It is widely admitted that organized economic interests determine political decision making at many levels of the French political process. This first comprehensive description of the French employers' and trade association movement shows how these pressure groups operate and indicates the extent of their influence. Originally published in 1957. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

It is widely admitted that organized economic interests determine political decision making at many levels of the French political process. This first comprehensive description of the French employers' and trade association movement shows how these pressure groups operate and indicates the extent of their influence. Originally published in 1957. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This is a general study of politics and society in the Fourth Republic founded on extensive primary research. It approaches the period in terms of successful conservatism rather than thwarted reform.

A disturbing account of the Vichy period, demonstrating how in the interests of stability, French national feeling favored collboration with the German-controlled regime.

Recounts the resurgence of significant political movements of the Radical Right in France since the end of the nineteenth century.

Business as a System of Power was the direct product of extensive and continuing study of the rise of bureaucratic centralism. The project was begun in 1934, and resulted a decade later in this volume, arguably the most important work in comparative and historical economics to emerge in the World War Two period. Indeed, Brady's theorems such as the bureaucratic authoritarian model of development, became a touchstone for the study of Third World economies.Brady saw the direction of business moving in a variety of directions: from the totalitarian model set by fascism with its highly centralized approach to special interests, profit making and policy made in the interests of those who rule; and the alternative democratic model set by the democracies of the West, which expound the latitude of direct public participation in decision-making and social organization of the economy as a whole. Brady does not indulge in cheap conspiracy theory. Rather he sees the business classes worldwide as possessing a collective mind, but not a collective will. In this setting the business civilization itself is at stake.The volume offers a fascinating study of German Nazism, Italian fascism and Japanese militarism as a series of policies rather than historical inevitabilities. But the work is also a foreboding and a warning to democratic varieties of capitalism. As business becomes increasingly global in character, unbound by national interests or democratic aims, it also becomes more rational in its own terms. Its drive for maximizing profits with scant regard to what may be less cost effective, but more open to popular control or participation, becomes transparent. Brady provides a remarkably prescient, albeit controversial, study of trends in Western democracy and big business. Robert S. Lynd, in his Preface, writes, "Brady cuts through to the central problem disrupting our worldàa world-wide counter-revolution against democracy." More than a half century later, in his outstanding review of the life and career of Robert Brady, Douglas Dowd points to the same lessons: economic inequities, economic globalization and political concentration of power. "In such a world, the counsel of a Brady never loses its vitality."Robert A. Brady was professor of economics at Columbia University, and author of The Rationalization Movement in German Industry; The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism; and The Scientific Revolution in Industry. Douglas F. Dowd was professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University and author of a number of important books on economics, including Modern Economic Problems in Historic Perspective.

The quasi-federal European Union stands out as the major exception in the thinly institutionalized world of international politics. Something has led Europeans—and only Europeans—beyond the nation-state to a fundamentally new political architecture. Craig Parsons argues in A Certain Idea of Europe that this "something" was a particular set of ideas generated in Western Europe after the Second World War. In Parsons's view, today's European Union reflects the ideological (and perhaps visionary) project of an elite minority. His book traces the progressive victory of this project in France, where the battle over European institutions erupted most divisively. Drawing on archival research and extensive interviews with French policymakers, the author carefully traces a fifty-year conflict between radically different European plans. Only through aggressive leadership did the advocates of a supranational "community" Europe succeed at building the EU and binding their opponents within it. Parsons puts the causal impact of ideas, and their binding effects through institutions, at the center of his book. In so doing he presents a strong logic of "social construction"—a sharp departure from other accounts of EU history that downplay the role of ideas and ideology.