Author: Paul Sagar
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691191514
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
How David Hume and Adam Smith forged a new way of thinking about the modern state What is the modern state? Conspicuously undertheorized in recent political theory, this question persistently animated the best minds of the Enlightenment. Recovering David Hume and Adam Smith's long-underappreciated contributions to the history of political thought, The Opinion of Mankind considers how, following Thomas Hobbes's epochal intervention in the mid-seventeenth century, subsequent thinkers grappled with explaining how the state came into being, what it fundamentally might be, and how it could claim rightful authority over those subject to its power. Hobbes has cast a long shadow over Western political thought, particularly regarding the theory of the state. This book shows how Hume and Smith, the two leading lights of the Scottish Enlightenment, forged an alternative way of thinking about the organization of modern politics. They did this in part by going back to the foundations: rejecting Hobbes's vision of human nature and his arguments about our capacity to form stable societies over time. In turn, this was harnessed to a deep reconceptualization of how to think philosophically about politics in a secular world. The result was an emphasis on the "opinion of mankind," the necessary psychological basis of all political organization. Demonstrating how Hume and Smith broke away from Hobbesian state theory, The Opinion of Mankind also suggests ways in which these thinkers might shape how we think about politics today, and in turn how we might construct better political theory.
Author: Jamin Creed Rowan
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812249291
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
The Sociable City chronicles how, as the city's physical and social landscapes evolved over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, urban intellectuals developed new vocabularies, narratives, and representational forms to explore and advocate for the social configurations made possible by urban living.
Author: Steven D. Kale
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801883866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
Challenging many of the conclusions of recent historiography, including the depiction of salonnières as influential power brokers, French Salons offers an original, penetrating, and engaging analysis of elite culture and society in France before, during, and after the Revolution.
Author: Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472115730
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
The first cultural and political history of German Freemasonry in the 19th and early 20th centuries
Author: Heikki Haara
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319993259
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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Book Description
This book centres on Samuel Pufendorf’s (1632–1694) moral and political philosophy, a subject of recently renewed interest among intellectual historians, philosophers and legal scholars in the English-speaking world. Pufendorf’s significance in conceptualizing sociability in a way that ties moral philosophy, the theory of the state, political economy, and moral psychology together has already been acknowledged, but this book is the first systematic investigation of the moral psychological underpinnings of Pufendorf’s theory of sociability in their own right. Readers will discover how Pufendorf’s psychological and social explanation of sociability plays a crucial role in his natural law theory. By drawing attention to Pufendorf’s scattered remarks and observations on human psychology, a new interpretation of the importance of moral psychology is presented. The author maintains that Pufendorf’s reflection on the psychological and physical capacities of human nature also matters for his description of how people adopt sociability as their moral standard in practice. We see how, since Pufendorf’s interest in human nature is mainly political, moral psychological formulations are important for Pufendorf’s theorizing of social and political order. This work is particularly useful for scholars investigating the multifaceted role of passions and emotions in the history of moral and political philosophy. It also affords a better understanding of what later philosophers, such as Smith, Hume or Rousseau, might have find appealing in Pufendorf’s writings. As such, this book will also interest researchers of the Enlightenment, natural law and early modern philosophy.
Author: Antoine Lilti
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199772347
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
The World of the Salons is a revisionist study of the French salon of the eighteenth century, arguing that it was a place governed by social hierarchy, not equality, connected to the world of the Court, and not the fount of the Enlightenment as has traditionally been believed.
Author: Comunello, Francesca
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1613503393
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
The recent popularity of Social Network Sites (SNS) shows that there is a growing interest in articulating, making visible, and managing personal or professional relationships through technology-enabled environments. Networked Sociability and Individualism: Technology for Personal and Professional Relationships provides a multidisciplinary framework for analyzing the new forms of sociability enabled by digital media and networks. This book focuses on a variety of social media and computer-mediated communication environments with the aim of identifying and understanding different types of social behavior and identity expression.
Author: Gillian Russell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521026093
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
This 2002 volume explores the often overlooked social networks of Romantic figures.
Author: Ralph Schroeder
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 178735122X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
The internet has fundamentally transformed society in the past 25 years, yet existing theories of mass or interpersonal communication do not work well in understanding a digital world. Nor has this understanding been helped by disciplinary specialization and a continual focus on the latest innovations. Ralph Schroeder takes a longer-term view, synthesizing perspectives and findings from various social science disciplines in four countries: the United States, Sweden, India and China. His comparison highlights, among other observations, that smartphones are in many respects more important than PC-based internet uses. Social Theory after the Internet focuses on everyday uses and effects of the internet, including information seeking and big data, and explains how the internet has gone beyond traditional media in, for example, enabling Donald Trump and Narendra Modi to come to power. Schroeder puts forward a sophisticated theory of the role of the internet, and how both technological and social forces shape its significance. He provides a sweeping and penetrating study, theoretically ambitious and at the same time always empirically grounded.The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of digital media and society, the internet and politics, and the social implications of big data.
Author: Istvan Hont
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674286197
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 161
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Book Description
Scholars normally emphasize the contrast between the two great eighteenth-century thinkers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. Rousseau is seen as a critic of modernity, Smith as an apologist. Istvan Hont, however, finds significant commonalities in their work, arguing that both were theorists of commercial society and from surprisingly similar perspectives. In making his case, Hont begins with the concept of commercial society and explains why that concept has much in common with what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant called unsocial sociability. This is why many earlier scholars used to refer to an Adam Smith Problem and, in a somewhat different way, to a Jean-Jacques Rousseau Problem. The two problems—and the questions about the relationship between individualism and altruism that they raised—were, in fact, more similar than has usually been thought because both arose from the more fundamental problems generated by thinking about morality and politics in a commercial society. Commerce entails reciprocity, but a commercial society also entails involuntary social interdependence, relentless economic competition, and intermittent interstate rivalry. This was the world to which Rousseau and Smith belonged, and Politics in Commercial Society is an account of how they thought about it. Building his argument on the similarity between Smith’s and Rousseau’s theoretical concerns, Hont shows the relevance of commercial society to modern politics—the politics of the nation-state, global commerce, international competition, social inequality, and democratic accountability.
