Politics

This book is a world-class report by the Asia Competitiveness Institute, updated annually to analyse Indonesia’s competitiveness at the provincial level. With 104 indicators covering four environments, the study’s unique methodology incorporates comparative strengths and weaknesses. Apart from scores and rankings, what-if policy simulations offer various provinces practical prescriptions to improve overall competitiveness to accelerate economic growth and development in a balanced, fair and sustainable way. Such qualitative and quantitative analyses in collaboration with various stakeholders generate an exciting pathway for Indonesia to attain its rightful place in both the Asian region and global contexts.

Political moderation is the touchstone of democracy, which could not function without compromise and bargaining, yet it is one of the most understudied concepts in political theory. How can we explain this striking paradox? Why do we often underestimate the virtue of moderation? Seeking to answer these questions, A Virtue for Courageous Minds examines moderation in modern French political thought and sheds light on the French Revolution and its legacy. Aurelian Craiutu begins with classical thinkers who extolled the virtues of a moderate approach to politics, such as Aristotle and Cicero. He then shows how Montesquieu inaugurated the modern rebirth of this tradition by laying the intellectual foundations for moderate government. Craiutu looks at important figures such as Jacques Necker, Madame de Stael, and Benjamin Constant, not only in the context of revolutionary France but throughout Europe. He traces how moderation evolves from an individual moral virtue into a set of institutional arrangements calculated to protect individual liberty, and he explores the deep affinity between political moderation and constitutional complexity. Craiutu demonstrates how moderation navigates between political extremes, and he challenges the common notion that moderation is an essentially conservative virtue, stressing instead its eclectic nature. Drawing on a broad range of writings in political theory, the history of political thought, philosophy, and law, A Virtue for Courageous Minds reveals how the virtue of political moderation can address the profound complexities of the world today.

About the Author

Aurelian Craiutu is professor of political science at Indiana University, Bloomington. His publications include Liberalism under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires, Tocqueville on America after 1840: Letters and Other Writings (edited and translated with Jeremy Jennings), and America through European Eyes (edited with Jeffrey C. Issac). He has also edited the political works of Francois Guizot and Madame de Stael.

A decade of exhausting wars, punishing economic setbacks, fast-rising rivals and unrealized global aspirations has called America’s global role into question as never before. Will the US long continue to be the only superpower in the international system? Should it sustain the world-shaping grand strategy it’s followed since the dawn of the Cold War? Everyone who thinks about international relations cares about these questions. But while opinions are common, answers grounded in scholarship are hard to find because of lack of data and theory relevant to the 21st as opposed to the 20th century. In America Abroad, Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, two of the nation’s leading international relations scholars, fill this gap with a bracing assessment of contemporary America’s shifting global role. Their findings will reorient the debate on America’s future position and grand strategy. Using new data and new approaches to measurement tailored to 21st century global politics, they show that United States’ position as a peerless superpower will be secure long into the future. Engaging a vast body of the newest scholarship, they develop the theory needed to answer the most pressing grand strategic question of the day: How would America’s interests fare if the United States decided to disengage from the world? Their answer runs counter to a rising chorus of calls from many academics and policy makers for US the “come home”: retrenchment would put core US security and economic interests would be put at risk. America Abroad is not, however, an unalloyed endorsement for the foreign policy status quo. By providing a new way to think about the United States’ position in the world, Brooks and Wohlforth move beyond the unrealistic dichotomies that characterize much of the contemporary debate. Although rise of China will not soon end America’s career as the sole superpower, it is a significant shift that alters the strategic landscape and demands adjustments. And they develop a distinct position in the evolving debate on US foreign policy, now torn between calls for a more expansive style of global leadership that seeks to remake the world in America’s image and demands for it to retrench and leave the world’s troubles behind. Their findings support America remaining globally engaged but focusing on three objectives that have been at the core of US foreign policy since the Cold War’s dawn: reducing great power rivalry and security competition in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East, fostering economic globalization, and sustaining institutionalized cooperation that advances America’s interests. Combining scholarly rigor and accessible prose, America Abroad will force us to rethink our assumptions about the nature and utility of US power in the global arena.

About the Author

Stephen Brooks, Associate Professor of Government, Dartmouth College, author of Producing Security, and co-author of World Out of Balance. William Wohlforth, Professor of Government, Dartmouth College; author of Elusive Balance and co-author of World Out of Balance.

By reminding readers that early Supreme Court justices refused to reduce the Constitution to a mere legal document, Approaching the U.S. Constitution provides a definitive response to Reading Law by Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner. Turning to the vision of Alexander Hamilton found in Federalists No. 78, Hunter argues that rather than seeing the judiciary as America’s legal guardian, Hamilton looked to independent individuals of integrity on the judiciary to be the nation’s collective conscience. For Hamilton, the judiciary’s authority over the legislature does not derive from positive law but is extra-legal by ‘design’ and is purely moral. By emphasizing the legal expertise of judges alone, individuals such as Justice Scalia mistakenly demand that judges exercise no human ethical judgment whatsoever. Yet the more this happens, the more the “rule of law” is replaced by the rule of lawyers. Legal sophistry becomes the primary currency wherewith society’s ethical and moral questions are resolved. Moreover, the alleged neutrality of legal analysis is deceptive with its claims of judicial modesty. It is not only undemocratic, it is dictatorial and highly elitist. Public debate over questions of fairness is replaced by an exclusive legalistic debate between lawyers over what is legal. The more Scalia and Garner realize their agenda, the more all appeals to what is moral will be effectively removed from political debate. ‘Conservatives’ lament the ‘removing God from the classroom,’ by ‘liberals,’ yet if the advocates of legalism get their way, God will be effectively removed from the polis altogether. The answer to preserving both separation of powers and the American commitment to unalienable human rights is to view the Supreme Court in the same way early founders such as Hamilton did and in the way President Abraham Lincoln urged. The Court’s most important function in exercising the power of judicial review is to serve as the nation’s conscience just as it did in Brown v. Board of Education.

About the Author

Kerry L. Hunter is full professor in the Department of Political Economy at the College of Idaho.