5 Politics, Sociology eBooks

Unnatural Frenchmen: The Politics of Priestly Celibacy and Marriage, 1720-1815 by E. Claire Cage
Resisting War: How Communities Protect Themselves by Oliver Kaplan
The Moral Person of the State: Pufendorf, Sovereignty and Composite Polities by Ben Holland
Wrongful Convictions and the DNA Revolution: Twenty-Five Years of Freeing the Innocent by Daniel S. Medwed
Harry Collins, Robert Evans, "Why Democracies Need Science"

*Unnatural Frenchmen: The Politics of Priestly Celibacy and Marriage, 1720-1815 by E. Claire Cage

English | July 1st, 2015 | ASIN: B00Q7BGPE6, ISBN: 0813937124 | 248 pages | EPUB/PDF | 8.60 MB
In Enlightenment and revolutionary France, new and pressing arguments emerged in the long debate over clerical celibacy. Appeals for the abolition of celibacy were couched primarily in the language of nature, social utility, and the "patrie." The attack only intensified after the legalization of priestly marriage during the Revolution, as marriage and procreation were considered patriotic duties. Some radical revolutionaries who saw celibacy as a crime against nature and the nation aggressively promoted clerical marriage by threatening unmarried priests with deportation, imprisonment, and even death.
After the Revolution, political and religious authorities responded to the vexing problem of reconciling the existence of several thousand married French priests with the formal reestablishment of Roman Catholicism and clerical celibacy.
Unnatural Frenchmen examines how this extremely divisive issue shaped religious politics, the lived experience of French clerics, and gendered citizenship. Drawing on a wide base of printed and archival material, including thousands of letters that married priests wrote to the pope, historian Claire Cage highlights individual as well as ideological struggles. Unnatural Frenchmen provides important insights into how conflicts over priestly celibacy and marriage have shaped the relationship between sexuality, religion, and politics from the age of Enlightenment to today, while simultaneously revealing the story of priestly marriage to be an inherently personal and deeply human one.

*Resisting War: How Communities Protect Themselves by Oliver Kaplan

English | July 20th, 2017 | ISBN: 1107159806, 9781107159808 | 396 pages | True PDF | 12.77 MB
In civil conflicts around the world, unarmed civilians take enormous risks to protect themselves and confront heavily armed combatants. This is not just counterintuitive - it is extraordinary.
In this book, Oliver Kaplan explores cases from Colombia, with extensions to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and the Philippines, to show how and why civilians influence armed actors and limit violence. Based on fieldwork and statistical analysis, the book explains how local social organization and cohesion enable both covert and overt nonviolent strategies, including avoidance, cultures of peace, dispute resolution, deception, protest, and negotiation. These 'autonomy' strategies help civilians retain their agency and avoid becoming helpless victims by limiting the inroads of armed groups.

*The Moral Person of the State: Pufendorf, Sovereignty and Composite Polities by Ben Holland

English | August 29th, 2017 | ISBN: 1108416888, 9781108416887 | 274 pages | True PDF | 7.10 MB
This is the first detailed study in any language of the single most influential theory of the modern state: Samuel von Pufendorf's account of the state as a 'moral person'.
Ben Holland reconstructs the theological and political contexts in and for which Pufendorf conceived of the state as being a person. Pufendorf took up an early Christian conception of personality and a medieval conception of freedom in order to fashion a theory of the state appropriate to continental Europe, and which could head off some of the absolutist implications of a rival theory of state personality, that of Hobbes.
The book traces the fate of the concept in the hands of others - international lawyers, moral philosophers and revolutionaries - until the early twentieth century. It will be essential reading for historians of political thought and for those interested in the development of key ideas in theology, international law and international relations.

*Wrongful Convictions and the DNA Revolution: Twenty-Five Years of Freeing the Innocent by Daniel S. Medwed

English | March 30th, 2017 | ISBN: 1107129966 | 442 pages | PDF | 4.54 MB
For centuries, most people believed the criminal justice system worked - that only guilty defendants were convicted. DNA technology shattered that belief. DNA has now freed more than three hundred innocent prisoners in the United States.
This book examines the lessons learned from twenty-five years of DNA exonerations and identifies lingering challenges. By studying the dataset of DNA exonerations, we know that precise factors lead to wrongful convictions. These include eyewitness misidentifications, false confessions, dishonest informants, poor defense lawyering, weak forensic evidence, and prosecutorial misconduct.
In Part I, scholars discuss the efforts of the Innocence Movement over the past quarter century to expose the phenomenon of wrongful convictions and to implement lasting reforms.
In Part II, another set of researchers looks ahead and evaluates what still needs to be done to realize the ideal of a more accurate system.

*Harry Collins, Robert Evans, "Why Democracies Need Science"

2017 | ISBN-10: 1509509607, 1509509615 | 200 pages | PDF | 1,5 MB
We live in times of increasing public distrust of the main institutions of modern society. Experts, including scientists, are suspected of working to hidden agendas or serving vested interests. The solution is usually seen as more public scrutiny and more control by democratic institutions experts must be subservient to social and political life.
In this book, Harry Collins and Robert Evans take a radically different view. They argue that, rather than democracies needing to be protected from science, democratic societies need to learn how to value science in this new age of uncertainty. By emphasizing that science is a moral enterprise, guided by values that should matter to all, they show how science can support democracy without destroying it and propose a new institution The Owls that can mediate between science and society and improve technological decision-making for the benefit of all.