The Politics of Cultural Despair

The Politics of Cultural Despair PDF Author: Fritz R. Stern
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520342690
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
This is a study in the pathology of cultural criticism. By analyzing the thought and influence of three leading critics of modern Germany, this study will demonstrate the dangers and dilemmas of a particular type of cultural despair. Lagarde, Langbehn, and Moeller van den Bruck-their active lives spanning the years from the middle of the past century to the threshold of Hitler's Third Reich-attacked, often incisively and justly, the deficiencies of German culture and the German spirit. But they were more than the critics of Germany's cultural crisis; they were its symptoms and victims as well. Unable to endure the ills which they diagnosed and which they had experienced in their own lives, they sought to become prophets who would point the way to a national rebirth. Hence, they propounded all manner of reforms, ruthless and idealistic, nationalistic and utopian. It was this leap from despair to utopia across all existing reality that gave their thought its fantastic quality.

The Politics of Cultural Despair

The Politics of Cultural Despair PDF Author: Fritz R. Stern
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520342690
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book

Book Description
This is a study in the pathology of cultural criticism. By analyzing the thought and influence of three leading critics of modern Germany, this study will demonstrate the dangers and dilemmas of a particular type of cultural despair. Lagarde, Langbehn, and Moeller van den Bruck-their active lives spanning the years from the middle of the past century to the threshold of Hitler's Third Reich-attacked, often incisively and justly, the deficiencies of German culture and the German spirit. But they were more than the critics of Germany's cultural crisis; they were its symptoms and victims as well. Unable to endure the ills which they diagnosed and which they had experienced in their own lives, they sought to become prophets who would point the way to a national rebirth. Hence, they propounded all manner of reforms, ruthless and idealistic, nationalistic and utopian. It was this leap from despair to utopia across all existing reality that gave their thought its fantastic quality.

Orwell and the Politics of Despair

Orwell and the Politics of Despair PDF Author: Alok Rai
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521397476
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Drawing on a wide range of Orwell's writing Rai charts his progression from rebellion through reconciliation to despair.

The Politics of Cultural Despair

The Politics of Cultural Despair PDF Author: Fritz Richard Stern
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520026438
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
"An enlightening and solidly documented book of great value to those who would like to trace the ideolgoical roots behind the most erratic and dramatic politics phases of modern Germany."--"American Political Science Review""If only because it presents the intellectual and emotional background to National Socialism with rare clarity and penetrating analysis of its several and often sharply contrasting components, the ably written and profoundly interesting book...would be of importance....With its useful footnotes, selective bibliography and good index Professor Stern's study is American scholarship at its best."-"International Affairs"

Biting at the Grave

Biting at the Grave PDF Author: Padraig O'Malley
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807002094
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
"In an eloquent and haunting book, O'Malley makes the fanaticism of [the hunger strikers] and their supporters, the obdurate and morally discredited tactics of the British Government and the hopeless combat of the Protestant and Roman Catholic factions in the Northern Ireland struggle explicable, and exposes the politics behind it."--The New York Times Book Review

The Politics of Despair

The Politics of Despair PDF Author: Tracy Campbell
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813187397
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Shortly after 1900, tens of thousands of tobacco growers throughout Kentucky and Tennessee convulsed the region for nearly a decade in a revolt against the monopolistic practices of the American Tobacco Company. Though the revolt known as the Tobacco Wars remains one of the more remarkable insurgencies of rural America, it is also one of the more misunderstood. In this first major account of the uprising in over half a century, Tracy Campbell tells the story of these embattled farmers and casts a provocative new light on the issues that fueled the Tobacco Wars. When tobacco prices fell below the cost of production in the early 1900s, farmers in western Kentucky and Tennessee, faced with desperate economic circumstances, formed cooperatives through which they could pool their crops and withhold tobacco from the market until a satisfactory price was offered. Campbell recounts the organizational underpinnings of the notorious "Black Patch War" and the forces that drove farmers to seek violent solutions to their economic ills. Campbell then expands the story to the burley region, where a simultaneous movement was under way. In 1908, over thirty thousand burley growers undertook the only successful large-scale agricultural strike in American history. Campbell brings this drama to life and describes the emotional day when the farmers achieved their unprecedented victory over the powerful Tobacco Trust. The Tobacco Wars represented one of the last desperate gasps from the countryside before the onset of "agribusiness" drove millions of farmers and their families away for good. The Politics of Despair thus stands as a unique reminder of a tradition of protest that has, perhaps, been irretrievably lost. This book will interest not only rural and labor historians and students of the American South but anyone concerned with the profound issues surrounding the decline of rural America.

Vanguard or Vandals

Vanguard or Vandals PDF Author: Jon Abbink
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047407008
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
This book contains a range of original studies on one of the major challenges in Africa today: the controversial role of youth in politics, conflict and rebellious movements. The issue is not only the drafting of child soldiers into insurgent armies or predatory militias, as in Somalia, Sierra Leone or Congo, but, more generally, that of the problematic insertion of large numbers of young people in the socio-economic and political order of post-colonial Africa. Even educated youths are being confronted with a lack of opportunities, blocked social mobility, and despair about the future. African youth, while forming a numerical majority, largely feel excluded from power, are socio-economically marginalized, thwarted in their ambitions, and have little access to representative positions or political power.

The Politics of Despair

The Politics of Despair PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Communist parties
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description


The Highway of Despair

The Highway of Despair PDF Author: Robyn Marasco
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231538898
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Hegel's "highway of despair," introduced in his Phenomenology of Spirit, is the tortured path traveled by "natural consciousness" on its way to freedom. Despair, the passionate residue of Hegelian critique, also indicates fugitive opportunities for freedom and preserves the principle of hope against all hope. Analyzing the works of an eclectic cast of thinkers, Robyn Marasco considers the dynamism of despair as a critical passion, reckoning with the forms of historical life forged along Hegel's highway. The Highway of Despair follows Theodor Adorno, Georges Bataille, and Frantz Fanon as they each read, resist, and reconfigure a strand of thought in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Confronting the twentieth-century collapse of a certain revolutionary dialectic, these thinkers struggle to revalue critical philosophy and recast Left Hegelianism within the contexts of genocidal racism, world war, and colonial domination. Each thinker also re-centers the role of passion in critique. Arguing against more recent trends in critical theory that promise an escape from despair, Marasco shows how passion frustrates the resolutions of reason and faith. Embracing the extremism of what Marx, in the spirit of Hegel, called the "ruthless critique of everything existing," she affirms the contemporary purchase of radical critical theory, resulting in a passionate approach to political thought.

Politics of US Labor

Politics of US Labor PDF Author: David Milton
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0853455708
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
The alliance of the industrial labor movement with the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt has, perhaps more than any other factor, shaped the course of class relations in the United States over the ensuing forty years. Much has been written on the interests that were thereby served, and those that were coopted. In this detailed examination of the strategies pursued by both radical labor and the capitalist class in the struggle for industrial unionism, David Milton argues that while radical social change and independent political action were traded off by the industrial working class for economic rights, this was neither automatic nor inevitable. Rather, the outcome was the result of a fierce struggle in which capital fought labor and both fought for control over government labor policy. And, as he demonstrates, crucial to the outcome was the specific nature of the political coalitions contending for supremacy. In analyzing the politics of this struggle, Milton presents a fine description of the major strikes, beginning in 1933-1934, that led to the formation of the CIO and the great industrial unions. He looks closely at the role of the radical political groups, including the Communist Party, the Trotskyists, and the Socialist Party, and provides an enlightening discussion of their vulnerability during the red-baiting era. He also examines the battle between the AFL and the CIO for control of the labor movement, the alliance of the AFL with business interests, and the role of the Catholic Church. Finally, he shows how the extraordinary adeptness of President Roosevelt in allying with labor while at the same time exploiting divisions within the movement was essential to the successful channeling of social revolt into economic demands.

The Politics of Cultural Despair

The Politics of Cultural Despair PDF Author: Fritz Richard Stern
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN:
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description