The Revolutionary Ascetic

The Revolutionary Ascetic PDF Author: Bruce Mazlish
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351475150
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Why have the great revolutionary leaders of modern times from Robespierre to Lenin and Mao Tse-tung‘so often been ascetics, austere "puritans" with few emotional ties? What functions, political as well as personal, do these ascetic traits perform for the modern revolutionary leader and for his followers?Noted historian and author Bruce Mazlish is convinced that, beginning in the nineteenth century, the needs of modernizing revolutions have produced a distinct new type of political leader, the revolutionary ascetic. This individual's denial of personal pleasures and commitments both enables him to perform politically necessary, if personally repulsive, revolutionary acts, and to command the allegiance of his more worldly followers.Starting with Cromwell and the religious ascetics of the Puritan Revolution, Mazlish shows, in a series of fascinating personality sketches, how this asceticism first became secularized with the French Revolution and then in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was put to the service of a new kind of "total" modernizing revolution in Russia, China, and elsewhere. In two remarkably vivid portraits of Lenin and Mao Tse-tung, Mazlish shows us precisely how two of the century's best-known revolutionaries consciously and unconsciously used their personal asceticism to induce revolutionary change.

The Revolutionary Ascetic

The Revolutionary Ascetic PDF Author: Bruce Mazlish
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351475150
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why have the great revolutionary leaders of modern times from Robespierre to Lenin and Mao Tse-tung‘so often been ascetics, austere "puritans" with few emotional ties? What functions, political as well as personal, do these ascetic traits perform for the modern revolutionary leader and for his followers?Noted historian and author Bruce Mazlish is convinced that, beginning in the nineteenth century, the needs of modernizing revolutions have produced a distinct new type of political leader, the revolutionary ascetic. This individual's denial of personal pleasures and commitments both enables him to perform politically necessary, if personally repulsive, revolutionary acts, and to command the allegiance of his more worldly followers.Starting with Cromwell and the religious ascetics of the Puritan Revolution, Mazlish shows, in a series of fascinating personality sketches, how this asceticism first became secularized with the French Revolution and then in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was put to the service of a new kind of "total" modernizing revolution in Russia, China, and elsewhere. In two remarkably vivid portraits of Lenin and Mao Tse-tung, Mazlish shows us precisely how two of the century's best-known revolutionaries consciously and unconsciously used their personal asceticism to induce revolutionary change.

The Revolutionary Ascetic

The Revolutionary Ascetic PDF Author: Bruce Mazlish
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351475142
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Why have the great revolutionary leaders of modern times?from Robespierre to Lenin and Mao Tse-tung?so often been ascetics, austere "puritans" with few emotional ties? What functions, political as well as personal, do these ascetic traits perform for the modern revolutionary leader and for his followers?Noted historian and author Bruce Mazlish is convinced that, beginning in the nineteenth century, the needs of modernizing revolutions have produced a distinct new type of political leader, the revolutionary ascetic. This individual's denial of personal pleasures and commitments both enables him to perform politically necessary, if personally repulsive, revolutionary acts, and to command the allegiance of his more worldly followers.Starting with Cromwell and the religious ascetics of the Puritan Revolution, Mazlish shows, in a series of fascinating personality sketches, how this asceticism first became secularized with the French Revolution and then in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was put to the service of a new kind of "total" modernizing revolution in Russia, China, and elsewhere. In two remarkably vivid portraits of Lenin and Mao Tse-tung, Mazlish shows us precisely how two of the century's best-known revolutionaries consciously and unconsciously used their personal asceticism to induce revolutionary change.

Beyond the Monastery Walls

Beyond the Monastery Walls PDF Author: Patrick Lally Michelson
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299312003
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
As the cultural and ideological foundations of imperial Russia were threatened by forces of modernity, an array of Orthodox churchmen, theologians, and lay thinkers turned to asceticism, hoping to ensure the coming Kingdom of God promised to the Russian nation.

Lenin

Lenin PDF Author: Christopher Read
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134624719
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
From a highly distinguished author on the subject, this biography is an excellent scholarly introduction to one of the key figures of the Russian Revolution and post-Tsarist Russia. Not only does it make use of archive material made newly available in the glasnost and post-Soviet eras, it re-examines traditional sources as well, providing an original interpretation of Lenin's life and historical importance. Focal points of this study are: Lenin's revolutionary ascetic personality how he exploited culture, education and propaganda his relationship to Marxism his changing class analysis of Russia his 'populist' instincts. A prominent figure at the forefront of debates on the Russina revolution, Read makes sure that Lenin remains in his place as a highly influential and significant figure of the recent past.

Way of the Ascetics

Way of the Ascetics PDF Author: Tito Colliander
Publisher: St Vladimir's Seminary Press
ISBN: 9780881410495
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
"Way of the Ascetics is a rich, compact introduction for modern readers to the Eastern Christian spiritual tradition that has been an inspiration to millions for centuries. These compassionate and insightful reflections on self-control and inner peace are meant to lead the readers to fuller union with God. The author makes a generous selection of succinct yet profound extracts from the spiritual Fathers and provides an illuminating commentary and practical applications for daily devotion. He tempers austerity with common sense, warmth, and even humor, as he urges us on our journey toward God. Written for lay persons living fully in the world as much as for clergy, Way of the Ascetics is an excellent resource for daily meditation, authentic spiritual guidance, and a revitalized religious life."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Maoist People's War and the Revolution of Everyday Life in Nepal

Maoist People's War and the Revolution of Everyday Life in Nepal PDF Author: Ina Zharkevich
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108600387
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
By providing a rich ethnography of wartime social processes in the former Maoist heartland of Nepal, this book explores how the Maoist People's War (1996–2006) transformed Nepali society. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with people who were located at the epicentre of the conflict, including both ardent Maoist supporters and 'reluctant rebels', it explores how a remote Himalayan village was forged as the centre of the Maoist rebellion, how its inhabitants coped with the situation of war and the Maoist regime of governance, and how they came to embrace the Maoist project and maintain ordinary life amidst the war while living in a guerilla enclave. By focusing on people's everyday lives, the book illuminates how the everyday became a primary site of revolution of crafting new subjectivities, introducing 'new' social practices and displacing the 'old' ones, and reconfiguring the ways that people act in and think about the world through the process of 'embodied change'.

Saints and Revolutionaries

Saints and Revolutionaries PDF Author: Marcia A. Morris
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438413688
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
An examination of literary works spanning more than seven centuries, this volume studies the ascetic hero and asceticism, exploring the elusive interplay between religion, politics, and belles lettres in Russia. The first part places works including the thirteenth-century Kievan Crypt Patericon and Life of Avraamii Smolenskii, Epifanii's Life of Sergii Radonezhskii, and other lives written in the north of Russia, in the context of crucial religious doctrines such as apocalypticism and deification. The author shows how Old Russian literature plays a major cultural role in the continuing development of these doctrines on Russian soil. The second part traces a revival of the Russian fascination with themes of apocalypse and perfectibility to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Morris also documents the development of a divergence in ideological approach between Russian writers who continued to view apocalypticism and deification as religious phenomena and those who used them as tools of social and political struggle. Works by Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chernyshevsky, and Gorky, as well as classic novels of the socialist realist tradition are analyzed as evidence of the underlying unity of the literary manifestations of this ostensibly bifurcated intellectual tradition.

The Leader, the Led, and the Psyche

The Leader, the Led, and the Psyche PDF Author: Bruce Mazlish
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351480189
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In this book of absorbing stories, Bruce Mazlish illuminates the lives of intellectual and political leaders with the penetrating light of psychohistory and in doing so illuminates our own lives as well. A pioneer in this field, Mazlish demonstrates that study of the origins of leaders—their personal history—can help us understand their work, and that only in a study of their context, can we grasp their impact on events. Mazlish brings the insights of psychoanalysis to bear on a wide spectrum of leaders, beginning with those who created the theories of psychoanalysis: Darwin, who began to uncover the story of the human species; Freud, whose theory of individual behavior was rooted in Darwin's evolutionary biology; and Nietzsche, whose philosophy can be seen as a precursor to Freud. He studies intellectual leaders whose work stimulated political change: Marx, who inspired a revolution and "a great secular religion"; Thoreau, who fantasized independence within a dependent life; Jevons, whose economic theories reflected a private tension between ambition and duty; and Weber, a man of reason and passion, whose theories emerged from personal traumas. A section on political leadership examines polar opposites: the raging mystic but opportunist Khomeini; and Orwell, whose hatred for totalitarianism was less fierce than his passive fear. A final section on the psychohistory of groups focuses on the United States, exploring the polarities of American life, its light-dark dichotomies. Mazlish finds that these ambivalences explain "the American psyche"—from the Puritan's melancholy conscience and Washington's sense of parental betrayal that compelled a break with the father-mother country to Nixon's uncritical self-righteousness and his conviction of being always under attack.

The Seven Deadly Sins

The Seven Deadly Sins PDF Author: Stanford M. Lyman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1461644070
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
When Stanford M. Lyman authored The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil in 1978 it was hailed by Alasdair MacIntyre as "a book of absorbing interest and importance...[that] places us all in his debt." By Nelson Hart as "a masterful and thought-provoking book...[that] is the only scholarly treatment of sin that is so well-informed by the best of ancient through modern perspectives." By James A. Aho as a work whose "abstract hardly does justice to the scholarly and detailed analysis of sin." And by Harry Cohen as a "book...[that] stands as a beautiful illustration of what holistic, idiosyncratic, interdisciplinary, and creative thinking and writing can bring to bear on the age-old problem of society and evil." The American Sociological Association's section on the Sociology of the Emotions selected this book as one of the works that laid the foundations for the study of pride, lust, envy, and anger—basic sentiments embedded in the social process. For this revised and expanded edition Lyman has written a new chapter, "Sentiments, Sin, and Social Conflict: Toward a Sociology of the Emotions." The new edition will be a valuable work for courses in social psychology, ethics, deviance, and the sociology of morals and of religion.

An Apprehensive Aesthetic

An Apprehensive Aesthetic PDF Author: Andrew McNamara
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039117208
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
The book was awarded The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Book Prize in 2010. Art continues to bemuse and confuse many people today. Yet, its critical analyses are saturated with daunting analyses of contemporary art's exhaustion, its predictability or its absorption into global commercial culture. In this book, the author seeks to clarify this apprehensive perception of art. He argues it is a consequence not only of confounding art-works, but also of the paradoxical impetus of a culture of modernity. By positively reassessing the perplexing or apprehensive features of cultural modernity as well as of aesthetic inquiry, this book redefines the ambitions of art in the wake of this legacy. In the process, it challenges many familiar approaches to art inquiry in order to offer a new understanding of the aesthetic, social and cultural aspirations of art in our time.