In the past fifty years, street crime rates in America have increased eightfold. These increases were historically patterned, were often very rapid, and had a disproportionate impact on African Americans. Much of the crime explosion took place in a space of just ten years beginning in the early 1960s. Common explanations based on biological impulses, psychological drives, or slow-moving social indicators cannot explain the speed or timing of these changes or their disproportionate impact on racial minorities. Using unique data that span half a century, Gary LaFree argues that social institutions are the key to understanding the U.S. crime wave. Crime increased along with growing political distrust, economic stress, and family disintegration. These changes were especially pronounced for racial minorities. American society responded by investing more in criminal justice, education, and welfare institutions. Stabilization of traditional social institutions and the effects of new institutional spending account for the modest crime declines of the 1990s.

This book contends that the transition of leadership from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will result in a crisis of legitimacy for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Using Max Weber’s typology of legitimacy, the book explains that the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy was based on the charismatic authority of the regime’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Since Khomeini’s death in 1989, the regime has failed to develop the rule of law necessary for legal-rational authority. Moreover, it abandoned the logical underpinnings justifying clerical rule when a mid-ranking cleric rather than a Grand Ayatollah was placed in the position of Supreme Leader. With neither a legal basis nor a traditional basis of authority, the new leader relied extensively on the cover of Khomeini’s charismatic shadow for legitimacy. After nearly four decades, this shadow is fading. Not only will Khamenei’s successor lack the same direct ties to Khomeini, but the demographic and societal changes in Iran have made the charisma of Khomeini a historical concept rather than a viscerally felt experience. First the book analyzes the likely succession scenarios, finding the most probable outcome is the appointment of a hardline conservative backed by the regime’s security forces. Next, the regime’s economic, political, and social failures are presented, in order to explain why the new leader is likely to try to return to a traditional basis of legitimacy – religion. Thereafter, the book explains how this hardliner focus on religion is likely to result in an aggressive Iranian foreign policy toward the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, impacting the region’s security.

Around the world, citizens have lost faith in their political and economic institutions—leading to unprecedented levels of political instability and economic volatility. From Moscow to Brussels, from Washington to Cairo, the failure of democracies and autocracies to manage the fiscal and political crises facing us has led to a profound disquiet, spawning protest movements of the left, right, and center. In The End of Authority, Douglas E. Schoen systematically analyzes the leadership crises facing democracies and autocratic governments alike. He presents a firsthand, detailed assessment for why this collapse in trust happened; and offers a comprehensive blueprint for how we can restore public trust in government and economic institutions in a world of division, dissension, and governments clearly lacking in responsiveness to citizen concerns. Schoen outlines bold and clear solutions and offers practical steps to fix our democracy and rebuild international institutions.

At an unsettled time for liberal democracy, with global eruptions of authoritarian and arbitrary rule, here is one of the first full-fledged philosophical accounts of what makes governments legitimate. What makes a government legitimate? The dominant view is that public officials have the right to rule us, even if they are unfair or unfit, as long as they gain power through procedures traceable to the consent of the governed. In this rigorous and timely study, Arthur Isak Applbaum argues that adherence to procedure is not enough: even a properly chosen government does not rule legitimately if it fails to protect basic rights, to treat its citizens as political equals, or to act coherently. How are we to reconcile every person’s entitlement to freedom with the necessity of coercive law? Applbaum’s answer is that a government legitimately governs its citizens only if the government is a free group agent constituted by free citizens. To be a such a group agent, a government must uphold three principles. The liberty principle, requiring that the basic rights of citizens be secured, is necessary to protect against inhumanity, a tyranny in practice. The equality principle, requiring that citizens have equal say in selecting who governs, is necessary to protect against despotism, a tyranny in title. The agency principle, requiring that a government’s actions reflect its decisions and its decisions reflect its reasons, is necessary to protect against wantonism, a tyranny of unreason. Today, Applbaum writes, the greatest threat to the established democracies is neither inhumanity nor despotism but wantonism, the domination of citizens by incoherent, inconstant, and incontinent rulers. A government that cannot govern itself cannot legitimately govern others.

Legitimacy and judicial authority -- Constitutional meaning : original public meaning -- Constitutional meaning : varieties of history that matter -- Law in the Supreme Court : jurisprudential foundations -- Constitutional constraints -- Constitutional theory and its relation to constitutional practice -- Sociological, legal, and moral legitimacy : today and tomorrow

Popular perceptions of a state's legitimacy are inextricably bound to its ability to rule. Vast military and material reserves cannot counter the power of a citizen's belief, and the more widespread the crisis of a state's legitimacy, the greater the threat to its stability. Even such established democracies as France and India are losing their moral claims over society, while such highly illiberal states as China and Iran enjoy strong showings of public support. Through a remarkable fusion of empirical research and theory, Bruce Gilley makes clear the link between political consent and political rule. Fixing a definition of legitimacy that is both general and particular, he is able to study the role of legitimacy as it has been maintained and lost in a diverse selection of societies. He begins by detailing the origins of state legitimacy and the methods governments have used to wield it best. He then considers the habits of less successful states, exploring how the process works across different styles of government. Gilley's unique approach merges a broad study of legitimacy and performance in seventy-two states with a detailed empirical analysis of the mechanisms of legitimation. The results are tested on a case study of Uganda, a country that, after 1986, began to recover from decades of civil war. Considering a range of explanations of other domestic and international phenomena as well, Gilley ultimately argues that, because of its evident real-world importance, legitimacy should occupy a central place in political analysis.

Critical Theory originated in the perception by a group of German Marxists after the First World War that the Marxist analysis of capitalism had become deficient both empirically and with regard to its consequences for emancipation, and much of their work has attempted to deepen and extend it in new circumstances. Yet much of this revision has been in the form of piecemeal modification. In his latest work, Habermas has returned to the study of capitalism, incorporating the distinctive modifications of the Frankfurt School into the foundations of the critique of capitalism. Drawing on both systems theory and phenomenological sociology as well as Marxism, the author distinguishes four levels of capitalist crisis - economic, rationality, legitimation, and motivational crises. In his analysis, all the Frankfurt focus on cultural, personality, and authority structures finds its place, but in a systematic framework. At the same time, in his sketch of communicative ethics as the highest stage in the internal logic of the evolution of ethical systems, the author hints at the source of a new political practice that incorporates the imperatives of evolutionary rationality.