The Tragedy of Political Science

The Tragedy of Political Science PDF Author: David M. Ricci
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300037609
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
"This book is both a comprehensive review and a thoughtful critique of the development of political science as an academic discipline in this century. David Ricci eloquently describes the tragic dilemma of political science in America: when political scholars deal with politics in a scientific fashion, they reveal facts that contradict democratic expectations; when the same scholars seek to justify those expectations, their moral arguments carry little professional weight."--Jacket.

The Tragedy of Political Science

The Tragedy of Political Science PDF Author: David M. Ricci
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300037609
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book Here

Book Description
"This book is both a comprehensive review and a thoughtful critique of the development of political science as an academic discipline in this century. David Ricci eloquently describes the tragic dilemma of political science in America: when political scholars deal with politics in a scientific fashion, they reveal facts that contradict democratic expectations; when the same scholars seek to justify those expectations, their moral arguments carry little professional weight."--Jacket.

The Politics of Political Science

The Politics of Political Science PDF Author: Paulo Ravecca
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351110535
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
In this thought-provoking book, Paulo Ravecca presents a series of interlocking studies on the politics of political science in the Americas. Focusing mainly on the cases of Chile and Uruguay, Ravecca employs different strands of critical theory to challenge the mainstream narrative about the development of the discipline in the region, emphasizing its ideological aspects and demonstrating how the discipline itself has been shaped by power relations. Ravecca metaphorically charts the (non-linear) transit from “cold” to “warm” to “hot” intellectual temperatures to illustrate his—alternative—narrative. Beginning with a detailed quantitative study of three regional academic journals, moving to the analysis of the role of subjectivity (and political trauma) in academia and its discourse in relation to the dictatorships in Chile and Uruguay, and arriving finally at an intimate meditation on the experience of being a queer scholar in the Latin American academy of the 21st century, Ravecca guides his readers through differing explorations, languages, and methods. The Politics of Political Science: Re-Writing Latin American Experiences offers an essential reflection on both the relationship between knowledges and politics and the political and ethical role of the scholar today, demonstrating how the study of the politics of knowledge deepens our understanding of the politics of our times.

The Tragedy of Political Theory

The Tragedy of Political Theory PDF Author: J. Peter Euben
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691218188
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
In this book J. Peter Euben argues that Greek tragedy was the context for classical political theory and that such theory read in terms of tragedy provides a ground for contemporary theorizing alert to the concerns of post-modernism, such as normalization, the dominance of humanism, and the status of theory. Euben shows how ancient Greek theater offered a place and occasion for reflection on the democratic culture it helped constitute, in part by confronting the audience with the otherwise unacknowledged principles of social exclusion that sustained its community. Euben makes his argument through a series of comparisons between three dramas (Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos, and Euripides' Bacchae) and three works of classical political theory (Thucydides' History and Plato's Apology of Socrates and Republic) on the issues of justice, identity, and corruption. He brings his discussion to a contemporary American setting in a concluding chapter on Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 in which the road from Argos to Athens, built to differentiate a human domain from the undefined outside, has become a Los Angeles freeway desecrating the land and its people in a predatory urban sprawl.

The Tragedy of American Science

The Tragedy of American Science PDF Author: Clifford D. Conner
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 164259203X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
A look at the destructive history of science-for-profit, including its toll on the US pandemic response, by the author of A People’s History of Science. Despite a facade of brilliant technological advances, American science has led humanity to the brink of interrelated disasters. In The Tragedy of American Science, historian of science Clifford D. Conner describes the dual processes by which this history has unfolded since the Second World War, addressing the corporatization and the militarization of science in the US. He examines the role of private profit considerations in determining the direction of scientific inquiry—and the ways those considerations have dangerously undermined the integrity of sciences impacting food, water, air, medicine, and the climate. In addition, he explores the relationship between scientific industries and the US military, discussing the innumerable financial and human scientific resources that have been diverted from other critical areas in order to further military aggrandizement and technological development. While the underlying problems may appear intractable, Conner compellingly argues that replacing the current science-for-profit system with a science-for-human-needs system is not an impossible utopian dream—and the first step to a better future is grappling with the mistakes of the past.

The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy

The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy PDF Author: Walter A. McDougall
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300224516
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
A fierce critique of civil religion as the taproot of America’s bid for global hegemony Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Walter A. McDougall argues powerfully that a pervasive but radically changing faith that “God is on our side” has inspired U.S. foreign policy ever since 1776. The first comprehensive study of the role played by civil religion in U.S. foreign relations over the entire course of the country’s history, McDougall’s book explores the deeply infused religious rhetoric that has sustained and driven an otherwise secular republic through peace, war, and global interventions for more than two hundred years. From the Founding Fathers and the crusade for independence to the Monroe Doctrine, through World Wars I and II and the decades-long Cold War campaign against “godless Communism,” this coruscating polemic reveals the unacknowledged but freely exercised dogmas of civil religion that bind together a “God blessed” America, sustaining the nation in its pursuit of an ever elusive global destiny.

Fear of Diversity

Fear of Diversity PDF Author: Arlene W. Saxonhouse
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226735542
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This wide-ranging and provocative book locates the origin of political science in the everyday world of ancient Greek life, thought, and culture. Arlene Saxonhouse contends that the Greeks, confronted by the puzzling diversity of the physical world, sought an unseen and unifying force that would constrain and explain it. This drive toward unity did more than place the mind over the senses: it led the Greeks to play down the very real differences - in particular the female, the family, and sexuality - in both their political and personal lives. While the dramatists and Plato captured the tragic consequences of trying to do so, it was not until Aristotle and his Politics did the Greek world - and its heirs - have a true science of politics, one capable of embracing diversity and accommodating conflict. Much of the book's force derives from Saxonhouse's masterful interweaving of Greek philosophy and drama, her juxtaposition of the thought of the pre-Socratics, Plato, and other philosophers to the cultural life revealed by such dramatists as Aristophanes and Aeschylus. Her approach opens up fresh understandings of such issues as the Greeks' fear of the feminine and their attempts to ignore the demands that gender, reproduction, and the family inevitably make on the individual and the family. The Fear of Diversity represents an important contribution to political philosophy, classics, and gender studies.

Theories of International Politics and Zombies

Theories of International Politics and Zombies PDF Author: Daniel W. Drezner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691223521
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
How international relations theory can be applied to a zombie invasion What would happen to international politics if the dead rose from the grave and started to eat the living? Daniel Drezner’s groundbreaking book answers the question that other international relations scholars have been too scared to ask. Addressing timely issues with analytical bite, Drezner looks at how well-known theories from international relations might be applied to a war with zombies. Exploring the plots of popular zombie films, songs, and books, Theories of International Politics and Zombies predicts realistic scenarios for the political stage in the face of a zombie threat and considers how valid—or how rotten—such scenarios might be. With worldwide calamity feeling ever closer, this new apocalyptic edition includes updates throughout as well as a new chapter on postcolonial perspectives.

Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy

Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy PDF Author: Robert Carl Pirro
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780875802688
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
A German Jewish refugee suffering tremendous personal and political upheaval during the years of Nazi conquest, Hannah Arendt turned to classical literature and drama as she struggled to make sense of the terrible events of her time. Studying fiction, plays, and poetry, she found a way to meld theoretical political philosophy and concrete personal commitment to action. Among her literary resources, the epics and plays of ancient Greece provided the ideal balance of politics and culture. In Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy, Pirro focuses especially on the influence of Greek tragedy on Arendt's political writings. Pirro casts Arendt's political thought as tragic storytelling, crafted to inspire her audience both to appreciate political freedoms and to act on those freedoms by participating in public life. Echoing an affinity for Greek drama common in the tradition of German philosophy and letters, Arendt draws on tragic characters, scenes, and dramatic conventions, as well as theories, to assess the maddening and often fatal contradictions of political life in modern times. Classical narratives of heroic achievements and failures shape the structure and content of Arendtian thought, as when she compares Jewish refugees' attempts to confront their stateless condition during the 1930s and 1940s to Ulysses's mythical quest. Turning her attention in the postwar years to the promise and limits of political freedom in American life, Arendt invokes Sophocles's last drama, Oedipus at Colonus, in an attempt to outline an alternative, aesthetic sense of political authority in the American Republic. In providing this new avenue of approach to Arendt, Pirro shows how elements of Greek tragedy helped her grapple with the problems of modern politics in the chaos of a universe without rules. Arendt enthusiasts and readers interested in the classics and politics will find fresh ideas to consider in Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy.

Eclipse of Action

Eclipse of Action PDF Author: Richard Halpern
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022643379X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
According to traditional accounts, the history of tragedy is itself tragic: following a miraculous birth in fifth-century Athens and a brilliant resurgence in the early modern period, tragic drama then falls into a marked decline. While disputing the notion that tragedy has died, this wide-ranging study argues that it faces an unprecedented challenge in modern times from an unexpected quarter: political economy. Since Aristotle, tragedy has been seen as uniquely exhibiting the importance of action for human happiness. Beginning with Adam Smith, however, political economy has claimed that the source of happiness is primarily production. Eclipse of Action examines the tense relations between action and production, doing and making, in playwrights from Aeschylus, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton to Beckett, Arthur Miller, and Sarah Kane. Richard Halpern places these figures in conversation with works by Aristotle, Smith, Hegel, Marx, Hannah Arendt, Georges Bataille, and others in order to trace the long history of the ways in which economic thought and tragic drama interact.

The Lessons of Tragedy

The Lessons of Tragedy PDF Author: Hal Brands
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300244924
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
A “brilliant” examination of American complacency and how it puts the nation’s—and the world’s—security at risk (The Wall Street Journal). The ancient Greeks hard-wired a tragic sensibility into their culture. By looking disaster squarely in the face, by understanding just how badly things could spiral out of control, they sought to create a communal sense of responsibility and courage—to spur citizens and their leaders to take the difficult actions necessary to avert such a fate. Today, after more than seventy years of great-power peace and a quarter-century of unrivaled global leadership, Americans have lost their sense of tragedy. They have forgotten that the descent into violence and war has been all too common throughout human history. This amnesia has become most pronounced just as Americans and the global order they created are coming under graver threat than at any time in decades. In a forceful argument that brims with historical sensibility and policy insights, two distinguished historians argue that a tragic sensibility is necessary if America and its allies are to address the dangers that menace the international order today. Tragedy may be commonplace, Brands and Edel argue, but it is not inevitable—so long as we regain an appreciation of the world’s tragic nature before it is too late. “Literate and lucid—sure to interest to readers of Fukuyama, Huntington, and similar authors as well as students of modern realpolitik.” —Kirkus Reviews