Students of politics frequently confuse politics with current events and the activities of political actors. Lost in this view is a deeper understanding of politics that emphasizes the need for governmental management of many facets of social life. It proceeds first by illustrating the need for civil organization in complex social settings and then by examining the way political culture informs the nature and degree of the political organization appropriate for a polity. Focusing specifically on U.S. political culture, the work explores American political inheritance in order to expose the enduring ideals and fundamental commitments of American political life. This permits a review of American liberalism with its characteristic emphasis upon individual freedom and basic human equality. The nature of constitutionalism and democracy are also explored in order to examine their fit with traditional American liberal ideals. But politics is also about change, and the work concludes with a discussion of the challenges the U.S. must face as the demands of political management generate pressures that might seem to erode or compromise the ideals of American political culture.

Old enemies meet on new worlds in The Line of Polity, the second novel in Neal Asher's popular Agent Cormac series. At the frontiers of human-occupied space, the Miranda space station has been utterly destroyed. Earth Central assigns Agent Ian Cormac to discover the truth, because the alien bioconstruct Dragon seems the most likely culprit. Meanwhile, rebellion is brewing on Masada. The planet’s people are enslaved on the surface, living in fear of their overlords in orbit, who punish transgressions with laser strikes. Leaving their compounds also means death, as monstrous predators roam the toxic wilderness. Civil war looms, while a rebel biophysicist brings lethal Jain technology to this world. Agent Cormac must find out what connects these events, if he is to avert catastrophe. The Line of Polity is followed by Brass Man, the third title in the Agent Cormac series.

In Designing a Polity, James W. Ceaser, one of our leading scholars of American political development, argues for the continuing central role of the Founding within the study of American government. Drawing on essays published over the past 10 years, extensively updated and revised to reflect current politics, Ceaser engages the Founding Fathers, particularly James Madison, emphasizes Alexis de Tocqueville as a model of political inquiry, critiques current and recent theorists such as Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida, and explores the varieties of contemporary conservative thought. Designing a Polity offers a rich exploration of the core values of political sciences that will be of special interest to scholars and students of American political development, Constitutional thought, and contemporary political thought.

An alternative account of the so-called 'succession crisis' in the first decade of the reign of Elizabeth I.

Borrowing from the perspective of macroeconomics, it treats electorates, politicians, and governments as unitary actors, making decisions in response to the behavior of other actors. The macro and longitudinal focus makes it possible to directly connect the behaviors of electorate and government. The surprise of macro-level analysis, emerging anew in every chapter, is that order and rationality dominate explanations.

Newly updated for the revised Directory for Worship. This detailed, comprehensive interpretation of the Presbyterian Book of Order is the most complete resource of its kind. Joan S. Gray updated this best-selling book to include the revised Directory for Worship. It explains the system of Presbyterian government, from sessions to presbyteries to synods to the General Assembly itself.

In "New Ecclesiology and Polity," Steckel argues that the United Church of Christ ecclesiology and its polity have an urgent need to be re-examined and re-shaped if the church is to be a faithful and strong ministry in the post-modern world. He describes the transition from modernity to post-modernity focusing on ways the United Church of Christ, is aware of these transitions in the life of the church, but no awareness of how the denominational governing structures undermine faithful mission in a post-modern world.