Requiem For Modern Politics

Requiem For Modern Politics PDF Author: William Ophuls
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429977301
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
This long-promised sequel to Ophuls’s influential and controversial classic Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity is an equally provocative critique of the liberal philosophy of government. Ophuls contends that the modern political paradigm—that is, the body of political concepts and beliefs bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment—is no longer intellectually tenable or practically viable. Our attempt to live individualistically, hedonistically, and rationally has failed utterly, causing a comprehensive crisis that is at once political, military, economic, ecological, ethical, psychological, and spiritual. Liberal politics has abandoned virtue, rejected community, and flouted nature, thereby becoming the author of its own demise. By exposing the intrinsically contradictory and self-destructive character of Hobbesian political systems, Ophuls subverts our conventional wisdom at every turn. Indeed, his impassioned text reads more like a Greek tragedy than a conventional political argument. He critiques feminism, multiculturalism, the welfare state, and a host of other “liberal” shibboleths—but Ophuls is not yet another neoconservative. The aim of his thesis is far more radical and progressive, offering a political vision that entirely transcends the categories of liberal thought. His is a Thoreauvian vision of a “politics of consciousness” rooted in ecology as the moral and intellectual basis for governance in the twenty-first century. Ophuls holds that a polity based on a renewed erotic connection with nature offers a genuine solution to this crisis of contemporary civilization and that only within such a polity will it be possible to fulfill the worthy liberal goal of individual self-development. Ophuls’s work will interest and challenge a wide spectrum of readers, though it will not necessarily be well liked or easily accepted. No one will put down this book with his or her settled convictions about American culture intact, nor will readers ever again take modern civilization and its survival for granted.

Requiem For Modern Politics

Requiem For Modern Politics PDF Author: William Ophuls
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429977301
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 506

Get Book Here

Book Description
This long-promised sequel to Ophuls’s influential and controversial classic Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity is an equally provocative critique of the liberal philosophy of government. Ophuls contends that the modern political paradigm—that is, the body of political concepts and beliefs bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment—is no longer intellectually tenable or practically viable. Our attempt to live individualistically, hedonistically, and rationally has failed utterly, causing a comprehensive crisis that is at once political, military, economic, ecological, ethical, psychological, and spiritual. Liberal politics has abandoned virtue, rejected community, and flouted nature, thereby becoming the author of its own demise. By exposing the intrinsically contradictory and self-destructive character of Hobbesian political systems, Ophuls subverts our conventional wisdom at every turn. Indeed, his impassioned text reads more like a Greek tragedy than a conventional political argument. He critiques feminism, multiculturalism, the welfare state, and a host of other “liberal” shibboleths—but Ophuls is not yet another neoconservative. The aim of his thesis is far more radical and progressive, offering a political vision that entirely transcends the categories of liberal thought. His is a Thoreauvian vision of a “politics of consciousness” rooted in ecology as the moral and intellectual basis for governance in the twenty-first century. Ophuls holds that a polity based on a renewed erotic connection with nature offers a genuine solution to this crisis of contemporary civilization and that only within such a polity will it be possible to fulfill the worthy liberal goal of individual self-development. Ophuls’s work will interest and challenge a wide spectrum of readers, though it will not necessarily be well liked or easily accepted. No one will put down this book with his or her settled convictions about American culture intact, nor will readers ever again take modern civilization and its survival for granted.

Desolation and Enlightenment

Desolation and Enlightenment PDF Author: Ira Katznelson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231111959
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, and David Truman, detailing their engagement with the larger project of reclaiming the West's moral bearing.

Engaging the Everyday

Engaging the Everyday PDF Author: John M. Meyer
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262028905
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
"Meyer pioneers a uniquely political approach to environmental social criticism that follows from a startling central propostion: that it is not outright oppression and denialism that are the most significant impediments but what he aptly terms the 'resonance dilemma.' This is the failure of climate and environmental challenges - however important we may grant that they are - to strike us as integral everyday concerns. This lively, eloquent, accessible volume models the very style of social criticism that it calls for in response to this dilemma: a 'resonant' environmental criticism that works on (rather than against) everyday practices." Lisa Disch, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, author of Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy.

Plato's Revenge

Plato's Revenge PDF Author: William Ophuls
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262297639
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
A provocative essay that imagines a truly ecological future based on political transformation rather than the superficialities of “sustainability.” In this provocative call for a new ecological politics, William Ophuls starts from a radical premise: “sustainability” is impossible. We are on an industrial Titanic, fueled by rapidly depleting stocks of fossil hydrocarbons. Making the deck chairs from recyclable materials and feeding the boilers with biofuels is futile. In the end, the ship is doomed by the laws of thermodynamics and by the implacable biological and geological limits that are already beginning to pinch. Ophuls warns us that we are headed for a postindustrial future that, however technologically sophisticated, will resemble the preindustrial past in many important respects. With Plato's Revenge, Ophuls, author of Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, envisions political and social transformations that will lead to a new natural-law politics based on the realities of ecology, physics, and psychology. In a discussion that ranges widely—from ecology to quantum physics to Jungian psychology to Eastern religion to Western political philosophy—Ophuls argues for an essentially Platonic politics of consciousness dedicated to inner cultivation rather than outward expansion and the pursuit of perpetual growth. We would then achieve a way of life that is materially and institutionally simple but culturally and spiritually rich, one in which humanity flourishes in harmony with nature.

Counter-Enlightenments

Counter-Enlightenments PDF Author: Graeme Garrard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134662238
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
The Enlightenment and its legacy are still actively debated, with the Enlightenment acting as a key organizing concept in philosophy, social theory and the history of ideas. Counter-Enlightenments is the first full-length study to deal with the history and development of counter-enlightenment thought from its inception in the eighteenth century right through to the present. Engaging in a critical dialogue with Isaiah Berlin’s work, this book analyzes the concept of counter-enlightenment and some of the most important issues and problems it raises. Graeme Garrard explores the diverse forms of thought in this field, with a wide-ranging review of the principle figures of the past two hundred and fifty years, and an incisive assessment of the persuasiveness of the most common and important criticisms of the Enlightenment.

Requiem for a nation

Requiem for a nation PDF Author: Roberto Cavallini
Publisher: Mimesis
ISBN: 8869771156
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
The primary objective of this collection is to examine the ways in which religion, culture and politics converge in configuring the contradictions of post-war Italy’s cultural history, starting from the assumption that conducting a critical reflection on Italian postwar visual culture requires investigating the inevitable impact of Catholic religion on everyday life in its social, political and cultural dimensions. The volume takes advantage of the privileged position of cinema to explore and critique religion’s influence on the Italian cultural landscape. This edited anthology thus seeks to probe how religion is experienced, practiced, criticized and represented from various methodological perspectives (historical, philological, aesthetic, psychoanalytical, popular studies, etc.) through four main sections: ‘Propaganda and Censorship’, ‘Framing Belief: Pasolini and Petri’, ‘Religion in Italian Popular Cinema’ and ‘Ancient Rituals, Modern Myths’.

The Sixties

The Sixties PDF Author: Todd Gitlin
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0307834026
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
Say “the Sixties” and the images start coming, images of a time when all authority was defied and millions of young Americans thought they could change the world—either through music, drugs, and universal love or by “putting their bodies on the line” against injustice and war. Todd Gitlin, the highly regarded writer, media critic, and professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, has written an authoritative and compelling account of this supercharged decade—a decade he helped shape as an early president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and an organizer of the first national demonstration against the Vietnam war. Part critical history, part personal memoir, part celebration, and part meditation, this critically acclaimed work resurrects a generation on all its glory and tragedy.

Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited

Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited PDF Author: William Ophuls
Publisher: W H Freeman & Company
ISBN: 9780716723134
Category : Environmental policy.
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description


Requiem for the American Dream

Requiem for the American Dream PDF Author: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609807375
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! In his first major book on the subject of income inequality, Noam Chomsky skewers the fundamental tenets of neoliberalism and casts a clear, cold, patient eye on the economic facts of life. What are the ten principles of concentration of wealth and power at work in America today? They're simple enough: reduce democracy, shape ideology, redesign the economy, shift the burden onto the poor and middle classes, attack the solidarity of the people, let special interests run the regulators, engineer election results, use fear and the power of the state to keep the rabble in line, manufacture consent, marginalize the population. In Requiem for the American Dream, Chomsky devotes a chapter to each of these ten principles, and adds readings from some of the core texts that have influenced his thinking to bolster his argument. To create Requiem for the American Dream, Chomsky and his editors, the filmmakers Peter Hutchison, Kelly Nyks, and Jared P. Scott, spent countless hours together over the course of five years, from 2011 to 2016. After the release of the film version, Chomsky and the editors returned to the many hours of tape and transcript and created a document that included three times as much text as was used in the film. The book that has resulted is nonetheless arguably the most succinct and tightly woven of Chomsky's long career, a beautiful vessel--including old-fashioned ligatures in the typeface--in which to carry Chomsky's bold and uncompromising vision, his perspective on the economic reality and its impact on our political and moral well-being as a nation. "During the Great Depression, which I'm old enough to remember, it was bad–much worse subjectively than today. But there was a sense that we'll get out of this somehow, an expectation that things were going to get better . . ." —from Requiem for the American Dream

Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism

Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism PDF Author: Cat Moir
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004272879
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
In Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics, Cat Moir offers a new interpretation of the philosophy of Ernst Bloch. The reception of Bloch’s work has seen him variously painted as a naïve realist, a romantic nature philosopher, a totalitarian thinker, and an irrationalist whose obscure literary style stands in for a lack of systematic rigour. Moir challenges these conceptions of Bloch by reconstructing the ontological, epistemological, and political dimensions of his speculative materialism. Through a close, historically contextualised reading of Bloch’s major work of ontology, Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz (The Materialism Problem, its History and Substance), Moir presents Bloch as one of the twentieth century’s most significant critical thinkers.