5 Politics, Sociology eBooks

The Bell Curve Debate by Russell Jacoby, Naomi Glauberman
Qualitative Evaluation Methods by Michael Quinn Patton
Individualism and the Social Order: The Social Element in Liberal Thought by Charles McCann
Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora"
Property Rights in Post-Soviet Russia: Violence, Corruption, and the Demand for Law by Jordan Gans-Morse

*The Bell Curve Debate by Russell Jacoby, Naomi Glauberman

English | 1995 | ISBN: 0812925874 | 720 Pages | DJVU | 29.9 MB
Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman have edited a book on race, class, and intelligence that will stand for the foreseeable future as the authoritative guide to the extraordinary controversy ignited by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's incendiary bestseller, The Bell Curve. The editors have gathered together both the best of recent reviews and essays, and salient documents drawn from the curious history of this heated debate. The Bell Curve Debate captures the fervor, anger, and scope of an almost unprecedented national argument over the very idea of democracy and the possibility of a tolerant, multiracial America. It is an essential companion and answer to The Bell Curve, and provides scholarship and polemic from every point of view. It is a must-read for the informed citizen in search of all the views fit to print.

*Qualitative Evaluation Methods by Michael Quinn Patton

English | 1980 | ISBN: 0803913958 | 381 Pages | DJVU | 22.2 MB
Wit, thoughtfulness, graceful style, and practical advice are well mixed… a welcome contribution to the maturing of evaluation into an interdisciplinary field whose function in describing and understanding social programs is as important as its role in explaining or judging those programs

*Individualism and the Social Order: The Social Element in Liberal Thought by Charles McCann

English | 2004 | ISBN: 0415326273 | 256 Pages | PDF | 2.1 MB
Liberalism is typically misconceived as a philosophy of individualism, which cannot accept that man exists in society and that man's values are shaped by that society.
This book attempts to identify the role of community and society in the political and social thought of leading liberal social philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries including John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and Friedrich A. von Hayek. While differing as to the nature of man and society, each thinker examined holds the basic premise that man is not an isolated creature whose life is 'nasty, brutish and short' but rather that his motivations are dependent upon his place in a social order.

*Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora"

ISBN: 0465014100 | 2010 | EPUB | 224 pages | 204 KB
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Tradition and the Black Atlantic is both a vibrant romp down the rabbit hole of cultural studies and an examination of the discipline’s roots and role in contemporary thought. In this conversational tour through the halls of theory, Gates leaps from Richard Wright to Spike Lee, from Pat Buchanan to Frantz Fanon, and ultimately to the source of anticolonialist thought: the unlikely figure of Edmund Burke.
Throughout Tradition and the Black Atlantic, Gates shows that the culture wars have presented us with a surfeit of either/ors—tradition versus modernity; Eurocentrism versus Afrocentricism. Pointing us away from these facile dichotomies, Gates deftly combines rigorous scholarship with humor, looking back to the roots of cultural studies in order to map out its future course.

*Property Rights in Post-Soviet Russia: Violence, Corruption, and the Demand for Law by Jordan Gans-Morse

English | May 4, 2017 | ISBN: 1107153964 | PDF | 250 pages | 4.2 MB
The effectiveness of property rights - and the rule of law more broadly - is often depicted as depending primarily on rulers' 'supply' of legal institutions. Yet the crucial importance of private sector "demand" for law is frequently overlooked. This book develops a novel framework that unpacks the demand for law in Russia, building on an original enterprise survey as well as extensive interviews with lawyers, firms, and private security agencies. By tracing the evolution of firms' reliance on violence, corruption, and law over the two decades following the Soviet Union's collapse, the book clarifies why firms in various contexts may turn to law for property rights protection, even if legal institutions remain ineffective or corrupt. The author's detailed demand-side analysis of property rights draws attention to the extensive role that law plays in the Russian business world, contrary to frequent depictions of Russia as lawless.