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Charles Maier offers a new narrative of the long twentieth century, focused on institutions that shaped politics and societies: project-states, driven by democratic or authoritarian ideologies; capital; and advocates of apolitical values, such as health, human rights, and international law. In this we discern the unfolding of our own troubled time.

We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century. For many in the West, after the two world conflicts and the long cold war, the verdict was clear: democratic values had prevailed over dictatorship. But if the twentieth century meant the triumph of liberalism, as many intellectuals proclaimed, why have the era's darker impulses – ethnic nationalism, racist violence, and populist authoritarianism – revived? This volume offers a radical alternative interpretation that takes us from the transforming challenges of the world wars to our own time. Instead of the traditional narrative of domestic politics and international relations, Charles S. Maier looks to the political and economic impulses that propelled societies through a century when territorial states and transnational forces both claimed power, engaging sometimes as rivals and sometimes as allies. Maier focuses on recurring institutional constellations: project-states including both democracies and dictatorships that sought not just to retain power but to transform their societies; new forms of imperial domination; global networks of finance; and the international associations, foundations, and NGOs that tried to shape public life through allegedly apolitical appeals to science and ethics. In this account, which draws on the author's studies over half a century, Maier invites a rethinking of the long twentieth century. His history of state entanglements with capital, the decline of public projects, and the fragility of governance explains the fraying of our own civic culture – but also allows hope for its recovery.

A new and original history of the forces that shaped the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century. For many in the West, after the two world conflicts and the long cold war, the verdict was clear: democratic values had prevailed over dictatorship. But if the twentieth century meant the triumph of liberalism, as many intellectuals proclaimed, why have the era's darker impulses—ethnic nationalism, racist violence, and populist authoritarianism—revived?The Project-State and Its Rivals offers a radical alternative interpretation that takes us from the transforming challenges of the world wars to our own time. Instead of the traditional narrative of domestic politics and international relations, Charles S. Maier looks to the political and economic impulses that propelled societies through a century when territorial states and transnational forces both claimed power, engaging sometimes as rivals and sometimes as allies. Maier focuses on recurring institutional constellations: project-states including both democracies and dictatorships that sought not just to retain power but to transform their societies; new forms of imperial domination; global networks of finance; and the international associations, foundations, and NGOs that tried to shape public life through allegedly apolitical appeals to science and ethics.In this account, which draws on the author's studies over half a century, Maier invites a rethinking of the long twentieth century. His history of state entanglements with capital, the decline of public projects, and the fragility of governance explains the fraying of our own civic culture—but also allows hope for its recovery

Throughout history, human societies have been organized preeminently as territories-- politically bounded regions whose borders define the jurisdiction of laws and the movement of peoples. At a time when the technologies of globalization are eroding barriers to communication, transportation, and trade, Once Within Borders explores the fitful evolution of territorial organization as a worldwide practice of human societies. Master historian Charles S. Maier tracks the epochal changes that have defined territories over five centuries and draws attention to ideas and technologies that contribute to territoriality's remarkable resilience. Territorial boundaries transform geography into history by providing a framework for organizing political and economic life. But properties of territory--their meanings and applications--have changed considerably across space and time. In the West, modern territoriality developed in tandem with ideas of sovereignty in the seventeenth century. Sovereign rulers took steps to fortify their borders, map and privatize the land, and centralize their sway over the populations and resources within their domain. The arrival of railroads and the telegraph enabled territorial expansion at home and abroad as well as the extension of control over large spaces. By the late nineteenth century, the extent of a nation's territory had become an index of its power, with overseas colonial possessions augmenting prestige and wealth and redefining territoriality. Turning to the geopolitical crises of the twentieth century, Maier pays close attention to our present moment, asking in what ways modern nations and economies still live within borders and to what degree our societies have moved toward a post-territorial world.--

Charles Maier, one of the most prominent contemporary scholars of European history, published Recasting Bourgeois Europe as his first book in 1975. Based on extensive archival research, the book examines how European societies progressed from a moment of social vulnerability to one of political and economic stabilization. Arguing that a common trajectory calls for a multi country analysis, Maier provides a comparative history of three European nations and argues that they did not simply return to a prewar status quo, but achieved a new balance of state authority and interest group representa

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Preface to the 2016 Reprinting -- Preface to the 1988 Reprinting -- Preface -- Abbreviations -- Introduction: From Bourgeois to Corporatist Europe -- PART I: THE CONTAINMENT OF THE LEFT -- 1. THE DIMENSIONS OF SOCIAL CONFLICT AT THE END OF WORLD WAR I -- 2. POLITICS AMONG THE VICTORS: ISSUES AND ELECTIONS IN NOVEMBER 1919 -- 3. THE LIMITS OF ECONOMIC RESTRUCTURING -- PART II: THE FAILURE OF THE PARLIAMENTARY CENTER -- 4. THE POLITICS OF REPARATION -- 5. THE ATTRITION OF THE LIBERAL REGIME IN ITALY -- PART III: PATHS TOWARD CORPORATIST STABILITY -- 6. BETWEEN NATIONALISM AND CORPORATISM: THE RUHR CONFLICT -- 7. MAJORITIES WITHOUT MANDATES: ISSUES AND ELECTIONS IN THE SPRING OF 1924 -- 8. ACHIEVING STABILITY -- Conclusion: The Structure and Limits of Stability -- Bibliography -- INDEX

Intro -- Contents -- Prologue: Questions at the Outset -- Part one: Recurring Structures -- Introduction: The Imperial Arena -- 1. What Is an Empire? -- 2. Frontiers -- 3. "Call It Peace" -- Part two: America's Turn -- Introduction: Highland Park and Hiroshima -- 4. Frontiers and Forces in the Cold War -- 5. An Empire of Production -- 6. An Empire of Consumption -- Afterword: The Vase of Uruk -- Tables -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index.