Franklin Delano Roosevelt stands astride American history like a colossus, having pulled the nation out of the Great Depression and led it to victory in the Second World War. Elected to four terms as president, he transformed an inward-looking country into the greatest superpower the world had ever known. Only Abraham Lincoln did more to save America from destruction. But FDR is such a large figure that historians tend to take him as part of the landscape, focusing on smaller aspects of his achievements or carping about where he ought to have done things differently. Few have tried to assess the totality of FDR's life and career. Conrad Black rises to the challenge. In this magisterial biography, Black makes the case that FDR was the most important person of the twentieth century, transforming his nation and the world through his unparalleled skill as a domestic politician, war leader, strategist, and global visionary -- all of which he accomplished despite a physical infirmity that could easily have ended his public life at age thirty-nine. Black also takes on the great critics of FDR, especially those who accuse him of betraying the West at Yalta. Black opens a new chapter in our understanding of this great man, whose example is even more inspiring as a new generation embarks on its own rendezvous with destiny.

On February 11, 1990, South Africa's Nelson Mandela walked free after spending twenty-seven and a half years in prison-more than a third of his adult life. A delirious throng of well-wishers, numbering more than 100,000, greeted him in Cape Town with chants of "Viva Mandela," to which Mandela responded with a clenched-fist salute and an address that began with thanks to "friends, comrades, and fellow South Africans" for their "tireless and heroic sacrifices." Ordinary black South Africans had not heard the voice of their anti-apartheid hero, or even seen what he looked like, in a generation. Release of "the prisoner of the century" captured headlines around the world. The seventy-one-year-old Mandela had been sentenced to life in prison on June 12, 1964, for conspiracy to overthrow the government of South Africa and its policies of white supremacy, known as apartheid. In apartheid South Africa, blacks had no rights: they could not vote, own land, move freely from one place to another, or live in "white" areas; and black children attended schools grossly inferior to those for whites. Initially, Mandela had tried peaceful means to attain equal rights for South Africa's black majority, advocating civil resistance, speaking out, organizing strikes and rallies. However, when the government did not reform, but responded with violence by killing women and children, Mandela and other leading activists turned to armed struggle, carrying out sabotage against non-human targets such as power stations arid government buildings. This was all a far cry from Mandela's humble beginnings as a herdboy in a small village. As a boy, he was often not sure of himself. He cared little for the outside world and rarely challenged authority. But when he grew up, Mandela bravely devoted his life to the cherished ideal of "d democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony with equal opportunities." Four years after Mandela's release from prison, that cherished ideal began to fake shape, when he became the first president of a democratic South Africa, serving as a symbol of peace, unity, and change, even in the face of enormously difficult social and economic challenges. A democratic South Africa is one of the twentieth century's greatest achievements, and its native son. Nelson Mandela, is one of the world's most beloved statesmen. Book jacket.

This book offers an original account of a distinctly republican theory of social and global justice. The book starts by exploring the nature and value of Hegelian recognition theory. It shows the importance of that theory for grounding a normative account of free and autonomous agency. It is this normative account of free agency which provides the groundwork for a republican conception of social and global justice, based on the core-ideas of freedom as non-domination and autonomy as non-alienation. As the author argues, republicans should endorse a sufficientarian account of social justice, which focuses on the nature of social relationships and their effects on people's ability to act freely and realize their fundamental interests. On the global level, the book argues for the cosmopolitan extension of the republican principles of non-domination and non-alienation within a multi-level democratic system. In so doing, the book addresses a major gap in the existing literature, presenting an original theory of justice, which combines Hegelian recognition theory and republican ideas of freedom, and applying this hybrid theory to the global domain.