Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940

Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 PDF Author: James Livingston
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807863033
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
The rise of corporate capitalism was a cultural revolution as well as an economic event, according to James Livingston. That revolution resides, he argues, in the fundamental reconstruction of selfhood, or subjectivity, that attends the advent of an 'age of surplus' under corporate auspices. From this standpoint, consumer culture represents a transition to a society in which identities as well as incomes are not necessarily derived from the possession of productive labor or property. From the same standpoint, pragmatism and literary naturalism become ways of accommodating the new forms of solidarity and subjectivity enabled by the emergence of corporate capitalism. So conceived, they become ways of articulating alternatives to modern, possessive individualism. Livingston argues accordingly that the flight from pragmatism led by Lewis Mumford was an attempt to refurbish a romantic version of modern, possessive individualism. This attempt still shapes our reading of pragmatism, Livingston claims, and will continue to do so until we understand that William James was not merely a well-meaning middleman between Charles Peirce and John Dewey and that James's pragmatism was both a working model of postmodern subjectivity and a novel critique of capitalism.

Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940

Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 PDF Author: James Livingston
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807863033
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
The rise of corporate capitalism was a cultural revolution as well as an economic event, according to James Livingston. That revolution resides, he argues, in the fundamental reconstruction of selfhood, or subjectivity, that attends the advent of an 'age of surplus' under corporate auspices. From this standpoint, consumer culture represents a transition to a society in which identities as well as incomes are not necessarily derived from the possession of productive labor or property. From the same standpoint, pragmatism and literary naturalism become ways of accommodating the new forms of solidarity and subjectivity enabled by the emergence of corporate capitalism. So conceived, they become ways of articulating alternatives to modern, possessive individualism. Livingston argues accordingly that the flight from pragmatism led by Lewis Mumford was an attempt to refurbish a romantic version of modern, possessive individualism. This attempt still shapes our reading of pragmatism, Livingston claims, and will continue to do so until we understand that William James was not merely a well-meaning middleman between Charles Peirce and John Dewey and that James's pragmatism was both a working model of postmodern subjectivity and a novel critique of capitalism.

A Political Economy of Modernism

A Political Economy of Modernism PDF Author: Ronald Schleifer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108472958
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
Analyzes the complex unity of modernist culture, paying special attention to artistic, intellectual, and social institutions that embody value.

Louis D. Brandeis and the Making of Regulated Competition, 1900-1932

Louis D. Brandeis and the Making of Regulated Competition, 1900-1932 PDF Author: Gerald Berk
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521425964
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
This book provides an innovative interpretation of industrialization and statebuilding in the U.S. by tracing the development of regulated competition. Conceptualized by Brandeis and implemented by trade associations and the Federal Trade Commission, regulated competition checked economic power by channeling competition from predation into improvement in products and production processes.

The Incorporation of America

The Incorporation of America PDF Author: Alan Trachtenberg
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780809058280
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Analyzes the development of the U.S.'s modern socioeconomic structure in the late nineteenth century, discussing factors such as westward expansion, mechanization, labor unrest, and the growth of cities.

John Dewey

John Dewey PDF Author: John Narayan
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526104814
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book argues that John Dewey should be read not as a 'local' American thinker but rather as a philosopher of globalisation. Although his work is rooted in late-nineteenth and early twentieth century America, its principal concern is with the role of the United States in a globalised world. Tracing Dewey’s emergence as a global democrat through an examination of his work from The Public and Its Problems (1927) onward, the book shows how he sets out an evolutionary form of global and national democracy, one that has not been fully appreciated even by contemporary scholars of pragmatism. In returning to and recovering this neglected dimension of Dewey's political philosophy, the book highlights how his insights about globalisation and democracy can inform present theoretical debates.

Panic!

Panic! PDF Author: David Andrew Zimmerman
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807830232
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
During the economic depression of the 1890s and the speculative frenzy of the following decade, Wall Street, high finance, and market crises assumed unprecedented visibility in the United States. Fiction writers published scores of novels that explored this new cultural phenomenon. In Panic, David A. Zimmerman studies how American novelists and their readers imagined--and in one case, incited--market crashes and financial panics.Panic examines how Americans' understandings of and attitudes toward securities markets, popular investment, and financial catastrophe were entangled with their conceptions of gender, class, crowds, and history. Blending literary, historical, and cultural analysis, Zimmerman investigates how writers turned to fledgling research in mob psychology, psychic investigations, and conspiracy discourse to understand how mass acts of reading and popular participation in the corporate transformation of the American economy could trigger financial disaster and cultural chaos. In addition, Zimmerman shows how writers, by experimenting with sensationalism, sympathy, the sublime, melodrama, and naturalism, explored the limits of fiction's aesthetic, economic, and ethical capacities in their portrayals of markets in crisis. With readings of canonical as well as lesser-known novelists, Zimmerman provides an original and wide-ranging analysis of the relation between fiction and financial modernity.

A Companion to 20th-Century America

A Companion to 20th-Century America PDF Author: Stephen J. Whitfield
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470998520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 584

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Book Description
A Companion to 20th-Century America is an authoritative survey of the most important topics and themes of twentieth-century American history and historiography. Contains 29 original essays by leading scholars, each assessing the past and current state of American scholarship Includes thematic essays covering topics such as religion, ethnicity, conservatism, foreign policy, and the media, as well as essays covering major time periods Identifies and discusses the most influential literature in the field, and suggests new avenues of research, as the century has drawn to a close

Calculating Promises

Calculating Promises PDF Author: Roy Kreitner
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804768054
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This book is a history of American contract law around the turn of the twentieth century. It meticulously details shifts in our conception of contract by juxtaposing scholarly accounts of contract with case law, and shows how the cases exhibit conflicts for which scholarship offers just one of many possible answers. Breaking with conventional wisdom, the author argues that our current understanding of contract is not the outgrowth of gradual refinements of a centuries-old idea. Rather, contract as we now know it was shaped by a revolution in private law undertaken toward the end of the nineteenth century, when legal scholars established calculating promisors as the centerpiece of their notion of contract. The author maintains that the revolution in contract thinking is best understood in a frame of reference wider than the rules governing the formation and enforcement of contracts. That frame of reference is a cultural negotiation over the nature of the individual subject and the role of the individual in a society undergoing transformation. Areas of central concern include the enforceability of promises to make gifts; the relationship of contracts to speculation and gambling; and the problem of incomplete contracts.

The Cambridge History of American Modernism

The Cambridge History of American Modernism PDF Author: Mark Whalan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108808026
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 948

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Book Description
The Cambridge History of American Modernism examines one of the most innovative periods of American literary history. It offers a comprehensive account of the forms, genres, and media that characterized US modernism: coverage ranges from the traditional, such as short stories, novels, and poetry, to the new media that shaped the period's literary culture, such as jazz, cinema, the skyscraper, and radio. This volume charts how recent methodologies such as ecocriticism, geomodernism, and print culture studies have refashioned understandings of the field, and attends to the contestations and inequities of race, sovereignty, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity that shaped the period and its cultural production. It also explores the geographies and communities wherein US modernism flourished-from its distinctive regions to its metropolitan cities, from its hemispheric connections to the salons and political groupings that hosted new cultural collaborations.

The Quest for “Just and Pure Law”

The Quest for “Just and Pure Law” PDF Author: John Paul Enyeart
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804749868
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Focusing on the political culture forged by Rocky Mountain workers from the 1870s through the 1920s, this book shows how the unique working-class politics of the region led to remarkable successes in securing progressive labor legislation. These successes--especially in improving workers' hours, wages, and safety--in turn played a central role in transforming the nation's attitudes toward workers' rights. Examining political culture in the everyday lives of workers (from shop floors to union halls to recreation), the author uncovers a labor movement based as much on pragmatism as on ideology, and he traces how its members productively focused their efforts on political action at the local and state levels. In the process, they developed a genuinely social-democratic political culture.