Summer reading

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

I'll be taking a blogging break next week to attend the IHS Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students. While I'm gone, I thought I'd leave some reading material for the half dozen readers of this blog.

John Nichols and Joel Rogers have several articles on the embattled liberal "urban archipelago" in the June 20 issue of The Nation.

• "Urban Archipelago"


• "Progressive City Leaders"


• "Cities: The Vital Core"

I hope that we culture-war liberals are finally getting it: the urban rural divide is important and pervasive, and it promises to define the cultural landscape for the near future. (UPDATE: link to previous post added.)

Russell Arben Fox, at In Medias Res has a few posts on theologian John Milbank. I still have to read them all, but I have followed an interesting link to an essay on the "new medievalism" that seems to be coming about as the attributes of state sovereignty become disaggregated and diffuse. Most of the literature deals with the effect of the diffusion of sovereignty on International relations, but I suspect that the effect on the domestic level are equally strong.

The neglected theoretical tradition of political pluralism, which is the subject of my dissertation, has garnered a lot of attention lately. Its central premise is that the state doesn't have a monopoly of sovereignty, but that sovereignty is shared by associations and intermediary groups.

Finally, I can't leave out the readings for the Social Change Workshop, available here.

Enjoy!