LAW AND POLITICS · LAW
Herbert Jacob
Also known as: Jacob, Herbert, herbert jacob
Professor of political science at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, outside Chicago. Family fled Nazi Germany, settling in the US. BA from Harvard, 1954; MA and PhD from Yale, 1955 and 1960. According to his biography on Northwestern's website, his major books include: Justice in America (1962), German Administration Since Bismarck (1963, 1974), Studies in Judicial Politics (1963), Debtors in Court: The Use of Court Services by Debtors and Creditors (1969), Elementary Political Analysis (1970, 1975), Politics in the American States (1965, 1971, 1976, 1983, 1990, 1996), Justice in America (1965, 1971 [Japanese edition], 1972, 1978, 1985), Urban Justice: Law and Order in American Cities (1973), Felony Justice (1977), Crime and Justice in Urban America (1980), The Frustration of Policy: Responses to Crime by American Cities 1984), Using Published Data (1984), Law and Politics in the United States (1986, 1995), Silent Revolution: The Transformation of Divorce Law in the United States (1988), and Courts, Law, and Politics in Comparative Perspective (1996). Source: Northwestern University (see link)
Most acclaimed
Silent revolution
Over the past fifty years, a silent revolution has allowed the radical left to seize power to an extent unthinkable only a decade ago. Stranger still, no one has noticed. Throughout the twentieth century, leftists worked tirelessly toward their goal of a proletarian revolution. But they continually fell short. American workers rejected socialism in the 1920s and declined to join the international communist movement in the 1930s. The New Left flowered briefly in the 1960s but petered out with the end of the Vietnam War. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991, radical Marxism seemed to have been defeated and discredited for good. Not so fast, says the political scientist Barry Rubin in this sharply pointed history of the modern American left. Far from disappearing, the radical left has undergone an ideological revolution and has rebranded itself as liberalism. Rubin traces the roots of this new ideology to the ideas of domestic radicals like Saul Alinsky, cultural Marxists like Antonio Gramsci, and Third World revolutionary thinkers like Frantz Fanon. This new brand of leftism constitutes a Third Left that now dominates the liberal movement in the United States. The Third Left's main ideological innovation is the abandonment of the working class as a revolutionary vehicle. Instead it targets the education system, and it has now trained several generations of Americans to think in leftist terms of fairness and social justice.