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Though it has been virtually ignored by historians of political thought, Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) is the first work of political theory on the grand scale by a woman. It is a serious analysis of the nature of political reality, & offers a remedy common in the Western political tradition -- the creation of a kallipolis, a utopian "city in words," to serve as a guide to political thought & practice. Though written in the form of a medieval allegory, The Book of the City of Ladies is remarkably modern in its elevation of individual reason, its analysis & critique of the social construction of private & public gender roles, & its hard-headed analysis of the use of power in political life. The book functions as a manual for princesses, in fact, as a manual of empowerment for all women, & in its substance & its use of esoteric literary techniques can be fruitfully compared to Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince. 31 References. Adapted from the source document.

Charles Goodsell and other scholars have drawn attention to the fact that images of bureaucracy in American popular and literary culture are uniformly negative, that there is a "metaphysical pathos" concerning the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of bureaucracy that results in very negative public opinion about public administrative agencies and government and politics in general. Attempts to explain this cultural bias have focused on the hyper‐individualism of the creative personality and, more recently, on the idea that literary artists, journalists, many academic social scientists, and politicians are motivated by the requirements of their various careers to portray bureaucracy in a negative way. But this explanation does not really come to grips with the persistent and ubiquitous negativity found in the portrayals of bureaucrats and bureaucracies by artists in all genres at all levels of culture. In this research I have extended the reach of the examination of the arts and public administration to include two examples of 20th century fine art with explicitly bureaucratic subjects. A careful examination of these works suggests that something more profound than career enhancement may be at the base of the "artistic" vision of bureaucratic themes.

This paper examines the political controversy surrounding the building of Camp Sister Spirit, a feminist cultural and educational retreat for women, on 120 acres of land in rural Jones County, Mississippi. The intensity of the resulting confrontation with individuals and groups in nearby communities quickly raised the scope of conflict and attracted national media and political attention, including intervention by the Clinton administration and hearings by the Subcommittee on Civil Rights of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. In discussing this ongoing controversy, we locate Camp Sister Spirit in the history of the search for alternative community and analyze the nature and rhetoric of the conflict between the camp and some of the citizens of the small town of Ovett, Mississippi, as a complex moment in the tension between the competing languages and value systems of individualism and community in the American political culture.

This study explicates the political thought of the playwright and dissident Vaclav Havel, who emerged as the most important and visible central European intellectual during the ferment leading up to the revolutions of 1989 and now serves as President of Czechoslovakia. Havel's political thought is centered in the interaction of three themes: the idea of a pretheoretical anti-politics from below; the phenomenon of the second, or parallel, culture; and the principle of living in truth. His ideas are likely to have great impact on Czechoslovakia and possibly other central and east European nations undertaking democratization.

The 1132 administrative law judges now serving in twenty‐nine of the most important agencies of the national government are among the least understood and least studied authorities in the American political system, yet they are among the most powerful authorities in the modern policy process. ALJs have undergone a repid development from the creation of the office of "hearing examiner" in the Hepburn Act of 1906 to the rpesent djay, when they hear cases cfomparable in importance to those heard by federal district judges. ALHs are selected through a merit procedure almost wholly controlled by the agencies in which they are employed and are subject to constant cross‐pressures from their judicial role and their administrative masters. Perceived problems of biased selection procedures, conflicts of interest, and lack of public accountability have led critics in Congress and elsewhere to propose a variety of marginal reforms. The policy proposal that probably gets to the heart of the problem, however, is the creation of an Administrative Court of the United States.