November 2023 MBR The Political Science Shelf

The Political Science Shelf

Transformative Civic Education in Democratic Societies
Tetyana Hoggan-Kloubert, et al.
Michigan State University Press
http://msupress.org
9781611864601, $49.95, PB, 250pp

https://msupress.org/9781611864601/transformative-civic-education-in-democratic-societies

Synopsis: Democracy is neither inevitable nor guaranteed to last. To survive, democracy needs people adequately prepared to enact it. Such preparation for effective citizenship in a complex and plural world requires an adult civic education, one that goes beyond simple knowledge acquisition. It requires a transformative education to help learners become agents and co-shapers of their worlds.

Collectively compiled and co-edited by the team of Tetyana Hoggan-Loubert, Paul E. Mabrey III, and Chad Hoggan, "Transformative Civic Education in Democratic Societies" offers examples of the roles that civic education has played and can play in different communities. In this collection, scholars from around the world report and reflect on civic adult education, examining approaches, paradigms, and concepts that help us to act in culturally, ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse societies.

Critique: "Transformative Civic Education in Democratic Societies" is a timely and informatively erudite contribution to our current national discussion with respect to the present forces that seek to replace our constitutional democracy with an authoritarian governance in the form of a personality cult driven MAGA take-over the Republican Party resulting in the attempted and violent overthrow of a freely elected government by an armed mob that invaded the Capital Building and sought the execution of Vice President Mike Pence at the behest of then President Donald J. Trump in his attempt to retain the presidency despite his having lost that election. While unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, governmental, and college/university library Contemporary Political Science collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists, It should also be noted that "Transformative Civic Education in Democratic Societies" available in a digital book format (Kindle, $47.45) for students, academia, political activists, governmental policy makers, and non- specialist general readers with an interest in the subject.

Editorial Note #1: Tetyana Hoggan-Kloubert is lecturer in Adult Education at the University of Augsburg, Germany. Dr. Hoggan-Kloubert researches migration and civic education in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and the United States. She has conducted research as a visiting researcher at various universities, including Harvard University, Tufts University, and Chernivtsi University. She is co-founder of the Civic Reconstruction Project and co-director of the Institute for Civic Studies and Learning for Democracy.

Editorial Note #2: Paul E. Mabrey III is the Communication Center coordinator in the Learning Centers and assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at James Madison University. Dr. Mabrey has received a "Civvy" award honorable mention for American Civic Collaboration, secured 4-VA and Colonial Academic Alliance grant funding, and published scholarship on the use of debate for civic learning. Previously, he served as the assistant director of Debate at James Madison University and president of the Cross Examination Debate Association.

Editorial Note #3: Chad Hoggan is an associate professor of adult and lifelong education at North Carolina State University and has been co-editor of the Journal of Transformative Education since 2016. Previous books include Transformative Learning in Community Colleges, which won the 2020 Cyril Houle Award for Outstanding Literature in Adult Education. Dr. Hoggan is co-founder of the Civic Reconstruction Project and co-director of the Institute for Civic Studies and Learning for Democracy.

Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss
Juliet Hooker
Princeton University Press
https://press.princeton.edu
9780691243030, $32.00, HC, 360pp

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Grief-White-Grievance-Politics/dp/0691243034

Synopsis: In democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can't always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally.

Propped up by white supremacy, whites (as a group) are accustomed to winning; they have generally been able to exercise political rule without having to accept sharing it. Black citizens, on the other hand, are expected to be political heroes whose civic suffering enables progress toward racial justice.

With the publication of "Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss", Professor Juliet Hooker (a leading thinker on democracy and race), argues that the two most important forces driving racial politics in the United States today are Black grief and White grievance. Black grief is exemplified by current protests against police violence -- the latest in a tradition of violent death and subsequent public mourning spurring Black political mobilization. The potent politics of white grievance, meanwhile, which is also not new, imagines the United States as a white country under siege.

Drawing on African American political thought, Hooker examines key moments in US racial politics that illuminate the problem of loss in democracy. Professor Hooker connects today's Black Lives Matter protests to the use of lynching photographs to arouse public outrage over post-Reconstruction era racial terror, and she discusses Emmett Till's funeral as a catalyst for the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.

Professor Hooker also traces the political weaponization of white victimhood during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Calling for an expansion of Black and white political imaginations, Professor Hooker argues that both must learn to sit with loss, for different reasons and to different ends.

Critique: Of special relevance to readers with an interest in how race shapes expectations about whose losses matter and whose losses are discounted, which in turn has shaped our political discord from generations (and which has only accelerated and intensified with Donald Trump and the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party), "Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss" is a welcome and timely contribution to our understanding of contemporary political discourse and political division. Informative, articulate, insightful, "Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss" is especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, and college/university Contemporary Political Science collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists. It should be noted for students, academia, political activists, and governmental policy makers that "Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $17.60).

Editorial Note: Juliet Hooker (https://juliethooker.com) is the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science at Brown University. She is also the author of Race and the Politics of Solidarity and Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos, which was awarded the American Political Science Association's 2018 Ralph Bunche Book Award for the best work in ethnic and cultural pluralism and the 2018 Best Book Award of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.

Machiavelli's Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World
Harvey C. Mansfield
Cambridge University Press
www.cambridge.org
9781009320122, $105.00, HC, 250pp

https://www.amazon.com/Machiavellis-Effectual-Truth-Creating-Modern/dp/1009320122

Synopsis: Niccolo di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (3 May 1469 - 21 June 1527) was an Italian diplomat, author, philosopher and historian who lived during the Renaissance. He is best known for his political treatise The Prince (Il Principe), written around 1513 but not published until 1532, five years after his death. He has often been called the father of modern political philosophy and political science. (Wikipedia)

While Machiavelli was a Renaissance era thinker, yet in a notable phrase he invented, 'the effectual truth', he attacked the high-sounding humanism typical of the Renaissance, while mounting a conspiracy against the classical and Christian values of his time.

With the publication of "Machiavelli's Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World", Professor Harvey C. Mansfield studies and explains this overlooked phrase for the first time. The upshot of 'effectual truth' for any individual is to not depend on anyone or anything outside yourself to keep you free and secure. Professor Mansfield argues that this phrase reveals Machiavelli's approach to modern science, with its focus on the efficient cause and concern for fact. He inquires into the effect Machiavelli expected from his own writings, who believed his philosophy would have an effect that future philosophers could not ignore. His plan, according to Professor Mansfield, was to bring about a desired effect and thus to create his own future and ours.

Critique: A seminal work of exhaustive research and meticulous scholarship, "Machiavelli's Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World" is an extraordinary contribution to Renaissance European political history and theory. Exceptionally insightful, persuasively argued, expertly written, thoroughly 'reader friendly in organization and presentation, "Machiavelli's Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World" is an impressive and recommended addition to personal, community, and college/university library Renaissance and Political Science collections, as well as supplemental Machiavelli curriculum studies lists. It should be noted for students, academia, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject that "Machiavelli's Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World" is also available in a paperback edition (9781009320153, $34.99) and in a digital book format (Kindle, $26.49).

Editorial Note: Harvey C. Mansfield (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Mansfield) has spent his life at Harvard University, where he studies and teaches political philosophy. He is a translator of Machiavelli and Tocqueville, writing on Edmund Burke, the invention of indirect government, defensible and constitutional liberalism, the discovery of the theory of executive power, and the nature of manliness. He has received the National Humanities Medal (2004), delivered the annual Thomas Jefferson lecture (2007), and has been awarded the Bradley Prize.

The Long Alliance
Gabriel Debenedetti
Henry Holt & Company
www.henryholt.com
9781250829979, $29.99, HC, 432pp

https://www.amazon.com/Long-Alliance-Imperfect-Union-Barack/dp/1250829976

Synopsis: Delving far deeper than the simplistic "bromance" narrative that's long held the public eye, with the publication of "The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama", journalist Gabriel Debenedetti reveals the past, present, and future of the unusual partnership, detailing its development, its twists and turns, its ruptures and reunions, and its path to this pivotal moment for each man's legacy.

The true story of this relationship, from 2003 into 2022, is significantly more layered and consequential than is widely understood. The original mismatch between the veteran Washington traditionalist and the once-in-a-generation outsider has transformed repeatedly in ways that have molded not just four different presidential campaigns and two different political parties, but also wars, a devastating near-depression, movements for social equality, and the fight for the future of American democracy.

The bond between them has been, at various times over the past two decades, tense, affectionate, nonexistent, and ironclad - - but it has always been surprising. Now it is shaping a second presidential administration, and the future of the world as we know it.

Critique: Simply stated, to understand and appreciate the presidencies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, it is essential to read "The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama" by political journalist and national correspondent for the New York Magazine, Gabriel Debenedetti. Impressively insightful and informative, as well as exceptionally well written, organized and presented, "The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama" is especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, and college/university library Contemporary Political Science collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists. It should be noted that "The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama" is also readily available in a paperback edition (978-1250871534, $19.99) and in a digital book format (Kindle, $12.99).

Editorial Note: Gabriel Debenedetti is the national correspondent at New York Magazine, where he writes about politics and national affairs. Previously, he covered politics for Politico and Reuters. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Economist, Politico Magazine, and the New Republic. A New Jersey native, he graduated from Princeton University. (https://www.marathi.tv/political-analyst/gabriel-debenedetti)

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