Oligarchy written by Larry Gillespie and published by Mason Crest Publishers. This book was released on 2018-08-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an oligarchy, political power rests with a small privileged group. Oligarchs may exercise power directly or indirectly, but they often act out of selfish or corrupt motives. This book examines the history of oligarchy, which was first described by the ancient Greeks more than 2,300 years ago. The book also asks whether today's super-rich constitute a new oligarchy that threatens to undermine democracy in the United States and elsewhere. Each title in this series includes color photos throughout, and back matter including: an index and further reading lists for books and internet resources. Key Icons appear throughout the books in this series in an effort to encourage library readers to build knowledge, gain awareness, explore possibilities and expand their viewpoints through our content rich non-fiction books. Key Icons in this series are as follows: Words to Understand are shown at the front of each chapter with definitions. These words are set in boldfaced type in that chapter, so that readers are able to reference back to the definitions--building their vocabulary and enhancing their reading comprehension. Sidebars are highlighted graphics with content rich material within that allows readers to build knowledge and broaden their perspectives by weaving together additional information to provide realistic and holistic perspectives. Educational Videos are offered in chapters through the use of a QR code, that, when scanned, takes the student to an online video showing a moment in sports' history, a speech, or an instructional video. This gives the readers additional content to supplement the text. Text-Dependent Questions are placed at the end of each chapter. They challenge the reader's comprehension of the chapter they have just read, while sending the reader back to the text for more careful attention to the evidence presented there. Research Projects are provided at the end of each chapter as well and provide readers with suggestions for projects that encourage deeper research and analysis. And a Series Glossary of Key Terms is included in the back matter containing terminology used throughout the series. Words found here broaden the reader's knowledge and understanding of terms used in this field.

Author : Andrea Bernstein
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 1324001887
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power written by Andrea Bernstein and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An absorbing, novelistic, and powerfully affecting work of history and investigative journalism that tracks the unraveling of American democracy. In American Oligarchs, award-winning investigative journalist Andrea Bernstein tells the story of the Trump and Kushner families like never before. Building on her landmark reporting for the acclaimed podcast Trump, Inc. and The New Yorker, Bernstein brings to light new information about the families’ arrival as immigrants to America, their paths to success, and the business and personal lives of the president and his closest family members. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and more than one hundred thousand pages of documents, American Oligarchs details how the Trump and Kushner dynasties encouraged and profited from a system of corruption, dark money, and influence trading, and reveals the historical turning points and decisions?on taxation, regulation, white-collar crime, and campaign finance laws?that have brought us to where we are today. A new afterword examines how the two families’ transactional politics left America particularly vulnerable to the crises of 2020.

Author : Matthew Simonton
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691192057
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Classical Greek Oligarchy written by Matthew Simonton and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classical Greek Oligarchy thoroughly reassesses an important but neglected form of ancient Greek government, the "rule of the few." Matthew Simonton challenges scholarly orthodoxy by showing that oligarchy was not the default mode of politics from time immemorial, but instead emerged alongside, and in reaction to, democracy. He establishes for the first time how oligarchies maintained power in the face of potential citizen resistance. The book argues that oligarchs designed distinctive political institutions—such as intra-oligarchic power sharing, targeted repression, and rewards for informants—to prevent collective action among the majority population while sustaining cooperation within their own ranks. To clarify the workings of oligarchic institutions, Simonton draws on recent social science research on authoritarianism. Like modern authoritarian regimes, ancient Greek oligarchies had to balance coercion with co-optation in order to keep their subjects disorganized and powerless. The book investigates topics such as control of public space, the manipulation of information, and the establishment of patron-client relations, frequently citing parallels with contemporary nondemocratic regimes. Simonton also traces changes over time in antiquity, revealing the processes through which oligarchy lost the ideological battle with democracy for legitimacy. Classical Greek Oligarchy represents a major new development in the study of ancient politics. It fills a longstanding gap in our knowledge of nondemocratic government while greatly improving our understanding of forms of power that continue to affect us today.

Author : Thom Hartmann
Publisher : Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1523091606
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy written by Thom Hartmann and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thom Hartmann, the most popular progressive radio host in America and a New York Times bestselling author, looks at the history of the battle against oligarchy in America—and how we can win the latest round. Billionaire oligarchs want to own our republic, and they're nearly there thanks to legislation and Supreme Court decisions that they have essentially bought. They put Trump and his political allies into office and support a vast network of think tanks, publications, and social media that every day push our nation closer and closer to police-state tyranny. The United States was born in a struggle against the oligarchs of the British aristocracy, and ever since then the history of America has been one of dynamic tension between democracy and oligarchy. And much like the shock of the 1929 crash woke America up to glaring inequality and the ongoing theft of democracy by that generation's oligarchs, the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has laid bare how extensively oligarchs have looted our nation's economic system, gutted governmental institutions, and stolen the wealth of the former middle class. Thom Hartmann traces the history of this struggle against oligarchy from America's founding to the United States' war with the feudal Confederacy to President Franklin Roosevelt's struggle against “economic royalists,” who wanted to block the New Deal. In each of those cases, the oligarchs lost the battle. But with increasing right-wing control of the media, unlimited campaign contributions, and a conservative takeover of the judicial system, we're at a crisis point. Now is the time for action, before we flip into tyranny. We've beaten the oligarchs before, and we can do it again. Hartmann lays out practical measures we can take to break up media monopolies, limit the influence of money in politics, reclaim the wealth stolen over decades by the oligarchy, and build a movement that will return control of America to We the People.

Author : Joseph Fishkin
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 067498062X
Total Pages : 641 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution written by Joseph Fishkin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold call to reclaim an American tradition that argues the Constitution imposes a duty on government to fight oligarchy and ensure broadly shared wealth. Oligarchy is a threat to the American republic. When too much economic and political power is concentrated in too few hands, we risk losing the Òrepublican form of governmentÓ the Constitution requires. Today, courts enforce the Constitution as if it has almost nothing to say about this threat. But as Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath show in this revolutionary retelling of constitutional history, a commitment to prevent oligarchy once stood at the center of a robust tradition in American political and constitutional thought. Fishkin and Forbath demonstrate that reformers, legislators, and even judges working in this Òdemocracy of opportunityÓ tradition understood that the Constitution imposes a duty on legislatures to thwart oligarchy and promote a broad distribution of wealth and political power. These ideas led Jacksonians to fight special economic privileges for the few, Populists to try to break up monopoly power, and Progressives to fight for the constitutional right to form a union. During Reconstruction, Radical Republicans argued in this tradition that racial equality required breaking up the oligarchy of slave power and distributing wealth and opportunity to former slaves and their descendants. President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers built their politics around this tradition, winning the fight against the Òeconomic royalistsÓ and Òindustrial despots.Ó But today, as we enter a new Gilded Age, this tradition in progressive American economic and political thought lies dormant. The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution begins the work of recovering it and exploring its profound implications for our deeply unequal society and badly damaged democracy.

Author : Aristotle
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520266056
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Aristotle and Xenophon on Democracy and Oligarchy written by Aristotle and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010-10-28 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection contains: Aristotle's The Constitution of Athens Xenophon's The Politeia of the Spartans The Constitution of the Athenians ascribed to Xenophon the Orator The Boeotian Constitution from the Oxyrhynchus Historian In bringing together, translating, and annotating these constitutional documents from ancient Greece thirty five years ago, J. M. Moore produced an authoritative work of the highest scholarship. An explanatory essay by classics scholar Kurt A. Raaflaub expands this indispensable collection.

Author : David E Hoffman
Publisher : PublicAffairs
ISBN 13 : 161039111X
Total Pages : 610 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Oligarchs written by David E Hoffman and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this saga of brilliant triumphs and magnificent failures, David E. Hoffman, the former Moscow bureau chief for the Washington Post, sheds light on the hidden lives of Russia's most feared power brokers: the oligarchs. Focusing on six of these ruthless men— Alexander Smolensky, Yuri Luzhkov, Anatoly Chubais, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky, and Vladimir Gusinsky—Hoffman shows how a rapacious, unruly capitalism was born out of the ashes of Soviet communism.

Author : David Edward Tabachnick
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1442640111
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book On Oligarchy written by David Edward Tabachnick and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Economic power is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few, even as democratic movements worldwide allow for political power to be dispersed among the many. With their access to influence, the wealthy can shape and constrain the political power of the rest of the world. As the economic dominance of an elite minority coincides with the forces of globalization, is oligarchy becoming the dominant political regime? This collection explores the renewed relevance of oligarchy to contemporary global politics. By drawing out lessons from classic texts, contributors illustrate how the character of oligarchical regimes informs contemporary political life. Topics include the relationship between the American government and corporations, the tension between republican and oligarchical regimes, and the potential conflicts that have opened up between economic management and political life. On Oligarchy deftly illuminates the significance of this regime in the context of pressing global economic and political issues."--Publisher's website.