Ruling oneself out : a theory of collective abdications
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Bibliographic Information
Ruling oneself out : a theory of collective abdications
（Politics, history, and culture）
Duke University Press, 2008
- : cloth : alk. paper
- : pbk. : alk. paper
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [369]-391) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
What induces groups to commit political suicide? This book explores the decisions to surrender power and to legitimate this surrender: collective abdications. Commonsensical explanations impute such actions to coercive pressures, actors' miscalculations, or their contamination by ideologies at odds with group interests. Ivan Ermakoff argues that these explanations are either incomplete or misleading. Focusing on two paradigmatic cases of voluntary and unconditional surrender of power-the passing of an enabling bill granting Hitler the right to amend the Weimar constitution without parliamentary supervision (March 1933), and the transfer of full executive, legislative, and constitutional powers to Marshal Petain (Vichy, France, July 1940)-Ruling Oneself Out recasts abdication as the outcome of a process of collective alignment. Ermakoff distinguishes several mechanisms of alignment in troubled and uncertain times and assesses their significance through a fine-grained examination of actors' beliefs, shifts in perceptions, and subjective states. To this end, he draws on the analytical and methodological resources of perspectives that usually stand apart: primary historical research, formal decision theory, the phenomenology of group processes, quantitative analyses, and the hermeneutics of testimonies. In elaborating this dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, Ruling Oneself Out restores the complexity and indeterminate character of pivotal collective decisions and demonstrates that an in-depth historical exploration can lay bare processes of crucial importance for understanding the formation of political preferences, the paradox of self-deception, and the makeup of historical events as highly consequential.
Table of Contents
List of Tables vii
List of Figures ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xxxi
A Note on Citations xxxv
Part I: The Stage and the Problem 1
1. Actors and Events 3
2. Constitutional Abdication 37
Part II: Subservience, Common Sense 59
3. Coercion 61
4. Miscalculation 92
5. Ideological Collusion 131
Part III: The Terms of the Challenge 179
6. Collective Alignment: Three Processes 181
7. Diffusion 211
Part IV: Collective Stances 243
8. The Production of Consent 245
9. Vacillations, Convergence 277
Part V: Coda: Judgments of Significance 305
10. The Consistency of Inconsistency 307
11. The Event as Statement 323
Appendix A: Counts and Accounts 333
Appendix B: A Two-Pronged Model of Alignment 346
Bibliography 369
Index 393
by "Nielsen BookData"